Making a Living in Virtual Reality
For local developer Owlchemy Studios, the best way to prosper in an environment with a small consumer base (i.e., those lucky few with headsets) was to not rely on software sales at all. The studio secured a deal to have their sci-fi/slapstick/faux-instructional VR game, Job Simulator, included as a pack-in game with the HTC Vive during its first months on the market. According to CEO Alex Schwarz, the deal (Valve bought an undisclosed number of copies of the game up front in bulk) has been a financial boon to the studio.
“Our best year is the one that everyone told us, ‘Watch out, there won’t be many headsets and you might have your worst year ever,’" Schwarz said. “We prepared for the worst.”
Owlchemy plans to eventually have the game available for purchase once the pack-in copies are depleted and additional versions of the game are released for the Oculus Rift and Playstation VR (a Sony-developed headset scheduled for release this October). They already had a price point of $39.99 decided upon and listed online. This turned out to be a consistent sticking point with the press in reviews of the game, which contended that there was not enough content present to justify the price (a common video game complaint stretching back to the days of cartridges and joysticks).
See the full story here: http://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/screens/2016-05-31/making-a-living-in-virtual-reality/
MIT media studies prof on media’s future: Virtual and augmented reality
...Uricchio also sees modern Big Media as an organic development of a world-view around since the 16th century but especially strong since the late 19th, which prioritizes the fixed, authoritative text. Emerging around the same time as the mathematical perspective that fixes the world visually in the same way that it does textually, the early modern canonic text is, according to Uricchio’s thesis, the residue of a tradition that has “privileged cultures of authorship, authority, and textual stability.” Ebooks and modern forms of collaborative fiction can be seen as an antidote to this view, because they are open to constant revision and reshaping, mutable and expansible. And Uricchio sees the collaborative approach to creation evolving in projects like community journalism, with a civic focus, which may succeed in taking power away from both traditional and new authority structures.
See the full story here: http://teleread.com/mit-media-studies-professor-gives-insight-medias-future/
Lucid VR (Someone is going to get rich selling cameras for virtual reality.)
Lucid VR’s answer to these challenges has been to simplify the camera. Instead of a 360-degree view, the LucidCam offers a 180-degree vantage. That means less memory and computer processing is required. It also limits the headaches associated with stitching by using proprietary software to read and process video data in real time.
Morris May, founder and chief executive of VR production company Specular Theory in Venice, is a fan of Lucid’s simplicity. The filmmaker, who had one of his projects shown at Sundance Film Festival, said all VR cameras, regardless of sophistication and price, have their shortcomings — be it light, sound or clarity.
“There is always something wrong with VR” cameras, he said. “One-hundred and eighty-degrees gives you less that’s wrong.”
See the full story here: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-360-cameras-snap-story.html
Virtual reality set to be GCC’s next billion dollar industry
Xiong Qineng likes to shop for virtual reality (VR) gadgets but online he can only buy from overseas vendors.
"I bought two VR devices -- one was by Google and the other was another foreign brand. I hope domestic shops will start to stock similar items," he said.
Xiong attended the Big Data summit in Guiyang, capital of southwest China's Guizhou Province, over the weekend, and had the chance to experience lots of different applications of VR by Chinese and foreign companies.
Wang Jiping, a VR specialist with the International Data Corp. (IDC), said stores that offer VR experiences, mostly gaming, started to crop up across the country last year. Many advances are happening in this exciting sector.
At a popular shopping mall in Guizhou, a VR gaming store has a virtual roller coaster ride for 40 yuan -- it is a hit with the young, who are more than happy to queue up for the "ride."
"Chinese VR technology has only just started to take shape, but it has great potential," he said.
See the full story here: https://www.zawya.com/mena/en/story/ZAWYA20160529052845/
Augmented World Expo 2016 – Superpowers to the People
Today fabrics can be used as surfaces for display, for input, and even for feedback in the form of pressure to the user as a means of interaction with virtual data. Fabrics that are worn can be bioluminescent, as the threads used to weave the fabrics can have the properties associated with deep sea fish and glowing insects. This is the brave new world of the intersection of biotech with digital media.
Fabrics might well for example serve as foldable, cuttable displays. A fabric could literally be a screen. Its like projecting a movie onto a dress made of movie projection screen material, only there is no projector. The dress is the display. Flaschen Taschen, an LED array screen by the San Francisco hackerspace Noisebridge is a good example of this type of development at a relatively low resolution and was 'all over' the Maker Faire this year.
A comprehensive demonstration display of smart fabrics will be on show at this year's Augmented World Expo so anyone attending will be treated to that also.
See the full story here: http://www.examiner.com/article/augmented-reality-expo-2016-superpowers-to-the-people
4 Wearable Products That I Can’t Wait To Wear This Year
Tap
A small strap that fits on your hand, the Tap Strap is composed of several textile embedded sensors, each monitoring the mechanical movements of our hands and fingers. By enabling any surface to become a virtual keyboard, this little device is powered using bluetooth technology.
Woojer
Based on a patented haptic technology, Woojer is a wearable tactile device that reproduces the rich emotional sensation of sound. It can be worn with a belt clip or with a sport strap.
At present, one of the main problems with VR is that it lacks the real-life feeling of the surrounding environment. Woojer, however, is positioned to solve this – the tactile sensation generated by its polyphonic transducer delivers extremely high fidelity which is accurate up to third harmonics.
HoloLens
Hololens combines the vision of augmented reality and the experience of virtual reality to create mixed reality, allowing users to actively interact with holograms.
O.zen by Ubisoft
In February, Ubisoft — a French biometric gaming company whose technology is used by Jabra, LG, and Sony — released O.zen, a wearable heart-rate sensor and application that plugs into your iPhone or iPad. Essentially, the device measures your heart rate and uses the beat and rhythm to influence your game play. It was first designed as a wellness application, intending to help users control stress, sleep better, and manage their emotions; but its founders see extreme potential in the gaming sphere.
See the full story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/yoavvilner/2016/05/29/4-wearable-products-that-i-cant-wait-to-wear-this-year/#346c41276a48
A Virtual Reality Manifesto: The Good, Bad, and the Ugly
We’re going to examine three specific axes on which VR creators will be forced to make a choice.
- Do you want your content to create empathy and drive human connection, or will you build experiences that spread hate and fear?
- Does your experience empower the user with useful information and unique experiences or exploit them for their cash and their data?
- Does your game authentically create a fun and engaging experience, or are you slapping a coat of paint on some 3D models and using loopholes in human psychology to keep people sucked in.
See the full story here: http://philiplelyveld.com/wordpress/wp-admin/post-new.php