Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is deprecating its own Mixed Reality Capture Tool for the Oculus Quest and will instead officially support LIV as the successor. In the virtual reality (VR) industry, “mixed reality” has two related meanings. The first refers to apps and games used in headsets with passthrough that blend real and virtual environments. The second, what LIV specializes in, is the compositing of a real person or avatar into flatscreen footage of a VR game to better represent the user’s experience within the game. This type of mixed reality footage can be used in trailers or livestreams, providing an immersive experience that is the next best thing to wearing a VR headset.
LIV, a company that has been in operation since 2016, has been instrumental in helping developers, YouTubers, and streamers create mixed reality footage for VR games. It has been used to create trailers for numerous HTC Vive and Oculus Rift titles. In 2019, Meta introduced its own Mixed Reality Capture Tool for the Rift and Quest, but has now announced that it is deprecating this tool and making LIV the official successor.
The initial focus of this partnership will be on enabling the capture of high-quality third-person footage of mixed reality Quest games using a PC and external camera. LIV already supports capturing full-VR game footage in this way, but Meta has funded LIV to add support for capturing Quest mixed reality games with this method as well. This funding also brings support for Quest’s hand tracking, scene understanding, spatial anchors, and dynamic occlusion to the app, allowing apps using these features to capture high-quality PC-side footage.
The new features are available in LIV SDK 2.0, with a beta version available today for Unity, and a version for Unreal Engine coming later this year. By the end of the year, the company plans to release a non-beta stable version for both engines. In addition, LIV plans to release a Quest Creator Kit in the coming weeks, which will allow creators to capture footage standalone on the Quest without a PC. This kit will allow for the stabilization and widening of the field of view for first-person footage, similar to the cinematic mode in the Meta Quest Developer Hub, and will also support third-person footage.
LIV assures that this partnership will not affect its existing PC VR offering, and the LIV PC app will continue to be distributed via Steam. The company also states that there is no exclusivity contract, and it may support other mixed reality headsets in the future when market conditions make sense. LIV also reiterates its commitment to never charging developers or creators for using its capture tools and SDKs, as it survives on funding from investors such as HTC Vive and Palmer Luckey, and has a commercial license for larger businesses.
