Experiences
Sandbox VR | In Here, It's Possible
Sandbox VR was one of the experiences we wanted to include last week but felt it would be too much content. With 6 North America locations (Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, and San Diego) and 3 in Asia (Singapore, Macau, and Hong Kong) there are a lot of locations to visit on your travels this summer. Enjoy VR with up to 6 friends in physical and virtual environments that all you to interact with everything inspired by the Star Trek Holodeck. We're looking forward to visiting them this summer. It feels like we will get a similar experience to what we had in VR Zone Shinjuku, which would be fantastic.
Apps
iCandi Apps ® | Night Sky
The latest version of Night Sky is the best app for anyone curious about astronomy within our solar system. Combining AR with the users location makes it possible to visualize over 1.7 BILLION accurately mapped stars. Look around to view beautifully rendered constellations, simulate the night sky from various cities around the world, or view the sky from the surface of other planets over time. Night Sky recently added 18 new languages making it available in all 36 languages the App Store supports!
Blazing-Fast Mobile 3D Capture | Canvas
Canvas is an iOS-only app that uses the LiDAR and Photogrammetry to create accurate measurements and full, professional, editable CAD models. The CAD service sets this apart from other scanning software that generally stop at point cloud and texture exports. The current generations of iPhone make this not only possible but exceptionally fast, and saves days of time when you need to capture a real world spaces for a digital twin.
VoxPlop!: A Spatial Video app for the Google Play Store.
VoxPlop! Plop 3D characters and record spatial videos in what looks to be the first spatial app ever released on Google Play. It is actually very fun to record a message, pitch your voice, and send it to friends for them to watch or remix by adding their own content into the video. We love the idea that this could be an evolution of machinima for the new, spatially aware world opened up by modern smartphones.
Just a Line - Draw anywhere, with AR
"Just a Line" is an AR Experiment inspired by AR artists playing with fixed spatial placement of their doodles. The app that lets you make simple drawings in augmented reality, then share your creation with a short video. Draw alone or with another person person in a shared drawing space for even more fun opportunities to create something interesting.
Gaming
Doge Robot Token - RobotDoge
What do you get when you combine Pokemon GO, AR, Tamagochi, and a cryptocurrency? Robot Doge allows you to buy, pet, breed, feed, and fight your virtual pet robot dog. Upgrades are available through the crypto currency, letting you customize and fight your virtual pet online or in AR. The currency backing the app is designed to be "burned" so there is not an infinite supply, and that may make both $RDOG and anything made using the currency have increasing value in the future.
Gear
Pinfinity - Augmented Reality Collectible Pins
Using collectable pins as AR targets is great to provide an experience themed around the pin. Pinfinity has worked with My Little Pony, Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, Transformers, Street Fighter, and NASA among others to bring popular fandoms to life in ways that hasn't been done before.
Learning
Low Cost Facial Scanning Using Photogrammetry in State of Decay 2
Released this past week from a 2019 GDC session, Undead Labs' Matt Heiniger shares lessons learned from 2 years and over 200 faces scanned in implementing photogrammetry. Using the technique for "State of Decay 2" took what could have been months of work down to days. The technique is one that you can use on any modern smartphone to capture reality as a 3D object with texture. Once you have this, you can use them for all kinds of useful things.
One More Thing
LiDAR mapping the Paris Catacombs
Beneath the city of Paris, France are over 200 miles of underground chambers, tunnels, and galleries that are officially off limits to the public. Using only the iPhone 12 Pro's LiDAR and mobile Apps, @emmanuel_2m scanned some of the Catacombs (less than 20 miles), and the resulting 3D meshes are available on Sketchfab to explore or remix. Seeing this blew us away, both as a realization of exactly how far technology has come and thinking of the possibilities for what this could mean for how we move forward with mapping the world. If you want to follow his journey, or see places not many have been able to visit, definitely check out the Twitter thread and downloadable files.
Commentary
Welcome to issue 30 if Other Realities! Every week we seem to be gaining new readers and we're thrilled to have more people interested and thankful for those of you who have been with us for the past 30 weeks for the newsletter.
Last issue's focus on real world experiences wasn't nearly complete, and there are hundreds of other locations globally you should be able to visit in the upcoming months as COVID restrictions are gradually being reduced. Since we do want to share as many of these as we can find be sure to look to the Other Realities Directory later this week as we add more and more locations which provide interactive and immersive experiences. Some of will require wearing an HMU, but the majority of them are designed to simply be viewed with your own two eyes. And probably the camera in your phone.
We had an issue planned that highlighted a lot of the established AR experiences that felt a little dull talking about what companies like Ikea and Amazon. These kinds of things are pretty easy to find online, and we found much more interesting. So instead of looking at what you can already do let's take a look at some of the fun, new things that modern smartphones and new sensor do to inspire creativity. There are only so many ways to build anything, but when you new materials it always makes if possible to reimagine things we thought we knew to potentially build it better.
We hope you enjoy trying these apps and AR/VR experiences, and feel free to drop us a line on Twitter to tell us how you liked (or disliked) them.
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