philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Addressing the Myths That Impact Creation of VR Standards

In VentureBeat, The Khronos Group president Neil Trevett and Sensics CEO Yuval Boger list four myths that are standing in the way of VR standards and more rapid market growth — “Myth 1: It’s too early for standards,” “Myth 2: Standards stifle innovation,” “Myth 3: Consumers won’t be impacted” and “Myth 4: There are too many cooks developing standards.” Trevett and Boger counter all four and note that The Khronos Group and IEEE are leading efforts to develop VR standards. The ETC’s VR/AR Initiative program lead, Phil Lelyveld, says that despite outreach efforts to the creative community by those organizations, active contributors are predominantly hardware and tool developers and technologists.

Members of the Hollywood creative community often make the argument that they want to shape the future of entertainment experiences rather than have their creative options bounded by the product development choices of hardware and software developers. It may be too early to codify standards, says Phil, but it is not too early for creatives to get involved in the discussions.

In response to “Myth 1: It’s too early for standards,” Trevett and Boger point to the number of companies that have signed up to work on The Khronos Group’s Open XR Working Group’s standards effort. According to the Open XR site, participating companies include AMD, Google, HTC, Intel, LG, Nokia, Nvidia, Oculus, Qualcomm, Samsung and Valve, among others.

Trevett and Boger counter “Myth 2: Standards stifle innovation” by noting that many innovative companies can only afford to develop for a few non-interoperable platforms, so the lack of standards is also stifling innovation.

They also argue that “Myth 3: Consumers won’t be impacted” is not true because the lack of standards makes consumers hesitant to purchase a product that may not work universally with all VR experiences. “Consumers hate uncertainty,” suggest Trevett and Boger. “Standards help build a sense of equilibrium in an emerging ecosystem, and that’s good for everyone.”

Phil added that he’s never heard anyone make the argument that consumers won’t be impacted (Myth 3) before, he believes that innovation is redirected rather than stifled (Myth 2), and there are other standardization efforts involving significant players (Myth 4).

“The IEEE has a list of potential VR standards that they are working towards, which address issues related to safety and privacy,” explain Trevett and Boger. “These standards fit well with the VR and AR standardization efforts of The Khronos Group, which is focused on creating run-time acceleration APIs… Khronos encourages all standards groups to continue to communicate so we can coordinate our efforts.”

See the original post here: http://www.etcentric.org/addressing-the-myths-that-impact-creation-of-vr-standards/

EON Reality plans $50m investment for Lagos

Lagos—Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State, will between today and tomorrow receive the executives of EON Reality Incorporated in Lagos as the global leader in Virtual Reality is set to collaborate with the state to establish the second African institution in Nigeria. The first one was located in South Africa.

Lagos State has been identified as potential host of IDC hub for West Africa region to benefit from the EON’s $50 million investment. The technology is already shaping knowledge transfer in education, industry and edutainment and clearly essential to future of development across the world.

30 forward-thinking governments, academic institutions, and corporations in France, South Africa, China, United Kingdom, United States, India, Singapore, and other locations have already joined the EON Human 2.0 initiative that targets to empower 3.8 Billion people to grow beyond current human constraints, democratize access to knowledge and create new smart jobs of the future.

See the full story here: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/08/eon-reality-plans-50m-investment-lagos-2/

Isobar Creates VR Emotional Measurement Platform

Working with the MIT Media Lab, Isobar developed a way to understand emotional states created by virtual, augmented and mixed reality experiences.

Isobar’s new emotional tracking system uses eye tracking, electroencephalography (EEG), galvanic skin response, EKG and facial electromyography (EMG).

“The issue is for us to understand emotions enough to tell when a person is open to a transaction,” said Meeker. “This is about brand commerce. It’s all about measuring content in 3D spaces.

The goal is to measure the emotions of individuals as they go through a VR experience to validate that a campaign is eliciting the desired responses.

Testing is pretty straightforward, as about 15 people get wired and go through a VR experience of fewer than 10 minutes.

The results can be viewed remotely, and the person viewing the results can go into the VR application to replay and see where the emotional states are and when they change.

