Robin’s Eye
Robins see the Earth’s magnetic field in one eye. I like the idea of placing a dynamic robin’s eye view of the magnetosphere into one eye using the Quizzer, like a heads up compass. The visualisation above was created by academics at the University of Illinois.
I decided to try this as my first Unity project. It would also be a good way of demonstrating the way the Quizzer can be used with AR apps which overlay onto a smartphone’s camera feed. The Quizzer makes the experience more ‘in the world,’ rather than at arms length on a smartphone screen.
With the help of Chris Chowen at the Immersive Lab and I was able to use Magic Paintbrush to draw a 3D egg shaped twinkling line to mimic how a robin ‘sees’ the earth’s magnetic field and put this asset into Unity, placing the camera/viewer inside the ring so that the viewer can turn their body to look around a ring that surrounds them.
After consulting Neil and researching webcam textures I cut and pasted some code to attach to a screen in the app so that the ring is overlaid on the camera feed.
The next step, is to anchor the ring to the phone’s magnetometer and export it as an android app.
Volumetric Capture Field Trip
George from Mutiny Media organised a Fusebox field trip to Dimension volumetric video 3D capture studios in Wimbledon and the DoubleMe start-up based in Ravensbourne University.
The Dimension studio makes high quality 3D video and images using hundreds of cameras, kinects and infrared cameras arrayed in a cylindrical studio with banks of computers to crunch the data.
The DoubleMe software works with 2 x Kinect depth cameras which takes a subjects’ 3D data and processes and transports it over Wi-Fi, enabling 3D real-time holograms of the subject to be viewed with a HoloLens in another location.
Basically we saw high and low res ways of making 3D assets. Thanks George!
