by Alex Anpilogov & Laurie Ainley

Comment from Alex:

“Laurie Ainley and I have been experimenting with pulling some external data into a filter. Here’s one demo – a live TV news feed, which we decided to ship – you can try it below. The aggregator API provides 4 channels with the ability to add more as needed. Each channel contains latest stories with thumbnails and channel-specific data like colours and channel names. The front camera is the ‘interview mode’ and the back camera is ‘studio mode’ with segmentation.

Worth noting that when using external video as a texture, there is a delay between the texture’s state being reported as downloaded and it actually rendering on the screen. We’re checking the state when switching channels and only hiding the “searching for channel” TV noise when all assets are loaded, but that doesn’t seem to be a reliable method with external video. Occasionally the filter doesn’t load at all when selected – this is possibly linked to the fact that it has many capabilities enabled. The user needs to reload the filter a few times to get it working. Also segmentation kills the fps but we left it on anyway for the studio mode.”