New VR app lets you step inside your smartphone videos - Freethink

Early-stage startup Wist Labs is processing a VR app that converts your smartphone clips into 3D videos — giving you a accidental to locomotion wrong your memories utilizing a VR headset.

“We marque it casual for anyone to measurement wrong and stock their memories, conscionable by taking a video,” Wist Labs co-founder Andrew McHugh told Freethink.

The startup: In 2021, McHugh near his occupation arsenic a elder VR/AR decorator astatine Samsung to make a VR app that would springiness radical a much immersive mode to prosecute with their photos and videos.

“[Photos and videos] enactment arsenic representation anchors, allowing america to question backmost to those moments and the moments astir the anchor,” helium wrote successful a Medium post. “[They] are large to look at, but they don’t springiness you the aforesaid acquisition arsenic being determination again.” 

Sixteen prototypes later, helium landed connected Wist, a VR app present undergoing alpha testing.

How it works: To make a representation with Wist, a idiosyncratic opens the app and records a video. The app past collects the accusation it needs to marque the 2D clip look three-dimensional.

“During capture, we prevention color, depth, instrumentality pose, audio, and country information,” McHugh explained to Freethink. “Depth is captured utilizing the LiDAR sensors connected the Pro exemplary iPhones and iPads.”

Once the app processes the video, the idiosyncratic tin play it backmost utilizing mobile AR oregon a VR headset.

“If they person a Quest VR headset, they tin measurement wrong their representation much immersively and invitation their friends and household into a multiplayer session,” said McHugh.

Looking ahead: The illustration videos that Wist has shared bash a large occupation of showing however the VR app works, but there’s intelligibly country for method betterment — the clips diagnostic tons of glitchiness and missing elements.

The adjacent steps for Wist Labs are to adjacent pre-seed funding, motorboat a beta, and past rotation retired features to capable successful those gaps and amended the app. Until then, McHugh plans to proceed utilizing it to seizure and stock memories of his archetypal child, who was conscionable calved astatine the opening of October. 

“I loaded [an ultrasound video] into our VR app, shared it with my ma who lives halfway crossed the country, and we were capable to some locomotion astir that infinitesimal together,” helium told Freethink. “It’s amended than a video due to the fact that it feels similar you’re really there.”

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