VR Loft experience

This loft appartment is an internal showcase/sandbox to illustrate and experiment with different approaches of delivering visualisations and VR experiences.

These could be:

• 360° VR walkthrough
• Realtime VR Environment
• Animation
• Still ImagesIn the following we want to sum up what these solutions are about – or better: explain their characteristics and advantages.
  

  360° VR Walkthrough

  With this setup architectural sceneries can be easily experienced in immersive panoramas. Multiple locations can be connected to gain a complete impression of any scenery. Especially architectural interiors as in this complete appartment may be well visualised.

  Technically the VR panoramas offer several advantages:The panoramas can be accessed by any browser and don’t require specific softwares to be experienced. They are especially powerfull in conjunction with any mobile device, since the requirements for hardware are very reasonable. The setup allows to experience spaces in full 3d with the use of stereo glasses, which even enhances the immersive experience. To access the panoramas only any device with a browser system is required. For 3d-glasses a simple set of stereo lenses in a smartphone holder are sufficient.

  The 360 panoramas is a good alternative to “full” 3d VR-setups. In fact in our experience most people would not really be able to tell the difference. The basic difference is, that the underlying graphics are rendered in advance. Just like regular 3d illustrations the images are rendered beforehand as 360 degree panoramas twice for both eyes separately. Each point of view requires an additional twinset of images. This is opposing the realtime image creation of “real” 3d-engines. As a drawback full motion is restricted to selected points of view, but then again, it is possible to make full use of any offline rendering engine to allow maximum image quality.

  The panoramas certainly offer an immersive spatial impression with a high degree of transparency due to the 360° nature.

   

  The full 360° Walkthrough can be viewed on your mobile here:

  xoio – VR spherical walkthrough

  Put your mobile phone into a pair of VR glasses and off you go! (Works also with a tablet)
  Just stay with the crosshair on the little box-icons to change your point of view!

  

   

  Realtime VR Environment

  This representation in opposite to the one showed above is this: You can actually move inside the space and interact with it just as if you were in it!
  The technical setup is a bit more complex in production but it certainly pays off – the immersion is imense.

  The scene runs on a computer wich is connected to a VR Headset with handheld controllers, in our case we used the HTC Vive system – but it also runs on the Oculus Rift.
  If you have such system „at hand“, feel free to download our scene and try it out.
  Below you see a video of one of us moving inside it 🙂
  As you can see you can freely move and interact with objects, changing materials of surfaces etc.

   

  Animation

  Of course, once you have the complete scene anyway – for creating VR environments it is for obvious reasons important to build the whole space – it is very convenient to generate an animation of it as well. In this case we used the realtime setup for rendering the scene – very short render times because of this!
  Of course this would also have been possible if there would only have been the „pre-rendered“ version.

  But see for yourself –

   

  Still Images

  Last but not least: there are of course the still images. Actually these have been created in the very beginnning of the project for designing and conecting, and for our understanding they are still a very powerful tool. They are clear in their framing and topic they are explaining. The eye rests longer on them – and of course it is easier with it to point at a certain aspect.
  Nevertheless they should regarded as the precious tool they are. They are accompanied by the „new“ techniques, not replaced. They tell different stories in different ways…