ristoraven wrote:Wow. Great.
John Carmack hinted at Oculus Connect2, that you could basically do a cubemap where is a "framed vision" with a stereo video screen. For example dr. Whos phonebooth. So you could look around and see the static interior of the booth and then "look outside" from the framed video screen, so you could travel around like this, with traditional stereo video making it appear to be live / 18k cubemap + audio creating the illusion that it all happens around you..
At this state of development, not a bad idea.
I agree that the option to compile all this into a proper form in order to be distributed via online stores, is of course a must to have. That being said, I need to point out that UE4 / Unity developers have quite painful times, because they can't distribute their products as easily as this, and they need to go trough a serious certification steps with proper phone ID tagging before installing them. Even early state versions.. So, we are very fortunate developers / artists for having as easy way as we now have..
We have put a lot of thought into distribution.
Firstly, ORBX is going to be the preferred packaging step (zip/jar breaks things like abc/mp4 embedding which we need). You will be able to export ORBX media packages from a web UI on orc.otoy.com. When ORC does the rendering, we also do fast cube map compression and embedded JSON/lua support. We are going to be adding more publishing tools, including ways to customize the current ORBX app home screen on your phone.
Secondly, as opposed to needing to build/publish/export a platform specific app to play an ORBX media file, we're aiming for something closer to HTML/PDF/MP4 etc. where one or more player/viewers can load ORBX media from a URL or file and view it correctly. I'd like to see VLC support ORBX media file some day. We will absolutely support HTML5 playback in ORBX.js.
There is a lot of value in the Corona/Unity/UE4 app export model, but it also means you have to go through the app approval process every time you submit content, and we'd like to avoid doing that for cinematic VR experiences that should be as easy to publish as video or images on a webpage.
The entire ORBX player app on the Gear VR store is written in LuaJit for Android. If LuaJit were already on the platform, any app could bootstrap an ORBX player session using LuaJIT->orbx.lua + URI
When more platforms are done, we will explore having ORC publishing tools support exporting a self contained, platform specific, ORBX player bundle with the ORBX media file embedded in it.
On open platforms we have a better alternative to this, which is to allow any app or web page (including Carmack VR Script) to dependably launch ORBX media from a URI. We will start by having ORBX Player 3.00 fully support Android intents for this purpose, and probably drop LuaJit.so+ orbx.lua into the ORBX\plug-ins folder so that any app can load luajit (if they don't build it into their app) call ORBX.lua and bootstrap an ORBX media file, same as ORBX.js will do for a web page.