Vr

[Chris MacDonald]

Hey guys,

 

I'm currently looking into getting our office to consider getting involved in producing VR for our buildings - and by VR all I mean offline/pre-rendered, not game engine stuff.

 

I've played around with the samsung gear vr a while back and was fairly impressed with how quickly/accurately it tracked head movement and so on. That and it seems reasonably future proof/cost effective and doesn't require you to be tethered to a PC.

 

My main concern is if I have a board room full of people all with the headsets on - how can I control what they are seeing?

 

Imagine how much of a nightmare it would be if everyone were looking at a different scene and making comments about décor, and such!

 

Is there any software/apps that let you sync multiple headsets into a session or anything that would allow me to press a button and they all load up the same file?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Nicolai Bongard]

Seems like this may be of interest? http://www.roadtovr.com/two-bit-circus-can-sync-audience-experiences-in-vr-tech-to-debut-at-vrla/

 

Edit: Also this? Not sure if it only applies to videos or also vr tours of still images. https://samsungvr.com/portal/content/gear_vr_synchronization

Edited December 6, 2016 by nicolaibongard

[Chris MacDonald]

Yeah, I managed to find that too and it sounds like it's exactly what I'm after - but it appears to currently be a prototype? Surely I can't be the only person that wants to show more than one person something at a time?

 

I should totally develop an app and make millions.

[kriskar]

Hey Chris,

 

I currently work with theViewer.co and it does pretty much what you describe.

 

You can create VR tours from 360 panoramas online, but then they have separate apps so you can download and view the content offline as well. Moreover, I had a sneak peek at their spectator mode - I can see on my Iphone (or any other device), what the person in the GearVR is viewing. So for a bunch of GearVR you can go the other way round - hook them up as "spectators" and then do a tour on your laptop for all to see.

 

Its pretty cool.

 

Check out more info on

http://theConstruct.co/beta

 

And there is a bunch of example tours on theViewer.co

 

Hope this helps - sounds like what you are looking for

[Scott Schroeder]

You want to control the main presentation through the web. Something like vrto.me helps in that while other people are using the Gear VR, the rest of the room can be just using their phones or the cheaper Google cardboard. And there is no app to worry about. You just have to deal with hopefully everyone is on wi-fi and downloading the images won't push them over their data plan.

 

The downside of vrto.me is that it is way too expensive for what it really is. All you need is 15 minutes of learning with Krpano and Domemaster's Photoshop VR scripts, and you can do what vrto.me does without much cost other than a full license of Krpano.

 

The other option is if you can, is to share the phone's display with the TV or projector in the conference room. You'd see the side by side view of the phone, but in a pinch you could at least have the room seeing what the person in the Gear VR is seeing.

 

In the end, the current VR technology is still a very singular experience and it does not adapt well for multiple people viewing it. Hell, even the in the Gear VR commercials there is one person all excited and a group of people sitting around them looking bored to tears.

[Francisco Penaloza]

You want to control the main presentation through the web. Something like vrto.me helps in that while other people are using the Gear VR, the rest of the room can be just using their phones or the cheaper Google cardboard. And there is no app to worry about. You just have to deal with hopefully everyone is on wi-fi and downloading the images won't push them over their data plan.

 

The downside of vrto.me is that it is way too expensive for what it really is. All you need is 15 minutes of learning with Krpano and Domemaster's Photoshop VR scripts, and you can do what vrto.me does without much cost other than a full license of Krpano.

 

The other option is if you can, is to share the phone's display with the TV or projector in the conference room. You'd see the side by side view of the phone, but in a pinch you could at least have the room seeing what the person in the Gear VR is seeing.

 

In the end, the current VR technology is still a very singular experience and it does not adapt well for multiple people viewing it. Hell, even the in the Gear VR commercials there is one person all excited and a group of people sitting around them looking bored to tears.

 

can you do guided tours with KRpano??

