/vir/ - Virtual Reality

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17005/palmer-luckey-explains-oculus-rifts-constellation-tracking-and-fabric/

Plenty of new details about the consumer Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) were revealed last week at the company’s pre-E3 show in San Francisco, California. In particular, creator Oculus VR talked about a brand new constellation tracking system to deliver positional tracking for users, along with the ergonomics of the device, which is wrapped in fabric. As it turns out, the material used to cover the kit also plays a key role making that new tracking system possible.

Oculus VR founder and Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey explained as much during an interview on Youtube today. “So we call it a constellation tracking system,” Luckey noted. “We actually have an external sensor that mounts and it can detect the infrared light that is in the headset. We’ve actually got a constellation of infrared, LED light emitters underneath the fabric, and this fabric is actually infrared transparent so it looks black to us but the infrared light, it passes right through.”

When asked house this differed to the last prototype for the Oculus Rift, dubbed Crescent Bay, Luckey replied: “Crescent Bay has holes drilled in plastic to let the light out, we’ve actually made this using a combination of textiles and plastic to make it really lightweight and durable and also it allows it hide all of the LED features rather than them being really visible.”

The Oculus Rift is due to launch in the first quarter of 2016, though pricing and a more specific release date for the device are yet to be announced.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17076/new-osvr-dev-kit-gets-positional-tracking-android-support-announced/

It’s been a busy E3 for virtual reality (VR) technology so far. VR enthusiasts have already seen updates from the likes of Oculus VR, Sony Computer Entertainment, and, to some extent, Valve, but now it’s time to turn attention to the developer-focused VR kit from Open-Source Virtual Reality (OSVR). This unique ecosystem was announced all the way back in January with its own OSVR Hacker Dev Kit, designed as a cheap and simple head-mounted display (HMD) for VR development. Today, the group has revealed updates to that HMD which include positional tracking.

OSVR has announced the OSVR Hacker Dev Kit version 1.2, which has been approved for distribution and is now being sent out for free to a number of ‘selected developers’. The main addition here is the introduction of IR positional tracking. An IR upgrade kit will be available to those that own previously editions of the device. The tracking technology is said to feed positional information at 100 Hz over 360 degrees. A table, seen below, lists the individual components seen in the different versions of the device along with pricing and release dates.

Elsewhere, OSVR has detailed new modules coming to the HMD that will add a wide range of support. It was already known that a new module with Leap Motion wireless hand-tracking is coming, though another is set to increase the Field of View (FOV) of the kit to 150 degrees, provided by Wearailty. Also on the way is a Mobile Faceplate, which will allow OSVR users to combine the HMD with a wide number of smartphones running on the Android operating system (OS). Android support also arrives in a software update as does direct support of external VRPN servers, a Windows Installer update, and additional support documentation.

In terms of new members, OSVR is adding Alchemy Learning, A-Volute, Big Bonsai Gms, Cineveo, Corelabs, Coretronic Corporation, Dolphin, Ghost Machine, Kermdinger Studios, Inc, MAG Studios, Manus Machina, MergVR, MureVR, NeuroDigital Technologies, NivalVR, Perception Nueron, Virt, Virtulify, VimersiV, Wearality, Voxelnauts and 3DiVi company to its every-growing list.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17095/epic-games-co-founder-on-oculus-touch-they-absolutely-nailed-it/

Arguably the biggest surprise of Oculus VR’s pre-E3 show in San Francisco, California last week was the reveal of Oculus Touch. This brand new input device consists of two six degrees of freedom tracked controllers, each with their own buttons, triggers, and sticks. They even feature gesture recognition. It was certainly an exciting reveal but, with E3 2015 just hours away from opening its doors, few are yet to truly sample the concept and judge it. Someone that has been lucky enough to go hands-on with the kit is Epic Games Vice President and Co-Founder, Mark Rein.

The verdict? Rein was a big fan. “Just tried Oculus Touch “Half Moon” prototypes playing ToyBox demo #MadeWithUE4,” he noted on Twitter. “They absolutely nailed it!” An image of Rein using the device can be seen below. ‘#MadeWithUE4′ of course refers to Epic Games’ popular videogame development toolset, Unreal Engine 4. The ToyBox demo was also revealed by Oculus VR last week, and will be the piece that other E3 attendees get to sample with the Oculus Touch prototype controllers, dubbed ‘Half Moon’.

While the retail edition of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) will be releasing in the first quarter of 2016, Oculus Touch won’t be available until a little later on in the year, with a current release window of the first half of 2016. Pre-orders for the kit will go live at the same time as the Oculus Rift later in the year. The HMD itself will include an Xbox One controller to use in the meantime. Oculus Touch represents the company’s answer to its rivals input solutions, including the HTC Vive’s Room Scale system and PlayStation Move for Project Morpheus.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17120/oculus-touch-uses-two-cameras/

Now that the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is open and in full swing, the first images are now coming out from our team at the show. Oculus VR’s stand has already shown unveiled some interesting information regarding the in-house developed controller, Oculus Touch which was shown at last Thursdays press conference.

The Oculus Touch has two controllers both wireless, each with their own control sticks and buttons but what wasn’t known was how the movement of the controllers transferred in the virtual reality (VR) world.

Below are some images of the sensors for Oculus Touch. Two sensors are mounted in front of the player, around shoulder height and approximately over a shoulder width apart. How far apart isn’t clear, what the minimum or maximum distance is.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17146/hands-on-with-oculus-rift-cv1/

Oculus VR’s consumer version reveal at the ‘Step into the Rift’, San Francisco, did not hold any hands-on opportunities for attendees. Though we got to see many of the titles that will accompany the head-mounted display (HMD) and the reveal of the input devices – Xbox One controller at first, Oculus Touch to follow – actually experiencing them was not an option. That changed today as Oculus VR opened the floodgates at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Los Angeles, for all of the above.

VRFocus has already been hands-on with Oculus Touch and it’s associated Toybox software as we all know the full range of 9 launch window titles on show. We’ll get to those in time, but right now it’s all about the consumer version of the HMD, aka CV1.

The finish of the device is near immaculate. The soft-to-touch front end isn’t as thick an velvety as you might imagine; more a smooth coating than a thick sheet, the firm wrap-around straps feel more solid than the most recent prototype hardware, Crescent Bay, and the velcro attachment straps are certainly more accommodating of frequent wear and removal than the plastic clips of the DK1 and DK2 editions of the hardware. The HMD is a little weightier than the Crescent Bay, however when being worn it’s certainly not noticeable. The idea of being able to wear the device for hours on end without discomfort is finally an identifiable goal.

The power button on the underside of the HMD is perhaps a little misplaced, but once having established a relationship both in-and-out of VR it will surely become natural instinct not to accidentally hit the button. Additionally, the nose curve won’t be perfect for everybody of course, and can take some fiddling to get the alignment perfect for your face.

The most important part of the CV1 experience however, is how it actually feels when in the VR experiences it can provide. The head tracking is near flawless. In VRFocus‘ hour playtest with the device there was never a moment in which latency became an issue. Positional tracking seemed to be more limited than that of the Crescent Bay, however all of the experiences presented were seated. Of course, VRFocus took the opportunity to walk around as much as possible, but as the software didn’t react in the same way as that which is made for a standing experience, making the tracking hard to evaluate.

The screen resolution has, finally, reached a level where screendoor effect is no longer an issue. There is a small amount of pixilation but no more than a Nintendo 3DS screen held at a reasonable distance. Noticeable more in some of the videogame titles than offers, small black dots appear over brightly mono coloured textures, but it’s certainly far from the significant issue that it was with DK1 and DK2. Indeed, it may only be because VRFocus was actively assessing the screen that it was noticable.

Needless to say, CV1 is the Oculus Rift HMD that we had all been hoping for. It may be late to the table and it’s still not yet known just how much that meal is going to cost – nor how long we’ll have to wait for the motion-control input dessert – but finally Oculus VR is ready to turn off the oven. CV1 is undoubtedly an extremely high quality HMD and once again Oculus VR have taken a leading role in the field of VR.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17293/luckey-explains-microsoft-and-oculus-relationship-ensures-rift-just-works/

One of the most surprising announcements at Oculus VR’s pre-E3 show last week was the reveal of a relationship with Microsoft. The latter’s popular controller for the Xbox One and PC will be packaged in with the consumer Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) when it launches in Q1 2016, and the Windows 10 operating system (OS) will also allow players to stream Xbox One titles into a virtual cinema in the kit. But the relationship doesn’t stop there, as Oculus VR founder and Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey recently explained.

Speaking to IGN at E3 this week, Luckey detailed how close collaboration with the company on Windows 10 was ensuring that the Oculus Rift itself is a better overall product and that the OS is more capable of running VR experiences. “By working with Microsoft we’re able to get under the OS in a way that lets us reduce latency, and make sure that the Rift just works when you plug in, and that’s really critical,” he told the site.

“It also means that we can help them improve Direct X for VR so we can get all kinds of optimisations that are not necessarily parallel to the kind of optimisations you would make for a traditional 2D game. Like, for VR, you don’t want to have any buffered frames. You don’t want to render ahead. You want absolute minimal latency, almost at the expense of all other factors. And that’s something that we’ve been able to work with Microsoft to make happen for the Rift.”

Pricing for the Oculus Rift is yet to be revealed although Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe has previously suggested that an ‘all-in’ price that includes a PC to run the device would total around $1,500 USD. The pre-E3 show also played host to the reveal of Oculus VR’s input solution, Oculus Touch, which is at the show in Los Angeles, California, though not being shown on the consumer version of the Oculus Rift.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-palmer-luckey-explains-present-near-future-vr-e3/

During his many rounds of E3 interviews, Founder and inventor of the Oculus Rift Palmer Luckey discussed the present and near future of virtual reality. Here’s a quick recap of our favorite bits:

Luckey, donning an engineering sample of the new Oculus Rift, explained to Gameslice’s Geoff Keighley the differences between the new Rift and the previous DK2 model. Drawing emphasis on the Rift’s 2160×1200 90Hz across dual displays, Luckey continued the interview with the headset in place for nearly 3 minutes while Keighley threw Luckey for a loop and switched sides mid-explanation.

Luckey then addressed the current and future situation of launch titles for the Rift in regards to developer timelines:

“You want there to be titles for launch, but you also want there to be a pipeline… VR is going to be around for plenty of time….The real battle isn’t necessarily in making content, its convincing consumers and gamers that virtual reality is something they have to try.”

“It is the right time to get people excited… the [Oculus and Sony] booths don’t get bigger through vanity, they get bigger through practicality. You have to show people VR to understand it,” Luckey told Jeff Gerstman of Giant Bomb.

Responding to an open question from Max Scoville of IGN about the Rift’s PC requirements, Luckey said that eventually “virtual reality is going to move to a model where the headsets do all the rendering.”

Luckey compares the Rift’s development cycle to smartphones, saying that today’s bargain smartphones can outperform flagship models of the 2008-2009 era. “If you go 5 years into the future, you won’t be able to buy a headset at [the quality of the current Oculus Rift] for more than $100,” Luckey told Scoville.

Considering Apple’s iPhone 3G and HTC’s T-Mobile G1 were the big names in smartphones just 7 years ago—both sporting 480×320 screens and single core processors—VR has an exciting 5 years ahead of it.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17475/virtual-reality-theme-park-to-be-built-in-china/

Here at VRFocus there is an obvious love of all things virtual. Whether its mobile virtual reality (VR) like the Gear VR or Google Cardboard, tethered VR like the Oculus Rift or Project Morpheus and augmented reality (AR) care of Microsoft’s HoloLens.

So when a recent article on the Fortune website popped up about a VR/AR theme park it definitely caught the teams attention. The theme park is being built in China by Landmark Entertainment Group, a company known for creating Universal Studios theme park attractions like Kongfrontation, Terminator 2 3D, and The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man 5D.

Landmark Entertainment Group has developed the creative and design concept for the L.I.V.E. Centre (Landmark Interactive Virtual Experience), a combined VR and AR entertainment destination that will launch in China within the next three years.

CEO and Founder Tony Christopher described to Fortune how the company has spent the past 14 months exploring how virtual reality and augmented reality can be added to traditional entertainment like 3D, projection, surround sound, and special effects. The CEO states “With virtual reality we can put you in the African savannah or fly you into outer space,” going on to say, “This completely changes the idea of an old-fashioned museum by allowing kids to experience prehistoric dinosaurs or legendary creatures as we develop new experiences that keep them coming back for more. We’ll combine education and entertainment into one destination that’s always evolving.”

The eventual goal for Landmark Entertainment Group is a have 20 to 30 L.I.V.E centres around the world, but first there’s a few years to wait before the first one opens.

http://www.roadtovr.com/starvr-detailed-hands-on-big-field-of-view-even-bigger-potential/

We go hands on with the latest StarVR headset prototype from Starbreeze Studios, sporting a 210 degree field of view and dual quad-HD panels as demoed at E3 with Overkill’s The Walking Dead experience.

The InfinitEye team’s metamorphosis from part-time garage hackers to fully fledged VR industry players is a real rags-to-riches technology tale, one which we’ll detail in the near future for you. For now, know that InfinitEye—the 210 degree FOV VR headset—is reborn as StarVR, now part of Swedish developer Starbreeze Studio’s planned assault on the virtual reality entertainment space.

StarVR was launched this week alongside a dedicated made-for-VR experience based on the hugely popular The Walking Dead franchise and available this week at a dedicated stand just inside the LA Convention Center at E3 2015. Starbreeze’s cunningly located custom booth houses five demo pods, each comprising a StarVR headset, motion tracked pump-action shotgun, and… a wheelchair(?). You see, Starbreeze’s The Walking Dead VR offering goes the extra mile compared with most other virtual reality experiences present at E3 this year. The team wanted people to feel not only immersed but involved in the action, which means physical props and feedback.

Sitting down and donning StarVR and headphones, I’m immediately reminded of what impressed me so much back in 2013 when I visited the InfinitEye team in Toulouse, France. Your peripheral vision is, for all intents and purposes, entirely enveloped in the virtual world. The combination of StarVR’s gargantuan 210 degree horizontal and 135 degree vertical field of view really wraps your brain in a panoramic VR experience. This is StarVR’s killer unique selling point and it’s beyond anything you’ve tried before.

StarVR’s other main strength is of course its dual Quad HD panels, which delivers 2560 x 1440 pixels to each eye, that’s a staggering 5k horizontal resolution. The result? No appreciable screendoor effect whatsoever, something that bizarrely takes a little getting used to at first.

As the experience began though, some problems did emerge. But, whilst I’ll of course detail them in full, please bear in mind the system’s prototypical status and read through to my conclusion before judging too harshly.

Firstly, head tracking is provided by an onboard IMU for rotational tracking and a set of external fiducial markers, tracked by a motion camera mounted nearby, for positional tracking. Positional tracking is 360 degrees in this ‘outside-in’ style system and was chosen by the team for its ease of application for rapid prototyping. The shotgun you’re handed a little way into the experience sports two fiducial marked cubes, ideal for a positionally tracked input device.

During our time with the system, the LA sunshine was beaming through the convention centre’s glass atrium and was playing havoc with computer vision. According to the company, this was the cause of some distracting judder in the positional headtracking.

Suffice it to say however, this is unlikely to be the tracking system that will feature on the final, consumer headset. The StarVR team are considering all options right now, including the possibility of Valve’s Lighthouse amongst others. In any case, the team are aware of the current system’s deficiencies and are working hard to replace or enhance it as soon as they’re happy they’ve found the right fit.

>>923

As the action gets underway, the capabilities of Starbreeze’s proprietary game engine, ‘Valhalla’, come to the fore. As you’re wheeled in-game through a dilapidated hospital environment crawling with the undead, the scenery is beautifully lit, with the engine painting a detailed, oppressive environment. The team are proud of Valhalla, claiming its suitability and optimsations make it perfect for virtual reality development.

The advantage of an in-house engine is that the hardware and integration teams have low-level access to the engine’s code, which should mean tight hardware and software integration; something not to be sniffed at and something that could give Starbreeze a real edge when it comes to delivering compelling and comfortable content for StarVR.

Back to the action… after being handed that shotgun, you get to start meting out zombie death-justice to the ever growing hordes of undead, now coming at you from all angles. A pleasing surprise was that the shotgun, a modified air-soft device with retro-fitted fiducial markers, worked really well. The weapon it turns out was built by input specialists TrinityVR, and had a functional pump action mechanism for reloading. The tactile sensation when reloading, physically aiming the weapon, and then pulling the trigger is hard to beat and added enormously to overall the experience.

starvr e3 2015 walking dead (8)One aside regarding the Walking Dead experience was an interesting experiment on the team’s part in enhancing presence in a virtual space. Physical interaction turns out to be a subtle touch. During scenes where your wheelchair is being pushed by one of your teammates in the game, one of the demo’s handlers gently shakes the wheelchair to match. As daft as this may sound, it was supremely effective in rooting your physical presence in this virtual world; incredible how such a seemingly asinine interaction like this can trick your brain so well.

StarVR’s dual 5.5 inch, quad-HD (1440p) LCD panels run at 60Hz and (as the team will admit) are not ideal. LCD panels are prone to smearing which was in evidence here; without the OLED-enabled low persistence of vision, visuals in motion lacked the silky smooth action we’ve come to expect from VR headsets. Contrast and vibrancy was also lacking, again another artefact of LCD panels. The team tell us this is another aspect they are well aware of and will address, likely with OLED panels in a future iteration.

There was also a problem with convergence when in the headset, borne from the current prototype’s fixed IPD and the software set for a global audience (it’s too time consuming to measure and calibrate for everyone’s IPD in such a setting, the team said). This lead to a slightly uncomfortable cross-eyed sensation which you needed to adjust to throughout the demo. Adjustable IPD in software will of course feature in the final headset, though we’re unsure if the team plan to add a physical IPD adjustment.

The final quibble comes in the form of head tracking latency. It is perceptible with the current hardware and software stack, albeit certainly not in an offensive manner. Once again however, we’re keeping in mind that this is still early prototype software and hardware, fast pixel switched displays and higher quality IMUs stand to further improve things.

After only a few minutes of intense action, I find myself overwhelmed by the zombie masses and my experience is over. After the headset is removed, I have a huge grin on my face. Despite the problems I’ve outlined above, The Walking Dead VR experience powered by StarVR is a hugely immersive and enjoyable time that I’d recommend to anyone.

As for the headset, although the issues I’ve listed above may seem numerous, bear in mind that they’re mostly entirely surmountable and known. Low persistence panels and adjustable IPD are becoming industry standards and it’s really only a matter of time until the team implement better components and tweak design to further improve the headset.

The bottom line is, StarVR is a hugely exciting prospect for anyone not satisfied by what some see as FOV compromises in the forthcoming wave of consumer headsets. Weight on this latest iteration has come down and ergonomics are much improved from what I saw of the very early protoype in 2013. The team continue to rapidly iterate through hardware revisions and by the time E3 2016 rolls around, I suspect StarVR will be a premium headset to aspire to. Starbreeze’s desire to tightly couple both hardware and software is a great approach and with ingenious, creative experiences like The Walking Dead, may offer content which goes beyond what the current generation of headsets will generally offer.

As ever, we’ll remain in close contact with the team and bring you experiences of new hardware as it become available. One thing’s for sure though, InfinitEye is dead—long live StarVR.

http://www.roadtovr.com/hands-on-oculus-touch-is-an-elegant-extension-of-your-hand-for-touching-virtual-worlds/

From the beginning, Oculus said they didn’t want to reveal an official VR input solution until they could do it right. Despite pressure from their developers, competitors, and the VR community at large, the company bided their time up until just one week ago where they showed the world the ‘Oculus Touch Half Moon’ prototype. After trying the system for myself, I can confidently say that it was worth the wait.

Anyone that’s used the Oculus Rift DK2 and beyond knows the company’s IR LED based positional tracking tech is some of the best in the business. It’s incredibly precise, low latency, and robust. So it’s no surprise that the company chose to use that tech as the foundation of their VR controller. But challenges remained: beyond just tracking position and orientation, how do you actually interact with objects in the virtual world; how do you prevent occlusion; how do you support existing game input modalities which might still be necessary?

Oculus has sufficiently answered all of these questions, and more, with an elegant VR controller which is poised to be the best on the market at the outset of consumer VR. For me, there are three major things that make the Oculus Touch VR controller a brilliant solution to the question of input.

Natural Resting Grip

Reach your arm out like you’re going to shake someone’s hand, with your fingers outstretched like you’re going to give a high five. With your arm still out in front of you, make a fist. Now switch back and forth between the high-five hand and the fist. Watch your arm carefully as you do and you’ll see muscles moving within it to achieve these different grips.

Now let your hand go limp, into its natural resting state. This is the ‘default’ position of your muscles and hand muscles when your hand isn’t doing anything, and this is what it feels like to grip the Oculus Touch controller.

Oculus has formed the controller to fit in your resting hand beautifully and this is one factor that contributes to what Oculus called “hand Presense” when they first revealed the controller. Initially I thought this was just some buzzword play, but now I realize they really meant it.

Center of Gravity

Having the core of the controller in the midst of your resting grip means that your hand feels much like there’s nothing in it. But how to get the controller ‘outside’ of the hand’s center of gravity in order to prevent occlusion? That’s where the ‘Half Moon’ ring, which reminds me of a basket crossguard on a sword, comes into play.

The ring orbits the hand at a steady altitude ensuring that the hand’s center of gravity doesn’t shift. Others, like the SteamVR Lighthouse controller, have significant appendages that move the hand’s center of gravity, causing it to feel more like a tool in your hand than the hand by itself (as Synthesis Universe’s OlivierJT eloquently put it).

The Half Moon ring achieves this natural center of gravity while at the same time offering ample surface area for IR LED tracking points for robust occlusion avoidance.

>>925

Hand Trigger

The hand trigger is the most natural way to grab objects in the virtual world that I’ve felt with any VR controller, including ‘controllerless’ solutions like Leap Motion (yes it turns out that mocking a grab gesture in mid air isn’t that natural). The hand trigger rests on the inside of the controller’s hilt and is just a squeeze away from your hand’s natural resting position. The trigger is big and easy to depress with your middle and lower fingers, an action which takes your hand from that natural resting state to more of a gripping state.

Mimicking this natural gripping motion is important for aligning the brain’s notion of ‘gripping’ with the gesture intended to do so—something we might call proprioceptive parity. The hand trigger leaves the index finger free for pointing or use of the index trigger, which is more like pulling the trigger of a gun, just like you would be used to on a gamepad.

Literally within seconds of first picking up the controller I was grabbing objects in the virtual world naturally with the hand trigger. It just felt right, and there was no confusion between grabbing with the hand trigger and my index finger—just like it’s easy to grip a pistol while keeping your index finger free for the trigger.

Gestures

The Oculus Touch controller also supports hand gestures, such that your finger position can be represented in the virtual world for social cues like pointing and giving a thumbs up (didn’t have a chance to check for that all-important middle finger gesture).

The inside of the Half Moon ring houses sensors which detect your finger positions. It isn’t clear how precisely or which fingers can be detected as the demo that I tried was using canned animations to ‘snap’ to pointing and thumbs up gestures. I was told that the system can detect analogue finger positions, but it seems to be something they’re still refining.

Whatever the case, using these gestures for specific cues it’s a great way to combine the precision of button input with the ability to naturally gesture within the virtual world, rather than abstracting those motions to a ‘point’ or ‘thumbs up’ button.

“Low Mental Load”

When Oculus founder Palmer Luckey brought the Oculus Touch controllers out on stage for the first time, he noted that they were made for “low mental load”, and it’s easy to tell that this was core to the controller’s design. The three factors outlined above contribute to this in a big way. Rather than manipulating a tool, the controller feels as close to having my own hand in the virtual space as any I’ve tried, and it makes a big difference.

When Oculus took me into their Toy Box demo, a sort of motion control playground, I was naturally grabbing, throwing, and passing objects back and forth with another player in mere moments; it felt like there was no learning to do. In fact, during the demo I never used the controller’s buttons or joysticks, there was simply no need.

It wasn’t long in the demo before the controllers began to feel invisible, there wasn’t this sense of needing to look carefully at the tracking performance; it was so good that it hardly warranted attention. Occasionally I would see some of my real arm out the bottom of the Rift, as I followed it up onto the Rift’s display, my virtual hands appeared to be aligned perfectly, it was surreal.

With this “hand Presence”, it was just me and another user in a virtual world, interacting like people might—handing objects to one another, throwing things around, shooting slingshots, and of course shrinking each other with shrink rays… but more on that soon.

Oculus’ insights go beyond mere ergonomics; proprioceptive parity was a clear priority of the controller’s design prompt, making Touch the most comfortable and natural VR controller I’ve ever used. The company’s positional tracking prowess means they are tracked nearly flawlessly. Unknown price aside, Touch is poised to be the best VR motion controller out there. Haters gonna hate, but Oculus has pulled it off again.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17494/nintendos-fils-aime-not-fan-current-vr/

With the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) over for another year, it has been reassuring to see over the last week such a fervent interest in virtual reality (VR) from the videogames industry at large. The big hitters like Sony and Microsoft were showing off their latest technology, Project Morpheus and Hololens respectively. But the other stalwart of the industry, Nintendo, had nothing on show in regards to VR.

In recent interview with Polygon, Nintendo of America’s President and COO, Reggie Fils-Aime, was asked if there were any ideas for Nintendo to work on their own VR device. The response from the COO was that VR wasn’t a priority for Nintendo at the moment and even though the technology is there it wasn’t fun or social. Fils-Aime stating “I haven’t walked the floor, so I can’t say in terms of what’s on the floor today, but at least based on what I’ve seen to date, it’s not fun, and it’s not social. It’s just tech.”

Nintendo are usually at the forefront of gaming innovation whether it was the N64 controller with its analogue stick or the Wii’s motion controls, Nintendo always seem to be the ones eager to push the boundaries of videogame experiences. Lets not forget the Virtual Boy back in the nineties was a VR device, although not of the same caliber of today’s devices and turned into a giant flop for the company.

Maybe Nintendo are just buying time, waiting to see how the VR industry progresses. After all it’s only a few months away until the first head-mounted displays come on general sale, then the true test of VR begins.

>based on what I’ve seen to date, it’s not fun, and it’s not social. It’s just tech.

Oh Nintendo, you short-sighted old fools who have no concept of potential and foresight. I won't argue that it's just tech right now, that it isn't fun depends on the content and it's debatable if he even tried it before making that statement, but to say it isn't social shows Nintendo's decrepit mindset when they think "fun with the family" is the only way to have a social experience.

I seriously hope they remember this moment and regret it forever when in 2016/17 they get burned for being such idiotic short-sighted dinosaurs.

