Existent

Physical Magic in VR! When PRELOADED come into the studio, you know you're gonna some some off-the-cuff creative ideas we've not had before! With their ongoing mantra of PLAY WITH PURPOSE, I guess it's hardly surprising. We welcomed Richard Winter Kyle Tugwell Mink ette Ptolemy Raven Spare and Seb Carder to the Existent studio where they took part in The Light Garden before their creative impulses took over and they started experimenting with all the possibilities our platform affords. If you look closely, there's a lot at play here that results in people feeling comfortable and present enough to start playing, iterating and devising while in a virtual environment. The headline is: 💡 Full Physical Presence is achieved and sustained 💡 In this video, Ptolemy and Richard were physically relaxed and comfortable enough to start exploring more options in the environment and how the combining of physical and digital worlds can lead to some exciting, innovative experiences! Because everything in the Light Garden is dynamically present, you can just pick stuff up and try it, there any then, with no programming or anything required. The only thing you need is ideas and being able to try them out. And the guys at Preloaded have idea coming out of their ears. In the first instance Richard wanted to explore being able to "magically" move and summon the refreshing drink. How did we do it? Simple. I removed my wrist tracker - the IK held together - to free up my now-not-tracked-hand so when I moved the cup in the physical world, it looked like it was hovering in the virtual world. NEXT: like every creative process, Ptolemy gave a big dose of YES, AND and then he and Richard made the cup float, "passing" it between them with their new found magical powers. This is exactly the type of creative flow essential to a creative process - rapid, real time, physically present devising, ideating and iterating in VR without feeling like you need to throw your HMD off after 15 minutes. If you make people comfortable enough then the creative flow can be hit earlier and sustained for longer. What other tricks do you think we could do with mixing virtual/physical object?! HTC VIVE Unreal Engine Phil Stuart Matt Vernon-Clinch Dan Webb #vr #play #immersive #themepark #entertainment #magic

Relaxing, chatting, drinking in VR. When you feel so comfortable in VR you can just kick back and chat about The Iron Giant. Probably a more dialled down video here, but feeling relaxed enough in your environment that you can engage in meaningful, friendly, social conversation is essential for any experience - whether in VR or the real world. Here James and I just ended up making small talk about the artwork, where the characters might come from, the lore. This sort of free wheeling creative flow is only possible is you are comfortable enough in your physical, social and psychological environment. No it's not a huge rollercoaster of an experience, but the gentle peace and harmony that sharing a happy moment with a friend brings is priceless. As ever there's a ton at play to ensure this was an easy environment to have a fun conversation in: 👫 Social - James and I were able to experience everything at the same time as each other and share the experience with each other: daring, reassuring, laughing: this all plays into becoming confident and comfortable in your surroundings. 🕺 Full Body - we could see our own, and each other's, fully represented body, in real time, and read each other's body language. Yes, I'm a half bodied rock-host, but my body language is still readable. 🤝 Physically Interactive - James had enjoyed his drink. The physical and digital lined up perfectly for him to enjoy the unique magic of drinking from a fantastical world, and also the refreshing drink itself. And also the reassuring, almost subconscious, interaction with the chairs and table (which required no thought or tuition on how to engage with them). Keen eyed observers will notice I actually am not wearing a headset. This is because this is actually our "performer" feature whereby the wearer only needs three trackers to be represented. This offers a much more lightweight, interchangeable and operationally smoother option for people running The Light Garden (or any customised version). The most valuable experiences are ones we share together, and with Existent we've doubled down on all the components needed to experience everything together. What else do you think is essential for social VR? HTC VIVE Unreal Engine #immersive #entertainment #events #magic #gaming #art #vr #spatialcomputing #TheIronGiant

Want to come visit?? Welcome to The Light Garden Existent HTC VIVE Unreal Engine #immersive #gaming #animation #vr #themepark

