VR Animation – Page 4 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

‘Invasion!’ Studio Baobab Returns With Second Episode, ‘Asteroids!’

It’s a busy time for Baobab Studios. After release on other platforms, the team is preparing to launch its cutesy debut VR short film, Invasion!, on PlayStation VR, and help with a big screen adaptation of it. But that’s not it has up its sleeves.

Baobab revealed its next film, Asteroids!, at the Oculus Connect 3 developer conference in San Jose this week. The piece is the second episode in a series that started with Invasion!, though it leaves Earth behind. This time viewers will follow the two clumsy aliens that we met in the last episode, Mac and Cheez, as they undertake a dangerous mission. These two were villains in the first episode; could they now become heroes?

Asteroids! boasts the same animation seen Baobab’s first work, which itself is reminiscent of the short films being created at Oculus Story Studio like Henry. It’s a piece for all ages.

The first clip of the film is above. It features Mac playing with his lovable robot sidekick, Peas. While not in VR itself, the sneak peek does give you a good idea of how the piece will utilize the platform. If you do want to watch the preview with a headset, it’s available now on Gear VR for free

Asteroids! launches next year for free. Its running time is three minutes and it arrives on Gear VR. Other platforms haven’t been confirmed but Invasion! moved from Gear to Rift and beyond and we’d expect this to do the same.

Elsewhere, Baobab is working on completely new projects. “In addition to Episode 2, we’re also working on completely other, different IP…that has nothing to do with aliens and bunnies at all,” Maureen Fan, Baobab’s CEO and co-founder, told us back in August. “I can’t say what we’re doing in the future, but you will see soon.”

Swedish robotics specialists are working on a system to allow game developers to deliver realistic, realtime and dynamic interaction animations, so that your VR hands can finally grasp in-game objects convincingly.

By the end of this year, every major virtual reality platform will have its own motion control solution, from the Vive’s SteamVR devices to Oculus’ Touch, but whilst these controller give developers the ability to deliver near 1:1 mapped input in VR, the virtual results of those actions, particularly with our hands, can look, well, pretty ‘shonky’. Objects we pick up often just stick incongruously to the in-game controller models and, should the developer have included hand models, snap into a predefined multi-purpose positions which is more often than not pretty unconvincing.

Hand presence isn’t just about accuracy of their position in space then, but also about representing the myriad subtleties our endlessly adaptable digits are capable of. For example, observe yourself picking up a tumbler glass, your fingers will wrap the cylinder securely, picking a wine glass though and you may clasp more daintily by the stem. Not only that, if your grip will change depending where on that object you choose to hold it. The sorts of subtleties we take for granted in every day life are generally deemed expendable in games and ‘brute forcing’ a real solution – say a canned animation for every world object – is clearly out of the question.

Now, Swedish company Gleechi claim to be well on their way to resolving these issues. The company claims that the animation systems they’re building are based on 8 years of robotic research conducted by the dedicated research group at KTH, Sweden’s leading technical university.

Gleechi’s says that its VirtualGrasp product resolves the need for labour intensive manual animations for the hands by using a “predictive and adaptive algorithm” which analyses the ‘physical’ properties of a virtual object, deciphering the most appropriate and realistic grip formation for the in-game hand model and snapping to that position. The software is still in an early state, but as you can see in the video embedded at the top of the page, it really does seem to work and seeing it in action you realise just how poor most in-game interactions look.

Clearly VirtualGrasp is a technology with general purpose benefits for many games, but in VR that extra piece of the realism puzzle, one that further ties your physical self to your virtual self, may have more significant implication for immersion and presence.

If you’d like to know more about VirtualGrasp, head over to the company’s website here.

The post VirtualGrasp Aims to Finally Deliver Realistic Hand Interactions in VR appeared first on Road to VR.