Step inside Butterfly’s house in virtual reality opera night
Welsh National Opera’s virtual reality experiment – Magic Butterfly– is installed in a shipping container, and will allow visitors to step inside scenes from two operas, Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Puccini’s Madam Butterfly.
The experience, created with Google Daydream technology, will open in Cardiff on 14 July before touring to Birmingham, Liverpool, Llandudno and London through the year.
See the full story here: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jun/11/art-culture-technolgy-3d-virtual-reality-cannes-opera
Mkt Res – Public VR Awareness Almost Doubling Annually with PSVR & Gear VR Leading the Way
See the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/report-vr-nielsen-report-awareness-almost-doubling-annually-with-psvr-gear-vr-leading-the-way/
Awareness among the general population over 13 yrs old
. Awareness among gamers over 13 yrs.
Meet Binky, the anti-social media simulator
Binky gives you a social media feed to interact with. Posts are called Binks. You can comment on stuff, you can like the things you enjoy, you can even re-Bink things. You can even swipe right and left on stuff, if that’s your preferred UI for expressing your desires or hang-ups.
The twist is that nothing you do makes it out into the real world; all your liking, re-Binking and swiping is completely, utterly, unavoidably futile. It’s kind of like being in space, where nobody can hear you scream.
“It started out as a joke,” Dan Kurtz, the app’s creator says.
“As soon as I started showing it to people, they said it felt a little bit like a nicotine patch for social media,” Kurtz said. “I put it out on the app store, and then the guy who made Cow Clicker — itself a satire on Farmville — ended up writing an articleabout it, and the rest is history.”
The app is free on iOS, and Kurtz suggests that an Android version is in the pipeline.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/10/binky/?ncid=tcdaily&utm_medium=TCnewsletter
(Jaunt story) Disney and other media giants are betting VR is the next big play in entertainment
Backed with nearly $101 million in venture capital, Jaunt has built a library of nearly 300 pieces of mostly short-form VR content that includes a 360-degree view of a concert by former Beatle Paul McCartney, a panoramic of "The Lion King" on Broadway and a bullet-splattered "Escape of the Living Dead" video segment.
...George Kliavkoff, the former NBC Universal and Hearst executive who joined Jaunt in September as its president and chief executive.
Jaunt co-produced "Invisible," a six-part supernatural drama series created by "The Bourne Identity" director Doug Liman's 30 Ninjas company that premiered on Samsung's VR service before being shown on Jaunt's VR app, YouTube, Facebook and co-producer Conde Nast's "The Scene" digital video platform. "Invisible" tells the story of a powerful New York family with the supernatural ability to make themselves invisible.
In January, Jaunt announced a slate of five new series to be produced at its 10,000-square-foot Santa Monica, California, studio, including a six-part stoner comedy series "Bad Trip" and a series based on the 1992 cult horror movie "The Lawnmower Man." Klaivkoff won't say when the shows will be making their debut.
Kliavkoff says Disney, which in September 2015 led Jaunt's $65 million Series C round, will soon offer its fans a 360-degree online trip to Pandora, the mythical planet in James Cameron's film "Avatar," which is also the backdrop for the media giant's new "Pandora—The World of Avatar" attraction at its Disney Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida.
Jaunt doesn't yet have a deal with IMAX. But it's venturing into China, the world's second-largest market, where its joint venture with China Media Capital and Shanghai Media Group will soon distribute more than 80 pieces of VR content, says Kliavkoff, including some from Jaunt's library.
Virtual reality is already taking hold in China. By 2020 the government's China Electronics Standardization Institute projects companies will be selling 55 billion yuan ($8 billion worth) of goggles, headsets and content in that country alone.
See the full story here: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/08/virtual-reality-startup-jaunt-to-shake-up-entertainment-industry.html
How to Prepare Your Content Strategy for Virtual Reality
1. Focus on Immersive Storytelling
2. Encourage User-Generated Content
3. Bring the Product Right to the Customer
Only 6.3 million headsets were sold for home use in 2016. This number isn’t exactly enticing for marketers to create large amounts of space in their budgets to fund VR projects.
