Photogrammetry – Page 2 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

April 13, 2018

Developer Creates Scan of Apartment to Work Inside of VR for 30 Days

Turin, Italy-based developer Enea Le Fons is aiming to spend more than 30 days of extended stints in VR, and although he won’t be able to qualify for any records—he’s still eating, sleeping, and using the bathroom sans headset—Le Fons is hoping to use his time in VR to explore its long-term effects while developing applications he says will help make “VR an essential part of our daily life.”

Le Fons started his 30-day challenge shortly after the release of Steven Spielberg’s film Ready Player One (2018), and although he’s nearing the end of his full 30 days, according to a SkarredGhost exclusive, he’s adding on another 15-30 days of multi-hour stints immersed in VR. It’s a bit of a solo-hackathon to come up with ideas related to a person’s normal activities like sitting, chatting, and even going to the dance club.

In effort to make his life easier in the some 7 to 16-hour sessions split between an HTC Vive, Vive Focus, and the new HTC Vive Pro, Le Fons completely ‘digitized’ his entire apartment using photogrammetry, and even created individual captures of things like chairs, tables and dishware. Importing it all into Tilt Brush (2016), Le Fons is able to make art in a sort of virtual-augmented version of the studio.

It isn’t all just Tilt Brush creations though; Le Fons also attached Vive Trackers to his physical furniture, making it possible to simply grab a chair and sit in it while in VR, or even operate his turntable to listen to music. A VR-tracked Roomba seemed like a perfect fit for Vive Tracker too.

Since he has a complete 3D model of his studio, he’s also spliced them into Unreal Engine prototypes using the Unreal Engine VR Editor. Simply put, he can work on VR projects while inside VR in a digital version of his house.

When not throwing the model of his apartment directly into his creations and developing from within his virtual-augmented reality space, Le Fons used the time to prototype 3D furniture that could be later laser-cut and realized in the physical world, and a martial arts/yoga experience he used to practice MMA and for his Hatha Yoga routines. Using a Beatmix DJ console, two Vive trackers, Ableton Live and Unreal Engine’s MIDI in-out capabilities, he also tinkered with performing a DJ set in VR.

Using Mozilla’s A-frame, Le Fons also experimented with creating a multi-user environment that worked completely through the web. “The first results are very promising, even if the un-ripeness of the A-frame framework didn’t allow to create a perfectly usable and stable experience just yet,” Le Fons said.

Taking his Vive Focus to a dance club with a prototype sound-reactive music experience, he says he’s “confident more development and design will likely make this app a commercial and cultural hit.”

Le Fons’ 30-day challenge isn’t the usual dash to post a new world record; it’s been more about finding a reason to stay in VR and live there comfortably. We’re hoping to see the fruits of his labor sometime soon, as he says they will be open-sourced to share with the greater VR community.

The post Developer Creates Scan of Apartment to Work Inside of VR for 30 Days appeared first on Road to VR.

February 17, 2018

VR Tour App ‘MasterWorks’ Uses Photogrammetry to Bring You to 4 Fully Explorable Heritage Sites

MasterWorks: Journey Through History (2018) is a new app for Oculus Rift and Gear VR that takes you on a guided tour through four cultural sites spanning three continents. Created using photogrammetry and presented with audio clips from experts, collectible artifacts and 3D 360 photos, the app does more than just let you explore the sites; it preserves these sites digitally while teaching you about the real-world threats they face amidst a rapidly changing climate.

Spanning over 3000 years of human history, you’ll be able to visit:

The historical city of Ayutthaya, Thailand, the second capital of the Siamese Kingdom
Chavín de Huántar, a pre-Incan temple in the Peruvian Andes
Mesa Verde Native American cliff dwellings of Colorado
The stone carvings of Mt Rushmore in South Dakota

You can download MasterWorks: Journey Through History for Rift here, and for Gear VR here.

Norman Chan and Jeremy Williams of Tested visited CyArk, the studio behind MasterWorks, to talk a little about how they captured the sites.

Founded in 2003, the non-profit company’s mission, CyArk CEO John Ristevski told Tested, is to capture, share and archive the world’s cultural heritage.

“We capture these places in accurate 3D, we archive it in case something happens to these sites – in case of destruction or damage – and we also makes this data available in interesting ways, such as in VR,” Ristevski explained.

The studio does this by using a laser-scanning Light Detection and Ranging device (LIDAR) and photo imagery using professional-level DSLRs and imagery captured via drones. Combining these two fundamental techniques, the company can make highly-accurate recreations of scenes like the ones seen below.

As it stands now, the process of creating these experiences is still pretty arduous, requiring between 5-7 days of on-site time to capture an area about the size of a quarter-mile squared area (about 400m squared).

CyArk Director of Product Scott Lee tells Tested their team uses motion-controlled camera rigs to capture the photos, which he says ensures the required 60-80 percent overlap is obtained to generate the photogrammetric models.

You can check out the full video interview here.

