Virtual Reality – Page 3

October 31, 2015

High Fidelity – October Updates Include Developments With Mouth Tracking, Avatar IK & More

High Fidelity keep people who have registered informed on their progress, whether or not they having been logging in recently. They do so via way of a monthly email update and this works very well.

The news letter usually appears on the High Fidelity blog, the September Newsletter was posted on September 30th. The October one hasn’t yet appeared but it will soon I would imagine. I should add at this point that finding the blog from the main High Fidelity website isn’t as easy as it should be using Windows 10 with a Chrome browser. The link to the blog is at the bottom of the main page in light on light text, or from a dropdown at the top of the page via company.

So what have High Fidelity been doing in October? The newsletter informs us that they have been working with a company called BinaryVR who develop facial tracking software that is intended to be used in virtual reality :

We have been fortunate to work with so many great entrepreneurs doing amazing stuff with VR hardware, BinaryVR is one of these companies. BinaryVR develops facial expression tracking technology for virtual reality, enabling users to create a personalized 3D face from 2D facial photos to track and retarget their facial animations in real-time in any transformed CG character or avatar mode. BinaryVR have integrated their technology into High Fidelity, allowing your mouth to be tracked while in the HMD.

I will include a couple of animated gif’s in this post, but for a better perspective of what’s going on in them please view the short video I’ll embed at the end of the post. Here’s a gif of mouth tracking in action :

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October 26, 2015

Looking To The Past Will Help To Move VR Forward

Those of us what have been around virtual worlds for a while can be forgiven for being somewhat bemused by a lot of the hype regarding the forthcoming virtual reality boom, because a lot of what is being discussed as futuristic advances are use cases we’ve all seen before. However there are use cases that already exist that may even pass us virtual world enthusiasts by.

These thoughts crossed my mind as I read a couple of articles today, the first was by Adi Robertson over at The Verge; The Virtual World’s Fair is where VR hype meets theme parks. The article concerns the work of Landmark Entertainment Group, who are famous for building theme park attractions and have plans to dip their toes very firmly into the waters of virtual reality.

What really struck me about this article was this part :

Landmark believes its role is to help solve the “chicken and egg” problem the industry faces: people won’t buy VR if there’s nothing to do in it, and no one will make experiences for VR if people don’t buy it. Christopher thinks the company is uniquely poised to succeed, compared to filmmakers or game developers — who are making a “whole different thing” compared to VR. “We’ve been doing what we call ‘total theater’ in the theme park space for three and a half decades,” he says. “We’re way beyond experimenting with this.”

Whereas I’m not familiar with Landmark Entertainment’s work, it is indeed true that theme parks have been the home to immersive experiences for quite some time. However those are immersive attractions where you go to the theme park itself and Landmark will be building what they call “live centers” that host digital art, zoos and more, with one set to open in China in 2017. However they will also have plans to launch The Virtual World’s Fair :

Landmark Entertainment Group has taken inspiration from its theme park design heritage and the long-standing World’s Fair tradition to create the concept for the “Virtual World’s Fair™,” a virtual reality experience loaded with real-time social interaction, entertainment, education, and shopping, just like a traditional world’s fair, but designed to be enjoyed in-home rather than as a real-world travel destination.

Landmark’s Virtual World’s Fair has been developed in conjunction with the Pavilion of Me ™ (P.O.M.™) concept, a daily-use in-home entertainment portal that reimagines everyday activities such as checking social media, online shopping, watching film and TV content, video chat, and playing video games into virtual reality experiences.

The Virtual World’s Fair will be accessed through the P.O.M. portal donning a VR headset; first-time users will create a personalized avatar, and then journey into the Virtual World’s Fair embodied in their newly customized digital persona. Both the P.O.M. and Virtual World’s Fair will enable social interactions with other people’s avatars (including family, friends, celebrities, world leaders and even total strangers) from around the world.

P.O.M. is scheduled to launch next year, with the complete Virtual World’s Fair experience to follow in 2017.

How well this progresses is of course dependent upon how well the technology surrounding headsets develops and gains acceptance but it’s interesting to see plans such as this in progress.

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October 23, 2015

Women Probably Don’t Want To Feel All Alone On A Crowded VR Island

I was in a pub one Sunday afternoon a year or so ago. I was enjoying a pint or two and watching a football match on the telly when a woman entered the bar. There was nothing unusual about this, well not at this point anyway, but then I heard the woman say; “This pub is full of men, I haven’t been in a pub like this for years“. At this point I turned away from the telly and duly noted that the pub was indeed, full of men and that the newly arrived woman was indeed the only woman on the customer side of the bar. There were women behind the bar, men work behind the bar too. I should note here that the pub is not usually as male dominated as it was that day and that plenty of women attend the pub quite happily.

