Epic Games Offers 3D Scanning On Smartphones Via App In Limited Beta

Epic Games unveiled its new 3D scanning app for smartphones called RealityScan.

The app uses smartphone cameras and photos to create high-fidelity 3D photogrammetric models of real-world objects for use on digital platforms. You can take a closer look at how it works in Epic’s new promotional video, embedded below.

In the video, the user takes a number of photos of an object — in this instance, the armchair — which then allows the app to create a 3D model that can be used in digital experiences and scaled and positioned as required.

Epic says that the app “walks users through the scanning experience with interactive feedback, AR guidance, and data quality-checks” and can then create a model “almost instantly.” The resulting models can be uploaded to Sketchfab (which Epic acquired mid-last year) and used across many platforms, including VR and AR.

The app was developed by Epic in collaboration with CapturingReality (acquired by Epic last year) and Quixel. It is now in limited beta on iOS — the first 10,000 users will be granted access on a first-come, first-served basis with wider access rolling out later in Spring.

This isn’t the first app to offer a form of 3D scanning on smartphone devices, but it is perhaps the most high-profile crack at the concept yet. 3D object capture will likely play a big role in VR and AR’s future. Headsets like the LiDAR-equipped Varjo XR-3 allows users to scan their environment and present it to others in real-time while  games like Puzzling Places showcase the creative potential of photogrammetric data as well, offering puzzles composed of real-world objects and places, scanned into the game as 3D models.

You can join the limited beta for RealityScan on iOS now, while spots last, via TestFlight. Android support will arrive later this year. You can read more about RealityScan here.

Puzzling Places Adds Mars Desert Research Station Paid DLC This Week

Puzzling Places is getting its first DLC with a paid pack including four puzzles to piece together from the Mars Desert Research Station located in Utah.

The MDRS facility is operated by the Mars Society in support of researchers looking to work in an area that’s one of the closest analogs to Mars on Earth. Based on fairly recent 3D scans of the location, the MDRS pack features four puzzles including the MDRS Exterior which gives an overview of the facility, its five primary modules and the surrounding landscape. When that puzzle is completed you’ll be able to see where the others in the pack — the Musk Observatory, The Ram, The Hab — are located relative to one another within the facility.

Developers realities.io brought Puzzling Places on a long journey to the Oculus store for Quest starting as a prototype on SideQuest. We rated the game “great” with its debut on Quest with its satisfying combo of interesting audio and stunning 3D puzzles, and it carries a 5-star rating on the Oculus Store. PlayStation VR owners should be able to play it as well soon, but for now Puzzling Places is available to buy on Oculus Quest and starting on Oct. 21 the new MDRS pack will be available as a paid DLC pack inside the game for $4.99.

Check out the trailer below:

If you’d like to hear more about Puzzling Places’ unusual path to release, we sat down with a couple of the developers recently to learn more about its development. You can check out that interview in the video below.

 

Puzzling Places Oculus Quest Review: Stunning 3D Puzzles With Most Of The Right Pieces

Puzzling Places features some stunning photogrammetric 3D puzzles on Oculus Quest, but does it bring all the right pieces to the table? Here’s our full Puzzling Places review.

Note: This review was originally published on September 2nd, 2021.

It’s been a long journey to the Oculus Store for Puzzling Places. What started out as a prototype of a 98-piece 3D model on SideQuest in April 2020 evolved into something a bit more substantial a year later, when it debuted 6 more puzzles in beta as one of the first 12 apps available as part of Facebook’s App Lab distribution system. Powered along the entire way by a loyal Patreon following, Puzzling Places has now found its way to a full release on the Oculus Store for Quest.

Puzzling Places Review – The Facts

What is it?: A VR puzzle game made out of 3D photogrammetry scans of real life locations.
Platforms:  Quest, PSVR 
Release Date: Out now on Quest, TBD for PSVR
Price: $14.99 on Quest.

The premise is simple — put together puzzle pieces to form a 3D model. It’s just like a standard jigsaw puzzle, but with more literal and figurative depth. The hook is that each of the puzzles’ 3D models are highly-detailed photogrammetry captures of real life locations or objects. You’re essentially recreating a model built from 3D scans, now split into a number of pieces for you to put back together.

