Tag

Create

Quest with New Tools Announced at Connect

Available for pre-order today starting at $499.99 USD, Meta Quest 3 is our next-generation headset designed to support mixed reality experiences in full color. It delivers 10x the pixels of Meta Quest 2 for Passthrough, more natural depth perception, improved hand and body tracking, and many more improved capabilities that enable you to push the limit of what’s possible.

At Meta Connect, we announced a set of tools to help you go from ideation to iteration faster in Unity. Using these tools, you can empower your creative process with the latest capabilities and decrease the time you need to set up and start building.

Keep reading to learn how you can accelerate development Project Setup Tool, Building Blocks, and Meta XR Simulator—and how these tools can work together to enhance your apps.

Reduce Debug and Setup Time with the Project Setup Tool for Unity

Launched with Integration SDK v49, the Project Setup Tool was designed to help you start building and spend less time setting up our SDKs. The Project Setup Tool automatically alerts you about issues and helps you fix them with one click thanks to its large library of automatic fixes.

To give you clarity into any compatibility, rendering, or SDK issues impacting your project, the Project Setup Tool’s alerts are also categorized based on urgency to help you prioritize what’s required, recommended, and optional.

All developers building in Unity can access the Project Setup Tool today, and we’re continuing to add more automatic fixes and supported APIs with every new SDK release. To get started, please visit the documentation.

Drag-and-Drop Features to Enrich Your Experience with Building Blocks

Building Blocks is a new experimental feature with Integration SDK v57 designed to help you easily discover and add Presence Platform features like Passthrough, hand tracking, and much more to your apps.

Building Blocks helps you get up and running faster thanks to a library of capabilities that you can simply drag and drop into your project, giving you a robust solution for rapid prototyping and adding new features into a production build. This tool gives developers building in Unity access to a library of “blocks” that contain the features powering MR, interactions, and social presence on Meta Quest headsets. With just a few clicks, you’ll have access to a library of features to create incredible immersive and mixed reality experiences at your fingertips.

Feature descriptions and the ability to search and filter blocks can help you discover new features to enrich your current app. At launch, Building Blocks will include support for 12 blocks:

Passthrough
Controller Tracking
Hand Tracking
Camera Rig
Surface Projected Passthrough
Room Model
Eye Gaze
Virtual Keyboard
Synthetic Hands
Throwable Item
Pointable Item
Pokeable Item
Grabbable Item

Once you find a block you want to add, you can drag and drop it into your project and get set up in three easy steps. Here’s how it works:

Blocks are classified as ScriptableObjects, and each contains dependencies, setup rules, unit tests, and more to ensure that you have the feature logic you need and that the features work independently and when combined with others. Designing experiences that leverage physical and virtual spaces can be difficult, but by using the provided blocks, you can combine features with greater ease—even for builds already in production.

This also makes iteration a more fun and enjoyable experience by allowing you to jumpstart a project with a working slate of installed features, then customize and configure them to meet the unique needs of your app without requiring excessive time and effort coding.

Building Blocks will be available for experimental use with Integration SDK v57, and in the coming months, we’ll add support for additional blocks, automatic testing, improved UI, and additional improvements. Be sure to check back with the launch of SDK v57 to find links to documentation and get started using Building Blocks.

Faster Developer Iteration with Meta XR Simulator

Meta XR Simulator (Unity | Unreal | Native) lets you quickly and easily test and improve the mechanics, design, and overall user experience of your apps without needing a physical device. Meta XR Simulator is a lightweight XR runtime that lets you simulate Meta Quest devices and features on the API level, saving you time and energy by achieving faster iteration and scalable automation. Meta XR Simulator makes it easier to do day-to-day development by enabling you to test and debug your apps without needing to put on your headset every time.

You can easily test and improve the mechanics, design, and overall user experience of your apps with Meta XR Simulator. The tool simulates the motion and input of Quest headsets and Touch controllers via keyboard and mouse input (or a game controller), making it easy to quickly iterate on your app. In addition to a more streamlined iteration process, the tool also lets you simulate headset attributes like accurate field of view and correct display resolution for each device. Meta XR Simulator is an invaluable tool for social apps, enabling multiple instances to run on a single machine so a solo developer can simulate and test multiple player interactions.

Meta XR Simulator also supports MR development via the Synthetic Environment Server (SES) that loads synthetic environments that simulate the physical world as well as Presence Platform features like Scene, Passthrough, and Anchors. MR presents new possibilities to enrich your apps with unique ways for your audience to see and experience the world around them, and Meta XR Simulator can help you tune your gameplay across a variety of environments.

