As the popularity and ease-of-access grows for VR development, so shall the amount of people working on projects. With that reality comes so many creators trying to provide unique experiences while refining things to the best of their ability and as quickly as possible. CognitiveVR, a Vancouver-based analytics company founded in 2015, is providing a tool geared toward easing virtual reality development. It’s inevitable that developers will mistakenly create bugs; knowingly or completely unaware to them. SceneExplorer is a data visualization tool that will show you just where your problems are.
We spoke with Robert Merki, cognitiveVR’s director of product, about the programs inspirations and goals.
Merki says the ball started rolling as their customers requested to see how users behaved in VR, details that were only shown in an abstract matter through charts, graphs, and data.
“Our customers – VR developers – wanted us to remove the abstraction layer and give a literal 1:1 view into how users interact with VR,” Merki says. “That’s what SceneExplorer is. We record how users interact within VR and overlay this positional, event, and gaze data onto a replica of your VR world.”
What SceneExplorer offers isn’t just a snapshot within the rendering engine, as Merki continues to explain. “Instead of using a sextant to try and measure the angles or coordinates of data points, we give you the Google Street View for your VR product along with GIS-style tools for mapping your VR world.”
Like Street View, the program works on the web as well and allows easy sharing with team members. Hopefully, ScreenExplorer’s visual data will be instrumental in constructive game design and that’s certainly the cognitiveVR team’s goal. “Many small teams have already shown us what they can do with VR, and the best is yet to come,” expresses Merki. “All of us at cognitiveVR are eagerly trying new VR apps and using our experiences to help shape the next generation of behavior analysis tools. By looking at the way people use VR, developers can optimize and build even better content.” Find more information on the program and cognitiveVR here.
