Like everyone working in VR and AR, we spent our summer watching fancy videos of cool ARKit demos showing portals, sculptures, pokemons, 80s clips and some furniture. Like a lot of furniture.
Watching all this, we kept wondering :
This an awesome new medium, and yet it only offers 1-player experiences? I don’t know about you, but I generally use my phone to exchange with other people, not much to interact with my furniture. And yet, I haven’t seen any take on what would a mobile social AR experience look like.
It’s our job at Mimesys to think about the future of immersive communication : our product Mimesys Connect is the first VR holographic meeting solution. We think VR and AR offer the opportunity to shift computing from personal to social. We also think immersive communication is far from solved and we need a good dose of experimentation to define the perfect product.
So we spent some time this summer to adapt our software for ARkit. And then, we were able to try a lot of cool things to get insights on the future of AR communication.
Medical collaboration in the park
Medical collaboration is one of the fields that requires a lot of visual data. It’s not exactly the kind of interactions you can have over a phone call, as you heavily rely on 2D and 3D imagery. That could change with ARkit.
Is this demo we show a collaboration between Dr Anne-Laure Rousseau and our CEO Rémi, playing the role of a physician being remote.
Dr Rousseau is connected on a Vive from the hospital, and recorded with a depth cam in our own holographic format (keep in mind those cameras should be broadly distributed in the next couple years). Her setup is then a PC, a Vive and a Kinect camera.
On the other side, the AR setup is very light for Rémi since he only carries his iPad around. Yet this simple setup is still quite powerful, allowing him to review all the data easily, whether it’s floating 2D images or a brain in 3D, and all that running on a 4G connexion.
What’s the point?
Even if the point of view of the iOS device running ARkit is limited, the ability to visualize the other person gives a feeling of presence and a different impression than a regular skype session since the person is firmly positionned in the world.
One of the big advantages of a mobile holographic session is to be able to visualize and comment a lot of visual content spatially , something that is difficult to do remotely, and even harder in mobility. Arkit also offers the ability to visualize 3D objects naturally from every angle, which makes the collaboration around them very natural. As with our own holographic meetings, we expect that usecases around 3D files will be the most popular to start.
It’s also an excellent presentation tool, allowing the person in VR to use advanced tools such as the pen to annotate content, and to move the content around.
What’s next?
The is the first of a series of demos we’re making with ARKit and Mimesys. The possibilities are great and need quite some exploration. For now, we haven’t designed interactions on ARKit, but that is the next step: being able to nail AR-first interactions, .
What is quite striking when you have worked on VR for more than three years is the convenience of the device. No wires, no calibration process, no drivers error, it’s running smoothly and conveniently.
The possibilities are already great for collaboration, sales scenarios, presentations, for doing things together rather than simply talking to each other.
If have any feedback or interest, contact us at contact@mimesysvr.com
