Winnipeg VR

Come see some of Winnipeg's local businesses

Some of the businesses included in this app are:

• CN Rail
• The City of Winnipeg
• Frescolio
• Mere Hotel
• The Winnipeg Blue Bombers
• Save on Foods
• Across The Board Cafe
• Vera Chiropractic
• The Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada
• North End Family Centre
• Lennard Taylor Design Studio

Technology used

We shot the content using a couple different cameras. All of the content is in 360-degree photos and video. The cameras we used were:

• Ricoh Theta S – Great for shooting large areas quickly, like the CN Rail Training Facility
• Samsung Gear 360 (2017) – This camera we actually got later on, it shoots great photos and uses HDR. We used this for our outside locations like with the Blue Bombers.

The application was developed for Google Cardboard and is released on the iTunes store and the Google Play Store. We also built an Oculus Rift version to showcase at events with the chamber. This early demo video shows the application running within Unity3D.

The idea is to expand this technology to enable any business access to this for marketing and tourism.

Tech info

The 360 portion of this project is built on our VRSafety training platform, which can be viewed in a web browser or a VR headset. 
We built an app that launches VRSafety directly into Mining VR. 

The 6-DoF portion of this project was built in Unity 3D for the Pico Interactive Neo 2 and Neo 3 standalone VR headsets. 

Take-Aways

This project forced us to learn a lot more about the features and limitations of Pico headsets, working with open XR, and supporting multiple headsets . We also had to focus on mobile XR optimization, and creating spacious scenes in a limited play space.

The biggest thing we learned, though, was we created a really unique workflow to go from 360 photos as reference for our art team using VRSafety to produce the reference materials for creating the 3D scenes. We reconstructed the mine and the PPE room in VR using VR.