Virtual reality within gaming and architecure
Jacob Honore, CEO and Founder at Zaxis will introduce you to two projects - a viking project with 360 video and a visualizer for architects.
Jacob says, that for the last 20+ years I have been striving to create vivid and contemporary visual content for both design, commercials and games using cutting edge technologies." Learn more about Zaxis here
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Internet Week DenmarkView transcript
As I said, we've brought two cases today. We've brought kind of a Viking project we're doing for an institution where we use like 3D or 360 video and we do use VR to give an extra experience. And then we've brought a different project where it's like a visualizer for architectural things which soon my companion is going to present for you. For us, we kind of take an approach to VR technology in the way that we see it not as a technology. We see it as mess pointed out as a place and he stole my exact picture which was kind of nice of him. But it's a good project. It's kind of a nice analogy because like for many of us, it was one of the first things where we were actually saw kind of the future where you could load anything into a world and give an idea of how this would shape the future. So what we've been doing with the Vikings is that we've done a couple of solutions for the Viking project. We've got the King's Hall which is going to be built which is going to be the biggest Viking building on the Northern Hemisphere. This building is going to be 60 meters long, 12 meters wide and 10 meters to the ceiling. And as you know these things, they have to be financed in some way. So this is going to take like three years to build from now on. So there's a lot of funding going on. So what the guys building this would actually do that they wanted to promote the Viking project. They wanted to promote it ahead of time. They wanted to give the audience an idea of how will it look when it's finally there. So what we did was actually we created the 3D model and then we have like constructed this in 3D and put it into Unity and exported to a phone so you can actually position yourself at different places and have a look around. And what's really catching is that the people that we've shown it to so far, when they see the drawings, when they see the 2D things, they're like, okay, that's like a Viking thing. But when they actually take on like the VR thing, they're really, wow, is it this big? So one of the things that we're really experiencing is like the scale that people get a really good idea about the scale of things and they get a really good spatial feeling about projects. One other thing that we did is that museums, they are not very interested in people being able to go into the museum or seeing their attractions from afar. I mean, so what they really want is they want people to go there. So what we did, like we did like a geotagging thing. So what you can download the app. So you can download the visualization, but you can't use it unless you're within a certain vicinity of the museum. So you can use part of the app when you are outside their premises. And when you go inside, you get like extra features because otherwise it wouldn't really serve the picture or the purpose of having an app. So there's like kind of a geotagging thing so you can only use the whole experience when you are on the actual site. Okay. Thank you. And then the third part in this thing we're doing for the museum is that we want to use a 360 feature for the carpool. And what we want to do is like we want to do like use the 360 camera as a kind of time machine. So what we're going to do is that we're going to go out to the location and we're going to do like some spot points. And we're going to have a lot of actors and people who's doing like the role playing thing, you know, with all their latex weapons and stuff. And we're going to record actual fighting scenes and we're going to record how the Vikings did, how they sacrificed things and how they had meetings. And we're going to record that on 360 videos. And what will happen when the kids go there is that they will take the app into their carpool. And they will position themselves on these spots around the premises. And when they take on the carpool, they will be in the precise, in the exact same spot. But now they will see it in the Viking age, which we hope will be kind of cool. And we hope that it will be a lot easier for parents to actually drag their kids to these museums and cultural institutions. So what we think about like VR, a lot of people are talking about VR. And VR is to some extent a pretty expensive kind of adventure. So what we're thinking is that we combine the VR with 360 videos, which is a lot cheaper. Then we can create a kind of combined experience for the audiences at these premises. Okay. And that is about it. So now I'm going to leave the microphone to Sune, who will be talking about our visualizer, our architectural solution. Hi, everybody. I am Sune from Liquid Media. And we have a collaboration between Saxx Games and Liquid Media. And I'm here to talk about our visualizer, which is a project we've been working on for six months now. And I'd like to take it from the beginning because what we thought was like when you have people who are used to doing stuff in a certain way, like everybody is. We all have our habits and our way of doing things. And we found that when we talk to people, our customers, we're doing a lot of normal visualizations and stuff like that, of course. And we kind of aired the idea of have you thought about these virtual reality conceptions? And people are like, yeah, well, isn't that