VR yesterday, today and tomorrow: one of the first opinions
I continue to interview all sorts of cool guys from the field of virtual reality. Today, we will talk with Alexander Lukichev, one of the pioneers of VR in Russia. Let's discuss motion capture, VR parks and the business direction of the industry. By the way, we have a short version for 9 minutes. Link to it under the cut!
Does VR have a future? Share your opinion in the comments.
Short version.
')
Author's vocabulary saved.
You are one of the oldest experts on the VR market in Russia. Tell me how you got there when it was not yet fashionable.
Well, it's probably no secret that I came to VR from the game-dev industry, from a big game business. At most international exhibitions, products like the Oculus DK1 gradually began to appear, a cardboard appeared, and the very first content sensations that could be touched and touched appeared.
And, undoubtedly, people were divided into two categories, the first - who believed in it, that in the very near future it would become HYIP, would become some kind of really motivator for companies, companies would be organized that would deal exclusively with this. And the second said that it is still early, it will wait. So, I probably fell into the category of people number one, who wanted, probably, some new horizons, new sensations in business. And, as they say, practice began directly with interest.
Oculus has collected a lot of money on Kickstarter. You looked at it and decided that you need to do VR, and instead of supporting the Oculus platform, you began to sculpt something of your own in a mobile VR. How did you decide on this?
In fact, it was quite simple to decide, because the status of "developer whale" and status "consumer product" until CV1 (consumer version), as we see now, was very far and incomprehensible when it was before. Cardboard seemed at that time quite an accessible device, that is, by and large, it did not require any special licensing, special use.
And the second motivating factor was that the screens of mobile phones, the screens themselves developed at such an insane speed that the picture that DK1 and even DK2 gave out at that time, appeared, it was already outdated in terms of pixel density, picture quality in relation to That generation of phones (Galaxy S5, iPhone 4 series). That is, the picture on them in the cardboard looked quite usable and pretty.
And it was still much easier to enter the mobile development market, that is, to find specialists who work on the same unit, rather than trying to build, to put it bluntly, a large ecosystem around a PC-based story, where ... get it to the customer leader and get some quick money, yes, to show that this industry is effective and can already bring some kind of income ... That is, there was no incentive, there was no Vive, there was nothing that the user could pick up and try. Therefore, mobile VR seemed at that time the niche in which you can experiment and get products no worse than what we saw on the PC.
And now the situation has changed? Millions of cardboards are on hand, tens of millions even, but at the same time content consumption is not that high in mobile VR.
As I have already said at many conferences, the business industry is always after its formation, when the market basically went through the first stage of formation, when players appeared, hardware, content, and those who consume them are scales that are always in disequilibrium. First, on one side of the piece of iron, on the other side of the content. And here in an unsettled market or in a young market, there is often a situation when the balance of scales outweighs one side.
That is, either there are a lot of cool pieces of iron, but they simply have nothing to show, because they have not yet been tasted, they have not felt, and so on. And the opposite situation. See what we did wow content, and how to show it. On the screen DK2, which is pixel and which is very hurt the eyes, although the content can be many times cooler. Then they say: "Well, when there will be 4K displays, everything will become cool." And in such non-equilibrium states, by and large, and there was a problem and mobile VR including PC-based VR.
And where is mobile VR now, in which position of the scales?
Now just the market ... they can no longer be put in one category. Because if we recall the chronology of the development of events, at conferences 360 video was shown as mobile VR. This is VR, this is great. It takes a year, someone says: "I make a 360-video." And they say to him: “This is not VR”. Everything. "I do for mobile phones." This is also not a VR. Here is VIVE, this is VR.
That is, the attitude to the content itself is very diversified and spread across different markets. There is a clear PC-based market where Oculus, HTC are played, where there is a steam. There are their own rules, their own rules for access to content. At the other extreme is mobile VR content, where the same Google company already features VR separately, puts a separate tag for them, does a search on VR, so that this content is not buried deep somewhere in the depths of the store, but it could be under a cardboard and under the boardboard, they have a separate story, they put their logo on a number of helmets.
