The Unreal Engine team presented an amazing interactive visualization of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, during Microsoft Build.
ILM Chief Creative Officer John Knoll and Andrew Chaikin, space historian and author of Man on the Moon, revealed the multi-user HoloLens 2 demonstration, showing the historic 1969 event with all the glorious details. The future will be all about manipulating high-quality 3D content using a headset like checking email on a smartphone now.
The visualization features the launch itself, an accurate model of the Saturn V, a detailed reenactment of the lunar landing, and a look at Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.
“When we combine the power of HoloLens with the power of Azure, our partners can deliver transformative solutions. From automotive to manufacturing, from architecture to healthcare, our customers need highly precise and detailed representation of their 3D content,” stated Alex Kipman, technical specialist in Microsoft’s Cloud and AI group. “Epic just showed us how to directly stream high-polygon content, with no decimation, to HoloLens. Unreal Engine enables HoloLens 2 to display holograms of infinite detail, far in excess of what is possible with edge compute and rendering alone.”
The whole thing stream wirelessly using Unreal Engine 4.22 on networked PCs to two HoloLens 2 devices with the help of Azure Spatial Anchors that set up a shared experience between Knoll and Chaikin. The amazing thing here is that the de,o features 15 million polygons in a physically-based rendering environment with fully dynamic lighting and shadows, multi-layered materials, and volumetric effects.
Please note that the Apollo 11 demo was intended to be presented onstage at Microsoft Build. “The live showcase has been postponed due to unforeseen onsite technical issues. Although we were unable to show the Apollo 11 experience onstage today, we’re excited to help others understand the potential of using HoloLens 2 to learn and share stories in entirely new ways that have never been possible until now.”
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