At the AcademyDay Lon Grohs and the rest of the Chaos Group team demoed different solutions for VR with 6 degrees of freedom, so that people don’t just stand in one spot and look aroung but the you can also slightly move and feel immersed in the scene.
Lon tells us that they partner a couple of companies like the Belgian No Zone, which created a plugin called Presence (a viewer for 6 degrees of freedom pre-rendered VR) and Lytro, which made a camera that can focus after taking a photograph.
Lon then move on talking about the next steps that Chaos Group is going to take. In particular he describes the collaboration with Adobe and thus the integration of V-Ray in the Adobe’s new tool on the creative Cloud (Felix – now in beta). With this tool they aim to turn 2D scenes into a 360 degrees HDRI. The hope is to bring the power of rendering to more people.
Since it’s still difficult to create a scenario with whatever application and feed the data into a real-time render without losing the rest of the work done, a big collaboration has been created between Chaos Group and Epic Games.
While Epic is working on DataSmith to give more flexibility and keep the assets once they’re in Unreal, Chaos Group is working on V-Ray properties. In this way they aim to let the plugin “export a VR scene and directly import it into the Unreal editor”. In this way you can create “a real-time solution that you can walk around but it also keeps all the V-ray metadata so that if you want to rerender/ pick out a still image or render an animation to your normal pipeline, you can just do it”.
Finally, Chaos Group is looking in keeping the plugin as simple and clean as possible without forgetting to look for optimizations. They also want to translate all this into the AR sphere, which thanks to cellphones can reach everybody.
What else can we say? The future is here. We can do nothing if immersing ourselves into it.