See the full story here: https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/306233/isobar-creates-vr-emotional-measurement-platform.html

HBR – A Survey of 19 Countries Shows How Generations X, Y, and Z Are — and Aren’t — Different

Relying on Technology

When we asked which technologies are likely to revolutionize work in the coming decade, we learned that Gen Z was most enthusiastic about the potential of virtual reality (VR). This was stronger in certain countries such as Mexico and Singapore and weaker in countries such as India. Gen Y professionals also saw VR as the technology most likely to revolutionize their work in the coming decade, putting it ahead of wearable technology, project management, and audio/video conferencing. Companies may want to consider virtual reality as a tool for recruiting these cohorts.

Gen X, on the other hand, believed virtual reality technologies would have a low impact on their work. They had the most enthusiasm for project management tools, with certain countries, such as Germany, Japan, and Russia, also expressing excitement about cloud computing and e-learning tools.

We also asked whether respondents saw technology as helpful to or hindering their work lives. More older professionals considered technology a hindrance in Britain, Sweden, and Norway. Technology was most viewed as helpful by Gen Xers in Denmark, Sweden, and Mexico. Among Gen Y, respondents in Mexico, Sweden, and Germany perceived technology most favorably. And Gen Z students in Germany, Japan, and Mexico also saw technology as useful, while those in China, the U.S., and Canada were more likely to view technology as a hindrance to their work.

See the full story here: https://hbr.org/2017/08/a-survey-of-19-countries-shows-how-generations-x-y-and-z-are-and-arent-different

The next Pokémon Go? ‘Star Wars’ unveils a massive ‘Last Jedi’ augmented-reality game

The campaign's basics, by the numbers: As the first wave of "Last Jedi" merchandise lands Sept. 1 (aka "Force Friday II"), the "Find the Force" AR game - involving about 20,000 stores in 30 countries - will let participants hunt down 15 "Star Wars" characters, two are which are new. (Is that the Admiral Ackbar you're looking for?)

To play, fans will download the "Star Wars" smartphone app, head to one of a fleet of participating stores and uncover potentially talking virtual characters by pointing the phone at the "Find the Force" placard. The app encourages social-media sharing of your character experiences, with the big carrot urging that you share being a sweepstakes contest that closes Sept. 3.

See the full story here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/ct-star-wars-unveils-a-massive-last-jedi-augmented-reality-game-20170824-story.html

Mini-antennas could power brain-computer interfaces, medical devices

The new mini-antennas play off the difference between electromagnetic (EM) waves, such as light and radio waves, and acoustic waves, such as sound and inaudible vibrations. ...at any given frequency, an EM wave has a much longer wavelength than an acoustic wave.

The trick is, of course, to quickly turn the incoming EM waves into acoustic waves. To do that, the two-part antenna employs a thin sheet of a so-called piezomagnetic material, which expands and contracts when exposed to a magnetic field. If it's the right size and shape, the sheet efficiently converts the incoming EM wave to acoustic vibrations.

The team created two kinds of acoustic antennas. One has a circular membrane, which works for frequencies in the gigahertz range, including those for WiFi. The other has a rectangular membrane, suitable for megahertz frequencies used for TV and radio. Each is less than a millimeter across, and both can be manufactured together on a single chip. When researchers tested one of the antennas in a specially insulated room, they found that compared to a conventional ring antenna of the same size, it sent and received 2.5 gigahertz signals about 100,000 times more efficiently, they report today in Nature Communications.

Tiny antennas could reduce the size of cellphones, shrink satellites, connect tiny objects to the so-called internet of things, or be swallowed or implanted for medical monitoring or personal identification. ... With a neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital, he’s also creating brain implants for reading or controlling neural activity—helpful for diagnosing and treating people with epilepsy, or eventually for building those sci-fi brain-computer interfaces.

See the full story here: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/mini-antennas-could-power-brain-computer-interfaces-medical-devices

Now There’s a Nausea Dial for Virtual Reality

Companies and researchers have been exploring a slew of potential solutions, from beefing up the resolution of the displays in headsets to limiting your field of view when there’s a lot of motion-related activity going on in the virtual world. And a very young startup called VRemedy Labs is working on an interesting fix of its own: a sort of software-based dial that you can turn up or down to raise or decrease the excitement level—and, it hopes, the resulting nausea—within VR games.

