In the long list of services provided by Amazon’s AWS, there are some really interesting and even “cool” finds. One of these incredible offerings is Amazon Sumerian. It is a virtual or augmented reality tool that also has a free tier option to entice you to play with it.
Amazon Sumerian – The Free Tier
The pricing for Sumerian is based on storage and usage. However, the free tier provides a bit of a playground to work with during your first twelve months. There is 5oMB of storage for a published scene and an equivalent of up to 100 views per month. This is not enough to provide you much of a production product. Instead, it gives you a playground to get familiar with this technology
Getting Started
The link provided above is not for the Sumerian home page. It is a link to a large number of tutorials. Each of these has an estimated time to complete and summary of what they cover. I highly recommend you start here. The learning curve is an easy one to understand. You have objects, facing, light sources, cameras (viewpoints), and other things like colors and intensities. The overall feel is much like Photoshop or a similar 2D design tool; there are just additional aspects that one would expect in a 3D environment.
Although the tutorials are well done, the default assets available are even more so. You can poke around the interface and have a full 3D scene created within minutes. Then click on the play button to view the scene from a variety of camera angles. Of course, you can also import your assets and images once you get comfortable with the tool. This includes being able to use services like Amazon Cognito to grab objects in the real world and use them with your scenes.
As with all of the Amazon services, this is easy to get started with, and you can scale it up to meet your needs. So why hesitate? Give it a shot and see where this technology can take you.
