The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 13, 2018

When I wrote my post about CES 2018 , I briefly talked about a headset called LooxidVR, able to “read the emotions” of the user by employing a combination of EEG sensors and eye tracking. Looxid VR has also won an innovation award at CES. The device has won the Innovation Award at CES (Image by Different Impulse). Today we are approaching CES 2019 and I have had the enormous pleasure of talking with Brian Chae, the CEO of Looxid Labs about his headset and the importance of Brain Comp

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VRScout

DECEMBER 11, 2018

The Vuze XR Dual Camera from HumanEyes Technology shipped out to its first customers in late November. Jim Malcolm, the General Manager for North America at HumanEyes , was previously involved with both the launching of one of the world’s first digital cameras as well as one of the first 360-degree cameras on the market. Now, he is helping to launch the first camera which can shoot in both 360 degrees and virtual reality. “I have committed most of my career to the imaging industry,&

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Road to VR

DECEMBER 11, 2018

VRgineers, a Czech Republic-based startup building enterprise VR headsets, today announced a more advanced version of their wide field of view (FOV) professional headset XTAL. The new version, which features a wider FOV thanks to a new pair of non-Fresnel lenses, will be making its debut at CES 2019. The upcoming version is said to incorporate proprietary non-Fresnel lenses that the company says will deliver “the clearest, most immersive VR experience to date.” With the new lenses co

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Tech Trends VR

DECEMBER 11, 2018

Sansar to Host Live Comedy Series of Shows with Steve Hofstetter. Fans will soon be able to step into a virtual Sansar comedy club and enjoy live stand-up shows by well-known comics such as YouTube star personality Steve Hofstetter – for a new event series called “Comedy Gladiators: a Virtual Comedy Experience.”. The live comedy showcase will allow fans to do everything in VR that they would do at a real-life comedy club Click To Tweet.

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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

The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 11, 2018

Today I want to propose you a quick solution for one big problem of the Vive Focus apps: the controller pairing popup always appearing in front of your eyes. The situation is this one: you launch the experience you have just developed with the Vive Focus and when you put the headset on your head, you see an enormous popup asking you to pair the controller occluding almost all your visuals.

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Road to VR

DECEMBER 12, 2018

Brisbane, Australia-based group #include today released a new app called ViewR that lets you observe a PC VR session in action from an Android mobile device. ViewR essentially inserts another camera into the VR game, letting a spectator hold up their Android phone or tablet to watch what’s going on, replete with positional tracking for the non-VR observer.

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Next Reality AR

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Owners of Google Pixel devices now have a plethora of imaginary friends to play with thanks to the Playground augmented reality app. The app, a rebrand of the AR Stickers app, launched as an exclusive app for the Google Pixel 3 and 3XL handsets in October. On Wednesday, Google unwrapped an update to the app on the Play Store, making the new features and its sticker packs, now known as Playmoji, available for previous-generation Pixel devices.

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The Ghost Howls

DECEMBER 10, 2018

Today I feature a very interesting blog post about Virtual Reality anime by Fedotov Maxim. If you like anime and you like virtual reality (as my buddy Max, to whom I dedicate this post), I’m sure that you will appreciate a lot this article. And if it is the case, don’t forget to join Fedotov’s VR Anime Society community! Have a nice reading… Anime industry always had a fascination with Virtual Reality.

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VRScout

DECEMBER 10, 2018

Have you ever wanted to jump through a mysterious portal and travel to a brand new universe where you loose all sense of space and time? LEGO Playgrounds, LEGO’s latest AR app-based channel , allows you to do precisely that. The LEGO Playgrounds portal is one of the latest LEGO digital innovations; a connected play experience designed to encourage kids and LEGO fans of all ages to create and interact with the physical and digital worlds.

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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

Road to VR

DECEMBER 14, 2018

IMAX shut down a number of its out-of-home VR Experience Centres a few months ago with the proviso that the company wouldn’t be making further investment into VR during 2019. What wasn’t certain at the time was the fate of the rest of its VR Centres. According to a recent Imax report filed with the SEC , the company is officially stepping away from VR with the closure of its three remaining locations.

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Next Reality AR

DECEMBER 10, 2018

Christmas has arrived early for ARCore app developers, as Google just unwrapped a few iterative improvements to the augmented reality toolkit in version 1.6. The first improvement comes in the form of improved lighting in Sceneform, Google's 3D rendering library for Javascript. Now, lighting defaults to ambient light to neutral or white shades, instead of yellow in previous versions.

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Cats and VR

DECEMBER 10, 2018

This Christmas, Square Enix is launching the Kingdom Hearts PSVR Experience they teased prior to Tokyo Game Show this year. The experience has around 10 minutes of content that allows you to relieve the history of the Kingdom Hearts series in VR. Cut scenes, music videos, and more will make up the Dec 25th release but the team does plan to support the VR experience with updates that will add more content heading towards the launch of Kingdom Hearts III.

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VRScout

DECEMBER 11, 2018

Scientists at Caltech are using AR to give objects in a room a voice, allowing the visually impaired to hear their surroundings. According to the World Health Organization , it is estimated that approximately 1.3 billion people around the globe live with some form of vision impairment. 217 million of those people having moderate to severe vision impairment, while 36 million people fall under the category of being legally blind.

