AltspaceVR is hosting another open beta weekend, and they want you to bring the chips and dip this time for a shared viewing of Super Bowl XLIX. Whether you’re rooting for the Patriots or the Seahawks, you’re sure to have a great time hobnobbing while watching on the largest screen playing the big game in virtual reality.
Wearing a brown cardboard box on your face is so 2014. So for the new year, DODOcase’s popular VR smartphone adapter (inspired by Google Cardboard) is getting a splash of color with the help of their new customization tool, letting you drag and drop your own designs and images to make something truly unique—if you only want just one copy, that is.
Last month, Rothenberg Ventures launched ‘River’, an accelerator through which they committed to investing $100,000 in 10 seed-stage virtual reality startups. Today the company has announced that its decided to bump the inaugural class count up to 13, totalling $1.3 million of investment in the VR ecosystem. Companies joining River hail from countries across the globe, including FOVE, from Japan, a company working on a VR headset capable of eye tracking.
I’ve been fortunate to try the Virtuix Omni VR treadmill several times over the course of its development. At every point though, I was testing some variation of the original prototype seen in the company’s highly successful Kickstarter campaign. That is until now—at CES 2015, Virtuix revealed the production version of the Omni, and I got to take it for a stroll (and sprint).
Before consumer virtual reality reaches any sort of widespread adoption, it must first begin to work its way into the public consciousness. To that end, we’ve spotted the Oculus Rift, one of the leading VR headsets destined for the consumer market, on NBC’s popular comedy series Parks and Recreation. Its portrayal is brief, but raises interesting questions about how the public will at first perceive virtual reality.
Every year the movie industry descends upon the small town of Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, a nearly two-week long independent film showcase of everything from documentaries to art-house. This year however, some of the bigger hits didn’t take place in any one of the little town’s 15 theaters, but rather in the side rooms where critics and other industry types hooked into an Oculus Rift to experience VR at its finest.
Though consumer virtual reality R&D has been healthily reignited, the challenge of marketing these new devices begins to take rise. Samsung is first to take a stab at selling VR to everyday consumers, and that means somehow explaining what VR is to the masses, without going door to door to get people to try on a headset. Two new ads from Samsung are taking that first marketing step for Gear VR—how’d they do?
The movement of virtual and augmented reality from niche industrial and enthusiast technology to something the world is talking about really was palpable at CES this year. Here’s a 6 minute video tour of the world’s biggest technology event highlighting most of the VR and AR devices on show.
Previously only available online from Samsung, the Gear VR mobile headset is now available in the US from Best Buy, one of the country’s largest electronics retailers.
Fiction plays a unique role in the formation of technology, often times giving far flung ideas a safe space to grow without being held too close to the light of ration or practicality. There’s no better example of this (to us) than VR, which has found a hospitable niche in Japanese manga and anime far before the first developer kit ever shipped from Oculus. Here we take a look at 3 anime series that we think will become fundamental viewing experiences when looking back on the time when you couldn’t just pop into another world.
Yesterday Oculus revealed that it had formed ‘Story Studio’, an internal team dedicated to experimenting with real-time CG VR cinema. Today the company has put out a promo video which reveals that the studio has five VR short films in the works for 2015.
Apparently bound by the fate of our names, Ben Gilbert, Ben Kuchera, and myself gathered ’round the virtual table to chat VR on the pilot episode of Three Bens in VR podcast.
NextVR has completed yesterday what they’re calling “the first ever live, broadcast quality transmission of a virtual reality experience,” a live-streaming, 180 degree video designed especially for VR headsets. The transmission virtually transported Engadget’s Senior HD Editor, Richard Lawler, from his icy Ann Arbor, Michigan abode to the sunny beaches of Laguna, California.
See Also: NextVR’s Stereoscopic 360-degree VR Cam Uses $180,000 Worth of RED 6K Cameras
NextVR is best known for their recent collaboration with Coldplay in their Ghost Stories Virtual Reality Concert Experience, a 360 degree video (also called ‘panoramic video’) featuring a performance of the single A Sky Full of Stars. The experience is short, but offers a peak at the what the company’s end goal to eventually serve up real-time 3D panoramic video of live events: concerts, major-league sports, fashion shows, educational programming, almost anything with limited seating it seems.
In yesterday’s beach-side transmission, Engadget’s Richard Lawler was virtually plopped into the 75 degree sands of Laguna Beach, California, using a Samsung Gear VR to receive the virtual video. Lawler reports that “there was still the occasional hitch in the frame, but that wasn’t enough to send me back to the reality of Michigan’s near-freezing temperatures.”
In their first public demonstration of the technology, NextVR opted to use a camera setup that offered a visual field of 180 degrees, sending 6K resolution at 80 frames per second. The footage was captured with a stereoscopic camera system that was also said to record “the 3D geometry of a location… the shape, size and distance of all the objects in the captured scene as well as the size of the environment.” This 3D effect however is only possible on headsets without positional tracking, i.e. only supporting the type of tracking available on DK1 and Samsung Gear VR at the moment.
The platform is currently focusing on delivering low bit-rate video (down to 4 mbps) so that viewers can even stream over cell networks to their mobile VR devices, including Samsung Gear VR as well as tethered VR headsets—a smart move by NextVR to get as many people to their service as possible.
See Also: NextVR Raises $5 Million for Live VR Broadcast Tech, Content to Come Pre-loaded on Samsung Gear VR
Dave Cole, Co-founder, of NextVR says their technology “opens up a whole world of possibilities for virtual reality. Imagine if you could have stood on the moon with Neil Armstrong as he took his first step. With this advancement, you WILL be virtually teleported to Mars as mankind takes our first step there.”
Although the term ‘broadcast quality’ used by the company is pretty ambiguous—even less precise than when talking about ‘HD’ when applied to 2D video—NextVR is most likely erring on the side of caution by not throwing too many foreign terms at the uninitiated, which is more than forgivable considering the difficult inroads associated with selling people a new way to consume media.
In the early days, it appeared that Oculus was taking a hardware and platform approach—’if you build it, [content creators] will come.’ But now with some 250 employees and the backing of Facebook, Oculus has begun working on first-party games, and is now experimenting with cinematic VR experiences in a newly revealed internal ‘Story Studio’ group. The first glimpse of the studio’s work, Lost, a CG VR short film, will be shown at this week’s Sundance Film Festival.
Unfortunately no cameras or phones were allowed inside the press’ special hands-on meeting with Microsoft HoloLens after the device’s announcement on Wednesday, so we can’t show you a single picture of the only verifiably working model of the new augmented reality headset. We do however have some first-hand accounts from the lucky few allowed into Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington headquarters for the meeting, who then got a little one-on-one time with a HoloLens prototype. The device has garnered a collective ‘the potential is awesome, but still needs some work’ vibe.
