Monocular 3D hand reconstruction | State of Matterless #18
A fine Friday to you! As we approach the end of May, let’s catch up on how things are going in the Matterless world.
Beyond Meatspace
The Matterless team is celebrating its one-year anniversary, but we can’t get too carried away because there is MUCH to do! We have been hard at work developing critical hand-tracking technology that will allow you to reach out and interact with your digital pet simply by touch. Our Unity Engineer JD has been particularly focused on integrating the Auki Labs stack into the Matterless app. With the initial stages of work complete, we are getting the AR space to recognize and visualize your hand.
What we’re looking to achieve is for your hand to touch your pet in meatspace (our in-house term for the physical world). After the touch is registered, we’ll be able to have your pet react and behave in a variety of ways in response to your hand movements. For example, we can have him wag his tail excitedly when you rub his head!
In this screenshot, the white lines represent what the system thinks are JD’s fingers in 3D space. Pretty good for our first crack at it! Over time, the recognition will improve substantially and once perfected, will take our vision of Matterless things into a whole new galaxy.
As JD notes, “Whenever I show the app to someone, the first thing they do is reach out and try to touch the pet.”
The beauty of what we’re making is that we don’t have to tell people they can reach out and interact with their pet; they instinctively do it! We just have to ensure that our app properly facilitates this natural desire to touch.
The Gears Working the Machine
The team is also making plenty of less fancy but important quality-of-life improvements that build a more solid foundation for the more pronounced features to sit on. These include making an authentication system that facilitates a smoother login process with options to use other methods; email to access your account, and setting up a config system that lets us rapidly deploy small updates (instead of updating the entire app).
For every eye-catching new feature we show off, there are always two or three technical achievements that allow current and future developments to happen. A big thank you to the wizards behind the curtain, our backend developers!
That’s our update for today. Catch us next week for a yearly recap of everything we’ve been able to achieve in the last year. Have a great weekend and see you next month!
-Kerwin, social media manager