>>927

>and it's debatable if he even tried it before making that statement

Nintendo was doing 3d with active shutter glasses as a console accessory back in 1987. They released one of the first self contained consumer head sets that had dual displays for real 3d with the Virtual Boy and sold 770,000 of them. They have over 50 million 3ds out there and have fought and lost massive patent battles over 3d imaging.

When it comes to 3d or VR they're anything but dinosaurs and I'm pretty sure their COO knows a thing or two about their previous attempts or what the industry is like considering billions are at stake if they're wrong. Why is he bothering to talk to anyone associated with the clickbait blog Polygon is a better question; those clowns were turned away from the Oculus booth at E3 until they changed their mind an hour or so later.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17548/luckey-on-vr-its-not-going-to-reach-hundreds-of-millions-of-people-in-the-next-three-years/

Oculus VR co-founder and creator of the Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey, is a well known evangelist of virtual reality (VR). His passion for the new medium is unquestionable, having taken it upon himself to create the first iteration of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) long before the possibility of any financial remuneration was known. However, he remains realistic about the commercial viability of VR, suggesting that it will see long-tail growth.

“In these early days, probably for at least two years, VR is going to be primarily for gamers and enthusiasts that are willing to invest in high-end machines,” stated Luckey in an interview with Re/code. “VR is going to become something mainstream, but it’s not going to happen right away. You just don’t have the horsepower to make it happen on a device, much less a cheap enough and comfortable enough device that a normal consumer is going to want to have. There’s also going to be more diverse content. Right now, it’s almost entirely games, because only the games industry has the tools and the talent to make immersive 3D worlds.”

That latter point was never made clearer than at Oculus VR’s ‘Step into the Rift’ press conference, San Francisco, last week. The company finally revealed the consumer version of the Oculus Rift HMD as well as the Oculus Touch input device, but in terms of software it was solely videogames that were discussed. The potential for other types of experiences remains, but Oculus VR concerted their efforts on attracting the existing videogame audience first and foremost.

In terms of that adoption, Luckey sees videogames as a stepping stone to bigger things. He’s still confident about the potential of VR of course, but is realistic about the commercial proposition.

“I’m the most optimistic guy about VR out there. I have crazy visions of what we’ll be doing in the future. But it’s not going to reach hundreds of millions of people in the next three years,” suggests Luckey.

Oculus VR revealed the consumer edition of their Oculus Rift HMD last week and offered hands-on demonstrations to attendees of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) earlier this week.

>>948

How cute of you to think that I care about Nintendo. Also, when 500 companies are doing the same thing that's called a trend, and when something is trending in the tech world that usually means a chance at getting a large amount of revenue.

If Nintendo who depend on video games want to ignore this trend which will definitely change the landscape of the games industry, then I can only call them foolish.

I rest my case with this quote:

"The next time when someone tells you that CD-ROM is the wave of the future, tell them that the future doesn't belong to the snails" - Nintendo, 1994.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17625/ar-and-vr-in-medical-education-presentations/

Generally at VRFocus most of the news that comes in regarding virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) revolves around videogames and the gaming industry at large. But the technology is that versatile it isn’t confined to just one medium, and one area of promise is in medical education. A presentation called Augmenting Reality – AR and VR in medical education, on Wednesday 24th June 2015 at Robin Brook Centre at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, will be previewing what could be the future of training in medicine.

Four subjects will be discussed during the course of the evening. These include Amplified Robot – Overview of the use of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality in Medicine, Virtual Medics – The use of Google Glass in Medicine, Medical Realities – Using Virtual Reality for the Training and Education of Surgeons, Doctors, and Medical Staff, The Virtual Surgeon – Surgical Training using Photorealistic 3D Avatars.

VRFocus has previously covered Google Glass and The Virtual Surgeon being used Dr Shafi Ahmed from St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, to perform the first live-stream of an operation using the Google Glass AR HMD, which was watched live by some 13,000 surgical students across 115 countries.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/steamvr-headset-from-htc-to-release-windows-only-first.5540

According to a renowned German PC games magazine, Gamestar, the SteamVR device HTC Vive is going to be released only for Windows in the beginning.

Gamestar journalists attended a demonstration of the Vive HTC and spoke to HTC representatives. They found the VR impression very convincing. But I guess there are enough descriptions of that out there on the net. The news for Linux users is hidden in their conclusion: According to HTC "Executive Director Global Marketing" Jeff Gattis, Vive HTC will only work with Windows on release.

Surprisingly, although Steam [Valve] is making great efforts to push its own Linux derivative SteamOS to the market as a gaming operating system, Vive VR will initially work exclusively with Windows. Steam machines are too slow for the Vive VR anyway, Gattis smiled mischievously, so they prefer to concentrate on the Windows operating system.

Not surprised one bit. When they need to build up hype it helps to be able to sell your device as working on everything and being completely open and free. When it launch time nears it's always an entirely different story.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17736/htc-allegedly-suggests-steam-machines-too-slow-for-vr/

When Oculus VR revealed the recommended specs for the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) earlier this year it became clear that the device would only be supporting Windows PCs at launch. Integration for the Mac and Linux operating systems (OSs) is to be put on hold while this initial launch is carried out in early 2016, though support will return later down the line. This came as a disappointment for many VR fans using these systems, but it appears as if they will have to put up with yet more setbacks with the other major PC-based HMD, Valve and HTC’s Vive.

As picked up by Gaming On Linux, the latest issue of PC-focused German videogame magazine, Gamestar, seems to confirm that the HTC Vive will also only run on Windows at launch. Gamestar cites HTC’s Executive Director of Global Marketing, Jeff Gattis, who allegedly confirmed as much at a recent event. Gattis even suggested that Valve’s Steam Machines, which run on Linix, are ‘too slow’ to run VR experiences.

“Surprisingly, although Steam [Valve] is making great efforts to push its own Linux derivative SteamOS to the market as a gaming operating system, Vive VR will initially work exclusively with Windows,” a translated quote from the article reads. “Steam machines are too slow for the Vive VR anyway, Gattis smiled mischievously, so they prefer to concentrate on the Windows operating system.”

If true it’s another upset for VR fans on these OSs. Take note that the ‘too slow’ comment seems to be a joke, but it still creates some big questions. The first Steam Machines are expected to go on sale later this year; will any of them be up to the challenge of running VR? The HTC Vive itself is to launch towards the end of 2015, with studios now receiving free Developer Editions of the device to prepare their own titles for it.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17747/rift-exclusives-only-to-be-sold-through-oculus-home/

One of the announcements that didn’t quite steal the headlines at Oculus VR’s pre-E3 press conference earlier this month was the reveal of Oculus Home. Nate Mitchell, the company’s VP of Product, took to the stage to reveal a brand new, VR-dedicated user interface (UI) that will serve as a hub for those using the consumer Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD). The software will also allow players to purchase Oculus Rift compatible content from the company itself. In fact, this will be the only place to buy some of Oculus VR’s exclusive content.

Mitchell recently revealed as much to PC Gamer. “It differs from developer to developer,” he said when asked if Home would be the only place to purchase Oculus Rift content. “We’ll have some exclusive games that you can only get through Home. Probably a lot of our stuff, right? That just makes sense. If we’re making it, we want to sell it through our own store. But there will be stuff you can buy directly from developers, for example. We’ve said from the beginning that the Rift—the hardware itself—is an open platform, and that’s really important to us. We think it matches the PC ecosystem really well. So, for example, if we make a game together, we can sell it directly to a consumer, they can run it, they can play it on the Rift, awesome.”

Mitchell went on to stress the importance of the user experience in Oculus Home, which doesn’t require anyone to keep taking the HMD off to make purchases. “In terms of publishing on our store, we’ve already launched our platform on GearVR, so all the Oculus Home experience and the Oculus Store that runs on Gear today is the exact same backend that’s powering the Rift store when it comes online,” he concluded. “So we have developers who’ve published games to our store who are making money today, and we’re going to be bringing basically all that same functionality to the Rift.”

Until now, Oculus Rift users have mainly been depending on platforms such as Steam and VR-dedicated services like WEARVR for to purchase premium VR content. Free experiences can also be downloaded via the Oculus Share portal. Expect Oculus VR to make a much bigger push for purchasing content through its own store when the Oculus Rift launches in Q1 2016, then.

It's to be expected, as soon as they announced Oculus Home and exclusives this was gonna happen.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17749/oculus-ceo-wants-to-move-quickly-on-oculus-rift-life-cycle/

After all the recent press coverage on virtual reality (VR) company Oculus VR everyone knows or should know that the consumer version is to be released in Q1 2016. But what many may not realise is that Oculus VR are already thinking of future versions of its head-mounted display (HMD).

Game Informer spoke to Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe about the HMD’s life cycle. He said: “This isn’t going to be the console five, six, seven year life cycle. VR is going to move too fast. It’s going to innovate and evolve really rapidly. We’ve already seen with the Rift from inception to shipping a product, we’ll have gone through two developer kits, many prototypes leading to a consumer Rift at high quality. We’re going to come out with another prototype some amount of time after we ship the Rift, and then we’re going to come out with another consumer product. We want to move quickly here, but we also want to give developers time to create content and ship against an install base. If we move too quickly, we need to always ensure absolute backward compatibility, so that everybody’s content works on the next generation as we’re updating.”

Iribe added: “There’s that happy medium between the console life cycle, which is far too long, and the smart-phone cycle, which is every six months or so. That’s a little too short for where VR is going to begin. It’s somewhere in between,” he explains. “We’re still trying to figure when our version two would come together and what features will land in it. If there’s a feature that would take an extra three to five months, we might push out the schedule if it’s that compelling of a feature. It’s too early to tell now. At this point, it’s all sights focused on shipping Rift and Touch.”

So while no schedule has been put into place, there will be a quicker turnaround of HMD versions than other areas of the videogame market, as and when further features develop.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17813/virtual-reality-to-be-used-in-future-of-urban-planning/

The rollercoaster that is virtual reality (VR) doesn’t look like it’s slowing down anytime soon as more and more industries embrace the technology to help develop future projects and spearhead advancements within their respective fields. One such industry looking at VR is urban planning.

European cities are leveraging their data sources in order to address high-priority objectives: to reduce traffic congestion, improve energy efficiency, engage citizens, and present government as accessible and accountable. However, the approach today is typically project-based. More integration across organisational silos will be needed to achieve their longer-term goals such as economic growth and development of an indigenous tech sector.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, “Real-Time Cities Survey”, finds that municipalities aim to do much more than simply make existing information and transactions accessible online. They are embracing open innovation and experimenting with advanced applications such as 3D mapping and VR to reduce the cost of urban planning functions.

The survey asked leading real-time cities about their data-centric strategies and initiatives. The survey received 27 responses back.

Principal analyst for Information & Communication Technologies Europe, Sheridan Nye states, “Public sector information (PSI) is being published on open portals and used internally to improve the efficiency of public sector services,” adding “Cities are also collaborating with academic partners and ICT vendors to build governance best practice into data transactions. This is the necessary foundation for commercialisation of data-enabled services in the near future.”

So what does that mean for the VR community, well a much greater reach for VR technology for one. Virtual reality maybe being pioneered by the games industry but it won’t be the sole beneficiary of the new technology.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17843/youtube-vr-released/

Last month saw Google hold its annual I/O developer conference in San Francisco. The company had plenty of updates to share across all areas of its business, including its work in virtual reality (VR). It revealed expanded work in VR beyond its Google Cardboard mobile head-mounted display (HMD), including its Google Jump system for 360 degree live action video filming. The system is made up of a number of aspects, including a video player in the form of an updated YouTube app. Said update was promised for later on in the year and, this week, it has indeed arrived.

The update only appears to be available on the Android operating system (OS) at this time, though incoming support for Google Cardboard on iOS suggests that it will also reach Apple’s platform further down the line. It allows for those with a Google Cardboard or one of the officially branded ‘Works with Google Cardboard’ kits to load up certain 360 degree videos and press a special icon in the bottom right corner. Having done so, the image on screen will split into two so that it can be viewed using the pair of lenses embedded in the given HMD. That support includes VRFocus‘ own inaugrual VRCast test run.

Images of the icon and the resulting side-by-side display can be seen below.

Along with iOS, many will hope that this service eventually reaches browsers on PCs so that it can be used with upcoming HMDs such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. The PlayStation 4 also has its own official YouTube app; could support for the Project Morpheus HMD make it into this service later down the line as well? The platform has become an instrumental part of everyday life for many, and YouTube VR support has huge implications for the technology’s future.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17803/new-study-suggests-vr-therapy-can-help-reduce-alcohol-cravings/

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications are already being explored within the medical profession, as VRFocus has previously reported. Now researchers are trying VR therapy to help people with alcohol dependance reduce their cravings.

According to VR Technology News, the findings, published in the July issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, come from a small study of just 10 patients. But researchers said they are optimistic about the potential for virtual reality as a therapy for alcohol use disorders.

Senior researcher Doug Hyun Han, M.D., Ph.D., of Chung-Ang University Hospital in Seoul, Korea, says: “This technology is already popular in the fields of psychology and psychiatry.”

His team recruited 12 patients being treated for alcohol dependence for the new study. All the patients went through a week-long detox program, then had 10 sessions of virtual-reality therapy, done twice a week for five weeks.

Each of the 10 sessions involved three different virtual scenes, one in a relaxing environment; another in a ‘high-risk’ situation in which the patients were in a restaurant where other people were drinking and a third, ‘aversive,’ situation, where patients were surrounded by the sights, sounds and smells of people getting sick from too much alcohol.

To check the before and after effects of the study, all of the patients underwent positron emission tomography (PET) and computerized tomography (CT) brain scans, prior to the study starting, which allowed the researchers to study the patients’ brain metabolism. The brain scans showed that compared with a group of healthy people, the alcohol-dependent patients had a faster metabolism in the brain’s limbic circuit, which indicates a heightened sensitivity to stimuli, like alcohol. After the VR therapy, however, the picture changed. Patients’ faster brain metabolism had slowed. Doug Hyun Han said this suggested a reduced craving for alcohol.

Longer term studies are needed as this was only a small trial but Han does say it shows ‘a promising approach.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-to-open-rift-constellation-positional-tracking-api-to-third-parties/

Oculus says that they’ll be opening up their ‘Constellation’ tracking API so that third-parties can use the tech to build positionally tracked peripherals beyond what the company will make themselves.

At E3 2015, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey told us that he believes the company’s Touch controller is “making the right set of compromises and tradeoffs to make a pretty universal VR input.” He does note however that “it’s never going to be better than truly optimized VR input for every game. For example, racing games: it’s always going to be a steering wheel. For a sword fighting game, you’re going to have some type of sword controller. For things that are really about fine-grain finger interactions, it’s probably going to be maybe even some type of glove or computer-vision based hand tracking solution.”

Luckey said the company won’t be making Wiimote-style docking peripherals for those purposes, but there will be a way for people to get their hands on niche VR controllers.

“…we’re going to be opening up our tracking API for people so then they’ll be able to make peripherals that are tracked using our tracking system,” he said. “I think you’re going to see people making peripherals that are specifically made for particular types of games, like whether they’re steering wheels, flight sticks, or swords, or gun controllers in VR.”

It may have been the plan for Oculus all along, but we heard little about third-party access to the company’s IR-LED based ‘Constellation’ tracking system prior to mounting pressure from competitor Valve. At GDC 2015 in March, Valve revealed its SteamVR virtual reality system including the Laser-based ‘Lighthouse’ tracking solution which afforded what they called a ‘room-scale’ tracking volume of about 15×12 feet. The company also said “we’re gonna just give [Lighthouse technology] away,” with the hopes of promoting a universal tracking solution for VR.

Details about how Oculus will open their Constellation tracking API is thin on the ground (and same with Lighthouse for that matter). It isn’t clear for either company’s solution if third-parties will need to purchase tracking markers, license the tech for use, or be charged an integration fee, among a number of potential business models. Nor is it clear if any sort of certification framework will exist to give consumers confidence that a third-party peripheral will work adequately.

The tracking tech question could play a major role in which headset leads adoption; if one of the two companies has a bigger and better lineup of tracked third-party accessories, it could tip the scales of the headset purchase for some consumers. We expect to learn more about both companies’ plans as their respective headsets approach launch beginning at the end of 2015 with Valve’s HTC Vive.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/17921/stanford-university-trialing-phobia-reducing-vr/

VRFocus has previously reported on how virtual reality (VR) is being used in medicine for training purposes, and even for people with alcohol dependency. Now Stanford University is looking at how VR can possibly be utilised to over come fears and phobias.

The Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University is using an Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) for educational purposes, testing the possibility of using the technology to help people overcome certain fears or for learning empathy.

USA Today went to the university to try out the simulation for walking across a deep pit. The site describes an experience in which the virtual floor beneath the user disappears, leaving them on a narrow wooden plank above a pit. The idea behind the experience is to replicate the phobias one would experience when faced with this situation in real life.

Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of the Stanford lab said of the experience: "We study the transfer effects — how does an intense virtual reality experience change the way you think of yourself and others?"

In another one of Stanford Universities simulations, viewers are presented with an audience of avatars keeping fixed stares on the viewer as they walk around the room, the goal being to help people uncomfortable with public speaking.

http://www.roadtovr.com/can-now-watch-360-youtube-videos-vr-currently-android/

With a recent update to the Android YouTube app, Google Cardboard-compatible smartphones can now view 360-degree video in side-by-side configuration.

The video streaming giant quietly rolled out VR support for their 2D 360-degree videos earlier this month, with no official mention in either their blog or other official information outlets. Only monoscopic videos are currently among those supported for VR viewing.

YouTube had teased VR enthusiats back in March with the addition of 360 video support for mobile devices and Chrome, as well as support for 60 FPS video—two things that point towards a strong interest in VR.

There’s still no word yet on when iOS smartphones will have a chance to get a hold of the now Google Cardboard-compatible app, but we’re optimistic that support is soon to follow.

To access the VR function on 360 videos, first search for the videos by typing #360Video into the mobile app’s search field. Compatible videos should show the symbol below.

You can then pick a video and start playback.

You’ll then have the option to switch to VR mode. Just touch the Google Cardboard icon on the lower right-hand side and insert your Android smartphone into Cardboard or any number of variants available online. Now look around and check it out!

We’re also crossing our fingers that other mobile VR platforms like Gear VR will also see some 360 YouTube video integration in the near future—despite the fact that may not jive with Samsung and Oculus’ current push to maintain a well-curated selection of 360 content.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18034/hololens-units-destroyed-in-shuttle-explosion/

Last week VRFocus reported on the news that Microsoft’s HoloLens mixed reality (MR) head-mounted display (HMD) would be heading to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of a partnership between the company and NASA. The special kits will include new software known as Sidekick, designed to help astronauts with training and communication. A pair of HoloLens units were set to be shipped up to the station this month to allow for testing of this project. Sadly, those units have been destroyed in-transit after their unmanned shuttle exploded.

As already reported, the HoloLens units were set to arrive via SpaceX’s seventh commercial resupply mission, which launched yesterday. Not long after the launch, however, the Dragon spacecraft that held the supplies and the Falcon 9 rocket that propelled it exploded. No one was injured in the accident and the crew of the ISS are said to have plenty of supplies to last them the next several months.

“We are disappointed in the loss of the latest SpaceX cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden said of the crash. “However, the astronauts are safe aboard the station and have sufficient supplies for the next several months.

“We will work closely with SpaceX to understand what happened, fix the problem and return to flight.”

The HoloLens units were only the first of a number that were meant to be delivered to the ISS as part of Sidekick. The software is to feature two modes. One of these will allow the HMD user to communicate with experts on Earth for training and more detailed instruction. Its successful integration will mark the first time that astronauts have been able to carry out real-time video calls with Earth. The other mode will place holograms on surfaces that will train the user. It’s not clear when new units might be delivered.

Kek, I guess it was destined to crash, the HoloLens that is. But on the more serious note, SpaceX should get their shit together.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18056/htc-probably-couldnt-have-made-vive-without-valve/

Taiwanese smartphone company HTC very quickly became one of the biggest names in virtual reality (VR) technology back in March 2015 when it announced a partnership with Valve to create the HTC Vive head-mounted display (HMD). This promising device surprised everyone with its unique approach to PC-based VR, supported by Valve’s SteamVR system, and its holiday 2015 release date. It seems like the perfect partnership now, and HTC itself recently suggested that the Vive ‘probably couldn’t’ have happened without Valve’s help.

Dan O’Brien, Executive Director at HTC, said as much to VRFocus in an interview that will be published in full later this week. “Valve, actually, and HTC have a lot of philosophical alignment in terms of marriage and how you guys actually work together,” O’Brien said. “I mean these guys are pioneers. They’re craftsmen in their trade and the products that they make for consumers. And so are we.

“I mean, if you look at the phones that we and the designs that we put behind those phones, you know, our design team, that’s a very big part of our DNA, and when you can take two companies that have this amazing quality aspect of what they bring to the table for the consumers, you combine those things and then you will produce something amazing that you probably couldn’t have done individually on your own.”

While HTC’s involvement opens up a lot of avenues on the manufacturing side of the HTC Vive, Valve’s SteamVR system provides many of the essential factors. Among them is the Room Scale tracking, enabled by a Lighthouse laser-based device. This kit is able to track a user’s movements in an area of up to 15-feet by 15-feet and then replicate them within the given experience. SteamVR also provided two position-tracked controllers for users to hold. Free Developer Editions of the HTC Vive are currently arriving for studios that successfully applied for them.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18032/vr-market-worth-15-89-billion-by-2020-states-report/

According to the new market research report “Virtual Reality (VR) Market by Technology (Semi & Fully Immersive), Device (Head-mounted display (HMD), Gesture Tracking), Component (Sensor, Display, Software), Application (Gaming, Entertainment, and Industrial), Geography – Trends & Forecasts to 2014-2020″, the Virtual Reality Technology Market is expected to reach $15.89 Billion by 2020.

VR technology is used in the gaming, entertainment, medical, industrial, aerospace, defence, education, and in many other applications. Several companies are investing heavily in the research and development of innovative virtual reality devices. Some of these big technology giants include, Facebook, which acquired Oculus VR in 2014, Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), which is developing Project Morpheus, HTC Corporation and Valve Corporation with their jointly developed HTC Vive HMD, and Microsoft Corporation, which has revealed its Microsoft HoloLens augmented reality (AR) device.

The report describes the virtual reality market trends, drivers, and challenges with respect to the global virtual reality technology market, and forecasts the market size between 2015 and 2020, segmented on the basis of technology, device, component, application, and geography.

Consumer demand will likely grow when these devices start to launch towards the end of this year going into 2016.

Several companies are also collaborating in VR, such as Samsung and Oculus VR with the Gear VR, to pool resources and share technology to help with market penetration.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18048/youtube-360-videos-now-viewable-with-oculus-rift-using-virtual-desktop/

Last week VRFocus reported on the news that YouTube, the ever-popular online video platform, now supports virtual reality (VR) in its app on the Android operating system (OS). Fans are able to use the Google Cardboard mobile head-mounted display (HMD) to watch 360 degree footage in VR. This is hopefully just the first step in YouTube’s planned support of the technology, though it’s not clear if and when this feature might arrive on other HMDs such as the Oculus Rift. For those tired of waiting, a workaround of sorts is now available.

Guy Godin, the developer behind popular VR app, Virtual Desktop, has revealed that it is now possible to watch YouTube 360 degree videos using the Oculus Rift with the help of his software. The developer recently explained how this was possible in a new thread on Reddit. With the software installed, users need simply copy the link from the desired 360 degree footage and then paste it into the app’s video player tab. From there Virtual Desktop will download the video as the best possible quality, which will then be saved in the ‘My Videos\360 Videos’ folder.

Virtual Desktop is a free app for Windows that allows for far more than 360 degree video viewing. The experience essentially presents the user’s own desktop on a huge virtual screen, meaning they can browse the web in VR. It’s even possible to play videogames in-app. While not in VR itself, this is similar to the Xbox One’s upcoming support for the Oculus Rift, while will allow players to stream their titles through the upcoming Windows 10 OS and into a virtual cinema of sorts.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18125/cinematic-vr-takes-step-forward-as-jaunt-announce-first-professional-grade-vr-camera/

The use of virtual reality (VR) to create more involved and engaging experiences for the big screen is a topic gaining traction. Cineveo and Cmoar VR are creating cinema experience applications, OTOY are working on events, independent filmmakers are creating new experiences and Hollywood directors have come out in support of the medium. One thing that is still being developed however is the specific technology to use VR in cinematography, and now Jaunt have announced something that will no doubt be a big step forward.

Jaunt have revealed the very first professional-grade VR camera system designed with the creation of fully-immersive, 360-degree experiences in mind. Codenamed “Neo”, the system which features a number of patent-pending features, is the latest generation of systems developed by Jaunt and the first built ‘from the ground up’ for VR over the course of two and a half years.

Features listed include:

High quality, high resolution, full 360° capture.

Custom optics specifically designed for 3D light-field capture.

Large format sensors with superior low-light performance.

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging.

Fully synchronized global shutter sensor array.

Time-lapse and high frame-rate capture.

Compact and weatherproof form factor.

Stunning 360 degree industrial design by LUNAR.

Extensive tool set for configuration, rendering, and asset Management.

Available from this August to partners of the company, Jaunt also announced their VR film making venture Jaunt Studios will be increasing production with access to the new camera system. According to the company partners will also be able to take advantage of increased tool compatibility, allowing VR content to be produced and edited using tools such as Avid, Premiere, Final Cut Pro X, Nuke, RV, Shotgun, Maya, 3Ds Max, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, Scratch, Lustre and more.

“NEO is the culmination of several years of research, its image quality and ease-of-use will allow creatives to focus on producing awesome content without the complexity of cameras built from off-the-shelf components not designed for VR.” Co-founder and CTO of Jaunt, Arthur van Hoff, commented. “With NEO we have overcome many of the technical hurdles of producing high quality cinematic VR experiences.” said Arthur van Hoff, co-founder and CTO of Jaunt. His enthusiasm was shared by colleague Koji Gardiner, Jaunt’s Director of Hardware Engineering at Jaunt.

“Every aspect of the NEO design, from the high-speed image sensor, to the wide-angle optics, to the embedded software, was engineered with cinematic VR capture in mind. NEO is a flexible system that offers turn-on-and-shoot simplicity for capturing spontaneous events, while also providing full manual control for creatives to set up the perfect shot.”

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18159/gdc-survey-finds-european-vr-devs-favour-oculus-rift/

Videogame developers working with virtual reality (VR) technology have been able to get their hands on development kits for the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) for almost three years now. The Project Morpheus HMD for PlayStation 4 is just over a year old and Valve’s HTC Vive only recently started to ship to studios, while a total of 118,930 second development kits (DK2s) for the Oculus Rift have been sold. It’s no surprise, then, to learn that Oculus VR it currently dominating when it comes to VR development popularity.