The thing was, it wasn’t until this woman had arrived in the pub and made her comment that I realised that the pub was full of men. I was reminded of this incident whilst reading a post by Hamlet Au over at New World Notes; How to Really Get More Women into VR: More VR Startups Founded & Run by Women. The post links to an article over at Digital LA; Women in VR: 26 Ways to Increase Women in VR.

A few points really stand out to me in terms of visibility :

Attend VR events such as VRLA Expo, Oculus Connect, and more to learn, connect, represent and increase visibility of women in VR.

Create documentary of leading women pioneers in VR. There are many women pioneers in VR who can be role models to girls or others who want to get into VR. The documentary film can be screened at VR events.

Create great content. Women need to start creating their own VR content. “I’m going to start creating my own content in addition to working on projects for others,” said Shannon Gans, founder of New Deal Studios which won the Oscar for Interstellar.

Get YouTubers, Viners and other influencers into VR. If top female influencers across various platforms started to do VR, that would increase women interest in VR. If iJustine (YouTube), Brittany Furlan (Vine), Amanda Oleander (Periscope) were invited to do a VR experience, that would be widely shared among their audiences and drive interest in VR.

That visibility is important and another factor to note is conformity, which leads me to another article featuring VR researcher Jenny Wu; Jenny Wu: VR researcher. Psychology grad. Social media dissenter.

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July 23, 2015

Project Sansar To Offer Instancing And Perhaps A Different Approach To Branding Experiences

Scientists have announced that they have found “The closest twin to earth outside the solar system“. The name of the planet is Kepler 452b and it’s considered Earth’s older and bigger cousin. However that’s not really what this blog post is about. No, this blog post is about me finding “The closest article to the article I found yesterday about Project Sansar, outside this blog“.

I have discovered the article at none other than Variety. The article in question is Second Life Maker Linden Lab Wants to Build the WordPress of Virtual Reality by Janko Roettgers, Senior Silicon Valley Correspondent for Variety.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, yesterday I blogged Ebbe Altberg And Peter Gray Talk To MMORPG About The Future Of Online Experiences, which was based on an article on MMORPG by Neilie Johnson entitled “Linden Lab Looks to the Future of Online Experiences“.

The article in Variety covers a lot of the same ground but it also has some additional and rather interesting information, for example, when it comes to how many people may be able to visit a build in Project Sansar, the Variety article states :

Why spend a lot of money to build a presence in Second Life if it could only be visited by only 70 people at a time? Project Sansar wants to solve this issue by allowing for unlimited copies of an experience. In other words, instead of just opening one restaurant, McDonalds could open hundreds or even thousands of eateries in the new virtual world, and open and close them based on customer demand.

This does indeed mean instancing! Now if you’re not familiar with instancing, imagine a Second Life region that is full. Instancing would address this by creating pretty much a copy of that region on demand, to allow more people to enter the experience. The obvious issue there is that you may not be in the same instance of the region as your friends, but we can worry about things like that later because instancing is a bloody brilliant concept.

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July 22, 2015July 22, 2015

Ebbe Altberg And Peter Gray Talk To MMORPG About The Future Of Online Experiences

First things first, some readers may find the website of MMORPG a little garish, it’s a bright site and very busy. I mention this because this post is about an article by Neilie Johnson on MMORPG; Linden Lab Looks to the Future of Online Experiences. The article is based on an interview with Linden Lab’s CEO Ebbe Altberg and Linden Lab’s Senior Director of Global Communications, Gray Of The Lab From San Francisco (AKA Peter Gray).

Whereas there are no ground breaking secrets revealed in the interview, it is worth looking at some things again. Firstly the proposed land model for Project Sansar, or what is known about it so far. The article reiterates that the plan for Project Sansar is to have much lower land costs than the USD$295.00 a month region cost in Second Life, with sales tax on the increase compared to the 5% Marketplace commission. There are no figures provided but I think it’s fair to say that this has been mentioned enough times now for it to be a reality.

The article also touches upon the fact that Linden Lab have learnt a lot from Second Life. Although the minimum age requirement will be 13, Linden Lab feel that they will be able to segregate content so that minors aren’t running into unsuitable content.

One of the things I’ve seen said about Project Sansar when comparing it to Second Life is that the Project Sansar development team will look at the way some things are done in Second Life and decide they would not want to start from there to achieve that in Project Sansar. Content and land restrictions are areas where Project Sansar can take a new approach and one that could very well deal with some of the problems we’ve seen in Second Life. The experience of the issues that have been raised in Second Life are an advantage here.

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