[kriskar]

can you do guided tours with KRpano??

 

I dont think so. Not unless you code the entire multiplayer side of it yourself.

 

From my experience (this is a few months ago so they might have improved) KRpano just creates copy-paste content for the web. No extra features, no cross-platform integration, NO GEARVR, and quite poor quality in VR. Then again you can only see it in VR with Google CardBoard, so of course its not good quality

[kriskar]

The problem with web is that it wont work for GearVR. And it will have worse quality.

 

Just sharing the Gallaxy screen from GearVR, if possible will give you a split screen on the projector - it will look horrendous.

 

I maintain that theViewer is the best option right now, at least I have not found anything better yet.

[Scott Schroeder]

It depends on what you mean by guided tours. If you mean by simple hotspots, then yes you can. The tours created by a tool like KRPano, then delivered by the web are about as cross platform as you can get. The quality is what you put into it. The tour we just created with KRPano works on any internet browser, iPhone, android phones, and the pixel phones. Can't get much more cross platform than that. Shoot, if you have an Apple IIE running chrome you can play the tour.

 

If you are putting in thumbnail sized heavily compressed images, you are going to get poor quality. If you follow the general guidelines for going into VR as in the little PDF Chaosgroup put out a bit back, then you are going to get really decent quality each time. Of course, for a web deliverable, you do need to balance quality with time to download if that is a concern for you. Especially if you plan on wide release and people may have data plans to worry about.

 

For the 100% pants-on-fire false information about web not working on the GearVR, you clearly haven't done much research. You can either run the web tour through the Samsung internet app or you can do a little hack and run it on your phone's browser and just simply not plug in the phone to the GearVR.

 

For what is is worth, the scenes I have seen on the viewer need more jpeg compression artifacts and obvious pinching at the poles. You are rah-rah for your product, so of course you are going to recommend it over everything else. Even going as far as showing how little you actually know about your competition.

 

I will say this about these easy-as-pie 360 pano services that are popping up. Learn the tools yourself. It takes virtually no time to learn the tools that these 3 click pano services offer and it is far far far the cheaper option. Then you are not tied to their services if they decided to go belly up or change their rates, etc.

 

As far as apps go. Clients may not want anyone looking into their phones or hooking their phones up to an app that can peek into them. A lot of these phones are company based and that won't even be allowed. Our IT dept would have a collective heart attack if we allow any of our principal architect's phones to have an app installed on it that let someone peek on the screen. A lot of people are concerned with privacy and you haven't considered that.

[Francisco Penaloza]

I also was wondering why @kriskar said 'low quality' it is all about what size you render, of course how good you are doing render also affect the output

 

Schott, we do use KRPano, I am not a programmer, but my boss does some, and we have a setup that works pretty good now, that's why I was wondering when you mentioned you could do 'guided tours' and by this term I was referring to the original question of this thread.

A way that a presenter can control what a few people can see at the same time.

We found that during our presentation is hard to tell what people are looking at then it becomes a jungle of random questions about different part of the project.

If there was a way to give everybody a viewer, and say, OK let's look the lobby.. Ohh haaa, ok now lets go to the office #1... and so on.

I am trying to setup something like this in Stingray, but only connecting 2 HMD is a pain in the neck already

[kriskar]

@Scott

Samsung internet is an option I hadnt considered, I will fully admit that. But for a presentation, its easier for me to open an app than save a link somewhere and then open it with a browser in VR and hope it loads.

