A R / V R
A considerable amount of research has been done within the fields of augmented reality and virtual reality. It is very exciting to see solutions leave the research labs and enter the hands of developers. It has been especially fascinating to see early pioneers work on transformative solutions for businesses and consumers. My most recent work in this field is re-imagining day to day computer experiences and innovating new experiences around this technology. Two areas I have recently worked on were STEM related experiences and consumer level platform experiences.
At zSpace we designed stunning interactive experiences by integrating the latest AR/VR technology in an all-in-one computer. zSpace utilizes three sensory characteristics to create a natural and intuitive experience: perception of depth, ability to look around and kinesthetic realism.
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This example simulates the users experience while shopping for a watch on Amazon with our custom browser. The display uses sophisticated head tracking software to match the scene to your view, as well as the orientation of your stylus manipulating objects in the scene.
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The consumer experience platform that we created provided a suite of new interactions for a number of standard user applications. We designed unique experiences for Facebook (3d posts and content), Amazon (watch configurator), NY Times Real Estate (a loft walkthrough) and a Medical Encyclopedia (3d heart) as examples.
With our Facebook experience, we created a lot of rich elements to play with. (e.g. user profile pictures were all stereoscopic images that would peak out of the page and pictures in the user feed could be manipulated.)
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This example allowed a user to touch elements of a picture and the appropriate 3d model of those element would then magically snap out of the page for them to manipulate and study.
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We created quite a few magical moments in our Facebook experience like this one.
To share the primary users experience with others, we enabled a mode with a second camera that would put the experience on another monitor so that they could see what was happening. The images below show example STEM experiences from both the different points of view.
Just for fun, I decided took one of the STEM biomes used in our zSpace experience and put it in WebGL to see how it looked. Enjoy!
