Gracia hands-on volumetric events: I’m impressed
One of the top three experiences I was on the AWE Europe show floor not an official AWE Europe show floor experience. It was a live show of Gracia’s moving pictures that I had in the corridors of the event.. I have been there pleasedtherefore I need to tell you in detail about it.
Grace
Gracia is a startup that aims to be the YouTube for volumetric content given by Gaussian Splats. Its long-term vision is to have developers upload 3D images (perhaps with their phones) to Gracia’s servers and then use multiple users to navigate through existing games and upload them. Thanks to the power of Gaussian Splats, viewers should be able to enter the scene (alone or with friends) and live as the creator would see it.
Currently, Gracia is at the beginning of this journey and is giving Quest application and Steam VR where it is possible to travel several times it is reviewed by the Gracia team itself. The Quest version has a nice edge, in the sense that in it you can enjoy regular graphics, while you’re at it. in the Steam VR version, it is possible to see some events that have been reviewed by the public. Gaussian Splats can be very difficult Quest version must use their simplified version, resulting in lower visual quality, too. It’s still impressive that this experience can be applied to the Quest, however, and the Gracia team is proud of the improvements they’ve been able to make.
A few weeks ago, I reviewed Gracia on Quest and said so the experience it offers is really interesting, and shows the potential of this platform, but I also highlighted its issues, such as the fact that some scans had obvious artifacts, or that the UI was bad. I couldn’t test the PC version to compare because I didn’t have a PC that was fast enough.
Fortunately, during AWE, investor Tipatat Chennavasin came to the rescue. He gave me at the scene a picture of me on the plane with Gracia on his powerful laptop. This way he could show me how well it works on PC, especially if it’s a newly released feature: moving pictures.
Moving volumetric images
Gracia’s team digitized 3-4 small images, usually involving people, of 10-30 seconds each. It is possible to install the Gracia app on SteamVR and enjoy something like a short volumetric video unfolding in front of you, is always used using Gaussian Splats. This is new because similar programs (such as Meta Horizon Hyperscape) have so far mostly tried to show static events. This comes at a price, however: as Upload VR reports, these images are very difficult to analyze and difficult to renderso it’s still an experimental feature:
Gracia says the clips were shot using expensive 3D studios, and it took six minutes to train one frame. That’s equivalent to weeks of average AWS computing time per minute, and while it may take comparatively less time, it’s still a significant expense. Moreover, the download speed of these clips is more than 300 megabytes per second. That means streaming this kind of content would take a 2.4 gigabit internet connection, which nobody has. But Gracia expects its pressure to improve by at least an order of magnitude within a year, making it feasible for today’s high-speed Internet connections. It also explores using cloud VR for streaming.
Graphics running audio on Gracia PC
Tipatat introduced Gracia and gave me a fancy Quest headset with an orange strap and an orange Link cable that connects to the PC. As soon as I put on the headset, I saw in front of me the Gracia UI, which I immediately removed. Then, as soon as I focused on that area, I saw the blonde girl singing in front of me. And I was afraid. (Pun intended. Because I was AWE. Okay, if you want to close this thread after reading this bad joke, I understand you)
First of all, the visual quality was much better than with the Quest. In Quest, the girl in the Cyberpunk area has a good quality, but due to the high pressure of the splats to make them move through the mobile material, there are small objects made on her body . It’s like his skin has some fur.
But on PC, this is no longer the case: the girl had a very convincing appearance. I can’t say that he was completely realistic because our brains are very picky about finding small mistakes when we see pictures of other people.. I could tell he wasn’t real, for example, because some parts of his skin looked like they were painted with a brush. But we were very close. The actual quality was amazing, even more so with Metahuman.
And even more impressive than the quality of his appearance was the fact that he was walking. She was doing a dance in front of me, and reproduction was very easy. Since it was a volumetric image, I could walk around him and observe the situation from all angles. This added to the realism because I could get as close to him as I would if he were real. At one point, I bent down to see the scene from another perspective, and while I was appreciating this, Tipatat jokingly shouted “You perv, you’re trying to look under his dress!”. I tried to explain “No, I was looking at things differently”, but I think no one in the room believed me.
via GIPHY
However, this wonderful incident got me thinking the value of this type of content that can have an adult industry environment. A walking character, rendered in such high quality that you can see him from all angles, maybe with AR in your room… I mean, this is clearly the future of adult entertainment. This can also be a good thing: adult entertainment has always had the power to push technological development forward, so it may also be a big help in the development of technology. of Gaussian Splat.
And that was fun I could use the controls to move and change the size of the dancing girl and make him very small: I put him in my hand and it was sweet. When she was as young as Barbie, the brush strokes on his body were not so visible and his appearance was even more convincing when he was at his true height. It was fascinating.
The video can also be pausedand so I could see her in all her full details, including the semi-transparency of her black dress.
After the dancing woman, I tried two other stimulating games. Another showed two parents dancing with their young baby. This scene was also very convincing, and I could feel their happiness watching them. The third episode was about a chef teaching how to cook a certain dish. It was still pretty good, but it was the worst of the bunch, first of all because it featured so many diagnostic tools, and also because it was a bit cold and impersonal. .
Final Thoughts
I didn’t expect Gracia’s performances to be so good: I really enjoyed them.. I think long-term it could become the future of content sharing: instead of just making videos, maybe people could remember their good times by taking a place and then render it as 3D running Gaussian Splats so they can replay it whenever they want. This would be surprising.
It is true that it is not something that can happen tomorrow. On the quality side, I think what I’ve tried is already good enough for general consumer use. However, capture devices are still bulky and expensive, and the resulting content is too large to download and too cumbersome to deliver.. When we will be able to use something like a phone with a mobile headset to do scanning and translation, we will be living in the future of 3D ideas.
For what concerns the present, on the contrary, I sincerely invite you to try these moving events in Gracia if you have a PCVR setup that has enough power because it is really big.
(Photo by Gracia)
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