[This first-person report from TechCrunch has praise for the concept of Canon’s new platform that enables high-presence phone calls via virtual reality, while noting that in its still-early form technical issues cause too many breaks in presence. A January 2023 TechCrunch story featuring an interview with the platform’s creators includes this description:
“’We support most of the popular consumer VR headsets in the market to enable people to engage in immersive calls, as we are calling them. In these calls, people can engage. They are dynamic, in living, breathing environments. You can download a companion app on a mobile phone, which lets the person you talk to see you from head to toe,’ explains [Jon] Lorentz. ‘No more legless avatars. No more wondering what someone is actually gesturing. And you can actually see the other person. You can be in the call, rather than on the call.’”
Follow the links in the story below and see the Canon press release for more information. –Matthew]
We tried out Canon’s VR calling app Kokomo
By Haje Jan Kamps
April 19, 2023
When you think Canon, you might think cameras, scanners, printers and such. At CES this year, the company did a stride toward the softer side of tech, taking a broader view of what imaging means. Today, the VR calling software the company showed off back in January is available to you — if you have a VR headset such as the popular Oculu… I mean Meta Quest 2.
In a limited preview earlier this month, I was able to try out Canon’s new VR calling software platform, which involves a phone and a VR headset. Overall and in theory, the system is super-well-thought-out: You scan your face using an app on your phone, which builds a model so the app can replace the part of your face that’s covered up by your VR mask. It also asks you how tall you are, so it can scale your picture proportionally to the person you are talking to — a nice touch; as a tall person, it often feels unheimlich to be face-to-face with people when I’m in VR.
Once you’ve gone through the setup process, you place your phone at waist height and take a few steps away, don a VR mask and dive into a conversation. The phone uses its front-facing camera to capture a live picture of you, while the VR headset shows your fellow caller. If everything goes to plan, it’s telepresence at its finest, without the vast expenditure of typical telepresence systems.
That’s the theory — and what Canon is working toward with its platform. I’m loving the vision, but the reality of the current system isn’t quite there yet.
In practice, things are not quite smooth. In my test call with the Kokomo team, I’m rather generous if I say I saw the other person in the call refresh at about three to four frames per second. That’s not enough to make the call feel smooth, and it rather got in the way of feeling the presence of the, er, telepresence. The avatar I was speaking to was also two-dimensional, which is something we haven’t seen in VR for a while — in effect, it feels like the person on the other side of the call is an animated cardboard cutout. That, combined with the low frame rate and the haphazardness of the VR mask removal (it appeared and disappeared at regular intervals), did everything it could to ruin the immersion.
The biggest praise I can heap on Kokomo is that despite being early in its technical journey — and despite the litany of bugs and early-software gremlins — I think it shows tremendous promise. For now, the team tells TechCrunch it won’t be charging for the service; it wants to learn and get feedback from early users to help direct product development.
It’s hard to predict what happens next for the product; VR adoption is growing, and telepresence is a compelling use case for spending some time with your friends in VR. Right now, the tech is good enough to enable you to dream of the future that’s yet to come, but is not quite to the level that it makes sense. All of these things could change, and the most interesting takeaway from this product, I believe, is Canon’s dedication to bringing Kokomo to market and putting it in front of customers. It’s definitely one to keep an eye on — and, if you have the required hardware, worth trying out with a friend.