L.A. 2097 is VR experience loosely based on the tech-noir classic film Blade Runner (1982), and although offering only a single re-imagined scene from the film—Rick Deckard’s high-rise apartment balcony—the demo holds a surprisingly tight grip on the imagination. We spoke with project creator E’van Johnston to learn more about his atmospheric sci-fi balcony and where it’s headed next.
Visionary VR, a stealth virtual reality startup which announced a $6 million fundraise back in March, will give the first glimpse of their VR storytelling application at VRLA.
Kite & Lightning, an LA-based studio known for some of the burgeoning VR industry’s most polished experiences, today announced that their next big project, the VR vehicular melee party brawler Bebylon Battle Royale, has been funded to the tune of $2.5 million in seed funding.
In an event at SIGGRAPH this evening, AMD’s Radeon Technology Group introduced a new line of ‘Radeon Pro’ WX-series GPUs. AMD has aimed the WX 7100 specifically at virtual reality content creation.
NVIDIA has announced its latest line of professional focused GPUs aimed at the VR industry and its specs impress, as does its potential price.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