Fibrum has a separate version of the helmet, which received this logo. These are separate markets, separate rules, a separate exit strategy, a monetization strategy. But we have to admit that in both markets there is currently a sufficient shortage with the end user. Because the numbers of helmets and the millions that we are talking about, especially regarding the PC VR market, they are in a very large percentage in the hands of developers, in the hands of distributors who make publicly available entertainment on the basis of these helmets, we all know the parks located in shopping centers.
Therefore, if we look at the business from the point of view of the sales market, it is not yet fully formed. A number of devices have not yet come out that will lower the entry threshold. We all heard about Oculus Go and so on and so forth. That is, there are many enough devices that will put their weights on these bowls in order to balance them somehow and make them more comfortable for the user.
But at the same time, you say that now these two markets practically do not compete with each other, if we are talking about the user, apparently, but if we are talking about the B-to-B scenarios, then they are still quite interchangeable.
Again, and agree, and no. I agree that there are already a sufficient number of devices that are interchangeable. There, helmets with the S8 Galaxy inserted will completely replace the Oculus CV1 for some solutions, and it will give a picture just as well and perhaps somewhere more attractive in terms of the final price for the organization of the ecosystem itself.
But to look ... the B-to-B market is currently representative from the point of view of individual specific cases, where the hardware and software part is chosen for a specific budget, customer, its requirements for the quality of the output product, and so on and so forth. Therefore, to talk about native tools, just take this, take it like this, build it like this and get the B-to-B case. They are not. That is, each case is a set of hardware, software and competencies of those people who took it. Because some people simply have a banal lack of competence to implement on one or another engine, on one or another technology.
That is, you want to say that there are, who can abandon the project simply because the requirements for iron ...
In Russia, as you know, very few people refuse from us. They will go to neighbors, friends, svatyam, brothers, they will propose to share ... Yes, the developer’s fate, share budgets, regalia and further on the list, but donate, put this or that project in the portfolio. We know very well that the market, for example, Unity-developers with the arrival of a mobile in general, Unity in a mobile, I’m not talking about VR specifically, it experienced a significant boom, if you take the second pole, the Unreal Engine, which is not very representative of a mobile platform . That is, there are few projects that were promoted through Epic to the mobile.
By the way, do you think Unreal will come to mobile platforms or is there not enough performance yet?
It is already there, it is already there, but they simply don’t see their market there yet. Just because C # developers, Unity, if we look at any game-dev hackathon there, how many people are such a rude word “turkeys in Anriel”, and how many of them can one person, let's say, assemble an orchestra for himself some kind of digestible prototype on Unity, which can be brought to normal production by investing money on graphics, licking gameplay, on the right preproduction before it goes somewhere in the store, to the store, to some kind of this niche.
Therefore, here, based on ... if you take these parameters, it is clear that the best, best interaction with VR will show PC-based on Unreal. Of course, there are many possibilities. Because Unreal has long been working with the film industry, its tools are used in the preparation of cinema animations, cartoon animations, so it is natural that the quality of the output content, taking into account the beautiful picture, Unreal will give more.
But if we take a mass production, when many studios can enter the market and compete, it is clear that many of them will look at Unity, because the entrance threshold, as they say, is the availability of specialists in the market ... Let's enter any game dev position . We need an Unreal developer, we need an Unreal developer ... They exist, but, as it were ...
They are already sitting where they are not bad. But the demand for them has long exceeded supply. And if we still look at the average level of Unity, I do not take on some leads, which I also run after, then ... vacancies ... I am looking for a company, I am a Unity-developer ... I am looking for, I am a Unity-developer. Probably, you can make some neat conclusions about why and how.
