News
Everyone you know is a Disney princess, which means AR is queen – TechCrunch
Like millions of others we played around with the new Cartoon 3D Style Lens and were amazed at just how high quality this new filter was at changing a person in the live camera feed into a 3D cartoon. Snapchat reports over 215 million people have tried the filter and there has been more than 1.7 billion views for the new filter. That’s over 90% of the 238 million projected daily Snapchat users trying out this one new filter.
Apps
Weird Cuts by Molmol Kuo, Zach Lieberman - Experiments with Google
Zach Lieberman is a fantastically creative artist and generous educator more widely known for his daily sketches on Instagram. Back in 2019 one motif that he helped popularize became a Google Experiment that is still very fin to play with to this day. It’s also a reminder that the world may be paying more attention to AR, but there have been people working with it for a long time that inspired all the cool things we are see now.
Reading
Digital twins help transform the construction industry | VentureBeat
Digital twins (yes, we mention them a lot) are becoming much more widely used in the construction industry beyond pre-visualizations. In an industry known to be risk averse, twinning has the largest potential to reduce errors and redoing work since potential issues can be resolved digitally before they become costly problems on a construction site. Even if this isn’t an industry you have an interest it’s worth reading this article and considering how the impact digital twins will have in the years to come.
Three big questions about Facebook’s new VR ads - The Verge
Facebook bought Oculus, which inevitably would lead to advertising being tried out in VR, which brings back the looming unresolved privacy concerns posed by VR. Facebook announced in 2019 it would use user data to enhance its social platforms so this isn’t something that wasn’t expected, but now that it’s here there are even more pressing answers needed around privacy and security in VR. The Voices of VR podcast and others have raised these issues a while now, but as we move from something happening in the future to something available within the next year it’s time for actual rules to be put in place to protect everyone’s privacy.
Business
Holo-Meetings – DVE Holographic
Though virtual meetings were made necessary by the pandemic, telepresence and virtual meetings have been available for decades. What DVE offers is very different than others, and is truly one of the most visually appealing telepresence setups we’ve seen. Their most recent Holo-Meetings offering looks to continue a well designed approach to virtual meetings, adding AR and interactivity that looks both very fun and useful. By allowing gestures to control presentations the computer can get out of the way and let the presenter and their message be the sole focus.
Health
Psious | Virtual Reality Platform for Psychology and Mental Health
Psious is the first VR therapy platform we’ve encountered outside research studies that offers tools and environments that target specific ailments as opposed to being just a way to engage with a therapist virtually. They currently have 70 courses of treatment and will most likely add more are they learn how patients respond. If you are more interested in getting familiar with VR therapy in general they also have several free VR therapy learning resources on the website.
Research
Enhancing Remote User Research through Virtual Experience Prototypes | by Almo Albastaki | Design at Sydney | Jun, 2021 | Medium
With so many things going remote last year it stands to reason that testing and research efforts also needed ways for gathering feedback and participant results remotely. This article is a synopsis of a paper presented last year at the 32nd Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. This article's synopsis is great, but you can find the full version of the paper here if you want to read it in full.
Gear
Quality motion capture in one simple suit
Software-based motion capture has gotten a lot much better, but most companies still rely on hardware solutions as they've been reliable and allow retakes while the talent is in the suit and on location. The Rokoko is a motion capture system we’re hoping to try out later this year that provides an entire solution built around one suit. It feels like it was constructed to solve real problems experienced during capture sessions, and the people behind it professionals that know what it takes to get the job done.
Tools
Welcome | DEEPMOTION
Software based motion capture has gotten really, really good and is giving traditional suit-based mocap intense competition due to its lower cost and convenience. DeepMotion has been on our radar for a while, both due to the quality data it pulls using only a video file as reference but also for their SDK that lets you gather markerless motion capture data in real time. This is another platform we're looking forward to trying out this year.
One More Thing
GitHub - eospi/Object-Capture-UI: A graphical interface for Object Capture on macOS
In our opinion the coolest announcements coming from WWDC were around AR, and the updates to Object Capture is a game changer. API updates are fun for us but not always for people that don't code. The project we're featuring is an open source project that provides a user interface, making Object Capture easy to try for anyone running an Apple computer with the recent version of OS X.
Commentary
The push for relevance within the AR space has been ongoing for years, with companies like Snapchat leading the charge on the consumer side with their video altering Lenses. With Facebook's acquisition of Oculus they have put themselves very far ahead other companies in terms of VR, but AR is still fairly open. The open source and enthusiasts may have kept AR alive, and that will never change, the bigger hardware advances will most likely come from companies iterating the hardware to get us to the next step in its evolution. Miniaturization and display refresh speeds are two of the largest (but not the only) hurdles that need tackling for AR to become viable for day-to-day usefulness, and we're looking forward to seeing what will happen when companies like Apple apply what they did to computing to the current hardware problems AR has yet to overcome.
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