At the alter of VR
It turns out when you start dealing with AR and VR and all the requests for one or the other, you are quickly pulled down a rabbit hole that would leave Alice bewildered.
As you may know, we used to do a lot of web apps involving Google earth, and when Google decided to walk away from Google earth, we were first panicked, and then moved most of our clients over to the Google map, and finally with the help of a crafty client, we discovered a replacement.
(I am getting to the VR part, Be Patient!) The new environment was far easier to manage than Google earth, and since our client loves to work in/on the miasma of scripting languages involved in the process, we have been making break neck progress.
In this new environment, we provide the X,Y,Z,R,Y,P,Xn,Yn,Zn and we get to define the position, zoom, roll, Yaw and Pitch and we can place anything in to the environment. None of this is news worthy of course.
(Here comes my favorite part) It turns out that in our attempt to make the admin of our ARTdynamix™ CMS easy to use and yet versatile as all get out, we have created a really nice CMS for the VR folks.
We had already been using ARTdynamix™ for Augmented Reality to talk to various beacons and to provide specific content based on positioning or geo-fencing. We have also been overlaying video, audio, and images on top of triggers of all kind. (All of this occurs through use of web services and handshakes with various applications out there!)
Now you may ask why someone might want to use our system for VR. Imagine any 3D environment that has basic content translation built in (in this case our client's amazing work) then you can utilize the admin interface of ARTdynamix™ to enter the time, location, stage size, avatarID (audio, video, construct - still or animated, text ...), orientation and zoom. You can import the sequence from an excel spreadsheet and be on your way to demonstrating a civil war battle on your globe with correct date and event sequence and have the content pop up on the side of the screen to support the visual of the story.
If you want this tomorrow, it is not quite done yet but we are getting there. I am happy to say that our good friend and client Ken J. is at the leading edge of VR content development and we are gladly riding along with him in this bumpy road to VR Nirvana.
P.S. Between the time I wrote this and tried to post it, I had a very exciting conversation with an amazing engineer that is developing compression algorithms for 3D environments that are really phenomenal and much better than what is out there that the gap time -- and thus the associated sense of nausea -- would nearly disappear. (so maybe VR will mature Before 2023 -- but that is a conversation for another time, location, stage size and construct. :) )