 

@Francisco

As I said before, theViewer has a spectator mode in beta, where you can see on one devices screen what another device is viewing. With that function you can hook up 5 GearVRs to one Ipads app and have 5 people see what you show on the Ipad. I havent tried it that way, but in principle the function is there

 

@both

The reason I say browser VR is low quality and not as good as true cross-platform integration with multiple apps is that I have experienced it first person. Rare if any browser VR has chromatic abbreviation, the loading times between panoramas are longer, the delays are longer and at the end of the day, you could never have a presentation without tip-top WiFi or 4G. In theory its great - one link for all devices (even GearVR with a bit of wit), but in practice its sub-optimal in terms of quality (hence I say its low [lower] quality)

[Francisco Penaloza]

@both

The reason I say browser VR is low quality and not as good as true cross-platform integration with multiple apps is that I have experienced it first person. Rare if any browser VR has chromatic abbreviation, the loading times between panoramas are longer, the delays are longer and at the end of the day, you could never have a presentation without tip-top WiFi or 4G. In theory its great - one link for all devices (even GearVR with a bit of wit), but in practice its sub-optimal in terms of quality (hence I say its low [lower] quality)

 

not with the idea of arguing, but just to do not confuse other people.

I don't agree with this comment above, You said static panoramas on a browser are not cross platform?? what you mean with that, any deice that can run a web browser can see it. Do you mean with Oculus Rif?? or HTC Vive too?

in that case you can make it work too. Why you would use such expensive device or that simple viewer that's an other story.

 

The Chromatic aberration you are talking about, it's default effect of a stereo image there are other way to do Stereoscopic images but the simple 2 images is the best way to go for now. If you are using a low quality card boar of course the glasses( usually plastic) will increase the distortion or low visuals, but using Galaxy VR the quality is pretty good.

 

Longer loading time, well that depend of the Phone and WIFI connection, and here is the lower point of this system, I'll give you that, Dealing with WIFI is a pain, but there are some Apps that load the images in your phone, so if that is your problem then that's a better solution.

When we do a presentations the main problem we usually have is not connecting to our portable hot spot but rather teaching all people how to go to the web browser and fit the phone inside the cardboard. Boy I have stories about that

 

It is also funny that you said that 'you have experienced it first person'. When I give an opinion related anything in this forum is because I have experience on the theme, and pretty much studies several variable about it, and solver a few problems here and there, I am pretty sure several of the participants in this forum have experience relating the things we talk here, I won't be giving my opinion just based on speculation or something that I read some were.

Thankfully at my office we have several VR devices, HTC, Oculus Carboard, Galaxy VR and others and yes they are not perfect, but each one of then has it strength.

[Josef Wienerroither]

How much interest would be in a combined tool ( 3ds Max -> mobile viewer app for the device ), where you essentially place your "tour" points in your 3ds Max scene ( represented by some helpers). On a button press, the 3ds Max tool would then render each of those pano "tour" points to a stereo/nonstereo panoimage (user adjustable) and store the images together with some meta info for the tour. On the App/viewer side this all would be read in and the "tour" be created automatically. Images and the tour config could be loaded from your web server or maybe even be directly deployed to the device's SDCard automatically)

 

I have a stereo viewer app in development for some time now (Unity). It currently can load the pano images from a webservice and has tour portals working already. Together with some real nice transition effects this could give a quite nice experience. But currently this has to be set up in Unity by the user manually ( number of pano spheres, assign rendered images , place Points of interests/Portals and assign target panosphere etc... )

 

As this is a bit of a major development undertaking, i'm just testing grounds here about the interest. But i figured it would be nice for 3ds Max users to be able to generate pano tours through their 3ds Max scenes right inside of 3ds Max, without the need for a 3rd party tour creation app/service. So i would like to know the interest of having such a (payed) 3ds Max tool working together with a viewer for cardboard/Google VR/ GearVR ....

 

BTW: what i noticed is that all the well established pano tour creation applications ( Pano2VR, krpano , Kolor pano tools etc.. ) seem to play catch up with all the vr/stereo hype thats going on . Newer tools like theConstruct ones seem to be well ahead of those established ones ...

Edited December 8, 2016 by spacefrog

[kriskar]

@Francisco

Im not here to discuss this to death and I agree with most what you say, so Ill keep it brief.

