I mentioned in yesterday’s post that Cyrille and I were heading across to Lausanne to host an AR Meetup. It’s our third Meetup for this particular group: the first was in the Autodesk office in Neuchatel, while the second and third have been held at the excellent Studio Banana. This one was really fun: between Cyrille and I we had three HoloLens devices for people to try, which made for a really interesting event.
Cyrille kicked off proceedings with a discussion of AR and VR in general, and where things stand right now.
Key Kawamura – from Studio Banana – talked about their BATBAND project. BATBAND is a bone induction headset that was successfully funded on Kickstarter and will be shipping very soon. It was fun to see how the project was initiated – and has evolved – and how it fits nicely within the AR theme: bone induction devices allow you to add an audible (rather than visual) overlay to reality, as they don’t block normal sound from reaching your ears.
Both Cyrille and I then talked about our various activities related to HoloLens: I talked about my Dancing Robot, Transformer and HoloGuide projects, which Cyrille shared information about the work he’s done on MoCap playback.
The most fun part of the evening was when people got to don HoloLens devices and try the various demos…
Cyrille managed to work out the kinks in his MoCap playback demo…
... so people could (for instance) wear a MoCap glove and see how it can drive the animation of rigged characters inside HoloLens in realtime.
This could be a game-changer for virtual filmmaking (pioneered by James Cameron for Avatar). Especially when you consider that the Perception Neuron MoCap system that Cyrille showed costs around $1,000. Cyrille is going to record a video showing the results of his MoCap system driving HoloLens models in realtime, which I’ll be sure to share here.