A survey carried about by the 2015 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in Europe recently discovered as much. The survey quizzed European studios at events and online, finding that a total of 73 percent of teams weren’t working in VR at all. However, 22 percent of developers were working on VR videogames that would be released on the Oculus Rift. For comparison, 7 percent were said to be working on titles for Samsung and Oculus VR’s mobile HMD, Gear VR, while 6 percent were working on Project Morpheus and just 3 percent on HTC Vive.

Again, these results are hardly surprising given that the HTC Vive is currently only shipping to select developers that applied for a free edition of the kit. That said, there’s certainly a large amount of interest in working with Valve’s device; 52 percent of studios said they are excited to work with Oculus VR while a further 38 percent also noted they wanted to work with SteamVR, the platform that supports the HTC Vive. 30 percent also said they had no interest in working with VR at all.

GDC Europe itself is set to take place just ahead of Gamescom from 3rd – 4th August 2015 in Cologne, Germany.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18156/zuckerberg-vr-experiences-to-become-the-norm/

Facebook made clear its confidence in the future of virtual reality (VR) in 2014 when it purchased Oculus VR for some $2 billion USD. The potential benefits of combining the popular social network and the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) were immediately obvious. It’s been a quiet year for Facebook and VR since then, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently noted that he expects the technology to ‘become the norm’ in the future.

Zuckerberg said as much replying to a question of the future of Facebook in a recent Q&A. “First, people are gaining the power to share in richer and richer ways,” he said. “We used to just share in text, and now we post mainly with photos. In the future video will be even more important than photos. After that, immersive experiences like VR will become the norm. And after that, we’ll have the power to share our full sensory and emotional experience with people whenever we’d like.”

He also touched upon how augmented reality (AR) tech will improve future communication. “Second, people are gaining the power to communicate more frequently. We used to have to be with someone in person. Then we had these bulky computers at our desks or that we could carry around. Now we have these incredible devices in our pockets all the time, but we only use them periodically throughout the day. In the future, we’ll have AR and other devices that we can wear almost all the time to improve our experience and communication.

“One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full rich thoughts to each other directly using technology. You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it too if you’d like. This would be the ultimate communication technology.”

Facebook recently announced that it would soon be bringing 360 photos and videos to its service, which would be viewable with the Oculus Rift.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18163/oculus-fighting-for-oculusrift-com-domain-report-suggests/

Given that the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display’s (HMD’s) first reveal was around three years ago, one might assume that creator Oculus VR had a handle on all major domain names for its kit. That’s not quite the case, however. One of the most obvious domain names for the company, oculusrift.com, is actually owned by a group of fans. However, it appears that Oculus VR itself is now fighting to get ownership of that name, with the fan site having recently been taken offline.

Kotaku claims to have obtained documentation that suggests Oculus VR is currently attempting to seize the domain, stating that it is likely to win the battle. Oculus VR is apparently reasoning that it deserves the URL for itself, filing a Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) complaint stating the fan site’s “use and exploitation of the Oculus Marks constitutes cybersquatting, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and/or unfair competition in violation of applicable law.”

Indeed, heading to the fan site now reveals just how far along this battle looks to be. The site has been replaced with a handful of messages, reading: “Our forum is closed. Thanks everyone for the last 3 years. It is a very sad day for so many of us who loved this place.

“A BIG thank you everyone who supported us! No more bullying, misinformation, and negative press please. Just let our little community die in peace.”

Site owner Ivan Smirnov contacted Kotaku with the information, noting that he wanted the VR community itself to be aware of the situation. “People should know how ruthless and greedy the company has become,” he reportedly said of Oculus VR. However, he had asked Oculus VR for $58,000 USD in exchange for the name, but this offer has been turned down.

It’s not the only legal battle Oculus VR has on its plate right now, although its fights with ZeniMax Media and Total Recall Technologies may be considered to be bigger.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18142/crytek-on-vr-people-should-not-be-forced-to-buy-one-type-of-input-device/

Crytek are keen to ensure that CryENGINE is seen as a leading development opportunity for virtual reality (VR). Following the launch of official VR support in the latest update, 3.8.1, the company have announced plans to incorporate a solution that will allow for developers to create experiences compatible with multiple input solutions without requiring the knowledge of programming for each specific device.

In a livestream held yesterday, Frank Vitz, Creative Director of CryENGINE, was very vocal about VR input devices: “We’ve seen at least 5 different prototypes of different control systems, all of which fundamentally have you getting your hands in so that when you’re in the [Oculus] Rift and put your hands in front of your face you can see them. Even if the model of your hands doesn’t look like your hands, it’s amazing what a difference that makes.”

Regarding Crytek’s plans for CryENGINE’s support of these solutions, Vitz revealed that the company intend on keeping things simple for developers whilst leaving consumers the opportunity to make up their own minds about which devices to purchase: “Basically what we’re doing on a low level with CryENGINE… I mean, there’s going to be all these different devices with different framerates and different fidelity and different numbers of buttons; you can imagine gloves that would actually input the position of your hand and the gestures of your hand. So we’re putting in a layer of software like a ‘device independent’ API – which is a programming interface – which will allow us to connect to any of these different devices. Hopefully so that we can design our games to be dependant on the devices that are connected to the computer. The point of that being that people should not be forced to by one specific type of equipment or device over another. If you create a game that will work with different devices, then that’s better because it provides more options for the consumers and also allows game designers to take advantage of new developments.”

There are a number of different input devices aiming to launch alongside the first wave of VR head-mounted displays (HMDs), be it the recently revealed Oculus Touch or the potential re-launch of PlayStation Move.”

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18169/gear-vr-to-get-airplane-mode-turning-off-head-tracking-imminently/

Head-tracking is a pivotal part of the virtual reality (VR) experience, allowing users to simulate turning their head within a virtual environment. It’s a key feature that the likes of Oculus VR and others have spent years trying to perfect. It may surprise some, then, to learn that the company will soon be allowing players to turn off the head-tracking feature in its mobile head-mounted display (HMD), the Gear VR.

Max Cohen, Oculus VR’s Head of Mobile, recently revealed as much in an interview with Heavy. Though this might seem like a strange idea, Gear VR users have been requesting this feature for use with the likes of the Oculus Cinema app, allowing them to watch content without worrying about moving around.

Cohen described this as the Gear VR’s ‘Airplane mode’. “This will be released imminently; it’s our version of Airplane mode,” he said. “This was surprisingly difficult to do right — we first experimented with just turning off head–tracking, and it’s really uncomfortable if you’re on a bus or a plane that’s going up and down. What happens when you need to operate the controls — you need head-tracking to use gaze-and-tap on the controls, so how long do you leave it back on?

“So we then tried a number of methods like locking the yaw, having the screen float back to where you’re looking, having it float back fast, and so on, and we’re finally happy with it. We’ll also be pairing this with the ability to resize the screen to any arbitrarily size, which I think people will be excited about. You can get that huge-screen experience without the neck pain. You’ll see these features in the Void theatre [sic] very soon.”

Obviously this mode would cause issues for other VR applications, but certainly sounds like a useful feature for those looking to watch traditional video in a VR environment. Could the Oculus Rift HMD one day feature a similar mode for its support for Xbox One streaming?

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18217/unity-ceo-dismisses-sour-grapes-vr-interviews-3d-tvs-a-bad-analogy/

While many large technology companies are still working out if virtual reality (VR) fits into their future, engine makers such as Unity Technologies have jumped straight on board. The company’s Unity Engine recently hit its 5.1 update, which included full support for the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD), while future upgrades will continue to improve VR integration. Now Unity Technologies CEO John Riccitiello has spoken out about some of the ‘sour grapes’ VR interviews that have taken place over the past few weeks.

“In the last 48 hours I’ve seen a lot of sour grapes interviews coming out of E3,” Riccitiello told GamesIndustry.biz. “Notable industry luminaries have come out and said VR is no fun, or VR’s not going to be interesting. I tend to think it’s sad when all people can think is whether it would be fun to play Call of Duty in VR. I mean, for God’s sake, too many people are still answering the wrong question.” Among those that have spoken out against VR in the past month is Warren Spector, the famed developer behind titles such as the original Deus Ex.

“Each successive generation of technology has yielded different kinds of experience, and the games have fundamentally changed,” he continued. “VR and AR are going to deliver fundamentally different experiences. They also try to make the analogy to 3D TV – it’s a bad analogy. 3D TV wasn’t really that different. VR is really different, and AR is really different from VR. We don’t know what’s going to come out of this. We have recognised a break in the road relative to what’s now possible, and we don’t know where that’s going to lead yet.”

Indeed, 3D TV’s are largely seen as a failure, certainly not proving as popular as many companies had hoped. Will Riccitiello’s statements about why VR will succeed where this technology failed ring true? The next few years will tell all.

http://www.roadtovr.com/gdc-europe-releases-state-industry-survey-majority-devs-say-vr-sustainable-long-term/

The most recent ‘State of the Industry’ survey from Europe’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) has shed some light on current trends in VR gaming. Although many European devs haven’t put VR games on the drawing table just yet, a majority say that the VR will provide them with a sustainable and long-term market.

GDC Europe recently released the results of their annual State of the Industry survey, and although VR isn’t on everyone’s mind just yet—with 73 percent of respondents saying “they weren’t working on VR games at all,” a good 22 percent said they were currently working on a game targeted towards Oculus’ new consumer version Rift.

It’s unclear if developers were allowed to choose multiple VR headsets for this specific question, with Samsung Gear VR only taking 7 percent, Sony Morpheus taking 6 percent, and SteamVR squeezing out a measly 3 percent when asked what VR headset they were targeting.

Although SteamVR’s HTC Vive scored low in regards to current projects underway, (see graphic above) 52 percent of respondents said they were excited about the future potential of Oculus, while a respectable 38 percent favored SteamVR.

With a resounding majority of 71 percent, European developers “believe VR is a long-term, sustainable market.” A strong vote of confidence from the second largest market in both DK1 and DK2 shipments worldwide.(http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-reveals-175000-rift-development-kits-sold/)

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18265/virtual-reality-offers-potential-breakthrough-in-preventative-care/

VRFocus covers all news relating to virtual reality (VR) not just videogames. Recent articles include, VR for medical training and VR for the treatment of phobias. These are just a couple of stories on how VR is being used to help people rather than just entertain. Another use VRFocus has found VR being possibly used for is preventative care.

Imagine watching an VR avatar of yourself drinking sugary drinks, or eating fast-food, which is then sped up to show in two minutes the course of two years worth of consumption on your body.

This is what researchers at Georgia University are trialling, as they have found so far that a VR simulation portraits a stronger message than traditional leaflets. The Wall Street Journal spoke with Grace Ahn, an assistant professor in advertising who leads Georgia’s VR research efforts. Ms Ahn explains “We’ve found virtual reality to be much more effective than pamphlets or videos at getting the message across and prompting behaviour change. The brain experiences and processes a virtual-reality scenario in the same way it does a real experience, watching a video, in contrast, creates some cognitive distance between the viewer and the subject.”

Ms Ahn goes on to say, “Virtual-reality researchers have shown that letting people experience the future today makes them more likely to change present-day behaviours. That makes virtual reality a good fit for preventive health care. There’s such a big temporal gap between what you do now and what happens to your health further on,”

But this way of treating patients does come with a hefty price tag, a single two- to five-minute scenario—the template into which individual avatars are introduced—is about $150,000. But the equipment required to run the simulations is far cheaper as they can run on smartphones using a VR app and a Google Cardboard head-mounted display (HMD).

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18237/mozilla-now-testing-virtual-reality-firefox/

Mozilla, the San Francisco based non-profit foundation, has now started letting outside developers use a test version of its Firefox browser with new virtual reality (VR) technology that could make surfing the web more like watching movies or playing videogames.

The company is hoping its new MozVR software can help Firefox better compete against some of its rivals like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari browsers. Talking to USA Today, Mozilla CEO Tom Beard said, “If ‘web video’ gets turned into ‘web VR,’ it could be a game-changer.”

Mozilla began working on the project two years ago in secret with a team led by Vlad Vukicevic, a Mozilla engineering director in Toronto who previously led development for WebGL, a tool for rendering complex graphics on the web. Josh Carpenter, a user-experience designer who’s been working with Vukicevic said “VR is too big to be left just to (gamers).”

Having previously confined the project to a small group of engineers, Mozilla is now getting feedback from developers and bolstering the MozVR research team with more people, hoping technology could soon make web-based virtual reality tours more like watching the movie “A Night at the Museum,” in which once-static characters and objects are brought to life.

“We want to lead development of an open VR platform,” Beard says, looking at the future of Firefox.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18058/microsoft-reveals-improved-lenses-for-oculus-rift/

After the recent collaboration announcement at E3 in Los Angeles, by Microsoft and Oculus VR, a freely downloadable CAD file (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/c73c6865-160f-451e-9106-ef7fef7543f4/default.aspx) has popped up online at Microsoft Research. This file claims that Microsoft Research has developed a superior lens design than the one currently inhabiting the Oculus Rift DK2 headset.

According to Microsoft Research’s site ” This zip file contains CAD files and source code necessary to build and use an improved lens for the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD). The optical quality is significantly better than the lenses that come with the Oculus. The lens uses off the shelf lens elements from Edmund Optics.”

In the readme file the new lens design features a field of view, “slightly smaller than the stock lens, but it is sharper across the field and has far less chromatic aberration.”

The lens was developed by a new “lens design program” at Microsoft Research and the housing can be 3D printed using a high-end Objet Eden 260 3D printer. The file goes on to state ” We haven’t tested any other printer but you may

have issues with hobbyist FDM printers because the thin crush ribs that hold the lens elements in place may not print properly.”

In the files provided the source code works with the Unity game engine to correct the lens distortion for the Oculus display. The file further details, “If you are using a different game engine you may have to modify them.”

Microsoft Research are hoping soon be able to publish a paper “Lens Lego: Automatic Lens Generation Using Off-the-shelf Components”, will shed more light on its work.

>>1009

The figures I've seen for the two lenses listed are around $225. So this is a $450 upgrade that sharpens the screen at the expense of losing some of the field of view.

http://www.edmundoptics.com/optics/optical-lenses/achromatic-lenses/mgf2-coated-achromatic-lenses/47737/ $125

http://www.edmundoptics.com/optics/optical-lenses/achromatic-lenses/mgf2-coated-achromatic-lenses/47717/ $100

I haven't seen any real number about what the lose of FoV is but just look at that lens, it can't be good. This is one of the most blatant VR non-news stories I've seen in awhile.

Hopefully we'll start seeing real innovative research done with contact or fluid lenses by independent third parties and not PR buzz spin from corporations that just want their name to be associated with VR in the tech blogging world. Maybe one day the tech rags that currently report on this nonsense will call it out for what it is.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18327/osvr-hacker-dev-kit-finally-goes-on-sale/

All the way back in January 2015 Razer joined forces with a number of other tech companies to announce Open-Source Virtual Reality (OSVR), a unique ecosystem that has dedicated itself to making VR development accessible. The system essentially allows developers access to a range of hardware and software that enables them to easily integrate a wide range of VR peripherals and develop for the range of head-mounted displays (HMDs). The group also planned to launch its own HMD in the form of the OSVR Hacker Dev Kit. That dev kit is finally now available.

The official OSVR website is currently offering 3 versions of the OSVR Hacker Dev Kit. The original 1.0 device, as first seen at the January reveal, is available for $199.99 USD and offers a 5.5-inch 1920 x 1080p display, Dual-Lenses Optics for a 100 degree field of view (FOV), a belt box to prevent cable tangling and a foam later facemask. The 1.1 version is also priced a $199.99 but includes an OLED, full HD display with a pixel density of 401 PPI. The facemask is also improved with bamboo charcoal microfiber.

The final version, 1.2, is similar to the previous iteration but crucially includes an IR Faceplate that provides positional tracking, including an IR Camera. This set costs $299.99.

For those that don’t choose the newest version, an IR Upgrade Kit can be purchased for $129.99, while the OLED display and improved facemask are also on sale for $149.99 and $19.99 respectively. Previously announced additions such as the Leap Motion faceplate, adding in hand-tracking technology, are listed but not yet available to purchase.

Expect plenty more additions to the HMD to be announced in the coming weeks and months as OSVR continues to partner with a wide range of technology companies.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18329/vr-has-incredible-potential-states-david-attenborough/

As VRFocus previously reported (http://vrfocus.com/archives/17822/natural-history-museums-first-life-gets-launch-video/), The Natural History Museum and Atlantic Productions have teamed up to produce First Life, a virtual reality (VR) experience that delves into the oceans of the Cambrian era, some 500 million years ago. The piece has been created in conjunction with Samsung using the Gear VR head-mounted display (HMD) and Galaxy S6 smartphone.

David Attenborough was chosen as the narrator of the film as his previous 60 years experience within the industry makes him the natural choice for many. Speaking to The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/05/david-attenborough-vr-atlantic-national-history-museum) about the launch of the exhibit Attenborough enthused, “VR has incredible potential. It takes you to places you could have never dreamed existed, and you have a vivid feeling of actually being there. It’s an experience you don’t forget – that’s what’s so exciting about it.”

If David Attenborough sees the potential in VR then hopefully he may be inclined to make more VR experiences in the future. His previous collaborations with Atlantic Productions certainly suggest that the pair could create some compelling educational VR content.

Anthony Geffen, founder of Atlantic Productions isn’t stopping with just the Natural History Museum, as six foreign museums have contacted him since First Life started. And Geffen now wants to go further, stating “Now that we’ve learned to use VR for storytelling, we are building experiences to enhance our major new productions.”

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18351/disney-ar-is-very-exciting-but-vr-has-socialisation-problem/

Disney has a huge global presence with some of the most popular franchises available. Legions of fans help to make any new idea based on these franchises almost an instant commercial success, so naturally companies involved in new technology like virtual reality (VR) would love to have Disney on board to help with promotion. But Disney is also a forward thinking business which wants to combine its latest products like Disney Infinity 3.0 with the latest technology for fans to enjoy.

Engadget recently interviewed VP of production at Disney Interactive (http://www.engadget.com/2015/07/01/disney-infinity-might-make-its-way-to-microsoft-hololens/), John Vignocchi about the Disney’s interest in VR and augmented reality (AR) devices, “We’ve had multiple meetings and discussions with Oculus, multiple meetings and discussions with Sony about Morpheus, multiple meetings and discussions with Microsoft about HoloLens. We’re very interested in that space,” he then adds, “There’s the socialisation problem right now with VR, but augmented reality is very exciting.”

Socialisation is obvious for a company like Disney which is so family orientated, it doesn’t want kids shutting themselves away, as videogames like Disney Infinity are multiplayer family-friendly products. Engadget also spoke with Disney Interactive head John Blackburn about the differences between VR and AR to which he responded, “My own experience with these devices right now is that I feel like they almost cut directly against what we’re trying to do, which is experiences that can involve you with somebody else,” Blackburn continued, “The idea of kind of creating that family memory and playing it together is really core to the experience we’re trying to build. And so when you put a lot of these headsets on, it’s almost isolating in a way. Until we can get over that piece of the technology, it’s not as interesting to me.”

So while Disney haven’t yet fully confirmed its intentions of bringing its Infinity videogame to Microsoft’s Hololens, the AR device has garnered the most interest.

Playing together with the family is an overrated notion, also I think he is a bit too optimistic that an average PC has the power to render more than 1 headset worth of content into the screens of VR or AR headsets. 2 maybe, but 3 and above? It would fry your PC.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-plans-to-have-rift-demo-stations-in-retail-stores-for-consumer-launch/

Although Oculus has sold more than 175,000 development kits, the vast majority of the world has still never had the opportunity to try the Rift VR headset, let alone any virtual reality headset. For a technology that frequently inspires notions of ‘you have to see it to understand it’, being able to try-before-you-buy will be a major hurdle for consumer adoption. In an effort to educate the public on what VR is all about, Oculus plans to put Rift demo stations in retail locations.

When the consumer version of the Oculus Rift goes on sale in Q1 2016, the company plans to sell the VR headset both online and in brick and mortar stores. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey tells us that in-store Rift demo stations will accompany units on the shelves so that the masses can take VR for a spin.

“Yes, we will be in retail. And we will have demos in retail so that people are able to try [the Oculus Rift],” Luckey said in our Oculus E3 2015 interview. “Because one way to show people VR is to show them at a trade show or a gaming show, another way is for them to try their friend’s unit, and the other way is for them to be able to try it out someplace else, and we want to make sure that they have that ‘someplace else’.”

Luckey also told us that the company’s VR headset would ship internationally, though he couldn’t say whether or not all regions would see a simultaneous Oculus Rift release date.

I remember back in the day before the advent of downloadable demos, the in-store demo station was a veritable Shangri-La of theretofore untested gaming goodness. As demos eventually migrated to discs (oh the joy brought forth by the monthly delivery of Official Xbox Magazine and its demo disc…) and then to direct download, the in-store demo station had lost much of its lust. But you can’t download a VR headset can’t download a VR headset without a 3D printer (http://www.roadtovr.com/usc-diy-vr-headset-3d-printing/), a prime opportunity for the in-store demo station to make a comeback.

Oculus has extensive experience with trade show activations, but the company has always had assistants on hand to walk newbies through their first-time VR experience, helping with the finer details like ensuring a proper fit, launching the experience, and wiping down the lenses between each user.

Presumably Oculus won’t be staffing in-store demo stations, but that leaves a big challenge for ensuring a positive experience for each user; even something as simple as a smudged lens can make VR uncomfortable. I can only wonder how they’ll handle the typical stiff security cable that’s almost always attached to expensive demo devices.

The company that’s had the most VR retail experience thus far in the modern VR era is Samsung who launched their mobile Gear VR headset in the U.S. in late 2014 and gradually made the unit available internationally. The headset was created in conjunction with Oculus, who may have benefitted from some of Samsung’s retail leanings, though the headset went through the latter’s retail channels, according to Luckey.

Gear VR is the first serious VR headset to see demo stations available in big box stores. Back in March, the company said that the headset would be available for purchase and demo in more than 100 Best Buy stores, one of the United States’ largest consumer electronics retailers. Samsung has also set up various demo activations, including one in America’s largest mall alongside to the headset’s launch.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18418/work-on-the-second-retail-oculus-rift-has-begun/

It’s less than a year now until the consumer Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) launches. The kit is set for release in Q1 2016, over three years since the company ran its historic Kickstarter campaign. Of course, as any VR enthusiast knows, the story won’t be ending there; Oculus VR will continue to iterate, bringing out new and improved versions of the Oculus Rift. In fact, according to company founder Palmer Luckey, work on the second iteration of the consumer device has already begun.

Luckey confirmed as much in an interview with Upload VR. When asked if the company had begun work on the second consumer Oculus Rift, Luckey simply replied: “Of course.”

This doesn’t come as too much of a surprise, as the designer explained that “there are components with long lead times, years even, or custom optimizations that aren’t going to fit into their roadmap for a few years. Those are the kind of things you have to start doing some work on if you want to ship a product on time.”

VR in its current state faces a number of issues concerning input and more. Oculus VR will no doubt be looking to combat these issues with future releases while also improving upon ergonomics and other factors. CEO Brendan Iribe has often talked about the goal of reducing the device itself down to resemble a pair of glasses, making them easy to put on and accessible for everyone. Meanwhile, Oculus VR has its own long-term research team, Oculus Research, that is dedicated to improving VR as a whole.

Don’t expect to hear more about the second consumer Oculus Rift for a long time. Just what kind of release cycle the company anticipates adopting remains to be seen.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18453/nintendo-schedule-and-format-for-vr-commercialization-is-unknown/

Nintendo has been quite vocal on its issues with virtual reality (VR) technology. The company has often cited issues with the potentially isolating aspects of putting on a head-mounted display (HMD) and obscuring vision of the real world, despite efforts from the likes of Oculus VR and Sony Computer Entertainment to dispel those concerns. Shigeru Miyamoto, legendary developer and iconic figurehead at the company, has echoed these concerns in the past and has recently talked a little bit more about his worries with VR.

Speaking in a recent AGM Shareholder’s Q&A, Miyamoto added: “Also, many demonstrations for virtual reality devices have been conducted at recent trade shows, and at this year’s E3, I noticed a number of dream-like demonstrations for which the schedule and format for commercialization are unknown. The current software for these virtual reality devices cannot be played simultaneously by a number of people, and since it is generally expected that the development for the applicable software for a high-performance device will take two to three years, there were a number of visual demonstrations for virtual reality devices.”

It certainly doesn’t sound like Nintendo is interested in getting involved with VR technology right now. That will come as a disappointment to many, considering the company’s stable of franchises would make for some of the dream VR videogames. Of course, Nintendo has experimented with VR before with its ill-fated Virtual Boy device and is even still involved with 3D technology thanks to the 3DS handheld console. Recently the company has made mention on a new system, the ‘NX’, which it will provide further details on next year, though, based on these statements, don’t expect it to have anything to do with VR.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18414/iribe-people-underestimating-third-person-vr-touch-is-for-first-person/

One of the more common misconceptions about virtual reality (VR) is that it only relates to first-person experiences. Some assume that the sensation of stepping into another world can only be experienced by trying to bring their own body into that environment. Plenty of VR developers would of course disagree, as a number of third-person experiences are currently in the works for the likes of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD). In fact, Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe recently went as far as to state that people are ‘underestimating’ third-person VR.

Iribe said as much in an interview with Gamasutra conducted at E3 last month. “I think people are underestimating the third-person viewpoint a little bit … There’s a ton of great content that’s in third-person, and it plays best with the gamepad,” he said.

It’s interesting to note that Oculus VR chose to showcase two third-person titles at its pre-E3 press event in early June in both Chronos from Gunfire Games and Edge of Nowhere from Insomniac Games. Both of these third-person adventure experiences were revealed after Oculus VR had announced that it would be partnering with Microsoft to include an Xbox One gamepad with every Oculus Rift that ships to consumers next year.

Iribe also made mention of Oculus Touch, Oculus VR’s official VR input solution. This consists of two handheld controllers that are position tracked and even include gesture recognition. “Touch is all about first-person presence,” Iribe said of the kit. The device is set to launch in the first half of 2016.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18502/facebook-has-a-long-roadmap-for-the-oculus-rift/

As the owner of Oculus VR, social networking giant Facebook is one of the driving forces behind virtual reality (VR) technology. The company hasn’t interfered too much with the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) maker since its purchase for $2 billion USD last year, but has provided the funding and support necessary for it to grow. But, while Oculus VR continues to move ahead to the launch of the consumer Oculus Rift next year, Facebook itself is still warning that VR fans need to have patience while they wait for ‘incredible’ VR.