From the software I have seen, browser VR is "a shortcut" to getting your tour on multiple devices (having cross-platform integration at the cost of loading times and quality). Im sorry, to this day I have not seen a browser VR experience that loads as fast and has as crisp of an FPS, as my theViewer apps. When going to a client, I want to be 100% certain my tour will load, it will behave as it should and my client will see top image quality. I dont have the courage to rely on the internet connection at their office, or have them make comments that its laggy or rooms load too slow. Thats my line in the sand, but of course, I accept the opposite view.

 

@Josef

If you know Corona-renderer, they are actually launching their Corona VR Warp Helper, I think its called, with theConstruct, so you can place scenes where the panos will be, put warps/hotspots in and then render the whole tour with warp coordinates already in the .jpg output, so its ready to go online or in an app.

I havent tried it myself, but Corona seems pretty proud of that one, my bet is that other rendering software will be soon to follow

[Josef Wienerroither]

@Josef

If you know Corona-renderer, they are actually launching their Corona VR Warp Helper, I think its called, with theConstruct, so you can place scenes where the panos will be, put warps/hotspots in and then render the whole tour with warp coordinates already in the .jpg output, so its ready to go online or in an app.

I havent tried it myself, but Corona seems pretty proud of that one, my bet is that other rendering software will be soon to follow

 

Ah - thanks for the heads up. Did'nt know about this warp helper thing. Certainly will investigate what it is all about...

 

EDIT: whoa - that Warp thingy is exactly what i had planned to implement too... Still i have some more ideas back in my head. So it all depends how effortable the theConstruct way will be as i understand it will be some kind of rental service only too .. no ?

Edited December 8, 2016 by spacefrog

[kriskar]

Its hard to say. Corona has always been a super low prices high quality software and their clients are used to it, so I assume they wouldnt want to charge very much. Then again, its all about market forces.

 

theViewer has a premium subscription, which is monthly and Im actually not paying at all, cause I need only basic functions.

 

But for Corona I really dont know, they might charge extra, might include it into the default licence

[Francisco Penaloza]

How much interest would be in a combined tool ( 3ds Max -> mobile viewer app for the device ), where you essentially place your "tour" points in your 3ds Max scene ( represented by some helpers). On a button press, the 3ds Max tool would then render each of those pano "tour" points to a stereo/nonstereo panoimage (user adjustable) and store the images together with some meta info for the tour. On the App/viewer side this all would be read in and the "tour" be created automatically. Images and the tour config could be loaded from your web server or maybe even be directly deployed to the device's SDCard automatically)

 

I have a stereo viewer app in development for some time now (Unity). It currently can load the pano images from a webservice and has tour portals working already. Together with some real nice transition effects this could give a quite nice experience. But currently this has to be set up in Unity by the user manually ( number of pano spheres, assign rendered images , place Points of interests/Portals and assign target panosphere etc... )

 

As this is a bit of a major development undertaking, i'm just testing grounds here about the interest. But i figured it would be nice for 3ds Max users to be able to generate pano tours through their 3ds Max scenes right inside of 3ds Max, without the need for a 3rd party tour creation app/service. So i would like to know the interest of having such a (payed) 3ds Max tool working together with a viewer for cardboard/Google VR/ GearVR ....

 

BTW: what i noticed is that all the well established pano tour creation applications ( Pano2VR, krpano , Kolor pano tools etc.. ) seem to play catch up with all the vr/stereo hype thats going on . Newer tools like theConstruct ones seem to be well ahead of those established ones ...

 

IMHO I think the main issue is while presenting, not creating the panoramas.

Creating stereos panoramas today is easy enough, for us tech people it is just other step, if you are strange to this media, and want to do stereos panoramas, then you want some one click solution. but again when presenting we have several types of scenarios and that where the diversity of app and techniques grow. and so far I haven' found one single solution that over all the needs.

 

For example, we have the simple way, one on one presentation, you give your GalaxyVR to your client, he enjoy the ride.

