High Fidelity, Philip Rosedale's new startup which is creating a new virtual world incorporating avatar interactions connected to Oculus Rift and other VR hardware (now in Alpha), has a seriously cool new feature that evokes the technology in Strange Days, Katherine Bigelow's cult cyberpunk movie from the 90s: Avatar playback. In other words, the ability to record your avatar's movement (which can be connected to VR suits, so you can record real world physical movement too), and then have that movement playback on your avatar or another avatar. (That includes NPC avatars.)
There's a bunch of ways playback can be put to use in High Fidelity, as company developer Chris Collins explains to me:
- "Machinima: Pre-record all the avatars in the scene and create a large interactive crowd." (The image here, for instance, is from a bar scene with multiple avatars that High Fidelity's Ryan Downe quickly created using playback.)
- "Heavily interactive environments: You could fill up your world with recorded interactions to go with your own interactions. e.g. recreate a city like NYC, or a bar.
- "Training: Run through a training scenario while recording yourself. Then allow others to run through the scenario as you OR watching the recorded avatar."
Then like I said, there's the Strange Days-type application, except with avatars:
"I log in as Wagner Avatar," says Chris by example, "I hit 'record' I walk around, say things, look at things, move, dance, fly... . I hit stop on the recording. That recording could then be played back as an NPC that will do the above. Or someone else logged in could play back that recording on their own avatar and experience what you did in first person."
If it works as promised, this could become a powerful way of creating new experiences in VR, and more robust avatar interactions in virtual worlds. And yes, of course, as the movie clip above suggests, we'll probably see playback used for virtual sex.
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It's like a Black Box for avatars. This would be a great tool for making machinima as you could shoot a scripted scene from various angles and pick the best one.
Posted by: GoSpeed Racer | Thursday, September 18, 2014 at 06:40 PM
This looks like vAcademia's 3D recording technology for playing back avatar interaction.
http://vacademia.com/social/mainPageVideo/id/2
Posted by: Professor Merryman | Thursday, September 18, 2014 at 06:51 PM
Good direction of R&D, however the "magic" feature is far from being new. It will be very interesting to see where will this world go...
I did a literature review on this topic recently (see the link) and found few tools that had/have VR recording:
Asynchronous Virtual Classroom (1999)
N*Vector (2000)
MASSIVE-3 (2002)
[Project] Wonderland
and most recently - vAcademia (http://vacademia.com/)
I am researching this topic and open for collaboration.
Posted by: Mikhail Fominykh | Thursday, September 18, 2014 at 10:09 PM
With those cartoon Avies as showcase, with less RL fidelity than SL or Opensim, Im afraid I wont be much interested on High Fidelity
Posted by: Carlos Loff | Friday, September 19, 2014 at 05:43 AM
Carlos, do you know what "alpha testing" means?
Posted by: Grizzla | Friday, September 19, 2014 at 06:00 AM
Yes, I know and Im aware many new creators will be tuning fine avatars to sell but. Showcasing a future consumer product can already be a bit more appealing than what we see now
Watching worst Avies than SL/Opensim is barely a fine strategy for showcasing evolution, just my feeling
Posted by: Carlos Loff | Friday, September 19, 2014 at 06:18 AM
Carlos you are not the only one with that thought!
Posted by: zzpearlbottom | Friday, September 19, 2014 at 08:39 AM
it's kind of like putting the cart in front of the horse. "We haven't really done much to the game, but you can take really cool videos."
Posted by: 2014 | Friday, September 19, 2014 at 09:13 AM
The recording feature definitely works and it works quite well.
Posted by: Ciaran Laval | Friday, September 19, 2014 at 10:00 AM