Managing VR content

Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) enable non-technical users to create and manage websites and mobile apps. Similarly, they can also manage content for VR environments, including text, images, videos, and even 3D models and scenes.

Our customers are already using Magnolia’s content hub to deliver content to VR devices. To learn more, check out our blog Manage VR with a Headless CMS.

But what’s the best way to create 3D content and virtual experiences? In VR, of course.

Many VR apps include a building component in VR, trying to encourage their communities to create user-generated content, like Spatial, RecRoom, and Horizon Worlds. There are also VR apps specifically for 3D content, like MultiBrush, Gravity Sketch, Arkio, and Shapes XR.

We can leverage the new VR capabilities to improve the authoring experience of "traditional" non-VR content, too.

This is what I want to explore today.

Managing content in VR

The film "Minority Report" caught the audience’s attention with its film-noir datgla oves. It envisioned a whole new way to interact with digital media.

Minority Report was directed by Steven Spielberg and is starring Tom Cruise

Sci-fi films and television shows relish exploring novel interactions. It's fun to watch and helps us imagine how VR and hand-tracking could be used to create and work better. Though to be honest, many science fiction user interfaces (UIs) are just non-sensical eye candy.

But what if we could really leverage the power of VR and MR for our creative processes? What would that mean for a real-world use case? It means you can break free from the screen! With VR, the UI does not need to be bounded by a frame anymore. You are free to imagine any interaction. A driver's seat? The controls in a bus or a cargo truck? Construction equipment? An airplane cockpit?

Controls in a classic vs. modern airplane

Imagining VR content management

For starters, VR headsets do provide web browsers, so it is theoretically already possible to work with a web-based content management system (CMS) using a VR headset. This might bring some value as you could have a very large monitor. But, after all, it is just a virtual monitor. How retro.

Can we use VR in a better, native way?

The heart of many DXPs and CMSs is the visual page builder that content authors use to create web experiences by adding components, content, and assets such as images. In VR, these elements would feel more like physical objects than on a 2D screen. I tried to imagine what this would feel like.

Naturally, as content authors, we want to conveniently drag and drop components onto a page. In VR, there's plenty of real estate, so we can have a palette of available components next to the page.

To drag a component, I can grab and move it like a real object. If I don't want a component any more, I can grab it and throw it away.

How would we place existing content on the page, like images from a DAM or products from an ecommerce system? Let's display these resources next to the page, too.

Having all content available at once is very comfortable. I can just reach over without changing the UI.

So, that's what I built. Have a look at this short video of a proof-of-concept that shows how Magnolia’s visual page editor could work in VR.

Teamwork in VR

Above, we wondered what kind of cockpit we might want. Considering that most of us work on teams, how could VR benefit teams?

Insead of working in a small cockpit, we could work on the bridge of a ship with banks of controls and information for your team, including a communications panel, a navigation desk, and the conn.

Bridge on the starship “USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D)” from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and on a modern cruise ship from the blog "This is how to drive a cruise ship."