Mixed reality, from A to V #2

Hello again!

Now that you’re more or less aware of what these blog posts are about, let’s get down to business! On the other hand, if you are a bit clueless on what VR is or what I’ll be talking about, check this out.

Once again, for the more distracted readers, I’d advise you to read the whole thing before diving into the links, or you’ll feel a bit lost and maybe not understand where things come from.

Rewind

In order for you to stay up to speed with the latest news, I’ll show you some of the most interesting I’ve found.

In Facebook F8 the public was presented to Spaces and AR Studio launching officially facebook to a whole new medium.

Oculus Story ends. Even though the VR community feels this is a great loss, there are a lot of upcoming cinematic VR companies happy with this outcome, due to the decrease of competition in festivals like Sundance and Tribeca.

Show and Tell

If you are into movies in general, The Verge’s Cheat Sheet has amazing contents regarding festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. However, these two caught my eye because of how mesmerising they look and sound. Dear Angelica is one of the first animation projects created by Oculus Studio, where you get inside the life of Jessica who writes reminiscence letters to her late mother. However, even though it is NOT an interactive movie, it makes you feel as if you’ve been transported to a moving painting. Did I make you curious? Here you can check out the trailer and Adam Tope’s experience of the movie.

Do you have the Chemistry bug in you? If not, I think you will in the next…. 5 or 6 minutes. In SuperChem VR you can not only make all your crazy experiments come true, but also learn in a safe and fun way, with no risk of breaking anything, getting intoxicated, and even the help of a lab assistant!

Hear my words people, VR will be HUGE when it comes to learning.

Going more for the hardware component of MR here is a very interesting article in which Road to VR gives you an insight in how Oculus is trying to create Room-Scale VR.

Tutorial Time

Drumroll Please… The part most of you have been waiting for!

In case you are into Unity, good news for you! Unity also has an AR functionality, when combined with Vuforia. Since the tutorial is already one year old, there are some features which are placed in different locations than in the tutorial. The one I had more problems with was not being able to find Database Load Behaviour (script). To solve this, when ARCamera is selected in the hierarchy, go to “vuforia configuration”, there you will find “datasets”’, check “load database”& “activate”. (When you have difficulties like this, the most useful thing is actually commenting or reading the comments, there’s over 50% likelihood of someone sharing your problem).

In Web VR Experiments you have a curated selection of VR projects that you can not only experience but also take a look at their code in Github, so you can tweak their code or try to submit your own work!

Stay tuned to Whitesmith Facebook Page! I might be doing a Live on Facebook to comment on more content and give you some insight about my experience as a designer programming for AR.

It’s getting really hard to curate these Show and Tell projects for you guys. Why might you ask? Well, I see so many amazing projects every day! If you are curious about this area and want to see more projects, go ahead and tweet your thoughts and requests!

Old but gold

Mixed Reality #1