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said as much in a recent interview with Geek Wire. “The trick with VR is, it’s going to be incredible, but everyone is going to have to be a little patient,” Schroepfer said. “I think everyone wants it today, including me, but we have a long roadmap for this. We are already planning out the second and third generations after the one we’re going to ship. It’s going to be amazing, but it’s just going to take a while for the hardware to get out there, and then to work with third-party developers to build all the experiences, because that’s going to be the real long pull.”

Earlier in the year Facebook detailed some of the first integration between its own service and the Oculus Rift. Users will soon be able to upload 360 degree videos to their news feed and then put on the HMD and step into them. This is just the first stage of what Facebook has planned for the Oculus Rift; no doubt in the years to come the company hopes to look towards bringing two people together online using other input technologies such as Oculus VR’s newly-announced controllers, Oculus Touch. That’s set to launch in H1 2016 while the Oculus Rift arrives Q1.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18567/htc-vive-showing-wireless-controllers-at-sdcc/

Valve and HTC’s anticipated virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD), the HTC Vive, may have been missing-in-action at E3 last month, but the pair are more than making up for it at San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) in California this week. HTC has brought the HTC Vive truck to the event as the first of several stops on an upcoming summer tour. VR fans and just about everyone else will be able to get their hands on the kit for the first time. But it appears that the version of the HTC Vive on display here has a major new feature; wireless controllers.

A tweet from Gizmodo confirms that the pair of controllers that players will hold in their hands when using the kit are now ‘truly wireless’. At past showings, the devices were tethered to the user as they played. It’s a big step forward for the HMD as a whole, as its input rival, Oculus Touch for the Oculus Rift HMD, was revealed to already be wireless at its announcement at Oculus VR’s pre-E3 event last month. Details such as battery life for the controllers and other features are yet to be revealed.

The HTC Vive is the first HMD to work with Valve’s SteamVR system, which provides Room Scale user-tracking in an area of up to 15 feet by 15 feet with the help of a Lighthouse base station. Free developer editions of the kit are currently being sent out to those that applied for them and will continue to be shipped throughout the summer. The consumer version of the device is expected to launch in time for holiday 2015, although a specific price and date are yet to be announced. The window pits the HTC Vive ahead of both the Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus’ 2016 releases.

http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-finally-shows-the-hololens039-real-field-of-view

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKpKlh1-en0

>Microsoft’s HoloLens is often touted as a revolutionary product and in this latest video, Microsoft shows how teaching institutions can use the HoloLens and change entire professions.

>But this video is interesting from another point of view as well, or should we say, another field of view. For the first time the company has started showing publicly what the HoloLens’ much maligned field of view actually is. You may remember that in our original hands-on with the device we were blown away by how immersive the experience was. We were subsequently very disappointed to find out that the final hardware would have a much more restricted field of view, taking away the experience’s immersive quality.

>Now, thanks to this video, all users can actually get to see the new field of view. It’s likely that as we’re moving closer to the HoloLens’ release, and as hardware is being finalized, Microsoft is looking to adjust the public’s expectations.

First time we see something about the HoloLens that is somewhat realistic and isn't just more bullshit CGI and it looks pretty underwhelming to me, something like the CastAR system or Magic Leap is probably going to be heavy competition for them considering how small the field of view is.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18581/first-picture-of-the-htc-vive-truck-arrives/

This summer HTC will be sending out a truck with HTC Vive demonstration units on-board, which VRFocus reported on yesterday, and the first stop is the San Diego Comic-Con between 9-12 July. Now the first image of the truck have appeared on Instagram.

The HTC Vive is a collaboration between, smartphone manufacturer HTC and Valve, the studio behind Half-Life and the Steam platform. The company’s have also created Lighthouse which allows for a user to have their movements tracked across a space of up to 15 feet by 15 feet. The technology was developed for Valve/HTC’s collaboration, Vive, however it will be made available for all HMD manufacturers.

The truck allows visitors to fully use the HTC Vive system, including Lighthouse (which is available in all three bays) and two wireless controllers to immerse themselves in virtual reality (VR). Some of the demonstration videogames available include painting, gathering ingredients for a meal and light painting. While these may not sound as exciting as space battles or racing round a track, the demos serve as a way to acclimatise users to VR, especially if they haven’t tried it before.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18541/warner-bros-virtual-reality-has-to-be-carefully-considered/

New technology drives the videogames industry as it searches for the next big thing. For a lot of companies that next big thing is virtual reality (VR); full immersive 3D gameplay that puts the viewer in the centre of the action. But there are company’s that are viewing VR with caution and even pessimism due to not one head-mounted display (HMD) actually being consumer ready. Warner Bros is one of those companies that wants to see how the user base develops before committing to a project.

Executive VP and General Manager David Haddad from Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment (WBIE) recently spoke with GamesIndustry.biz about the current climate with VR, saying: “We love being able to innovate interactive experiences, storytelling, character, and character development and we think ultimately this is going to be another tool to do that in the future. We have our R&D efforts in that area. We still need to get to a place where there’s an installed base to really commercialize it. So it’s too early to talk about anything specific, but I think anytime you see this much creativity, this much energy, this much attention, and you see such interesting experiences coming out of it… We think it will be a great thing for gaming over the long term.”

So while WBIE are interested in VR and the possibilities that it can provide against traditional platforms, the popularity is still unknown. Big publishers like WBIE have to consider the large financial investment AAA titles can cost to produce and the install base will have an effect on that decision.

Haddad goes on to say: “In some sense, you have to get to a stage where you have an installed base of these devices where you can attach the experience to that. It does make investing in it at a very early stage something that has to be carefully considered. And the lens that I personally look at it through, as well as my senior team, we’re still looking for that defining, must-have piece of content. Simply doing it to be ‘me-too’ in the space, or doing it to have a single interesting experience isn’t where we ultimately want to land on this. And we’re still working on that and trying to find those ideas,”

Gamer’s may have to wait until the HMD’s have fully launched before some of WBIE biggest and most popular franchises are seen in VR.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18599/report-proposes-samsung-galaxy-note-5-specs-suggests-september-reveal/

Anyone that follows the smartphone industry is likely well aware of Samsung’s bi-annual release cycle. For the past few years the company has hosted two major press conferences six months apart from each other. The first of these takes place at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona, Spain around March, while the second is usually hosted at IFA in Berlin, Germany. That second event is fast approaching, then, and could hold some big news for fans of the company’s mobile head-mounted display (HMD), the Gear VR.

The initial Gear VR was revealed at last year’s event and supported the Galaxy Note 4 enlarged smartphone. According to Sammobile the handset’s successor, the Galaxy Note 5, is expected to be revealed at this year’s show. It’s expected that the new phone will also support a fully consumer-focused Gear VR that co-creator Oculus VR has confirmed is coming this year. According to the site, this isn’t the only phone set for a debut at the event; Samsung will reportedly also announced the Galaxy S6 edge Plus, a larger edition of the Gear VR compatible S6 edge.

Both handsets are expected to feature 5.76-inch Super AMOLED displays, boasting a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels. The Galaxy Note 5 is reportedly codenamed Project Noble internally, and is said to be the first Samsung handset to feature an Exynos 7422 processor. It will apparently combine a 64-bit octa-core CPU, GPU, RAM, storage and more and uses a flat display. It’s important to note that this resolution is the same as last year’s model, though Samsung could be looking to improve on its predecessor’s performance, which would be a major boost for VR experiences.

Featuring a curved screen, the Galaxy S6 edge Plus is apparently codenamed Project Zen and utilises a hexa-core Snapdragon 808 processor with 32GB of internal storage space. It’s not clear if Samsung has any intentions of making this enlarged handset compatible with any model of the Gear VR at this point in time. Take note that Sammobile hasn’t provided any information on its sources with this information.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18591/oculus-rift-will-not-natively-work-on-xbox-one-confirms-microsoft/

After a rumour about the Oculus Rift working natively with the Xbox One surfaced this week, Microsoft has now responded with an official statement on the matter.

In Microsoft’s response to Hardcore Gamer the company states: “To clarify, Oculus Rift will not work natively with Xbox One.” The official statement adds: “We’ve said that Xbox One will be able to stream games through Windows 10 to the Rift, letting you play Xbox One games in your own virtual reality cinema. This means you can play your favourite Xbox games on a cinema screen in VR – it will be like playing games in your very own theatre. We have nothing further to share at this time.”

So that’s the rumour quashed, gamers won’t be able to plug an Oculus Rift into an Xbox One, the only feature will be the virtual reality (VR) cinema to steam videogames.

Microsoft do have the HoloLens mixed reality (MR) head-mounted display (HMD) in the pipeline but as nothing official has been said of its release, consumers will have to be patient.

http://www.roadtovr.com/research-survey-suggests-kids-equally-aware-major-vr-headsets-want-buy-one-console-prices/

A recent survey conducted by Touchstone Research, an online marketing research firm, suggests that kids and teens between the ages of 10–17 know what VR is, and when they see it in action they think it’s “off the charts cool.”

Touchstone Research, which conducted the online survey of 500 kids from ages 10–17, said that the sample was statistically significant and that it was “drawn to provide even distribution across the ages, 50/50 boy/girl and nationally representative on the basis of US Census region and ethnicity for kids this age.”

Kids and VR has been a hot topic of discussion, and whether or not children under 13 should even use it is still a question for the manufacturers and medical professionals to answer. But kids want what they want, they scream, and for some reason they’re the only people allowed to do it in public.

Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe at Re/code back in May explained that Oculus’ 13+ age limit was due more to cautiousness and was “something that made a lot of sense when we became a part of Facebook. Their age is 13 as well, and so we just felt ‘let’s start at 13, let’s evolve the technology more, let’s build more confidence in the health and safety side of it'” and that “eventually one day we want to have Oculus for kids, especially for all the educational use of this.”

Before any information was presented to them, kids and teens had a pretty good understanding of the major VR headsets out there, according to Touchstone’s research. The most well-known headset among them—recognize by 38 percent of participants—was Samsung Gear VR, arguably the headset that’s closest to a consumer-level fit and finish on the market today. Oculus Rift, Sony Morpheus, Microsoft HoloLens, Google Cardboard, and Mattel’s View-master VR scored surprisingly similarly, rounding out about one-third of all kids and teens.

HTC Vive took last place at 19 percent, unsurprisingly so considering it has only just been shipped out to vetted developers early last month and has neither brand name recognition or flashy concept video to boast (but hey, there’s juggling! (http://www.roadtovr.com/yes-you-can-juggle-in-vr-with-the-htc-vive/)). Still, it was interesting to see no runaway leader in recognition for the major VR headsets among those 10–17 years old.

Kids like VR, suggests Touchstone’s survey data which they rounded up into an infographic (http://touchstoneresearch.com/infographic-the-new-reality-of-virtual-reality-and-the-potential-with-youth/). In fact, they like it so much that after exposure to an informational video, three-quarters of the kids and teens polled said they would ask for a VR headset if it was priced similarly to a console. There were however some concerns in around half the participants about health, headset weight, accidental injury, and how addictive VR headsets could become, but even then, 88 percent said that VR was “off the charts cool.”

>>1029

Pretty sure he means Pentium 4 computers. Not PS4 consoles.

What's crazy is those P4 computers would be fine for displaying basic VR at decent framerates if you crank down the detail and resolution and have a good GPU. They'd provide a smoother experience than $1,500 top of the line macbooks or mac trashcans because of display issues they have that makes high framerates impossible.

A lot of people are going to buy into the hype, ignore the demanding hardware requirements, plug it into their shitty laptop and then place the blame for wasting their money where it doesn't belong.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18586/htcs-advanced-concept-group-explains-vives-origins/

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the HTC Vive virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) is the partnership that made it possible. The Taiwanese smartphone maker has partnered with none other than Half-Life developer Valve to create the kit. The legendary company was thought to be simply assisting Oculus VR in its pursuit of consumer VR, making the announcement all the more shocking. But how did this unlikely team-up come about? That’s something that Dana Nicholson, Executive Director of HTC’s Advanced Concept Group explained to VRFocus shortly after the kit’s reveal earlier in the year.

“Valve’s had a long history of doing a lot of laboratory studies around VR,” Nicholson noted in an interview that will be published in full later this week. “So we really sort of– we were sort of watching them and a lot of the stuff that they demoed last year at dev days was a big breakthrough. And so that’s where we started to follow, track them a little bit and further conversations where we got to see some of their breakthrough technologies, especially around the Room Scale laser tracking stuff. Gosh we were excited and so we brought our whole team on board and we’ve been working very fast ever since.”

The ‘dev days’ that Nicholson is referring to are the Steam Dev Days that took place at the developer’s offices in Seattle, Washington in early 2014. It was here that Valve revealed its VR room, which consisted of an HMD that tracked various markers plastered on the walls and ceilings. This allowed for true user tracking within VR experiences, a concept which has since been adapted into SteamVR with the help of a laser-based solution known as Lighthouse. This kit is part of the HTC Vive, allowing for Room Scale user tracking in areas of up to 15 feet by 15 feet.

The HTC Vive is expected to launch in full in time for holiday 2015.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18749/oculus-vr-founder-talks-exclusivity-for-oculus-rift-and-gear-vr/

This week Palmer Lucky, the creator of the Oculus Rift and founder of Oculus VR took to Reddit for a Q&A session about ‘console tactics on PC platforms’ and having a closed eco-system where titles would be exclusive to Oculus VR.

Luckey starts by saying: “What we are doing is working with external devs to make VR games. These are games that have been 100% funded by Oculus from the start, co-designed and co-developed by our own internal game dev teams. The majority of these games would not even exist were we not funding them, it is not like we just paid for exclusivity on existing games – making high quality VR content is hard enough to do when targeting a single headset, trying to support every single headset on the market with our own content is just not a priority for launch. Most companies would have done this as a 1st party software development effort, but we decided it would be better to work with existing developers who wanted to get past the bean counters and make sweet VR games.”

When asked about Oculus VR software having third-party support for other head-mounted displays (HMD) Luckey said: “Extending VR support to multiple headsets is not as simple as a patch, it requires pretty deep integration into the code of the game, integration that the developers themselves have to spend a lot of time integrating and updating. This is especially true for games that rely on our SDK features like timewarp, direct mode, late latching, and layered compositor to get a good experience. We can’t possibly make any promises about support through external patches, and we won’t commit to supporting people who want to use our store to buy games for headsets that our store and software don’t currently support.”

The videogames that Oculus VR currently support and in most cases being co-produced will soley be for Oculus Rift and Gear VR, as Luckey goes on to say: “As far as being exclusive to the Oculus Store, that is exactly what we do – our platform also supports Samsung’s GearVR headset, and we will be supporting future Samsung VR devices as well.”

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18868/career-opportunities-in-organised-crime-begins-shooting-in-baltimore/

A virtual reality (VR) feature film which will be shot simultaneously with 360 degree VR camera and conventional RED Epic cinema cameras, beings principle photography this week. Career Opportunities in Organised Crime will be the one of the first feature films to be created especially for VR head-mounted displays (HMD).

Career Opportunities in Organised Crime is a comedic, documentary style film following the recruitment process of Nicholas Stevenson into the Russian Mafia, their first American recruit.

The films director Alexander Roman said of using VR for the project: “The intent is to examine the effect of Virtual Reality on the cinematic narrative. Will the same story have more of an emotional impact when viewed through virtual reality? Will it actually prove more difficult to tell a focused story without being able to control what the audience sees? These are the questions we are hoping to examine with our project.”

“Viewers will have the experience of being in the movie, right there, with the characters,” he adds.

With the major HMD releases starting at the end of this year with the HTC Vive and going into 2016 for the Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus, Career Opportunities in Organised Crime plans to be available for download for the headsets upon their release.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18896/virtual-reality-now-being-used-to-treat-bipolar-disorder/

The medical benefits of using virtual reality (VR) are becoming evermore apparent as the technology develops. Medical professionals are looking to VR to either train future doctors or as treatment for a number of different psychological conditions. Researchers are now trying VR to treat people suffering with bipolar disorder.

In a recent article by Aljazeera, researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London and King’s College Hospital are looking at how VR videogame technology could be used to help those with mental health issues learn to deal with the disorder in a safe environment alongside traditional treatments like psychotherapy and medication.

Bipolar disorder is characterised by extreme mood swings, switching from severe depression to hypomania.

The researchers are using Oculus Rift head-mounted displays (HMD) with various different types of software to trigger emotional responses, as the immersive aspect of VR has the same effect as real life, creating anxiety, joy and other emotions.

King’s College Hospital has a cutting edge VR lab with motion sensors around the room to enable full motion tracking of users in the VR environments. The hospital has created software that simulates the London Underground or being on a bus to test how users react to situations with members of the public, which is especially useful for patients suffering psychosis or schizophrenia.

It’s still early days for this type of treatment, with only a handful of researchers offering a VR option but this may develop as the technology does.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18930/2016-will-be-critical-for-virtual-reality-say-htc/

With the HTC Vive launching towards the end of 2015, and the other head-mounted displays (HMD) by Oculus VR and Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) to be launched in the first half of 2016 it will be important for the companies to ensure that the first impressions by consumers is good, because as HTC have said next year will be ‘critical for the future of virtual reality (VR).

In a recent interview with Cnet, Jeff Gattis Head of Marketing for HTC’s Emerging Devices Group has remarked that “The industry needs a successful first year,” adding “Next year is critical.”

With prices for the HMD’s and definite launch content still to be announced the industry may be pinning their hopes on hard-core gamers and enthusiasts to start the ball rolling as the PC specifications to run the units will need to be good. SCE with the Project Morpheus may have an advantage due to the HMD plugging straight into the PS4 and the console’s large install base.

And to also push the technology into the commercial mass markets, VR will need to be more than just a gaming platform, it needs to be an entertainment platform for a variety of experiences. This is starting to happen as company’s like Oculus VR have recently partnered up with film studios like Felix & Paul, and HTC keen entice media companies like HBO and Lion’s Gate to bring content to the HMD.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-connect-2-registration-and-talk-submissions-now-open/

Oculus have just announced that registration for their second show dedicated to all things Oculus, ‘Connect 2′, is now open.

Oculus’ inaugural Connect show in September of last year was a resolutely and unapologetic developer focused event. Wary that content is going to be everything as virtual realty hits retail, Oculus wanted to bring their dev community together to share ideas, tips and generally talk VR until they were blue in the face.

With the Rift now scheduled for release in Q1 2016 and developers have that target window to aim for, this year’s event is poised to be Oculus’ most important event yet. Developers know their ship date (roughly), they know their controller options (for the first 6 months at least, the packed-in Xbox One controller) – so Connect 2 will surely be all about doubling down and preparing for the cold, hard realities of consumer VR.

Of course, Oculus also announced their long awaited virtual reality motion control solution, Oculus Touch (aka ‘Half Moon’) controllers. Designed by recently acquired design wizards Carbon, the optically tracked devices won us and many others over when they were demo’d at E3 last month. Expect many questions from developers as they try to wrap their head around the creative possibilities the devices present whilst squaring commercial concerns over the staggered ship date of Touch.

Oculus have now opened registration for the show, scheduled to run 23-25 September at the Loews Hotel in Hollywood, CA. Once again, places are limited to approx. 1500 and as VR has grown immeasurably in popularity just in the last 12 months, those 1500 spots won’t hang around for long.

Oculus are also interested to hear from you if you’d like to speak at the event. Specifically if you fall in the following tracks:

'VR Engineering – These talks will cover technical details of developing for PC and mobile platforms, including best practices for optimizing performance, minimizing latency, and mastering advanced rendering techniques. Game and App Design – These talks will focus on design and development principles for creating new VR games, apps, and experiences that are innovative, immersive, and fun. Cinematic VR – These talks will share lessons around combining elements of traditional film, games, theatre, and performance art to create unique VR experiences that place the audience inside the story and virtual world.'

If you think you’d be interested in submitting ideas for talks at Oculus Connect 2, head over to the website and register now (https://www.oculus.com/en-us/connect/).

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18993/microsoft-reveals-multi-person-hololens-experience/

Microsoft’s HoloLens stands as an intriguing prospect for ‘mixed reality’. Unlike the traditional virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs), HoloLens doesn’t entirely block out your vision, nor does it limit the field of view in the same way that many augmented reality (AR) HMDs do. That offers some interesting opportunities for multi-person use, and Microsoft has revealed the first such possibility at their Worldwide Partners Conference (WPC), Toronto.

In a presentation about how existing software (and practices therein) can easily be adapted for use with HoloLens, Microsoft discussed the possibilities of using 3D modelling tool Maya with the HMD. An expansion of the motorcycle teaser revealed alongside the device itself, Dan McCulloch, Studio Manager, Windows & Devices, demonstrated how visuals created on a PC package could then be skinned in real-time atop a real world object. Further to this, he demonstrated how that skin could then be manipulated with hand gestures and the data transferred directly back into the PC program.

Later in the talk, McCulloch introduced a colleague who was based in Barcelona, a significant distance from the presentation, and displayed his input via a hologram. The HoloLens recorded this secondary user’s position relative to the object and their viewpoint while allowing them to record a message to the primary user.

“Using HoloLens we have shown that it can revolutionise the way people work, play, communicate, learn and create,” stated McCulloch, “I want to show you another example of how holograms can change the way you work and create.”

While the demonstration offered erred very much on the side of design and creativity, there’s no doubt that this technology offers some extremely exciting possibilities for entertainment also. Asymmetrical gameplay between two users is easy to imagine, but in time could we see more complicated real-time experiences?

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19032/virtual-reality-system-being-used-to-train-nfl-players/

Virtual reality (VR) has been used for a number of years for training purposes mainly by the military due to the expense of the systems. As modern VR technology by company’s like Oculus VR have helped improve and reduce the cost, its application in a wider range of fields has grown. Now the Tampa Bay Buccaneers NFL team have purchased a new VR teaching system for rookie quarterback Jameis Winston.

ESPN have reported that when the Bucs begin training in August they will be using the Sidekiq football-simulator software developed by EON Sports VR.

EON Sports VR CEO Brendan Reilly said: “Virtual reality has become very popular in high school and college programs, and there has recently been much more interest in the technology from professional sports teams looking to add to their teaching tools while limiting exposure to injuries that may occur in live-action situations,” adding: “We are excited to get to work with the Buccaneers and provide their quarterbacks with the opportunity to train more efficiently than ever before.”

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers General Manager Jason Licht said about the new technology: “We are excited to be coming in on the front end of this new wave of technology that is designed to supplement the on-field and classroom work that our quarterbacks are already doing. Obviously, there is no real substitute for being on the field when it comes to getting our players ready for game action. However, this virtual-reality technology allows us to enhance the learning experience for our quarterbacks without requiring them to put in additional time on the practice fields.”

The VR system from EON Sports VR generates game conditions and allows customisation of virtual scenarios to be created from the same view point as the player.

I think handegg is shit, but whatever.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/18964/vr-exciting-states-dixon-carphone/

With PC gaming on the rise and virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMD) set to bolster that rise further over the next 12 months, the need for consumers to venture into retail stores to see and experience the technology before they purchase means company’s like Dixon Carphone will be keen to take advantage.

Dixons Carphone which owns the Carphone Warehouse and Currys/PC World brands has now confirmed to PCR-Online that due to the nature of HMD’s, the company will be stocking more ‘sophisticated’ PC gaming systems as well as HMD’s in the future. Andrew Harrison, deputy group CEO at Dixons Carphone spoke to the website saying: “I think the interesting direction and the thing we’re quite excited about in the long term is virtual reality/augmented reality.”

Harrison continues: “From the things we’ve seen at the events we’ve got to go on, and some of the products available, you need very high-powered computers in order to do that. You need setup capabilities and a room to be able to do it in, and you need peripherals. People are going to need to come to physical retail places and explore what’s on offer. I think it’s quite exciting. I think it’s going to be one of the bigger trends over the coming years and we’re working quite hard on that in terms of how we bring that to consumers.”

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19004/virtual-reality-helping-people-with-low-vision/

Virtual reality (VR) is managing to open whole new avenues to researchers in various fields of study alongside its commercial applications of videogames and entertainment. One such field of use is how VR can help people who suffer with low vision.

Low vision is defined as a chronic, disabling visual impairment that can’t be corrected with eyeglasses or surgery. People who suffer with low vision, which is caused by macular degeneration, usually have to use various glasses, magnifiers and other gadgets depending on the situation.

Frank Werblin, a professor of neuroscience at UC Berkeley was recently interviewed by the Los Angeles Times regarding at new piece of software called Visionize. The software is combined with a smartphone and a VR head-mounted display (HMD) to help magnify the users surroundings. Werblin said about the technology: “Traditional treatments use magnification, but they magnify everything. Most people with low vision experience blurriness only in the centre of their eye, he said, and don’t need the whole-eye magnification that existing treatments offer.”

“If you wear a telescope, then you lose peripheral vision,” he said. “So our challenge was to find a way for people to see the world in context, but to create a kind of telescope in the middle of that view.”

The other benefit to using current technology like smartphones and Samsung Gear VR HMD’s is that they are easily and cheaply available, as previous projects have been trialled that cost thousands of dollars to make.

Trials for Visionize are on going but as manufacturers compete to improve their devices for the commercial market, researchers like Werblin will benefit from those technological advances.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19036/machine-vision-market-worth-9-50-billion-by-2020/

Lots of companies are gambling on one fact, that virtual reality (VR) will be a success. It’s a gamble that is worth billions to those companies that have invested in the new technology, like Facebook purchasing Oculus VR for $2 billion USD. Recent market research suggests that VR, augmented reality (AR) and industries affiliated with them could be worth $9.50 Billion by 2020.

A report published by Markets&Markets estimate the total value of the machine vision market is to reach $9.50 Billion by 2020 at an estimated to grow at a CAGR of 12.51% from 2014 to 2020, which includes an in-depth analysis of the market by component, product, technology, application, verticals, and geography.

The technology segment for machine vision systems market includes imaging technology, image sensors, laser technology, and augmented reality , while the component section relates to optics, hardware, software and peripherals.

There has been a great deal of support from both the public and private sectors, but while the entertainment and videogame industry might be garnering a large amount of the press it will possibly be other industry’s that ensure the markets success. From the military to the healthcare sectors which traditionally do make heavy investment in emerging technologies, the scope of the global market has flourished.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19003/battlezone-dev-on-vr-scepticism-is-natural/

Rebellion Developments announced their intentions to become a part of the virtual reality (VR) scene at last month’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Los Angeles, with a Project Morpheus demonstration of the forthcoming Battlezone reboot. Despite the impressive nature of this debut outing, the studio isn’t over confident in their position, recognising that VR still has some way to go to convince those yet to try it for themselves.

