DEFINITION February 2019.pdf

FEATURE | R I CHARD MI LLS I NTERV I EW

Sky, BBC, Discovery, Fox, Universal have all got VR apps and AR content as well. They see it as being important. Whereas a couple of years ago it was done for gimmicks or maybe an advertising stunt. People are now starting to monetise this. There’s a rise in 360 video popularity. And with virtual reality the platforms are becoming more capable. In the next year, we’re going to see more mixed reality become available in bespoke see-through headsets or Magic Leap or other platforms that are coming out. There are some serious players now looking at mixed reality to improve techniques within the workplace. Several car manufacturers are using Microsoft HoloLens for assembly training, assembly checking and for service and repair work. It enables you to have generalist trained service personnel rather than a specialist. Another area where there is a bit of take- up is in medical applications. It’s possible now to be able to practise complicated surgical techniques in virtual reality before the operation takes place, and even during operation you can be coached by a remote expert to give input into a surgical process. This needs to be looked at from the ethics point of view, but if it’s well curated and designed it definitely has a value.

IMAGES AR made possible the phenomenon that is Pokémon Go and brought the mind of David Attenborough into homes around the world.

It’s quite possible now to be able to practise surgical techniques in virtual reality

geometry of the scene and then clads it with the photographs. You can produce a photo realistic rendition of a scene and realistic objects. These go particularly well with virtual reality. For instance, in the production for Sky, a number of tablets with hieroglyphs on them were captured. These went into a virtual reality production and you could interact with them, pick them up, look at them, turn them over, have the inscriptions on them translated for you. A very useful technique. First, there are two main frameworks, Unity and Unreal, and most apps are built within these frameworks. There are a couple of others as well, but they’re mainly one of these two simply because a lot of work and development has gone into them. In the mobile and PC worlds, Unity is probably ahead, but Unreal engine is being used quite effectively by the broadcast industry. Nowadays, TV production, certainly sports coverage, will use a number of 3D assets. You can take player profiles in football, which are scanned assets of the footballers, and parade them up and down, animate them out into the frame and so forth. Years ago, they were just flat images on the screen. Most of that work is done in Unreal within the graphics engine, which is normally a Vizrt platform. We’re seeing Unreal doing a lot of that work in the What are the main platforms for delivering AR content?

broadcast field, but in the mobile and PC type apps, it’s mainly Unity. But these are basically enabling technologies. They’re not a platform per se. The real competition comes between the various VR platforms. We’ve got the Oculus store, we’ve got Steam and then there are a number of solo apps not related to either of the two major VR platforms. So the actual method of disseminating content is really dependent on whether the publisher wants to retain control or if they want to have apps, which can go on the Android Play or Apple Store or if they want purely stand-alone apps. I think one of the first stand-alone apps I saw was from Fiat, which was for car sales and it was published independently, not on any platform. There is room for small developers to actually put stuff out there. It’s a bit competitive and independent, but you see some very, very useful things out there from small developers. It’s still useful to put an app on the stores, because then you have got reach and can take advantage of recommendation and push, but if you were to avoid tying it to anything and make it, say, for a PC-based platform, there are a number of ways of doing that.

What does the future of VR, AR and 360 video look like? I think at the moment it’s a constantly changing world. Things that were

gimmicks a couple of years ago have become useful, and that’s attracted the attention of the more serious players. So

64 DEF I N I T ION | FEBRUARY 20 1 9

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