Learn how to create 360 AR experiences and what possibilities there are with markerless three hundred and sixty degree Augmented Reality. Add 3D content around your audience or create immersive VR like Scenes.
Learn how to create 360 AR experiences and what possibilities there are with markerless three hundred and sixty degree Augmented Reality.
At hololink, we’ve recently released our newest feature; 360 Scenes. These are augmented reality creations that act as a 360 degree canvas all around your audience, creating immersive experiences in their own surroundings.
With this, you can place content anywhere around your audience at a fixed distance to where they are standing without having to scan an image or detect floor and walls around them. They just have to access the experience and jump right in.
Within 360 Scenes, your audience has 3 degrees of freedom. This essentially means that they can look in any direction, be it right, left, up, down or behind them. Your content will stay where you have placed it in relation to the user, no matter how much they move around.
And you can of course add interactions to any content, so that clicking an object makes things happen, takes the users to another scene or to an external URL, i.e. a website, social media, youtube etc.
Adding Depth with Animations
To create deeper immersion, you can choose to animate objects in the scene so that they move around or over the audience. Like in the Christmas UFO Hololink below.
If you’ve worked with Hololink before, you know that a classic Hololink works with a target image that your smartphone recognises, whereafter the augmented reality content is placed on or around the image, making it come alive. Like in the christmas card below.
With 360 Scenes, we’ve added the possibility of showing your 3D content all around the user, giving them freedom to enjoy your content in any direction, without having to point the phone at a target image. Like in the Christmas UFO experience shown above.
The two different scene types lend themselves to different types of experiences, depending on the context so you’ll find that at some times you want to use image-tracking while at others 360 will be the way to go to make your story come alive.
But you don’t have to settle for one or the other. Unlike some other AR editors on the market, Hololink lets you create AR experiences containing a mix of both types of scenes, moving from image tracking to markerless 360 and back as many times as you want to engage your audience in just the right way.
With this new type of augmented reality, you can surround your users with a whole world populated with your brand experiences. Imagine bringing your products out right in front of their eyes, letting them see the product in their own environment. Then a single click will take them to your webshop where they can proceed to purchase the item. Experience-led sales, right at your fingertips.
Or perhaps you want to create a treasure hunt where the participants are surrounded by virtual pirates and touching the treasure chest brings them to your website. The possibilities are endless, only limited by your creativity.
You can also create a portal-like VR effect by adding a spherical video or image as the background of your 360 Scene. This allows you to completely control the user’s environment, letting them gaze into other worlds. When combined with 360 scenes without a full spherical image, or with image tracking scenes, you can take your audience in and out of different worlds in one smoothly told story.
When you want to add 360 AR to your hololink, all you have to do is add a new scene in the same way that you’ve always done. When clicking the + in the storyboard you’ll be given the choice between Image tracking or 360 tracking. Simply click 360 and then click create scene.
Once you’ve done that, you just have to open the new scene and add content to it, like you would in any other scene.
If you want to add full immersion with a spherical image or video, simply click the 360 button in the left hand panel and choose an image or a video to add to your scene.
Or upload a 360 image or video of your own by clicking the upload button in the 360 Team Library.
You’ll then be able to see your content on the chosen 360 background, as shown below:
With 360 Scenes we’ve opened a whole new world of possibilities, enabling you to easily place content around your audience, letting them experience your brand, art and products, interact with them and drive them to your website or online store. All without having to track images or surfaces, which makes the experience easilæy accessible on any smartphone.
Try it out for yourself and see the power of 360 Augmented Reality.
