Road to VR

MAY 3, 2017

As one of the first game genres to embrace VR, sim racing has been successfully transitioning from the ‘very early adopter’ stage (using Oculus development kits) to the ‘early adopter’ stage (the first-generation consumer headsets). Now that the majority of PC racing sims support VR, there are several compelling options to try. Update (5/3/17): Complete overhaul to listing now that consumer versions of the Rift and Vive have launched and most major sims have added VR support.

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UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

Tracking Amazon’s work in VR can be tricky, as the company is famously quiet in response to media inquiries while seemingly being involved in multiple areas. The company is helping to make VR games with its Lumberyard development engine, and appears to be interested in VR video for its streaming service. But what about when it comes to its juggernaut online store?

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Road to VR

MAY 3, 2017

IMR is one of several companies creating technology to enable a future where high-end VR headsets can break free of the tether that keeps them connected to the host PC. The company’s secret sauce is their proprietary compression algorithm which they say is made-for-VR, allowing for huge compression at much faster speeds than traditional video compression technology.

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Latency Data HTC Technology 230

UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

If someone told me back in 2012 that Tupac was going to be the surprise guest at Coachella, I would have asked them where they bought their LSD. When Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were joined on stage by Pac’s hologram, the crowd lost their minds. (Except for the Tupac-is-Alive conspiracy theorists, who sighed a collective “I told you so.”) For a lot of people, the iconic performance was the first time they’d ever seen a hologram in real life.

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Speaker: Chris Paxton McMillin, President of D3 Training Solutions

To avoid awkward and sometimes disastrous learning content, instructional designers must use authentic translation in the right context to get optimal results. For example, even a simple phrase like “got milk” translates to “are you lactating” in Mexico. Can you imagine what a straight translation might do to your course? With over 317 million people in the US and over 6.7 billion potential customers in the world, personalizing training seems logical.

Mexico

Road to VR

MAY 3, 2017

By now it’s trite to call any CG VR film studio “the Pixar of VR,” but one reason for that pervasive comparison is that Pixar’s waxy-textured, brightly-colored, hard-edged geometry has become a dominant style for big-budget CG films. But we hear over and over about how ‘VR is a completely new medium’; doesn’t it deserve a new look?

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Filming Construction Video 225

UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

Early last month we published a story about Chris Hewish, the former Head of Studio at Raw Data and Sprint Vector developer Survios, leaving the VR company. According to both parties it was a completely amicable parting performed purely for growth-related business reasons as both looked to continue moving in separate directions. Now we know where Hewish is headed next: Skydance Media.

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VRScout

MAY 3, 2017

This post is part of an ongoing series about writing, storytelling, and critique in VR, in partnership with Galatea , a writing and project management tool for immersive stories. Aaron Koblin has spent the past decade working on some of the most innovative interactive storytelling projects on the planet. In 2014, that trajectory culminated in co-founding Within (known at the time as Vrse) with longtime collaborator Chris Milk.

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UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

PlayStation’s Magic Lab R&D team is one of the major reasons why PlayStation VR (PSVR) exists. Sadly the team’s work with a Minority Report-style input glove didn’t get as far. Speaking at this week’s GamesBeat Summit, Magic Lab’s Dr. Richard Marks, a man instrumental in the creation of PSVR, revealed a quick look at a prototype version of these gloves, as reported by VentureBeat. “We’ve created a lot of different prototypes,” Marks said on-stage. &#

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Cats and VR

MAY 3, 2017

Perplexigon is a multiplayer collaborative block building game out on Steam Greenlight looking for a chance to come home to your VR hearts. The game is an immersive multiplayer VR physics sandbox game in where you choose from a toolbox of blocks and joints to create anything from castles to complex remote controlled rockets. Use the tracked Vive or Oculus Touch controllers along with seated or room-scale tracking to fully move around your constructions and build them quickly and intuitively.

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Gaming Construction Controllers Immersion 100

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With a rapidly changing economy, Avangrid Renewables looked to virtual reality to develop a standardized form of immersive training in order to onboard and upskill technicians faster than ever before.

Virtual Reality

UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

If someone told me back in 2012 that Tupac was going to be the surprise guest at Coachella, I would have asked them where they bought their LSD. When Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were joined on stage by Pac’s hologram, the crowd lost their minds. (Except for the Tupac-is-Alive conspiracy theorists, who sighed a collective “I told you so.”) For a lot of people, the iconic performance was the first time they’d ever seen a hologram in real life.

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Virtual Reality 360 Video AR Video 136

Cats and VR

MAY 3, 2017

Now You See Me: Back to Macau is the first major hidden object game in VR and features 6 challenging, adventurous missions. The game is based on the global blockbuster Now You See Me film franchise from Lionsgate. The player assumes the role of Special Agent Price, assigned to find the whereabouts of the “Four Horsemen” band of magicians depicted in the film, who have disappeared yet again after another narrow escape.

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Gaming Entertainment Filming Virtual Reality 100

UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

Ultrahaptics , founded in 2013, specializes in a technology that provides haptic feedback without needing to wear or touch any type of gear. Called “mid-air haptics”, it uses ultrasound to project sensations onto users so they feel buttons and objects. With the recent series B funding round of $23 million, the company will be expanding globally and initiating entries into the VR and AR industries as well.