The 16 included puzzles range from large landscapes to individual buildings or even singular objects, providing very different senses of scale. For each, you have the option to choose between 25, 50, 100, 200 or 400 puzzle pieces. Once complete, the models are absolutely stunning and you’ll likely spend a few minutes just admiring the finished product from different angles. There’s a really high level of detail on offer and while there are a few literal rough edges, on the whole the quality of the scans are very impressive.

Puzzling Places Oculus Quest

The Virtual Jigsaw Experience

For each puzzle you’re given a few reference images to help, akin to the photo on a puzzle box. While in-progress, individual puzzle pieces will sometimes look confusing and almost foreign when compared to the references. However, once you get rolling, things slip into place and seemingly unconnected pieces come together to form a larger whole.

In other words, it’s exactly like a 2D puzzle, and that’s part of what makes Puzzling Places so comfortable. It has familiar elements that borrow and transpose the real life jigsaw experience into something new in VR, preserving those ‘a-ha’ breakthrough moments while offering a level of detail not found elsewhere.

It’s not all visual either — some truly beautiful ambient sounds are included for each puzzle, with more and more fading in as you make progress on the model at hand. There’s even specific sound effects for key pieces and objects within each puzzle, such as creaking floorboards or the sound of a closing garbage bin lid. These sounds significantly increase your immersion in the puzzle. Not only does it set a tone to match what you’re working on, but the sounds mark your progress and encourage you to keep moving forward.  

Building Your Way

One of the strongest elements of Puzzling Places is the toolset it provides for customizing your play area. The game really gives you options to cater to any style of puzzle builder. When you’re building a puzzle, you’re greeted with a vertical wall of all the pieces that can be force pulled toward you, along with any other object in the game. While you could play seated, the force pull mechanic really encourages you to play in a big area where you can move around and sort pieces in different categories, taking full advantage of the space around you.

Pieces can also be grouped together, so they can be moved and displayed as one big unit. This makes sorting, moving and searching for pieces infinitely more organized for those who want to play that way, like me. For those who don’t, you can have everything in a scattered mess all around you.

The real difference with Puzzling Places is that you’re not limited by a table or the constraints gravity — you can have a group of pieces to your left, reference images above you and your work-in-progress model in front of you. And best of all, the force pull mechanics give you the power to rearrange everything with ultimate ease. It’s certainly easier than tediously shuffling groups of 2D puzzles pieces across a small tabletop.

Because there’s no gravity, you can also temporarily places pieces in a position that seems correct relative to your in-progress model, even if you don’t have the right piece to connect them together just yet. This is useful with bigger models and larger piece counts, letting you work on distinct areas without having to connect everything.

Puzzling Places Kimono

A Few Missing Pieces

The best part of this puzzle-building experience is that, for the most part, it feels incredibly intuitive. The force pull mechanic is easy to use and from there it’s really just about connecting pieces. I did get confused about halfway through the 200-piece version of the Kushi Yaki Restaurant puzzle. I started to wonder how certain elements could possibly be finished with the pieces I had available. That was when I realized that at higher piece counts, Puzzling Places puts pieces on additional pages that you don’t see until you scroll across by pressing your joystick to the right. The indicator for a second page of pieces was a small set of dots at the bottom of the vertical wall of pieces, and that seems like it can be easily missed.

Puzzling Places Shop

From there, I was back on track. The UI when building puzzles is fantastic, but the game’s main menu where you select a puzzle is presented as a curved 2D screen that feels a bit cheaper than the amazingly rendered 3D models that you’re creating. And when pulling pieces off the wall, the pointer doesn’t always appear immediately. This means you have to aim blindly for pieces when standing far away, which often resulted in me accidentally pulling off the wrong piece and having to course correct my selection.

Puzzling Places doesn’t support hand tracking. As we’ve seen with other titles like Cubism and The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets, slow-paced puzzle games are a perfect fit for Quest hand tracking. Given how simple Puzzling Places’ controls are, it feels like a notable omission not to be able to pick up the pieces with just your hands.

Puzzling Places Beiritz

Each of the puzzles I completed while reviewing Puzzling Places left me suitably impressed. Each one presented me with different challenges and scales to work with, making them feel fresh, immersive and exciting. It’s good that the puzzles can be replayed at different piece counts, but part of me wonders whether the replayability would mirror puzzles in real life — once you’ve done them once, would you really ever want to do them again, even if you’ve made it a bit harder or easier? My guess is no, but your mileage might vary.