VR is now out of the state of HYIP around it. For all Gartner cycles, VR is in the state of reaching the plateau of productivity, but there is a topic in VR, which now, it seems to me, is at the very peak of its hype. This is a full immersion VR. I understand that you know a lot about it, develop projects related to this. Tell me what degrees of immersion in VR now exist.
Well, if we start with chronology and remember how full immersion VR began to emerge, the effect of total immersion is quite a speculative concept, about which many, adding any degree of freedom while consuming VR-content, that is, the appearance of hands, some tactile feeling All this was called full immersion VR. Now full immersion VR. Naturally, with the development of hardware, technology, and so on, we began to receive more and more opportunities to influence more sense organs.
Therefore, any full immersion is all around in order to close all degrees of human interaction with others ... Yes, the sound, smell, hearing, surround sound is the same, the visual picture and tactile sensations. The path is quite simple and no one invented a serious bike, we took the path of 5D cinemas, when we walked the 3D, 5D cinema from a flat picture and there we had 4D 5D cinemas, and so on.
In the end, we received feedback, gyro platforms, sound, light, and so on, and so on. One of the same solutions was tested when we worked in Fibrium. We made the connection of 360 content with gyro platform, with synchronization, with synchronization of movements. We received, by and large, a 5D cinema in 360 format only. Samsung and many other companies actively used this later.
Was it a successful B-to-B case that you could sell in Russia? I would not say that it was directly insanely successful, which went straight to cloning, for sale, but we also tried ourselves in this niche, realized that it worked, and saw that the market also quickly responded to it and started to appear customized solutions that used not only mobile VR, and PC-based, and DK2.
Various platforms began to appear up to Omni with steps, cubes, balls, etc., and so on ... all the stories that, by and large, copied the same as they were, the rides were flying on an airplane in the cabin, where there was a 2D picture, improving the quality of interaction. Next STEP - this was the biggest problem in VR, that we see neither our own body, nor our hands, we cannot interact with anything tactile. That is, I needed some kind of adapter.
There is a new class of devices. The first is the controllers with feedback, the second class of devices are devices a la Leap Motion, which could capture the hand tracking and create some kind of feeling that something can be touched. Everything. It was the next era of full immersion VR. Here came the hands, great ... and so on. And, probably, the biggest such, most serious step that was on my way to full immersion VR, is tracking, of course, tracking, because everyone, while in a VR environment, interacted with content at a certain level at 360 pictures . A sphere was created around them in which all the action took place. But it was impossible to move this sphere and move along it.
That is, you could even track the movement, but how exactly a person walks, how he moves
Yes, though, for a start, it was necessary to track its movement well. That is, everyone saw that there are devices such as Kinect, PlayStation Move. Everyone understood that tracking is very important, that is, interaction. But the quality of this tracking for such systems is not enough to get rid of problems in VR. Leytencie, delays ... needed better tracking.
The solution was quite simple, and it lay on the surface. Everyone looked at how animated films are shot. For them, the complex motion-capsing systems were invented a long time ago: Vicon, Optitrack, and so on, through the list that allowed us to create animations, what we see. Special effects in Hollywood are used for a long time. But the main problem was that there was no rial time.
There was content, which then passed filtering, processing, combing, so that later on the screen the picture looked wow. The task of the VR people, that stumbling block and the challenge, was to do the same for all of this, only in real time. Not just VR shchiki use groundwork, here the very one, probably, happened ...
For me, the most significant situation was when such big vendors like Vicon, like Optitrack, on the other hand, such vendors like MSI, Hewlett-Packard started making devices for VR, but for that very idea, when we carry a backpack behind our back, We walk under the motion capture system and get the same full immersion, where we see the arms, legs, all the smooth interaction. That is, it is so moved the industry that large companies began to produce a class of devices for just such a decision.
So Vicon for animation and Vicon for VR are different cameras?
Already, yes. Here, everything ... you will come back to this issue, I think, when we talk from the business side, but now there is, if you go to the Optitrack website, and go to the Vicon website, the same prerequisites “VR-ready, VR-ready, VR-ready ".