Meta XR Simulator supports Unity, Unreal, and Native development. To get started with Meta XR Simulator, please reference the documentation (Unity | Unreal | Native).

How These Tools Can Work Together

Starting and iterating on an MR project can become a more flexible and efficient process when you use these tools together. For example, once you’ve installed the Integration SDK and Meta XR Simulator, you can start up a new Unity project and see that everything is set up correctly in the Project Setup Tool or address specific issues that may prevent your project from running correctly.

Next, you can launch Meta XR Simulator and set up the SES so your project gets room environment data. The Meta XR Simulator menu also provides you with several room options to choose from. After your environment is set up, you can use Building Blocks to drag and drop feature blocks like Passthrough, hand tracking, and many others into your project. Adding the Room Model block can also help you visualize how room data is constructed by automatically marking all the scene anchors in the environment with visible meshes. Now you’re free to explore your MR environment like you would in-headset, but only using your mouse and keyboard or game controller.

While testing and stimulating environments works great when building for MR, testing performance and interactions that use tracking capabilities is best done through a headset-based workflow. Thankfully, if you’re looking to integrate or iterate on interactions in your app, you can drag Interaction SDK features like hand tracking into your project and launch Quest Link to test them out in-headset.

Grow Your Audience with AR Foundation

In partnership with Unity, AR Foundation now offers support for Quest 3 and Quest Pro. With AR Foundation, you build MR apps once and release them on any ecosystem of your choice, not just Meta Quest. Creating MR apps for multiple platforms becomes easier thanks to hooks, which let you simply update your package in order to integrate missing platform-specific features as they’re added. Learn more about AR Foundation here.

Looking Ahead

Mixed reality and Presence Platform’s capabilities present new possibilities for engaging and immersing your audience, and we’re excited to offer you a variety of tools to accelerate your development with this technology. We’ll continue to release and update our tools to make developing for Meta Quest a more flexible, streamlined, and enjoyable experience.

Quelle:

https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/native/xrsim-intro/

https://developer.oculus.com/blog/accelerate-development-mixed-reality-building-blocks-unity-meta-quest-developers/

17. Oktober 2023 0 comment

Examples

Arkio Launches Impressive Design Tool Free On Quest

If you’re unfamiliar with Arkio’s design tools, now is the time to check it out on Quest 2.

The design app is available now in the Quest store starting with a free tier which has multiplayer, passthrough portals to the physical world, hand tracking, and the core modeling tools for shaping worlds. Starting at $8 per month, though, hobbyists looking to get started with spatial design get Unity integration that includes the ability to import and export directly from Quest to the world’s most popular game engine.

“Game devs can take their Unity scene, import it into Arkio, make changes, and then export everything back to Unity and everything will update on that end as well,” Arkio’s founder and CEO Hilmar Gunnarsson told UploadVR.

There are additional pricing tiers as well with features designed for professional architects and enterprises — the types of things we learned about when Arkio launched on Quest’s App Lab last year. But with those first two pricing tiers now available with the full launch, Arkio should offer creators a powerful new tool for designing spaces directly in VR. While ShapesXR seems tuned particularly for 3D storyboarding sessions and Meta’s Horizon Worlds is focused on creating worlds you might want to visit with friends, Arkio seems designed to appeal to a wide range of spatial designers.

I sat down with Gunnarsson in our virtual studio this week and he explained the features launching with Arkio. You can check out a 5-minute cut of our interview in the embedded video above where he goes into detail on Arkio and, in particular, explains how the passthrough features effectively break down the walls between virtual and physical worlds. In the video, he shows how one designer could layer shapes onto their physical environment for interior design purposes while a colleague designs a vast cityscape right outside the physical window.

You can download Arkio on Oculus Quest now.

Quelle:

Arkio Launches Impressive Design Tool Free On Quest

3. April 2022 0 comment

Knowledge Software/Apps

Masterpiece Studio announces release of its complete Virtual Reality 3D creative suite ‘Masterpiece Studio Pro’

Masterpiece Studio (formerly MasterpieceVR), has recently announced the release of Masterpiece Studio Pro, a complete virtual reality (VR) 3D creative suite that enables creative professionals without 3D modeling experience to create usable 3D content for animation, gaming, and more.

