Stereopsia report / 2: hands-on with Lenovo Mirage AR, and many storytelling VR experiences!

In this second and last post about my experience at Stereopsia in Bruxelles, I will focus more about creative and storytelling experiences. If you lost the first part, that was more about XR companies, you can check it out here.

Lenovo Mirage AR

I was so happy to try a Lenovo Mirage AR headset because I’ve never tried it in my whole life. At Stereopsia there was the new game Marvel Dimension Of Heroes, with the new two 6DOF controllers, and I thought that I would have spent my whole day playing with this headset. Well, actually, no.

I don’t know if it was the setting that didn’t help, or if it was the headset that was really faulty, but my experience with the Lenovo Mirage AR has been very negative. Absolutely different from the one I imagined reading the reviews.

The system worked with an AR headset on my head, two 6DOF controllers in my hands, employing a colored light to facilitate tracking, and two colored markers on the floor to provide a reference system for the 6DOF tracking.

As soon as the operator put the headset on my head, I’ve noticed immediately two things:

1. The visuals were very transparent, and with the non-bright illumination of the room I was in, they were hard to be seen. Not to mention the FOV that was of course very limited;
2. The tracking was super-choppy, and it couldn’t follow my head properly even if I just rotated it.

If this was not enough, when the game started, I had no idea what I should do. And when the operator explained to me what I had to do, I wasn’t able to do it properly because of the bad tracking of the controllers. I should have thrown my Thor hammer against the enemies (I guess you’ve already noticed my resemblance with Chris Hemsworth), but my throw gesture was detected only half of the time.

So, my experience was that I had a rectangle in front of me where there were some semi-transparent enemies, that moved lagging and that I couldn’t attack properly. The result was that I just moved my hands at random all the time, dying in a bad way after like 1 minute of match.

I really hope that the device wasn’t configured well and this is not the true Lenovo AR experience.

Digitalis

Digitalis is an artistic installation that Louis of VRrOOm invited me to try. It was a dark room with inside many luminous colored flowers made of real plastic. The flowers were reactive, and if you tried to touch them, some of them emitted a particular sound of their own. In the experience, sound was a fundamental component, and there was a soundtrack playing the whole time emitting the sounds typical of a garden (birds, etc…). We could hear the sound thanks to headphones we had on our heads, while we had no visual augmentations. I can say that it was an audio AR experience.

Digitalis had no purpose: we had just to wander around in this synthetic flower garden, touch some flowers, listen to the music and relax. And in fact, I found the experience very relaxing: I could feel its ASMR vibes, and it made my brain feel “massaged”. The visuals and the audio were also very well made, and everything felt like a trippy journey in a forest.

via Gfycat

It was also a bit weird: I was having the same sensations that I usually have in a real garden, but that was a completely fake one, with the flowers being made of plastic, and the music being offered by headphones. This dissonance made me think about our possible human future: we are destroying nature and so everything in many years may be re-created in a fake way. It also made me think about the fact that we use a lot of plastic and all the other reasonings about pollution.

I think that making me think was the purpose of the artist, and he fulfilled it in a great way. I loved it. And actually Louis told me that this was only a part of the real installation, that is much bigger than that…

Le sommeil

Le sommeil was an experience about intimacy. I had to lie in a real bed, and next to me there was a touch screen depicting a naked woman lying next to me, showing me her back. I could touch the screen, touching so her back, and she reacted to my touch, moving in the bed and changing its pose. But no matter where and how I touched it, she never showed me her face, nor the front part of her body. The result was a frustrating experience because from one side it was intimate, but from the other side, I never obtained true intimacy from her, because she just treated my touches as a disturbance.

It was interesting also because after I tried it, the artist, another girl and I started talking about it, its meaning, and if the experience would have been the same if it had shown a naked man. If a creative work fosters a debate, in my opinion, it is successful, so I think Le Sommeil reached its goal.

AR Comics

I’ve tried some nice cyberpunk AR Comics magazines, where I could point a phone at all the pages of the paper comic and see every single illustration frame animating in augmented reality. It was nice because it made the whole comic come to life, not only the cover page as many magazines do. All the story felt more real. Very cool, in my opinion.

https://gfycat.com/identicalacclaimedeagle-augmented-reality-comics

The problem was the same as many phone AR experiences, that is usability: holding a phone with one hand while turning the pages with the other and looking at the comics through the screen of the phone is not much comfortable.

iMARECULTURE

I got to know another Italian guy, that has developed with his company a very interesting AR project regarding the Italian cultural heritage.

