Road to VR

Living Stories: What VR Can Learn from Immersive Theater

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Aug 4, 2016

When the recession hit in 2008, book publisher Charlie Melcher looked to reinvent how Melcher Media told stories using the latest smart phone technologies. They developed an iOS app for Al Gore’s Our Choice, and started having a lot of conversations with other media producers from many different disciplines to see how they were using code as a canvas for storytelling. So in 2012, Charlie founded The Future of Storytelling Summit to gather together the most cutting-edge innovators of telling immersive and interactive stories. For the past four years, they’ve been featuring more and more virtual reality technologies at their yearly summit, which is happening again this year on October 5th and 6th.

Oculus Connect 3 Registration Now Open, Early Bird Passes from $199

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Aug 3, 2016

You can now register to attend Oculus’ 3rd ‘Connect’ conference, an event dedicated to all things Oculus from Rift to Touch and is focused primarily on developers and VR development.

‘Everest VR’ Review

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Some things in life really need to be experienced first hand, and the ascent of Mount Everest is probably pretty high up on that list. Photos and videos can’t compare to the real thing, but VR just might. Step forward Sólfar Studios whose debut title Everest VR, built in collaboration with Reykjavik-based visual effects and animation studio RVX, launched yesterday for HTC’s Vive headset. Everest VR intends to bring the mountain to you, with a journey to the most iconic summit on the planet.

Watch Real Madrid vs. Bayern Munich Tonight in VR

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Aug 3, 2016

Bundesliga champions FC Bayern Munich are up against La Liga’s Real Madrid tonight for the 2016 International Champions Cup, and providing you have a Gear VR, you can watch it livestreaming in virtual reality starting August 3rd at 7:30 PM ET (click for local time).

Interactive Lab to Make VR Trike Racing a Thing at VRLA This Week

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Aug 3, 2016

Interactive Lab bring something you never knew you wanted to try to this year’s VRLA Summer Expo, virtual reality room-scale and untethered trike racing.

Gear VR Pre-orders Now Open, Launches August 19th – 16 New Photos

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Aug 3, 2016

Samsung yesterday announced the latest version of their Gear VR mobile headset alongside the new Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. Both the headset and phone are available for pre-order starting today with a release date of August 19th.

Hands-on: Samsung’s New Gear VR for Galaxy Note 7

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Aug 2, 2016

Just before noon at Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom, guests to Samsung’s Unpacked 2016 were invited to the floor to demo new phones and accessories. And, given the event’s drama-infused focus on the Galaxy Note 7, that is what the new Gear VR felt like—an accessory, if a glorified one.

DriveClub VR Will Launch With the PlayStation VR, Leak Suggests

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Aug 2, 2016

According to leaked information on a Japanese PlayStation blog post, Sony will indeed bring one of their biggest franchises DriveClub VR to market alongside PlayStation VR when it launches on October 13.

‘Tilt Brush’ Brings the Rave to Your Living Room with New Music Visualizer Mode

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Aug 2, 2016

Tilt Brush, the virtual reality paint application from Google, saw an update today that brought with it a whole new ‘audio reactive mode’—now making your trippy creations pulse to the beat of your own music collection.

New Gear VR for Note 7 Announced with Wider Field of View, Compatible with Prior Gear VR Phones

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Aug 2, 2016

Samsung today announced a new version of their Gear VR headset with a wider field of view. The headset is compatible with both the Note 7’s new USB Type-C connector as well as micro-USB, offering support for all phones from the prior version of the headset.

‘Adventure Time’ Creator Pendleton Ward on Stretching the Boundaries of Identity in VR

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Aug 2, 2016

Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward has been fascinated by the idea of virtual reality since he first read Snow Crash as a teenager. He backed the Oculus Kickstarter, and has been exploring many of the early VR prototypes over the last three years and started to create interactive stories. Little Pink Best Buds has some VR components and was created as a part of Double Fine’s 2-week Amnesia Fortnight game jam in 2014. Pen is currently exploring the bounds of identity in VR through a new adventure game and story that he’s working on, and he’s been taking inspiration from many different early VR prototypes but especially the out-of-body experiences he had in Robin Arnott’s Sound Self VR experience.

I had a chance to catch up with Pen at SIGGRAPH where he talked about Sound Self, contrasting his ability to express identity in real versus virtual spaces, how VR allows him to get out of his head, recreating a scene at the Black Sun virtual nightclub from Snow Crash, his explorations in social VR, and where he sees the metaverse is heading.

Wizard of Oz Narratives: Puppeting Virtual Characters with Improv Acting

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Aug 2, 2016

‘Wizard of Oz’ VR experiences use improv actors to drive either a single or multiple virtual characters. This technique is commonly used within VR training applications where it’s cheaper to have a single actor puppeting multiple virtual characters rather than hiring multiple actors in order to create a sense of social presence. The ‘interactors’ driving the content of the experience are able to use a set of keyboard commands in order to drive pre-rendered gestures and animations, or they can also do more sophisticated motion capture and virtual embodiment.

First Look: ‘New Retro Arcade Neon’ Launches Today with All New Arcade Space, Multiplayer, Mini-games, and More

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Aug 1, 2016

The much anticipated New Retro Arcade Neon, a totally revamped version of the lauded virtual reality arcade, finally lands on Steam today, built to take advantage of the HTC Vive.

‘Situational Knowledges’ in VR Narrative: The Role of Place & Perspective

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Aug 1, 2016

Catherine Rehwinkel is working on creating a conceptual framework that enables storytellers to storyboard linear stories in VR. She’s a filmmaker who recently finished a master’s degree computational & systems thinking at NYU. She’s been inspired by Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” feminist theories that take into account how location and place impact our perspective on events, and she’s intrigued by VR stories that grow and evolve when you watch them from different locations.

‘Unlimited Corridor’ Video Shows Mind Bending ‘Infinite’ Redirected Walking

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Jul 31, 2016

This video showcases a new redirected walking implementation project that creates an “unlimited” virtual corridor in a space just 5 x 7 metres in size.

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