That is, the cameras ... they began to produce a class of devices according to certain technical and tactical characteristics that are not redundant for this task, do not increase the cost of the device several times, what will not be used in VR, and at the same time, give the same , the required quality is in terms of accuracy of capture, in order to transform it into a VR-environment and get that same capturing, what VR-shchiki themselves want from him.
And the software while they also provide some? Is this the SDK ready, or is it ...
Here there was, in fact, the longest journey. And many earned money on it, including me. At Rent, I made a platform for connecting the motion capture system to the classical one (there was no separation at that time, just the basic motion-capcher system), with a single software called Tracker. This is a software that processes the flow of data from the cameras ...
And transform them on the game engine, on Unity and on Unreal. Because until recently, neither Unity ... Unity was not used at all in the film industry, Unreal was used rather indirectly, to solve a number of post-tasks, post-production. Accordingly, our task here was to implement, cut out, let's say, this very ... some intermediary programs that increased ping, and bring this ecosystem to simple interaction: the camera otrechili, gave the data, they got the game engine, he drew it.
And here, just, appeared on the market ... there is such a Swiss company Artanim, which was practically the first to offer its solution. They came from sports kinematics, not just analysts of the movement of athletes, they offered one solution at Vicon. My team was engaged in this decision, which was later acquired by the holding VRTech. And everything was just around to take the pieces of iron when they are not adapted for VR, and make them work easily and natively with game engines.
Now, if we even look at the new versions, if we look at where the big vendors are looking, they have already begun to move even in this area. That is, their first step was to adapt the devices and sell ... Simplify, so that it is cheaper for these purposes ... Yes, highlight the key camera qualities that are important for VR, and give them for a non-space price. Because the film industry ... the cost of equipment in the film industry is completely incompatible with the cost of the current VR.
We have few companies that can afford a VR range with a large number of cameras, the cost of which starts from one and a half thousand dollars for one piece. And in order to close more or less some kind of a digestible site, the number of cameras amounts to tens, ten or more. … , , -, , , . . . , full immersion VR .
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Does VR have a future? Share your opinion in the comments.
Short version.
')
Author's vocabulary saved.
Interview
You are one of the oldest experts on the VR market in Russia. Tell me how you got there when it was not yet fashionable.
Well, it's probably no secret that I came to VR from the game-dev industry, from a big game business. At most international exhibitions, products like the Oculus DK1 gradually began to appear, a cardboard appeared, and the very first content sensations that could be touched and touched appeared.
And, undoubtedly, people were divided into two categories, the first - who believed in it, that in the very near future it would become HYIP, would become some kind of really motivator for companies, companies would be organized that would deal exclusively with this. And the second said that it is still early, it will wait. So, I probably fell into the category of people number one, who wanted, probably, some new horizons, new sensations in business. And, as they say, practice began directly with interest.
Oculus has collected a lot of money on Kickstarter. You looked at it and decided that you need to do VR, and instead of supporting the Oculus platform, you began to sculpt something of your own in a mobile VR. How did you decide on this?
In fact, it was quite simple to decide, because the status of "developer whale" and status "consumer product" until CV1 (consumer version), as we see now, was very far and incomprehensible when it was before. Cardboard seemed at that time quite an accessible device, that is, by and large, it did not require any special licensing, special use.
And the second motivating factor was that the screens of mobile phones, the screens themselves developed at such an insane speed that the picture that DK1 and even DK2 gave out at that time, appeared, it was already outdated in terms of pixel density, picture quality in relation to That generation of phones (Galaxy S5, iPhone 4 series). That is, the picture on them in the cardboard looked quite usable and pretty.
