Daniel Voyager has an article about Project Sansar. Daniel has changed the look and feel of his blog. I thought my Feedly sent me to the wrong place… He points us to a couple of new bits out about Project Sansar®.
Ebbe Altberg talked about Project Sansar at the 2015 Web Summit. An audience member, Janne Juntunen, got a video of a video shown at the event. There is a 30 second clip on Twitter.
Daniel also points to a news article published in Fortune: How ‘Second Life’ Developer Hopes To Deliver The ‘YouTube For VR’.
In this article Ebbe is quoted as saying,
“Much like YouTube, Sansar will empower people to create, share, and profit from their own social virtual experiences. Doing that today requires an engineering team—it’s hard and expensive, and that limits the use-cases for VR. That’s similar to the old days of the web, so we sometimes also use WordPress as an apt analogy.”
You may remember Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, talking about making FB into a place for users to share VR experiences much like they share photos today. The idea they can snap a VR capture and put it on FB and we can look at it with a VR headset and feel like we are there. Well, we almost have the VR headsets. But, how much have you heard about VR cameras?
The VR camera are showing up. See Google. But, it looks like most of these are just a remake of old stereo cameras with new labeling. There are some 360 degree cameras somewhat like Google’s custom made camera they use for street level capture.
Have you thought about the massive number of tools we have for editing 2D images? Look at Adobe’s Creative Cloud tools. Those are from just one company. What have you heard about tools for editing your 3D VR snapshots? What about creating your own 3D snaps? We can paint 2D images in Photoshop. But, in a VR image? Sansar is the only tool I have heard of that comes close.
Have you heard of or used Autodesk’s 123D Catch? It turns 2D images into 3D mesh models. It is a free product. You can download it and play with it. Much like Sketchup, it produces an overly complex model. For use in SL or any digital virtual world the model produced now will require considerable work to optimize. But, we have the tech on the shelf.
Think about how 2D digital cameras developed. In 1838 the idea of stereo imaging arrived. In 1839 Louis Daguerre developed the first practical photographic process. Alexander Wolcott made the first camera in 1840. By 1885 George Eastman was manufacturing photographic paper and by 1889 celluloid film, which made movies possible. For 70± years devices that made use of these products were improved. In 1963 Polaroid came out with the first color film. In 1984 the first digital camera was marketed by Canon. Camera phones arrived in 1990. 2012 wireless camera’s were released by Kodak.
Now we are thinking about capturing 3D models of the world. If you watch crime shows on TV you probably know about 3D laser scanning used to capture crime scenes. Those are turned into 3D models for analysis, often using AutoCAD. And there are the 3D scanners used to capture small objects. The cost is high for these devices. But, Peachy Printer, a kickstarter project is underway to produce a US$100 3D scanner/printer. So, combining tech already on the shelf it should be possible to CHEAPLY capture 3D models that we can import into a virtual world. We can put on a headset and walk inside the capture or scale the model and print a copy. Imagine VR-Photoing the Roman Colosseum on a hand-held video camera… then having the virtual world model… you could walk through it any time you wanted.
There would be difficulties capturing the image and model. It would likely require editing. If you do photography of any kind you know how limited the devices are compared to the human eye. We do all sorts of editing to get images to look like what we saw. That editing will likely be a part of the VR-creative process too. So far it looks like Project Sansar is the only project that can meet that ‘editing’ need.
Here it is, the first digital VR video camera:
http://www.roadtovr.com/lytros-immerge-360-3d-light-field-pipeline-is-poised-to-redefine-vr-video/
🙂 Thanks
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All I can say about the Lyto camera is ….WOW ! In abut 5 years it might actually be affordable.