Category: Google

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Key Google AR/VR Director Heads To Facebook Reality Labs

Google continues to bleed experts in AR and VR technology as Facebook Reality Labs staffs up for a bigger push into hardware.

The latest move to Facebook is Joshua To, a key Google director who led “a large team of product designers, artists, writers and researchers focused on supporting our wearables and hardware efforts,” according to a Linkedin profile, which says he started at Facebook Reality Labs this month. A report by Input added that he worked on AR/VR projects like Lens and Daydream and confirmed he’ll be working on AR at Facebook.

To is the latest Googler to move on in recent years after the company shuttered efforts in VR right as it was on the cusp of delivering an all-in-one package similar to Facebook’s Oculus Quest. We’ll note that Paul Debevec left Google recently for Netflix. Debevec is one of the leading researchers in light field technology who joined Google in 2016 after pioneering work at USC working at the same institute Palmer Luckey spent time in before kickstarting the Oculus Rift. Debevec is now “Director of Research, Creative Algorithms and Technology” at Netflix where he’s doing “Research in computer graphics, computer vision, and machine learning to improve the creative filmmaking process.” A recent deal by Netflix with a prolific producer could lead to VR content from the company.

The pair join a long list of experts who have moved on from Google as the company shifts its ambitions in hardware and platforms. The company open sourced its art app Tilt Brush and shut down its 3D object hosting service Poly while adding new AR-centric features to its efforts in smartphones. Meanwhile, Facebook continues to hire at an incredible rate with more than 10,000 people working on VR and AR at the company.

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Icosa Gallery Beta Launches For As Open-Source Replacement For Google Poly

Icosa Gallery, a community-built, open-source replacement for Google Poly, has launched in beta, just seven days before the latter service shuts down for good.

It offers VR artists a way to store their creations online, including environments and models built using Tilt Brush and its new open-source counterpart, Open Brush.

In December last year, Google announced that Poly, its 3D object sharing service, would be shutting down on June 30, 2021. Just over a month later in January 2021, Google then announced that it would also be ending official development of popular VR creation tool Tilt Brush and making it open-source, so that the community could continue to tinker and play with the software in lieu of official support.

Since then, community solutions and replacements for both Poly and Tilt Brush have sprung to life. Open Brush offers an open-source, free version of Tilt Brush for PC VR and Quest users via App Lab. Meanwhile Sketchfab’s CEO encouraged creators to upload 3D models to the successful site in Poly’s absence. Likewise, Psychic VR Lab’s platform Styly added direct uploads for Tilt Brush creations in March, which can be viewed both in VR via a native app or online in browser.

Icosa Gallery is the latest option for Tilt Brush creators, with the ability to upload GLTF and GLB files from Tilt Brush sketches and have them display and animate online in the same way as they would in Tilt Brush. There’s also plans for direct integration with Open Brush in the future, as well as support for the .tilt sketch files. It’s also possible to import all of your current Poly creations into Icosa Gallery before the service shuts down in a week’s time.

You can view Icosa Gallery’s beta site here and download Open Brush for Quest via App Lab and PC VR via Steam.

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Google’s Project Starline is a Light-field Display System for Immersive Video Calls

This week Google revealed Project Starline, a booth-sized experimental system for immersive video chatting, purportedly using a bevy of sensors, a light-field display, spatial audio, and novel compression to make the whole experience possible over the web.

This week during Google I/O, the company revealed an experimental immersive video chatting system it calls Project Starline. Functionally, it’s a large booth with a big screen which displays another person on the other end of the line at life-sized scale and volumetrically.

Image courtesy Google

The idea is to make the tech seamless enough that it really just looks like you’re seeing someone else sitting a few feet away from you. Though you might imagine the project was inspired by the pandemic, the company says the project has been “years in the making.”

Google isn’t talking much about the tech that makes it all work (the phrase “custom built hardware” has been thrown around), but we can infer what a system like this would require:

  • An immersive display, speakers, and microphone
  • Depth & RGB sensors capable of capturing roughly 180° of the subject
  • Algorithms to fuse the data from multiple sensors into a real-time 3D model of the subject

Google also says that novel data compression and streaming algorithms are an essential part of the system. The company claims that the raw data is “gigabits per second,” and that the compression cuts that down by a factor of 100. According to a preview of Project Starline by Wired, the networking is built atop WebRTC, a popular open-source project for adding real-time communication components to web applications.

