I did a AWE talk on the last year of AR prototyping this week, so thought I’d finally update this site showing them off. In the video above I went through a few of them very quickly (was just a 20 minute talk), so I’ll try adding more detail here.
In 2022 I bought the Varjo XR-3 headset to try some new AR prototype ideas. I had previously used a Zed Mini + HTC Vive in my 2018 AR prototypes – which worked well for videos but was a horrible headset experience (mostly due to latency of the passthrough, but also FOV and weight). The XR-3 is an actual headset designed for AR passthrough – loaded with every possible feature headsets were capable of (lidar for depth sensing, UltraLeap hand tracking, eye tracking, high res focal area).
First test I did was trying the Varjo sample skeleton app. It was then reposted by some large accounts who mistakenly seem to think it was Apple AR:
The first prototype I built was to try out the depth sense and occlusion. For this I add a particle effect to follow the controller. The Varjo XR-3 has a Lidar depth sensor so it can fairly accurately do depth occlusion about 1 meter away from the headset (Mainly useful for hand occlusion)
I then wanted to test how it felt to use the headset while using Unity. I often need to position stuff exactly in AR – it’s massively easier to just keep the headset on and adjust things while being able to see their AR placement. The Varjo’s incredible focal resolution also makes coding or using small editor controls actually possible.
The furry creature was a initial attempt at making a AR AI character – though I didn’t keep that project going.
The next thing I wanted to try out was trying to use the XR-3’s UltraLeap hand tracking:
This is using the package ‘Skinner’ by Keirjiro. It emits particles based on the movement speed of the model’s vertices – so in this case the hand model that I am just not rendering to the headset. So using this I am able to flick particles in directions by quickly moving my fingers.
Next post I’ll go over the liquids physics in AR prototypes.