Chaitanya Shah

Client: Emblematic Group

Tools and framework: ThreeJS, A-FRAME, webGL, openXR, REACT, NodeJS, VR/AR, Paper & Pen, Javascript, Visual Studio

Role:Prototyper, Software Engineer

Team size: 5

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The 21st Century brings in a new wave of interactions, immersive storytelling techniques, and devices. Ever improving technology makes the world a better place. Storytelling - which is an integral part of human beings, is advanced by the creative humans enabled by developing technologies. Emblematic Group is one of the world's foremost producers of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality experiences. Though with the whole expertise - it has been a bottleneck to share those experiences to the mass.

REACH platform simplifies authorship and distribution for making XR experiences over the web. REACH enables storytellers, journalists, and creators to build immersive volumetric stories without any hassle of downloading software, coding, and learning any new skills.

Creating 3D content is hard, unintuitive, and full of artifacts as compared to 2D media editing. There are frameworks like OpenGL, Metal, and WebGL but lack sophisticated tools. REACH born out of a simple idea - Can we expedite the VR production by sharing the 3d scene fragments over the web to stakeholders?
Yes! One fine day, I spent 3 hours making builds of a fragment of a VR project to get it reviewed by the Director, only to find out that the Director was traveling and doesn't have access to a VR headset.

Imagine playing a video on a webpage. There are hundreds of ways to do that. It is quick and simple. Embed the youtube link or add the <video> tag. However, the same task in a 3D scene is exceedingly complex. One had to load the video into a texture, attach that to a material, build a geometry, attach the material, add it to the scene, and then play the video. Even after that, the aspect ratio will not be appropriate. Huh! What is all that? - Such complex product techniques have motivated me to work on this platform.

Along with the team at the Emblematic Group, I built the core components connecting the front-end interface with the virtual world. I oversaw the platform capabilities, enhancing them to the needs of the storyteller along with prototyping new simplified modules.

REACH is in beta version since January 2019. The team and platform have been invited around the globe to showcase the power of XR on the web. REACH projects have been officially selected at numerous film festivals, including - Sundance 2019, SXSW 2019, Future of Everything, and more.