Every time I’ve ever been shown a piece of 360 video content with an improperly aligned horizon, I’ve wondered to myself why it seems like no one is using hardware-stabilization. Then I saw Spherica’s custom-built 360 camera rig which is designed to do exactly that.
DJs looking to hone their musical craft in front of a live audience – or perhaps those looking for a more stimulating way to mix music – can rejoice. TheWave from developer WaveVR is looking to provide DJs with a psychedelic immersive interface to allow them to express themselves creatively and show it off to a virtual audience. Here’s a look at it in action.
Oculus’ long fought partnership with Microsoft, to bring the enormously successful social, creative Minecraft franchise to VR, begins with a release to Samsung Gear VR today as the title hits the Oculus Store.
Redirected walking is a concept within VR that tricks a user into walking into circles, but gives them visual feedback that they’re walking in a straight line. We tend to trust our visual input over our other senses, and so redirected touch using that same principle of visual dominance in order to trick our minds into thinking it’s touching different objects while only using a single passive haptic object. It can also fool us into thinking that straight surfaces feel like curved surfaces.
Luv Kohli is one of the pioneers of redirected touch, and he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the topic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013. I had a chance to catch up with Luv at the IEEE VR conference to learn more about the extent that we can warp VR spaces without our minds being able to consciously perceive it beyond having it temporarily feel weird.
Today VREAL is taking the shroud off of their VR livestreaming platform that puts viewers inside the game, right next to their favorite streamers. The unique mashup of virtual reality, game streaming, and social interaction feels like something we’ve simply not seen before.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and in commemoration a group of Ukrainian documentary filmmakers have set out to capture the wreckage that was once the city of Pripyat and its surrounding countryside. The 360 film aims to take you deep into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, through spaces only accessible by employees.
Looking to get your VR project off the ground? HTC might be able to help. The company has just announced a $100 million fund attached to the ‘Vive X’ accelerator program.
Is VR on the open web going to provide a good enough experience as to be a viable distribution platform for certain VR content? That’s the big question that people have been asking for the past couple of years, and there’s been a lot of big steps towards that within the WebVR community. Before GDC this year Mozilla and Google proposed the 1.0 version of the WebVR specification.
I had a chance to catch up with Josh Carpenter at the VR Hackathon before GDC, and he also had some exciting news about moving frame rendering from the browsers to the Oculus and Vive runtimes. He talks about going from 10 fps to 500 fps with the Servo Webrender, the LA Times Mars experience using WebVR, AFrame, and the future of the open web and WebVR.
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Here’s Patrick Walton talking about the Servo Webrender at a meetup hosted by Mozilla in February:
Here’s a demo of the Servo Webrender getting 60fps compared to other browsers running this demo scene.
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BigScreen is a social VR app currently in beta for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive that lets you livestream your monitor to friends in an online environment, essentially letting you throw a virtual LAN party or movie night with your best VR buddies. While the new app focuses on connecting people in a virtual space so they can mirror their monitors to friends, it can also be used solo as a virtual desktop solution.
Project Sansar from Second Life creator Linden Lab is a new virtual world, built for virtual reality which promises world building tools capable of generating beautiful, shareable worlds online. Now, Linden Lab has announced it’s opened the sign up process for Project Sansar, inviting people join them on their ‘creator preview’, due to start in the Summer.
Kevin Cornish is a LA-based VR filmmaker who teamed up with AMD to do some interactive narrative experiments using gazed-based content in Believe VR. Depending on which character you look at different moments will triggered up to 32 different variations within this one-minute experience. He’s using Unreal Engine mixed with live-action footage to achieve this, and he hints that there will be additional post-production tools released that will make this type of experience easier. I had a chance to interview Kevin at GDC where he shared with me his ideas about writing interactive narratives, first-person storytelling for mute characters using the reluctant protagonist as a guide, stories where characters empathize with you, and the role of emotion and eye contact in immersive experiences.
Nokia Technologies today announced that it will be providing The Walt Disney Studios with OZO, the company’s 360 degree camera. Disney will use the camera to create ‘special VR content’ for upcoming films.
In an interesting announcement today which sees Valve’s Steam platform becoming increasingly competitive toward video distribution platforms like Amazon Video, Lionsgate will be making more than 100 films available for purchase through the platform, and you’ll be able to watch them in VR.
Amidst a mounting trade deal between the U.S. and the EU, President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel today visited the Hannover Messe, an annual trade fair for industrial technology, where they donned a VR headset using a depth sensor touted as ‘the smallest 3D camera in the world’.
VRLO is a London based VR event which celebrated its fourth outing in March, just prior to VR landing (or not) on people’s doorsteps worldwide. Road to VR‘s Jonathan Tustain was there to report from the show armed with a question: Is VR hype or hope?
