Week 4: Oculus Developer’s Conference – Alex Wang

Part 1: Watch the Oculus Connect 6 Developer’s conference videos

The 3 videos that I decided to watch:

Oculus Connect 6 VR event in 12 minutes

Creating Spatialized Music for AR/VR

Hand Tracking Deep Dive: Technology, Design, and Experiences

12 minutes summary:

I am very excited about the new technologies that Facebook have been working on with their VR department, especially with their developments in hand tracking and brain reading accuracy. Even though to create a fully  functional brain reading interface will not be achieved anytime soon, Facebook have teamed up with ctrl labs who have already developed a wristband that can interpret brain activities. I believe that neural interfaces will be a very important technology in the future, as it opens up limitless possibilities for the application of this interface. I definitely agree with Facebook valuing the potentials of a neural interface and spending their resources on the development of this technology, but I disagree with the focus on wristbands. Because I do not believe the wristband can capture enough information to perform tasks that we envision neural interfaces to be able to do.

Hand Tracking:

Hand tracking was the other big thing that was announced in the developer’s conference. I am sure that machine learning and computer vision was capable of doing hand tracking a long time ago, but I am still very surprised by the accuracy and precision of Facebooks demo. The video shown was so accurate that it could be the level of precision one would expect from a glove with sensors on it. Not only did their team achieve a high precision network, they also cut the cost/computing resource/battery cost by perfecting their code and training data. Instead of using multiple cameras or depth cameras, they ended up using 4 monochrome cameras on each edge of the oculus and was able to sense the small movements of a hand. There is one disadvantage about hand tracking and that would be the lack of feel or haptics when interacting with objects, one of the comments on youtube was that without the handle it would not feel like holding an actual sword anymore. I totally agree on the disadvantages of this lack in haptics, though I believe that the advantages outweighs the disadvantages by a lot. 

Spatialized Music:

I am really interested in audio so I decided to check out their presentation on spatialized music. It was really cool to learn about actual practices in the field of creating music for VR. Techniques such as quad mixing, ambisonic mixing was all completely new concepts to me. It was also really cool to learn about the workflow of creating a soundtrack for a VR based experience. 

Part2 : images, videos, or audios taken in Shanghai that have absolutely no signs of humans

I took 8 pictures of nature without signs of humans, it was really hard to get absolutely no sign of human in the picture so I had to crop out certain parts of the image so that no buildings are shown.

aside from these pictures I also have recording of ambient sounds on my phone that I recorded at Minsheng road over the summer. I think this is really suitable for what we are doing because it captures the sounds of cicadas and other animals/insects sounds.

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