And it was still much easier to enter the mobile development market, that is, to find specialists who work on the same unit, rather than trying to build, to put it bluntly, a large ecosystem around a PC-based story, where ... get it to the customer leader and get some quick money, yes, to show that this industry is effective and can already bring some kind of income ... That is, there was no incentive, there was no Vive, there was nothing that the user could pick up and try. Therefore, mobile VR seemed at that time the niche in which you can experiment and get products no worse than what we saw on the PC.
And now the situation has changed? Millions of cardboards are on hand, tens of millions even, but at the same time content consumption is not that high in mobile VR.
As I have already said at many conferences, the business industry is always after its formation, when the market basically went through the first stage of formation, when players appeared, hardware, content, and those who consume them are scales that are always in disequilibrium. First, on one side of the piece of iron, on the other side of the content. And here in an unsettled market or in a young market, there is often a situation when the balance of scales outweighs one side.
That is, either there are a lot of cool pieces of iron, but they simply have nothing to show, because they have not yet been tasted, they have not felt, and so on. And the opposite situation. See what we did wow content, and how to show it. On the screen DK2, which is pixel and which is very hurt the eyes, although the content can be many times cooler. Then they say: "Well, when there will be 4K displays, everything will become cool." And in such non-equilibrium states, by and large, and there was a problem and mobile VR including PC-based VR.
And where is mobile VR now, in which position of the scales?
Now just the market ... they can no longer be put in one category. Because if we recall the chronology of the development of events, at conferences 360 video was shown as mobile VR. This is VR, this is great. It takes a year, someone says: "I make a 360-video." And they say to him: “This is not VR”. Everything. "I do for mobile phones." This is also not a VR. Here is VIVE, this is VR.
That is, the attitude to the content itself is very diversified and spread across different markets. There is a clear PC-based market where Oculus, HTC are played, where there is a steam. There are their own rules, their own rules for access to content. At the other extreme is mobile VR content, where the same Google company already features VR separately, puts a separate tag for them, does a search on VR, so that this content is not buried deep somewhere in the depths of the store, but it could be under a cardboard and under the boardboard, they have a separate story, they put their logo on a number of helmets.
Fibrum has a separate version of the helmet, which received this logo. These are separate markets, separate rules, a separate exit strategy, a monetization strategy. But we have to admit that in both markets there is currently a sufficient shortage with the end user. Because the numbers of helmets and the millions that we are talking about, especially regarding the PC VR market, they are in a very large percentage in the hands of developers, in the hands of distributors who make publicly available entertainment on the basis of these helmets, we all know the parks located in shopping centers.
Therefore, if we look at the business from the point of view of the sales market, it is not yet fully formed. A number of devices have not yet come out that will lower the entry threshold. We all heard about Oculus Go and so on and so forth. That is, there are many enough devices that will put their weights on these bowls in order to balance them somehow and make them more comfortable for the user.
But at the same time, you say that now these two markets practically do not compete with each other, if we are talking about the user, apparently, but if we are talking about the B-to-B scenarios, then they are still quite interchangeable.
Again, and agree, and no. I agree that there are already a sufficient number of devices that are interchangeable. There, helmets with the S8 Galaxy inserted will completely replace the Oculus CV1 for some solutions, and it will give a picture just as well and perhaps somewhere more attractive in terms of the final price for the organization of the ecosystem itself.
But to look ... the B-to-B market is currently representative from the point of view of individual specific cases, where the hardware and software part is chosen for a specific budget, customer, its requirements for the quality of the output product, and so on and so forth. Therefore, to talk about native tools, just take this, take it like this, build it like this and get the B-to-B case. They are not. That is, each case is a set of hardware, software and competencies of those people who took it. Because some people simply have a banal lack of competence to implement on one or another engine, on one or another technology.
That is, you want to say that there are, who can abandon the project simply because the requirements for iron ...
In Russia, as you know, very few people refuse from us. They will go to neighbors, friends, svatyam, brothers, they will propose to share ... Yes, the developer’s fate, share budgets, regalia and further on the list, but donate, put this or that project in the portfolio. We know very well that the market, for example, Unity-developers with the arrival of a mobile in general, Unity in a mobile, I’m not talking about VR specifically, it experienced a significant boom, if you take the second pole, the Unreal Engine, which is not very representative of a mobile platform . That is, there are few projects that were promoted through Epic to the mobile.
