A Room Full of Dinosaurs
What do you get when you unleash a crowd of augmented reality enthusiasts into a Microsoft HoloLens running the real-time, multi-person, collaborative Enklu Lens Editor? A room full of dinosaurs, that's what.
Last week in San Francisco at our venue E.den, Enklu hosted our first ever In-Lens AR Workshop taught by our Lead Producer, Ganga Baird. For previous workshops, attendees brought laptops or were provided workstations, where they accessed the Enklu Web Editor to build individual scenes. They would later view the scene on the HoloLens in the second part of the session. That's actually been one of my favorite parts of assisting the classes. Watching the delight, the squeals and the surprised reactions when a creator is first immersed into their holographic creation. The fact that this is possible with under an hour of training and very little or no tech experience still blows me away.
For this workshop, we decided to cover some basics and put participants right into the HoloLens. Using our Lens Editor they could search through a library of 3D assets, animated objects, effects and lighting, and drop them into the scene while they were standing in it. They could also move, resize and make other adjustments right there on the fly. Before I tried it a few months ago, I wasn't really sold on the Lens Editor idea. I figured people would want their familiar mouse and screen. They are still useful for some parts of the process, but imagine being able to build a scene out of holograms, and then to make refinements to it and pretty much be able to rearrange everything using only the powers of intention and your eyeballs! It's ridiculously satisfying and fun!
But wait, there's more. Not only are you able to do this, but so are 30 other people who are working in the same scene simultaneously! Of course, what do people do when they first discover new toys? They try every 'button' and download every dinosaur and asset in the box. The first round of co-creation was like a holographic garage sale or the holographic aftermath of a holiday sale at some strange department store with all the Halloween and Holiday decorations tossed together. Let's just say it was more dinosaur than design, but gosh it was good fun. Eventually, we reset the scene, broke the group into teams and got them to work building a few more intentional experiments.
If I wasn't right there, doing it with them, I might have thought I was dreaming that I was in an episode of Star Trek, but there I was adding a dancing rainbow quantum force field in front of a cluster of spaceships placed there by someone else. There was a volley of high-fives and appreciations once we realized who we were collaborating with and how much we were digging the results.
To make things even more interesting, we had just pushed a new build of the Lens Editor software earlier that day. (Always a good idea when 30+ people are coming over to use it and stress test it later that day - wink.) Along with the powerful tools available via eye-gaze controls, now the lens responds to many more vocal commands, and those commands can be issued more naturally. Heard around the room "Edit Experience", "Scale", "Stop", and "Oh my god, there's a dinosaur on my head!", and so on. That last one isn't a command... yet. Our brilliant CTO, Benjamin Jordan is actually working on natural language scene creation capabilities, which I'm sure I'll gush about another time.
Enklu's CEO, Ray Kallmeyer and others have said Enklu is "like the Google Docs of Augmented Reality", but I tell you what, I've never had this much fun editing a Google Doc. Google Docs has nothing on these dinosaurs.
