Stereopsia report / 1: hands-on with Presenz, Antilatency, full-body on Quest and more!

One month ago, I’ve participated in the Stereopsia event in Bruxelles (Belgium) to perform a talk about how to organize an event in virtual reality. I realized that I have never described to you my experience there, so let me write a cool summary for you all!

The summary will be split in two parts: today I’ll tell you about Stereopsia and some nice companies I met there, while tomorrow I’ll describe more the artistic/storytelling side of the event (and I will also talk about the Lenovo AR headset!)

How is Stereopsia?

The first question that may pop in your mind is how is Stereopsia and if it is worth going there. Like every event, it has pros and cons. The con is that it is a rather small event. There were like 3 small rooms to exhibit content, plus other 3-4 rooms for the speeches, a big hall and nothing more. In just one day, it is possible to try most of the experiences showcased there.

The pro is that it is a great event for networking. In two days that I’ve been there, I exchanged a great number of business cards. I’ve met so many high-profile people I only knew virtually like Louis Cacciuttolo, Christopher LaFayette, Mohammed Jean-Philippe Sangaré, Frédéric Lecompte, Amir Bozorgzadeh, and many others! I got also to know lots of other cool AR/VR professionals because the atmosphere is so nice and there are so many networking opportunities, that it is easy to get to know almost everyone there.

The event is mostly focused on storytelling, creativity and this kind of artistic applications of XR, but I also met companies like One Bonsai that are in the enterprise field.

via Gfycat

All in all, I was very satisfied with spending two days there… also because my friend (and VR enthusiast) Anne Snell took me to a very fast tour of Belgian life, making me visit three famous places of Bruxelles, eat Chocolate, French Fries and drink Belgian Beer in the record time of 90 minutes :D. What a good time!

Let me now talk about some cool stuff that I’ve seen at Stereopsia…

Improvive

I’ve met with Roger ter Heide of Improvive, a company focusing on LBVR. I found very interesting that they are trying to create full-body VR content for the Oculus Quest. Without using Vive Trackers or other sensors, they try to reconstruct the pose of the full body of the users by just using the pose of the headset and the two controllers.

Of course, this can’t work perfectly, but I think they’ve done a nice job, because sometimes this pose reconstruction was indeed coherent with the actual position of my body, and it felt like black magic. I’ve noticed it worked well especially for standard poses of the body, while for more strange ones (e.g. crossing the legs), of course, it couldn’t work.

This startup makes a nice multiplayer full-body VR game called Hide and Freeze VR, described this way: “Players take turns in playing hider or seeker. The seeker needs to freeze all the hiders to win; the hiders need to all reach the home base safely to win.  If you get frozen you are still part of the game as you can still observe and call out to other hiders to unfreeze you.”. It seems cool, and in fact Upload VR tried it and expressed a positive opinion about it.

I have instead tried another demo for Oculus Quest called Anamika, where you impersonate a four-armed Indian goddess. The very original idea is that among these 4 arms, two are controlled by you (with your controllers) and the other two are controlled by the other player. The player that is with you in the experience controls his own avatar the same way. This creates a very strange sensation because you perceive your four arms, but two are not under your control… and at the same time, you control two hands of another person. I can’t describe how I felt, but it was very cool and original. An experience that opened my mind. You should try it as well.

Presenz

Presenz is a company developing a solution to create 6DOF Videos. That is, using its software, you can create a 360 3D video where the user can move the head. It is not tailored to shoot videos of the real world with a camera, but to create CGI videos.

Presenz offers you a plugin for the most popular 3D modeling software (like Maya, 3D Studio Max, etc…) that gives you a special camera that substitutes the standard camera you put into the scene. After that, you create around it all the 3D environment and the animation that you wish, as you usually do with this kind of programs.

But when you start the rendering, this special camera renders the scene from many points of view around its original position outputting a lot of volumetric data. You then may take this mega-render file and put it inside a proprietary player, that will use all the renderings of the camera to let you move in the scene while you watch the CGI animation that you have created.

Presenz also offers a Unity plugin so that you can import this render file in Unity and so mix the resulting volumetric video with some real-time interactions that you add in the game engine.

I’ve tried two experiences made with Presenz, and I have to say that the volumetric effect was very nice. Of course, I would have liked to move everywhere in the scene, while actually I could move my head only up to 1m or such in every direction. It was cool the same, though.

There was an action video of the robot mafia that killed the family of a good robot and it was quite creepy actually. Another demo was more relaxing, and showed an interior design environment, with very high quality. There I could notice that the Presenz system has some little problems with reflections. If you move in the video, the reflections in the scene behave in a weird way, distorting in an unnatural way. The system has anyway potential for the interior design market.

Vigo Universal

I have tried an LBVR experience by Vigo Universal. They use AntiLatency tracking to provide positional tracking in a large setting to a VR headset and some props present in the scene. I was equipped with a backpack PC, a Rift S, and I could enter in a virtual scenario with fire all around me. As you may have understood, this was not a game, but a training experience aimed at the enterprise sector. I could grab a real extinguisher, that was mapped to a virtual extinguisher in VR, and extinguish the fire.

