SIF: Magic Leap GOT experience, Gloomy eyes, Intel’s Grease AR hands on!
A new day, new experiences at the Sandbox Immersive Festival in Qingdao!
Magic Leap “The dead must die” GOT experience
Magic Leap’s GOT experience presented here in Qingdao is maybe the best “room scanning experience” I have ever tried in my life.
It works like this: you put the Magic Leap One on your head, and then you start scanning your room to prepare Magic Leap tracking for the true experience. To do that, you have to search in your room for some flying rings and look at them until they become frozen: when you find one and you have looked at it for enough time, you can go to the next one. All of this is used to let Magic Leap scan all the room properly without giving the user the impression that he is just scanning the room for technical purposes. The process is pretty boring and took me some minutes to complete.
After the tracking has been initialized, the app starts and asks you to select a proper wall. After you have chosen a wall that is big enough, you see a dagger appearing in front of you and you have to pick it with your controller. After a while, a big frozen portal opens up in the wall you selected and a bad man comes out of it, wanting to kill you. Seen from some meters of distance, the portal in the wall appears pretty cool and believable and looking through it, you can see a frozen world.
This frozen man comes towards you and you have to fight with him. And that’s a pretty weird fight, since the dagger looks almost transparent, and so you can’t see it that well. At the same time, the enemy comes really close to you, so you have no idea of what he is doing, because due to the low FOV of Magic Leap, you don’t see well him as well. So, in the end you resort moving the dagger in a random way against him… and bam! At the first hit he dies. He falls to the floor and the experience is over.
3 minutes of room scanning and 30 seconds of experience. In the end, I think Magic Leap has done a great job in making the room scanning experience using GOT’s rings [sarcasm]. That’s impressive: moving in the room just to prepare the tracking for an experience that almost don’t exist is really exciting. Who is the director of this experience? Robert B. Weide?
Gloomy Eyes
Gloomy
The dog of the girl sometimes go playing with the little boy. And thanks to this, at a certain point, they meet. They look one in the eyes of the other. You can see that some sweet feeling
It is a pretty short experience, because it is just a first prologue episode. I think that the authors are looking for money to continue it.
I think that Gloomy Eyes is very cute. First of all, it is interesting the choice of the authors of creating a real-time 6 DOF experience in
The visuals are very well conceived and also some special effects make the experience more pleasant: when the boy and the girl see each other, you can see some purple colored particles coming from the floor and making them fly. It is a great allegory of love.
And the fact that it is narrated by Colin Farrel is for sure a plus.
I would like to see how the story unfolds: Gloomy Eyes was very short IMHO, but it looks promising. For this reason, it has just won a pri
Nothing To Be Written
Nothing To Be Written is a 3 DOF VR experience about the world war. It is based around the fact that during WW1, the British soldiers could send to the families some letters with preset messages (e.g. “I’m fine”, “I’m returning to the base”, or “I won’t be able to write to you for five days”, etc…) to communicate them simple things and also show the family they were still alive. The advantage of these letters was that they didn’t need to pass through censorship, so they delivered faster. The disadvantage was that the soldiers weren’t able to write anything else on that, just fill the preset messages and sign them.
The experience starts showing you one of these letters, that you send to your family at home… and then you start seeing a lot of them flying towards their destinations, meaning that the soldiers that were in the battlefield sending them were really many. After that, you start seeing a set of visual animations showing you how these letters were the connecting thread between the men on the front line and the families. So you maybe see the interior of a house, then a letter of this kind arrives and with some smooth transitions, the parts of the house slowly become a barrack, or a trench, and inside
The experience ends with a soldier taking one of
Nothing To Be Written is a well-made experience and for sure thanks to very good visuals and audio soundtracks is able to create a good sense of discomfort in the user. War is always unpleasant and this experience is able to show how it impacted the
It was not one of my favorite experiences, though, because I hoped for a more strong ending. For instance, I thought that at the end you received a letter that your husband died, after all the letters he sent you… while actually, you just get the letter of the beginning. It closes the circles, but I hoped for a more strong climax. I think this is something that you see to have feelings, to think about the war and how it was impactful, and that’s it.
Intel’s Grease
I continued hearing Grease’s most popular song while I was in the screening venue, so in the end, I went to see what was happening there and I found the Grease experience made by Paramount in collaboration with Intel Studios. Basically, Intel has recorded with its technology a volumetric capture of a professional crew while it was dancing the Grease musical. And the director was Randal Kleiser, the same of the original Grease. It has been
So, I was able to take a tablet, put some headphones on, and frame with the camera of the tablet a round table with a big Grease logo on (clearly a marker for the experience). After that, the Grease music started and on the tablet, I was able to see the crew dance at its rhythm.
The quality of the visuals was astounding: Intel has done
It has been one of the most original tabletop AR experiences that I’ve tried until now.
And that’s it for this post! Today has been a great day… and I have also had a selfie with Joanna Popper during the party in the evening (you can see that in the header)! But stay tuned because my experiences here in China are not finished yet…
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