Personal Project: MemVR
Mobile Web, Responsive Design, three.js, Storytelling, Photogrammetry
MemVR is a personal project I'm creating using photography, photogrammetry, and web technologies. I am delighted by camping, hiking, canoeing, and going places where I can find adventure. This website will chronicle some of these virtual memories, and share them in an immersive, fun way. This multi-year project involes travelling to locations to capture photos and scans, creating my own 360 HDRI spheres and assets for use in games and rendering. Over time it will grow into not only a repository of usable 3d assets, but an immersive experience they conveys a slice of what it was like to be at each location at that moment in time.
I plan to expand to additional types of assets and experiences in the future such as scanned 3d models from locations, webvr implementation via A-frame, and immersive environments in Unity and Unreal.
To capture HDRI Spheres, I take dozens of pictures at distinct angles, from a special triod head (Nodal Ninja).
I use PTGUI to take all of the images and stitch them into an HDRI. This process can be very time consuming if the photos don't properly align, or my lighting was off.
Each image is taken 3-12 times at each location, depending on the level of quality I'm going for. The camera is set to adjust for different exposures at each shot. The resulting panorama looks like this.
Protoype site with hardcoded product entries, no database, and hardcoded three.js
Initial wireframes of the site. I decided to really be able to showcase the work and emphasize the immersive storytelling aspect, this design would not work.
Revised mockup and current direction of the project.
Takeaways
- Photogrammetry technology is changing fast, and I'm open and flexible to changing how MemVR will use it.
- My initial thinking with MemVR was a marketplace of HDRI's and other assets, but HDRI's have largely been supplanted by realtime skies.
- Going forward I'll be focusing less on the marketplace aspect, and more on communicating these images and data into emotional, memory-based experiences.
I look forward to slowly piecing this project together in my spare time, and letting it become a truly personal experience to share with my kids as they grow into adults and begin their own outdoor adventures.