Presenting Amazon Sumerian: An easy way to create VR, AR, and 3D experiences

Update May 18, 2022 – Amazon Sumerian is no longer available to new customers. Existing customers’ Sumerian data will be available until February 21, 2023. We recommend that these customers transition their existing scenes to Babylon.js where they can be published using AWS Amplify. For more information about Amazon Sumerian and tutorials on transitioning your existing scenes, please see our FAQ here.

If you have had an opportunity to read any of my blog posts or attended any session I’ve conducted at various conferences, you are probably aware that I am definitively a geek girl. I am absolutely enamored with all of the latest advancements that have been made in technology areas like cloud, artificial intelligence, internet of things and the maker space, as well as, with virtual reality and augmented reality. In my opinion, it is a wonderful time to be a geek. All the things that we dreamed about building while we sweated through our algorithms and discrete mathematics classes or the technology we marveled at when watching Star Wars and Star Trek are now coming to fruition.  So hopefully this means it will only be a matter of time before I can hyperdrive to other galaxies in space, but until then I can at least build the 3D virtual reality and augmented reality characters and images like those featured in some of my favorite shows.

Amazon Sumerian provides tools and resources that allows anyone to create and run augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 3D applications with ease.  With Sumerian, you can build multi-platform experiences that run on hardware like the Oculus, HTC Vive, and iOS devices using WebVR compatible browsers and with support for ARCore on Android devices coming soon.

This exciting new service, currently in preview, delivers features to allow you to design highly immersive and interactive 3D experiences from your browser. Some of these features are:

• Editor: A web-based editor for constructing 3D scenes, importing assets, scripting interactions and special effects, with cross-platform publishing.
• Object Library: a library of pre-built objects and templates.
• Asset Import: Upload 3D assets to use in your scene. Sumerian supports importing FBX, OBJ, and coming soon Unity projects.
• Scripting Library: provides a JavaScript scripting library via its 3D engine for advanced scripting capabilities.
• Hosts: animated, lifelike 3D characters that can be customized for gender, voice, and language.
• AWS Services Integration: baked in integration with Amazon Polly and Amazon Lex to add speech and natural language to into Sumerian hosts. Additionally, the scripting library can be used with AWS Lambda allowing use of the full range of AWS services.

Since Amazon Sumerian doesn’t require you to have 3D graphics or programming experience to build rich, interactive VR and AR scenes, let’s take a quick run to the Sumerian Dashboard and check it out.

From the Sumerian Dashboard, I can easily create a new scene with a push of a button.

A default view of the new scene opens and is displayed in the Sumerian Editor. With the Tara Blog Scene opened in the editor, I can easily import assets into my scene.

I’ll click the Import Asset button and pick an asset, View Room, to import into the scene. With the desired asset selected, I’ll click the Add button to import it.

Excellent, my asset was successfully imported into the Sumerian Editor and is shown in the Asset panel.  Now, I have the option to add the View Room object into my scene by selecting it in the Asset panel and then dragging it onto the editor’s canvas.

I’ll repeat the import asset process and this time I will add the Mannequin asset to the scene.

Additionally, with Sumerian, I can add scripting to Entity assets to make my scene even more exciting by adding a ScriptComponent to an entity and creating a script.  I can use the provided built-in scripts or create my own custom scripts. If I create a new custom script, I will get a blank script with some base JavaScript code that looks similar to the code below.

'use strict';
/* global sumerian */
//This is Me-- trying out the custom scripts - Tara

var setup = function (args, ctx) {
// Called when play mode starts.
};
var fixedUpdate = function (args, ctx) {
// Called on every physics update, after setup().
};
var update = function (args, ctx) {
// Called on every render frame, after setup().
};
var lateUpdate = function (args, ctx) {
// Called after all script "update" methods in the scene has been called.
};
var cleanup = function (args, ctx) {
// Called when play mode stops.
};
var parameters = [];

Very cool, I just created a 3D scene using Amazon Sumerian in a matter of minutes and I have only scratched the surface.

Summary

The Amazon Sumerian service enables you to create, build, and run virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and 3D applications with ease.  You don’t need any 3D graphics or specialized programming knowledge to get started building scenes and immersive experiences.  You can import FBX, OBJ, and Unity projects in Sumerian, as well as upload your own 3D assets for use in your scene. In addition, you can create digital characters to narrate your scene and with these digital assets, you have choices for the character’s appearance, speech and behavior.

You can learn more about Amazon Sumerian and sign up for the preview to get started with the new service on the product page.  I can’t wait to see what rich experiences you all will build.

– Tara