To come up with different comfort levels, VRemedy labs first built a spectrum of nausea that takes into account existing research as well as best practices at the companies selling headsets, such as Rift maker Oculus and Vive makers Valve and HTC. Nish Bhandari, another cofounder, says they try to make the changes between different levels very subtle.

“We want to break the mold of having [VR] experiences that are nauseating and awesome or comfortable and boring,” Oates says. “And instead make games everybody can play and play at their own pace.”

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608709/now-theres-a-nausea-dial-for-virtual-reality/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=d92c00cb67-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-d92c00cb67-153894145

PTSD Exposure Therapy in VR: Importance of Storytelling & Emotional Presence in Healing Trauma

VR is used to incrementally trigger an embodied sensory experience in PTSD patients by placing soldiers within the virtual sights, sounds, feelings, and smells of common combat scenarios in Iraq and Afghanistan. This virtual exposure therapy stimulates the original embodied experience of traumatic events for soldiers so that they can connect to specific details of their memories so that they can engage in cognitive restructuring by telling the story of their experience. Rizzo says that a key component of healing from PTSD is if the patient is able to connect to the underlying emotions of the experience while sharing the narrative of their experience, and that this can unlock a cascade of healing effects that USC has been able to measure over the years.

I had a chance to try out a demo of the VR PTSD Exposure Therapy project during a reception at USC ICT during the IEEE VR 2017 conference in Los Angeles in March, and was struck by their holistic multi-modal approach of using subwoofers, smells, and passive haptic guns.

See the full story here: https://www.roadtovr.com/ptsd-exposure-therapy-vr-importance-storytelling-emotional-presence-healing-trauma/

Zero Latency’s ‘Warehouse Scale’ VR Arena Comes to MGM Grand in Vegas

Launching Sept. 8, 2017

Zero Latency’s new installation at the MGM Grand’s massive Level Up gaming lounge marks another positive milestone for the Melbourne-based company and out-of-home VR technology. The Las Vegas facility opens on September 8th, offering untethered, eight-player VR entertainment across a 2,000 square-foot arena.

As explained on the new VR page of the hotel’s website, guests can choose from three games, Zombie Survival, Singularity and Engineerium for a 30-minute experience. Players can move around tether-free thanks to the Alienware backpack PCs powering OSVR HDK2 headsets fitted with a custom ‘warehouse-scale’ tracking solution.

See the full story here: https://www.roadtovr.com/zero-latency-warehouse-scale-vr-comes-to-mgm-grand-in-vegas/

4 myths are blocking real, needed VR standards

Summary By Phil Lelyveld

Neil Trevett, the president of The Khronos Group, and Yuval Boger, CEO of Sensics, list four “myths” that stand in the way of VR standards and more rapid market growth.  Their rebuttal to #1 ‘It is too early for standards’ is to point to the number of companies that have signed up to work on  The Khronos Group’s Open XR Working Group’s standards effort.  They counter #2 ‘standards stifle innovation’ by noting that many innovative companies can only afford to develop for a few non-interoperable platforms, so the lack of standards is also stifling innovation.  Myth #3, ‘consumers won’t be impacted,’ they argue is not true because the lack of standards makes consumers hesitant to buy a product that may not work universally with all VR experiences.  Finally, they discount the argument that there are too many groups developing VR standards by point to two group’s, The Khronos Ground and the IEEE, as the two organizations leading the effort.  The ETC’s VR/AR Initiative program lead, Phil Lelyveld, says that despite outreach efforts to the creative community by those organizations, their active contributors are predominantly hardware and tool developers and technologists.  Members of the Hollywood creative community often make the argument that they want to shape the future of entertainment experiences rather than have their creative options bounded by the product development choices of hardware and software developers.  It may be too early to codify standards, says Phil, but it is not too early for creatives to get involved in the discussions.

Phil added that he’s never heard anyone make the argument that consumers won’t be impacted (#3) before, he believes that innovation is redirected rather than stifled (#2), and there are other standardization efforts involving significant players (#4).

See the original story here: https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/25/4-myths-getting-in-the-way-of-necessary-vr-standardization/