Posted by Manfred Ernst, Software Engineer

Great VR experiences make you feel like you're really somewhere else. To create deeply immersive experiences, there are a lot of factors that need to come together: amazing graphics, spatialized audio, and the ability to move around and feel like the world is responding to you.

Last year at I/O, we announced Seurat as a powerful tool to help developers and creators bring high-fidelity graphics to standalone VR headsets with full positional tracking, like the Lenovo Mirage Solo with Daydream. Seurat is a scene simplification technology designed to process very complex 3D scenes into a representation that renders efficiently on mobile hardware. Here's how ILMxLAB was able to use Seurat to bring an incredibly detailed 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story' scene to a standalone VR experience.

Today, we're open sourcing Seurat to the developer community. You can now use Seurat to bring visually stunning scenes to your own VR applications and have the flexibility to customize the tool for your own workflows.

Behind the scenes - How Seurat works

Seurat works by taking advantage of the fact that VR scenes are typically viewed from within a limited viewing region, and leverages this to optimize the geometry and textures in your scene. It takes RGBD images (color and depth) as input and generates a textured mesh, targeting a configurable number of triangles, texture size, and fill rate, to simplify scenes beyond what traditional methods can achieve.

To demonstrate what Seurat can do, here's a snippet from Blade Runner: Revelations, which launched today with the Lenovo Mirage Solo.

Blade Runner: Revolution by Alcon Interactive and Seismic Games

The Blade Runner universe is known for its stunning worlds, and in Revelations, you get to unravel a mystery around fugitive Replicants in the futuristic but gritty streets. To create the look and feel for Revelations, Seismic used Seurat to bring a scene of 46.6 million triangles down to only 307,000, improving performance by more than 100x with almost no loss in visual quality:

Original scene:

Seurat-processed scene:

If you're interested in learning more about Seurat or trying it out yourself, visit the Seurat GitHub page to access the documentation and source code. We're looking forward to seeing what you build!