“VR has shown promise in revolutionizing 3D content creation by making it fast, easy, and enjoyable, but this was never fully realized because there were always missing gaps in the pipeline,” said Jonathan Gagne, CEO at Masterpiece Studio. “Masterpiece Studio Pro is an industry milestone that uses VR and machine learning to remove the missing gaps to create production-ready 3D assets.”

According to the company, these missing gaps include the fact that when creating 3D content using VR tools, artists and creators could not use this content in the real world without spending additional time cleaning it up in multiple desktop programs.

“One thing that Masterpiece Studio Pro has done for me as an independent artist and creative is opened up the potential to create things that I could not have ever made or had the resources or time to create,” commented Dylan Sisson, Digital Artist at Pixar Animation Studios. “Just by being able to take my 2D skillset, directly apply it in 3D, and then take those 3D assets to do something like 3D print is such a fluid and immediate process.”

Masterpiece Studio noted that following the innovation of rigging and skinning for VR with its Masterpiece Motion platform, Masterpiece Studio Pro now streamlines 3D for creatives by simplifying mesh optimization, Auto UV, retopology, and texture painting – all in one immersive suite.

“VR content creation is a whole new way of creating CG animation to keep up with audience demand and not sacrifice quality,” added Tom Box, Co-founder, Blue Zoo Animation. “Discovering tools like Masterpiece Studio Pro and seeing how they can be combined to create powerful new workflows has shown us that breaking free of the traditional 2D input and output devices … can vastly speed up the creative process both in the speed of team communication and speed of which ideas can be explored and developed.”

Masterpiece Studio Pro’s creative suite includes all the features and creation tools of the original, MasterpieceVR and Motion apps, with the addition of layers, retopology tools for making models production-ready, auto UV, and texture painting, as well as blend shapes for creating facial animations.

Furthermore, Masterpiece Studio Pro can export in formats that are compatible with most 3D programs, including 3DS Max, Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Marmoset, Blender, Medium by Adobe, Tvori, and Gravity Sketch, with the company stating that more programs will be announced in the future.

Masterpiece Studio Pro is available for HTC, Oculus, Valve and Window Mix Reality headsets. For more information on Masterpiece Studio and its VR creation platforms, please visit the company’s website.

Quelle:

https://www.auganix.org/masterpiece-studio-announces-release-of-its-complete-virtual-reality-3d-creative-suite-masterpiece-studio-pro/

Image credit: Masterpiece Studio

27. April 2021 0 comment

Examples

Could This VR Sketching Tool Finally Be Coming Of Age?

Oluwaseyi Sosanya, founder of Gravity Sketch, tells Design Week virtual 3D sketching is a “gateway to new abilities”, so long as the industry can overcome a “cultural hurdle”.

The lockdowns of 2020 forced many designers out of their studios and into makeshift home offices. As a result, they needed to adapt to new ways of working, often away from their colleagues.

Some design disciplines were easier to migrate to home working than others. The inherent tactility and materiality of product design meant being outside of the studio posed a challenge to many.

For Oluwaseyi Sosanya and Daniela Paredes, the circumstances posed by lockdown reaffirmed the relevance of their Gravity Sketch invention. The virtual reality (VR) powered suite of tools and software, initially launched in 2018, is designed to allow cross-disciplinary teams to collaborate remotely and ease designers’ dependence on pen and paper.

“There was no great communication stream”

The motivation behind developing Gravity Sketch was simple, Sosanya tells Design Week.

“We just found there was no great communication stream between the people who design a product and the people who manufacture it,” he says.

Going from pen and paper to CAD (computer-aided design) software is a huge leap, Sosanya explains, and with it comes the potential for inefficiencies and compromises.

Gravity Sketch was an attempt to allow creatives to “stay true” to a design throughout the production process and keep everyone happy and informed along the way.

“We all understand 3D in the same way”

Gravity Sketch’s software requires users to wear a VR or augmented reality (AR) headset and use handheld controllers or hand-tracking devices.

Users can then apply these tools to sketching in 3D – this is a crucial part of the platform’s offering, Sosanya says, since “we all understand 3D in the same way, because that’s our life”. The process of translating a 3D image in the mind, into a 2D sketch on paper, and then into a 3D piece in CAD can really slow up the design process, he adds.

Sosanya is quick to point out that Gravity Sketch is not positioned to take the place of pen and paper sketches or CAD, but rather act as a “wedge” between the two.