In the Gulf of Naples, there is an underwater city that many years ago was like the Las Vegas of ancient Romans. Italian company 3D Research, together with other companies, has recreated the city as it was at that time, with all its beautiful appearance, and now it lets you enjoy it by going underwater. You can go underwater in that exact location and with a custom-rigged tablet, you can see in AR how was the city at that time.

It is the first time that I heard about underwater-AR, and I am happy that it is because of a project in my country. I asked him how they perform the tracking underwater, since there is a very bad lighting, and he told me that of course, they couldn’t use ARCore or similar solutions, but they had to rely on ultrasounds. As for the visuals, he told me that there are no problems underwater and that the tablet can be seen very well even below the sea level.

Of course, there is also a related VR experience for who wants to enjoy it without having to go underwater with an instructor.

The Wings of Mosul

The Wings of Mosul has been one of the best storytelling experiences that I tried in Stereopsia. I have to thank Giulia, one of the volunteers there in Bruxelles, for having advised me to try it.

It is a 360 movie that tells the story of some Iraqi guys that love paragliding. During the Isis occupation of Mosul, they haven’t been able to play their favorite sport and had even to hide all the equipment to avoid the occupants impound it. This group of people talks about the war, an event that has taken everything from their lives and that has completely destroyed the city.

It is devastating, being there, immersed in this city where there’s almost nothing more, just destroyed homes, where people try to start again their life from scratch, to recreate a whole city. But at the same time, it is so moving (spoiler alert) that in the end, you see them having fun in a tent and smiling so much while paragliding again. They have so little, but they seem so happy.

I really loved this documentary, because it makes you understand how war is devastating, but at the same time, it ends with a big smile, with the hope of a better future.

-22.7°

I really wanted to see this movie, because I’ve heard about it online, but after I saw it, I was like

-22.7° is a very trippy journey inside a frozen land: it should be a trip inside Greenland, but the 360 videos about this land are interspersed with trippy audiovisuals effects regarding ice and snow. This makes the experience more original, but it makes also very weird. It seems like a journey in Greenland during an acid trip. Honestly, I haven’t understood it very well, and so did all the people that were with me at the event.

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

This experience tries to reconstruct the famous Manet’s painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in virtual reality. The painting shows a girl being a bartender at a big café in Paris, with a mirror behind her that reveals all the details of the location, and the people that inhabited it. This is truly a masterpiece.

Using all the information contained in the painting (especially the mirrored image), the authors of this VR experience tried to reconstruct in virtual reality the exact setting of the painting. While it is only in 3DOF, this experience is nice because it is exactly as entering in the life of a painting: you can see all around you the beautiful location of the Folies-Bergère, all depicted with a graphical style that is like if the world was made by brush strokes. You can also hear the noises of the bar, and the girl’s thoughts. It’s quite cool: those kinds of magic sensations that only VR can give you.

Daughters of Chibok

Daughters of Chibok is one of the saddest experiences that I tried at Stereopsia. It is a documentary that makes you see the tragedy of many mothers that have seen their daughters disappearing when Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of girls from a school in Nigeria. I knew the story, but seeing a documentary centered on the life of a woman that lives in a very poor country and that even loses her daughter is really heartbreaking. I also discovered that many mothers there have died for the trauma of having lost their children.

Daughters of Chibok is also interesting because in the first minutes it makes you see the humble life of villages in Africa, where people have many difficulties, but try to have a peaceful life the same. Very well made but also very sad.

A#3 MOTU

A#3 MOTU is an experience where you interact with volumetric dancers inside a tree. You are inside this gigantic trunk of a banana tree, and with you there are these dancers, a male and a female, that are recorded with volumetric technology. The dancers perform some moves, drawing some lines on the floor. After that, you have to touch them, to make them move so that to perform other moves and erase these lines. When the lines are correctly erased, a new tree gets generated.

Honestly speaking, I’ve not understood completely the meaning of the experience, and also the interaction with the dancers was a bit weird (you had to look at a little fireball in the room plus the direction of the line and touch the dancers in a way coherent with these data). But the volumetric capture was good, and when the creator told me that it was something made by them in-house, I was astonished. She also showed me the dancers dancing in the room in AR with the volumetric recording shown on a tablet with ARKit. I liked this a lot, and I also liked the idea of interacting with the volumetric recording of a person.

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And that’s it! This last paragraph completes my roundup about the Stereopsia event. It was fun being there, meeting people and having a talk about social VR.

As always, if you have any questions or you want me to put you in touch with some companies that were there, please let me know, I will be happy to help you! See you at Stereopsia next year!