John Legend is coming to VR. News of the multi-talented artist’s involvement in Baobab Studios’ latest, Rainbow Crow, spread last week. To recap, Rainbow Crow is an adaptation of a Lenape Native American tale, and Legend’s starring as the eponymous varicolored bird, writing and performing original songs and serving as executive producer.
Nokia’s improvements to the software for their professional OZO VR camera platform are significant enough that the company has opted to now call their VR camera the ‘OZO+’, even though the hardware remains the same. This is the result of a major firmware update combining with a custom-built image signal processing framework used in the new OZO Creator 2.0 software, launching in May.
VRgluv has blown past its $100,000 funding goal in 56 hours on their Kickstarter page, with 27 days still to go. The product is described as the “first affordable force feedback gloves” that feature “total hand tracking, full force feedback, and pressure sensitivity”.
At the NAB Show currently in progress in Las Vegas, Nokia announced a partnership with Lucasfilm to deliver an immersive behind-the-scenes VR experience of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. This forms part of the existing, multi-year technology agreement between Nokia and Disney, where the OZO camera is being used to create unique VR content.
The Tribeca Film Festival featured over 30 different VR experiences within their Storyscapes and Immersive Virtual Arcade, and I had a chance to catch up with curator Loren Hammonds about some of the highlights of the festival program with genres spanning from live-action narrative, animated narrative, documentary, interactive installations, guided tours, empathy pieces, and even a couple of immersive theater, mixed reality pieces. The overall focus and theme that connected all of the VR pieces is storytelling, both in terms of strong storytelling execution as well as in innovations around interactive storytelling.
If you don’t already know Cliff Bleszinski from his involvement with the Unreal Tournament and Gears of War franchises, you may remember him from Oculus’ 2012 Kickstarter video. Now under the banner of his own studio, Boss Key Productions, Bleszinski says he’s been seeking funding to develop a big budget VR title.
In development by indie studio KUKURU3, Panzerwehr: 1949 is a mech combat simulator made for VR which imagines an alternate WWII timeline where mechs rule the battlefield as anti-tank hunters in a war that’s dragged on to 1949.
Batman: Arkham VR (2016) is one of PlayStation VR’s top games, and an exclusive too, until now. Developer Rocksteady has launched the game for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
Comedy Living Room, the stand-up comedy show created by Matt Lottman and Frank Chad Muniz (and literally held in a living room), is hosting its first show in VR on Thursday, April 27th at 5pm PT. The collaboration between Comedy Living Room, comedy group JASH, and social VR app AltspaceVR will feature six comedians and a “house party complete with pool, BBQ and endless Frisbee”.
Wilson’s Heart (2017) is a psychological thriller that takes you on a wild first-person adventure through the mind of a hospital patient recovering from a curious surgery, one that has replaced his live-beating heart with a strange machine. Ripping it from your chest, you find it gives you a growing number of abilities to help you not only fight against your personal demons, but also some very real ones that have passed into the world thanks to experiments done by the brilliant, but clearly insane Dr. Harcourt.
Outside of a few demonstrations at tradeshows, Meta has only give glimpses of the content on its impressive AR headset dev kit in short clips. During a recent visit to the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters to catch the latest improvements to the headset, I got to see a selection of demo content which Meta has allowed Road to VR to capture and share in full for the first time.
This year’s 2017 Google Play Awards include new categories for top VR and AR apps, to which Google has nominated five apps each. The award ceremony will take place on Thursday, May 18th at 6:30PM PT during Google I/O, the company’s annual developer festival.
The forthcoming Alien: Covenant movie is getting a VR experience, Alien: Covenant In Utero and it launches this Wednesday on Oculus platforms.
Google today announced what the company is calling the “next-generation” of its ‘Jump‘ 3D 360 camera initiative. In partnership with Google, Yi Technology has created the Yi Halo, a 17-camera clock-synchronized array that is designed to be optimized for Google’s automated Jump stitching process which creates impressively seamless 3D 360 output.
In the context of AR and VR systems, predictive tracking refers to the process of predicting the future orientation and/or position of an object or body part. For instance, one might want to predict the orientation of the head or the position of the hand.
