What’s holding back VR?
Virtual reality simulator, communnication.
Step one: Get that phone off your forehead
This industry knows how to create elegant designs. We know how to miniaturize components, dissipate heat and transfer high volumes of data at short range. Intel, for example, is making major efforts to drive down transistor sizes, ramp up vision-sensing technologies and add artificial intelligence and 3D sound processing to create true VR experiences. These kinds of efforts will help drive down costs and create the inflection point VR needs to drive mass adoption.
Step two: Create more VR gaming studios
BodyLabs, another startup we’ve funded (and which was recently acquired by Amazon), transforms photos, videos, body scans or physical measurements into accurate 3D body shapes. If you’re a gamer, you can capture your favorite touchdown dance or combat move and bring it into the field of play.
Step three: All roads lead to Hollywood
The highest wall VR must climb is the one separating it from Hollywood. To be sure, there’s a bit of A-List, goggle-friendly content, in many ways thanks to Travis Cloyd. He created “The Recall Abduction,” a 13-minute VR film based on the Wesley Snipes thriller. He is also soon releasing “Distorted“ with John Cusack; a John Travolta VR film; and the upcoming dystopian saga, “The Humanity Bureau,” starring Nicolas Cage.
Hollywood also needs to integrate VR into its existing production workflows. That means a full stack of protocols, techniques and tools. This software infrastructure is coming, but not yet in place. Getting the gaming industry to create VR-only titles will accelerate the process.
They’re likely watching early entrants such as One Touch, a VR distribution company working on generating cinematic entertainment in VR.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/05/whats-holding-back-vr/
A Boston landmark travels back in time, thanks to AR technology
The Old Corner Bookstore, a two-story brick building on the corner of School and Washington streets in downtown Boston, was built in 1718 and now houses a Chipotle Mexican Grill. But it was first a private home with a drugstore on the ground floor. It also served as the headquarters of a famous publishing house, and later became a bookstore, jewelry store, and pizza parlor. From 1998 to 2002, The Boston Globe operated a retail store in the building, stocked with Globe-related books and memorabilia.
Now Historic Boston Inc., the nonprofit that saved the Corner Bookstore from demolition in 1960, is celebrating the building’s 300th birthday by letting visitors experience the space in several of its past incarnations by scanning it with their smartphones.
See the full story here: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/11/05/landmark-travels-back-time-thanks-technology/YSApXNeuk2oZl3Op8cHWKL/story.html
Will blockchain help make Virtual Reality more social?
High Fidelity, VTime, RecRoom,...
With Mark Zuckerberg announcing a year ago a host of new Social VR features at the Oculus Connect 3 keynote (such as the ability to create ‘parties’ and ‘rooms’ wherein friends can gather in VR environments), appointing Rachel Rubin – previously vice president and executive producer of The Sims 4 at Electronic Arts – as the head of Social VR and subsequently channeling $250 million into VR development, it seems clear that Facebook itself is keen to step up to that plate.
The true potential of VR might be realized, and certainly surpass what already exists, if this power were put into the hands of the users instead,” believes Ariel Meilich, founder of blockchain-based virtual platform Decentraland.
Earlier this year, the company’s ICO (Initial Coin Offering) raised over $25M USD – in less than a minute. They are now planning to launch in early 2018 following its first land auction which will take place in December.
With Sansar, Linden Lab ...a more user-centric approach which also focuses on enabling monetization for individual users, who can earn Sansar Dollars (S$) for their VR creations.
What makes Decentraland fundamentally different from other emerging virtual platforms is that it’s not only the content that will be owned by users, but the platform itself. This means the community will also have collective responsibility for regulating it. According to its creators, the blockchain structure – which uses the Ethereum network – creates a mechanism for consensus among strangers that allows this to work at scale.
See the full story here: https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2017/11/06/will-blockchain-help-make-virtual-reality-social/
Threat of AR Hacking Fixable With Machine Learning
Along with co-writers Tadayoshi Kohno, and David Molnar, Roesner penned a paper in 2012 on the “Security and Privacy for Augmented Reality Systems”.
The paper asks practical questions about the integration of AR into daily life.
Because you are actively following directions given by the tech with physical actions like driving your car, the implications of hacked AR include physical harm. But that’s not the only negative that could come of it.
At some point, as we navigate a new reality where everyone around us uses AR to find their way and record their experiences, our likeness and actions will be recorded by others. Others’ actions will be recorded by our devices. In a world where a digital signature can unlock everything we own, at what point are we taking in too much information?
AR devices have access to your location, surroundings, and everything on your phone or tablet. Roesner also raises the point that other people’s devices are also recording you.
What happens to this data?
As suggested in the Digital Journal op-ed, if we can teach AI to recognize malware and potentially harmful code, we can address security concerns more readily.
