This man is cycling around the UK in virtual reality using Google Street View
Hooking a Galaxy Gear up to Google Street View and cycling the length of the UK — 1,500 kilometers from Land's End to John o' Groats — all from the comfort of his front room.
Puzey has been documenting his travels on his blog, Cycle VR, updating the site with edited video highlights of every 100 kilometers. He says he's been lengthening the amount of time he dedicates to the journey, and reckons he'll be finished in around 50 days.
"The single biggest problem with the Street View data is the high compression on the depth information," says Puzey, with Google storing a limited number of planes to represent complex scenes. "Some things, like buildings, fit very well to this model and look quite solid, but things like trees and hedges and anything lumpy often just looks a mess.
...nausea can be a problem, especially when he's navigating complex routes — like roundabouts — that have been squashed into only a few layers of depth. "The problem [is that I'm] telling the 'bike' in VR to face in the direction of the path it was moving along," says Puzey. "Then I had a breakthrough and realized if I make it face about 5 meters ahead of where I was it made an enormous improvement."
See the full story here: http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/9/12411262/cycle-vr-google-stree-view-uk
New iFly virtual-reality experience tricks your brain into thinking you’re skydiving
While it’s not an exact re-creation of the daredevil activity itself, the sensations of the wind blowing against a user’s belly combined with the video that shows one plummeting toward Earth at high speeds might help to temporarily trick the brain into thinking it’s actually happening. A switch of a button could also mimic different types of skydiving — from basic free fall out of a plane, to BASE jumping off a cliff, to gliding through the sky in a wing suit.
“We think some of the biggest innovation possible is combining things that already exist in just a really unique way,” said Gaddis.
See the full story here: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-virtual-reality-experience-tricks-your-brain-into-thinking-youre-skydiving-2016-08-09
Symphonies in space: orchestras embrace virtual reality
[Philip Lelyveld comment: These examples are simple pairings of old media ideas, but the experimentation with classical musicians will lead to new experiences and the evolution of the language of VR.]
At Brooklyn’s Prospect Park on Saturday, the emerging technology took New Yorkers inside the Orion Nebula, the gaseous cloud of dust and evolving stars some 1,500 light years away. The VR installation was part of the Hubble Cantata, an hour-long composition for orchestra, 100-voice chorus, soloists and narration, by composer Paola Prestini and librettist Royce Vavrek.
Staged at the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn concert series, the cantata’s climatic moment came in its last five minutes, when audience members were cued to slip their phones into free cardboard VR headsets that were distributed at the gates. As the narrator, astrophysicist Mario Livio, poetically described the life and death of stars, attendees shifted in their seats, craned their necks and even stood to view the three-dimensional renderings of Hubble photographs, directed by Eliza McNitt.
Last year the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in Australia hired Jumpgate, an Australian VR studio, to create a stage-view, 360-degree performance video of Sibelius’s Finlandia. Created using a rig of 16 GoPro cameras in front of conductor Guy Noble, the video has been distributed through YouTube and Facebook (it can be viewed using a headset or on a desktop computer).
Similar in concept is a 360-degree rehearsal film of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony created by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra with the Canadian studio VR Cinematic.
Last year the American violinist Tim Fain worked with Jessica Brillhart, a VR film-maker at Google, on the 360-degree short film, Resonance. The vaguely surreal film shows Fain performing an original composition against several backdrops, including a graffiti-tagged empty warehouse, a barnyard and a church, with directional sound guiding the viewer through each new space. Filmed using Jump, a new camera rig intended to create a greater sense of depth, it has drawn over 420,000 views since November.
Matterport secures new investors for its virtual reality 3D mapping tech
Matterport, a company creating tools to allow 3D spaces to be scanned into virtual reality,
Matterport has raised $56 million to date, including a $30 million Series C in June of last year led by Qualcomm Ventures.
One of the main external-facing metrics for success that the company is sharing are “visits” or views of the scanned 3D models. In August of 2015, Matterport had seen 10 million visits to its properties. Fast forward a year and that number has increased dramatically, the company just announced that it has surpassed 60 million visits to the nearly 270 thousand structures that have been scanned using Matterport’s tech.
