VRScout

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Last Friday I drove to San Francisco’s North Beach, headed to a venue called HACK Temple —a newly renovated space (and organization) with the aim of helping future-forward thinkers “hack the matrix of Silicon Valley.” In its off hours, HACK Temple looks like this: But during ARTandVR—a sold-out show of 500+ positioning itself at the intersection of art, technology, and consciousness—it looked like this: …and this: Safe to say this was anything but a typical Friday night.

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Road to VR

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Valve today announced the Steam Audio SDK, a spatial audio plugin that the company says is made is designed to “enhance all interactive products, specifically VR applications.” The company has launched a beta of the SDK today supporting Unity, and support for Unreal Engine is on the way. Realistic sound is an important but often underappreciated aspect of the immersion equation in VR.

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Valve today released a new tool called Steam Audio that represents the fruit of its purchase of Impulsonic in January. The tech promises sound which very realistically responds to a virtual environment and would serve as an improvement over the standard 3D audio. In the demo video below you can hear the audio change as a player moves around a virtual room.

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Road to VR

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Although the Samsung Galaxy S8 may not make its big entrance at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next week, the company will however be presenting a few new VR/AR projects coming direct from their in-house incubator Creative Lab (C-Lab). Just recompense? Maybe not, but there’s at least two in the bunch that ought to raise an eyebrow—and all of them will undoubtedly explode your computer’s spellcheck.

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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

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Many concept vehicles over the years have teased the idea of utilizing augmented reality in the windshields, glass dashboard panels, and even side windows. When it comes to VR, Faraday Future is one of the most recent that have flirted with the technology by using the platform to design their connected car. Audi wants to use VR to give us a chance to make our childhood dreams a reality by allowing customers to test drive the new Audi Q5 on a virtual track they design in a sandbox.

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017

I’m scared of roller coasters. Not heights, not speed, not intricate examples of mechanical engineering: roller coasters. I am specifically, and dreadfully, terrified or riding roller coasters. This is the story of me riding a roller coaster. Gulp. Last week, my wife and I were invited by the folks over at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo California to stop by for a preview of their brand new attraction.

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Road to VR

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Tilt Brush is Google’s first VR app to launch on the Oculus Rift , and I had a chance to catch up with Tilt Brush product manager Elisabeth Morant. We have a broad discussion about adapting Tilt Brush for the Touch controllers, the Tilt Brush Artist in Residency Program, the Tiltbrush Unity Toolkit, and some of the features coming in the future potentially including a layering system and more non-intuitive and unexpected features similar to audio reactive brushes.

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Studio Wildcard’s ARK Survival Evolved might not be the best fit for VR. That’s probably why Ark Park exists. This spin-off of the popular survival game is on the way to the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and PlayStation VR (PSVR) later this year. This week, Wildcard and Ark Park developer Snail Games posted the first look at gameplay for the title, played on the Vive, shot in mixed reality (though released a little too soon to take advantage of Google’s new face-rendering software) an

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Cats and VR

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Cyan Inc., makers of the legendary Myst and Riven franchise, announced today that its critically-acclaimed sci-fi adventure game, Obduction, will become available on HTC Vive and Touch for Oculus Rift on March 22 on Steam, GOG, Humble Store, and the Oculus Store for $29.99, in a feature-rich package that includes all platforms released to date, including Mac which is coming soon.

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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

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Lower-priced cameras from long-time motion tracking company Optitrack could slash as much as 40 percent off the cost to track VR headsets and accessories over very large areas. The price cut could accelerate the roll-out of out-of-home VR experiences like The Void. The Void covers very large regions with Optitrack cameras overhead to find the locations of people, controllers or other objects that are part of the overall story.

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Slashgear

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

GDC and MWC are just around the corner, and Qualcomm is diving head-first into virtual reality with a new dev-kit and hand-tracking technology. The chipmaker may be best known for its smartphone processors, but that same silicon is just as much at home in head-mounted displays. Indeed, the Snapdragon 835 is the centerpiece of Qualcomm‘s new Virtual Reality Development Kit. … Continue reading.

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Cyan’s Obduction [ Review: 8/10 ] was one of the best games released on the Oculus Rift last year, and soon HTC Vive owners will get to enjoy it too. The developer behind classic adventure games like Myst and Riven today announced that its latest title will be hitting the SteamVR headset on March 22nd. At the same time, the Rift version will also be updated with Touch controls.

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AllThingsVR

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

SVRFing The Web: The Best Way to Search and Discover Virtual Reality (VR) Content on the Internet SVRF enables the discovery of VR content right from your desktop or mobile web browser. Want to just see the best new VR content every day? Check out our Daily Top section that is curated to deliver new, trending, and high-quality VR experiences to you every day.