With that in mind, I am surprised that there’s not more than 16 puzzles included in the release, especially given how many were tested and included in the SideQuest, App Lab and the Patreon builds over the last two years. I would hope to see more added regularly to the game as time goes on. Weekly or monthly additions would be a great way to keep me coming back.

Puzzling Places Review – Final Impressions

Puzzling Places really is a resounding success. It has cemented itself as one of the best and most unique puzzle games on the platform, presenting a virtual spin on the classic jigsaw puzzle, incorporating some stunning 3D scans of real life places and objects. Like Cubism and other puzzle games of this nature, it’s perfect to use as a calming, meditative experience and leaves you with satisfying and beautiful end results. At a time where the world is slowly coming back to life, it feels apt to be able to immerse yourself in the construction of your own tiny pocket of somewhere far away.



For more on how we arrived at this rating, read our review guidelines. What did you make of our Puzzling Places review? Let us know in the comments below!

Photogrammetry App OtherSight Coming To Oculus Quest Late 2021

OtherSight is a new exploration app featuring photogrammetric captures from around the world, coming to the Oculus Quest and Quest 2 in late 2021.

The developers, Raiz New Media, posted a trailer announcing the news on their YouTube channel. There’s not a whole lot of detailed information, but it seems like the app will use photogrammetry to create lifelike environments from around the world, which the user can explore and be guided through.

The trailer only features one location, ‘A Piece Of Tokyo’, set in the 50s back alleys of modern Tokyo. You can see a tour guide is imposed on top of the environment, and there even seems to be custom-made, interact-able objects within the environment too, such as the ‘no bikes’ sign that the user places on the ground.

The environment also seems to support free movement as well, which is quite impressive.

There’s only the Tokyo location featured in the trailer, but the same YouTube channel features videos of loads more photogrammetry captures of real-life locations, such as this one of the Dolmen of Vinyes-Mortes, Girona. You can browse all the other captures on the channel here. Likewise, the company’s website has lots of other captures listed as well.

The only other information we have on OtherSight is in the trailer’s description, which mentions that the app has been approved by Oculus and will release at the end of 2021. It also says that there will be “various places to visit around the world” in addition to the Tokyo location, and that more information will be available “in the coming weeks.”

Keep an eye out for more info on OtherSight soon.

RiVR Unearths the Secret Tunnels of Warwick

RiVR - Warwick

UK-based RiVR is a specialist in creating photorealistic virtual reality (VR) environments for a range of organisations including fire and rescue services and the police. Based in Warwickshire, the team has begun a project close to their hearts (and location) by uncovering and mapping the secret tunnels of Warwick for everyone to explore. 

RiVR - Warwick
Image credit: RiVR

The project is the brainchild of Warwick residents Joe and Alex Harvey – Production Director and Creative Director at RiVR respectively – taking their knowledge of photogrammetry to scan the tunnels. This was not only to preserve part of the historic town’s heritage but to also allow people to head down and see the tunnels for themselves, all in VR.

“Our passion is anything to do with cultural heritage and being able to use what we have learnt with photogrammetry to do something in the community while preserving history in the local area and further afield,” said Alex in a statement. “In Warwick, there has always been the myth or the pub story of the tunnels of Warwick – a bit like most towns that have these ancient tunnels.”

So while locals do know the tunnels exist, little is known about what condition they might be in and where they lead. Initially, Joe and Alex teamed up with local historians Jim Griffin and Peter Chapman to pool information. Griffin and Chapman shared a newspaper cutting from the 1920’s saying there was a tunnel off a well in Jury Street. “About six months ago, Joe arranged for safety equipment to be put over the hole and Jim volunteered to explore down the tunnel,” Alex continued. “With a laser scanner and a GoPro 360 camera, we documented it so people can actually experience it at a later date.”

RiVR - Warwick
Image credit: RiVR

“More recently we went down again with the Tech Rescue team from Leicester fire and rescue service. We put GoPros on them and they went further into the hole and filmed more footage for us,” Alex explained. “You have to traverse down the well and you go through this hole in the rock and then to the left-hand side there’s one tunnel that leads back up towards the house’s basement, then straight ahead of you (facing towards St. Mary’s Church) you can go about 10-15 metres until the tunnel turns off to the left then there’s a partial collapse a further 10 meters down that way, but we ran out of safety line on the G-saver to go any further on this attempt.”