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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

Road to VR

DECEMBER 12, 2018

Survios, a veteran VR game developer, shared fresh insights into the health of the company’s out-of-home business activities, a sector of the VR industry which has been increasingly heating up in the last 18 months. While the consumer VR space is still waiting for its inflection moment, 2018 has seen increasing interest in both VR enterprise and commercial sectors.

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Next Reality AR

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Augmented reality gaming company Niantic Labs is now instigating conflicts between Pokémon GO players, but it's not as bad as it sounds. On Wednesday, Niantic began rolling out the new Trainer Battles player versus player fight mode, starting first with players level 40 and above. Now, the rollout is complete, with the game mode available to all players level 10 and higher.

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Cats and VR

DECEMBER 14, 2018

BAFTA-winning independent British developer Supermassive Games is proud to announce Shattered State, an interactive cinematic thriller for Daydream. Developed in partnership with Google and published by Supermassive Games, Shattered State features a compelling storyline, blockbuster production values and a branching narrative to deliver an immersive gaming experience that sets the benchmark for cinematic VR gaming on mobile devices.

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Google Gaming Technology Course 101

VRScout

DECEMBER 8, 2018

Altspace, the popular social VR app that is most notably compatible with both 3DOF and 6DOF VR headsets, is becoming efficient for users looking to get groups of people to connect and organize within VR. On a technical level, AltspaceVR has received a series of updates designed for event organizers to host audiences on stages that can be broadcast to several consecutive “overflow rooms”, allowing hundreds of AltspaceVR users to attend the same events simultaneously.

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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

Road to VR

DECEMBER 10, 2018

SpicyTails , the studio behind VR anime experience Project LUX (2018) , recently launched a Kickstarter for their latest VR project, Spice & Wolf VR. After having reached their initial funding goal of ¥8,000,000 (~$70,800) in the Kickstarter’s first 24 hours, the campaign has now hit the 200% fulfillment mark. While the project tripled its funding goal on Japanese crowdfunding platform Campfire in relatively short order, it wasn’t certain if Spice & Wolf VR would see the

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Next Reality AR

DECEMBER 11, 2018

When the announcement of the Cheddar app for Magic Leap first went out on Tuesday morning, the app was not available on my updated Magic Leap One (located in New York City). However, after checking throughout the day, I can confirm that the app is now live. The free app downloaded very quickly and launched immediately with no problem, so I thought it might be good to give you a quick first impression of the app and how it works.

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Cats and VR

DECEMBER 11, 2018

GUNGRAVE VR , the virtual reality shooter featuring third- and first-person gameplay modes and designs from original character designer Yasuhiro Nightow ( Trigun ), and the standalone episode 2 GUNGRAVE VR U.N in North America for PlayStation®VR on the PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system. GUNGRAVE VR is available for $29.99 and the standalone GUNGRAVE VR U.N for $14.99 on the PlayStation®Store, or get the combined “ Loaded Coffin Edition ” bundle, which includes both titles together, for

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VRScout

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Stepping through into another dimension is easy, but can you get out in time? It’s always interesting to see what types of games become popular as a relativaly new platform continues to expand. And it’s often not what you’d expect. Even as AAA graphics and high-speed Internet access on smart devices became ubiquitous, it was relatively simple games like FarmVille, Candy Crush, and Angry Birds that would eventually steal the show, glueing millions of people to their screens.

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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

Road to VR

DECEMBER 14, 2018

Ready to get in the holiday spirit? Echo Games just pushed an update to Rift exclusive Echo VR that has transformed the lobby into a ‘Winter Village’, including a few holiday-themed avatar customizations and plenty of Christmas cheer for all. In-keeping with the shitty-Christmas-sweater fad, Echo VR also now has new avatars replete with knit patterns, a gingerbread man emote, and reindeer decal—all of it unlockable by competing in either one match of Echo Arena or Echo Combat duri

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Charlie Fink

DECEMBER 12, 2018

2019 is shaping up to be the year VR invades public spaces like malls, family entertainment centers, and theme parks.

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Entertainment 108

Cats and VR

DECEMBER 14, 2018

In A Fisherman’s Tale , you live a cozy, isolated life until one day you realize you’re just a little wooden puppet trapped inside the model of a lighthouse! Worse, the model is replicated inside and out on an infinite recursive loop. Luckily, you quickly find out you can collaborate with none other than yourself to solve the multi-dimensional riddles that pave the way to discovering your true reality.

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VRScout

DECEMBER 12, 2018

Make some noise in a VR experience inspired by histories greatest women’s rights activists. In this day and age, one could be forgiven for being somewhat disillusioned with democracy, but still, come election time, I always vote. One of the reasons I do that without fail is because I figure that, as a woman, traveling a short distance to put a few ticks on a ballot (or even doing it from the comfort of my own home) is really the least I can do to honour the sacrifice made by people like Em

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Speaker: Micah Eppler, Account Executive for Rehearsal of eLearning Brothers

Did you know that companies such as Paychex, 3M, and Honeywell are getting better results by incorporating video-based practice and coaching within their L&D strategy? From sales pitches to soft skills, learners are becoming top performers by applying and validating knowledge transfer using the unique benefits of video. Whether used as a stand-alone application or integrated with a learning platform, video-based practice and coaching platforms give learners the ultimate opportunity to repeatedly

Video