Took some time this morning to learn about Sketchbox on the Oculus Rift S. It’s a cooperative VR application for exploring and making 3D scenes/objects. The amount of options available were very robust and the online collaboration only had one major hiccup.
The tutorial scene they set up is very nice for figuring out the motions of the system. You can both pull your way through a scene by grabbing the air and teleport using the stick. You can bring in pictures and 3D objects you copy to the Sketchbox file folder and manipulate them freely. Every object is brought in as a single piece that can be scaled, moved and rotated all together. Separated objects within the FBX will be tied together so you can’t, for instance, remove a panel from the side of a machine even if they are 2 separate objects within the FBX. This limitation isn’t so bad, however, as you can instead simply export 2 FBX and line them up within Sketchbox if needed thanks to the snapping feature. Sketchbox also has many options for free expression and development within the scene, such as a pen tool to write or draw straight lines with in the 3D space, and a text tool that allows you to type things into the 3D space that become movable objects of their own. You can also adjust your local scale to see the scene zoomed in or out, allowing for greater scene setup when large that retains a nice meeting area setup when going back to regular size.
Of course, the biggest benefit of the program is the collaborative meeting mode. It was very easy to set up the meeting. Each user seems to have a specific meeting code. When sending the code to someone, they can follow the link and be brought instantly into the meeting with a single button press, assuming they’ve already set up their Sketchbox account by using the application once. In the collaborative space, audio chat was enabled and the other users are visible within the scene. All of the above functionality worked perfectly when testing the meeting system with 1 other user. Another useful feature that helped with the meeting was the ability to set a specific view. The view object is singular, shared between all the users in the meeting, so it is helpful to be able to have someone else set the view to something they were looking at, then have others to use the “Go to View” button to join the first user in examining something in specific.
The only major issues that came up during our meeting were both possibly due to us trying to test the limits of the system. We were able to bring in parts of the WRXR rocket I’ve been working on to examine as a group, but when I tried bringing in the WHOLE rocket as a single object, things started to break down. The audio quality severely dipped and the person I was meeting with experienced a crash. Starting a new scene seemed to fix these issues, so it is pretty likely that the meeting had these issues due to trying to load in a model that was too high poly. This limitation isn’t huge, however, as we were able to find a lot of decently high poly objects in the Sketchbox examples that didn’t crash the meeting, so there’s likely a fairly high threshold that the rocket just happened to break when brought in as a single piece.
In summary, Sketchbox is an amazing tool for collaborative viewing of a 3D object.
- Robust movement options to fit many user preferences
- Many extra ways to communicate such as drawing or typing 3D assets into the scene to label things
- Able to bring in any model or image on your personal computer to share with others
- Able to move, rotate, scale and highlight the object freely
- Highly functional multi-user meeting system (only problems came from trying to load a massive object at once)
It is certainly something to consider using if a client is simply looking to have a collaborative meeting space to examine 3D assets without needing more complex functionality.
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