To mark the debut of its new show, Cursed, Netflix is using WebAR to give users the ability to virtually conjure roots and lightning, receive the sword of power and find their path of magic in a series of augmented reality challenges.
To mark the debut of its new show, Cursed, Netflix is using WebAR to give users the ability to virtually conjure roots and lightning, receive the sword of power and find their path of magic in a series of augmented reality challenges.
Today we are excited to announce the release of our Video Recording feature which can be added to any 8th Wall project to let your users capture and share their experience.
When you add Video Recording to your project, your users will be able to capture moments within the WebAR experience and have the option to download their media and/or share it with their friends using the most popular messaging and social media applications. This opens up viral marketing opportunities for your experience by equipping your users with the tools they need to share their experience with their network and inspire further use.
8th Wall Video Recording happens in-browser and on-device, supporting iOS, Android, and Desktop computers. Designed with privacy in mind, capturing video on-device not only makes recording of web content extremely fast but it also ensures that only the user has access to the media they have created.
Around the world, as shelter-in-place protocols begin to ease and people slowly step out of their homes, we’re urged to maintain a safe distance of 6ft (or at least 1.5 meters) from one another. Grocery stores are using tape to mark the ground at 6ft intervals between patrons, and public parks are painting “social distancing circles” onto their lawns.
With AWE 2020 Online right around the corner, we’d like to recognize our talented partners’ WebAR projects that have been nominated for various Auggie Awards. Vote for your favorites to help them take home an Auggie! Here are the 10 nominations…
Best Campaign Nominee
To promote Fox’s LEGO Masters TV show, Fox teamed up with Trigger — The Mixed Reality Agency to develop a WebAR experience that allows people to build their own 3D LEGO creations alongside the show’s master builders. Users could share their AR builds on social media for a chance to win tickets to LEGOLAND, a LEGO Masters Build Box, or a feature on official LEGO Masters social channels.
Best Campaign Nominee
Indie rock band Real Estate became the world’s first musicians to launch a WebAR concert. Dubbed “Quarantour,” the virtual performance was created to bring the live music experience directly to fans amongst worldwide shelter-in-place protocols due to COVID-19.
To celebrate the release of our new MRCS Hologram project template (which makes it way easier to create WebAR holograms), we’ve dedicated this Week in WebAR exclusively to some of the exciting hologram projects our partners have whipped up.
Independence Day in Israel is observed on April 28th and 29th this year, and in order to personally “visit” each and every home in Israel (while practicing good social distancing), President Reuven Rivlin has transformed himself into a WebAR hologram.
This is the first time in history that a country leader has been telecasted in full augmented reality to visit constituents in the privacy of their home and speak to them using volumetric virtual video. The project is a collaboration between The Office of the President, video capture system TetaVi, volumetric video streaming service Omnivor, creative director Nim Shapira, and WebAR technology by 8th Wall.
During the activation, President Rivlin delivers a speech about the 72nd anniversary of Independence Day in Hebrew. Rivlin concludes with: “You know what? Let’s take a selfie. But I didn’t bring my camera…Come on, let’s take a picture together and don’t forget to smile!” presenting a perfectly-timed photo op for participants. Users are encouraged to share on social media with the hashtag: #PresidentRivlinandI.
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Stuart Weitzman is bringing the catwalk to your living room. The luxury fashion brand just launched a WebAR campaign that uses holograms of models to showcase its latest line of accessories.
Holograms are in high demand as brands and organizations turn to volumetric captures of actors, celebrities and spokespeople to entertain, educate, train, and sell to customers. When combined with WebAR, these holograms become free to be wherever the user is, including their home.
Back in October, we launched our integration with Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studios (MRCS) to support streaming of its volumetric video in augmented reality on the web. Combining Microsoft’s high-resolution, low-latency volumetric videos with 8th Wall’s scalable and frictionless WebAR platform has unlocked a massive market opportunity for holograms. Since this launch, the 8th Wall platform has been used by brands, agencies and even musicians to create WebAR hologram activations that bring a lifelike human experience directly to users.
We gained some valuable feedback in supporting many of the early developers in their hologram project development. This insight was used to implement some powerful changes to our platform to improve the end-to-end development of MRCS hologram WebAR experiences.
Today, we are debuting our official MRCS Hologram project template and a new Cloud Editor feature enabling asset bundle uploads which makes it possible to add MRCS volumetric video (HCAP) files to your project. The release of these new tools makes the 8th Wall Cloud Editor the best platform to create and publish WebAR MRCS hologram content.
The A-Frame MRCS Project Template kick starts your hologram project development by using the latest versions of Microsoft’s HCAP player and 8th Wall’s SLAM engine hyper-optimized for the browser to provide world tracking. It also includes everything you need to set the hologram’s initial scale, enable gestures for manipulation and movement and easily modify looping, muting, control playback, and display messages based on HCAP playback states.
The new asset bundle feature lets developers drag and drop .ZIP files or complete directories into their Cloud Editor projects. The addition of this feature is critical to supporting MRCS HCAP assets. Developers can now drag and drop HCAP asset bundles into a Cloud Editor project, preview the hologram once it has uploaded and then add it to their project.
When ready, the hologram WebAR project can be published instantly to a password-protected staging environment or live to the world — hosted right at the edge, where your users are, with low latency via 197 points of presence globally.
While MRCS hologram projects benefit greatly from asset bundles, this new feature can also be used to upload files with any file extension, including glTF, and brings support for files that rely on referencing relative path files. It also allows developers to serve files as assets which can improve build and load times.
You can check out the new asset bundle feature by logging into the Cloud Editor and clicking the “+” arrow beside “Assets” in any Cloud Editor project. Or, read more about it in our Documentation.
To get started with a hologram project, head on over to the Project Library to clone the MRCS Hologram project or select it as a project template in the Cloud Editor. MRCS Hologram projects will require you to have a volumetric video file (HCAP) from Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Studios (MRCS) or MRCS partners Metastage and Dimension Studio.
We can’t wait to see what you create!
To educate customers on its journey toward zero carbon and zero waste, Nike worked with production agency Unit9 to transform its shoe boxes into interactive WebAR stories. When scanned, the shoe boxes activate a 3D augmented reality experience that appears on top of the box, and tells the story of Nike’s commitment to sustainability.