The post VR Tour App ‘MasterWorks’ Uses Photogrammetry to Bring You to 4 Fully Explorable Heritage Sites appeared first on Road to VR.

March 6, 2017

Photogrammetry Showcase ‘Realities’ Update Brings New Content, Touch Support, and Improved Visuals

Realities, a ‘virtual travel’ title that presents near photo-realistic VR captures of real-world locations, has received a major update. In addition to a new explorable location, the software has been overhauled to support forward rendering and improved support for Oculus Rift and Touch.

Practically as old as photography itself, use cases for photogrammetry (making measurements from photos) have evolved over time, from triangulation and georeferencing through to movie CGI production and most recently, real-time game environments. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a famous example of using the technique in Unreal Engine 3 (see The Astronauts’ blog for a detailed explanation), and Realities.io took a photo-realistic approach to create their free SteamVR product Realities using Unreal Engine 4, which launched alongside the HTC Vive in April 2016.

With 102 cameras, Metapixel can create photorealistic 3D models in 30 minutes

The era of not-quite real video game characters is almost at an end. Using an amazing 102-camera rig, Metapixel can scan and recreate a digital version of you with uncanny accuracy. We tried it out.

The post With 102 cameras, Metapixel can create photorealistic 3D models in 30 minutes appeared first on Digital Trends.

October 3, 2016

Matterport Creates the “World’s Largest Library” of Real-World VR Places

Immersive media company Matterport have just announced they’re to make available what they claim is the world’s largest collection of VR-focussed real-world models and locations in a bid to become the premiere 3D asset source for VR developers.

Matterport specialise in the capture of real-world places via photogrammetry for use in immersive applications. You may already have experienced some of their work via the GearVR, where their application, which allows you to traverse photo-scanned environments, was one of the first to appear for the Gear VR. The company claims to have some 300,000 real-world ‘spaces’ captured and banked to date, having focused on pushing the next generation of real-estate applications for some time.

Now, the company is set to make their extensive library of real-world locations available to everyone for the rest of the year. The company have announced today an initiative that allows any developer to acquire the assets and models via their CoreVR ecosystem for developers to use as they see fit. Note however, that once we’re into 2017, any captured space will cost $19 a pop.

Matterport are selling the move as “a major leap forward for the VR ecosystem as it makes the world’s largest library of 3D Spaces immediately available to everyone, and offers an easy and highly scalable way to capture more real-world places in 3D and then share those spaces in VR.” A fairly bold move, although it’s key to point out that these are ultimately assets not ‘experiences’ in and of themselves.

“Like any new platform, VR needs content to grow, and with the new CoreVR option, Matterport delivers a huge library of real-world VR content and the most effective and scalable option to allow anyone to create a VR experience of a space,” said Bill Brown, CEO of Matterport. “Matterport is excited to bring this capability to its thousands of camera owners and to millions of consumers visiting Matterport Spaces. We believe in the power of VR to help us achieve our vision of giving people the power to experience any place at any time.”

Watch HypeVR’s Impressive Volumetric 360 3D Video In Action

HypeVR may be poised to alter the 360 video landscape with their depth-mapped, volumetric video system that lets VR users move in, out and around the captured scene. Watch Fox’s Futurist Ted Schilowitz as he gives one of the first real time demonstrations of the technology.

We’ve followed HypeVR for some time now, first reporting on their incredible looking LiDAR powered, depth mapping camera rig back in early 2015 and once again just recently, after the company released the first ever look at footage captured with its technology.

HypeVR’s proprietary system uses 14 Red Dragon, 6k Video Cameras rig-mounted to capture a 360 degree field of view. Recording at 60Hz currently (with 90Hz planned) the definition of the resulting footage, once stitched would probably be impressive enough in and of itself, but there’s more. HypeVR’s rig is extended to use a Velodyne LiDAR scanner, capable of capturing up to 700,000 points of 3D depth information every second at a range of up to 100M.

The practical upshot of all this is that, the resulting data captured allows any recorded scene to be reassembled and ‘played’ with the scene able to respond in real time to a viewer’s movements – this means parallax within a video and even the ability to move in and out of the scene.

The HypeVR team have just released a video featuring 20th Century Fox’s Futurist Ted Schilowitz, who as it happens co-founded RED, the company which builds the cameras featured on HypeVR’s rig. Schilowitz holds a small tablet, with a scene apparently captured using HypeVR technology playing on it. As he begins moving around, the video (a looping coastal scene) can be seen to respond to his shifts in position, with both parallax and advancement / retreat in and out of the scene displayed.

It’s impressive stuff and the applications for virtual reality video are blindingly obvious. However, with every apparent breakthrough, especially one still largely unseen by the media or public, questions remain. How is HypeVR’s likely vast quantities of data reassembled in such a way as to be transferable and rendered on consumer devices? Is the scene ultimately distilled to a series of simplified geometric surfaces, extrapolated from the LiDAR depth-sensing information and will therefore look poor quality under close inspection?