As for the display, Google claims it has built a “breakthrough light-field display” for Project Starline. Indeed, from the footage provided, it’s a remarkably high resolution recreation; it isn’t perfect (you can see artifacts here and there), but it’s definitely impressive, especially for real-time.

Granted, it isn’t yet clear exactly how the display works, or whether it fits the genuine definition of a light-field display (which can support both vergence and accommodation), or if Google means something else, like a 3D display showing volumetric content based on eye-tracking input. Hopefully we’ll get more info eventually.

Once hint about how the display works comes from the Wired preview of Project Starline, in which reporter Lauren Goode notes that, “[…] some of the surreality faded each time I shifted in my seat. Move to the side just a few inches and the illusion of volume disappears. Suddenly you’re looking at a 2D version of your video chat partner again […].” This suggests the display has a relatively small eye-box (meaning the view is only correct if your eyes are inside a specific area), which is likely a result of the particular display tech being employed. One guess is that the tech is similar to the Looking Glass displays, but Google has traded eye-box size in favor of resolution.

Image courtesy Google

From the info Google has put out so far, the company indicates Project Starline is early and far from productization. But the company plans to continue experimenting with the system and says it will pilot the tech in select large enterprises later this year.

The post Google’s Project Starline is a Light-field Display System for Immersive Video Calls appeared first on Road to VR.

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Google Trials ‘Starline’ Glasses-Free Light Field Display

Google’s research into light fields is bearing fruit with a glasses-free 3D display technology called “Project Starline” available at a few of its offices.

Google revealed the work as part of its annual developer conference this week. It is pitched as working like a “magic window” and relies on “custom-built hardware and highly specialized equipment” with advances in real-time compression, spatial audio, computer vision, and machine learning to provide a sense of being face to face with someone no matter the physical distance.

The image below posted by Google’s Vice President of AR and VR Clay Bavor offers a look at the substantial footprint for the system while it is used in one of Google’s offices.

project starline google

Google also posted a video showcasing the technology used for some person-to-person interactions said to provide “a sense of volume and depth that can be experienced without the need for additional glasses or headsets.” The company says it is planning to trial deployments with enterprise partners later this year.

We tested some early-stage glasses-free light field display technology in 2018 and it required years more development and enormous investments to improve brightness and cost enough to put it within reach of average consumers. In our 2018 demonstration from Light Field Lab, for instance, the 3D effect only worked if you kept your head in a very specific area relative to the display. Indeed, even with Google claiming key breakthroughs in its efforts to prove its glasses-free 3D display technology as a direction “technology can and should go”, the company cautions that only “some of these technical advancements” are likely to make it into its communication products.

Still, we’d love to go eyes-on with Project Starline at some point for a better sense of its use cases and the investment Google will need to spend to bring its advancements into wider use.

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Creative Platform Styly Adds Support for Google Tilt Brush Models

Styly - Tilt Brush

Google has been dropping support left and right for its virtual reality (VR) initiatives but others in the industry are either helping pick up the slack or giving users alternative avenues to explore. Tilt Brush recently went open-source and now web-based creative platform STYLY has announced official support for 3D models built in the painting app.

Styly - Tilt Brush

It was necessary due to the fact that Google Poly is closing this year, where artists could upload their models and then use them in STYLY. Now developer Psychic VR Lab is enabling artists to directly upload their creations to STYLY to remove that worry.

“STYLY has supported the Google Poly API for many years, offering a platform for Tilt Brush artists to easily create and distribute XR content. The closure of Google Poly will drastically reduce the number of places where Tilt Brush artists can present their works, which will, in turn, affect the creative activities of many artists and will be a major issue for the culture of XR art,” says Ryohei Watanabe, CMO of Psychic VR Lab in a statement. “We have decided to officially support Tilt Brush with STYLY in order to support the creative activities of Tilt Brush artists in their continuous efforts to break new ground for XR art.”

