Gabe Baker
At WorldViz, we make tools that help a wide variety of professionals create immersive VR experiences that can be experienced collaboratively. Our VR collaboration solution Vizible, has a unique feature that we want to highlight in this post: avatar recording.
Avatar recording gives you the ability to record your avatar’s movements, gestures, actions, and voice. Then you can embed that recording inside of your Vizible presentation. Before we get into the how, first let’s explore the why. There are lots of possible use cases for this feature.
The obvious one: you could record yourself as an avatar as you explain particular aspects of the 3D models or 360 photos/videos in the scene. Since the recording includes your gestures and interactions with the scene, you could be explaining a model as you interact with it. You could have it in your hands and rotate it, or point your laser pointer anywhere in the environment as you talk. Then, when anyone views that Vizible presentation, they’ll see your avatar recording exactly as you’ve recorded it – voice, gestures, laser pointer, drawings, and more. Here is an example using a proximity sensor to trigger a short avatar recording showing the grabbing feature in Vizible. The recorded avatar is grabbing a model, rotating it, and talking.
The combination of proximity sensors (sensors you can place throughout your scene that trigger actions) and avatar recordings opens up other useful possibilities. You could embed recorded avatars throughout a scene so that when users explore different parts of it, they see particular recordings. You can embed as many recordings as you want in any particular scene in your presentation. To differentiate the experience for your viewers, you can trigger one recording if users go to one spot or push a certain button, and another recording if they’re in a different spot or push a different button. Your recorded avatars can give guided tours, provide helpful notes, give instructions, offer explanations, or be characters in a narrative placed throughout the environment to create story-like experience.
So, how do you do it?
We make it pretty simple, but the process is easiest if you have two people, with one person at the computer pressing the “record” button and the other one in an HMD ready to perform the recorded actions and voice. With your presentation open in Vizible Presentation Designer, first you want to go to the “Sessions” tab (bottom left). Any presentation you currently have open will have a session open called the “editing session”. Grab the ID for the editing session (see arrows below), open up Vizible Attendee, put in the ID, and enter the scene.
Once you’ve entered the editing session as a Vizible attendee, you’re ready to record. Select the “Scene” object in the component graph and right click on it (see arrows below). One of the options available to you is “Set Recording”. As soon as you select this, the recording will begin, and any avatar activity/voice will be recorded. As soon as you click "Set Recording" again, the recording will stop.
Then, the recording will be saved in your asset library - you can see what the asset looks like in your asset library below, where you can see me dragging one in to the scene view.Once you drag the avatar recording into your presentation, it will be positioned based on where the avatar was during the recording. You can right click on it and select the "Start Playing" action to have the recording play right when that slide loads, or you can trigger its playback with a proximity sensor or a time sensor. You can have as many avatar recordings as you want on any particular slide of your presentation. You can also adjust its volume and set whether you want the recording to loop or not.
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Have questions about avatar recording in Vizible, or about anything else? We're happy to help.
