Unite Berlin – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

June 21, 2018

Liveblog: Unite Berlin 2018 – ‘Engineering the Best Possible Experience for PlayStation VR’

VRFocus is once again providing liveblog coverage of sessions (where we can) at this year’s edition of Unity’s Unite Berlin. Over three days this week, creators who use Unity are coming together to discuss all the recent developments in both software, hardware and the usage of both. Naturally, both augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences are at the event and how immersive technology is being implimented around the world is a topic a number of speakers are getting into.

Next, the subject turns to videogame development. As many of you no doubt know the addition of VR has changed how many developers look at the development process. What was considered to be ‘the rules’ has had to be rewritten. Even more so on console.

“This talk will cover common issues that arise when developing for PlayStation VR. Gleaned from real-life examples of issues that prevented VR titles from passing PlayStation certification, the talk will explore several common scenarios faced by developers and offer high-level technical strategies to mitigate the associated problems.”

It is given by Lloyd Crawley of Sony Interactive Entertainment. Your liveblogger for the event is Peter Graham.

June 20, 2018

Liveblog: Unite Berlin 2018 – ‘TRINITY: Next-Level Graphics for Cinematic VR’

Trinity - UNLIMITED Next up,UNLTD take to the stage to discuss TRINITY. Back in April it was revealed that UNLTD would be teaming with Made with Unity, the two companies joining forces to create an interactive, immersive live-action VR experience – TRINITY – which combined footage shot on live-action cameras with 3D VFX produced with Unity’s real-time development platform.

At the time, John Hamilton, the CEO of UNLTD commented that “Working with Unity has been amazing, and completely accelerated not only our post-production process, but gave us a creative freedom to accomplish things nobody has ever seen before. We’re looking forward to partnering up again to make TRINITY a global success.” Hamilton will speak more on the project today.

“VR Creator UNLTD share how they achieved photoreal avatars and environments in TRINITY using volumetric capture in a whole new way!”

Your liveblogger for the event is Peter Graham.

June 20, 2018

Unity Announces Project MARS For Improved AR Development

Augmented reality (AR) has become hot hot topic in recent months, with the release of Apple’s ARKit and the later release of ARCore by Google. To feed into the increased demand for AR apps and services, at the Unite Berlin developers conference new tools were unveiled specifically for the development of AR.

The new tools are being gathered together into a new extension for Unity called Project MARS, which stands for Mixed and Augmented Reality Studio. The aim of the new extension is to give developers to means to create new modern AR apps.

Timoni West, director of XR research at Unity Labs said during the keynote: “Our motto for this project: Reality is our build target. In other words, we don’t want you to just think about building to a device or building to a console. We want you to think about how you can make apps that actually live in the real world. Apps that work the way we want augmented reality to act — context aware, flexible, customizable, works in the space.”

Project MARS has been designed to allow developers to create fully-featured AR experiences without the need for customised coding. The extension provides a set of tools that lets developers draw spatial parameters such as proximity, plane size and distance relationships in a more intuitive way that coding them by hand.

“Before MARS, it would be almost impossible to set-up even these relatively simple set of conditions without coding,” said West. “With MARS, you can now create complicated, multi-plane experiences in augmented reality that work across a variety of spaces, and you don’t even have to leave your desk to check it out.”

Unity will also be introducing a new workflow for facial animation, called the Facial AR Remote Component, which lets creators capture high-quality live-action performances using the TrueDepth camera built into the iPhone X.

For further news on Unity in VR and AR, keep checking back with VRFocus.

June 20, 2018

Liveblog: Unite Berlin 2018 – ‘How to Drive VR/AR Use Cases for Enterprises Using the Example of Volkswagen’

Next, we’ve seen many times how both VR and AR are being utilised within the automotive industry. The idea of an AR assisted windscreen, effectively implementing a HUD onto the road ahead of you, has been prevelant for many years but immersive technology has also come into use in car design, as a means to give virtual test drives and as another form of onboard entertainment.

This talk discusses AR and VR and is a part of the AutoTech Summit at the event and is given by Torben Volkwein of Innoactive

“Come hear the story of how the Volkswagen group is using VR to make training for 10,000 of their production and logistics employees more accessible and effective. You’ll learn how they are working closely with Innoactive to provide the right platform for the fast adoption of VR/AR in many applications within the Volkswagen Group. You will also see a live demo showing how the Innoactive Hub and the Innoactive SDK allow business experts and developers to plan, build and manage their VR/AR applications.”

Your liveblogger for the event is Peter Graham.