You can see this process in action in the video below. RiVR hasn’t said when this project would likely be made available to the public but the team is also working on some others. Developer Realities.io has been in contact with the team to utilise scans in its 3D jigsaw puzzle title Puzzling Places. “We are in conversations with the church regarding this idea, as we want to take any money made from the game and donate it to St. Mary’s Church,” the brothers note.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of RiVR, reporting back with progress on these developments.

Sidequest Prototype Puzzling Places Turns 3D Model Into 98-Piece Puzzle

A new SideQuest prototype from Realities.io turns 3D models captured with photogrammetry into puzzles you can put together in VR.

Puzzling Places is a “very early” prototype concept for an Oculus Quest puzzle game that sees the player putting together 3D models made from captures of real places. The prototype was put together over the last several weeks in social isolation by the folks at Realities.io, a company which made the technology used for The Key and other VR projects. It only features one puzzle at the time of this writing because the creators wanted to release it quickly to get feedback on the concept. The included puzzle is described as fairly difficult with 98 pieces of the Tatev Monastery in Armenia, so if you’re looking for a VR alternative to real life puzzling this looks like an intriguing concept.

“We’ve had the idea of Puzzling Places floating around our heads for a while. One day, due to a Unity import error, the pieces of a scanned environment were scrambled around the scene. Someone made a joke that fixing this by hand would like making a 3D jigsaw puzzle, and so the idea was born,” Realitis.io photogrammetry expert Azad Balabanian wrote in a prepared statement. “When the Coronavirus Crisis travel restrictions forced us to postpone some of our planned scanning projects, the lockdown forcing us to work from home, and physical jigsaw puzzles selling out everywhere, we decided to make the best out of the situation.”

Check out the trailer below:

The game also includes audio recorded on location and the ability to “force pull” puzzle pieces toward you with the promise of more features to come.

You can download the Puzzling Places prototype free for Oculus Quest now from SideQuest. If you’re unfamiliar with sideloading content onto the Oculus Quest standalone we put together a guide that walks you through all the steps involved.

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Viking Combat Brought To Life In New VR Experience Using Volumetric Capture

Virtual Viking

Volumetric capture is one promising avenue for creating photorealistic VR. It’s a process in which a lot of cameras capture an actor’s performance from a wide range of angles. The results are then stitched together to recreate the performance as a 3D asset. So far we’ve seen the technique used cautiously in apps like Blade Runner: Memory Lab. With Virtual Viking – The Ambush, though, volumetric capture gets bloody.

This new VR experience will be going on display tomorrow at The Viking Planet Centre in Oslo, Norway. It’s an 11 minute and 30-second story viewed on motion-platform chairs. In it, viewers come face-to-face with a crew of Vikings on Norway’s west coast (also authentically recreated using photogrammetry).

A total of 30 actors were involved in the production, which was shot at Hammerhead’s volumetric capture studio in London. Created in partnership with Hammerhead, The Viking Planet, and the Ridley Scott Creative Group’s RSA Films, the piece was produced over the past 18 months and is quite different to anything recorded with volumetric capture before.

You find yourself sitting around a campfire, listening to stories from a Viking elder named Skald. As he recounts tales you’re transported back in time, joining a crew on a boat. As the piece’s name suggests, an ambush quickly breaks out and the crew find themselves fighting for their lives.

“The Virtual Viking – The Ambush’ project is a terrific example of the kind of immersive experience that challenges the future of storytelling,” Ridley Scott Creative Group CEO, Luke Scott said in a prepared statement. “It is one thing to be a passive audience, it is quite another to be at the heart of the action.”

Last week during our E3 VR Showcase Hammerhead also revealed it was working on a continuation of the psychological horror series, Abe.

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ZenART VR Seeks Kickstarter Funding for Photo Realistic Travel App

Apps like Google Earth already provide a wonderful way of exploring our planet using virtual reality (VR) technology. Allowing users to visit far off exotic locations they may never get the chance to travel to. Yet those kinds of apps tend to be limited to 360-degree photos and videos, which can only provide a limited level of immersion. Looking to take this to the next level is ZenART VR, a Bulgarian-based team who are using photogrammetry to make exploring locations even more realistic. 

ZenART VR

ZenART VR is a travel platform which aims to allow users to visit world landmarks and mythical places in VR with extraordinary visual fidelity. To do this they head to a place of interest and using state-of-the-art camera equipment and drones 3D scan the location to then digitally render in the studio.

