Immersive Story Creator App for Virtual Reality

This project is already assigned.

Motivation

With affordable high-quality standalone head-mounted displays (HMD), virtual reality is ready to move into the mass consumer market. With modern VR-cameras, images can be captured with a single camera shot covering the full sphere with 360x180 degrees around the camera (VR360). Other cameras have two wide-angle, forward-facing cameras and can capture stereoscopic content covering a half-sphere with 180x180 degrees. At the company immerVR GmbH, we are supporting immersive story telling by using these kinds of images and by having options to augment them with background audio, voice-overs, and descriptions. However, today, the process of generating immersive stories out of images and sound files is manual and tedious and has to be done over a web interface and by naming files in a certain way on a PC.

Figure 1: current way of manually creating additional files for immersive stories

What we imagine instead is to create immersive stories directly with an immersive interface in virtual reality!

Tasks

During this project, the app immerGallery (developed in Unity) will be used as base which can load VR photos and augment them with audio. On top of it, an editor for immersive stories is created. For example, VR photos are shown as spheres for VR360 or half-spheres for VR180. The user can drag and drop the spheres through VR controllers or hand tracking input. Audio can be directly recorded through the microphone of the HMD and is represented as a 3D item in VR which the user can drag and drop. The order of images in a story can be changed through controllers or hand gestures. If an image should be removed, it can be dropped into a virtual waste bin. While these are just some of the examples, we expect the candidate to use a creative approach and to explore more useful options for the immersive story creator.

Figure 2: 360-degree content previewed in a sphere that can be interacted with. Example taken from Valve’s “The Lab”.

Prerequisites

• Excellent skills in C# and in Unity

• Interest in User Interfaces and User Experience

• Familiarity with Virtual Reality devices

• Interest in VR photography is a plus

Execution

The project would be executed together with the VR startup “immerVR GmbH” near Erlangen. It could be in the form of an industry cooperation for a Bacherlor’s thesis, a Master’s thesis or an internship (“Pflichtpraktikum”) starting now.

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg

Prof. Dr. Sebastian von Mammen (Primary Contact Person)
Mensch-Computer-Interaktion, Universität Würzburg
sebastian.von.mammen@uni-wuerzburg.de

Daniel Pohl, CEO immerVR GmbH (Primary Contact Person)
Contact through website