Steve Bristow, Lead Designer on Battlezone, acknowledged the issue in a recent interview with Push Square: “A lot of the stuff that people have tried on VR so far are really demos; we’re still asking people to imagine what the games are going to be like when they’re finished, so the scepticism is natural.”

He went on to explain an inherent problem in marketing VR experiences that traditional videogames don’t suffer from. That is, of course, the distribution of teaser assets via the internet. Traditional videogames are played on a 2D screen and so the translation from trailers is a simple step. With VR, that simply isn’t the case.

“VR does have a fundamental problem of selling itself through 2D video. You just can’t get the experience across in that way. You really have to try it for yourself,” stated Bristow. “I think that Battlezone is going to surprise people because if you’ve played tank games before, you probably think you know how it feels to sit in the cockpit of a fighting vehicle. But you put the HMD on and try the game out and you quickly feel the difference. It’s the difference between playing an FPS and going paintballing. They’re both cool but one of them feels more real, more intense, more close to reality.”

Battlezone is expected to launch in 2016 alongside the Project Morpheus head-mounted display (HMD).

I doubt that it will even be in the same dimension of fun as Battlezone 1998, that game was the best. This, I'm expecting mediocrity.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19064/deepoon-aiming-to-bring-vr-to-chinese-market/

The advent of low cost screen and tracking technology has lead to the modern wave of virtual reality (VR) thanks to the higher quality of head-mounted displays (HMDs) aiming for a consumer market. However, while the likes of Oculus VR, HTC/Valve and Sony Computer Entertainment have set the bar, there’s plenty of room for other competitors. One such company is Le Xiang Technology Ltd., which has revealed its HMD aimed at the Chinese market: DëePoon.

Le Xiang Technology Ltd. raised 1.14 million yuan (£117,687 GBP) in crowd-funding to develop the HMD, which will feature a 1080p screen supplied by Samsung. Other specifications include a 75hz refresh rate and 120 degree field-of-view, with 19 milliseconds latency. According to Le Xiang Technology Ltd., the HMD outperforms the second iteration of the Oculus Rift development kit, aka DK2.

To support the launch of the HMD Le Xiang Technology Ltd. has been working with domestic videogame developer Shanda Games Ltd. to create a spin-off of an as-yet-undisclosed existing first-person shooter (FPS) videogame. The title is set to be revealed at the upcoming ChinaJoy 2015 event. Furthermore, a partnership with 3D Bo Bo to create a video content portal will accompany the launch of DëePoon.

DëePoon is a tethered device and requires a PC desktop to operate, with a price point set at 1,899 yuan (£196). It’s not yet been confirmed which operating systems (OS) DëePoon will be compatible with.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19201/oculus-on-windows-10-support-is-coming/

With the consumer version of the Oculus Rift set to launch early next year as a dedicated Windows device, support for the latest version of the operating system (OS), Windows 10, is critical. While no such compatibility is officially available as of yet, an Oculus VR spokesperson has stated that it being ‘worked on’.

Windows 10 is set to launch worldwide on 29th July 2015, and will be a free upgrade for existing owners of Windows 7 or Windows 8. As such, the expectation is that the adoption rate of Windows 10 will be significantly higher than previous OS’, and so both hardware and software based on the Windows platform will need to offer compatibility for the new OS very soon.

Arguably, as the consumer version of the Oculus Rift is still several months away from launch, Oculus VR are in a more comfortable position than most. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a very present concern.

“Windows 10 support is coming, for sure, and is being worked on now,” stated an Oculus VR spokesperson, going by the name of CyberReality, on the official Oculus Forum. “It’s just not ready for release yet, please be patient. Thanks.”

Not only is Windows 10 support important for developers and the potential consumer audience of the Oculus Rift, but also for Microsoft itself. A partnership announced last month would allow for Xbox One content to be streamed to the head-mounted display (HMD) via Windows 10, but in order to do so the device must be compatible with the OS first and foremost.

There has been no specific date yet announced for the Windows 10 compatibility of the Oculus Rift, but with both Mac and Linux support no longer on the agenda we can expect an update on this soon.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_28534169/q-stanford-vr-expert-new-techs-promise-and

Jeremy Bailenson may be one of the foremost experts on virtual reality. But, as he puts it, he's no evangelist.

A Stanford professor and the founder of its Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Bailenson has studied VR for 20 years, conducting some of the most extensive research on the technology. He has a good sense of how VR can be used and what works well in virtual environments.

Bailenson is excited about how far the technology has progressed and sees great potential for it to be used as a more realistic simulator or as a therapeutic tool for people with disabilities. But he's worried about how it could be abused. And he thinks the use to which VR will be put in the near future – games – isn't appropriate for the technology.

Bailenson spoke with this newspaper about the state of virtual reality, his hopes and worries for it, and what he thinks will be the killer app. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What's the state of VR today?

A: The ability to track movements has gotten much easier than it's ever been. And the ability to display using cheap, nonspecialized optics has changed pretty drastically.

Where it is right now more conceptually is there's all this money behind it, and it's crazy. But there's so much energy. I gave a keynote address at the Tribeca Film Festival, and I brought a version of my lab to New York City, and New York is not the Valley, right? When those folks start caring about VR, it's interesting.

Q: What kinds of experiences are VR good for and for what is it inappropriate?

A: When Commissioner Adam Silver of the NBA came to my lab, he thought that I was going to try to convince him that one should watch an NBA game from VR. And I can't imagine what would be worse than that.

I've never worn an HMD (head-mounted device) for more than a half an hour in my life, and nowadays, I rarely wear one for more than five or 10 minutes. And a two-hour NBA game would be pretty brutal on the perceptual system. I believe VR's really good for these very intense experiences, but it's not a 12-hour-day thing.

>>1070

Q: Why wouldn't you wear a VR system for more than 30 minutes at a time?

A: Even though the newer HMDs like the Rift and the Vive and Morpheus are much lighter and really comfortable, think about how much time you spend on your device a day. It's more than six to eight hours, and that's a long time to be wearing a pair of goggles. But even if that wasn't the case, the real problem is that the visual experience with an HMD necessarily produces some eyestrain, and that gets fatiguing over time.

Q: But all the new VR systems are being pitched primarily as game machines, and gamers tend to play for hours at a time. Isn't that a big concern?

A: I don't believe that video games are an appropriate market for this. Especially when you get into the highly violent games – do you really want to feel that blood splatter on you? I don't think it's the right use case.

I don't believe VR should be used for hours a day. I think VR's great for really particular and specific moments that you try to learn about yourself and learn about others. Maybe I'm in a minority, but when these games come out, I don't think people are going to want to play them for eight hours.

Q: The research you've done in the lab seems to focus on how VR could be used to impart things such as empathy or concern for the environment that many people would consider to be positive. But assuming the effects are as strong as they seem to be, how concerned are you that VR might be used to encourage thoughts or behavior that are less beneficial or even dangerous?

A: VR experience changes the way you think of yourself and others and changes your behavior. And when VR's done well, it's a proxy for a natural experience, and we know experiences physically change us.

I've chosen to focus on the pro-social ones in this lab. I can't look you in the eye and claim that it only works for the good stuff. I can't. Am I terrified of the world where anyone can create really horrible experiences? Yes, it does worry me. I worry what happens when a violent video game feels like murder. And when pornography feels like sex. How does that change the way humans interact, function as a society?

I'm not a VR evangelist. The technology is powerful. It's like uranium. It can heat homes and destroy nations. I'm choosing to work on things that I believe are good for us. But that's my choice.

Q: What's going to be the killer app for VR?

A: I actually think the perfect fit for VR is the quarterback simulator. Most of the time when I show someone VR, they say, "Oh, I can see how this is going to be really cool in a year. I can see how I might use that." When Stanford Coach David Shaw put that on, he said, "We want this yesterday."

But what I want to be the killer app is communication. If I could do really good avatar communication systems, then we can reduce travel. When I want to do it, I can, but I shouldn't have to.

>>1077

Not so much. These academic departments are forced to justify their existence in the framework of whatever social causes are in at the moment if they want to keep receiving funding, it's a constant battle between warring departments to prove that they're the most socially progressive that they can be. Whenever they're interacting with the media it's always the same spiel from them about how they're trying to improve the world while next week they'll have no problem working for the military helping destroy it.

If it was a few years ago he'd be saying the exact same thing about how his VR research was going to help combat global warming. Oh look, a quick glance at his research department and here's the second news story posted:

>Virtual reality could make real difference in the environment, San Francisco Chronicle

>Jeremy Bailenson describes how virtual reality can bring people inside of a degraded ocean ecosystem to show how their personal carbon footprint contributes to ocean acidification.

I have to agree with him though, I can't see a normal person using a HMD for more than a few minutes at a time in the foreseeable future. And this is one of the few academic researchers that I want to hear more about when he talks about the communication aspects of VR because he seems to know his stuff on that subject. Asides for this 'pop science' book he co-authored that looks 500 years into the future and a few technical terms he uses that I disagree with this is by far the most credible VR researcher I've seen yet.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19307/carmack-to-host-keynote-vrscript-sessions-at-oculus-connect-2/

Those that watched last year’s inaugural Oculus Connect developer conference in Hollywood, California will undoubtedly remember John Carmack’s keynote speech. The Oculus VR CTO hosted a now legendary talk in which he spoke about the workings of both the Oculus Rift and Gear VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) for well past his allotted time before finally being told to stop. Those that enjoyed his talk last year are in for a treat at the upcoming Oculus Connect 2, as Carmack has not 1 but 2 talks scheduled.

The famed developer revealed as much on Twitter over the weekend. Carmack noted that he would be hosting another keynote speech at this year’s event, which takes place from 23rd – 25th September. Though he didn’t comment on exact what he would be talking about, it’s likely that Carmack will again steer his session towards the Gear VR, a mobile HMD that runs with Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy S6 phones. A new, consumer-focused version of the Gear VR is in development with the help of Carmack and is expected to be revealed before Oculus Connect 2.

On top of this, the developer will also host a talk on VrScript which, as one fan explained, is a Scheme dialect that Carmack has previously talked about. This will be a ‘live coding session’, so expect it to be a tech-heavy talk that will assume a good knowledge of VR development from the off. It’s not year clear when these talks will be hosted across the 3-day event, though the keynote speech will likely come sooner rather than later. Last year’s show featured 3 keynotes speeches in a row from CEO Brendan Iribe, Chief Scientist Michael Abrash and Carmack respectively before standard sessions got underway.

Plenty of other details are expected for Oculus Connect 2. Many will be hoping to learn the full release date of the consumer Oculus Rift, which currently has a Q1 2016 release window. Pricing is another detail currently under wraps.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19337/tsc-announces-opening-of-virtual-reality-lab-for-improving-transport-network/

The Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) recently announced the opening of its ‘Visualisation Laboratory’ where virtual reality (VR) technology will be used to help generate innovation and overcome problems in the UK’s transport network.

The TSC is utilising VR to enable engineers and designers the ability to physically walk though cities and towns, virtually, so that they will be able to test new services and ideas without building costly prototypes. The lab uses numerous different systems to make the VR as immersive as possible, including the Omnifinity Omnideck 6 which is a 6 meter wide omnidirectional treadmill that is combined with an Oculus Rift DK2 head-mounted display (HMD) to allow users to walk, jump and even crawl around the VR world because the Omnideck6 was originally designed for use by the military for infantry training.

Eurotransport Magazine spoke with Graham Fletcher, Modelling and Visualisation Director at TSC, he said: “We see huge potential for virtual reality technology to help solve the UK’s transport problems at a lower cost and without the associated risks of testing new technology in a live environment. The Omnideck Treadmill and virtual reality equipment we have installed here at the TSC is totally unique in the UK and will allow businesses to experiment, develop and demonstrate new technologies in a new and inspirational way.”

The ‘Visualisation Laboratory’ can also be hired by businesses associated with the transport sector looking to experiment and develop ideas. The cost to access and use the floor is £500 GBP per day, this covers the costs of the technicians to configure and operate the floor and general troubleshooting. Or if you’re planning an event there, the floor can be booked for £120 GBP per hour.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19354/bbc-looking-to-fund-vr-experiences-and-more/

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is already involved with virtual reality (VR) technology to some extent. Last year the company partnered with digital studio BDH to create War of Words, a mobile VR experience that visualised a poem from Siegfried Sassoon. The organisation has since hinted at further work with the tech, although hasn’t revealed any specifics just yet. Now it’s been announced that the BBC is in fact looking to fund new immersive experiences, which could well include VR technology.

The broadcaster recently started the next phase in its ‘The Future of Content’ programme, an initiative that’s designed to provide new digital experiences for BBC Online based around specific themes. For this phase, the BBC is looking for immersive experiences, including technologies such as augmented reality (AR), binaural audio, emerging gaming technologies and, of course, VR. Companies are being encouraged to submit proposals for new experiences that will be tested on an audience facing platform known as BBC Taster.

Specifically, ideas should be based around experiences that target young audiences, ideally in the 16 – 24 age group. The brief notes that ‘research tells us that younger audiences are more likely to share and engage with content where they have a more personal involvement in the experience.’

The BBC has up to £100,000 GBP prepared for funding ideas to be developed into full experiences. Submissions are being accepted until midnight on 28th August 2015. Those interested can sign up via Bravo (https://bbc.bravosolution.co.uk/web/login.shtml), where they’ll be granted more details.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19372/osvr-opens-research-portal/

OSVR the Open Source Virtual Reality ecosystem spearheaded by Razer and designed to bring companies, software and hardware together to create an accessible environment for VR development has now announced it’s new research portal is live.

OSVR’s research portal is designed for anyone interested in gaining in depth knowledge and insights into the virtual reality (VR) industry. There will be whitepapers featured here to gain interesting perspectives, access to pivotal research or just expand on your VR & augmented reality knowledge.

The OSVR ecosystem has 158 supporters to date, ranging from head-mounted display (HMD) manufacturers, software developers, peripheral manufacturers to Universities worldwide.

Also on the same site as the research portal, interested developers can learn about the OSVR software and it’s own HMD, the OSVR Hacker Dev Kit which is now available to purchase in 3 different versions. The original 1.0 device, is available for $199.99 USD and offers a 5.5-inch 1920 x 1080p display, Dual-Lenses Optics for a 100 degree field of view (FOV), a belt box to prevent cable tangling and a foam later facemask. The 1.1 version is also priced a $199.99 but includes an OLED, full HD display with a pixel density of 401 PPI. The facemask is also improved with bamboo charcoal microfiber.

The final version, 1.2, is similar to the previous iteration but crucially includes an IR Faceplate that provides positional tracking, including an IR Camera. This set costs $299.99.

With OSVR’s popularity increasing the research portal will be a popular place to learn about VR and AR for future development.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19203/altspacevr-raises-10-3m-to-accelerate-product-development/

AltspaceVR has today that it has raised an additional $10.3M USD to further develop its virtual reality (VR) communication platform in a new round of funding. Investors include return parties Tencent, Dolby Family Ventures, Raine Ventures Lux Capital, Western Technology Investments, Maven Ventures, Promus Ventures, Streamlined Ventures and Rothenberg Ventures, along with new investor Comcast Ventures.

Currently, the AltspaceVR software is available for Oculus Rift users, Mac and PC desktops, and 3D televisions. The additional funding will be used to grow the AltspaceVR team and accelerate product development. Including $5.4M raised in 2014, AltspaceVR has now raised $15.7M in total capital to develop this platform.

“We’re working hard to make AltspaceVR the most natural and fulfilling way to communicate online, and our new capital will help us get there faster,” said Eric Romo, Founder and CEO of AltspaceVR. “We can’t wait to show our community some of the exciting new things we are building.”

AltspaceVR officially launched its open beta in May 2015, and since then has attained users from over 50 countries. Through the platform these participants can share a variety of experiences online including gaming, streaming content through popular platforms such as Netflix and Twitch, sporting and eSports tournaments, and business collaboration. The company is hiring and has also recently moved into larger offices to accommodate its rapid growth.

To be honest I think this and/or VR browsing will be stuck as a niche thing, but who knows I could be wrong.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19437/valve-launches-new-vr-interface-for-htc-vive-the-dashboard/

At its pre-E3 event back in July 2015 Oculus VR revealed Oculus Home, a central interface for using the virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) that allows players to purchase content, access their library and more. It’s only natural to expect Valve, the company working with HTC to release the upcoming HTC Vive, to deliver something similar for its SteamVR-supported HMDs. Of course, the company already has the ideal interface in Steam itself. This week, Valve has released a new way to interact with Steam in VR; the Dashboard.

Currently only available for the Developer Edition of the HTC Vive, the Dashboard currently resembles a basic interface, as seen below, that allows players to interact with Steam channels such as the Store, Library, and Community tabs within VR. Included as part of this week’s Steam Client Beta update, which itself is paired with the latest SteamVR Beta update, Valve plans to add plenty of new features to the system in the coming weeks.

“Our goals for the Dashboard are to provide users with easy access to both system-level features and contextually-relevant content while in VR,” the company explained in a new blog post. “And because this whole thing runs on a PC, we want to create a space where any software can be accessed while in VR. The Dashboard makes this possible with Overlays, the applications it hosts.”

Valve has provided APIs for developers to build their own Overlays within its OpenVR software development kit (SDK). It’s not clear which other HMDs will be able to use the Dashboard down the line though it’s safe to say that other SteamVR-supported sets such as FOVE will take advantage of it. The HTC Vive itself is set for launch in holiday 2015, so expect this to be how players purchase and start videogames within VR when it is available.

Oh really? I hope it isn't like big picture mode because that was a crappy waste of time.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19449/with-virtual-reality-architects-can-change-the-world-like-a-god/

Virtual reality (VR) is enabling creative minds the ability to create all sorts of immersive entertainment, from videogames to movies, but what about creating a factual immersive experience where clients can view an architects vision for their dream home in full VR way before building has commenced. Olivier Demangel thinks that future is here.

Demangel is the Design Director at London based 3D imaging company IVR Nation. He was interviewed by Dezeen, an architecture and design magazine about VR, after he created a VR model of a house called Ty Hedfan, designed by architects Featherstone Young, which featured in the magazine four years ago from photos and plans online.

Talking to Dezeen, Demangel says: “Virtual reality will become an essential tool for architects. This technology is going to be so precise, you’re going to be like a magician. You’ll be able to change the world around you like a god.”

Describing the Ty Hedfan VR model he said: “In the Ty Hedfan demo you can open the doors and turn on the lights. You can instantly change materials for the walls, the floor, the position of lights. Interactivity means you can experiment with a lot of different options — design, materials, lighting, weather — very quickly.”

The walk-through was created using the Unreal Engine 4 and is compatible with the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) which the designer says is the best way to view the model. The designer also thinks that VR designs will be used by architects within a few years to show clients using a HMD.

When the designer was asked VR architecture would be more convincing than the real thing he replied: “There is no doubt in my mind about that. I used to say that when VR tech matures, it’s going be more powerful than cocaine.”

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19539/nba-team-using-oculus-rift-to-sell-courtside-seats/

VRFocus has recently been reporting on several NFL teams like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Minnesota Vikings bringing in virtual reality (VR) technology to improve training. Now NBA club the Sacramento Kings are utilising VR, but for a whole different purpose, selling seats.

The NBA club is using VR to help sell courtside seats and sideline club seats for the new Golden 1 Centre, Sporting News reports. The courtside seats go for as much as $2000 USD per game, while the 850 sideline club are priced at $200 – $300 USD per game.

Across the street from the construction site is the Sacramento Kings preview centre, where potential buyers can use an Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) to view renderings of the premium seats and showcase their benefits.

Kings President Chris Granger remarked: “It’s such a powerful way to tell a story. They can literally do a walk-through of the courtside club and see the Tahoe- and Napa Valley-inspired thematic in the rooms. It gives people a great sense of comfort as to what they can expect. It makes the investment safe and easy for our fans.”

While the NBA team maybe the first to use VR technology, if it proves to be a success then more teams and other sporting events may use VR as a new marketing tool.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19498/mark-zuckerberg-states-immersive-3d-content-is-the-obvious-next-thing/

When Palmer Luckey created the first Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) he wanted VR to be a success but couldn’t have for seen how much it would snowball in the coming years. When Facebook bought Oculus VR in 2014 for $2 Billion USD, Luckey now had the backing of Mark Zuckerberg, and the Facebook cofounder knew VR had a definite future.

In a conference call this week Zuckerberg, along with COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Wehner outlined the state of the company, its latest earnings and the its future plans including VR.

Reported in Wired, Zuckerberg said: “There’s this continued progression of people getting richer and richer ways to share what’s on their mind. So if you go back ten years, most of how people communicated was through text. We’re going through a period where now it’s mostly visual and photos. We’re entering into a period where that’s increasingly going to be video—and we’re seeing huge growth there. But that’s not the end of the line.”

“There’s always a richer way that people want to share and consume thoughts and ideas. And I think immersive 3D content is the obvious next thing after video,” he added.

And with Facebooks massive size, the company is perfectly placed to push VR into the mainstream. Facebook’s daily active user base was up to 968 million, while its monthly active user base now stands at a giant 1.49 billion people.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19523/oculus-vrs-chief-scientist-to-give-keynote-at-aes-convention/

With Oculus VR becoming evermore dominant in the virtual reality (VR) space, in part due to the acquisition by Facebook last year, the VR company is becoming prolific in numerous fields and has acquired some of the best people in the field to take the company forward. One of those is Michael Abrash, Oculus VR’s Chief Scientist, who is to give the opening keynote address at this year’s 139th Audio Engineering Society International Convention in New York City.

His Keynote Speech titled ‘Virtual Reality, Audio, and the Future,’ will be on 29th October 2015 at 1pm in the Special Events Room at the Jacob Javits Centre.

Jim Anderson co-chair at AES139 stated in an article by Audio Media International: “Michael’s address is a great opportunity to bring awareness of VR to the audio community. In the future, audio will contribute to this field in ways that we can only presently imagine.”

Abrash has had a long and varied career spanning 30 years, working with John Carmack to write Quake at Id Software, he worked on the first two versions of the Xbox video games console and he used to work for Valve on VR and augmented reality. He has also authored several books including, Zen of Code Optimization: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Software That Pushes PCs to the Limit and Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19564/can-brain-signals-be-controlled-with-virtual-reality/

While teams in the NFL are using virtual reality (VR) to train their instincts, and researchers are using VR to eliminate peoples phobias, some scientists are now using the technology to help patients take control of the area of their brain affected by Parkinson’s.

Researchers from the University of Ottawa Brain and Mind Research Institute in Canada are using the technology to get patients to control the colour of a ball within a virtual world while undergoing surgery.

In a news piece by CTV News Ottawa, patient Gilles Cloutier undergoes deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery with an Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) on, and manages to change the colour of the ball.

One of the researchers working on the project, Chadwick Boulay told CTV: “We are hoping to reduce the severity of the symptoms. At this very early stage we are trying to identify what kind of brain signals are important, and whether or not patients can learn to control their signals and – if they can – does that improve the symptoms? We have some good evidence that patients can control signals – the same signals that are important for their disease. We don’t know yet if controlling those signals will improve their behaviour. That’s what we hope to find out in the coming months.”

Cloutier is the third patient to trial this procedure and says “I think it’s worth it” to help develop the trial.

These are very small steps towards Non-invasive BCIs and even then it's questionable if this research will be useful for practical BCIs.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19675/nvidia-showcasing-htc-vive-at-gamescom-official-booth-revealed/

This week sees Gamescom get underway in Cologne, Germany. Virtual reality (VR) fans have a lot to look forward to, with titles such as Pollen and Kôna set to be on display. On the hardware side, HTC will be taking its anticipated head-mounted display (HMD), the HTC Vive, to the show for the public to get some time with. Slots to see the kit are already completely used up but. Those that missed out shouldn’t despair, however, as NVIDIA is offering a few more chances to see the kit at the show.

As revealed over on SteamVR’s Twitter account, NVIDIA will be giving its own demos at the show, which gets underway on 5th August 2015. Attendees will have the chance to win a demo by visiting their booth on the show floor. HTC will also have its own space on the show floor, an image of which can be seen below. Take note that, although a part of the ongoing HTC Vive World Tour, HTC’s showing is not a stop on its Vive tour bus, which is currently working its way through the USA but will be heading over to Europe towards the end of the year.

The HTC Vive itself is currently being shipped out to select developers for free. Both HTC and Valve intend to launch the kit in time for holiday 2015, with a full reveal of both the consumer product and its launch line-up expected to take place in October. The kit runs with Valve’s SteamVR system, offering ‘Room Scale’ user-tracking in an area of up to 15 feet by 15 feet, and works with a pair of position-tracked controllers. SteamVR is also set to work with a number of other VR HMDs including the FOVE eye-tracking device.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19679/oculus-vr-founders-view-on-vr-theatres/

Palmer Luckey the founder of Oculus VR is one of the many people who work in the virtual reality (VR) industry, who can see, even at this early stage, that VR has the potential to change the way users view entertainment. Luckey has recently given his view on the possibility of VR’s use in film theatres for future mass entertainment.

In a Reddit thread posted this week a question was asked by an unnamed source saying: “Can’t wait to check this out! Think we’ll have theaters retrofitted with VR immersion rig rooms, or a whole new network of physical VR theaters to reach the masses? It would be great to have spaces families and friends can experience VR film together.” To which Luckey’s response was: “That is missing the point. People won’t have to physically go to a theater and pay for the huge physical operational overhead, they will use their own personal VR headsets.”

“When people want to use their phones at the same time, they just pull them out, they don’t drive to a phone theater. Same for online gaming, most people don’t want to drive to a specific place to play with their friends,” he added.

Luckey’s comment shows that he believes for VR cinema experiences, customers won’t want or need to go to physical establishments, as VR can be enjoyed at home. VR head-mounted displays (HMD) like the Oculus Rift can create a cinema experience, with a screen as big or bigger than an normal theatre. And for VR films like the recently premiered Henry, the fact that these can be enjoyed as the creators wanted in the comfort of your own home is surely a better way to immerse the viewer.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19683/valve-vive-is-not-a-standing-exclusive-experience/

Easily the biggest feature of the HTC Vive virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) is the ‘Room Scale’ user-tracking provided by Valve and its SteamVR system. Using a laser-based tracking solution named Lighthouse this unique option allows users to walk around a virtual environment of up to 15 feet by 15 feet and have those movements replicated in-game. It’s something yet to be seen in any other VR HMD but, all that said, Valve has recently stated that it isn’t thinking of VR as a ‘standing exclusive experience’.