“We all want virtual reality to get to the level where you can’t tell the difference between game and real life. That’s why we were super excited about the hype around VR, but also underwhelmed by the fact that most available experiences looked like games from 10 or 20 years ago. So, we got together and decided we should do something about it. Real-life locations were the obvious choice, since our goal was exceptional realism. Then it occurred to us that we could use the assets to take people where they can’t normally go, like Avalon or Atlantis,” says head writer Ivan Popov in a statement.

To help make the project a reality ZenART VR has turned to Kickstarter to crowdsource the funds needed. Looking to raise $75,000 USD, the team plan on launching ZenART VR in September 2019 with two locations, the real world Belogradchik Rocks and fictional Avalon. Supporting HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR, the project can be backed for as little as $20 to gain access to the Belogradchik Rocks. Spend $35 or more and you’ll gain access to both locations.

ZenART VR

ZenART VR isn’t just about digitally travelling to an awesome looking location, with the developers adding an interactive element to the project. Locations will have storylines, quests, and interactable objects. Users will be able to solve puzzles and learn the history while at the same time taking in the visual spectacle of day/night cycles and dynamic weather and lighting.

VRFocus will follow the progress of ZenART VR on Kickstarter, reporting back with the latest updates.

Fire Investigators Are Now Using VR Photogrammetry Tech to Assess Damage to Homes

A house fire is a sickening reality, but when it’s finally time to clean up and tally losses, that’s where fire investigators come in. Now, forensic investigation firm Donan and 3D scanning company Matterport are partnering to bring fire investigators the tools to make highly detailed photogrammetry scans so they can review the situation from afar through a VR headset, desktop client, or mobile app.

Donan is bringing every fire investigator across the country a Matterport camera, and every Donan fire client the ability to view the resultant interactive 3D models. Matterport’s photogrammetry system is automated, allowing for the creation of virtual 3D models, accurate measurements, high-resolution 4K 2D photography, and floor plans.

According to a press statement, the scans will be included in their official documentation process for all structural fire losses, including tools for soot and smoke claims. Insurance adjusters can also use the scans to assess damages, and more easily write estimates for quicker claim settlement.

Notably, in the event of suspected wrongdoing, the scans can even be used in court to put the jury at the scene of the fire with the help of a VR headset, enhancing the available evidence in an arson case.

Since its founding in 2010, Matterport’s tech has mostly found a home in the real estate industry, providing their Pro2 3D camera series to real estate agents around the world so they can more accurately capture and show off properties to potential clients. In 2016, the company embarked on a mission to make the “world’s largest library of VR places” in their online gallery of publicly available 3D scans.

Check out an example scan on Donan’s website to see a fully interactive walk-through.

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Photorealistic VR Tour ‘Nefertari: Journey to Eternity’ Takes You Deep into a 3,000 Year-old Egyptian Tomb

Using state-of-the-art photogrammetry technology with millimeter accuracy, Simon Che de Boer of Reality Virtual and Experius VR have digitally scanned Nerfertari’s tomb, letting owners of Vive, Rift, and Windows VR headsets step inside the fabled burial site and learn about the over 3,000 year-old Egyptian queen’s life, religion, and culture.

Nefertari was an Egyptian queen who died around 1255 BCE, and as the first of the Great Royal Wives of Ramesses the Great, her death was commemorated in the same way many Egyptian nobles were at the time: entombed in a lavish underground structure tucked deep into the hills of the Valley of the Queens in southern Egypt.

The VR tour shows you Queen Nefertari’s tomb in a way no other person has seen it in a century, lit by oil lamps and devoid of artificial lighting—except for your hand-held flashlights, giving you the sense that you’re truly discovering the 520 square meter tomb far away from modern-day tourist groups.

Image courtesy Experius VR

While the 360 video below is actual footage captured from within the tomb, VR users are treated to a decidedly more realistic version, replete with textured walls that appear so real you might actually be able to accidentally chip away the 3,000 year-old paint. As you teleport around the tomb, you can also activate a helpful guide who explains the more important images of both the gods and Nefertari and what they meant in her culture.

Nefertari: Journey to Eternity (2018) is free on Steam and Viveport, offering a prescient glance at what the future of photogrammetry can provide VR users.

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