How to Present Your AR and VR Application
You are a smart person investing your time in climbing the VR learning curve. You’ve obtained some skill or have peers that help with development. You have a few VR prototypes. What is next? You create a demo that targets a very specific business problem. You solve it better in VR than you could with traditional 2D devices. You go to businesses and impress them. You prove that you are capable to develop a VR solution. If you have the right solution for the right problem and pitch it right, you will eventually get some funding — either internal for your company to drive innovation, or externally to crate a VR product for others. Then you grow.
One of the most important phases of project management is validation. Ideally you will not invest time in development before you validate the idea for your product. VR is old, View-Master stereoscope is patented 1939, but still very few people have experienced modern VR technology.
Here is one of the unique features of this technology. If you must create a web-based solution, a sketch prototype is enough to express your idea and talk to customers. That is because they are preconditioned by seeing thousand such projects and little is left to the imagination.
VR on the other hand — they have not experienced the technology, they are uncertain of the benefits, they are uncertain of the technical challenges. Low fidelity prototype, presented in the form of video or images, does not deliver the necessary credibility nor proves the technology capabilities of your team.
You are now making high fidelity prototypes and present them on real devices.
Presenting AR
We’ve been doing AR and VR R&D for quite some time. We have learned a lot by presenting our AR and VR applications since the beginning of our journey.
Microsoft Build 2018
For Microsoft Build we created the HoloStock application for HoloLens and presented it as part of a social meetup and later at the Progress booth. The application was high fidelity demo, with some Data Visualization controls. Since it was our first public appearance, we run several test runs inside the company and gathered and addressed all the feedback we could.
Spectator View Marketing Videos
For marketing materials, we implemented networking and set up the HoloLens spectator view. At its core by that time this involved running a capturing application on a computed wired to a DSLR. The setup was too heavy for what we could place at the night club or at the booth. But we had to do it to capture videos to publish on our site. And to have something to show first-time users what to expect when running the app.
A Night in the Club
The day before Microsoft Build 2018 we gathered people from the IT industry in a gorgeous night club. To talk, to socialize, to present our demo. We planned to connect the out-of-the-box streaming of the two HoloLens devices to projectors on a big screen. While the devices and the app performed well, the HDMI cables between our laptops and the projectors failed. People were interacting with the app and we had little idea what they are doing.
At the Booth
The app was well polished, people were quickly getting how to use it. We continued without the streaming on the following days at the booth.
Going Home
We had to leave back home, with some key take-away:
- AR headsets obstruct communication
- First-time users may feel awkward from the unknown
- You must see what your users are doing, sometimes they need guidance
- The technology generates a lot of excitement
- You cannot teach people how to use headsets with videos
ProgressNEXT 2018
ProgressNEXT is an US conference organized by Progress. It is a place to get inspired, get connected, get creative. It is the largest global gathering of Progress customer, partner and developer community.
We had presence on a booth there and were demonstrating our demo in a similar way to Microsoft Build.
Presenting VR
Our focus has always been in delivering a data visualization suite. VR offers a much better arena for immersive data visualization compared to AR. Head-mounted AR focuses at on-field workforce and assistance.
We developed the next set of demos for the Oculus Rift and Oculus GO VR devices.
DevReach and ISTA Conference 2018
These are two events that happened in a same week. And our team talked at both of them.
DevReach is a conference organized by Progress at Sofia. We gather developers from all over the world, for 2 days. This time we were not only doing demos on our booth, we were also presenting. And ISTA is a QA focused conference, again in Sofia.
Presenting on a Big Screen
The presentation starts with intro of what AR and VR is, use-cases, the projected AR and VR economy growth, and ends with a live demonstration of our applications.
We made training presentations internally in the company a few times. The presentation of the demos was done using Oculus Rift on a laptop. The laptop monitor was mirrored onto the big screen.
This kind of demonstration reaches much broader audience. Even in smaller numbers it is much easier to present a VR application to group of peers or business clients like this instead of letting them take turns with the headset. However, this comes with challenges.
Giving a presentation of the application and then inviting the people to try the demo on the booth works well.
Presenting at a Booth
Presenting at a booth is fun. It makes new friends and twitter followers. But whether you are in a small room demoing to your peers or your boss, or on a booth for an event, you need a high-fidelity demo app and you need them to experience it.
Just like you can’t teach a person to ride a bike on a video — you can’t teach a person what the VR application is on a video.
These kind of demos however:
- Blocks you out of the user’s view
- You cannot explain gestures
- The headset obstructs their hearing
- You must watch out for symptoms of motion sickness
- You must accommodate for glasses
- You must take case of hygiene
Spectator View
At this point it was clear that for presenting your applications you need two things:
- Be able to show it in front of a crowd on a TV like screen
- Be able to guide first time VR users through your app
While experienced user will work flawlessly with a well-done app, first-time users will need some guidance. They are not used to the controllers. They are not used to the system gestures. It takes several minutes to go through the system welcome apps and get known with the controller and gestures, but this moves the focus away from your app.
