20170207 Vive Camera experiment

The chaperone effect is pretty neat if you like Glowing Edges in Photoshop. I do.

Tonight, we ran some experiments related to the HTC Vive's built-in camera, mostly riffing on how possible it might be to use as a real-world camera in which one might place virtual objects.

From what we can tell, the camera simply isn't high-definition enough to be useful for this, and given our three-hour session limit, it felt like too much of a rabbit-hole to re-fit the camera's image output to be suitable for use within the headset. My inclination is also that someone has already done this part somewhere out there.

We also took a side-trip and made a little cube character who would mimic your movements in reverse, thus mirroring you. Its name is HeadFriend and it is strangely compelling and 'life-like' despite being obviously not lifelike at all.

One fun little thing we ran into tonight was the weird feeling of watching the Unity Game view as someone else wearing the headset approaches you from behind. It is a chilling feeling, even though you know they are there, to watch someone approach you! Pretty interesting.

The overall outcome of tonight is that we're really starting to pick up the pace on the idea-implement-execute cycle. Some things this evening barely took 20 minutes to go from 'what if' to 'oh, cool!'. That feels good, for sure. Not bad for just 4~ weeks of VR experimentation.