If you’ve gotten a hold of a Gear VR recently, then you’ve probably already downloaded near everything in the store on your visual buffet through the first consumer-ready virtual reality headset. If you’re celebrating Thanksgiving with a family get-together, the right set of apps and a few hard-won tactics will let you show everyone why you’ve gone crazy for VR—and why they should too.
Domna Banakou is a Ph.D. student studying with Mel Slater at the Event Lab in Barcelona, Spain. She’s been researching different aspects of the virtual body ownership illusion in order to investigate the short-term and long-term impacts of embodying virtual avatars which have different qualities than your physical body. Specifically, she found that embodying the avatar with childlike proportions can result in an overestimation of the sizes of virtual objects. She also has found that it’s possible to create the illusion of attributing things that appear to be coming from your avatar, but that you hadn’t actually said. There are a number of potential implications for how the virtual body ownership illusion through VR can alter our sense of self and identity, and Mel Slater’s Event Lab is on the forefront of investigating these questions.
Most of my regular listeners know that I have recently taken a job in the architectural visualization world. I have moved to Seattle to work for a company called Studio 216, and am very thankful for the opportunities provided to me. In this Thanksgiving episode, I talk to my boss, Boaz Ashkenazy, about how Studio 216 is using VR to lead the arch vis world into the future.
Whilst all of geekdom simmers with hot anticipation awaiting a brand new entry in the Star Wars movie franchise, ILMxLabs and Google are about to drive the hype further with a new virtual reality experience, based on Star Wars:The Force Awakens – and it’s out soon!
Here we go again. A decade ago, it was online video that changed everything. Now virtual reality is set to change the world once more. As we approach the Q1 2016 Oculus Rift release date, you can literally see and feel the excitement build on a weekly basis.
Meso VR, an educational project created by Dallas based studio Eightfold VR, introduces you to the world of the Maya by taking you back to 900AD to see one of the ruins brought to life.
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson has a bold vision for CCP with the mission statement “To create virtual worlds more meaningful that real life.” He believes that after someone’s basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are met, then humans will always be searching for ways to bring more meaning and self-actualization in their lives. A lot of those current methods are through consuming physical objects that require a lot of natural resources to produce. Hilmar’s long-term vision is for virtual world’s like CCP’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game of EVE Online to be able to satisfy this human search for meaning through virtual objects and experiences that are more sustainable in the long-run.
Figment VR, a virtual reality smartphone adapter created by Quantum Bakery LLC, has passed its $75,000 Kickstarter funding goal in just 7 days.
Nick Ochoa is a co-founder of UploadVR, and he was recently at the VRX Virtual Reality Intelligence conference hosting a panel on social VR. Nick talks about of his open questions about social VR such as what does it mean to be a social VR app, and where is social VR going when there could hundreds of applications that have a social aspect to them. He’s found some of the lightweight social VR experiences like Oculus Social Alpha to be some of the most compelling, but that there hasn’t been an experience that he feels really motivated to have with his friends yet beyond sharing some entertainment of movie experiences together. He talks about the importance of audio in social VR, as well as how avatars are used as well as whether the experience will be hosted on a private servers or be open and distributed on the open web like an approach that High Fidelity and JanusVR are taking. Finally, he sees that part of the ultimate potential of virtual reality is to be able to cultivate experiences of empathy, and he highly recommends checking out the work of Chris Milk and VRSE in that realm.
With Samsung’s mobile Gear VR headset hitting stores in time for the holidays, a deluge of new VR users is on the way. If you’re among them, here’s three quick warnings you should heed.
Tyler Hurd, creator of the infamous BUTTS: The VR Experience, is working on a new project in collaboration with VR production studio WEVR, Road to VR has learned.
Disney and Total Cinema 360 have released a 360-degree video documenting the opening five minutes (read: “The Circle of Life”) of The Lion King musical to VR platforms, including Littlstar’s iOS and Android apps, YouTube 360, Vrideo’s app and MilkVR for Samsung Gear VR users.
Samsung’s Gear VR launched officially in it’s first consumer ready form last week, and as the first commercial VR headset launching in decades, how do you sell a technology famously difficult to demonstrate other than in person? Samsung’s new advert has a very effective stab at this problem.
Consumer VR is finally here with this week’s release of the Samsung Gear VR. If you’ve never owned a Gear VR (there’s two previous ‘innovator editions’ out since last year) but you’ve managed to get your hands on a pre-ordered headset and compatible phone, you’re ready to plug into the world of virtual reality. But what do you download (and buy) first?
Ray Davis is the Studio Manager of Epic Games Seattle, and he talks about working on Bullet Train, which is Epic’s latest VR tech demo that uses the Oculus Touch controllers and debuted at the Oculus Connect 2 gathering. I had a chance to catch up with Ray at the Seattle VR conference where he told me about the iterative design process behind Bullet Train, the evolution of the teleportation VR locomotion approach, and how they discovered the innovative bullet grab and throwing game mechanic.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Ray Davis talks about some of the goals and motivations behind Bullet Train. Epic wanted to create an immersive VR experience that was interactive and dynamic designed for anyone to go through regardless of what their level of gaming experience might be. Lead VR engineer Nick Whiting and Creative Director Nick Donaldson collaborated on creating Bullet Train, and they wanted to explore what it means to have hand presence within a VR experience.
Ray says that there’s an art to constructing a competitive death match environment in terms of the player flows and different pickups that encourage different pathways throughout the environment. It’s not just a matter of teleporting from location to location, and Nick Donaldson took a lot of that into consideration when creating Bullet Train.
Bullet Train has definitely been the most comfortable first-person shooter experience that I’ve had in VR so far. This level of comfort is largely thanks to their teleportation mechanic in order to move between different way points that are set on a subway train and out into the station. There’s a ghosting trail that you can see after you teleport that can help you orient you to your new location. Ray says that they thought a lot about ways to design the experience so that you could have enough visual cues to maintain your orientation as you teleported between the various waypoints.
Ray says that game design process at Epic Games has always been very organic and iterative. His advice is to just make a VR experience, and then see what people want to try to do in the experience, and then implement those things if it hasn’t been implemented yet. This is how they discovered their bullet grabbing and throwing game mechanic. They noticed that people kept trying to to catch them, and so they went ahead and just added that feature. He says that their ultimate goal is to create an intuitive experience such that people forget that they’re controlling a game, and that they can get into a flow where they’re reacting with their unconscious muscle memories.
Ray says that it’s ultimately a lot of fun to develop for virtual reality when you’re the target audience, because you’re the best expert in what you find fun and engaging. Especially when they could look to their favorite Hollywood action movies, and see what they could start to recreate within their VR experience. There are a still a number of design challenges in moving something like Bullet Train from a novel tech demo into a full-fledged game, and Ray didn’t mention any specific plans for what the future of Bullet Train might be. But it wouldn’t be surprising if they were continuing to refine and develop this concept after giving more than 500 demos over the last couple of months.
There’s also a lot of these experiments in VR where these ad hoc teams at Epic are able to dogfood the Unreal Engine. And so there is a lot of feedback and improvements that are made to the engine to make it more and more well-suited to create different virtual reality experiences. Ray says that part of the culture at Epic Games is to make things, and then try to give as much away of those innovations as possible.
Finally, Ray sees that VR and AR will have a convergence and eventually replace our screen-based interfaces in monitors, laptops, tablets, and phones. He sees that VR and AR will continue to unlock a lot of actual changes with how we gather and consumer information as well as how we connect with each other.
Become a Patron! Support The Voices of VR Podcast Patreon
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