“Making the jump between pen and paper and CAD can involve a handoff between several different people – our idea is to be a bridge between the two, so the next person along the line can pick up and run with the original idea seamlessly,” he says.

“Akin to working in a design studio together”

Beyond speed, what other benefits does VR sketching bring to product designers? Sosanya says the one of the most attractive features of Gravity Sketch is being able to work at any scale.

Designers are able to zoom in to see angles they wouldn’t be able to explore on paper, which “drives confidence” in the overall design, he says.

“You can have communication at such a granular level of something that has yet to exist in reality,” he says. Being able to examine work so closely is particularly useful in lockdown, since “working spatially in this way is akin to working in a design studio together.”

Overcoming a “cultural hurdle”

All of the problems that come from a usual design process are amplified when designing remotely. A 40% rise in Gravity Sketch users this year reflects the challenges designers have faced outside of the studio.

But while the platform is enjoying success in a diverse range of industries now, from jewellery design to automotive and industrial design, Sosanya says wider uptake of Gravity Sketch rests on studios overcoming a “cultural hurdle”.

“There are designers who see no problem with their current workflow and we know this might make it harder for them to adopt our offering,” he says, adding that designers often have a “well-perfected muscle memory” when it comes to sketching. “We’ve found the biggest uptake in those studios who don’t view new tech as a hindrance, but as a gateway to new abilities.”

“Smaller design studios have not been adopting new tech”

Right now, students and universities make up a large portion of Gravity Sketch’s userbase. Universities are great testing grounds, Sosanya says, because people are there to challenge the status quo and try something new.

The biggest priority for Sosanya is making sure Gravity Sketch is accessible. Many platforms and software take months, if not years, to understand inside and out. Sosanya says the onboarding period for Gravity Sketch is around eight hours.

This is particularly important for many smaller studios she says, which have been working under increased pressure during the pandemic.

“Smaller design studios have not been adopting new tech in the same levels as bigger studios and this is because they’re having to work really hard in exceptional circumstances,” Sosanya says. “Bigger studios have been able to afford to pause projects somewhat and take the time to understand new tech.”

Quelle:

https://www.vrroom.buzz/vr-news/tech/could-vr-sketching-tool-finally-be-coming-age

7. Dezember 2020 0 comment

Knowledge Software/Apps

AnimVR: Animationen in der Virtual Reality erstellen

Mit AnimVR steht eine neue Anwendung im Oculus Store sowie auf Steam bereit, welche euch Objekte und Animationen in der Virtual Reality erstellen lässt. Wir haben etwas mit dem Tool gearbeitet und verraten euch, was euch für knapp 30 Euro damit erwartet.

AnimVR – Animationen in der Virtual Reality erstellen

Umfangreich und aufgeräumt präsentiert sich AnimVR bereits nach dem ersten Öffnen des Programms. Der Einstieg ist simpel, denn die Tutorials sind als kleine Videos hinterlegt, die schnell und einfach die Bedienung der Software erklären. So wird auch der große Funktionsumfang fix durchschaubar und bereits in kurzer Zeit können erste Kreationen entstehen. Schon nach ca. 30 Minuten war es uns möglich, erste Skizzen umzusetzen, was verglichen mit einem Desktop-Tool, durchaus kein schlechter Wert ist.

Innerhalb der Software könnt ihr Objekte entweder von eurem PC oder aus dem Internet importieren und in eure Welt einfügen. Ihr könnt aber auch mit Platten oder voluminösen Pinseln neue Objekte in VR erschaffen, verschiedene Parameter anpassen und mit unterschiedlichen Ebenen arbeiten. Zudem steht eine Timeline mit den einzelnen Spuren und Ebenen bereit, in welcher ihr auch Übergänge und Laufzeiten optimieren könnt.

Die erstellten Kunstwerke könnt ihr als Video, PNG-Sequenz oder als 3D-Objekt (FBX, OBJ, GTLF, USD) exportieren. Mit den Ergebnissen dürft ihr anschließend weiter in Unity, Unreal und Co. arbeiten. Ein Export als 360-Grad-Video ist ebenfalls möglich.

AnimVR kann derzeit für 29,99 Euro auf Oculus Home gekauft werden. Dabei handelt es sich allerdings um eine private Lizenz und keine kommerzielle Version. Die private Version für die HTC Vive ist aktuell noch nicht auf Steam erschienen, sollte aber bald freigeschaltet werden.

Quelle:

AnimVR: Animationen in der Virtual Reality erstellen

20. November 2018 0 comment