Your monthly non-spammy newsletter from your friends at oio.
This month we are extremely happy as we finally got to release one of our latest projects in the wild. It's bouncing, it's augmented and it's finally in reality.
Some news from the oio space.
In the past months we had the pleasure of working with the team at Google Creative Lab in London, taking part in a new series of experiments exploring the potential of WebXR.
WebXR is actually a pretty interesting new approach that brings together AR and VR on the web to make them more convenient and widely accessible as no apps are needed and it all runs on Chrome mobile!
In our experiment we explored the overlap of AR, music and play, using a series of virtual objects in real spaces to create a sort of physics-random-chaos driven musical experience that we call...Bouncing Band.
Bouncing Band turns any space into a musical instrument. Drop objects and characters to create music and beats interacting with the space around you or just fill the room with chaotic noise.
Launch the website from your Android device, scan the floor and other surfaces with your camera, then tap to drop some bouncing characters. Explore the sounds of rubber ducks, broccolis and hotdogs!
Launch the experiment here:
*Android phones only, for now
Also, it's all open source! You can look at the code here, tweak it and make your own version of bouncing.band!
Share the beats and places where you made your own #bouncingband with us on Instagram or Twitter, the best bouncing band video will get a chance to name the next object that we will create for it!
Browser based AR apps are actually pretty damn cool!
But here you might ask: "Whats the big fuss about? Hasn't AR been around for a while?". And yes that's true, but we believe that until now the creative and experimental potential of AR has been seriously held back by the need for native apps.
The implications of app-free XR are many but here are three that we find particularly interesting:
1) A new canvas for artists and creators - A bouncing broccoli band and other types of short, experimental experiences don't really justify the process of downloading and launching a native app. And that's a pity for all the brilliant artist and creatives who are looking to engage and tell stories with technology.
We think and hope that the accessible nature of WebXR will make AR a much more interesting medium for artist and creatives and hopefully start a new wave of ArtisticAR.
2) A new platform for brands - Many blog posts have been written about the marketing and CX potential of AR. And if Facebook's organogram is anything to go by there are big bucks in getting the experience right. Standardised and friction less browser based AR might just be the final push for the potential to be fulfilled. Any commercial use case from in-store wayfinding to product information to technical troubleshooting just got much more accessible for any customer, regardless of the hardware they own and the apps they have installed.
3) It's pretty easy to build and launch- Writing the code for the experiment was surprisingly simple and rather quick, taking no more than a couple weeks. It is still very "experimental" (full of bugs) but having something up and running shouldn't take more than a few minutes, if you've ever built a website before. We recommend taking a look at three.js examples such as AR Hit Test and AR Cones to get started. Local development could be tricky, as WebXR doesn't run without https, but we have a few tips on the GitHub page of the experiment here. If you are curious about the underlying technology, here's a technical overview of the WebXR Device API.
Our Discord community is growing, we are now almost 200 people (not on Discord? Join now!). Here some cherry-picked links for you:
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✌️ Have a great rest of the week everyone!