VR so comfortable you feel like surfing a chairlift?? When you get a creative person like Phoebe Hyder into the Light Garden you can expect them to do the unexpected! Halfway through the chairlift part of the experience, Phoebe couldn't resist climbing up to see how it felt. Watch to the end for the full rollercoaster (excuse the pun) of emotions. While we absolutely don't recommend you do this (!), if you looks closely there's a lot at play as to why Phoebe, a seasoned physical performer, (including Royal Shakespeare Company's ground breaking Dream, production), would feel confident enough to do something as bananas as surf a moving chairlift, with only my hand as support: 👫 Social - Phoebe and I were able to experience everything at the same time as each other and share the experience with each other: daring, reassuring, laughing: this all plays into becoming confident and comfortable in your surroundings. 🕺 Full Body - we could see our own, and each other's, fully represented body, in real time, and read each other's body language. I KNOW, the skeleton pops a bit in this video, we are constantly erasing bugs :) 🤝 Physically Interactive - the chairlift was exactly matched up with its physical counterpart - resulting in natural, no-thought-needed interaction and a sense of physically connecting with the virtual world. ALSO being able to confidently take my hand while she stood up! Plus a great many other smaller things to do with head-location, frame rates, optimisation and visuals that is table stakes with Existent. Make people comfortable in the virtual world and they will be able to do incredible things. Love to hear people's thoughts and ideas on how to get people relaxed and comfortable in VR. HTC VIVE Unreal Engine #vr #ar #immersive #presence #themepark #tech #animation #gaming #art

The Light Garden fully road tested by an energetic 4-year-old! AKA testing the scaling limits of our skeleton solution. One of the most frequent questions I get is around the limits of Existent's skeleton scaling solution. So I brought my 4 year old son in to test. And what a cute tiny robot he turned out to be! We have tried to make our solution as adaptable as we can for this experience - and there’s always more we can do. Having a virtual body that is in the correct proportion to you is essential for sustained presence and being able to naturally interact with your environment. We have poured a lot of time and effort into this, and we’re getting great feedback from early users on it feeling comfortable and natural. A few other thoughts having a small child do it, were the physical interactions that were important to him: - holding my hand - sitting on my lap - drinking his drink Being able to have the safe, meaningful parent-child interaction in a fantastical world made it all the more impactful. And my son thought it was the best trip to my work ever. HTC VIVE Unreal Engine #art #vr #immersive #family #spatialcomputing

VR so comfortable and natural, you just want to play in it. This clip is a little different from the usual, but I wanted to share it because it highlights so many components we’ve worked on at Existent to make being in VR feel effortless and intuitive. After taking James through The Light Garden, we found ourselves just chatting away in our headsets, then naturally messing about with the props and furniture. This happens all the time in The Light Garden—and in any demo we run at Existent. People feel so comfortable in the environment that they’re not desperate to rip off the headset as soon as it ends. This points to something fundamental about both The Light Garden and Existent as a platform: 💡 Full, sustained physical presence has been achieved 💡 Participants are physically, and psychologically, at ease. Their actions align perfectly with their expectations, building trust in the environment and removing friction from the experience. When people feel fully comfortable, their imagination can take over. In this case, we started reconfiguring stools and tables, stacking them, and joking around—not because we were testing the tech, but because we were instinctively playing. This ability to “play,” to experiment freely, is central to how children and adults learn. It’s not just fun; it’s foundational. Would love to hear what others think is essential for creating a truly relaxed, present VR experience. What do you think? HTC VIVE Unreal Engine Dan Webb #vr #immersive #animation #gaming #play #learning

This is why we built Existent - VR that’s feels real

Next up is our awesome Hand Grip Authoring tool Finger tracking is an incredible capability that can be fraught with challenges in implementation; occlusion, poses, interactions. With Existent we have smoothed out the entire workflow. - Allows for automatic collision-based grips, or manually authored grip poses - Blends naturally between finger tracking poses and custom grip poses - All entirely customisable You can see a bunch of this at play with the below video. This is HTC VIVE's new and improved finger tracking, blended with our grip authoring around an OptiTrack tracked torch. Looks good right? Natural, realistic, physical hand interactions with virtual objects and people? Head over to the website and try it out for free. Epic Games Unreal Engine HTC VIVE PICO XR OptiTrack #devtools #xr #vr #spatialcomputing

Thanks Luke! Luke is doing some seriously interesting research and taking full advantage of our full body player system! Looking forward to seeing the results. Head to our website now to access the open Beta

OUR OPEN BETA IS LIVE Existent has a ton of features and work flows for smoothing out the entire dev process of building physically interactive, multiplayer, free VR applications. So first up - our flexible player body system - Choose 3-point or full-body tracking - Hardware agnostic IK system - Use default avatars, or import your own - UE5, UE4 or Mixamo - No animation programming needed Full-body, social VR out of the box? Head over to our website and try it today for free. Epic Games Unreal Engine HTC VIVE PICO XR OptiTrack #devtools #xr #vr #spatialcomputing