Valve Designer Yasser Malaika said as much today during his ‘Interaction in VR: The Rules Have Changed (Again)’ talk at the 2015 Games Developer Conference (GDC) in Europe. When asked about using more traditional input devices with the HTC Vive the developer noted that the company was “not thinking of VR as a standing exclusive experience.” The company has confirmed that the HTC Vive will also support seated videogames in the past, although the kit is yet to be seen being used with such an experience.

The HTC Vive is set for release during this holiday season, pitting it ahead of the launch of the Oculus Rift PC-based HMD in Q1 2016 and the Project Morpheus HMD for PlayStation 4 within H1 2016. Specific details about the consumer device such as pricing are yet to be revealed, although HTC has suggested that it will be sharing such details at some point in October 2015. A launch line-up is also said to be being around this time.

No need to state the obvious Valve.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19710/riftcat-virtual-reality-store-launches-for-oculus-rift/

There are a number of different places virtual reality (VR) fans can download content from including Oculus Home and WEARVR. Now a new contender has recently launched an all-in-one VR download store to help users find and manage their videogames called RiftCat.

To begin using RiftCat users first need to download the RiftCat Client. After installation users can then select and download whichever titles they wish to use from the stores database of almost one hundred videogames. The client is free to download and use, and current content is free, although RiftCat does state some future titles may come with a charge. The software will also automatically update its database, ensuring users are playing the latest version of a developers videogame.

RiftCat also has a VR mode enabling users to control the application directly from their head-mounted display (HMD) without needing to remove the HMD.

Not only does RiftCat contain content for VR users to enjoy but the site also supports developers wishing to publish software. Studios can submit apps and videogames to RiftCat which will then be made available on the service. With built-in tools RiftCat will even help promote developers titles.

Currently RiftCat only supports the Oculus Rift HMD but the team intends to support further HMD’s in the future. As the HTC Vive is due to be launched towards the end of this year and the Oculus Rift in Q1 2016, supporting both would spread the services appeal.

>>1134

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-cinema-getting-online-multiplayer-and-new-social-features-coming-to-the-consumer-rift/

Oculus Cinema is a first-party VR application that recreates the experience of having your own personal cinema or leather chair adorned home theater. And while it’s great to feel like you’re sitting in front of a massive screen, what fun is it alone? Oculus understands that movie-going is not a solo activity and says that they’re building online multiplayer and social features into the app.

Those with Samsung’s Gear VR headset have been able to step into Oculus Cinema since day one; the app is part of a host of first-party applications from Oculus (who collaborated with Samsung on Gear VR) and it has pulls out all the stops to make a graphically impressive experience, surrounding the viewer with rows of seats in detailed environments that even reflect the ambient light from the movie on the screen. Only one problem—the theaters are empty of even a single human soul beyond your own.

And this puts the current incarnation of Oculus Cinema in a curious place. For a bulk of users, movie-going is a social experience. If Oculus really wants to create a VR movie theater, they need to account for that aspect of the activity.

And account for it they shall, according to Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey, who told Road to VR at this week’s Gamescom 2015 that the company recognizes the need to make Oculus Cinema social.

“That’s definitely the point of Oculus Cinema. It’s not that you want to replicate the experience of being in a movie theater alone, you want to replicate the experience of being in a movie theater or home theater with all of your friends,” Luckey said.

With that, the company is building out social features that it plans to roll out in the near future.

“So we already have a lot of internal social functions in Cinema that are going to be rolling out in the next few months. Things like avatar systems, being able to communicate with people over long distances… rather than just local multiplayer, but having actual long distant multiplayer as well.”

Luckey affirmed that Oculus Cinema would also be coming to the Oculus Rift at launch saying that “what’s going to be shipping with the [consumer] Rift has a lot more [social features] built-in than the versions of Oculus Cinema that are shipping right now [on Gear VR],” including several features that he says are yet unannounced.

What kind of feature parity will be seen between the Gear VR and Rift versions of Oculus Cinema remains to be seen. Of particular interest will be whether or not the social features will work across the two platforms.

http://www.roadtovr.com/crytek-and-basemark-announce-vr-benchmark-using-cryengine/

Finnish benchmarking company Basemark have today announced that they’re working with game technology house Crytek to produce a virtual reality specific benchmark to test how well your gaming hardware can handle the forthcoming consumer VR revolution.

Hot on the heels of Futuremark’s recent announcement that they’re due to step into the fledgling VR benchmark market, today Basemark and Crytek are announcing a joint partnership to deliver a benchmark capable of rating a system’s performance. In essence, “Can it run VR?”.

Developed on Crytek’s CRYENGINE technology, the engine behind the Crysis game franchise and the recently announced Robinson: The Journey VR game, will not only test your PC’s rendering mettle, it’ll also help suggest optimal graphical settings to improve your experience. Although, quite at what level (driver settings, game settings) or how this will work is not yet clear.

Crytek’s Creative Director for CRYENGINE, Frank Vitz, said: “Basemark is already helping to measure technology standards in other areas of gaming, and we’re thrilled to be partnering with them as we work to establish a user-friendly yardstick for VR performance. We believe CRYENGINE can become a go-to tool for developers looking to create compelling VR experiences, and this partnership means players can also count on CRYENGINE as they evaluate whether their PC is ready for the most advanced, cutting-edge VR content available.”

Basemark has partnered with TÜV Rheinland, a global testing giant with around 20k experts in 70 countries worldwide, to help design and deliver the metrics gathering processes.

The new benchmark differs from Futuremark’s forthcoming VRMark in that it will use a real world game engine, testing performance on a system that will actually support virtual reality titles in the future. Futuremark’s will be what’s known as a ‘synthetic’ benchmark, in that images are rendered using a proprietary system.

“We wanted to make a real-world VR gaming benchmark as opposed to a theoretical one and hence we’re very excited to announce this partnership with Crytek, the leading game engine PRESS RELEASE company”, said Tero Sarkkinen, founder and CEO of Basemark, “By using CRYENGINE as the base and vetting the test workloads under our rigorous development process involving all the key technology players, we will forge the definitive benchmark for all PC VR gamers.”

It must be stressed however that, although it’s certainly welcome to have a real game engine to run benchmarks on, it is only one engine. Games that run on competing engines such as Unity and Unreal won’t enjoy a 1:1 correlation with metrics gathered although of course if your system can run Basemark’s offering it’ll certainly be a good indicator.

Basemark ‘VR’ will come packaged in different guises, from feature-complete business oriented versions to the obligatory feature limited free user version. No prices have yet been announced however.

Those who wish to get involved in guiding the development of Basemark’s VR benchmark can also get involved in the company’s Development Program. If you’re interested in this, you can sign up for that initiative here (http://www.basemark.com/participate-vr-benchmark-development/).

There’ll be more information released as both companies begin to talk in more detail about the new VR benchmark at SIGGRAPH 2015 next week.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-toybox-playground-touch-controllers-sets-bar-remote-interaction/

Gamescom 2015 has just started, a time when a sizeable portion of the European gaming community flocks to Cologne, Germany for a chance to get a glimpse at the newest that the videogame industry has to offer—which in our case means the latest virtual reality games and gear—and more specifically to me, getting to see the Oculus Touch controllers for the first time.

You’re not supposed to focus too much on the people that facilitate these sorts of demos. They open the doors, answer the questions they can, and try to stay out of the way so you can experience whatever it is you came in to do. But Toybox, a sort of polished up internal test platform for Oculus’ recently announced Touch motion controllers, was different. Very different.

Mustafa, an ex-Dreamworks guy turned Oculus believer, stood across from me in the virtual space. Between us, a wrap-around waist-high table with everything a curious five year-old would love to play with: brightly colored stacking blocks, toy cars, robots, breakable over-sized lawn gnomes, ping pong paddles and a handful of bouncy balls.

“Try and stack the blocks. Let’s have a competition.” I wagged my index finger incredulously, letting it off the trigger and watching the index finger of my virtual hand stick straight out. “You’ll probably win, dude. You work here,” I returned with my own special brand of self deprecation. His virtual head and two hands glowed an iridescent blue, floating in space not connect to a virtual body; Aand yet still I could swear he shrugged, laughing it off good-naturedly.

I stacked the blocks. I smashed the cars. I broke an orb that transported us to a world with underwater physics, one that turned off gravity, shooting ranges where I shot dual laser pistols at jolly ceramic gnomes. We took turns shrinking each other to the size of GI Joes with a shrink ray. I laughed and played and forgot all about the reserved journalistic integrity I told myself I had to maintain, of course following the words of the late great Terence McKenna who once said about tripping on DMT “Don’t give into astonishment.” It’s a motto I take with me into VR, just so I can take in anything and everything about the experience.

But it was too late. I had already reverted back to a child, tossing around beach volley balls and catching them before they hit my head (which would have just bounced off) and absent mindedly catching a block as it fell from my precarious stack.

There’s a good reason why it all seems to work so well. Toybox and Touch grew up together, so to speak.

“The thing about Toybox is it wasn’t designed as a demo, it wasn’t… designed to be the most fun or even necessarily the most representative of the capabilities of touch. It’s actually an internal test bed,” Palmer Luckey told me, Founder of Oculus. “We’ve been using Toybox for a really long time in various forms to basically design Oculus Touch, to experiment with different types of interactions, whether that’s flicking things or poking things or punching things or throwing things…”

And all of this madness in the Toybox (including some roman candles and a flickable Zippo lighter) took place while standing in a completely separate physical space as Mustafa. In the virtual world I watched him interact with the toys on the same table as the one before me and had an easy conversation about how I suck at ping pong in real life too. But in the real world it was me alone in a room wearing a VR headset, holding some futuristic-looking controllers. Though just in the next room, Mustafa could have easily been across the country and it would have made no difference to how natural it felt interacting with him in this space.

The Touch controllers are good. “Convincingly, incredibly good,” as I put it walking out of Oculus’ demo space responding to (warning: name drop ahead) CEO Brendan Iribe and Palmer Luckey who just happened to be strolling by. Not only was I surprised at the ease of use, which had practically zero learning curve, but the level of interaction that it facilitated is, in my mind, monumental for social VR. I knew Mustafa through that virtual social fabric. I knew when my dour jokes didn’t land well and he was forcing a laugh to keep the energy going. I knew that he was better than me at sports, and had better aim with plasma pistols.

And all of this was done with my new Oculus bud transmitting from another room entirely—a bold illustration of what can be possible with integrated VOIP and a very clever pair of motion tracked hand controllers.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19895/htc-vive-has-over-1000-developers-working-on-software/

While HTC and the other head-mounted display (HMD) manufacturers may still be tinkering with the final designs for their HMD’s before launch, they know that just as important as the hardware is the software. A lack of decent software for any hardware launch can destroy a company’s chance of creating a commercially successful product, which is why HTC is working with over 1,000 developers to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Recently reported in UploadVR, according to HTC, the company is: “working with over a thousand developers on content creation over a wide spectrum of applications including gaming, entertainment and education, to ensure a compelling ecosystem ahead of the highly anticipated launch of HTC Vive at the end of the year.”

The company is heavily investing in virtual reality (VR) as its core mobile phone business continues to decline. HTC reported an operating loss of $161 million USD ($5.1 billion in New Taiwan Dollars), in its second quarter financial results, revealing that revenues were roughly half what they were for the same period in the previous year. This investment stretches from software to the HTC Vive’s marketing. With the HTC VIve World Tour in full swing, the company is trying to ensure as many people as possible get to try the device before it goes on general sale later this year, giving the HTC Vive a head start over the Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus HMD’s.

With Samsung and Apple dominating mobile markets, and Samsung also having the Gear VR HMD which is being used by companies and institutions all over the world for VR experiences, HTC looks to have a lot riding on the HMD when it launches this winter.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19908/aimed-at-the-vr-market-edo-announces-6-4k-amoled-smartphone-panel/

One of the driving forces behind the rise in popularity of virtual reality (VR) hasn’t been the full size head-mounted displays (HMD) like the Oculus Rift, but to the smartphone market. Devices like the Samsung Gear VR and the popular Google Cardboard have seen a slew of videogames and 360 degree VR video experiences become available. So the demand for higher resolution screens is growing and now EverDisplay Optronics (EDO) has announced the worlds first 6-inch 4K AMOLED display.

The display will have major benefits to the VR mobile market due to AMOLED displays offering low latency, real darkness with superb contrast ratio and minimal hazardous high-energy blue ray. Generally at a 6-inch screen size 4K would have minimum benefits over current displays, but it’s where VR is concerned that EDO is aiming.

Dr. David Chu, EDO’s CEO says: “Visually a person immerses himself into a faux real surrounding by means of VR devices. To do so, it requires exponentially higher PPI in display, far beyond what current market offers. Using today’s UHD (4K) display turn-on as a launch pad, EDO is determined to enter the VR market.”

EDO was established in 2012 in Shanghai, China, to focus purely on small to medium sized AMOLED displays. Within that short period EDO has progressed rapidly to where it is today.

Whilst the company has launched the panel it maybe some time before smartphone manufacturers decide to implement the technology into new devices, but as VR grows so will the demand for these panels.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19927/vr-glove-manus-machina-partnering-with-osvr-for-integrated-tracking/

Back in June 2015 VRFocus reported that glove-based virtual reality (VR) input company Manus Machina was one of the latest teams to be added to the list of those working with the Open-Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) ecosystem. The company is working on a pair of wireless gloves that provide accurate hand-tracking for a number of VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) such as the Oculus Rift and even the HTC Vive. It’s also working closely with OSVR’s own Hacker Dev Kit HMD, and recently confirmed to VRFocus that it was integrating the kit’s own IR tracking with the gloves.

The company’s Bob Vlemmix confirmed as much. “We decided that the best course of action for our product is not to develop our own tracking solution,” he said in a statement. “We want to create a user friendly solution that does not require the user to set up additional tracking cameras or base stations. As such, we want to support the tracking solution that each individual HMD provides. With Oculus that would mean their constellation tracking, with HTC Vive the Valve Lighthouse.”

But while Manus Machina was already known to be working on those kits along with Samsung’s Gear VR mobile HMD, it’s working closely with OSVR itself. “We recently got OSVR on board and we are one of the first companies that can announce that we will integrate their IR tracking in our glove design,” Vlemmix continued. “We received their HDK and our engineers are working hard to get OSVR support integrated as soon as possible. We will be sure to keep you updated on the progress.”

OSVR has partnered with other input solutions in the past, even releasing a new faceplate with integrated support for Leap Motion’s wireless hand-tracking controller. Development kits for Manus Machina are expected to ship in the near future, selling for $280 USD. The full launch of the consumer version of the device is expected in the first half of 2016 and will be available for around $200.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19968/smi-completes-oem-eye-tracking-platform-for-displays-including-vr/

Sensomotoric Instruments (SMI) has announced of an eye tracking platform with designs for desktop, mobile, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) displays for consumer and industrial applications.

Currently in the VR market only the FOVE head-mounted display (HMD) has eye tracking built in, while the Oculus Rift has head tracking and the HTC Vive has motion tracking with its Lighthouse system.

The integration of eye tracking technology into devices gives an enhanced method of interaction with the screen, and in VR terms can help further the immersive feel of a videogame. Characters will interact with players just by noticing their gaze, HUD information can be accurately brought up by glancing at certain areas, low latency gaze data could be used for rendering, which could optimize visualization as well as the assignment of processing resources.

Christian Villwock, Director of SMI’s OEM Business Unit has said: “SMI has an unmatched track record with OEMs and users. Based on this experience, our technology outperforms in accuracy, robustness and freedom of movement. We are looking forward to seeing many new applications and insights enabled by SMI’s world’s first eye tracking platform covering all major consumer displays.”

SMI will be demonstrating the eye tracking technology at the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference and Exhibition 2015 this week which VRFocus will be attending to report on the latest announcements from the show.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/19988/oculus-epic-google-more-join-15-vr-speakers-at-casual-connect-this-week/

As if Gamescom, SIGGRAPH, PAX Prime and Samsung Unpacked weren’t enough for virtual reality (VR) fans this month, there’s another event to add to the calendar. The USA edition of the Casual Connect conference is running from today through to 13th August 2015 at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco, California. There are a number of talks being hosted throughout the event, with different tracks for those focused on specific aspects. But the Next-Gen Innovator track will be of particular interest to fans of new technologies. Talks on this track get underway tomorrow.

One of the highlights of the week will be a talk from Noah Falstein, the Chief Game Designer at Google that’s currently working on VR titles for the Android platform. He’ll touch on ‘Design Challenges for VR’ at 11:30 PT on Wednesday 12th August. Those developing VR titles using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 should also look out for General Manager Ray Davis’ speech on ‘Leveraging Visual Programming to Build Compelling VR’ at 10:30 on the same day. Falstein, Davis and Oculus VR’s Head of Partner Relations Aaron Davies will also join the ‘VR Roundup – Looking for What’s Around the Corner’ panel at 13:00.

Kicking off at 14:30 is a talk from Vincent Martel of Frima on ‘How to Make a VR Game Not a Game Using VR’. Merge VR fans can join the company later on in the day for a talk titled ‘Mobile VR is Already at Your Fingertips’ at 16:00.

The final day of the event will also see some panels including ‘Investing in VR & AR: Opportunities and Challenges’ at 10:30 with representatives from Jaunt and more on-stage. ‘Perceptual Learning Games in Virtual Reality’, a talk hosted by James Blaha of Vivid Vision, will follow at 11:30.

A number of indie developers will also be at the show including Tommy Palm and Card-Arvid Ewerbring, co-founders of Solitaire Jester developer Resolution Games and Ariel Arias of The Hum developer Totwise. All-in-all there’s more than enough on offer for VR fans at the event, then.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20022/oculus-vr-facebook-fail-to-halt-zenimax-media-lawsuit/

It has been over a year since we last heard on the legal proceedings involving Oculus VR, its parent company Facebook and ZeniMax Media. The tech company began a legal claim that John Carmack, Oculus VR’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), “illegally misappropriating ZeniMax trade secrets relating to virtual reality technology, and infringing ZeniMax copyrights and trademarks” from when he moved from id Software to his current position within the Oculus VR, ZeniMax also citing “breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition against the defendants”.

Whilst Oculus have previously made no bones about their opinion of the claims, describing them as having “no merit whatsoever” and being “a transparent attempt to take advantage of the Oculus VR sale to Facebook”, unfortunately for all parties named in the claim by ZeniMax the motion to dismiss the lawsuit has, as revealed by Polygon, now been denied. The defence’s arguments relating to the accusations of misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of an non-disclosure agreement (NDA) by Palmer Luckey and what is termed ‘unjust enrichment’ being refuted by the judge on July 27th. A following session yesterday, relating to those points directly relating to Facebook, ruled that all five accusations could not be dismissed owing to the discrepancy not being about the position under law, (i.e. the law being wrongly invoked in the accusations) and were instead being about the facts involved, which have to be resolved by the law courts.

What will happen now is that the case will, inevitably go to trial with an initial date targeting just under a year from now on August 1st 2016, at which point both ZeniMax and Oculus will bring their evidence to the court for a jury to decide. In the meantime of course Facebook and Oculus CV will have the launch of the Oculus Rift Consumer Version (CV1) head-mounted display (HMD) to concentrate on this is certainly one distraction that no one involved will be comfortable with. At the time of writing no one from Facebook, Oculus or ZeniMax have commented further.

It may also not just be Oculus and Facebook staff who are affected by any further legal. Bethesda Softworks, the force behind The Elder Scrolls series had to come out and state at the time of the initial accusations that the issue wouldn’t stop the developer from creating videogames for the Oculus Rift. Bethesda being owned by ZeniMax the matter could change in the future.

Oh for fuck's sake, fuck the retarded judge for failing to see that there is no case. But more importantly fuck off already ZeniMax, once CV1 is released you are going to be buried with hate from all sides for your short-sighted stupidity.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20067/augmented-reality-tech-used-by-wartsila-service-engineers/

Ever since Microsoft’s E3 conference back in June, gamers have been eagerly awaiting news of the HoloLens’ arrival. But the videogame industry isn’t at the forefront of augmented reality (AR) technology, as more industrial businesses have utilised the tech for practical purposes. Wärtsilä is now equipping its service engineers with AR to help improve its service for customers.

Reported on ctech.com, Wärtsilä a Finnish corporation which manufactures and services power sources and other equipment in the marine and energy markets, has been developing a virtual engineering concept by introducing AR into its remote support services.

The company’s service engineers wear specially-designed head-mounted displays (HMD) designed with AR technology and a wireless connection to the ship’s communications equipment to communicate with shore-based engineers. These engineers can then visualise machinery from the engineers through the communications link and help provide visual advice and assistance for problem solving using the AR tech. Being able to involve more engineers enables complex troubleshooting and repairs to be done more efficiently and effectively without having to halt operations aboard the ship.

Wärtsilä has developed this software to run AR and audio-visual guidance programmes as part of it virtual engineering solution, whilst using the data from onboard sensors to advance data analysis.

AR use is starting to become more widespread as the technology improves and it’s still early days as more industries develop tools around AR’s use.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20099/oculus-rift-price-to-be-as-affordable-as-possible-says-creator/

After years of waiting, virtual reality (VR) fans finally have some details about the consumer launch of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD). Oculus VR’s long awaited kit will be arriving within the first 3 months of next year and the near-final version of the device has been showcased at multiple events. One question that still linger however, is the Oculus Rift price. The company has hinted at ‘all-in’ figures in the past, including a PC that is in line with the minimum specification for running VR, but not revealed the final cost of just the HMD. That said, it has recently reassured that it is making the device ‘as affordable as possible’.

Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey recently explained as much in an interview with Tom’s Hardware. “Many people think that the limiting factor for virtual reality is going to be the price,” Luckey said. “The reality of it is, we’re trying to make the hardware as affordable as possible, and the money will be made on software. The one thing people forget, however, is that the PC that it will take to run a VR experience will be the defining factor in the total cost. Even if we sell our hardware for as little as $100, or even $50, the PC that it will take to run VR will take the total cost up much further, and that isn’t something we can control.”

Just when Oculus VR will announce the final price for the Oculus Rift remains to be seen. A good chance to do so will arrive next month at the company’s second ever developer conference, Oculus Connect 2. The event runs from 23rd – 25th September at the Loews Hotel in Hollywood, California and will include keynote sessions from major VR figureheads as well as panels, sessions and opportunities to sample some of the latest VR software. Fans are also hoping to learn a specific launch date for the Oculus Rift at the show.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20163/samsung-consumer-gear-vr-coming-soon-but-release-date-is-a-surprise/

Virtual reality (VR) fans were left somewhat disappointed yesterday as Samsung’s latest Unpacked press conference came and went without so much as a mention of the consumer version of the Gear VR mobile head-mounted display (HMD). The kit has been promised for launch this year, a statement that was recently backed up by co-creator Oculus VR’s Palmer Luckey, meaning that the company is running out of events to reveal it at. But, according to the electronics giant itself, fans shouldn’t worry; the launch is still scheduled to take place ‘soon’.

Samsung co-CEO and Head of Mobile JK Shin confirmed as much to Cnet following its press conference in New York City, New York. Shin promised the kit would arrive ‘soon’ but noted that its exact date was being kept as ‘a surprise’. Does this mean that fans can expect that launch close to the consumer Gear VR’s reveal? It’s certainly possible; the smartphone industry usually has a quick turnaround from a product’s reveal to its release, though the original Gear VR didn’t launch for some 3 months after its debut.

While the consumer Gear VR wasn’t present at yesterday’s show Samsung did reveal 2 brand new smartphones in the Galaxy Note 5 and the Galaxy S6 Edge+. The former succeeds last year’s Galaxy Note 4, which was the first phone to support the Gear VR. The latter is simply an enlarged version of the Galaxy S6 Edge, which made its debut in March 2015. Samsung hasn’t yet commented on its either phone will support any version of Gear VR either old or new. Both are set to release later on in the month.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20146/videostitch-introduces-real-time-360-degree-3d-video-stitching-at-siggraph/

360 degree video is set to become a hugely important part of the virtual reality (VR) industry as the technology heads towards the consumer market in the coming months. Using multiple cameras, filmmakers are creating experiences both story-based and otherwise that put viewers in the centre of the action. But, while work in this field is progressing by the day, plenty of work still needs to be done to streamline the process. Paris-based VideoStitch has this week revealed what it thinks is a big step forward; real-time 3D video stitching.

Stitching refers to the process of taking the footage shot by each individual camera and weaving it together as seamlessly as possible to make a true 360 video. VideoStitch has been showcasing its work in making this process instantaneous at this week’s SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles, California using the Oculus Rift PC-based head-mounted display (HMD). As seen in the image above, several GoPro cameras capture footage which is then instantly converted into 3D 360 degree video that can be viewed within the device.

“Today the standard in 360 live streaming is still 2D, but for real life events to be realistically streamed into Virtual Reality we’ll need to make the leap towards real time live streaming in 3D”, said VideoStitch founder and CEO, Nicolas Burtey. The company is yet to talk about how it might distribute its work for others to use or confirm compatibility with other HMDs.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20187/carmack-hints-at-oculus-connect-reveal-for-consumer-gear-vr/

Samsung threw virtual reality (VR) fans off course this week when it hosted its Unpacked press conference in New York City, New York without so much as a hint of the consumer version of its Gear VR mobile head-mounted display. The company did announce 2 brand new smartphones in the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+, but it wasn’t confirmed if either phone would support its VR device, which is made in partnership with Oculus VR. Now the company behind the Oculus Rift has suggested that more information on the consumer Gear VR may be arriving at its own event next month.

Chief Technology Officer at Oculus VR, John Carmack, has suggested via Twitter that some sort of news will be provided at the Oculus Connect 2 developer conference from 23rd – 25th September 2015 at the Loews Hotel in Hollywood, California. “If you are considering buying a phone for VR,” he wrote, “you might want to hold off until after Oculus Connect for relevant information.” The developer didn’t offer any other teases, though has in the past confirmed that he himself will be hosting a keynote speech among other talks.

The most interesting point of Carmack’s statement is that it suggests that the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+ might not be the phones that support the consumer Gear VR, which both Oculus VR and Samsung remain adamant will arrive this year. Could Samsung be developing a handset that’s designed with VR in mind? It seems certain now, then, that Oculus Connect will be the event in which we finally learn more about the anticipated consumer version of the device, which will drop the ‘Innovator’s Edition’ branding seen in the previous two iterations.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20224/shuhei-yoshida-vr-is-a-tech-that-in-a-few-years-everyone-will-use/

Virtual reality (VR) may finally be approaching the consumer market, with a number of high-profile head-mounted displays (HMDs) set to launch in the coming months, but the technology still has a long way to go. Most of the HMDs that will release over the course of the next year will be updated and improved upon in order to prepare it for a time that everyone is using it. According to Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE), Project Morpheus HMD for PlayStation 4, that time is just a ‘few years’ away.

