
Show HN: LiveTourLab – A framework for creating Live VR Tours - andelar
https://github.com/livetourlab/live-tour-lab
======
andelar
We are at a critical point in defining what VR will become.

It would be sad if VR just makes humankind even more addicted to consuming
passive entertainment, or something that you "scan in", or a better youtube
video. We therefore set out to make cinematic VR a more active experience.

We believe VR can become something that helps us be more present in the
moment, that fuels our imagination, that boosts our creativity. We believe in
making interactive cinematic VR into something that everyone can handcraft
with care, like the art of photography of videography. We believe in marrying
the art of the old medias with VR and with code. The code added into your live
tour becomes portable across all platforms, thanks to WebVR.

There are billion dollar companies with proprietary solutions in this space,
but we felt nothing good enough. We believe that with the power of open
source, it can be done. If you like it, please contribute, or support by
starring the repo. Thank you!

// Anders, main developer

~~~
yodon
You stuff looks really impressive but any page that starts with "10x more
interactive than ..." and "10x more extensible than ..." makes me want to
click away because I'm clearly being told nonsense.

If you've actually done the research to back up those claims, by all means,
include them and cite the research, otherwise please don't make up statistics
and think it will improve how we think about your work.

Your video is impressive, your work is impressive. You don't need to make up
statistics to get people to understand that.

~~~
andelar
Hi Yodon,

thank you for your suggestion and feedback. But as a matter of fact, we have
done the quantification, so it was not taken out of thin air :-)

10x more interactive than 360 videos:

=> We measured the average engagement time increase from around 1 minute to
around 10 minutes for the same content, when transferring it from a 360 video
to a LiveTourLab tour. This is not surprising. The same general observation
was done by YouVisit already a year ago, as I can read, when you give
navigation control to the user. You are drawn into the experience, step by
step.

10x faster creation than game engine VR

=> We have many users now confirming they could produce an interactive Live
Tour within hours from never seen the framework before following the getting-
started in the Readme, with custom code. At least for me, with a few decades
of coding and knowledge of over 20 programming languages, it took me 2 days on
both UE and Unity to reach far less functionality.

10x more extensible than GUI authoring tools

=> This is more like "infinitely". How much more extensible is code than a GUI
tool? :-)

100% cross-platform including custom code

=> Clear.

100% standard camera compatible

=> Clear. So not like Matterport where you need to buy a $4,000 proprietary
camera.

100% open source

=> Clear. So different from say Matterport, YouVisit, InstaVR, iStaging, etc.

0 server lock-in with static build

=> Clear. I wanted to make this clear because a lot of companies talk about
"open source" but then in practice you have to host on their server. Not the
case here. Fully static build that can be hosted on any web server.

0 effort to start, a lifetime to master

=> 0 is an approximation. First I wrote "1 hour to get started 100 years to
master", but then someone complained that it is more like 85 years since the
first 5 years you are too young and last 10 years at 90-100 you might be too
old. Not easy to get everyone happy haha :-)

