Valve has announced a new ‘Site Licensing’ model which allows businesses interested in providing VR experiences to customers as an out of home experience. It seems the company have their sights on SteamVR powering a renaissance in VR-enabled Cybercafés.
The annual presentation at Oculus Connect by Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist at Oculus, is always a highlight of the company’s annual developer event, projecting a forward-thinking and ever inspirational look at the future of virtual reality. This time, at Oculus Connect 3, he made some bold, specific predictions about the state of VR in five years.
A hardware launch wouldn’t be complete without an iFixit teardown, and the most recent VR device on their operating table is Sony’s PlayStation VR.
Some of the earliest experiments of making VR a first-class citizen on the web originated at Mozilla in 2014. Then the WebVR spec was drafted in a collaboration between Mozilla and Google’s implementations. There’s been a lot of excitement and momentum building around WebVR over the last couple of months first with the WebVR announcements by Oculus at Oculus Connect 3, and then with over 140 WebVR developers meeting for a W3C workshop on WebVR that happened on October 19th & 20th.
There’s been a lot of talk lately (including from yours truly), about the impressive comfort of Sony’s PlayStation VR headset, but Idealens K2, a mobile all-in-one VR headset out of China, features a promising new ergonomic approach that might be the most comfortable I’ve ever worn.
Got an idea for how virtual reality could revolutionize education? The White House suggests six ways you could get funding to make it a reality.
Oculus has announced that the first-party VR game Dead and Buried will come bundled for free with Oculus Touch (for all purchases, not just pre-orders), bringing the Touch bundled content count to three games.
During the opening keynote to their annual Unite conference yesterday, Unity announced that their in-development VR authoring tool EditorVR, which allows creators to step inside and work on their projects using virtual reality, is on its way within the next couple of months. Here’s a video of the full demonstration which showed off the latest version.
It’s been a long road for FOVE, the creators of the eye-tracking VR headset that hit Kickstarter last summer, but today the company launches pre-orders for their first commercially available product, the FOVE 0. Pre-orders start at a special discount price of $549, available from today until November 9 at 8 a.m. PT (local time), with the price going up to $599 afterwards.
As we wrote recently, Google’s first dedicated Daydream VR headset ‘View’ is out on November 10th and Google have now detailed the Daydream platform’s launch window software line up.
Oculus plans to bring livestreaming to Gear VR, letting users stream their gameplay to Facebook allowing friends to watch and interact with comments and reactions.
On October 28-31, there was a virtual & augmented reality art show in San Francisco called “The Art of Dying.” It featured 15 VR experiences and another dozen artists exploring death and grieving using immersive technologies. The show was produced by Kelly Vicars & Lindsay Saunders with the intention of promoting VR and AR as new art mediums that deserve to be seen within the context of an art gallery setting. They created immersive physical installations for each VR experience to help create an environment where participants could have difficult conversations about death and dying inspired a series of shared virtual and augmented reality experiences.
So today’s podcast episode is a unique combination of covering The Art of Dying show with an interview with Kelly and Lindsay, but it’s also an opportunity to speak to my experience as an artist with a piece in the show. Kelly and Lindsay share their process of producing The Art of Dying as well as some of their observations in the types of conversations and reactions that were catalyzed by the VR experiences.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I attended the show both as a journalist and VR enthusiast interested in having all of the experiences, but also as an artist with a VR experience within the show. I co-wrote & produced Crossover in the the Spring of 2015, and it’s an narrative story based upon my experience of losing my wife and father to suicide. I created a virtual reality grief ritual in order to explore how the affordances of VR could be used in my process of healing.
Death is already a difficult topic to talk about, and going through a suicide is an extra burden that has a lot of cultural taboos associated with it. I wanted to use VR as a medium to break those taboos because I felt that VR offered a certain amount of intimacy and emotional presence to explore difficult topics. Just as some difficult conversations need to happen face-to-face, there are some stories that just work better within VR because it cultivates an intimate face-to-face context that allows deeper topics to be explored.
Other topics covered in other VR experiences in the show included floating down the River Styx and transitioning from Earth into the Underworld, a VR conceptualization of going through bardo states explained in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, an immersive Tiltbrush world featuring a ceremonial ritual temple inspired by Mayan culture, and a series of experiences that were abstracted representations of different bardo states. A full list of all of the experiences is down below.
Here’s a 360 video of my Crossover experience that was featured in The Art of Dying:
Here is a list of artists participating in The Art of Dying show.
Virtual reality (VR)
Augmented Reality (AR):
Mixed Reality (MR):
Interactive art:
Art:
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
A spokesperson for Google’s VR team has confirmed that Google Cardboard applications will be able to benefit from the enhanced VR performance that’s baked into Daydream ready phones.
