Experiencing Virtual Reality With Limited Sight

Autodesk has shared an inspiring story about Simon Che de Boer and his New Zealand–based VR company called RealityVirtual. The team has recently developed Nefertari: Journey to Eternity, a hyperrealistic virtual tour experience that takes viewers into the tomb of Nefertari, an ancient Egyptian queen and one of the favored wives of Pharaoh Ramesses II.

Che de Boer and his team captured around 4,000 photographs of the site, then implemented photogrammetry and deep learning techniques for processing and visualization. “Essentially, we’re able to feed the computer all this data that we captured from the location, and the computer looks at all the photographs and teaches itself to understand what it’s looking at,” the developer states.

The thing is that Che de Boer build VR experiences while dealing with approximately five percent vision. He could never really examine the beauty of the tomb, but virtual reality allowed the artist to get closer to the whole experience and study more details.

Che de Boer has strong spatial and situational awareness because of his condition, which is quite good for VR development. “When I walk anywhere, I have to memorize exactly where I’ve been. For my entire life, I’ve been mapping out environments just to get around,” he states. 

Make sure to read the full story here.