Hao Li is an assistant professor at USC who has been collaborating with Oculus Research on facial tracking while wearing a virtual reality headset. The group’s initial prototype and research paper “Facial Performance Sensing Head-Mounted Display” was presented at SIGGRAPH 2015.
WebVR is not a new thing — people have been talking about using WebGL to render interactive 3D graphics in the browser for over half a decade, in various different implementations. What is new, however, is the availability of open source libraries that even novice developers can use to build VR experiences in very little time. Even just 24 months ago, this would have been difficult to state. But the hard work of a few dedicated enthusiasts (Josh Carpenter, Brandon Jones, Vlad Vukićević, Tony Parisi, and Boris Smus just to mention a few) has opened up a world of new content for the web.
VFX specialists MPC have collaborated with Sony Pictures on building a virtual reality experience to promote the box office hit horror comedy film Goosebumps, as well as handling visual effects for the movie itself.
As reported previously, the virtual reality injection driver that lets you play your favourite games in virtual reality is now released. This update bring with it a host of technical enhancements, and a selection of newly supported games such as The Witcher 3, Mortal Kombat X and Star Wars classics Jedi Knight II and Knights of the Old Rebublic.
We’ve been tracking Playful since E3 2014, when the developer behind virtual reality platformer Lucky’s Tale blew away the pre-conception that VR was reserved only for first person games. Now, the developer is to receive $25M to accelerate the game’s development.
Mary Spio is the president and founder of Next Galaxy, and she’s working on a number of different VR experiences including music videos, medical training, and enterprise applications. They’re also developing the Ceekars 4D Headphones in order to increase the immersion from audio. They’ve included haptic feedback on the ears and band of the headphones in order to do things like amplify the feeling of wind blowing or a passing train. Mary loves going to concerts, and so she’s channelling her passion for music into the virtual reality experiences that she’d like to have. Next Galaxy is working with some heavy metal bands and talks more about how she sees that VR could help increase the engagement and distribution of music for bands who adopt the technology.
An interview with Polish site TVN24Bis.pl may have just revealed the release date for the HTC Vive in three territories, US, UK and Germany. In an interview with the site, HTC with Bartosz Zik, Product Commercialisation Manager at HTC, it’s mentioned that HTC expect to “Premiere” the SteamVR headset on December 8th.
As the company drives toward releasing SDK 1.0 alongside the consumer Oculus Rift they’ve now released SDK 0.8 with “Improved Support for Windows 10.”
Paramount Pictures will try to scare the pants off you whilst also extolling the virtues of virtual reality from today as they’s rolling out a series of demonstrations of a new HTC Vive experience based on ‘Paranormal Activity’. The demonstration, debuting in 15 AMC theaters across the states from today, is designed to promote the forthcoming game of the same name, currently in development for all virtual reality platforms by Beast Media Group.
Between October 22nd and 24th, the experience will be shown in the following theaters:
Adam Orth, one of the founders of studio Three One Zero, will present the story of how ‘astronaut in peril’ virtual reality title ADR1FT game, came to be. The presentation, which will include a ‘screening’ of the title and a creator Q&A, is being organised in conjunction with the New York Film Academy and will be streamed live on Twitch.TV via the organisation’s channel. The event kicks off at 7pm PST / 10pm EST.
ADR1FT is being for VR from the ground up and will appear on all major virtual reality headsets next year.
There are a number of different 3D audio plug-ins available for game engines like Unity, but there have not been any solutions for mixing 3D audio for cinematic VR productions. Two Big Ears just released the 3DCeption Spatial Workstation, which is a digital audio workstation that integrates with professional audio production tools.
During yesterday’s WSJD technology conference, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz finally broke the silence since the mysteriously cancelled TED appearance scheduled back in March, where he was to give insight into the company’s ‘Digital Lightfield’ technology.
3D spatial audio specialists Two Big Ears have launched a new ‘Spatial Workstation’, a platform for audio engineers to mix and edit immersive audio with realtime feedback leveraging VR headset head-tracking information.
Magic Leap debuted some footage of their mysterious tech at WSJDLive today, a yearly conference held by The Wall Street Journal featuring some of the biggest names in tech.