By the way, do you think Unreal will come to mobile platforms or is there not enough performance yet?
It is already there, it is already there, but they simply don’t see their market there yet. Just because C # developers, Unity, if we look at any game-dev hackathon there, how many people are such a rude word “turkeys in Anriel”, and how many of them can one person, let's say, assemble an orchestra for himself some kind of digestible prototype on Unity, which can be brought to normal production by investing money on graphics, licking gameplay, on the right preproduction before it goes somewhere in the store, to the store, to some kind of this niche.
Therefore, here, based on ... if you take these parameters, it is clear that the best, best interaction with VR will show PC-based on Unreal. Of course, there are many possibilities. Because Unreal has long been working with the film industry, its tools are used in the preparation of cinema animations, cartoon animations, so it is natural that the quality of the output content, taking into account the beautiful picture, Unreal will give more.
But if we take a mass production, when many studios can enter the market and compete, it is clear that many of them will look at Unity, because the entrance threshold, as they say, is the availability of specialists in the market ... Let's enter any game dev position . We need an Unreal developer, we need an Unreal developer ... They exist, but, as it were ...
They are already sitting where they are not bad. But the demand for them has long exceeded supply. And if we still look at the average level of Unity, I do not take on some leads, which I also run after, then ... vacancies ... I am looking for a company, I am a Unity-developer ... I am looking for, I am a Unity-developer. Probably, you can make some neat conclusions about why and how.
VR is now out of the state of HYIP around it. For all Gartner cycles, VR is in the state of reaching the plateau of productivity, but there is a topic in VR, which now, it seems to me, is at the very peak of its hype. This is a full immersion VR. I understand that you know a lot about it, develop projects related to this. Tell me what degrees of immersion in VR now exist.
Well, if we start with chronology and remember how full immersion VR began to emerge, the effect of total immersion is quite a speculative concept, about which many, adding any degree of freedom while consuming VR-content, that is, the appearance of hands, some tactile feeling All this was called full immersion VR. Now full immersion VR. Naturally, with the development of hardware, technology, and so on, we began to receive more and more opportunities to influence more sense organs.
Therefore, any full immersion is all around in order to close all degrees of human interaction with others ... Yes, the sound, smell, hearing, surround sound is the same, the visual picture and tactile sensations. The path is quite simple and no one invented a serious bike, we took the path of 5D cinemas, when we walked the 3D, 5D cinema from a flat picture and there we had 4D 5D cinemas, and so on.
In the end, we received feedback, gyro platforms, sound, light, and so on, and so on. One of the same solutions was tested when we worked in Fibrium. We made the connection of 360 content with gyro platform, with synchronization, with synchronization of movements. We received, by and large, a 5D cinema in 360 format only. Samsung and many other companies actively used this later.
Was it a successful B-to-B case that you could sell in Russia? I would not say that it was directly insanely successful, which went straight to cloning, for sale, but we also tried ourselves in this niche, realized that it worked, and saw that the market also quickly responded to it and started to appear customized solutions that used not only mobile VR, and PC-based, and DK2.
Various platforms began to appear up to Omni with steps, cubes, balls, etc., and so on ... all the stories that, by and large, copied the same as they were, the rides were flying on an airplane in the cabin, where there was a 2D picture, improving the quality of interaction. Next STEP - this was the biggest problem in VR, that we see neither our own body, nor our hands, we cannot interact with anything tactile. That is, I needed some kind of adapter.