The company’s Head of Worldwide Studios and somewhat VR evangelist Shuhei Yoshida stated as much in a recent interview with Business Insider. “So, I always say this,” Yoshida began, “any company providing the first time VR experience to different people, we are helping each other to get people to say, ‘Ah. Yeah. I never expected this could be done.’ And VR is a tech that, in a few years, everyone will use in some form or manner. And we are just trying to accelerate the time to get to that point.”

Project Morpheus itself is set to launch within the first half of 2016, though a specific date and price are yet to be announced. The kit boasts a 1080p OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. The device is capable of ‘reprojecting’ compatible titles with a 120fps refresh rate, rather than requiring them to achieve this themselves. SCE is set to reveal even more new experiences for the device at both Tokyo Game Show and Paris Games Week in the coming weeks and months. Fans are also hoping to see the device once again at the upcoming PlayStation Experience event in San Francisco, California this December.

He is right, but too bad he fails to see that his companies game console PS4 is dead-weight which will bring Morpheus down from it's full potential.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20230/oculus-touch-reveal/

Just months ago, Oculus VR faced 2 pressing questions. The first was simply asking after the release date for the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD). The second was concerned with input and what the company was doing to solve what is the biggest challenge that the technology currently faces. Its solution turned out to be Oculus Touch, a pair of controllers featuring buttons, triggers and even analogue sticks that are also capable of motion tracking and gesture recognition. But why did Oculus VR wait so long to reveal its device and, more importantly, what makes Oculus Touch better than PlayStation Move and the SteamVR controllers?

That’s something that CEO Brendan Iribe recently explained in an interview with Wired. “The important thing is hands, being able to look and see your own hands looking natural is something we’ve really focussed on,” Iribe said of Oculus Touch. “We’ve waited to reveal it and we wanted other people to reveal their own stuff first, so no-one was adopting our stuff and doing their own ways first. We went with a lot of ways but our Touch device is the path for the future.”

According to the CEO, studios will start moving to work with Oculus Touch once they realise the benefits it offers over other control ‘sticks’. “I think you’re going to see a lot of developers changing path to go our way, because holding a stick in your hand isn’t going to work in the world. You really want to see your hands. The Rift brings a visual presence, Touch brings hand presence and that amplifies the entire experience to just reach out and pick things up,” he said.

Oculus Touch won’t actually be launching with the Oculus Rift itself next year. The HMD is scheduled to arrive in Q1 2016 with the controller arriving in H1 2016. In the meantime the Oculus Rift will be bundled with an Xbox One controller.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20246/issues-with-your-gear-vr-then-unblock-facebook/

The modern technology everyone uses everyday is all seamlessly linked together so that users around the world can contact each other instantly. But not everyone wants to be so integrated and people do block apps on smartphones and tablets from communicating with each other or to stop data being sent into the outside world. Now it seems that if you’ve got a Samsung Galaxy S6 and a Gear VR that blocking Facebook may cause issues.

On a NeoGAF forum a user Krejlooc brought up a thread posted by a new user who was having issues with their S6 smartphone and Gear VR head-mounted display (HMD). The thread was answered by an Oculus employee who asked among other questions: “Are you blocking Facebook?.” After receiving a response saying “No”, the Oculus employee responded with: “No, you should not block Facebook.”

User Krejlooc does say that: “The Gear VR troubleshooting guide you get mentions unblocking certain applications if you are having trouble.” There is now the possibility that having a block on Facebook could impair use of the Gear VR HMD, with several users responding that it could be that Oculus VR being owned by Facebook as a possible reason.

'Fuck you Facebook' pretty much sums up this news.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20240/college-football-team-developing-its-own-vr-training-system/

Professional NFL teams like the New York Jets, Vikings, 49ers, Cardinals and Patriots have all recently adopted virtual reality (VR) training from STRIVR Labs. VR training is starting to become big business as the football training season continues. But now the Tennessee Volunteers, a college team have implemented VR themselves rather than bringing in an outside company.

Reported in timesfreepress.com, Joe Harrington, Tennessee’s veteran sports technology coordinator saw a demonstration by STRIVR Labs and noticed that all the technology the company was using was off the shelf, and so decided to create his own VR training system. Harrington said “(The coaches) are wanting to buy the STRIVR,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘You’ve got to give me a chance to do it on my own. I can do this thing.’ Coach (Butch Jones) was like, ‘We really like this STRIVR thing, but if it’s something that you think you can do, have at it.’ Off I go into this world, and I had no idea. I knew you could buy the stuff, but I had no idea how hard it would be to make it work.”

All the VR training systems revolve around a 360 degree camera array and an Oculus Rift DK2 head-mounted display, and the quarter backs are finding the system invaluable. Starter Josh Dobbs said: “This is definitely something that we use every day that helps us,” adding: “It’s just great. If you miss something on the field, you’re able to go back and look at where your eyes exactly were and what you were looking at. It puts you right back in that play and you’re able to simulate it again. You’re able to pick up on little things you might have missed on the field.”

Whichever system an NFL or college football team uses whether its STRIVR Labs or their own, VR definitely seems to be the ‘in’ technology for training future stars.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20232/oculus-ceo-vr-will-take-off-very-quickly/

Those within the virtual reality (VR) community agree that the technology is set to take the world by storm. What is up for debate, however, is just how fast it does that. The first consumer VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) are set to arrive over the next 9 months, but will these be the devices that catch the attention of the mainstream? Perhaps not, but Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe still thinks that the technology – and the company’s Oculus Rift PC-based HMD – is set to ‘take off very quickly’.

“In the early days of a new industry it’s almost always enthusiasts — whether it was the first set of cars, telephones or personal computers — and this is the beginning of real consumer VR,” Iribe said in a recent interview with Wired. “So it’ll be dominated by early consumers, enthusiasts and gamers who are really passionate about it, but then it’ll expand very quickly because with the internet the world is a very small place.”

He continued, touching upon the influence that VR figureheads such as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Oculus VR’s parent company, Facebook, will have on sales. “When Mark shares something, it gets tens of millions of views within minutes — that’s unprecedented. I think you’ll see it take off very quickly but it will start more around enthusiasts. There are millions of sci-fi enthusiasts in the world, not just gamers. It’s going to be easy enough with a decent PC that you can plug it in and get good experiences with Rift,” he said.

Of course, the Oculus Rift isn’t the only HMD to be releasing in the coming months. Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) will also launch the Project Morpheus HMD for PlayStation 4 next year and Valve’s HTC Vive will arrive this holiday season. Will each of these HMDs be able to make an impact?

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20303/iribe-devs-will-master-oculus-touch-in-1-2-years/

Oculus VR surprised the virtual reality (VR) community back in June 2015 with the reveal of its anticipated input solution for the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD). The company announced Oculus Touch, a pair of position-tracked controllers that feature analogue sticks, triggers, buttons and are even capable of gesture recognition. The kit will be arriving in H1 of 2016, putting it just behind the launch of the Oculus Rift itself in Q1 2016. According to Oculus VR itself, fans will see developers ‘master’ the controller in ‘1 – 2 years’.

CEO Brendan Iribe said as much to Gamasutra in an interview from this month’s Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. “You’re going to see a lot of Touch content showing up, probably more like middle of next year to late next year,” Iribe stated. “Developers need time to work with it; it takes 6-12-24 months to work with a new input device and build and ship a game for it. These things take time. We believe that, within about 1-2 years, developers will start to master Touch. And then we’ll see where we go with that second generation of Rift packages.”

This time frame makes sense. Most of the titles that Oculus VR itself has revealed for the Oculus Rift so far are third-person experiences that rely on a gamepad for control. Releasing these experiences first will give VR fans content while they wait for the release of the new controllers. Select developers are said to already be working with Oculus Touch and these are the ones that will likely provide the best implementation early on.

Currently Oculus VR has only showcased Oculus Touch with a tech demo known as The Toybox. Other developers have expressed interest in the kit, but are yet to commit to developing for it.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20404/htc-looking-at-audio-solutions-for-the-vive/

As HTC and Valve continue their marketing campaign in the run up to the HTC Vive head-mounted display’s (HMD) launch this winter one of the interesting aspects of the HMD that has rarely been covered is audio. With the Oculus Rift’s consumer version coming supplied with detachable headphones, HTC are still being coy on the matter.

In an interview on YouTube with Spanish site realovirtual at Gamescom recently, Executive Director of Global Marketing for Connected Products, at HTC, Jeff Gattis was asked about the inclusion for headphones and a microphone, saying: “We haven’t revealed the specs yet – but we are looking at audio solutions, obviously that’s an important part of the overall experience,” adding: “I’ll have to say tease it and stay tuned for the fall when we can talk about that in much more detail.”

As VRFocus has previously reported HTC are keeping a lot of details on specifications other details tightly sealed until October when the full release is expected to be announced. Whether there will be headphones included with the HMD or if the final design will greatly differ from the current developers model and have built-in headphones is still up for debate, but it looks like everyone will have to wait until October to find out.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/oculus-rift-isn-t-going-to-sell-billions-in-2016-and-that-s-okay/0154719

For 18 months, there have been a lot of exciting developments for VR.

Facebook purchased Oculus for $2bn, while Sony was getting involved in this new space with Project Morpheus. And Valve announced it had partnered up with HTC for its first Valve VR headset, the Vive.

But in recent months, the mood surrounding VR has been slightly dampened. We have Network CEO Neil Young predicting a ‘VR collapse’ as companies rush into the sector before it hits the mass market, while Frontier’s David Braben urges caution towards the new tech. Furthermore, development veteran Warren Spector went as far as to call VR a fad.

But Oculus boss Brendan Iribe says that the dream hasn’t died; rather, the reality has set in.

“VR is the Holy Grail – it’s the Holodeck,” he says. “For a lot of enthusiasts like ourselves, that moment of sensation occurred during the first two years of Oculus’ Kickstarter where everyone was excited about VR and saying ‘Oh my God, it’s finally here’.

“Then it’s: ‘Okay, it’s going to be here and it’s going to ship. Now where are we really? It’s going to work, but how? What is this? Who is this for?’ You’re not going to get a billion people on Oculus Rift when we ship in 2016. You are going to get hopefully millions, and that’s okay. But we have come down from the initial sensation to focus on the reality and on making this an incredible experience. You buy it, you have to love it, you have to want to go back into it every day, you want to show your friends and then they want to buy it and they want to go back into it.

“That domino will start to fall in 2016. It’s going to be very excited. MCV has seen [Oculus’ control input] Touch and the Toy Box tech demo. Most of the world hasn’t seen that. They’ve seen maybe [older version] DK2, probably only DK1. This new Rift is a huge leap. And it’s really where VR starts. The world is about to see that in 2016 – it’s going to be very exciting.

“Then every year or so they are going to see another leap. Not necessarily in consumer VR, but we will have at least a new prototype for a new consumer product almost every year. You are going to see new kit and tech coming at a very rapid pace. There’s more to come.”

For all its pioneering ideas around new technology, it’s clear that Oculus is a very grounded company. Iribe’s expectations of Oculus Rift’s sales are an indication of this. Another is the firm’s partnership with Microsoft, which it announced just before E3. While Oculus has developed its own Touch controller (pictured top right), this is a new device that developers haven’t had much experience with. But its Microsoft deal – which sees every Oculus Rift headset ship with an Xbox One pad – will help studios familiar with this controller.

http://www.psfk.com/2015/08/echopixel-zspace-virtual-reality-organs.html

EchoPixel uses 3D tech to let doctors explore and manipulate medical imaging in virtual reality fields. This means doctors can dissect your heart on 3D screens before having to open you up using only information from your MRI.

EchoPixel CEO Ron Schilling, PhD thinks it’s time to move away from the flat images doctors work with and help them unlock the full potential of information they already have access to. When working with flat images, doctors have to mentally convert these images into 3D images. This grueling process, given the breadth of virtual reality (VR) technology available today, is just not necessary anymore.

Medicine is fertile ground for VR technology. Medical imaging technology like CT Scans and MRIs already record information enough to build 3D rendering body parts and it does but only in 2D screens that are still unable to project depth.

For example, when a doctor is trying to look for blood clots in the brain, scanned images reveal tissues layer by layer in flat 2D images. Using EchoPixel’s idea, the patient’s brain can be rendered in its entirety as a 3D mass.

On the zSpace display, EchoPixel’s partner, medical doctors can view the patient’s brain as a floating mass of tissue. They can inspect crevices by simply moving their heads. The stylus-based interface allows doctors to take the projected brain apart and look at irregularities in 3D detail so in surgery they come in well-rehearsed.

In non-invasive colon scans, doctors are often left with hundreds of flat images to inspect. In contrast, with VR technology, the colon can be recreated and explored in fly-throughs. Through this, physicians can concentrate on spotting dangerous irregularities than figuring out how each image fit the puzzle.

Medical students can also use this as a tool to explore the human body as if they’re dealing with the actual thing. Although the digital screen won’t replace work on actual tissue, the zSpace can let the medical community build a library of illnesses in VR data so closer inspections, even in rare diseases, can be possible.

The groundwork has already been laid. VR content is already being made every time someone undergoes a diagnostic scan. Hardware capable of VR rendering are already available. Soon enough, we will be able to see our hearts floating in our doctor’s screens.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/palmer-luckey-gaming-has-spent-20-years-getting-ready-for-vr

Games Editor Sam Loveridge speaks to OculusVR founder Palmer Luckey about virtual reality, the gaming industry and the Oculus Rift launch.

It’s fair to say that I’m intimidated by Palmer Luckey. He’s the founder and the genius behind the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset that got snapped up by Facebook. And he’s only 22.

So when I have the chance to meet him at Gamescom 2015 after playing with the consumer version of the Rift and the excellent Oculus Touch controllers, it’s quite an intense experience.

But nothing seems to phase Luckey. He strolls into the meeting room wearing a teal shirt with large yellow stars on it and sits down at the table opposite me. On the table is a row of objects such as controllers and toy cars. He doesn’t seem able to keep still.

Despite Facebook’s acquisition of OculusVR in 2014, Palmer still believes that games will be what launches virtual reality into the public spotlight.

“The games industry is the only industry that has the technology and the tools and the talent to create an immersive real-time 3D world”, Luckey explains. “In a way, what the games industry has been doing for the last 10 or 20 years is building the foundations for virtual reality.

“Games are going to drive virtual reality for the foreseeable future, because they are the most natural fit for the technology.”

That’s not to say that he doesn’t believe virtual reality won’t have other applications in the future, and Facebook has certainly outlined its plans for pushing a wider adoption of VR.

“It’s all a matter of quality and cost. The higher the quality gets and the lower the cost gets, the more you’re going to see virtual reality adopted throughout different kinds of businesses.

“[But] I think it is probably the obvious conclusion for gaming in that it will allow you to play any type of game that you could possibly imagine, not just things that exist in the limitations of one particular platform.”

It doesn’t seem like Luckey believes there should be limits to the game experiences you can have with virtual reality either. In response to the comments from Sony’s Andrew House on the idea that VR sessions should only last 15-20 minutes, Luckey was quick to contradict.

“I don’t think there’s any one set of play times that are going to become dominant.

“If you look at console games, there are lots of games that have play times going down as short as two minutes, like one round of Smash Bros. Then there are games that go all the way up to the point you can’t really have a good session without playing at least three or four hours. It’s the difference between playing Candy Crush and a game of Monopoly and I think there’s room for both to exist.

“I mean right now what you’re seeing in terms of 15- to 20-minute things, it’s more the realities of the technologies and how it exists today. A lot of the things are just demonstrations that are meant to get people in, show it to them, and get them out. That’s the most people are building around, because so far there haven’t really been any launches of virtual reality technology.”

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20521/intel-and-google-partner-for-project-tango/

When most of the general public think of Silicon Valley search giant Google and virtual reality (VR), the Cardboard head-mounted display (HMD) will probably be the first thing they think of. Its ease of use and low-cost has meant that a lot more people have experienced VR and seen its potential than the more expensive HMD’s that are yet to be released could do. But Google has lots of plans and one of those is its recent partnership with Intel for Project Tango.

Intel has recently integrated its 3D sensing RealSense Cameras into Googles Project Tango system, which allows for instant 3D mapping of real environments on a smartphone of tablet, reports Nasdaq.com. VRFocus has previously reported on Project Tango when it was unveiled early last year.

Project Tango allows users to scan rooms to virtually render furniture and any other items scanned quickly and easily. This collaboration will mean that Project Tango could now work with smartphones using the RealSense cameras. Intel will be launching a new smartphone with the RealSense camera, powered by its Atom chip, and believes the collaboration will aid developers creating apps for: “3D scanning, indoor navigation, depth-enabled photography and video, measurements and immersive augmented reality and virtual reality,” its said in a statement.

For consumers this could mean putting a compatible smartphone into a HMD like the Google Cardboard would then digitise their real world surroundings creating lots of possibilities for developers.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20555/oculus-rift-consumer-version-to-make-us-public-debut-at-pax-prime/

While the Oculus Rift is still a few months away from launch, many may have already tried the second iteration of the development kit, DK2, which developers have been using to create their videogames. Now at this week’s PAX Prime, Seattle, Oculus VR will be debuting the consumer version of the head-mounted display (HMD) to the US public for the first time.

Many eager virtual reality (VR) fans will be keen to try the consumer version of the Oculus Rift, aka CV1, after all the recent hype, and with a full roster of available titles for demonstration at the event, which can now be booked via the Oculus VR Guidebook app. At previous events Oculus VR also showed its wireless motion controller, Oculus Touch, alongside the Xbox One controller which will come bundled with the HMD. No confirmation has yet been received if Oculus Touch will be on display.

The consumer version of the Oculus Rift made it’s playable debut at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Los Angeles, in June of this year. However, this event is only open to members of the interactive entertainment industry, and as such PAX Prime will be the first time consumers in the US will be able to get hands-on with the device.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20525/luckey-still-hasnt-tried-htc-vive-says-rifts-tracking-can-go-a-long-way/

Valve and HTC shocked the virtual reality (VR) industry earlier in the year by revealing what’s quickly become one of the most anticipated head-mounted displays (HMDs) on the horizon, the HTC Vive. The kit separates itself from the other major PC-based HMD, the Oculus Rift, by offering Room Scale user tracking across an area of up to 15 feet by 15 feet. Despite being revealed in March 2015, Palmer Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift, is still yet to sample Valve and HTC’s work, but is keen to note that his own kit is no slouch in the tracking department.

Luckey said as much in an interview with German site Golem (http://video.golem.de/games/15849/palmer-luckey-interview-gamescom-2015.html). “I haven’t had the chance to try their hardware so I can’t really fairly comment,” he stated when asked about the HTC Vive. “But it looks like what they’re doing is pretty interesting. I’m still obviously– I’m biased but I prefer our hardware and software, but it’ll be interesting to see what they end up shipping.”

He was then asked about the Oculus Rift’s own user-tracking capabilities, to which he replied: “We can go a long way. You tried Oculus Touch; we can track in that whole room which is a maybe 4 metre by 4 metre room. So it’s pretty– we can go bigger than that room it’s just that’s how big all of our demo rooms have been, these cube rooms.”

The HTC Vive is set to launch ahead of the Oculus Rift in time for holiday 2015, with the latter arriving in Q1 2016. More specific release details for either kit are yet to be revealed, making it impossible to compare factors such as price just yet. The other main HMD on the way is Project Morpheus for the PlayStation 4, which is due to hit in the first half of next year.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20603/valve-wants-vr-developers-to-publish-everywhere-oculus-creator-criticises/

Last week as part of the ‘VR vs.’ series VRFocus took a look at the subject of virtual reality (VR) videogames that are exclusive to specific head-mounted displays (HMDs), and what role they might play within the industry. The article suggested that, while the open nature of VR development was healthy, platform holders should be looking to secure their own content exclusive to their device in order to differentiate. This has sparked some debate in the VR community this week, with both Valve’s Chet Faliszek and Oculus VR’s Palmer Luckey weighing in.

Faliszek sparked the discussion by noting on Twitter that the company wanted all developers to publish wherever possible. “This article really misunderstands our goals with @OpenVR – we want developers to publish everywhere – no exclusives,” Faliszek wrote. In response to a follow up from VRFocus, he also noted that it was “wrong to think some are coming because we haven’t announced them.” So far, neither Valve nor HTC has not revealed any content that it has explicitly said is exclusive to the first SteamVR HMD, the HTC Vive.

Faliszek’s comments then became the source of a discussion on Reddit, which Luckey, creator of the Oculus Rift, commented on. “Also easy to say when you have not been investing countless millions into funding tightly optimized VR content from AAA and startup studios alike for years,” he said of Faliszek’s comments. “Anyone with a store would obviously love to reap the benefits without taking the risk.”

“Nobody is reaping those benefits without taking huge risks of their own,” he later added.

Oculus VR hasn’t revealed many specifics on just which titles it’s currently funding for the Oculus Rift though two upcoming projects, Playful’s Lucky’s Tale and a port of Gear VR’s Herobound: Spirit Champions, are being published by the company. The company did however recently state that it wasn’t simply ‘buying’ Oculus Rift exclusives but instead funding them from the ground up. It has also confirmed that any such titles will only be sold through its own digital content store, Oculus Home.

Palmer is in the wrong here. It's true that they invested money to develop those exclusive games and it would take time to reconfigure them to work on their rivals headsets (but not a considerable amount of time), but the difference between releasing games only on their store versus everywhere else as well is only a matter of how many per cent they get for each purchase.

We absolutely don't fucking need exclusivity for display devices when no one in their right mind would only make software for a particular brand of computer monitor only. Your VR headset is not a console Palmer, it's not something that is akin to a PC, it's a goddamn peripheral. A very good peripheral mind you, one that could become wide spreed just like the mouse did, but a peripheral nonetheless.

Get off your high horse Palmer, you are in an industry that is going to be full of competition and rivals. You are expecting for a vast majority to buy your VR headset when they might very well buy other headsets in the future. You will be making games for a small minority of gamers in the future with that kind of thinking.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20522/luckey-augmented-reality/

As virtual reality (VR) technology heads towards the consumer market, interest in augmented reality (AR) is also steadily growing. Microsoft is causing a stir with its HoloLens mixed reality (MR) head-mounted display (HMD) for example, while other companies such as Magic Leap are showing promise in this field. Oculus Rift VR HMD creator Oculus VR isn’t involved with AR tech in any way right now and, while co-founder Palmer Luckey is certainly interested in it, he admits that it’s very difficult technology to get right.

“I mean, I’m all interested in AR and VR, but I agree that augmented reality is very difficult technology to get right,” Luckey said in an interview with German site, Golem (http://video.golem.de/games/15849/palmer-luckey-interview-gamescom-2015.html). “Especially because we don’t really know how to use it. With virtual reality, it’s really obvious. Putting someone inside of a videogame is something people have wanted to do for a long time. With augmented reality, how do you make a good game that relies on changing the world around you? Nobody really knows how to do that yet.

“There’s people starting to experiment, but AR seems to be more useful for things like showing where you’re driving or showing where you’re walking or augmenting things with information. It doesn’t seem to be as useful for gaming yet,” he concluded.

Microsoft has already showcased potential videogame applications for HoloLens. Back at E3 2015 in June the company revealed a new version of the ever-popular Minecraft series that utilised the kit. One player would be controlling the title as per usual while another wearing the HoloLens was able to bring up the iconic blocky world in front of them. From there the HMD wearer could drag the world around using gestures and peer into it. Microsoft hasn’t, however, released any details about when HoloLens may release.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20672/xilinx-providing-tech-for-osvr-hacker-development-kit/

The Open-Source Virtual Reality Consortium has selected Xilinx All Programmable devices to manufacture the industry’s first, fully upgradable virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD), the Open-Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) Hacker Development Kit, Xilinx, Inc. has revealed. Originally revealed at CES 2015, Las Vegas, in January of this year, OSVR provides developers a modularised platform to create their content.

Co-founded by Razer, the Open-Source Virtual Reality Consortium aims to set an open standard for VR, beginning with the OSVR HMD. Xilinx, a member of the OSVR ecosystem, provides technologies that accelerate the platform deployment with shorter production times and variety of interface standards including HDMI, Display Port and USB.

“Xilinx FPGAs and All Programmable SoCs provide customisation options to make the Hacker Development Kit versatile and easy to reprogram. This allows developers to make tweaks for added functionality like multiple sensors and algorithms for computer vision processing,” said Lau Lee Yang, senior director for OSVR business development at Razer. “In the near future the Hacker Development Kit will also be able to offload software processing tasks such as optical distortion correction using its hardware and potentially perform image enhancement functions.”

“We are proud to provide the industry’s first modular Virtual Reality headset, the OSVR Hacker Development Kit with Razer,” said Steven Fong, director of the consumer market segment at Xilinx. “Xilinx’s industry-leading, All Programmable product portfolio is perfect for applications like the OSVR platform that need a low density programmable solution with a broad feature set for varying levels of integration, performance and power at a low cost.”

The OSVR Hacker Development Kit, which includes a positioning and head tracking device, display and double lens optics, has started shipping to selected developers.

http://www.roadtovr.com/consumer-htc-vive-headset-modular-headphones-new-mounting-system-and-more/

While the HTC Vive’s room-scale VR experience is one of the best available today, the device itself still needs to undergo a significant metamorphosis from development kit to consumer-ready product. Details about exactly what changes we’ll see in the consumer device have been slim but we’ve gleaned new info from HTC.

The Vive Developer Edition system provides an impressive experience, but it isn’t quite ready for the consumer market. Speaking with HTC’s Brian Lowe, Executive Producer working on VR content, Road to VR has learned about design changes coming to the consumer HTC Vive which is set to launch in Q4 of 2015.

Ergonomics may be among the most significant changes. Both the Vive headset and controllers leave much to be desired in this department compared to competitors, and Lowe says that it’ll see attention for the consumer version.

On the headset side, Lowe says the Vive will get a new mounting/strapping system which will replace the current flex straps and velcro with something more rigid. He compared it to a bike helmet with a ratcheting adjustment that hugs under the crown of the head, making it sound similar to the mounting mechanism on Sony’s Morpheus headset.

“The weight distribution will be better. [The consumer Vive] may be slightly smaller, it’s more about getting the weight back a little bit. The [front of the headset] is a little far [forward],” said Lowe.

Visually speaking, he said “it’s gonna look a lot different,” and that the final color likely won’t be the grey of the Vive Developer Edition headsets. HTC is known for using a bright/white product color scheme unlike most of their competitors in the smartphone landscape.

In addition to “modular” headphones, Lowe says that the headset will have a microphone and that the cable coming off the unit will be made thinner.'