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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

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017

ZeniMax filed for a proposed judgment and final injunction in its $500 million case against Oculus. The company proposed Oculus be “permanently enjoined, on a worldwide basis, from using…any of the Copyrighted Materials, including but not limited to (i) system software for Oculus PC (including the Oculus PC SDK); (ii) system software for Oculus Mobile (including the Oculus Mobile SDK); (iii) Oculus integration with the Epic Games Unreal Engine; and (iv) Oculus integration with the

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Slashgear

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Virtual reality, and really even augmented reality, is a very personal experience in the sense that only the one wearing it can really appreciate what’s happening. In fact, only the one wearing it can actually see what’s going on, with spectators left imagining. With some age-old “green screen” Hollywood magic, some 3D modeling, and eye tracking, Google has devised a … Continue reading.

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Augmented reality company Zappar wants to make it easy for developers to deliver AR and VR content on mobile. Today, it’s raised a significant amount of funding to help it do so. The company announced the closure of a Series A round of funding in which it raised $3.75 million. Investors included iDreamSky, a China-based app developer, along with Hargreave Hale and You & Mr Jones, an investor in Pokemon Go developer Niantic.

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Everything VR & AR

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Dallas VRARA Chapter President and Digital Strategist for Groove Jones , Gary Glass joins Kevin to talk about some of the latest things going on at Groove Jones and in the Dallas area as the chapter continues to move forward and grow. Gary also shares what led him to pursue a position with a VR/AR company along with some reasons why he is involved in an upcoming company called VrontRow and how they aim to provide a variety of different experiences in a variety of entertainment industries and mor

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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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FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Back in August we reported that HTC was holding its first very Viveport Developer Awards to recognize VR content on its own digital storefront. Six months on, we finally have the first batch of winners. A total of five categories featured in the awards. They’re mostly named after the types of experiences their nominees offer, including Explore, Create, Connect, and Experience, along with a user-voted Community Choice Award.

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VRScout

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

The reimagined paintings bring you face to face with Magritte’s gently growling lion and soaring past Dali’s horse and cart. Auction house Sotheby’s is letting you step inside some of the works on sale during their Surrealist Art Evening sale exhibition at New Bond Street in London. The four auction highlight pieces include the illusory perceptions of a Spanish plain in Salvador Dalí’s 1930s masterpiece, Moment de transition, the enigmatic dreamscape of Paul Delvaux’s Jeunes filles au bord de l’

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UploadVR Between Realities podcast

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

The VR ecosystem is flush with experiences that can completely shatter our perceptions, bringing us into incredibly realistic or fantastic worlds and giving us devastating weapons or abilities. Other more quaint experiences can project a sense of comfort so solid, we can forget that we’re even wearing a VR headset altogether like one of our writers when he got a hands-on opportunity with Magic Table Chess.

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VRScout

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Valve reveals it’s opened up its VR platform to Linux game developers among a bounty of other announcements. Valve and Linux have been an ongoing partnership for years, so it was only a matter of time until SteamVR made its way to the niche, yet incredibly open-ended operating system. Well the day has finally come as Valve has officially released ‘ SteamVR for Linux ,’ a new program that will finally allow Linux developers to create virtual reality content for the HTC Vive.

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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

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Superhot [ Review: 9/10 ] is easily one of the best Oculus Touch titles available today. The beautiful art direction, ingenious gameplay mechanic of time only moving when you do, and creative puzzle environments all add up to one of the most memorable and enjoyable adaptations for VR we’ve seen thus far. Naturally, when the Make it Superhot Game Jam was announced, it came as no surprise.

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Road to VR

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Everyone in the VR industry can envision a world in the next 10 years that’s radically changed by virtual reality. From healthcare, education, social, training, cinema, gaming, and more, VR has a lot of Killer Use-cases. But it seems most of the industry is in agreement that the Killer App —a single, platform-defining piece of software that compels buyers—has not yet arrived.

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UploadVR Between Realities podcast

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

The great thing about VR games is that they can take the most seemingly trivial action and turn it into an immersive gameplay mechanic. Games like Bounce create an entire multi-hour adventure out of trying to get a ball into a hole. Audioshield asks you to punch colored orbs. And now Symphony of the Machine , an upcoming VR puzzle game by Stirfire Studios , wants you to bounce light off of mirrors to trigger a weather changing device.

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Road to VR

FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Zappar, a London-based developer in the Augmented Reality space, is announcing the closing of its Series A funding round. The $3.75m investment will accelerate the development of several new products along with increased support for ZapWorks , their flagship content creation tool. Having worked with over 200 partners from the retail, television, film and packaged goods industries including Warner Bros, Coca-Cola and Manchester City Football Club, Zappar is a leading developer of Augmented Realit

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Speaker: Bruce Armstrong Taylor, Co-Founder & Managing Director of SmartNations Foundation, Jimmy Jia, Venture Partner at Pi Labs, Fabienne Durand, Senior Advisor to the SmartNations Foundation, & Roger Strukhoff, Executive Director of the Tau Institute

The Climate 4.0 Economy. Climate change is here. We see it in many ways already. Weather catastrophes: Texas freezing over, the wildfires of California, the increasingly unpredictable violence and frequency of hurricanes, the rapid melting and disappearance of polar ice caps. Much more evidence all around us. What can we do in our corporate organizations, in our homes and communities, to change the current course?

Texas