AntiLatency is a 6DOF tracking system for LBVR that uses custom floor tiles made of active IR markers. These lights are then framed by a tracker that features an IMU plus an IR camera, which, using the position of the markers on the floor, understands its position in space. So, you can put a tracker on every object that you want to track with 6DOF in VR, from headsets to props. It was interesting for me to try Vigo Universal’s solution also to try AntiLatency tracking.

It worked quite well over a large surface, but it lagged a bit. After I moved, I could see the virtual world moving with a noticeable lag (the same lag that you may have using VR over Wi-fi streaming). Anyway, that was bearable. The real problem was that when I rotated my head, all the system lagged as well, and also sometimes behaved in a weird way. This problem with head rotation made me dizzy.

Vigo Universal told me that the experience was still in beta, so I don’t know if these problems are typical of AntiLatency or of the setup that has still to be tuned up by Vigo. If someone of you has experience with AntiLatency, please let me know!

One Bonsai

One Bonsai is a very nice Belgian VR company that is active in the field since years. They develop many custom B2B VR experiences for their clients, mainly about training, and now they are also thinking about offering their own products regarding VR training.

INVR.SPACE

INVR is another nice company making 360 videos and volumetric videos. They showcased a series of 360 videos shot by them and that could be enjoyed through an Oculus Go.

What I liked a lot was the artistic idea that they had: they took a series of paintings by the famous Belgian painter Bruegels and recreated them in real life, but with the setting of the present time. So, for instance, there was a painting of a market, and they shot 360 videos of a wholesale market where there were fish and other kinds of food. For a painting of some people cooking, they shot a video inside the kitchen of a modern restaurant. A very nice idea, mixing the art of the past with the technology of the present.

Altheria Solutions

Altheria Solutions is a little startup that is working on developing an engine to create VR training solutions. Current game engines like Unity or UE4 are difficult to use for non-techies, so they are developing an easy-to-use engine all focused towards the creation of VR training experiences, so companies can create these kinds of solutions without the need of hiring developers (as a developer and consultant, I don’t like this of course! 😀 😀 :D)

From the demo I had, it seems to work, but the features are limited because the project is in early stages. It is a very ambitious project, though.

VR Pianist

A guy and a girl from Prague showcased in Stereopsia a simple demo where you could play the piano with a Vive with a Leap Motion mounted on. Since the tracking of Leap Motion is not fast and reliable enough to let you really play a virtual piano, they made a game inspired by playing this instrument.

In this game, there is music going on, and you have to accompany it by pressing certain notes on your piano keyboard at the right time. The more you press the keys at the right times, the more the environment around you starts getting to life, coloring itself from being just black and white. Very nice experience.

Miguel Schiaffino Tienda

I want to close today’s roundup talking about Miguel Schiaffino Tienda, a nice Spanish man that I’ve got to know thanks to Stereopsia and that is now a friend of mine.

When we met and had the first talk, after some minutes he told me that he was the person inventing the cardboard viewer. I was like “Yeah, sure sure, and I invented the fridge”, but then he showed me the proof that his company, vrAse, had already showcased a plastic holder for smartphones able to provide VR in 2013 (one year before the release of Google Cardboard). You can also find references to this all over the internet:

So it is highly possible that Google took inspiration from his work to create the Cardboard, being then able to create a much broader impact than the one that a little startup could have had. I have to say that I was pretty impressed.

And I was also pretty impressed by the fact that Miguel still believes in the vision of smartphone-based VR. So while all the major companies are abandoning the field of mobile VR, he still thinks that this is the right way to make VR mainstream, because we all have a phone in our pocket, and a VR viewer that is just a box for a phone can be very cheap.

He says that the other models have failed because they provide shitty quality (e.g. cheap cardboards) or problems in usability (e.g. Gear VR), and if done the right way, a VR viewer can still be the best option. He says that there should be a fine-tuning work on the ergonomics, the optics, and the tracking (maybe with ARCore?) of such a device to create the right mobile viewer to appeal to the general consumer.

Honestly, I don’t know what to think: making a mobile viewer appealing is very hard, and even if Miguel managed to really find the secret sauce that makes it usable solving all the problems of past devices, he would still have to find the skepticism of investors, consumers and experts that are now all oriented towards the standalone form factor. I’m very curious about what he will be able to cook up with vrAse if he gets some investments.

Miguel has also now a new company, called Eyedak, working as well on immersive technologies. He also showed me some interesting prototypes, but I am not allowed to tell you more about them. Nice stuff, though.

I really loved the passion of Miguel towards VR and his many ideas in the field. I’m sure that with one project or another, he will be able to succeed. Good luck!

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And that’s it for today! As always, if you have any comments on these companies or you want me to put you in touch with them, just let me know in the comments or on my social media channels!