Existent

OUR OPEN BETA IS LIVE Existent has a ton of features and work flows for smoothing out the entire dev process of building physically interactive, multiplayer, free VR applications. So first up - our flexible player body system - Choose 3-point or full-body tracking - Hardware agnostic IK system - Use default avatars, or import your own - UE5, UE4 or Mixamo - No animation programming needed Full-body, social VR out of the box? Head over to our website and try it today for free. Epic Games Unreal Engine HTC VIVE PICO XR OptiTrack #devtools #xr #vr #spatialcomputing

*Why physical interaction in VR?* I get asked a lot about this, and I feel very passionately about it, so thought I’d write down a bunch of, slightly long and freewheeling, thoughts about it. 1. Physical interaction is how you engage with the world 2. When you’re physically comfortable you can focus on everything else. Inversely, when you’re not physically comfortable you can’t focus on anything but your discomfort. 3. In the future of out-of-home VR, enterprise, training, industry, I think everyone can agree that it will be some combination of inhabiting virtual, environments. 4. The future of existing in virtual worlds, especially for industry, enterprise and entertainment requires people to be physically comfortable in a simulated environment so they can concentrate on more nuanced tasks and take on more detailed information 5. Physical interaction is an open ended idea. In order to have physical interaction, you need to accurately represent the sensation of physically being somewhere. This also feeds into the broader idea of “What is Needed” in order to feel physically present. 6. Things to consider for comfort: - Your virtual body behaving as you’d expect it to. - Your interactions to be as you would expect them to be. - Your vestibular system to not be confused by the input it is getting from the eyes and ears.  - Other players in the experience being physically represented in a way that is none distracting 7. To wit: all your physical interactions meeting your conscious and subconscious expectations 8. Touch is how we first learn to interact with our world, we reach out and grab things. We learn objects’ weight, their balance, texture, temperature. We take this all in, our subconscious vestibular based responses adjust, and then we never have to think about it again. 9. Our physical experience of the world is a consequence of our lived experience of physically interacting with our environment every day. We think very little about how to use a door handle, adjust a chair, pick up an apple etc.   10. There’s a constant conversation around the UX of spatial computing and how to lower friction. If the only thing you need to think about when you enter a room, is how do I the *new* thing in the experience: operate this machinery, put out this fire, shoot this zombie, and *not* what do I press to pick this up? How do I move forward? How do I make these hands grab this object? 11. When these concerns are mitigated, then the ecological validity of training, working and learning goes through the roof. 12. Imagine trying to train a room full of people on how to use a new piece of equipment, but before that you need to constantly remind them how to use their bodies to look, move and feel. It would be untenable. Would love to know people’s opinions/solutions to any of this :) Oh and Existent Beta launches next week! Epic Games PICO XR OptiTrack HTC VIVE MANUS™ #vr #ar #spatialcomputing #immersive #interaction #animation

Moving around VR environments - but without motion sickness? A common complaint/worry I hear: "It makes me feel sick" How you move around a virtual environment has a huge impact on your sense of physical presence in that world and making that locomotion feel real is a huge challenge. Common compromises involve teleporting, "snapping", "tunneling", but none of these are as natural as you moving your body as you normally would. There's a *ton* to be talked about on this but, at a super high level: Sensory Mismatch: When your body's experience of an environment is a mismatch of your cognitive understanding of the environment, it's common to experience nausea: motion sickness. In VR this is called simulation sickness as it's not just about locomotion - it's the entire sensory package starting to feel like it's not aligned. Technical solution to a physical problem: We made Existent to make it simple to fully author an environment that fully adheres to your conscious and subconscious expectations of every interaction and move. You need the travel to *feel* exactly as it *looks*. Existent makes it trivial to create seamless movement of players and objects between spaces within the virtual environment with our awesome "Vehicle" system. It looks simple but look closer and you'll see: 👬 Multiplayer 🦿 Full body IK system 🩻 Skeleton system 🎯 Calibration and alignment of Virtual and Physical items, world and players 🤝 Physical interaction 🏃 Free roam 👋 Grip authoring All working out of the box. Being able to realistically author movement around an environment, without compromise, makes a huge difference if you're building anything like: 👩🚒 Training 🚀 Simulation 👾 Games 👩⚕️ Health 🎭 Theatre 💃 Dance What else is essential for an environment to feel real? Stack: HMD: HTC VIVE Focus 3 Tracking: HTC VIVE Ultimate Trackers and OptiTrack Game Engine: Unreal Engine Plugin: Existent #vr #xr #immersive #animation #game #ar #spatialcomputing #focus3 #devtools Epic Games

A great pleasure hosting Thomas Dexmier from HTC VIVE at the Existent studio today. We talked all things tooling for building physically interactive, multiplayer, free roam VR. Especially when deploying the Vive Ultimate Trackers. It was also *very* exciting hearing about all the large company deployments of VR for training, simulation and education. Seamless interaction with virtual worlds is the future of work, and we'll be right there to power it. BETA IS COMING > follow the Existent page for updates! #VR #XR #Immersive Marios Bikos Dan Webb Oliver Jauncey Leah Kurta