How we Built our SIGGRAPH Experience

Our team at the Future Reality Lab has developed a new kind of collocated mixed reality experience that premiers this weekend at the SIGGRAPH show in Vancouver.

Dubbed the “Post-show for Cave,” our experience uses the NVIDIA Holodeck for compute power, four of the HTC Vive Pro headsets for full field of view augmented reality, and the Autotoon Character System for procedurally animated interactive characters that are streamed from the cloud.

To build this experience, our team used a variety of tools a part of our production process:

• Gitlab – for code repositories and issue tracking
• Whiteboards – for writing down high priority objectives where everyone can see them
• Digital Ocean – for inexpensive staging and test servers
• Text editors – for task management (I like org-mode in Spacemacs.)
• Cardboard – for mocking up the collocated experience
• Slack – for team messaging
• Unity – for the mixed reality front end

Two to three times a week, our team would gather in person to debug and test the current build of the experience. This was a crucial part of the process, as we were both developing the content for the experience and actively developing the Autotoon Character System.

We are really excited to share this experience with the world.

If you’ll be at SIGGRAPH send us a note. We’d love to see you.