Oculus’ 2nd developer conference ‘Connect’ is under way, and with day one over, Road to VR is partnering with AltspaceVR bring you a virtual reality recap of everything that happened. Hosted by our very own Ben Lang and AltspaceVR‘s ‘Cymatic’ Bruce Wooden – it’s be the next best thing to being there.
Rob Bredow is VP of New Media and head of ILMxLAB, the Immersive Entertainment R&D wing of Lucasfilm, and will be presenting the talk, entitled ‘The Force of Virtual Reality at Lucasfilm’ at 2:30pm PDT today (Wednesday, September 23rd). Don’t forget to check here for your local time.
A rare behind the scenes glimpse featuring work by the newly formed ILMxLAB. xLAB is responsible for Immersive Entertainment within Lucasfilm and combines the forces of Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound and Lucasfilm itself. ILMxLAB collaborates with filmmakers to create VR and other immersive experiences along with building tools specifically designed to improve the filmmaking process. Come see rarely viewed footage and the latest behind the scenes work-in-progress in VR.
Duration: 60 min
Check below for Executive Editor Ben Lang’s liveblog which will be kicking off shortly before 2:30pm.
Respected and longstanding tech news media network TWiT.tv (This Week in Tech) has kept a watchful eye on virtual reality’s growth over the years and tomorrow will live stream coverage of Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe’s opening keynote address at the company’s second developer conference, ‘Connect’. Road to VR Executive Editor Ben Lang will be joining the TWiT team on the TWiT Live Specials broadcast to give you in-depth commentary throughout the live-streamed event.
Facebook has today announced an update to the social network’s News Feed which will now include support for 360 video. Revealed back in March during Facebook’s F8 developer’s conference, the company has lined up a number of premium content providers to ‘chum the 360 waters’ so to speak.
At the IEEE VR conference this year, there was the first-ever workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality for Molecular Science (VARMS). Molecular science is one branch of science where virtual reality has a lot of applications, and Logan Herche from the University of the Pacific talks about his presentation about “Visual Similarity Analysis of Atmospheric Nucleation Data using Virtual Reality.”
The 2015 Proto Awards are over for another year, and as attendees awake from their after-party hangovers, footage from the event is emerging. One of the biggest highlight this year was the surprise appearance of Ivan Sutherland who accepted a ‘Special Founders Award’. Sutherland is regarded as a virtual reality legend primarily for his work as inventor of one of the first ever VR headsets, the Sword of Damocles.
Ixian Gate is a unique, psychedelic virtual reality experience formed from a collaboration between artist Jess Johnson, Music Video director Simon Ward and VFX artist Kenny Smith, based on Johnson’s dazzlingly bizarre creations. The results of this unlikely pairing is teased in this beguiling trailer and forms the centrepiece of a new exhibition.
This latest promo video from HTC, highlights the enthusiasm the featured developers have for the Vive’s SteamVR powered “room-scale VR”. SteamVR developers Cloudhead Games (The Gallery: Call of the Starseed), Owlchemy Labs (Job Simulator), Phaser Lock Ineractive (Final Approach) and Northway Games (Fantastic Contraption).
The HTC Vive is first VR headset to launch for the SteamVR platform and should ship in limited number by the end of year with a full release Q1 2016.
Starbreeze, an “independent creator, publisher and distributor of high quality entertainment products” has announced that its StarVR headset will receive eye-tracking support as the result of a partnership between specialist in the field, Tobii.
With Oculus’ annual Connect developer conference now less than 24 hours away, the VR community at large is saturated with excited speculation about what might be revealed. One thing we won’t be seeing at the event, says Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, is positional tracking on Samsung’s Gear VR headset.
In a move seemingly designed to diffuse mounting expectations of VR enthusiasts everywhere on the eve of Oculus’ Connect developer conference, Palmer has quelled any hopes of Oculus Rift CV1 pre-order at the show. However, seems like we may still be in for a few exciting surprises.
