Finist Painter: Looking Glass Edition
collaborative framework for XR art creation
Overview
Finist Painter: Looking Glass edition is an artistic framework that allows two users to collaborate using VR and Looking Glass with Leap Motion at the same time. If you want to dive deep into the development process, use cases and the inspiration behind the project, read our large Medium blogpost
what is looking glass
Looking Glass is a patent-pending combination of lightfield and volumetric display technologies within a single three-dimensional display system. 45 unique simultaneous views of a virtual scene are captured on a computer at 60 frames per second.
The Looking Glass always seemed incredibly interesting for us as user experience (UX) researchers, developers and designers. We’ve been following Looking Glass Factory for a while, since they first launched their volumetric display prototype (Volume) back in 2015. This year, the Looking Glass finally became a small, versatile and truly magical fish tank with a handy Unity SDK. At Synesthetic Echo we decided to develop something daring, deeply challenging and also fun. So we made Finist Painter!
We started to play around with the idea of using the Looking Glass as a device to preview and potentially interact with VR painting and sculpting software. We imagined potential use case scenarios - ranging from art direction meetings where a group of people can preview and correct a VR project or design brief in real-time without wearing the headset to showcasing public VR art in exhibitions and conferences without sacrificing the attention of a large group of people having to line up to wait their turn for the headset.
As we continue our development we are scheduled to deliver the demo to work with the brand new Looking Glass App Library. We often demo the experience at events and festivals and are always happy to accept honest feedback.Currently Finist Painter: Looking Glass Edition works for the Oculus Rift with the Looking Glass, as well as on the Looking Glass independently. The Oculus-only Finist Painter app will come to the Oculus store in 2019. If you have both Looking Glass and Oculus Rift and want to be beta-tester, please get in touch!
