Road to VR

SMI Talks Eye Tracking VR Applications & Foveated Rendering

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Aug 31, 2016

smi-eye-tracking — Image courtesy SMI

Sensomotoric Instruments (SMI) is a German-based eye tracking company who has released an eye tracking kit for the Oculus DK2 & Gear VR, and most recently for the HTC Vive. At SIGGRAPH this year, Nvidia was showing a foveated rendering demo where it only renders high resolution to the sections of the scene that you are actually looking at. It’s really an imperceptible difference that would allow mobile technologies to render higher resolution scenes, or potentially help make it more feasible to wirelessly transfer data to a desktop VR HMD.

‘Damaged Core’ Review

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Damaged Core is a first-person shooter set in the dingy near-future of a robot uprising. The Core, an artificial intelligence recently gone rogue, is destroying the Earth, and you, an AI program fighting on behalf of the humans, must hack your way closer to the Core by jumping from robot to robot.

Lytro Shows First Light Field Footage Captured with Immerge VR Camera

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Aug 30, 2016

Back toward the end of 2015, light field camera company Lytro announced a major turn toward the VR market with the introduction of ‘Immerge’, a light field camera made for capturing data which can be played back as VR video with positional tracking. Now the company is showing the first footage shot with the camera.

‘TheWaveVR’ Co-founder on His Rave & Interactive Concert Platform

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Aug 30, 2016

TheWave-Dondonyan-VRLA — image courtesy TheWaveVR

TheWave VR coordinated two days worth of DJs playing musical sets in the world’s first VR Rave at VRLA. It was TheWave’s first event since announcing that they raised a round of $2.5 million to build out an interactive, VR music concert platform. I previously had a conversation with TheWave co-founder Aaron Lemke at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference where they were showing off their musical content creation tools, but they’ve since shifted their focus on building out the social experience for watching live performances of electronic DJs.

‘Jesus VR’ Claims First Ever Feature-length VR Film, to Preview at Venice Film Festival

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Aug 29, 2016

jesus-vr-film — Photo courtesy Venice Film Festival

Jesus VR: The Story of Christ, an upcoming feature-length 360 film, is getting its first public preview at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Hailed as the world’s first ever feature length VR film production, the 90-minute movie depicts the life, works, and death of Jesus of Nazareth.

Viacom VR Summer Fellowship Fosters Fresh Talent in NYC

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Aug 29, 2016

The park is green, the mother behind me. She pushes my stroller perfectly straight; we glide across the pavement, green at either side. I face forward and listen to her voice, the only one audible in the park. On her cell she’s speaking about herself and me in the way one speaks about preverbal children in their presence: as though their presence and awareness flicker on and then off when the speaker addresses and then ceases addressing them.

Hands-on with the VR Ready Asus GL502VS Laptop with Nvidia GTX 1070

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Aug 29, 2016

With the latest generation of NVIDIA GPUs, the company opted to stick what they say are desktop-equivalent cards into the next generation of gaming laptops, putting VR Ready performance into highly portable systems. How do they handle? Ritchie Djamhur takes the Asus GL502VS with GTX 1070 for a spin.

Oculus Explains Why They Didn’t Launch Touch with the Rift (Even Though They “Could Have”)

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Aug 27, 2016

oculus touch hands on e3 2015 (3) — Founder reveals the Oculus Touch 'Half Moon' Prototype in 2015 | Photo courtesy Oculus

Oculus says they could have shipped Touch alongside the launch of the Rift back in April, but explains why they’ve been biding their time.

‘Mythica VR’: VR LARP With D&D-style World Building Hits Kickstarter

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Aug 27, 2016

Arrowstorm Entertainment is what you might call ‘serial Kickstarters’, as they’ve successfully completed 13 different campaigns on the crowdfunding site—mostly focusing on small budget sword and sorcery flicks starring the likes of Kevin Sorbo from Hercules (1995) and Kristian Nairn (aka Hodor) from Game of Thrones (2011). Now looking to VR for their next project, Arrowstorm is putting together a live-action role playing game with the level-building capabilities of Dungeons and Dragons. The game is called Mythica VR.

Sketchfab: Largest Social Media Site for 3D Objects Adds VR Navigation

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Aug 27, 2016

Originally launched in 2012, Sketchfab has grown to be the largest social media website for sharing 3D objects and scenes with over 500,000 members and close to 1 million experiences. At SIGGRAPH, Sketchfab launched their VR browser to be able to navigate between many different 3D objects without having to leave virtual reality. Once inside an Sketchfab experience, then you can teleport around and change the scale. Sketchfab can import over 30 different types of 3D file formats, and is currently working with the Tiltbrush team to be able to have direct support for exporting and sharing your 3D creations on the web.

I had a chance to catch up with Sketchfab co-founder Alban Denoyel at SIGGRAPH to talk about the evolution of Sketchfab over the years, and their two big bets that there are going to be more and more 3D content creators and consumers as virtual and augmented reality technologies become more mainstream.

Survey: 78% of AR/VR Developers Not Planning Platform-exclusive Content

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Aug 26, 2016

In a survey published by VRDC, AR and VR developers are largely leaning toward platform agnostic development for their next projects.

PlayStation VR Pre-Orders Had “Quickest Sellout in GameStop’s History”

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Aug 26, 2016

GameStop executives have revealed that the last pre-order event for the soon-to-be-released PlayStation VR was the “Quickest Sellout” in the company’s history.

President Obama Makes His 360 Video Debut

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Aug 26, 2016

Felix & Paul Studios got together with Oculus Studios and National Geographic to shoot 360 video footage of President Barack Obama’s recent Father’s Day trip to Yosemite National Park, becoming the first official appearance by Obama in a VR presentation.

Oculus is Working on a ‘Chaperone’-like Boundary System for Touch

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Aug 26, 2016

valve-chaperone — Valve's 'Chaperone' system displays a virtual wall inside the headset | Photo courtesy Valve

Physically moving your body around to move through the virtual world is a great way to enhance immersion, but it can be potentially dangerous if users lose a sense of their real world surroundings. To keep users safe, Valve introduced what they call the ‘Chaperone’ for the HTC Vive headset, a virtual wall which appears when needed to keep users from exiting a safe playspace. Oculus is working on their own version of such a system which will be especially important for the upcoming launch of their Touch VR controllers.

Highlights from the SIGGRAPH 2016 VR Village with Denise Quesnel

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Aug 26, 2016

There was a VR Village again this year at the SIGGRAPH 2016 conference where a lot of experimental interactive technologies were on display. I had a chance to talk to the program chair Denise Quesnel about some of the content themes and technologies this year at the SIGGRAPH VR Village as well as the different technology trends that were emerging.

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