Tomáš Mariančík (aka Frooxius) is one of the most innovative and mad genius VR developers that I’ve met. He is probably the most well known for SightLine: The Chair VR demo, which uses the mechanism of change blindness to cut between different scenes.
The version that’s on Oculus Share is an updated version of Sightline that he created for the Oculus Game Jam back in 2013, which destroys the concept of object permanence and creates an experience that you can only have in VR. You see a table, look away, and then look back and the table is gone. It’s a surreal experience to be within a world that is so volatile, which is what really excites Tomáš. He loves to explore realms that are only possible to do within VR.
Tomáš also talks about some of his work with incorporating light fields into 3D scenes within Unity, which allows him to include a lot more complicated geometries than he would otherwise be able to. Here’s a demo scene with lightfield diamonds where “the diamond image rendered using Blender’s Cycles pathtracer into a lightfield and then new views are synthesized and blended with the scene goeometry within the Unity scene.”
Tomáš also recently won a Broze prize within the Oculus Mobile Game Jam of 2015 with the educational experience called Neos VR, which Tomáš starts to allude to when talking about some of his future plans around building out an interactive educational metaverse.
Tomáš also created some innovated 3DUI with the Leap Motion in VR Comenius, which is an educational framework prototype for teaching about anatomy.
Tomáš is definitely a VR developer to keep an eye on, and you can track his latest experiments on his @frooxius Twitter account and his latest experiments on his YouTube channel.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.138] Tomas Mariancik: My name is Tomáš Marjančík, but also I go by the nick Fruxius, and I develop virtual reality games and virtual reality applications. I'm also cooperating with the VR Union company, which develops virtual reality hardware, like the new Clare VR headset. and we are part of the OSVR project which allows us to integrate the headset with Unity with other kinds of applications. The demo itself showcases a new software development called Lightfields which allows us to capture light coming from any kind of object in this case like fancy diamonds and then reproject this light to generate new views of the objects in real time. With the cooperation with VR Union we are developing capture a rig for the light field so we can take any kind of object from the real world or even wall sceneries and environments, have them captured and then reprojected in VR, integrated into traditional 3D or Unreal Engine scenes and have this easy method to create vast amounts of content for VR.
[00:01:09.212] Kent Bye: And so is this a plugin for Unity, or what is this light field that you're talking about? I know that you've had a demo online of a diamond that you've shown, but tell me a little bit more about this light field and how someone would use it.
[00:01:22.962] Tomas Mariancik: Well, the light field is essentially, it's a construct that captures light coming from some object. And this is a generic method, so it can be integrated with all kinds of software. But specifically, I'm working on the parameters on the light field using some two-dimensional surface. So you can have like a sphere wrapped around the object, and you capture the light rays that come through this two-dimensional surface, like the sphere, or it can be a little window into some scenery. And the work that I'm doing is integrating them into a traditional graphical pipeline. So you can take any kind of software, like Maya, Blender, or 3ds Max, render very fancy objects, like these diamonds, which are very computationally expensive. So the diamonds, for example, took a whole day to render on the GTX 980. But thanks to the light fields, they can be put into the Unity, like traditional assets, like any kind of 3D mesh, and interact with the scenery. like essentially any kind of mesh except the data is a four-dimensional texture instead of a mesh.
[00:02:19.604] Kent Bye: Yeah, and probably a lot of people within the Oculus and virtual reality community would recognize you from Sightline. So maybe you could talk a bit about Sightline and then, you know, the original Game Jam game and then how that evolved into the eventual version of Sightline that you released on the Oculus Share.
