VRAR Innovate Conference, Dublin. What we learnt.

Last week we were invited by Welsh Government to exhibit and attend the VRAR innovate conference and expo in Dublin, Ireland.

It was an amazing experience and well worth investing in visiting next year for any companies within the VR, AR or MR industries.

Our Creative Director, Klaire was on a Q&A panel on the creative arts within VR and AR.

It was a really inspiring collaborative experience. Some of Klaire's takes on the event are below to let you know what we learnt.

Volumetric Capture

Being used by theatres and opera for 3D capturing performances to be shown in VR from all angles so that it generates a full model.

Volumetric capturing is pretty much photogrammetry for people that can capture movements and save this as an animation.

This could be optimised and used in real time and could be a very powerful tool for us. This could also be a quicker and more accurate method for realistic animations of people.

Unreal

Unreal are doing 7day free training with the idea that they can transfer your skills from Unity to Unreal in that 7 days. There is a high demand for Unreal users, every exhibitor had been developing in unity and no one I spoke to knew how to use Unreal but all wanted to learn, they said no one they spoke to knew how to use it either. So there will be a lot more Unreal users soon with this huge push on up skilling that unreal are doing for free. The worry amongst developers are that Unreal will then drop huge costs for use once more people are using it.

An example of what can be achieved in Unreal can be seen below.

Hololens

Hololens still isn't there, the models come across washed out and emissive as well as not crisp but did have good depth and was able to walk around them but the headset has a very limited field of view. The limited field of view completely breaks emersion.

Pico

Pico Neo 3 headset has nearly all the same benefits as the oculus, without a difficult and complicated set up with the added benefit of no Facebook login. Speaking to people, I found that the military, police and fire service will not use Oculus because of the need to sign into Facebook and the security issues around that so Pico Neo 3 would be the best alternative. The down side to this is Oculus Quest 3 due out in November, will have Passthrough capabilities. No hand tracking capabilities built in to Pico, comes as a separate piece of hardware that needs connecting.

If you'd like to discuss any of the above findings with us then feel free to drop us a line - [email protected]

Likewise if you'd like to talk to a member of the team about possible projects with animation, VR and AR then email us on the above email address.