Month / February 2018

by dshah1120

Reflection: Bigscreen VR

Before I continue I’ll take a step back to define any VR application that brings together people in an environment as “social vr”. What makes Bigscreen interesting is the paradox of choice. In other social applications VR Chat, AltspaceVR, High Fidelity; there are no core activities that you can derive outside of being together, which makes the choices for what you can do very broad. With Bigscreen it’s a display extension or place to watch movies with a cinema experience. Simple.
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Recently I saw that they enticed Paramount (?) studios to do a premiere of Top Gun in VR. I thought that was a nice blend of a social construct we know and love of going to the movies and social VR––though I didn’t attend the screening. I’ve used Bigscreen recently and the environments are nice with physically based shadows and lighting. Bigscreen’s reliance on virtual displays makes it well-positioned to benefit from forthcoming improvements in display clarity.
multiplayer-bigscreen-1400
One thing worth noting is that I haven’t been able to get audio to work for all people in a living room setting. When putting your content on the Bigscreen audio seems to play only for you. This wasn’t the case in the movie theater where a host had no problem playing Rogue One off of Netflix for all to enjoy with sound.
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Finally, when Oculus Home released it’s core 2.0 update everyone on Rift had the ability to see and use their desktop screen in VR. SteamVR also enables desktop viewing. Viveport? Although, today Oculus Home doesn’t offer social as Bigscreen does… this probably effects the uniqueness of their total product and must be considered for continuing fundraising.
by dshah1120

Supermedium

Part of YC’s W18 Cohort, Supermedium, is a superset of webVR experiences. It features work from the likes of Inigo Quilez, Ricardo Cabello, Marpi, and others, the browser can be downloaded on Windows today.

I enjoyed Shadertoy’s audio visualizations in particular though they didn’t support touch controllers. An idiosyncrasy of the platform right now is that usually, experiences have HTC Vive controllers supported only. This means that when you use your Oculus Touch controllers the API will receive button presses and input but they will visually appear to come from an HTC Vive controller.

Check out the Supermedium website here. The founders are experienced contributors to webVR efforts, Kevin Ngo and Diego Marcos, and technical artist, Diego Goberna.