Category: Shopify

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Livestream With @Pushmatrix VR Hand Tracking Prototypes And Nightmares

We’ve got a special guest joining us in our virtual studio this week — Daniel Beauchamp aka @Pushmatrix on Twitter — and we’re going to look through his fascinating and occasionally nightmarish hand tracking prototypes with our live audience.

Tune in at 10 am Pacific time on Wednesday March 24th for our live discussion with Pushmatrix.

We’ll be in our virtual studio with hand tracking for an in-depth discussion about the VR experimentation he’s been doing since 2015. He’s the head of AR/VR at Shopify and in late 2019 Facebook released experimental hand tracking support for the Quest. In 2020, Beauchamp started publicly sharing his various experiments centered around Facebook’s hand tracking technology and it turned him into a bit of a viral sensation.

From machine learning and Beat Saber to cheese grating and string cheese, Beauchamp’s experiments turn his fingertips into a playground of ideas and the videos he produces showcasing these ideas spread far across Twitter and the wider web. We even worked with some folks who know American Sign Language to try one of Beauchamp’s experiments in a networked setting to explore what limits there are to that sort of robust communication with current generation hand tracking technology.

Pushmatrix shared more than 20 of these experiments with us and we’re ready to show them on our virtual TV during this special broadcast. We’ll have our hands tracked in our custom virtual studio for the discussion, and if you’ve got any questions or comments for Pushmatrix be sure to share them in our live chat as we discuss the past, present and future of VR hand interaction.

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Beat Saber AR Concept Imagines Miniature Lightsaber Fingers

We’ve seen a lot of funny and intriguing concepts for projects from Daniel Beauchamp, aka @pushmatrix on Twitter, but his latest reimagines for AR something that’s become an icon of VR design.

The idea sees blue and red lightsabers coming out of the ends of fingers for a tabletop miniature version of Beat Saber. He tweeted three videos showing different aspects of the idea which he designed with a 3D model of an airplane seat and populated with Beat Saber cubes. He put it all together in Unity with some visual effects to bring home the idea.

In other words, this isn’t a real game (you won’t get the kind of dexterity and low latency required to pull this off out of the current Oculus Quest’s hand tracking) but the concept is nonetheless an intriguing depiction of a VR classic adapted to augmented reality.

Check it out here:

Beauchamp runs the AR/VR efforts at Shopify and over the last several months tweeted various videos he made — most of which have gone viral — depicting various concepts with the Oculus Quest hand tracking system. You can also grab Hand Space on Sidequest if you have a Quest and want to test out a couple of the experiments yourself.

I asked Beauchamp over direct message about what he wanted to explore with this latest experiment. He explained:

“I think a lot about how AR / VR headsets will be worn in public, and what types of games we’ll play on the go. You’re obviously not going to be standing up thrashing about in Beat Saber while on a train. This exploration was made to see if hand tracking + AR headsets could open up a new type of gaming. Could we port some of our favorite titles from VR into small, more discreet playspaces? Plus I wanted to feel what it would be like to have lightsaber fingers.”

The post Beat Saber AR Concept Imagines Miniature Lightsaber Fingers appeared first on UploadVR.

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Try The PupLounge Before You Buy Thanks To Shopify AR And Treat A Dog

Treat A Dog, an innovative pet product company has revealed that is it one of the first e-commerce partners to implement Shopify AR for the pet company’s best-selling PupLounge memory foam pet bed. Thanks to the latest in augmented reality (AR) technology, those thinking of picking up a PupLounge now have the option to be able to see it in their own home and get an idea of how it will look next to the lucky pup owning it without evening downloading an application.

PupLounge Augmented Reality

“How a pet bed will look in your home is always a consideration. Now, thanks to these tech advancements from Shopify and Apple, our customers can try before they buy and see how our PupLounge looks, actual size, anywhere they want in their actual home,” stated David Gimes, founder and CEO of Treat A Dog. “We’re thrilled to be one of the first Shopify customers to implement this easy to use and ground breaking technology to provide a great experience for our customers,” Gimes continued.

The new AR feature in partnership with Shopify works by allowing visitors who access TreatADog.com via the Safari browser on an iOS 12 device to select a PupLounge in the size they desire and then instantly see a perfect 3D image of the product to scale in their home. Thanks to there being no need to download an application it means that the experience is easily accessible to anyone so long as they have an iOS 12 device.