Although the numbers themselves aren’t super promising, the innovation of current VR marketing strategies proves it is going to be a major player in the future.
See the full story here: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/vr-content-strategy/200086/
The State of Virtual Reality
...Microsoft remains firmly committed to the technology, Kipman said.
"We are all-in on mixed reality," he said. "Our primary focus is making our Windows Mixed Reality experiences a success.
This year alone, Acer, Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo plan to ship Windows Mixed Reality-enabled headsets that work on Windows 10. Microsoft also recently unveiled motion controllers that are designed to be plug-and-play with those headsets and which will hit this holiday.
While Microsoft also has its own HoloLens augmented reality device, the company isn't saying much about it right now.
Bringing computing into the 3-dimensional world in which humans have always existed is the next step in making computing truly more personal.
Vive recently announced plans for an "all-in-one" Google Daydream-supported, mobile-phone-powered VR headset and earlier this year the company announced a tracker that can be used to help inject real world, trackable items into the virtual world. Both seem tied to where Vive sees VR heading.
"In the future, devices will become lenses, lenses that will allow us to see, touch and feel mixed reality," Kipman said. "Mixed reality will enable us to freely and instinctually mix real people, places, and things; with virtual people, places and things. This will unlock amazing new experiences anchored to the physical world around us.
"In the future, we won't need to choose between transparent or opaque headsets. Devices will adapt instantly blending the real and the virtual into mixed realities."
The PlayStation Eye introduced the concept to PlayStation gamers in 2007. From that came a redesign of the camera and more AR games. There were even AR games for the PlayStation Portable and Vita.
See the full story here: https://www.polygon.com/e3/2017/6/8/15761548/virtual-reality-e3-2017
Snap is developing a second version of Spectacles which may include augmented reality
It seems increasingly likely that Spectacles II will ship with augmented reality features built in. A major clue came last month when a Snap patent application for AR glasses was discovered by Mashable. The filing, dated November 2015, details how Snap plans to use a dual-glass arrangement to sense a user’s location and then beam digital content into the space around them.
Snap’s app is already primed to support such a move. It recently rolled out an augmented reality feature — called World Lenses — in April which allows users to place digital objects around them. Unlike masks and filters, users can walk around the 3D objects which exist in their space when viewed through the Snapchat app for a limited time before disappearing.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/12/snap-is-developing-a-second-version-of-spectacles-which-may-include-augmented-reality/
A Breakdown of the What Apple’s New ARKit Can Do for iPhones & iPads
Using only the RGB cameras and other sensors built into iPhones, along with a technique called visual-inertial odometry, or combining information from the device's motion-sensing hardware and computer vision through the device's camera, Apple has added a version of world tracking and virtual object anchoring that is comparable to some of the depth sensors that exist. Considering the lack of additional hardware the tracking is really impressive.
In addition, through the use of hit-testing, world tracking can understand the scene it sees. At least, on a basic level. Using plane detection the iPhone can find flat surfaces in the camera view which will allow the user to place a virtual object on a table for example.
ARKit also does ambient light estimation, which allows the application to more accurately match its virtual lighting to the lighting in the area. This will provide a more seamless and immersive AR experience for the user.
Along with all of these new additions to their SDK, they have added in Unity and Unreal support. Unity has a bitbucket repository up with a plugin to enable all of the added ARKit functionality to Unity applications for iOS.
So while the revelations presented at WWDC may not be the new AR wearable some of us were hoping for, and a few expected, they have in a single move created the world's largest AR platform.
See the full post here: https://next.reality.news/news/dev-report-breakdown-what-apples-new-arkit-can-do-for-iphones-ipads-0177958/
The State of virtual reality
This is a lengthy pre-E3 article at https://www.polygon.com/e3/2017/6/8/15761548/virtual-reality-e3-2017