News
Mixed Reality with Passthrough - Oculus Developer Blog
This article is both cool and reminds us of the work we featured in May's One More Thing, where the passthrough more on the Oculus Quest was used as night vision goggles. Facebook's latest developer update makes support for this official and also pushes the Quest further into being a mixed reality headset with just a few software updates.
The Looking Glass Factory Returns With New Holographic Systems | Tech Times
The Looking Glass Factory (whose display we backed on Kickstarter and are enjoying) is working on new holographic interfaces, and advancing real world holographic display technology. Holograms are a type of XR that should not be ignored or forgotten. As we collectively discuss building the metaverse it shouldn’t always be assumed we’ll be wearing VR headsets to engage with an experience. We're looking forward to seeing what experiences will come once this technology gets into the hands of creative and talented people when the next generation of holographic displays ship later this year.
Experiences
VR Gallery | ArtScience Museum
The ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore is ahead of just about every other museum on the planet. Their VR collections bring some of the most cutting edge exhibitions from artists, scientists, festivals, and other institutions to push the boundary of what a museum experience could be. We wish we lived closer so that we could experience their current exhibition Hyperealities, but when traveling is safer this is on our list of places we'd love to visit.
Vermillion on Steam
The Twitter hashtag #vermillionvr has trended, showing some great paintings people have created using the new Vermillion VR painting app. Comparing real world painting against this app this is definitely not as messy and but still creatively liberating. We're looking forward to finding some time this week to complete a painting we started a few days ago, and can see this being one of our go to VR experiences when we need to relax and unwind.
Painting VR on Oculus Quest | Oculus
Painting VR describes itself as a "virtual reality art painting simulation game with gigantic canvases" but that doesn't really give you a sense of how much fun it is to play with their giant canvases. More than other VR painting experiences this one embraces how virtual environments enables tools and scales that can be downright impossible within reality.
Brushwork - VR painting tool built for everyone
Brushwork is an up and coming painting simulator with social sharing built into the core experience. Still in alpha, we can see there is a lot of potential for this to become a fun way to create and share artwork. If you're up for trying something with a little less polish we'd recommend giving it a try, and also joining their Discord server to let them know what you like or what could be improved.
Tools
Home - Voxon Photonics
Voxon creates a display that brings volumetric captures and 3D objects into the real world in staggeringly high fidelity without the need for special glasses or limited viewing angles. Augmented Reality is not limited to glasses despite what big tech is doing these days, and the technology to bring data and experiences into the real world will take many forms in the future. Also be sure to check out a great video the Voxon team put together showing 37 use cases for a Voxon display.
Holo-SDK | a Unity-plugin for DesktopAR Apps
Holo-SDK enables normal computer displays to simulate depth and 3D perspective without the need for additional hardware. Using a webcam to track the user's viewing angle this Unity3D utility makes it appear like something is floating in front the display. It's free to make demos but has a time limit unless you subscribe. There is also a 1 year free educational license available to help teachers incorporate this into your classroom curriculum, and with so many remote learners it would be great to see this in use as a way to make lessons a bit more engaging for students.
One More Thing
Brickit: Rebuild your Lego
If you've played with Lego than eventually you have all a pile of them and imagined what else you could build. So an app that takes a random assortment of Lego and helps both scan and recommend projects could not be anything other than our One More Thing. This is a fascinating example of AI and computer vision coming together to provide ideas and fuel imaginations to use what we have to build something we may not have thought possible.
Commentary
We're back after a week off, hope you didn't miss us too much.
Since the last issue we found ourselves picking up on a few trends, two of which you'll see playing prominently in this issue: Holograms and VR Painting. There is no current link between the two but the news around apps and SDKs around these two areas piqued our interest.
We found a few really great companies and communities working to make advancements in both areas that you should definitely keep an eye on, as we're sure they'll have a part to play in the future of VR and XR experiences.
Thank you for reading and subscribing, and we'll see you next week!
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