more for gaming or isn't that for something else? And what is it for me? And is it really, really expensive? It sounds like you're buying a jet plane. I'm buying a jet plane when someone says VR. And we were just thinking about what is the angle here and now, not in a year, not now, today, tomorrow. Is someone going to buy this product and actually spend money on it? What is the angle? And that is why we're thinking about the Gear VR. That is our choice at the moment, our spear point, if you may. We have other products. We're doing other things. And we're doing stuff for the Vive and we're doing stuff for Cardboard. But we are finding as we get down and dirty, if you will, that when you get down to business and start actually working with it, it kind of feels like there's a place and a market. And there's something there. There's a certain kind of, how can you say it, areas where they seem more useful of getting to it. And it's basically because you can't have it all. Everything comes at a cost in some sense. Like if you take this, like you have the Vive or the Rift for that sense. And you get the best experience. It's the most useful, great thing and it's really great. But the accessibility of it is not that great. Because you cannot lend this out to people and just rely on them. They can set it up. If anyone tried to use this, actually, you have to set up the cage. You have to log into an account. You have to do a lot of stuff setting it up. So it's not just something that you can just hand over to someone and say, well, like you can hand over drawings and say, if I have a customer and we have visualization, I can send it. And they're happy. Everybody wins. I can't do that with this product. And that is our main concern for a solution that actually works in the real life. So on the other hand, we have the software. We have the cardboard. Great accessibility. Everybody can have it. It's really cheap. Everybody has a phone. But the quality is, I don't like to use the word quality because what is quality? But the lenses and you can get into the details. But everybody can agree that you get a more immersive experience with the Vive than with the cardboard. That is for sure. And somewhere in the middle. But the Gear VR and other contractions, there are lots of products that you can buy in China and whatever that's similar to this. And with that, the reason why we chose that is basically that we thought that we could combine this. And our main focus, combine the best of both. I mean. Our main focus has been that it has to be an add-on solution. People are reluctant at the moment buying pure virtual reality experiences unless it is for something specifically like the Viking project. If it is a case of a building or whatever, they still want their visualizations. They still want their maps. They still want what they're thinking about. So it has to be an add-on. That was our first objective. Then it had to be geared for our pipeline. So you bring down the cost. You have to have a solution that is ready for the pipeline that you're working on. So that it's not a custom solution every time because that will make it more expensive. And that is also a no-go. And of course in that sense we have this modularized build. And that kind of means that in the setup we're using Unity. Thanks guys. But it means that instead of just making a single code page where everything is kind of intertwined in each other, we made everything like small modules so we can, like Legos, take it apart and put it together again in a very easy way. Again bringing down cost. And then of course the really important one, intuitive usage. It has to be a product where you can like take the Gear VR, lend a phone with it, everything is put on the phone. It's just like here's the drawings, here's the Gear VR, the code for the phone is this, make it work. And people can put it in and it works. No explanation needed. So that's really, really important. I'll go over this. The actual visualization. We have it with us actually so you can try it afterwards if someone's interested. But really fast. We have like a main room where you have the model. Or you can have the model. You can do it. You can have floors or floors in a building. You can switch them and whatnot. But then you have like a plan drawing where you have these access points. I'll get back to that. And then we have the live model where you can go around. You can go around the live model. In this case we're flying. But it doesn't really matter. Over here we have the stereoscopic renderers. And the reason why we're doing this is because we found that we couldn't really find or get the quality that we wanted from the vibe, that we get with the vibe. So we're kind of bringing it together. So we have these specials. We have these little interest points. You can move freely in the live model. But you have these interest points where you can see a rendering from that location. So you can actually see what it would look like if you had more processing power basically. And that's combining the best of both worlds. You have the possibility of getting the scale. It's stripped down. You can move to basic textures. And you can also just remove all the textures so you just get a spatial feeling because that is the most important thing that VR provides. It's the feeling of scale and feeling of presence. And you don't really need all the fancy things for that actually. But then easy navigation on the map so you can see where you are. And bringing big renders into it. So. Okay. If there's any questions I would like to answer it. Otherwise I will say thanks for your time. I hope it was nice to see a little project from the real world.