“…the controllers won’t look anything like [those of the dev kit], the form will change,” said Lowe. “…the controllers have gone through a few iterations now and it’s looking pretty cool.”

He noted that most of the changes to the controller would be ergonomic, likely meaning that features and inputs would remain largely the same as we see now (a circular trackpad and grip buttons) but with a better grip and balance.

Regarding HTC’s role in the hardware and their relationship with Valve, Lowe says “They developed the tech, we’re taking it over to the manufacturing side, making some improvements as we go. It’s a good partnership, I’ll say. It’s just been a pleasure working with them.”

http://uploadvr.com/oculus-founder-expect-tens-of-real-games-for-oculus-rift-launch/

Bill Gates once famously said, “content is king.” That old adage has proved true throughout the years. Take smartphones for example, it wasn’t until we started seeing good content that was created specifically for the medium that the revolution really began to take off in the main stream.

The same will undoubtedly be true for virtual reality, which represents a wholly new medium that asks a decent amount from the average consumer. I mean if you thought trying to convince people to carry a small computer in their pocket everywhere they went was hard, try asking them to sit there with something strapped to their face.

Now before you take out your pitchforks listen up, I think – no – I know, people are going to be willing to do so once they get a glimpse at the content that the medium can bring. And that is the reason that the Oculus Rift is planning on launching with “tens of real games,” according to Oculus’ founder Palmer Luckey.

Speaking with him at a recent event, Luckey told us that we should be expecting a pretty hefty launch library, “I don’t want to make any promises… but it’s going to be tens of things that are of pretty high quality.” Luckey stopped short, however, of giving us any kind of exact number, “you could say, we’re going to have a library of 200 games. But a lot of them are just mobile—there’s a lot of applications on Gear VR. Just very small snippets of game play. We don’t necessarily want to make a number based on that because it’s just grossly over inflated.”

Luckey was careful to make the distinction between “snippets of game play,” and “real games.” The content that is coming to the Oculus Rift’s launch will be beyond what we have seen in the past, which has for the most part been those “snippets of game play,” that we have been able to download on Oculus Share. But according to Luckey, these games coming to the platform’s launch will be “real long form content that you’re going to spend a lot of time in.”

As of now, Oculus has announced a $10 million developer grant fund for content creation on the Rift. Currently, however, the company has not released any of the names of the development companies who have received any of that funding. “A lot of them aren’t ready to announce anything,” says Luckey, “even the stuff we are 100 percent funding, we’re not making announcements for.” He continued, “you’re going to see more and more announcements made as more and more games are ready.”

Beyond the mystery $10 million, Oculus has given us a look at some of the games and experiences that we can expect to see with the launch. At the CV1 announcement event in early June, we were shown a slide that outlined the sixteen official, original launch partners as well as getting a peek at some of those projects at E3.

http://www.roadtovr.com/valve-dials-back-htc-vive-release-expectations-suggests-bulk-will-ship-in-q1-2016/

Having revealed SteamVR and the Vive VR headset just six months ago, Valve and HTC set an aggressive consumer release date of Q4 2015. This would make the companies first-to-market over major competitors. Now, however, Valve is dialing back expectations for the HTC Vive release date, saying that most of the headsets will go out in Q1 2016.

While Valve and HTC’s announcement of an entry into the consumer VR landscape came last compared to its two nearest competitors, Oculus and Sony, the company had impressively planted the first flag in the ground for a consumer release of the headset in Q4 2015, with Oculus and Sony following in Q1 and Q2 2016 respectively.

That lead out the gate doesn’t seem quite as far now, with Valve announcing today that only a limited quantity of units would be shipped before year’s end.

Later this year, HTC will offer the first commercial Vive units via a limited quantity of community and developer systems, with larger quantities shipping in calendar Q1 2016.

While there are reportedly a few hundred Vive Developer Edition kits now in the wild, Valve says that they’ve received more than 10,000 signups for the Vive dev kit. Other than nearing the shipping date, this is likely a major reason behind closing signups for the kit as the company did just the other day (http://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-developer-edition-signups-closed-hundreds-of-dev-kits-still-shipping/).

While Oculus doesn’t plan to ship the consumer version of their Rift headset until Q1 2016, they have stated that pre-orders will start sometime in 2015. With Valve’s latest announcement, the ‘first-to-market’ advantage may not be quite as clear cut as expected.

The ‘big three’ headsets have yetto be priced for release.

>>1236

>Glu – VR Project Unknown, previous work includes: Kim Kardashian: Hollywood

>Kim Kardashian: Hollywood

So that's the kind of devs VR is attracting, like flies on a fresh smelly shit.

Looks like nothing worthwhile will come out of VR for a while.

They all look set on the starting blocks ready to milk the masses for all it's worth.

Shit smells bad, really bad.

I am going to buy used and pirate everything.

>>1245

Faggot? I disagree.

Time will tell.

http://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-ceo/2015/september/virtual-reality-of-john-carmack

A damn long interview, but quite insightful. Check the link for the full interview.

>Eventually in our conversation we return to VR technology and Oculus/Facebook. There is a prickled awareness in his tone as he divulges that some of his fans have labeled him a sellout to the mega-corporation. But then he beams. “Facebook has turned out to be a phenomenal company,” Carmack says. “Of course people will say I am a shill for them now, but the leadership are really earnest people. But, yeah, a lot of people went, ‘What the hell?’”

>I attempt to lead him further in that direction, to perhaps get more scoop on Facebook, but he is not quite done talking about space travel. “I miss the physicality of building things, and the raw rumbling power of rocket ships,” he says. “But I am so ‘overflowingly buzzy’ about so many things. Some people look at the Internet and see a cesspool of all the degenerate stuff that is wrong with humanity. I look and see millions of brilliant, hard-working people that are adding all this value.

>“The smartest human being who ever lived is alive right now … by the nature of the fraction of the number of people here, the information assets, the health facilities,” Carmack goes on. “The world is full of brilliant people—and is getting better day by day.”

http://vrfocus.com/archives/20881/oculus-touch-controllers-recieve-first-sdk-documentation/

There are a lot of virtual reality (VR) developers out there hoping to get their hands on Oculus Touch in the near future. Oculus VR’s new input solution for its Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) has been praised by those lucky enough to have sampled it since its reveal in June 2015, leaving many studios eager to start actually working with it. It’s still not clear exactly what plans the company has for developer kit distribution, but fresh updates to its software development kit (SDK) documentation have provided the first glimpse of how creators will get to grips with Oculus Touch.

Oculus VR’s Developer Center website (https://developer.oculus.com/documentation/pcsdk/latest/concepts/dg-input-touch-poses/) has been updated with new details on working with the controllers. A total of 5 new pages have been added including an overview of new APIs included in the recently released Oculus 0.7 SDK and then individual pages for Hand Tracking, Button State, Button Touch State and Haptic Feedback. While the information provided is of course developer-focused, it does reveal some interesting titbits such as the fact that the constellation tracker for the Oculus Rift is also used to track hand poses.

Oculus Touch consists of a pair of handheld controllers that, as this documentation details, are position-tracked and even recognise gestures. Currently labelled as a ‘Half Moon Prototype’ the controllers consist of buttons, triggers and analogue sticks. While the Oculus Rift is on track to launch in Q1 2016 with an Xbox One controller, the controllers aren’t set to arrive until a little later on in H1 2016. Pre-orders for the kit are expected to go live at the same time as the Oculus Rift itself later in the year.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/australian-defence-force-employs-oculus-gear-to-explore-vr/

The Australian Department of Defence is exploring the use of virtual reality, by way of Oculus Rift head-mounted displays, kicking off a study to explore the future applications of the technology.

he Australian Government Department of Defence's Defence Science and Technology Group (DST) has launched a study to explore virtual reality (VR) and its potential future application within the defence force.

The DST Group has teamed up with California-based VR manufacturer, Oculus, to perform a study being undertaken by Sarah Hibbard as part of a Graduate Industry Placement at DST Group Edinburgh, in South Australia, with the study forming the thesis component of her degree.

According to the DST Group, the study will include up to 60 defence civilian and military personnel, and has been administered to improve training, education and performance within the military environment.

"DST Group supports Defence in maintaining a technology watch," a spokesperson for the DST Group told ZDNet. "This involves understanding and evaluating emerging technologies, such as low cost VR."

"The improved performance of such systems, combined with the low cost and ease of use suggests that there will be considerable interest from various training providers, including Defence, in potentially exploiting such technologies.

"DST Group is working to understand some of the potential negative consequences of such technologies as well, such as VR simulator sickness."

According to the department, over four weeks the test group will use simulation technologies based on gaming technologies, to increase the realism and immersion of simulated military scenarios designed to test the cognitive performance of each participant.

"The study will test each participant individually over a 1.5 hour period, commencing with a written survey to collect data on demographics, digital literacy, and immersive tendencies," Hibbard said. "Using the Oculus Rift VR head-mounted display or a desktop computer, each participant will then undertake an initial training session and complete two missions as a driver within the laboratory's vehicle simulator."

The participants will have their head movement tracked and represented within the virtual world, operating a simulated 4WD vehicle via the headwear.

"The two instruction formats to be used are a lean and a rich condition; the lean condition involves a text based description of the purpose of the mission that participants will be asked to undertake, and in contrast, the rich condition will involve presentation of the same description but delivered through use of multimedia," the spokesperson said.

"The study will provide a greater understanding of how display types and instruction formats can influence one's sense of presence and performance within the virtual environment."

http://www.roadtovr.com/new-oculus-touch-documentation-reveals-capacitive-buttons-and-recognizable-gestures/

While the Oculus Touch controller is largely designed to tell the computer where a user’s hands are, the controller also has an idea of what a user’s fingers are doing. New documentation adds to our understanding of the controller’s hand-tracking capabilities, and reinforces the device’s deliberate name.

Released alongside the latest version of the Oculus SDK (v0.7) the updated Oculus Rift Developer Guide describes how devs can access data provided from the Touch controllers. Orientation and position of the controllers is provided in the same coordinate frame as the Rift headset itself, separate from the input state (button presses). “Having both hand and headset data reported together provides a consistent snapshot of the system state,” the document explains.

Touch Sensitive Buttons

The input state of the controller expectedly tells the developer when buttons are pressed, triggers are pulled, and joysticks are tilted. But it also tells something that most other controllers don’t: when a user’s fingers are touching (but not pressing) certain buttons.

This data isn’t particularly important for non-VR controllers but, inside VR, giving the controllers a way to sense finger position means the user’s hand/finger position can be matched closely, leading to a greater sense Presence. It also provides important feedback for users; when you can’t see your hands on the real controllers, it’s hard to tell which button your finger is on. But with capacitive buttons that can sense touch, the game world can show users where their fingers area located on a virtual representation of the controller. I imagine this will be especially helpful for in-game tutorials explaining the controls to first-time players.

Calling ovr_GetInputState checks the controller’s Button State, which includes Button Touch State, indicating which buttons are being touched (but not pressed). Every input on the controller, with the exception of the side ‘hand trigger’, can sense a user’s touch, including the index trigger and the joystick.

While both the index trigger and hand trigger report analogue values (to report partly-pressed states), the controller’s two face buttons and joystick button (clicking down on the joystick) are binary (not pressure sensitive), according to the documentation.

Hand Gestures

Hand gesture recognition is something we’ve known about since seeing Oculus Touch for ourselves at E3 2015, but the new documentation explains what data developers will have to work with.

Oculus told us that the sensing of hand positions is indeed analogue, but as far as the SDK documentation reads, the company has opted to bake in pre-defined gestures. It doesn’t appear that developers will have raw access to the hand gesture data for now.

There are only two supported gestures at this time: pointing with the index finger and thumbs up. These can be checked using ovrTouch_RIndexPointing and ovrTouch_RThumbUp respectively, switching out the R for and L to check the left hand’s state.

Although no middle finger gesture is documented, Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey confirmed to Road to VR that the only fingers the controller doesn’t detect are the pinky and ring finger, leaving the possibility of more gesture states being added to the SDK down the line. The current set of two is likely the result of testing which gestures could be identified with high consistency, so as not to have players see their fingers jumping around unnaturally.

Here’s to hoping for a ‘peace sign’ gesture so I can start work on Hippie-Sim 2016.

http://uploadvr.com/second-camera-needed-oculus-touch-unreal-improves-controller-support/

New documentation from Oculus suggests a second camera with another wire running to your PC will be needed to bring your hands into VR with Oculus Touch controllers.

All three announced consumer VR platforms — Oculus, SteamVR and Sony — have plans for bringing your hands into VR and a new 4.9 update to the Unreal experience engine this week is designed to standardize motion controllers through a common interface so it is easier for developers to support the input solutions. While it is getting easier for developers to bring hands into VR across multiple systems, the documentation from Oculus suggests that adding hands to an Oculus system might be a little more difficult for consumers than with SteamVR or Sony.

From the Oculus documentation:

The constellation tracker used to track the head position of the Oculus Rift also tracks the hand poses of the Oculus Touch controllers.

For installations that have the Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch controllers, there will be at least two constellation trackers to improve tracking accuracy and help with occlusion issues.

Valve’s SteamVR controllers communicate with a pair of lasers that are typically placed high at opposite ends of the room to solve the same problem. Occluding (blocking) the sensors on either SteamVR or Oculus might mismatch what you feel in reality with what you see in VR, leading to a bad experience. Back in June, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey said “you could use the Touch controllers and one camera”. That said, adding more cameras to the mix should help expand the area a person can roam in VR while making sure there’s no loss of tracking.

The SteamVR lasers, however, only require power and aren’t wired directly to a PC. The “constellation” optical trackers from Oculus are likely to need to be wired to your PC. This difference in design means that if you decide you’d like to upgrade your Rift when the Oculus Touch controllers launch there may be an added layer of logistical complexity compared to SteamVR. While you just need to provide power to the SteamVR lasers, likely positioning them next to a power outlet, with Oculus you’ll likely have to figure out how to hide another cord running to your PC that could potentially have to run around the perimeter of the room like a speaker cord.

To the most enthusiastic VR adopters the difference might not matter much but with general-interest consumers every bit of added complexity with either software or hardware will make it harder for the technology to see widespread adoption.

http://uploadvr.com/htc-vive-will-ship-with-forward-facing-cameras-with-a-purpose/

When the HTC Vive was first shown off to developers and press at the Mobile World Conference there were a lot of questions remaining about the mysterious stacked forward facing cameras. The cameras were one of the few things that HTC wouldn’t comment on at the time and so speculation began to run rampant with every idea from pass through to AR being suggested by the community.

Adding further to the mystery was that when the Vive developer kits started shipping earlier this year, they were shipped with the cameras blocked off (or completely missing). The reasons for this were unclear so the question was raised, will the consumer Vive have the cameras or not?

The answer, it turns out, is yes.

“Yeah, so there are front facing cameras on the unit,” said Jeff Gattis, HTC’s Executive Director of Global Marketing, in a recent interview with UploadVR.

But Gattis didn’t stop there, continuing further he revealed that the cameras do in fact have a very specific purpose. The cameras are there “more [for] safety reasons… We want to notify you that an object is moving in front of you, things like that. ” For example if a pet were to run in front of you, the system would be able to detect it and notify you so that you don’t end up accidentally stepping on your cat or kicking your dog – a problem some developers, like StressLevelZero, have looked to solve with… creative methodologies.

So the Vive will have the ability to detect objects, but what about other camera applications, like AR? According to Gattis, things like that simply aren’t in the cards right now, “I don’t want you to think augmented reality,” he says, “or anything on those lines.”

Even without the addition of AR, this should come as great news to anyone looking to buy a Vive. Right now the current versions of the Vive in developers hands don’t have the ability to access the cameras, which ultimately somewhat diminishes the effectiveness of the unit’s Chaperone System. With the addition of cameras things like smacking the controllers against the guy demoing for you (something that has happened to me at least once) will become far less of an issue, making the world a much safer place for those who perhaps get a little too excited in VR.

http://www.roadtovr.com/osvr-hdk-v1-3-120hz-oled-pricing-release-date/

OSVR, the open source virtual reality project founded by Razer and Sensics, today announced the latest version of their HDK (Hacker Development Kit) VR Headset. The v1.3 version of the open source headset includes an improved display and optics.

After its initial debut at CES 2015, the OSVR HDK headset has seen several updates even before heading out the door to developers and makers. OSVR offers the v1.0, v.1.1, v.1.2, and now v1.3 headsets at various pricing tiers with features improving as you work your way up.

The new HDK v1.3 gets an upgraded 5.5-inch 1080p OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate. OSVR says that the panel supports Low Persistence (a technique used on other major headsets to reduce motion blur).

Though the display’s refresh rate is 120Hz, it seems that OSVR is still targeting a 60Hz rate for game rendering, possibly using asynchronous timewarp (newly supported by the OSVR software stack) to fill in the extra frames, similar to Sony’s Morpheus headset. Though Sony also offers Morpheus developers access to the full 120Hz, provided they can push the frames. We’ve reached out to the organization for clarification.

In addition to the new display, the HDK v1.3 will see an updated optics module: a two-element lens system that will increase the eyebox and support per-eye focus. Increasing the eyebox means a larger ‘sweet spot’, providing sharp focus for a larger range of IPD without the need for independent IPD adjustment.

The HDK v1.3 will be available for pre-order on October 1st with a release date later that month. The headset price is $299.

OSVR says that the HDK is “designed to be open-source and affordable,” and that they will provide the headset’s full set of schematics and components under open-source licenses.

We expect that the HDK v1.3 will retain the other features of the v1.2 predecessor, like positional tracking. OSVR is promising some add-ons for the headset in the future like a Leap-embedded faceplate and 150 degree Wearality lenses.

http://www.roadtovr.com/osvr-gets-nvidia-gameworks-vr-support-adds-65-new-industry-collaborators/

The OSVR project is celebrating the addition of a further 65 companies in support of their initiative, among them GPU technology giant NVIDIA, adding a low latency, driver optimised ‘Direct Mode’ to the list of OSVR’s features.

OSVR has evolved rapidly since we first covered their launch at CES in January. The initiative is led by peripheral specialists Razer and virtual reality veterans Sensics and was setup to encourage the open sharing of all aspects of virtual reality technology, with the ultimate aim to drive and nurture progress in the field.

Along the way they’ve shown multiple revisions of their Hacker Developer kit (and you’ll be able to buy the latest soon), and today OSVR has announced that their supporters have swelled by a further 65 to a grand total of 230.

Among those announced, NVIDIA is one of the most significant. The GPU manufacturers Gameworks VR API is now utilised by OSVR’s ‘Render Manager’, the pipeline designed to deliver images to any hardware device that uses the open platform. The Render Manager provides (quoted from OSVR’s press release):

Direct Mode — the NVIDIA driver treats VR headsets as head mounted displays accessible only to VR applications, rather than a typical Windows monitor that your PC shows up on, providing better plug and play support and compatibility for VR headsets.

Front Render Buffering—enables the GPU to render directly to the front buffer to reduce latency.

Context Priority — provides headset developers with control over GPU scheduling to support advanced virtual reality features such as asynchronous time warp, which cuts latency and quickly adjusts images as gamers move their heads, without the need to re-render a new frame.

These features are of course not exclusive to OSVR, but it does mean the system keeps pace, at least on paper, with the likes of Oculus, who recently released v0.7 of their SDK and drivers supporting features like Direct Mode.

“Our work with NVIDIA is a key step towards achieving our goal of providing developers with a comprehensive infrastructure that allows creating high-performance VR and AR experiences regardless of the particular operating system, HMD platform, game engine or input peripherals,” says Yuval Boger, CEO of Sensics. “OSVR allows the VR/AR community to create exciting experiences without being locked in to any single vendor”.

Alongside NVIDIA, the initiative is welcoming a further 65 supporters to the fold helping to add to a “… fast-growing list of curated content ranging from 360-degree media to VR games from across the OSVR supporter network.” That curated content can be seen in more detail over at their website. OSVR are ensuring you’ll be able to get hold of this content more easily with online stores holding OSVR supported VR content, including:

Boondogl

Itch.Io

Qihoo360

Razer Cortex

Steam

V

Vrideo

WearVR

Once the HDK becomes available in October, it’ll be interesting to see how the ecosystem evolves and how successful that ideal of an open virtual reality hardware and software platform is.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-09-02-palmer-luckey-3d-tv-was-never-a-real-medium-it-was-a-feature

The Oculus founder explains why virtual reality is more than a gimmick

Palmer Luckey, Oculus founder and general virtual reality wunderkind, has dismissed comparisons between VR and the last big technological innovation in the gaming space, 3D TVs.

"The thing about 3D TV is that it was never a real medium, it was another feature for TVs that… it changed the experience, but not fundamentally. It was a little bit of an additional thing, but fundamentally you're still watching a very narrow field-of-view image on a TV on a wall," he told GamesRadar.

"Virtual reality on the other hand I think is inevitable. If you look at 3D TV and think how far it could go; ultimate 3D TV like with 16K resolution and 240 frames-per-second or whatever, it's still about the same as what we have today. If you think about virtual reality, and what the ultimate conclusion is - it's basically technology that you use to see virtual worlds that are as real as the real world except without any of the limitations of the real world."

3D TV was briefly big news in games back in 2011, as Sony pushed the capabilities of its 3D TV range with PlayStation 3 tie-ins like Killzone 3.

Luckey also repeated his assertion that VR going mainstream is inevitable, even if no one is yet willing to commit to a timeframe.

"It's very clear that VR will take off - it's just a matter of time. Will it take one year, five years, ten years before it's mainstream? I can't say. It's going to depend on how fast we can push this technology, but I think that if you told someone 'Hey what if you could put on a pair of glasses and be anywhere in the world with perfect quality?', very few people would say 'Oh no, that'll never take off'."

He also responded cheekily to suggestions that the look of the headset could be a factor in the uptake of VR.

"If you're a gamer and you have high end graphics cards - I don't want to stereotype - but you're probably not the kind of person who cares about fashion."

Oculus is expected to reveal more about its consumer unit and Oculus Connect later this month.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-cto-john-carmack-will-demo-his-vrscript-language-at-connect/

John Carmack is something of a legend in the programming world with a history that’s intertwined with the early gaming industry. Now at Oculus as Chief Technical Officer, Carmack may be poised to leave a similar mark on the world of VR. A made-for-VR scripting language of his design will be demonstrated at Oculus Connect.

Since joining Oculus in 2013, Carmack has been closely involved with the company’s mobile initiatives. Samsung’s Gear VR was revealed last year to be ‘Powered by Oculus'; the headset had been crafted in partnership with the two companies. Carmack, as we learned from his talk at last year’s Connect developer conference, has been working up and down the render pipeline to optimize virtual reality on Gear VR.

As if that wasn’t keeping him busy enough, he’s also been developing his own scripting language, called (simply enough) VrScript, specifically for VR application development. In a 60 minute presentation on the last day of Oculus Connect, Carmack will be the centerpiece of a ‘Live Coding Session’ where he’ll show VrScript in action. The session synopsis reads:

"John Carmack will demonstrate the process of developing a simple VR application using a new development environment for rapid development and open deployment on Gear VR. You’ll also learn more about media processing, remote development, deployment, and multi-user setup."

Sharing an internal overview of his work a few months back, Carmack gave some indication of the motivations behind the Scheme-based VrScript language in a message board (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/RFlh0o6l3Ls/8InN7uz-Mv4J) for the Racket programming language:

Doing VR GUI development in the native apps is unpleasant – you can gut it out in C++ with our current interfaces, but the iteration times and code structure don’t make it a lot of fun.

In-editor prototyping is nice in Unity, but actual on-device testing cycle times are terrible, and you wind up with all the bulk of Unity and poor access to the native VR features like TimeWarp layers.

With app signing, we have no way for developers to casually share work with each other or limited communities.

He continues listing several ways in which the scripting language will function:

Web Like: where the script is downloaded from the net for each execution and run by a single signed app that we provide (NetHMD). Fully specified by an app-scheme URI, this allows VR experiences to be launched directly from web pages or app-links on Facebook, which I think is VERY powerful – read about how great something is while browsing on your phone, then just click the link and get the “insert into HMD” dialog and jump right there. VR scripts can link to other VR scripts without leaving VR. There is no direct monetization here, but IAP can eventually be supported.

App Like: where the script is bundled into a conventional apk to be distributed through the store, and the scripting is simply used as a more effective development environment for some classes of applications.

Remote development: where the script is actually executed in an IDE on a PC, communicating with NetHMD over a TCP connection. This allows sub-second code-change to VR change iteration cycles, and the use of a debugger. There might also be a use for a related mode where a central server directly drives one or more clients.

From Carmack’s early descriptions, enabling rapid iteration is an important part of VrScript. But social is also important as well. He wants VrScript to make it easy for people to create networked “activities” in VR, like board games and card games.

For now VrScript seems quite focused on mobile VR development for Android, but it’s possible that some of the lessons learned (if not the language itself) will eventually be useful for desktop VR development as well.

http://www.roadtovr.com/matter-vr-signs-with-eevo-for-vr-content-distribution/

MatterVR, a VR content house founded by film industry vets, has announced a distribution deal with Eevo, a streaming platform for curated VR video.

MatterVR may be relatively new to the VR scene, but they bring with them decades of notable film production. Founders Steve Holtzman and Daniel Gregoire met while working together on Cosmos (2014) and have since founded the company to tell stories in virtual reality. Holtzman has worked on film and TV productions for a number of major networks, while Gregoire has had his hands in Evolve (2015) and Star Wars Episode II (2002) & III (2005), among a roster of other notable projects, according to the company.

FIRST, one of the company’s debut pieces of content, is an impressive recreation of the Wright Brother’s famous first flight at Kitty Hawk, NC. Rendered in real-time, the experience is detailed not only graphically but also historically. After recreating an identical virtual version of the dual-prop glider, MatterVR recreated the entire experience of the first flight, down to the initial flight checks and starting the engine with a hand crank. A good thing too, as the Smithsonian—who is curating the experience—would expect no less.

To expand their distribution, MatterVR has signed with VR video streaming platform Eevo, which will host pre-rendered versions of MatterVR content that can be viewed on a wider variety of platforms, like Samsung’s mobile Gear VR headset. First won’t be distributed through EEVO, but “serial VR content” from the company will be.

Unlike YouTube’s open hosting, Eevo is a “highly curated, high quality content” platform. The company is hand-selecting content for their streaming platform and say they also support content creators with tools and funds to tell their stories in VR. The company recently closed a $1 million investment to build out their VR streaming platform.

Eevo plans to first bring their streaming platform app to Gear VR, with other VR headsets following. The company is further working on analytics tools and a multi-path narrative editor to enable the possibility of branching storylines based on user interaction.