4 things that this year have made me improve the most

Last post of the year: 2016 is going to end and here comes the time we make a balance of the past year. For me 2016 has been crazy, like every year for every startupper: you have lots of stress, lots of things to do, lots of problems and an emotional rollercoaster that never ends. We of Immotionar had made lots of steps further in our vision for providing full body virtual reality: our suite has come out in private beta in July, then went public last month. We made our first event. We developed Hit Motion, the first cross platform full body VR and had reviews even in Chinese!

But the most important thing is that I personally made lots of steps further in becoming a better person, a better startupper, a better developer. I could write lots of words about what I learned and give you advices and I surely will do it, but not now. I think you just want to briefly read this post and then start the New year’s eve party 🙂 … so I’ll just give you some 4 short hints!

First experiments with Oculus Touch!

Today I’ve made first experiments with Oculus Touch and their companion SDK! It’s been super-interesting and I’ve learnt really a lot! I’ve also had some fun, but I found that there are some obscure things that I had to learn with trials&errors… so in the new year I’ll make a tutorial just for you my dear readers!

In the meantime, enjoy this video showcasing the results of my experiments!

Mirror GearVR with ScreenBeam Mini 2

One of my Christmas Gift has been a ScreenBeam Mini 2. What is that? Well, it is a little device that lets you stream movies from laptops or smartphones to and HDMI screen through Wi-fi. If you’re thinking “Woah, it is like a Chromecast!” well, yes, it definitely is. And if you’re thinking “Woah, so I can use it to mirror GearVR content to an external monitor!“… well, yes, you’re right!

This is another piece of hardware that you can use to stream GearVR / Cardboard content to an external monitor so that people can see what the user is seeing in virtual reality. If you missed my article about other possible methods… what are you waiting for? Follow this link and read it!

ScreenBeam Mini2 is a little device by ActionTec that lets you stream content from any device to an external HDMI screen. Main advantage over Chromecast is that it is not an Android-dedicated piece of hardware. It works also with Windows ecosystem (even Windows Phone!).

How to show a video in a Texture with Unity on Android

Yesterday I’ve been asked about how to display a video inside a hobbist AR application in Unity, so I’m writing this tutorial to help people having the same problem.

You know, in Unity to display a movie inside a texture, you have to use a MovieTexture. MovieTextures are cool and work flawlessly, but… they don’t work on Android. The only thing that you can do in Android is showing the movie full screen using methods of HandHeld class. But… if you are going to develop a mobile VR or AR application and you want to show the movie inside a quad (maybe because this is the screen of a TV inside your game), this is absolutely useless. So, how can you do it? I can give you some hints.

1. Develop your own solution. This is the preferred answer if you have time to employ in doing it and/or you want to learn how this stuff works. Or if this is a critical piece of your applications, so you develop it once for all and then you use it forever. Here you have to find a way to open your movie file (OpenCV can be an option), then read every frame and put it on a texture using Unity methods. Of course some optimizations have to be performed or everything will come out super-laggy (very low FPS).

The little satisfaction of seeing your game reviewed all over the world…

Some days ago we of Immotionar launched Hit Motion, the first game with cross platform full body virtual reality: using Kinects we allow the user to use his/her full body to interact with the VR game!

I’m very proud to announce that some important VR website have already talked about it. VRFocus, for instance, dedicated us a little article, that you can read here. This is awesome, since I think VRFocus is a great website for VR news and seeing something about me on it has been incredible!

Oculus Touch: first review

Some days ago, finally my Oculus Touch that I preordered some months ago have arrived… but I haven’t been able to try it thoroughly until today, when I played 2 hours with them. I’ll write here a short review about them and then I’ll write a more detailed one on our Immotionar website in the next days.

I’ll drop the bomb immediately: I did not fall in love with Oculus Touch. Now I’ll give fanboys the time to go at the end of this article and write bad comments about me saying that they want to kill me… have you done it? Ok, now I can go on happily :). Let me explain what I mean… I like both Oculus and Vive, so it is not a matter of brand…

Palmer Luckey, don’t get angry… but I don’t think that your controllers are super-awesome

Happy whatever!

So this is Christmas and New Year’s Eve is coming… and I’m finally going to have two days of rest 🙂 Sorry if I didn’t update this blog that much in these days, but I’ve been super-busy in doing stuff, like preparing our Christmas VR-card (haven’t you seen it yet? Go to www.immotionar.com and download “Best Christmas 2016” now!)… and creating my super-cool Oculus Avatar (do you like it?), but after Christmas I’ll write some great posts about VR, so stay tuned!

In the meanwhile, have very nice holidays… don’t know what is the politically correct way of saying this, so be happy whatever you want to celebrate! 😉

HTC Vive 2 will be announced at CES 2017?

There are really lots of questions about the Vive 2. HTC Vive is a device that completely changed our way of thinking VR, since it introduced for first full room scale (well, actually us of Immotionar introduced it before them using Kinects, but that’s another story :P) and first true VR controllers.

But HTC Vive is still an expensive device and has to face the fierce competition of Oculus: after Oculus Connect 3 and the following release of Oculus Touch, Oculus now has a competitive advantage over them: the ability to use true ergonomic controllers. Vive has already answered in a great way showcasing some new prototype controllers and releasing with TPCast a device to make Vive wireless, but all hype on reddit now is for Oculus Touch. The competition between the two vendors is high and this is giving us lots of fantastic stuff. But now there is also a new competitor: Microsoft, with its announced super-cheap headsets with inside-out positional tracking.

Full body VR game Hit Motion is out now!

At Immotionar, we’ve just made a great announcement that I want to share with you all! We’ve released Hit Motion, a game that we’ve been developing in the last weeks with some local indies: the game designer Massimiliano Ariani and 3D artist Victor Pukhov.

Hit Motion awesome logo

Hit Motion is in pre-alpha, so it is still not a complete game, but it’s already fun because using the ImmotionRoom system, it lets you use the full body to run from one side of your room to the other kicking and puching every thing that comes in your virtual sight! This is Max while playing with it… isn’t he funny?

The game is compatible with every headset (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Razer HDK, Gear VR, Google VR) and with every supported sensor (at the moment Kinect v1 and Kinect v2), so if you have at least a Kinect (but the more you have, the better 😉 ) and a VR headset, download it for free on Immotionar website!