Medium's Mixed Reality Shopping List
I gave a talk at Oculus Connect 4 where I talked about how Oculus Medium does its mixed reality implementation, and I promised attendees I'd share our shopping list of the actual equipment we used, because we tried to be pretty scrappy about it - for the entire physical installation I think I spent less than $2000, and that includes the $500 ZED stereo camera, on top of the lightboxes, ceiling clamps, green sheets and gaffer's tape, camera shoulder rig, and so on.
Sorry to people who've been patiently waiting for this, I know it's late, that's just me being busy / lame. Feel free to ask questions here, I'll answer all I can.
Lots of photos at the bottom.
One final disclaimer note: most of this equipment is literally the first result I found when I went to Amazon and typed a search string in. I'm not saying this is the best equipment available, or that nothing else would work. But I can say that this works for us. Also, obviously it's based on our room; the Medium office demo room has, significantly, exposed ceiling joists, so we were able to clamp a lot of stuff to those. If you don't have a ceiling you can clamp things to, this setup probably isn't quite what you need, but maybe get some tripods instead of the clamps and this can still be a good starting point?
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OK, here's how we built out the Medium demo room for mixed reality. A few things: Our room is big enough that we just green-screened one corner. Also, the ceilings are high, about 13', and have big exposed joists running across, so we were able to drop the trackers from the ceiling on extensions to about an 8' height off the floor.
Sorry to people who've been patiently waiting for this, I know it's late, that's just me being busy / lame. Feel free to ask questions here, I'll answer all I can.
Lots of photos at the bottom.
One final disclaimer note: most of this equipment is literally the first result I found when I went to Amazon and typed a search string in. I'm not saying this is the best equipment available, or that nothing else would work. But I can say that this works for us. Also, obviously it's based on our room; the Medium office demo room has, significantly, exposed ceiling joists, so we were able to clamp a lot of stuff to those. If you don't have a ceiling you can clamp things to, this setup probably isn't quite what you need, but maybe get some tripods instead of the clamps and this can still be a good starting point?
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OK, here's how we built out the Medium demo room for mixed reality. A few things: Our room is big enough that we just green-screened one corner. Also, the ceilings are high, about 13', and have big exposed joists running across, so we were able to drop the trackers from the ceiling on extensions to about an 8' height off the floor.
GREEN SHEETS:
We bought three chroma green sheets:
- $58
Then we grommeted around the sides of two so we could stretch them taut up the walls:
- $10
We relied heavily on C-clamps to make attachment points on the joists. Bought a whole mess of these, used several to make places to tie off the sheets:
Then we used some standard rope to tie from the grommets on the sheets to the clamps on the joists. It's also worth getting a hand steamer like you'd use for clothing and steaming out the sheets to get as many wrinkles as possible out.
Finally, for the seams between sheets (and other uses like covering the tracker poles) we use this chroma green gaffer's tape:
- $17
LIGHTS:
We ringed the space with cheap light boxes, as you can see in the photo. I just used C-clamps to clamp the poles that came with them to the joists and then screwed the lightboxes onto the poles.
- $130
TRACKERS:
We drop the trackers from the joists using these tripod clamps on the joists:
- $35
Then we screwed on these selfie stick / monopod things (which I love, I use these for tons of stuff)
- $23
Finally, we ran the cords up along the ceiling, extending with these USB extenders:
- $16
We use a Startech USB expansion card in the machine just so we don't have to worry about USB issues of any kind while running a bunch of trackers into the machines.
- $88
CAMERA:
Our camera rig is a ZED stereo camera on a Neewer shoulder rig. We also put a field monitor on the rig so the camera operator can see the composed mixed reality view easily right in front of them. This is particularly helpful because with the ZED you can't get within a meter of the subject or the video gets clipped, so you have to be watching carefully for that - with the field monitor you can just look straight ahead instead of glancing to the side to see some monitor in the room somewhere.
In its full configuration the camera rig has three cables running to it: the ZED USB cable (extended) going back to our observer machine, the HDMI cable carrying the MxR signal from the observer machine to the field monitor, and a power cable for the field monitor. The power supply is for the field monitor. Often we just use batteries for the field monitor so we don't have to mess with the power cable.
- Zed camera x 1
- $500
- Shoulder rig x 1
- $60
- Field monitor x 1
- $190
- 12VDC supply x 1
- $8
- USB extender x 1
- $16
- (same as in Room section)
- HDMI splitter x 1
- $18
- HDMI cable, 15ft x 1
- $11
- 15ft power cord x 1
- $10
- 3D printed touch clamp
- This is available from the Oculus MxR package, and it should be fine printed out of any reasonably durable plastic. We used our own printer but Shapeways should work well too, I'd imagine.