The other one is you give to your client a free carboard with your branding and tell him to go to some link to see the project.

The other option is tell him to download some app to load the tour.

Then you have a medium size presentation, let say 8 client board and they all uses their phones to see the tour. unless you have big pockets and show up with 8 Galaxy phones and Galaxy VR sets ready to go.

But in all of them you have the problem that the presenter does not have clue what the people are looking at.

Per Kirs I will give a try to theviewer and see if that linking works for us. But as you can see my point is, the creation process already been covered enough, but the presentation part is the weak spot.

Regarding pricing, pay per use is OK I guess, cheap for the user, but if you are a large company this does scale correctly. Most of the existing plans seems to be designed for freelancer or small team, but if you are a large company, let say 200 or more possible users, the pay per use becomes ridiculous expensive.

My two cents.

[Scott Schroeder]

100% agree with Francisco. There are so many apps out there to create tours that the market is getting saturated. All of these apps fail to take in one critical piece of information. The use of it during a presentation with more than one person. Which is a pretty big weak point that VR as a whole has not fully solved yet.

 

Monthly subscriptions for the service is also another weak point. How do we deal with the cost? Do we constantly bill the client the subscription cost, do we eat it? If we stop paying, do we lose the content we created? The only way a monthly cost works is if you pay for the software itself, but you get a solid forever living deliverable like the html files for a web piece or an exr that can run forever. This is where as a service vrto.me went sideways with their subscription. You need to keep paying to keep that web link alive, unless you go with their whitelist option. Which I don't know what that cost is, but I'm betting it is far more expensive than learning the tools to create the tours yourself. You have to be able to beat the one time cost of the current VR tour software out there.

 

Once I got my head wrapped around the tool we use, which took all of an hour or so, I realized that constantly paying for a create a tour service is not a effective use of our money. I understand this might not be for all, but for us, holy crap we can save so much more by doing it ourselves. So if you do want to create a service, you have to add that extra 10% to make it worth our money. Simply adding hotspots and other easy automation isn't going to swing it for people who have been developing these for some time.

 

Vrto.me's hosting is another good example. Great easy tool. However, a whopping 0% of all of our clients would want their tour being hosted on an outside site. They all want them branded to their main web presence. Thankfully, the creators of Vrto.me are working with the feedback they are getting on various forums, but is shows the initial lack of thinking past the VR itself.

 

If you are going to create a app that someone needs to download, you need to make it as stupid proof as possible. For most of the clients we deal with, PowerPoint is considered high tech to them. You give them a lot of these apps with very basic instructions and you'll see a room full of adults looking like chimps trying to build a rocket ship.

 

Last, as an app goes, you still need to have a backup plan if that person can't install the app on their phone. I know our company phones are restricted to what the user can install to them, both for security purposes and for troubleshooting purposes. So while an app does get you pretty much instant load images on the phone, what do you do if you can't get it installed during the presentation? You say you don't like slow wi-fi connections that you can run into during presentations, but how else are the 25 people in the room going to download the app?

 

Is there any plan to support 12x1 cube maps? All I see is spherical, which can be tough for web loading. With cube maps, you load the tiles which get you into the tour faster versus waiting for the entire single spherical render to load.

[bogelbo]

wow....that so cool..

[kriskar]

@Scott

 

I have not been in that 25 people situation, to be honest. But theViewer gives a direct link too, so I dont see the issue - if I want, I can have any number of clients see the tour at once on their device, be it at sub-par quality. As I said, the app is best when I come in with my GearVR and Ipad and want to show a premium quality tour to clients and its perfect for that, IMHO.

 

I only work with spherical panos and those are certainly supported mono and stereo. Im not sure about cubes, havent had the chance to use any. Its interesting what you say about cube loading times - hadnt thought of that. Then again, thats where the app comes in again

I wouldnt spend my time to convert from spheres to cubes just to save web loading times though..