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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Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
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?
Small form factor PC specialist Zotac are about to enter the virtual reality hardware race with a nifty solution to your tethered, cable-lugging room-scale VR woes; A portable PC that can be strapped to your back.
The Oculus Rift launch saga continues. Following a surprise delay of nearly two months, some orders are now shipping out significantly ahead of the initial delay estimates provided by Oculus. Meanwhile, eager customers seek the fastest way to get their hands on the Rift.
While we first saw the HTC Vive iOS app appear at the end of March, it had vanished by the Vive’s April 5th launch day. Now the app has returned to the App Store to keep you connected to your iPhone while inside the Vive.
Liv Erikson was able to to live out one of her dreams when she stepped into the Star Wars universe to battle against a lightsaber training Remote within Sixense’s VR demo. This helped her discover that she has a passion for immersive technologies, and so she started teaching herself Unity and documenting her learning process on her blog called “The Matrix is My Office.” This caught the attention of Microsoft’s developer evangelism team, and they offered her a full-time job where she could explore, learn, and teach about virtual and augmented reality development on her Channel 9 videoblog called “Just A/VR Show.” Liv’s show and blog are some great resources for people who are looking for beginner content for how to get into VR development. I had a chance to catch up with Liv at Microsoft’s Reactor space during the VR Hackathon just before GDC this year to talk about all of her different VR & AR evangelism efforts.
This week at Fanfest 2016, CCP Games has announced that EVE: Valkyrie will not only find its way to all three major VR headsets, but will also allow cross-platform play between them. We went hands-on with PC and console versions of the game to see how the experiences will compare.