To upload your Tilt Brush artwork Psychic VR Lab explains that the: “3D modeling data created with Tilt Brush can be uploaded to STYLY after exporting it as a glb file.” For further information on the process follow this link.

Styly - Tilt Brush
Tilt Brush brush compatibility table for STYLY – ○: Supported / △: Partially Supported

The Japanese studio launched STYLY in 2017 as a web platform specifically tailored to the easy creation of VR experiences. A cloud-based solution, creators can use STYLY for any type of artistic projects, some have created music videos whilst others down the anime route. All of which are promoted every year as part of the NEWVIEW Awards held in Tokyo. In addition to VR, Psychic VR Lab added augmented reality (AR) support last summer, greatly expanding STYLY’s functionality. The studio recently held a successful funding round, managing to raise $8.5 million USD (¥900m JPY) towards expanding the platform globally. 

VRFocus will continue its coverage of STYLY as well as its NEWVIEW Awards, reporting back with further updates.

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Let Your Google Poly 3D Models Live on at Sketchfab

Google Poly

In December 2020 Google continued its run of abandoning support for its virtual reality (VR) initiatives by announcing that its 3D object library Poly would be shutting down in June. Which obviously made a lot of content creators who used the service since 2017 rather unhappy. Today, rival service Sketchfab has announced a new tool to transfer Poly models onto its platform.

Poly to Sketchfab UI

After Google Poly’s announcement was made public Sketchfab contacted the team to find a solution for users. They came up with the Poly-to-Sketchfab Tool, a seamless method to transfer 3D models between the two platforms rather than creators having to download their entire library before 30th June 2021.

The tool works by connecting both accounts after which it then presents users with a list of models which can be transferred. Most 3D files can be copied across, only those created in Tilt Brush or Tour Creator aren’t supported. If you are a Tilt Brush users don’t forget that: “you can publish your work directly from Tilt Brush to Sketchfab using Tilt Brush’s built-in Sketchfab Exporter,” notes the company.

So hopefully that’ll make things a little easier for those artists with large Google Poly libraries. In a press release, Sketchfab also notes: “Some apps were using Poly as an integrated library of assets; Sketchfab also offers this functionality through our Download API, giving access to over 500,000 freely downloadable Creative Commons models.”

Even Tilt Brush got the chop from Google this year but was at least given a second chance to continue with its code now open source. While Google has ended official support, the XR community quickly got to work exploring the possibilities, one of the most notable was multiplayer. Thanks to work by Rendever CTO, Tom Neumann, he released MultiBrush as a free Oculus Quest app via SideQuest.

Apart from its acquisition of Owlchemy Labs (Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator), Google’s interest in VR has significantly waned considering how invested it was only a few short years ago. As Sketchfab continues to support the XR community VRFocus will keep you updated.

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Oculus Android App Has Now Surpassed 5 Million Installs

The Android version of the Oculus app has been downloaded more than 5 million times from the Google Play Store. It’s also available on Apple’s App Store, but download numbers are not publicly visible there.

For those unaware, the Oculus app is required to setup a new Oculus Go, Oculus Quest, or Oculus Quest 2. You can also use the app to remotely trigger PC VR games to download as well. It’s not the most accurate metric to gauge the size of the Quest userbase, but in a little over two years it has increased 5x in size from just 1 million in 2019.

Facebook still does not reveal sales figures for any of its hardware products, but game sales for Quest continue to rise. The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners made over $29 million in its first year across all VR platforms, Beat Saber is now over four million copies sold, and over 60 different apps on Quest have surpassed $1 million in revenue. Those are all strong indicators that VR is growing steadily.

Not to mention the fact that less than six months after its release last year, the Oculus Quest 2 is already the most-used VR headset across all of Steam — and it’s not even marketed as a PC VR-first device. It’s a fully standalone platform, that just so happens to also be capable of playing PC VR content if connected to a VR-ready PC. You’ll just need to either use an Oculus Link cable or setup Virtual Desktop.

How many Quest headsets do you think are out there in the wild now? Let us know down in the comments below!

h/t: u/lostformofvr from Reddit