Garden VR

OK, why has it taken me 4 months of lockdown to realise that I've got the ideal room-scale VR space out in my garden! Having thought of the idea I did have some doubts about a) were there too few straight lines for it to manage the tracking, b) would rough grass flag as intruders in the scene and c) what happened if the dog walked through, but in the end it all worked swimmingly.

Wifi reaches about half way down - so that may be an issue, although I found it hard to draw out more  the first half the garden as a space. Oculus kept putting its "draw boundary" panel right where I was looking and walking and drawing didn't help - but I'll see if I can do better another time. I ended up with a space 15 paces by 7 - far bigger than the attic (and no slopey ceilings).

The image below shows a rough mapping of the space to the WebXR demo room - so I could walk about half of it (Oculus hides the warning barriers in photos - annoying in this case as I'd set myself up to show the exact extent!)

After that everything worked just as though I was indoors - apart from the occasional need to walk back closer to the recover the wifi. I certainly lost all sense of where I was in the garden and alignment, the soft grass didn't interfere with the immersion, and the slight slope up to the house end was a useful warning!

Not related to being in the garden I did notice that I felt more latency/unease with the 3D photospheres (and even more with the stereophotospheres) than with the true 3D spaces - where I felt none at all. Perhaps one reason why there were a lot of reports of unease with VR is a lot of people were having photosphere experiences - although admittedly true latency issues remain (but made worse by doing "crazy" things in VR - like rollercoasters - rather than just walking around in a room!

One experience which was heightened was the Mozilla vertigo experience - walking on ever smaller blocks over nothing. I suppose because I could move more in the garden I could better explore it and fully immerse myself in it - and it certainly made me check I could feel grass under my feet before I stepped - particularly when I just stepped off the blocks and into space.

Anyway all the space allowed me to have a good walk around the solar system model without using teleports and actually get the planets lined up for the first time! Even in the garden they are proving too big so need to at least halve the sizes!

Further Adventures in WebXR - Playing with the Solar System

Having a bit more of a play with WebGL/WebXR and now have a nice draggable solar system! Could be a neat learning tool once finished to get the planets in the right order, too  look at their globes in more detail, and perhaps access further information about them. With World Space Day/Week going virtual might be time to set up a gallery of experiences for people to try that week. 

Need to sort a few more things first though - like rings for Saturn, a starscape backdrop, and change the highlight colours. Maybe also the option to check your order and give the you the right one. Also need to add a sun, and shrink the planets even further!

The more we play with WebGL/WebXR the more excited we are by it as a tactical solution, quickly creating small but powerful bespoke VR experiences that can be instantly accessed by anyone with a WebXR compatible VR headseat without any need for an install!

Virtual Archaeology Review publishes Virtual Avebury Paper

The Virtual Archaeology Review has just published Professor Liz Falconer's paper on the Virtual Avebury project we did last year. The paper looks at the response to the VR experience by visitors to the National Trusts Avebury Visitor Centre - where two people at a time could collaboratively explore the Avebury site as was - i.e. without a village being built in the middle of it and all the missing stones replaced!

You can read the paper at: https://polipapers.upv.es/index.php/var/article/view/12924/12360

Key findings included:

• More than 1200 members of the public experienced a 3D, fully immersive simulation of Avebury Henge, Wiltshire, UK over a nine-month period.
• Patterns of use and familiarity with information technology (IT), and using mobile technologies for gaming were found that did not follow age and gender stereotypes.
• There was little correlation between age, gender and IT familiarity with reactions to Virtual Avebury, suggesting that such simulations might have wide appeal for heritage site visitors.