There is a new class of devices. The first is the controllers with feedback, the second class of devices are devices a la Leap Motion, which could capture the hand tracking and create some kind of feeling that something can be touched. Everything. It was the next era of full immersion VR. Here came the hands, great ... and so on. And, probably, the biggest such, most serious step that was on my way to full immersion VR, is tracking, of course, tracking, because everyone, while in a VR environment, interacted with content at a certain level at 360 pictures . A sphere was created around them in which all the action took place. But it was impossible to move this sphere and move along it.
That is, you could even track the movement, but how exactly a person walks, how he moves
Yes, though, for a start, it was necessary to track its movement well. That is, everyone saw that there are devices such as Kinect, PlayStation Move. Everyone understood that tracking is very important, that is, interaction. But the quality of this tracking for such systems is not enough to get rid of problems in VR. Leytencie, delays ... needed better tracking.
The solution was quite simple, and it lay on the surface. Everyone looked at how animated films are shot. For them, the complex motion-capsing systems were invented a long time ago: Vicon, Optitrack, and so on, through the list that allowed us to create animations, what we see. Special effects in Hollywood are used for a long time. But the main problem was that there was no rial time.
There was content, which then passed filtering, processing, combing, so that later on the screen the picture looked wow. The task of the VR people, that stumbling block and the challenge, was to do the same for all of this, only in real time. Not just VR shchiki use groundwork, here the very one, probably, happened ...
For me, the most significant situation was when such big vendors like Vicon, like Optitrack, on the other hand, such vendors like MSI, Hewlett-Packard started making devices for VR, but for that very idea, when we carry a backpack behind our back, We walk under the motion capture system and get the same full immersion, where we see the arms, legs, all the smooth interaction. That is, it is so moved the industry that large companies began to produce a class of devices for just such a decision.
So Vicon for animation and Vicon for VR are different cameras?
Already, yes. Here, everything ... you will come back to this issue, I think, when we talk from the business side, but now there is, if you go to the Optitrack website, and go to the Vicon website, the same prerequisites “VR-ready, VR-ready, VR-ready ".
That is, the cameras ... they began to produce a class of devices according to certain technical and tactical characteristics that are not redundant for this task, do not increase the cost of the device several times, what will not be used in VR, and at the same time, give the same , the required quality is in terms of accuracy of capture, in order to transform it into a VR-environment and get that same capturing, what VR-shchiki themselves want from him.
And the software while they also provide some? Is this the SDK ready, or is it ...
Here there was, in fact, the longest journey. And many earned money on it, including me. At Rent, I made a platform for connecting the motion capture system to the classical one (there was no separation at that time, just the basic motion-capcher system), with a single software called Tracker. This is a software that processes the flow of data from the cameras ...
And transform them on the game engine, on Unity and on Unreal. Because until recently, neither Unity ... Unity was not used at all in the film industry, Unreal was used rather indirectly, to solve a number of post-tasks, post-production. Accordingly, our task here was to implement, cut out, let's say, this very ... some intermediary programs that increased ping, and bring this ecosystem to simple interaction: the camera otrechili, gave the data, they got the game engine, he drew it.
And here, just, appeared on the market ... there is such a Swiss company Artanim, which was practically the first to offer its solution. They came from sports kinematics, not just analysts of the movement of athletes, they offered one solution at Vicon. My team was engaged in this decision, which was later acquired by the holding VRTech. And everything was just around to take the pieces of iron when they are not adapted for VR, and make them work easily and natively with game engines.
Now, if we even look at the new versions, if we look at where the big vendors are looking, they have already begun to move even in this area. That is, their first step was to adapt the devices and sell ... Simplify, so that it is cheaper for these purposes ... Yes, highlight the key camera qualities that are important for VR, and give them for a non-space price. Because the film industry ... the cost of equipment in the film industry is completely incompatible with the cost of the current VR.
We have few companies that can afford a VR range with a large number of cameras, the cost of which starts from one and a half thousand dollars for one piece. And in order to close more or less some kind of a digestible site, the number of cameras amounts to tens, ten or more. … , , -, , , . . . , full immersion VR .
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/351850/
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