See the full story here: https://edgylabs.com/could-machine-learning-reduce-ar-tech-user-safety-concerns/
Google Releases ‘Resonance Audio’, a New Multi-Platform Spatial Audio SDK
Google today released a new spatial audio software development kit called ‘Resonance Audio’, a cross-platform tool based on technology from their existing VR Audio SDK. Resonance Audio aims to make VR and AR development easier across mobile and desktop platforms.
In February, a post on Google’s official blog recognised the “confusing and time-consuming” battle of working with various audio tools, and described the development of streamlined FMOD and Wwise plugins for multiple platforms on both Unity and Unreal Engine.
The new Resonance Audio SDK consolidates these efforts, working ‘at scale’ across mobile and desktop platforms, which should simplify development workflows for spatial audio in any VR/AR game or experience. According to the press release provided to Road to VR, the new SDK supports “the most popular game engines, audio engines, and digital audio workstations” running on Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Google are providing integrations for “Unity, Unreal Engine, FMOD, Wwise, and DAWs,” along with “native APIs for C/C++, Java, Objective-C, and the web.”
Much like the existing VR Audio SDK, Resonance Audio is able to model complex sound environments, allowing control over the direction of acoustic wave propagation from individual sound sources. The width of each source can be specified, from a single point to a wall of sound. The SDK will also automatically render near-field effects for sound sources within arm’s reach of the user. Near-field audio rendering takes acoustic diffraction into account, as sound waves travel across the head. By using precise HRTFs, the accuracy of close sound source positioning can be increased. The team have also released an ‘Ambisonic recording tool’ to spatially capture sound design directly within Unity, which can be saved to a file for use elsewhere, such as game engines or YouTube videos.
See the full story here: https://www.roadtovr.com/resonance-audio-googles-new-multi-platform-spatial-audio-sdk/
Pressure Mounts for Xbox’s Missing VR Strategy as PSVR Rakes in Half a Billion in Hardware Alone
Gamespot reports Sony’s latest PS4 sales figures (including both PS4 and PS4 Pro) at a whopping 67.5 million units. Microsoft meanwhile hasn’t publicly revealed their Xbox One sales figures for some time, though estimates earlier this year put it somewhere between 30 and 40 million units. Competitively, that’s a massive gap. And it isn’t helping Microsoft that, for gamers on the fence between the two consoles, PlayStation has a big fat check mark in the VR column while Xbox doesn’t.
VR and AR intelligence firm Greenlight Insights estimates that Sony has sold 1.5 million PlayStation VR headsets through October 2017. The headset is sold in several different bundle configurations ranging, in the US at least, from the $500 Launch Bundle to the now discounted standalone headset at $290. Roughing out a $350 average selling price (which is conservative given the generally higher prices in Europe), we can estimate that Sony has pulled in some $525 million in hardware revenue. Software revenue on top of that stands to add considerably more.
Microsoft Joins OpenXR, Becoming a Decisive Backer in the Open, Royalty-free VR/AR Standard
Khronos Group, the consortium behind the OpenXR project which aims to standardize the way applications communicate with AR and VR headsets, just added Microsoft to its ranks.
Although guessing at a company’s motives is a bit like reading tea leaves sometimes, Microsoft taking part in building OpenXR makes a strong case for its ultimate interest in growing the open, royalty-free standard, and not trying to create its own internally developed “DirectXR” that would essentially dictate how headsets will talk to their OS. Up until now, it wasn’t clear which way Microsoft was headed.
Khronos says work on the actual OpenXR project has already begun and that it stands to eliminate market fragmentation by forcing VR applications and engines to be ported and customized to run on multiple VR runtimes, and requiring VR sensors and displays to be integrated with multiple driver interfaces.
THE SURREAL COMEDY BOT THAT’S TURNING AI INTO LOL
The best Botnik creations, like this PBS-derived set of otter facts, retain the structure and wordplay of their source material, while adding a goofy, appropriately robotic sense of stiltedness. They all represent a new form of comedy, a human-computer collaboration, one that “gathers all these evocative phrases from a genre, and then builds them together in an absurd collage," says Botnik cofounder Jamie Brew.
The two paired up, and with support from Techstars' Alexa Accelerator program, the Botnik team spent this past year building and fine-tuning several corpuses—essentially large language databases, each one culling from a specific pop-cultural genre or entity, like beauty ads, or *Savage Love* columns. Those terms populate the site's individual keyboards, which allow you to craft sentences—each word dictating your options for the next—and ultimately your own weirdo missives.
It's technology as well-informed collaborator, as opposed to a coldly automated content-creator.
As of now, there are Botnik keyboards dedicated to Tennyson, pancake recipes, and animal facts—all genres with their own familiar structures. Much of the strange, spun-out prose these devices generate is then overseen by an editorial community of about 150 volunteer writers, including staffers from Saturday Night Live and The Onion. Using Slack, they upvote and cobble together the best entries, resulting in works like this Seinfeld script...
See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/botnik-ai-comedy-app/