The company is experimenting to offer in a phone with ARCore a window to the virtual world.
Owlchemy Labs, the studio behind Job Simulator, who joined Google last year, has unveiled a project which, using a mobile phone with ARCore, you can see on the screen of the terminal what happens within the virtual world, having the ability of the device to be moved freely to appreciate in real-time to any angle of the experience (with some latency due to the process which includes the decoding of the video that receives the phone). Using Google’s augmented reality platform allows you not to have to use accessories such as Vive Tracker to position your phone, something we had already seen on other occasions.
Mobile Spectator, the name given to the project, uses ARCore to position the phone over real space, a task that requires an initial calibration that is done by pointing the camera to the VR viewer and pressing the synchronization option, all of which are both devices relatively close (about 30 centimeters). The communication between the PC and the smartphone is carried out via WiFi, being the team in charge of rendering the view that reaches the phone, which means a higher cost for it, since in the end it is a new point of view to generate. Of course, it frees the mobile from having to run a native application to perform the rendering, thus becoming a streaming task.
Explanation of the configuration and operation process.
As they explain, the ideal is that the application has a system of avatars so that we can see on the phone the virtual representation of the user. Vacation Simulator, their new game in development and with which they have done the tests, offers an avatar composed of head and hands. The VR user can also see the position of the external user, which is represented as a screen on which the user sees the same image that is shown on the phone.
Mobile Spectator also allows you to take photos in the same way that we do in the real world. In addition, in order to experiment with interactions, they added another button with which to throw beach balls to the VR user.
For the moment, it is an experiment that could become an addition to Vacation Simulator or even become an independent application for more content.
