NVIDIA’s New Quadro P6000 GPU Targets VR Industry Professionals
NVIDIA has announced its latest line of professional focused GPUs aimed at the VR industry and its specs impress, as does its potential price.
NVIDIA Announces ‘VRWorks 360’, Claims “Real-Time” VR Video Stitching
SIGGRAPH 2016 is underway, and as is traditional for NVIDIA, the company has brought with it a raft of professional and prosumer to announce. And for those involved in the rapidly expanding world of 360 video and film, they’re announcing a new VRWorks 360 Video SDK which they claim will allow you to “Capture, Stitch, and Stream VR Content in Real-Time with VRWorks 360 Video SDK.”
‘Lawnmower Man’ Director Brett Leonard on Building Storyworlds
Brett Leonard’s journey into VR all started when he moved to Santa Cruz and started partying and smoking pot with some of the elite visionaries from the Silicon Valley technology scene. He was an aspiring writer and film director who got inspired by Jaron Lanier’s evangelism of virtual reality technologies. Brett got to try out a lot of cutting edge VR and then went on to help popularize the term “virtual reality” on a global scale with his 1992 film The Lawnmower Man, which is a dark cautionary tale that also contains many prophetic predictions. It’s still one of the earliest and most accurate portrayal of the potential of VR as an immersive video game medium, and Palmer Luckey has cited it as an inspiration for being able to step into a video game. It also shows how VR could open up new neural pathways into the mind and serve as one of the most transformational mediums today.
Exploring Methods for Conveying Object Weight in Virtual Reality
With no way of generating resistive force feedback with today’s VR motion controllers, how can we make users feel and behave as though virtual objects have varying weights? Creative agency B-Reel explored several approaches and open sourced their experiments for others to learn from.
Update Opens the Door for Enhanced Roomscale Tracking with Rift and Touch
A recent update to Oculus Home has enabled support for tracking the Rift and Touch with up to four trackers, enabling robust coverage of a roomscale space.
Limited Edition DOTA 2 Championship HTC Vive Now Available
Feeling your immersive adventures leave you lacking in the style department? Want to stand out from the VR crowd? Then this new limited edition HTC Vive headset might be for you.
Memory Capture & Virtual Tourism for the Benefit of Those with Physical Disabilities
Roy Sherrill is enabling the time travelers from the future to get a sense of presence at a number of different tech and cultural events around the San Francisco Bay area. Roy’s been shooting a lot of 360 videos from his wheelchair at a number of different VR events this Spring and Summer, and he thinks of his selfie stick with a 360-degree bubblecam as a “wizard staff” and “portal stone.” When asked to explain why he’s recording all of this footage he says, “I capture slices of reality one moment at a time and save it in a bubble so that I can project others into it in the future so they can get the sense of presence as if they’re there themselves.” He’s enabling future members of the Society for Creative Anachronism to have a more direct experience of history as it unfolds.
Take an Immersive Drive Through the World’s Most Secretive Country
North Korea is one of the most secretive states in the world, but one man received permission from the nation’s strict regime to capture a drive through its capital Pyongyang. It’s a rare and immersive peek into a world few are allowed to witness.
Samsung’s New Standalone VR Headset May be Called ‘Odyssey’
Samsung reportedly confirmed back at the company’s own developer conference that a new, standalone VR headset was on it’s way and new trademark filings may indicate it’s name.
HTC Vive Accessory Store Now Stocks Things You Actually Need
Want to know how much a replacement HTC Vive Base Station or SteamVR controller would set you back should the worst happen? HTC’s Vive accessory store has been updated to include these items, along with some eye opening prices.
New Magic Leap Videos Shows AR Shopping and Voice Control
A new video of Magic Leap’s augmented reality tech in action was shown at a conference in China today.
Facebook CEO: ‘In Five to Ten Years AR Will Be Where VR is Today’
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company is working seriously on augmented reality R&D, but he believes it will take time for the technology to catch up to where VR is today.
Immersive Game Design Lessons from ‘Pokémon Go’
Pokémon Go has quickly become the #1 mobile game of all time, and while there’s been some debate as to whether it should be considered Augmented Reality or not, it’s clear that location-based gaming has taken to the next level.
I had a chance to unpack some of the game design principles to see how it’s optimized to facilitate cooperative social gameplay with Roadhouse Interactive’s VR Director Kayla Kinnunen at Casual Connect this week. Kayla talks about how Pokémon Go has connected her to more strangers in two weeks than in 15 years, how it’s changing her relationship with her wife, encouraging her to walk more, as well as some of the social contract issues and deeper lessons for the future of augmented and virtual reality gaming.
