Yes, I’ve shot a selfie with the Vive Focus and the gesture SDK

I’ve obtained the beta version of the gesture SDK that Vive is developing for the Vive Focus and that will allow people to command the Vive Focus using only the bare hands and not the controllers. So I started thinking about what I can develop with it and a lot of good ideas came in my mind, but in the end, I decided I could actually develop a bad one: shooting selfies with the Focus 🙂

It was Friday evening and I was actually very tired and I hadn’t the time to develop something well-made, so I thought that a simple and funny demo just to start getting used with the gesture SDK could have been the best choice. I remembered that on some phones it is possible to trigger the selfie by performing some easy gestures with the hand, so I thought: “Why can’t I make it on a VR headset? XR headsets should substitute the smartphones in the future, so they should be able to do selfies, too!” :D.

So I started doing some experiments in this sense… I have already developed a plugin to show the view of the cameras inside the Vive Focus for AR apps and I’ve already developed the photo-shooting functionality inside Beat Reality, so shooting photos with the Focus was something I was able to do very well. I tried with some different combination of gestures, but in the end, I found that the hand open-hand closed was the easiest to make and also the one that performed the best with the gesture detection engine seeing the hands from the wrong point of view (the gesture SDK expects to see the hands from the point of view of the head, not the other way around, of course). So I went that route: the experience showed the preview on the screen and then as soon as the user performed the shooting gesture, it took a photo and saved it in the DCIM folder of the Focus.

As a companion of this crazy adventure, I chose Mister President: since we had not the opportunity to do a real selfie in real life in Beijing, I thought it could have been a great idea doing a real selfie with a virtual reality headset with me and the virtual copy of the president. So, I opened a photo of his on my PC, then I put my Focus on, launched my selfie application, then I grabbed the Vive Focus from the light sensor (so to prevent it from going in standby mode) and in the end, I smiled and made the trigger gestures. BAM, I got the first selfie triggered by gestures on a VR headset in history!

I was amazed by this wonderful result, but I would have liked to add a color touch to the photo. So I searched online and I found a fantastic online service by Algorithmia that uses AI to colorize black and white pictures. I fed the above picture to the algorithm and the results are not very adherent to reality, but anyway, the picture is better than in black and white. It seems like an old picture from the 60s, I like it.

I sent the photo to Mister President and the idea made him smile, but he also added that the Focus is meant to stay on the head and not in hand! 😀

That’s why I also decided to do what teenagers do, and shot a selfie of myself in front of a mirror in the bathroom… am I not supercool? I’ve just transformed the Vive Focus in a digital camera!

Anyway, I’ll try to do something more useful with the gesture SDK in the upcoming times and I’ll keep you updated. I think that this new interaction mode will open a lot of new possibilities for standalone VR, but do not expect a full review soon: it is still in a closed beta stage, so I’ll share further details with you when it will be closer to an official launch. And please don’t ask me to give you the gesture SDK plugin… I would like to, but at this point, I can not.

I also made a little video about this crazy thing and you can find it here. Watch it, so you can see the magical moment of the selfie shot!

If you want to take selfies with the Focus and share them on your social media channels, contact me and I’ll give you the APK so that you can shoot photos and selfies with the Vive Focus! Let’s be vain with our VR headsets!