Starbreeze has acquired visual effects (VFX) studio Nozon for €7.1M (~$7.7M), a Belgium-based company known for their pre-rendered PresenZ VR technology which promises to bring ‘Pixar levels’ of visual quality to real-time VR scenes with positional tracking.
Flying through an obstacle-filled arena in zero gravity like in the Battle Room scenes of Ender’s Game, catching and throwing a disk to score in an opposing team’s goal, all while in a Tron-looking virtual reality, is probably about the best way I can describe Lone Echo’s surprisingly successful multiplayer mode in one sentence.
Business leaders gathered at this year’s Seattle based IMMERSE Summit (previously Sea VR) to explore how VR/ AR and Mixed Reality is transforming manufacturing, design, education, health and medicine and much more. Road to VR‘s Michael Glombicki caught up with two VR/AR investors to get their insight into the opportunities available in the immersive technology space and the strategies they’re employing to capitalise on them.
With Google’s Pixel phone out the door, the first Daydream-ready phone, the company is now ramping up to launch Daydream View, the first Daydream-ready VR headset. The device is making a cameo alongside the first cable TV ads for Pixel.
The concept of embodied cognition is a hot topic within immersive education circles, and was a featured topic at during the Embodied Learning educational workshop that happened at the IEEE VR academic conference. Embodied Learning could help revolutionize education by incorporating our bodies within the learning process.
We generally believe that humans think with our brains, but embodied cognition theories suggest that we also use our bodies and surrounding environments in order to think and learn. This has huge implications for VR since it both provides a mechanism to be able to more fully engage within the learning process as well as have more control of our contextual environments that are optimized to teach different concepts.
I had a chance to catch up with educator Erica Southgate from the University of New Castle at the Embodied Learning workshop this past March. She’s from the University of Castle in Australia and is using serious games and augmented reality to teach literacy. She’s exploring how to use social VR to enable high prestige professionals to mentor disadvantaged youth, and she’s also studying how indigenous cultures use social structures and knowledge holder rituals in order to train youth, and how this could inspire open world collaborative learning environments in VR.
Phil Tippett, the visual effects genius behind classic stop-motion animation sequences from films such as the holochess scene from the Star Wars franchise, Jurassic Park (1993), and RoboCop 2 (1990), brings his latest stop-mo project MAD GOD to virtual reality.
On today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Benjamin Lok from the University of Florida about how they’re using Virtual Humans as patients to train medical students. He talks about the key components for creating a plausible training scenario which include both accurate medical symptom information, but also more importantly a robust personality and specific worldview. Humans hardly ever just transmit factual data, and so whether the patient says too much or not enough, the students have to be able to navigate a wide range of personalities in order to get the required information to help diagnose and treat the patient.
NextVR, the leader in live VR sports broadcasting, today released their full schedule for their live NBA coverage, including 25 games featuring 30 teams throughout the 2016-2017 season. Make sure to have your phone battery charged, your Gear VR lenses cleaned and ready to go tonight though, because the first VR live coverage starts tonight at 10:30 p.m. ET (local time) with San Antonio Spurs vs. Sacramento Kings.
By now, there have been many attempts at storytelling in VR that have been inspired by various traditional forms of entertainment, such as film or animation, but with Project Hikari the Square Enix Advanced Technology Division is pioneering the concept of what it would be like to adapt existing manga into immersive VR experiences. I was able to try an early demo of it at Oculus Connect 3 using Oculus Touch.
Oculus Story Studio has been exploring VR storytelling through a series of short narrative experiences starting with Lost and Henry, but they wanted to push the envelope of immersive storytelling with their next short titled Dear Angelica. They developed a new content creation tool called Quill that enables artists using Touch to create immersive illustrations and animated stories entirely while being enveiled in VR. It was announced that it was going to be released sometime at the end of January when Dear Angelica premieres at Sundance.
Virtual reality is a fitting medium for adventure games. When the atmosphere is right and the scene is set, you start to think about the world in a way that taps deep into your reptilian brain, the same one that thinks “I exist here. Everything here is important to me.” When done right, you’re just there. This is where I took issue with Alice VR. At moments I easily snapped into the game’s mysterious adaptation of Alice in Wonderland with all the requisite futuristic set pieces of any sci-fi adventure worth its salt, and at other times felt stuck inside of a conventional PC game that didn’t respect me as a VR player.
HTC opened their third officially branded ‘Vive VR Cafe’ last week, this time in Shenzhen, China, the country’s Silicon Valley of hardware. In an interview with Haptical, HTC China’s President of Vive Alvin Wang Graylin confirms the company will be rolling out hundreds of these Shenzhen-style Vive cafes in 2016 and 2017 in China.
The number of big-name manufacturers getting into VR is going to increase substantially with the entry of Microsoft VR hardware partners, revealed on stage today at Microsoft’s hardware-focused event.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Ubisoft’s upcoming collaborative space adventure, sadly won’t be here for the November 29th launch date as promised, so if you wanted to give that special someone a Trek-themed Christmas present, you may need to rethink your options. The game is now slated to release on March 14th, 2017.
Valve opened up their SteamVR tracking technology for third-party development in August, and since then, 50 developers have completed the mandatory training course provided by Synapse, the first company to enter the field.
