Sébastien Kuntz is the founder of MiddleVR, which is a middleware VR solution that integrates the latest VR input controller and tracking technologies into platforms like Unity and Unreal Engine, as well as some of the higher-end VR tracking solutions that are used in academia and industry.
Sébastien was on a couple of panels at IEEE VR talking about open source vs. closed source middleware solutions as well as the future of consumer VR. He sees a future where it’ll be more of a mixed reality with some augmented reality combined with virtual reality. Telepresence will be one of those killer apps that he’s really looking forward to.
He also sees that the projection-based VR solutions aren’t going to go away because they are really compelling for industry to collaborate together on, but that you can keep increasing the resolution fidelity by adding more and more projectors to the system.
One of the things that MiddleVR is doing to differentiate itself from the initiatives from OSVR is start to implements some of the 3D user interface best practices within their solution. They’re have a variety of comfortable locomotion techniques as well as object selection and manipulation that includes an implementation of the HOMER technique. HOMER stands for Hand-centered Object Manipulation Extending Ray-casting technique, and it’s from a 1997 paper from Doug Bowman and others.
Finally, talks about some of the experiences that MiddleVR is creating and some of their future plans.
Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Subscribe to the Voices of VR podcast.
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.976] Sebastien Kuntz: My name is Sébastien Kuntz. I'm the founder and president of Middle VR. And so we were here presenting the new version of Middle VR for Unity and for Unreal. And I was in two panels. The first one was about open source and closed source VR. So we were discussing OSVR, Middle VR, and the such. And the second panel was about what is the future of consumer VR. So what is the experience going to look like? And so what I personally believe is that in the living room we will have something between VR and AR. And what I want to see as an application is to have like telepresence. I want to be able to be with my family when I'm far away because they're not close to me. So I just want to be able to have them really near me and be able to interact as if they were here. Really, that's what I want.
[00:00:59.045] Kent Bye: And yeah, so there's this tension that I see between, you know, a lot of the industry that's been using VR for many decades, they end up doing these projection-based cave systems, and then there's consumer VR is being driven by the Oculus Rift and other type of head-mounted displays. And so there seems to be this, are things going to be in more of a projected cave, or do you foresee things being more like an HMD-based?
[00:01:23.585] Sebastien Kuntz: So it will depend. So currently we still need caves because we can have really infinite resolution. We can just add more and more projectors and we will have really very small pixels. And with the caves currently what's really nice is that we can see our own body. And currently with head-mounted displays that's something that's quite difficult. And also in caves we can collaborate with multiple people in the same space very easily. So in the future I think it depends on how the hardware will play out. Currently people think okay we can do now everything we want to do and the industrial people say no with the Oculus Rift so we can do a lot of stuff we will be able to do more and more stuff but we still need to have some very high-end VR systems because of the pixels and all the such.
[00:02:05.264] Kent Bye: Great. And so what's sort of new or in the future for middle VR in terms of what you're trying to implement, especially when you have things like the OSVR, which seems to be doing some of the similar things of trying to be kind of like the middleware for all the different devices to be able to use one sort of interface?
[00:02:21.757] Sebastien Kuntz: So there's lots of debate over this. So firstly, middle VR is dealing with much more things than OSVR. So we have of course the head-mounted display, the tracking, leap motion, etc. So OSVR has this also. And we're also on the high-end VR systems like caves, etc. And the other thing that we're adding is also high-level interactions like different ways of navigating in the scene, manipulating objects, and menus, and displaying webpages. So we really want to have lots of building blocks that you can use to create VR applications very quickly. And something that we are working on right now is also having a collaborative layer so that you can very easily create an application in which you can be several people in the same cyberspace. So that's quite a different scope.
[00:03:01.458] Kent Bye: Does that include sort of the networking layer, if you were to put something in a Unity project, if you wanted a really great 3D user interface and a way to collaborate with other people in a shared virtual environment, that's sort of where you're going with Middle VR?
[00:03:14.830] Sebastien Kuntz: Yes, exactly, yes. And also one of the comparisons I'm starting to use now is that OSVR is like an Android, so you can have really lots of different experiences, and also you can have crappy experiences. And with Middle VR, maybe that's a bit more like Apple, that we are trying to control the experience. We are not adding drivers for things we don't think are good enough. And so we really want to have really good VR so that people can really work with it and not just say, yeah, OK, that's nice, but I cannot work with it. No, we want to have a really good experience and raise the bar.