[00:02:36.790] Tomas Mariancik: Well, Sightline, it started with the first VR jam in 2013. I have developed, the idea was essentially to use virtual reality for some kind of unique feeling. Because what I love about virtual reality is that it allows me to create the words I imagine in my head, have them created in the computer, and then people can actually interact with the words that I have imagined. And with Sightline, I wanted to use virtual reality to create a new kind of feeling. a new kind of world that people can get in the real one. Because I think virtual reality is awesome for creating both worlds that feel very real, but also worlds that feel very unreal, that are very unlike anything that we have seen. So I based it on the idea that as you look around, everything will change. The world is completely volatile. Because when people are born, one of the first things that they learn is a concept of object permanence. And object permanence essentially tells us that when we see a table in front of us, and we look away, and then we look back, that the table will still stay there. But the sideline is basically based on the idea that this concept is broken. That anything in the world can change the moment it leaves your field of vision and create this very strange environment. So I have developed this idea for the VR gem in 2013 and I started expanding this concept into a fully fledged game with an actual sci-fi story. which will explain why this actually happens because I like the combination of surrealism with hard science fiction story and as the game progressed in the development it was kind of slow but Oculus announced the release of the DK2 and I wanted to release a new short demo which would showcase both the possibilities of the DK2, the new features like the OLED display, the positional tracking and such. So I have taken the concept to essentially introduce people into virtual reality and show them that it can be used to create both things that are very familiar to them, but also things that are unlike anything they have seen. So that's for the Sightline, the chair. Meanwhile, the Sightline is still being developed, albeit quite slowly, into a fully-fledged game. Nice.
[00:04:34.377] Kent Bye: And so how did you get involved with the OSVR then?
[00:04:38.070] Tomas Mariancik: We got with the OSVR, actually it was several parts, because I also did the project called World of Communions, which is educational software for virtual reality, and entered the Leap Motion 3D Jam, and the Leap Motion then contacted us with the information that they are joining the OSVR, and they would like to use the World of Communions to demonstrate their OSVR integration. So we actually provided them with the version of World of Communions that they use for their demos, but also because I'm working with the guys from the VR Union, or cooperating with them, and they are developing their own VR headset and essentially they needed an SDK, they needed unity integration so people can create applications for them. So I asked them about this part and we established a connection with other people at Sensix who are developing the integration with the headsets and from there we actually developed integration for the Claire VR headset into OSVR. And I personally like the OSVR because it allows us to easily add new headsets into existing applications. So once I integrate OSVR into my applications, then it will work with any kind of headset that also has the OSVR integration and without having me to implement like a dozen different SDKs for each different platform.
[00:05:49.188] Kent Bye: I see. That's great. Yeah. And it reminds me of the educational experience that you did with the Leap Motion Jam to be able to do almost like medical visualization into a skeleton as an educational experience. And maybe you could tell me a bit more about that and some of the user interface innovations that you found there.
[00:06:04.948] Tomas Mariancik: Yes, the World of Kamenius was independent of the input system, but we are using Leap Motion because it allows for easy natural interactions with the user. At first we were using the Razer Hydras, but that's not very useful for demoing in public because people are getting confused. which button they have to press, which button they have to press to do this and to do that. So we integrated the Leap Motion with the application for this natural kind of interaction. So even without much tutoring, people can have some basic interaction with the demo. Because to grab an object, they reach out, they touch the object, and they actually do a grabbing motion instead of having been told which button to press to represent this action. Of course, like I said, the War of Communos, it's a bigger project, and it's not specifically tied to a specific input. but it has modular system, it can go anywhere from the keyboard with mouse and gamepad to hand tracking systems like the STEM or Hydra or complete finger tracking systems like the Reemotion, Control VR and other kinds of devices that are introduced on the market.
[00:07:06.154] Kent Bye: Nice, and what type of VR experiences do you want to experience?
[00:07:10.266] Tomas Mariancik: Well, all of them. What I like about VR is essentially diversity, that I have a lot of content, a lot of big worlds to explore, or a lot of different environments that I can explore. I personally like the environments the most that give you the specific sense of feeling like you are in another world that's different from yours, that you are exploring a whole different universe. And these are one of my most favorite experiences, but of course, like I said, I really love the diversity of the content, because if I played the same thing over and over again, it would get eventually boring. But with the diverse content that's been created for VR, you have a lot of stuff that you can choose from.
[00:07:46.083] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:07:52.977] Tomas Mariancik: Well, I'm not sure if there's a singular potential because there's a lot of them, but one of the biggest and one of the things that we are actually building with the educational software is Metaverse, a big world where people can explore, a world that people also can expand with their own content and have this ever-growing community and hub of content like, for example, Wikipedia, where people can just expand the Because the world of Kamenios is being represented as Neo's VR and it's been developed as a big educational metaverse where people can create new kinds of content, new kinds of experiences, and have this world where there are both users and also the creators. Great, well thank you so much. Thank you very much.
[00:08:33.853] Kent Bye: 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 voicesofvr.