PupLounge Augmented Reality

This news of Treat A Dog implement follows shortly as Shopify announced it was integrating Apple’s latest AR tech to enable the new AR Quick Look feature. This feature is part of the new ARKit 2 tool-set and was introduced at the recent Apple event alongside the new iPhone XS. The feature, and ARKit 2 are integrated into iOS 12 which is why it is required to use the new feature with Treat A Dog.

A video of the new AR feature for the PupLounge can be seen below and for those wondering, the memory foam orthopedic bed is available in four different sizes and prices start at $69 (USD). You can find more information on the PupLounge here and for all things AR in the future, keep reading VRFocus.

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Shopify Is Integrating Apple’s New AR Tech

An increasing number of retailers, both online and in brick-and-mortar stores are turning to immersive technology such as augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) to better showcase their products. One company which has embraced AR and VR is online retail platform Shopify, who are now seeking to expand the capabilities of the platform with Apple’s newly enhances AR technology.

Shopify is a Canadian company that is using AR technology to allow customers to get a better look at the products they are interested in buying.

Shopify have announced that it has integrated the new AR Quick Look feature, one of the new features that form part of the new ARKit 2 toolset. AR Quick Look was introduced at an Apple event alongside the new iPhone XS, and ARKit 2 is integrated into iOS 1.

By utilising AR Quick Look, companies and brands will be able to upload 3D models of their products which users will be able to tap on and view from within the Safari web browser in order to see the objects projected into real world environments.

While this kind of AR had been available previously, it usually required a separate app download, whereas ARKit 2 allows it to be integrated into the browser, creating a more seamless experience for users.

Shopify are set to re-affirm its commitment to AR technology with the new feature, as Daniel Beauchamp, AR/VR lead at Shopify has said previously: “We strongly believe that virtual reality and augmented reality will fundamentally shift how we shop in the future.”

Apple Keynote September 2018 - ARKit 2
ARKit 2 as powered by the A12 Bionic chip.

As iOS 12 rolls out to more users, it is expected that more companies and brands will be implementing the new AR features into their websites and portals to allow users to try out items such as furniture, clothing and make-up.

For future coverage on Shopify and ARKit, keep checking back with VRFocus.

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Oculus’ Jason Rubin Responds After HTC Criticism of Oculus Financial Support

Recently Vice President of Global VR Content at HTC, Joel Breton was critical about the approach that Oculus was taking when it came to exclusivity and funding of developers.

In a recent interview with Gamespot, Breton said that Oculus was hampering developers by blocking them from other platforms. He went on to claim that though the games would not exist without significant funding from Oculus, restricting them to one platform was ‘problematic’ as it means developers could not “develop relative to market size” and accused Oculus of putting more cash into the market than it was possible to recover.

Oculus’ financial support for developers and securing of exclusives (wholly, or temporarily) for the Oculus Rift continues to be a divisive topic in the VR community at large. On Twitter, Jason Rubin VP of Content and Breton’s equivalent at Oculus, hit back with the following: “Is Oculus “over-investing in VR, spoiling developers, allowing them to make titles that otherwise wouldn’t exist?” Uh… guilty as charged.”

For example, Oculus Rift’s latest hit game Robo Recall, had a development budget roughly equivalent to that of the original Gears of War, but was free to download for anyone with an Oculus Rift.

Rubin’s comments naturally received many comments on Twitter, with a number of developers and users both coming out in support and against his comments. Paul Kolls, Creative Director at Fierce Kaiju, came down firmly on the side of Oculus, saying: “Because of such support our studio exists, simply wouldn’t be here doing what we love without it. Always grateful.”

Jason Rubin

Other commenters were a little more humorous, such as Jon Wade, part of the VR R&D department at Shopify, who said: “are banks spoiling entrepreneurs? Loaning/investing in small businesses that otherwise wouldn’t exist?”

Another anonymous Twitter user did point out that Rubin seemed to ignore the issue of exclusive content, however, adding: “You conveniently overlooked the bit about ‘exclusive’ that the article seems to focus on.”

This incident seems likely to continue the debate for some time to come; VRFocus will keep and eye on the situation and report any further developments.