Some of the key data are shown below:

Emotional Responses to Virtual Avebury

Experiences of Virtual Avebury

Responses to the Virtual Avebury Soundscape

Read the full paper at: https://polipapers.upv.es/index.php/var/article/view/12924/12360

DadenU Day: WebXR

MozVR Hello WebXR Demo Room

For my DadenU Day I decided to get to grips with WebXR. WebXR is an new standard (well an evolution of WebVR) designed to enable web-based 3D/VR applications to detect and run on any connected VR or AR hardware, and to detect user input controls (both 6POS and hand controllers). This should mean that:

• You can write and host VR applications natively on the web and launch then from a VR headsets built-in web browser
• Not worry whether its Oculus, HTC or A.N.Other headset, both for display and for reading controllers
• Have a 2D/3D view automatically available in the web browser for people without a VR HMD.

What WebXR does NOT do is actually build the scene, you use existing WebGL for that (essentially a 3D HTML standard, not to be confused with WebXR or WebVR!) through something like the Three.js or A-Frame frameworks.

There's a good introduction to WebXR at: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/05/welcome-to-immersive#what_is_the_webxr_device_api

To get a good sense of what web-delivered VR (via WebXR) can do I headed over to Mozilla's demo at https://blog.mozvr.com/hello-webxr/. This room has a bunch of different demos, and a couple of "doorways" to additional spaces with further demos. If you view on a 2D browser you just see the room, but can't navigate or interact (don't see why WebXR should pick up ASDW same way as its picks up a 6DOF controller). If you go to the page in your Oculus Quest (or other) browser you also see the same 3D scene in 2D. BUT it also offers you an "Enter VR" button, click this and your VR lobby and the 2D browser disappears and you are fully in the VR space as though you'd loaded a dedicated VR app. Awesome. In the space you can:

• Play a virtual xylophone (2 sticks and sounds)
• Spray virtual graffiti
• Zoom in on some art
• View 360 photospheres - lovely interface clicking on a small sphere that replaces the VR room with a full 360/720 photosphere. I'd always been dubious about mixing photospheres and full 3D models in the same app but his works well
• View a stereoscopic 360 photosphere - so you can sense depth, pretty awesome
• Enter a room to chase sound and animation effects
• View a really nice photogrammetry statue which proves that web VR doesn't need to mean angular low-rez graphics 

MozVR Photogrammetry Demo

There's a really good "how we did it" post by the Mozilla team at: https://blog.mozvr.com/visualdev-hello-webxr/

Having seen just what you can do with WebXR the next step was to learn how its done. For that I went to the WebXR sample pages at https://immersive-web.github.io/webxr-samples/

Although thee are a lot simpler than the MozVR one, each shows how to do a particular task - such as user interaction, photospheres etc. You can also download the code and libraries for each from GitHub at https://github.com/immersive-web/webxr-samples.

Movement demo

Controller demo

The only downside of these seems to be that they use Cottontail - a small WebGL/WebXR library/framework purely developed for these demos and not recommended for general use - so adapting them to your own needs is not as simple as it would be if they were written in Three.js or A-Frame.

Keen to actually start making my own WebXR I started by copying the GitHUb repository to my own server and running the demo's up. Issue #1 was that any link from a web page to the WebXR page MUST use https, using http fails!

Starting simply I took the photosphere demo and replaced the image with one of my own. The image had worked fine on the photosphere display in Tabletop Simulator but refused to work in WebXR. Eventually I found that the image had to be in 2048x1024, higher resolutions (but same ratio) fail. Also the photosphere demo is for stereoscopic photospheres so you have to remove the " displayMode: 'stereoTopBottom'" parameter.

Hougoumont Farm at Waterloo in WebXR Photosphere

Next up was to try and add my own 3D object. I liked the block room in one of the demos and worked out how to remove their demo blocks form the middle, and to hide the stats screen. Nice empty room loaded up. Then I hit the bump that I usually write in Three.js or A-Frame and I could't just cut-and-past into their WebXR/Cottontail template. Then I ran out of time (it was Friday after all!)

I've now found a page of really basic Three.js WebXR demos at https://threejs.org/examples/?q=webxr so the aim for this week is to get those working and start on my own WebXR spaces.

It's obviously early days for WebXR, but given the MozVR demo this really could be a lovely download-free way of delivering both 2D/3D to ordinary browsers, and full VR to headsets without any downloads. Joy!