[00:03:43.753] Kent Bye: I see. And so maybe in terms of the 3D UI, what are some of the basic things that you're trying to implement in terms of object selection, manipulation, menus, navigation? What are some of these components that you're trying to implement with your system then?
[00:03:57.340] Sebastien Kuntz: So currently we have three different ways of navigating. There's the simple joystick. You push the joystick and you're moving forward. And you have an elastic metaphor that we can use. So that's a very good way to change the speed very efficiently. And also we have a grab the world in which you're just taking with hand and grabbing the world and taking the world with you. And this particular technique seems to be quite efficient at not getting people sick because it's like you're not moving around but that's the world moving towards you. So we offer that so that people have the choice which would be the best for the application and then maybe they don't have to re-implement that for example. Selection currently is quite simple, just point an object but you could have boxes to select multiple objects, you could have circles, you can voice command for example, we're also looking into that. And for manipulation, for example, you can either stick an object at the end of a ray, and then it's like the object is stuck on a ray. Or you can have another interaction which is called Homer, which was invented here by people on the 3D UI community, in which once you've selected an object, it will just mimic locally the position and the rotation of the hand, so that's much more effective and much more precise in terms of manipulation, for example. And also the menus, what we're bringing. Menus can be really hard to do and if you want to use the menus of Unity or Unreal, they won't work in VR. It would be very difficult for helmeted displays and it doesn't even work in a cluster environment. So what we have is now menus which are based on HTML5 rendering. So we have a very simple way of creating menus and then you can also just create your own graphical user interface in HTML5 and CSS. So any web designer can do that and create very fancy graphical user interface.
[00:05:36.762] Kent Bye: Yeah, and here at IEEE VR, it's very focused on kind of pushing forward the academic, you know, body of knowledge of virtual reality from the long papers and short papers and the posters and as well as the demos and in different contests and talks and panel discussions here. So, from all the things that you've seen over the course of the week, what are some of the things that you find really interesting or particularly salient in terms of virtual reality?
[00:06:00.625] Sebastien Kuntz: What I like about this community is that the answers are progressing slowly, but they raise good questions. So we have more and more questions, and they say, oh, that's a question I never thought about, so maybe I should start finding answers for that. And so that's really more about finding the good questions to answer. Exactly what Oculus did is like, OK, what's the good question for VR? The first good question is field of view and latency, and so they focused on that. And some other people say, OK, VR is just about displays and optics and display panels, but that's not a good question for VR. So finding the good questions is a good way to find the good answers.
[00:06:36.239] Kent Bye: Just to get a flavor, this is my first experience at the IEEE VR, and how do you make sense of the differences between a conference like this and a more consumer-based virtual reality gathering?
[00:06:48.878] Sebastien Kuntz: I think the consumers are mostly in the now and what is going to happen in the next six months. And here at Academia, they're more like, what will happen in five to ten years? What will you do now? So now it's interesting, we can do stuff, but they're trying to get much more further. Also what's interesting is that those people have been doing VR for quite a long time, so we are discussing maybe deeper questions, because over the time we've discussed basic questions for a long time and now we're trying to go further than that.
[00:07:18.940] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what type of experiences do you want to have in virtual reality?
[00:07:25.102] Sebastien Kuntz: So different ways. Personally, I would like to have games, of course. And what we're showing here is also the simple application in which you can draw in space. That's just very funny and very interesting. And we will show you in two weeks the same application, and you can have multiple people in the same VR environment, cyberspace, drawing together cubes and spheres and lines. So this should be really fun. And in terms of professional applications, I really want to use VR not to escape reality, but to improve reality. And for this, we have developed an application for engineers, so that they can load their 3D XML data, the CAD data, and work in a collaborative way also, like remotely together on the models, and have also ergonomic studies of the body, so that people have less back problems or articulation problems. So that's, I really think, that's something helping humanity in terms of efficiency and helping people in work environment.
[00:08:14.170] Kent Bye: And you're also creating more of your experiences at middle VR and had a poster here Maybe could talk a little bit about some of those
[00:08:20.311] Sebastien Kuntz: Yeah exactly, so we're creating the middle VR for developers and we're also now creating applications because we have lots of companies that know nothing about VR but they're interested in that so they come to us because they've identified us as experts and we can choose the right hardware for us so it can be Oculus Rift, it can be a ZSpace, it can be a Cave depending on the application and we can quickly create applications that really work for anybody and we often see people creating VR applications that are very difficult to use or make people sick. And we really focus on having simple applications that work for everybody and you have presence for the whole application.
[00:08:59.390] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you very much. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