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Haptic AR Groups Technology 133

Slashgear

MAY 3, 2017

As if it weren’t enough to have the equivalent of a smartphone strapped to your head, Vive, the HTC-owned VR company, is finding more things to add to that contraption. It is, at least, calling it a “deluxe” strap, so you know it can only be good. The Vive Deluxe Audio Strap promises a more ergonomic way to put on, … Continue reading.

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HTC Virtual Reality 79

Speaker: Richard Goring, Director at BrightCarbon

Remote meetings are here to stay - and many are BORING. If you are trying to engage your learners (or any audience), compelling content is critical. But trying to create stimulating content with the same tools you’ve always had is hard, right? Thankfully, wrong! Terrific tools in PowerPoint along with visual assets help you create the kind of dynamic content you need to capture your remote audience’s attention, with functions that allow for interactive sequences and navigation.

How To

UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

Anything that you can do to get the price down for entering into the VR sphere is a good idea. When the PlayStation VR (PSVR) headset released last October, the options were a bit confusing. The $400 core version included only the headset and its breakout processing box, but didn’t include the camera (which is necessary for it to work at all) or any PlayStation Move controllers, which some games support and many games encourage.

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VRWorld

MAY 3, 2017

After several weeks of detailed and less detailed leaks, Xiaomi’s Mi 6 smartphone launched at the tail end of April. Couple of months ago, we did a wild rumor article that you can read here and by looking at the final product, we can see that we were not far off. Actually, not at all. Design. Let us start with the phone’s appearance. The Mi 6 leaked through and through ahead of its debut, but most of the leaks showed just the black version.

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Construction Samsung Sony Simulation 45

UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

User-generated content might be a common feature of many games these days, but you could argue that its inception was kick started by Sony’s LittleBigPlanet series. Unity is hoping that, one day, something will do the same for VR. Unity CEO John Riccitiello said as much to UploadVR in an interview at this week’s Vision Summit. We asked Riccitiello about the company’s two experimental in-VR development tools, Carte Blanche and EditorVR.

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VRWorld

MAY 3, 2017

There’s no denying that the Indian movie industry is one of world’s leading cinemas, and one of most productive industries in the world. The amount of Bollywood movies that are coming out is just staggering, and easily beats Chinese or the American production capabilities. However, the need to support multiple languages (Hindu, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu – barely any English) caused strain on the budgets, limiting the directors vision.

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Speaker: Nik Gowing, Brenda Laurel, Sheridan Tatsuno, Archie Kasnet, and Bruce Armstrong Taylor

With 191 country signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement now hard at work in the race to zero carbon by 2050, much of the heavy lifting in ecosystem sustainability falls on the shoulders of the world's densely populated urban centers. This conversation considers how today's AI-enabled simulation media, such as AR/VR, can be effectively applied to accelerate learning, understanding, training, and solutions-modeling to sustainability planning and design.

Simulation

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MAY 3, 2017

It’s appears to have been a period of big change for all major VR companies. Today, HTC is appointing a new General Manager for Vive in Europe in former Disney executive Paul Brown. Brown joins the company after five years at Disney, where he served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital D2C and Disney Interactive. He also spent a year and a half at Spotify as Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships.

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Europe HTC Industry Hardware 108

The Rift Arcade

MAY 3, 2017

Jumpscares, creepiness and more await in this effective horror experience. Looking for a new creepy experience for the Rift? Séance: The Unquiet might be just what you’re looking for. A short five-minute video was released today both in the Oculus Store and on Steam, and it uses a combination of Unreal Engine graphics and motion capture to bring a Séance experience to life.

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UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

There I was fulfilling yet another childhood fantasy with the help of VR. I was driving my own train, complete with hat and occasional coal-shoveling. Every once in a while I’d treat myself to the kiddish glee of pulling a chord and letting my mechanical wonder whistle out across the dense forest that surrounded me. I was having a lovely time, but then a drone had to go and shoot me.

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Training Gaming Examples HTC 105

UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

A few days ago I was playing H1Z1: Just Survive alone and it was horrifying. For those unaware, the game is a lot like other survival games available for PC on Steam, such as DayZ , Rust , Ark: Survival Evolved , Conan Exiles , and more. The premise is that it’s the middle of the zombie apocalypse and you must scrounge up supplies to get by, teaming up with and killing other players along the way.

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Speaker: Treion Muller, Chief Strategy Officer at ELB Learning

Since when has learning and development (L&D) become such a negative experience with its intended learners? Could it be because learners have been conditioned by very poor learning experiences over the past two decades, combined with the kinks of technological innovation? Or is it because learning has typically been designed as a one-size-fits-all solution, despite the fact that humans are not clones?

Technology

UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

I’m ready to proclaim Facebook Spaces the killer app that VR has been waiting for. Despite owning every single consumer VR headset since the Oculus Rift DK1, there has been nothing out there that drew me back into VR day after day. Until Spaces. Since its release I’ve spent a couple hours just about every day goofing off in the incredible social VR world of Facebook Spaces with my VR friends from around the world.

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UploadVR Between Realities podcast

MAY 3, 2017

This year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (e3 2017) will officially begin on Tuesday, June 13th, and run until Thursday, June 15th, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. However, we all know E3 actually occupies that entire week. We’ve already mixed copious amounts of Airborne, orange juice, and espresso together to prepare our bodies for what’s to come.

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