The company’s revenues are comprised of both the sales of its $4,500 Matterport Pro 3D Camera and the monthly subscription fees, ranging from $49 to $149 per month which allow users to host their scanned models on the site. The camera is an interesting beast, using a technology called Lidar to blast lasers across a space and capture a full visual scan of the area from that perspective.
See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/09/matterport-secures-new-investors-cash-for-its-virtual-reality-3d-mapping-tech/
Nokia and Disney Just Created a Big, Green, Virtual Reality Dragon
Nokia said last week that, with the help of digital effects company Weta Digital, it had built a short virtual reality video that lets people fly on the back of Elliot, the lovable dragon from Disney’s DIS 0.05% upcoming Pete’s Dragon remake.
The virtual reality short, called “Pete’s Dragon: Elliot’s Flyover,” was shot with Nokia’s newly released OZO 360-degree camera to capture the mountains, skies, and canyons of New Zealand. A CGI version of Elliot the dragon was spliced into the video to give users a sense that they are riding Elliot like a wild stallion through the skies.
Guido Voltolina, Nokia’s head of presence capture, said in a statement. “Each activation we’ve created with Disney has been unique to each film and we will continue to push innovation in the VR category to create even more immersive experiences to complement Disney films.”
The new VR short-film comes after Nokia and Walt Disney Studios signed a multi-year deal in April for Disney to use Nokia’s OZO cameras and related software for the studio’s films and marketing materials.
See the full story here: http://fortune.com/2016/08/08/nokia-disney-virtual-reality-petes-dragon/
AMD – Virtual reality is coming to your movie theater lobby
Taylor took the show as an opportunity to introduce another option in the form of a pod called the VenueVR Gateway. Made by Awesome Rocketship, the concept is simple: a station with a motorized platform, haptic feedback, and integrated computer that can be used to power high-end VR gaming, with various configurations allowing sit-down, stand-up, or full room-scale experiences. The hope is that by offering an easy way to deploy pay-per-play VR stations, the industry can piggyback on top of movie theaters and other venues to create a profitable market for virtual reality developers nearly overnight.
...it was easy to see how the idea could catch on, even at the tentative $1-per-minute price point. Imagine a group of friends that go to a theater to see Star Trek Beyond, walk out afterward, and then all sit down at a four-pod cluster to tackle their own mission with Star Trek: Bridge Crew.
See the full story here: http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/9/12405776/virtual-reality-movie-theater-lobby-awesome-rocketship
Osmo – AR for kids
A shaggy-haired monster as lovable as a teddy bear offers a wave and an encouraging smile that is in no way diminished by the pair of incisors jutting up from his jaw. "Nice to meet you," says the creature, named Mo, who lives in an iPad app called Osmo Monster. "Can you draw me a magic wand?"
So begins a surprisingly intuitive interaction between digital and physical worlds, the complex software operating in the background masked by the childhood delight of free-form play. Draw a magic wand for Mo on a real-life whiteboard placed in front of the iPad and suddenly the exact sketch appears on the screen. One after another, Mo requests drawings of coins, a magic banana, and a favorite toy, incorporating each into his digital home. As music plays, he conducts the "grand finale": an act that features all the drawings as they spin and dance.
Pramod Sharma, cofounder and CEO of Osmo, the startup that designed the app, describes the Osmo Monster experience as a way to give "Walt Disney moments" to kids that have grown up around screens.
Reflective AI - "It’s very hard, iterating on the storytelling side, the computer vision side, and the animation side,"
See the full story here: http://www.fastcompany.com/3062536/the-recommender/pokemon-go-may-be-a-fad-but-augmented-reality-for-kids-is-here-to-stay
Is Pokemon Go Finally Making Augmented Reality Mainstream? Brands like Porsche and State Farm are trying it out
This week, Porsche is unveiling a new augmented reality experience with a five-page, gatefold ad in Outside magazine featuring a photo of the Swiss Alps. The experience, created by the AR player Blippar, allows Blippar's mobile app users to scan the page to unlock a digital display of the mountain, along with a 360-degree photo of a Porsche 718 Boxster interior. They can even play a game driving the car through the mountainous Gotthard Pass.
"It isn't just a narrative," said Omaid Hiwaizi, Blippar's president of global marketing. "It's an immersive, emotional experience that's memorable in a way that most of the time a written story can't be."
See the full story here: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/pokemon-go-finally-making-augmented-reality-mainstream-172823