Star Wars in Virtual and Augmented Reality

Hi everybody,

happy new year and a good start into 2016! Hope you had a great time off with your families and are ready to dive into mixed reality business again. Of course, we are all waiting for the upcoming VR news from CES in Las Vegas! While we wait, I’d thought I’ll share a few Force-related videos with you. Maybe to pass the time in empty offices…

ILMxLAB

If you haven’t yet consumed all details done by the lab guys from Industrial Light and Magic (the visual effects company from George Lucas, initially for Star Wars) – now it is the time to take a closer look (and send your CV)! Watch the longer video (17 min) from TheVerge that is worth every second if you want to hear from the pros on their work with mixed reality, from CAVEs to VR headset experiences. They show off with some fancy dinosaurs and demonstrate their creative process supporting real-time renderings for Star Wars. Their systems lets you interact with the whole CGI world and manipulate it in virtual reality. (If you want to miss out on the long video, here is a short version that allows a glimpse on it.)

With upcoming headsets like HTC Vive and Oculus we can sure hope for consumer versions of their experiences and games – if we don’t get dizzy from fast-paced FPSs. But many don’t. :-) But we can expect a lot to hit us in 2016 from them and others in the VR and AR realms.

Demos

For example, Trixi Studio also brings us a neat tech demo – specifically no product. It is done with a Google’s Project Tango enabled tablet and shows us the power and potential of AR nicely. You move in your real environment and fight against storm troopers or observe cute little BB-8:

Well, but what can we experience today? You might have seen the facebook-launched Star Wars VR exerience, were you could hover over the sands of Jakku watching the crash-landed star destroyer. The mentioned ILMxLAB was also responsible for the Star Wars content created for the iOS/Android apps that were available in advance to the movie allowing different AR and VR experiences including the above ride (“Jakku Spy”).

So, let’s enjoy and hope for more to come and hit us right after CES in two days!