Voices of VR Podcast
SMI Talks Eye Tracking VR Applications & Foveated Rendering
Sensomotoric Instruments (SMI) is a German-based eye tracking company who has released an eye tracking kit for the Oculus DK2 & Gear VR, and most recently for the HTC Vive. At SIGGRAPH this year, Nvidia was showing a foveated...
‘TheWaveVR’ Co-founder on His Rave & Interactive Concert Platform
TheWave VR coordinated two days worth of DJs playing musical sets in the world's first VR Rave at VRLA. It was TheWave's first event since announcing that they raised a round of $2.5 million to build out an interactive,...
Sketchfab: Largest Social Media Site for 3D Objects Adds VR Navigation
Originally launched in 2012, Sketchfab has grown to be the largest social media website for sharing 3D objects and scenes with over 500,000 members and close to 1 million experiences. At SIGGRAPH, Sketchfab launched their VR browser to be...
Highlights from the SIGGRAPH 2016 VR Village with Denise Quesnel
There was a VR Village again this year at the SIGGRAPH 2016 conference where a lot of experimental interactive technologies were on display. I had a chance to talk to the program chair Denise Quesnel about some of the content...
Amazon’s VR-capable Lumberyard Game Engine Sustained by AWS Cloud Services
Back in February, Amazon announced that they had purchased and forked Crytek's CryEngine and made the full source code available in a free AAA VRgame engine offering called Lumberyard. The only catch is that if you want to use...
VR Design Best Practices with Google VR’s Alex Faaborg
At the company's annual I/O conference, Google announced the Daydream VR platform and mobile headset that will be coming to the latest Android phones later this year. There's a DIY dev kit that you can start using today to...
Documenting the Evolution of VR Headsets with Zenka’s Sculptures
The artist Zenka has been documenting the evolution of virtual reality by making raku sculptures of VR headsets. She's also created an interactive timeline of some of the major VR and AR headsets. Technology has been progressing so quickly that...
Khronos Group President Neil Trevett on glTF: The ‘JPEG for 3D Objects’
The Khronos Group announced that the open standard of glTF was gaining momentum by some of the key players within the graphics industry before SIGGRAPH this year. glTF provides a standardized baseline and interchange format to deliver 3D content...
Telling Stories in VR with Improv Acting and ‘Mindshow’
At VRLA Summer Expo 2016, Visionary VR premiered Mindshow, an interactive storytelling platform which allows users to animate and voice characters by inhabiting those character's bodies.
I had a chance to catch up with Visionary VR and VRLA co-founder Cosmo Scharf,...
Overcoming Fears of Public Speaking with ‘Speech Center VR’
Cerevrum is building an ambitious educational platform starting with training people to become better public speakers with Speech Center VR. The basic mechanic is that you stand in a variety of different virtual rooms in front of an animated crowd...
NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH: New Quadro GPUs, AI, & the Future of Interactive Ray Tracing
SIGGRAPH is a popular place for GPU manufacturers to announce new versions of professional graphics cards designed for the visual effects industry and high-end virtual reality content producers in architectural visualization and engineering. NVIDIA announced two new 'Pascal' GPUs including the Quadro...
Social Presence & Training Social Dynamics with Virtual Humans
Team training scenarios are often difficult due to the logistics involved with coordinating many different people's schedules. One solution has been to use virtual humans as stand-ins for actual humans in team training scenarios where the conversation is mediated...
‘Headmaster’ & Why the Physics of Stuff Flying at Your Face is so Compelling in VR
When Ben Throop went to the Boston VR hackathon in June 2014, he didn't know that Valve was going to be showing off some prototype VR hardware that had positional tracking. At this point the Oculus DK2 had not...
Research on VR Presence & Plausibility with VR Technical Achievement Award Winner Anthony Steed
One of the gold standards of a VR experience is being able to achieve Presence, but Presence is an elusive concept to precisely define. Mel Slater is one of the leading researchers into Presence and says that it's a combination...
AMD’s Roy Taylor on New GPUs, Tools, & Consumer VR Pods
I had a chance to catch up with AMD's Roy Taylor, VP of Alliances, Content, and VR, at VRLA to hear more about AMD's recent announcements, their open source philosophy, their support for VR storytellers, and the upcoming VR...