We had two options at that moment.
Use System Streaming
One option was to use the mirroring or streaming when doing demos on the booths and presentations. This thing is supported by the devices, both HoloLens Oculus Rift and Oculus GO have capabilities to stream. However, during presentations subtle head movements shake severely the picture. You must present very carefully trying to keep your head steady. That extra attention draws away focus from your talk. At booths, the standalone devices spend additional power to capture, encode and transmit the video. This generates additional heat and wears of the batteries faster. The quality of the image may be reduced for the users.
VR Spectator View
The second option was to implement a spectator view for VR experiences.
Spectator view is rendered on a PC, thus it required proper networking. Collaboration is one of the key pillars for AR and VR, so we were going to implement networking anyway.
It shows us what the first-time users experience while in the app. It gives us precise control on the camera that the viewers see on the big 2D screen. It smooth movements like a steady-cam so it looks good when streamed on a big screen. Requires less attention from the presenter.
The stream must look like shot with a steady-cam. However, in the virtual experience you don’t need all that hardware. Instead, software simulates the camera movement.
We decided to go for it!
Iterations, Iterations
After the DevReach and ISTA conferences, we continued giving presentations, in similar format, to prospects that reached to us.
Internally at the company, we have meeting rooms where we used the following setup — we connect a laptop to a TV, we present the app using Oculus Rift with display mirrored to the TV, then we use the stand-alone Oculus GO devices to let the prospects experience the app.
This setup, although in very small area and group of people, uses the exact same hardware and configuration we used on the presentations for the conferences and at the booths.
Networking
We were addressing iteratively the feedback and that led to building our multiplayer environment based on the new Unity networking system. The Oculus GO devices now connect to the laptop over WI-FI.
First, we integrated a way to share highlights tooltips and the laser pointers, so users can share insights on the data visualization dashboard. Then we integrated the Oculus Avatars, so users can see each other’s virtual self, and exchange head and hand gestures.
Building the VR Spectator View
The multiplayer made the Oculus Rift optional. With the networking in place, the laptop now could participate in the experience without a VR device — it became our steady-cam or spectator view.
The image on the laptop renders the same 3D scene but designated for 2D displays. The camera that it uses has an algorithm to follow some of the users of the Oculus GO devices. The camera will interpolate linearly its position and rotation, so the movements are in real time, follow closely the presenter, but are also smooth.
For Full-HD or 4K TVs the picture rendered by the spectator view is in native resolution. It is not up-scaled from the headset resolution to the TV resolution. This further improves the quality.
Telerik Campus Presentation
With the networking and spectator view in place we had the chance to present at a local meetup before 30 people. Everything went smooth. HDMI cables to the projectors failed us again. This time we had replacement!
Website Redesign
At this point we were ready to redesign our website and include our new demos. You can check the site at:
The presentation setup allowed us to also capture the promo videos for our two demo applications for our website. Smoothing the camera movements and locking its up direction to always face up — to prevent side way tilt. This gave the video a professional look.
You can see the difference by comparing the following “shaky” video captured directly from Oculus Rift:
Capturing 2D videos was not the only thing we had to do. To enable people see the potential of data visualization for VR we also created 360 movie to put on YouTube, this is an easy distribution channel.
Read the whole story about generating 360 movies here.
Microsoft Build and Progress NEXT 2019
These are two upcoming events and we plan to present and show the demo applications in their full potential. There are a few things that we aim to achieve.
- Give a talk, present the demos with high quality on big screen
- Let the attendees try the apps in a shared experience
- Capture videos and images for our blog and website
And here is our growing check list. We would like to share it with you, it may help you present your own VR creation.
Capture Images and Videos
- After the talk you will need videos and images for reference.
- Be proactive and get consent from users to capture marketing photos.
Present on Big Screen
- Practice in advance.
- Ask for dedicated presenter WIFI network.
- If possible test your setup in the actual presentation room a day early.
Let People Experience the App
- Ask for dedicated WIFI network if you depend on internet connection.
- Charge the devices before the event.
- Prepare power bricks for mobile VR if you expect long working hours.
- Prepare extra batteries for the controllers.
- Test with a few first-time users in advance.
- Share the experience on a TV or laptop.
- Prepare visit cards and flyers to give away.
- Care for hygiene — take tissues and disposable masks.
Wrap-up
Doing proper and quality presentations is key to promoting your AR VR product idea. I hope that you find this post useful and we will be looking forward to meeting you at Microsoft Build 2019 or ProgressNEXT 2019. If you have some comments or feedback you can share them here or contact me over Twitter:
