NAB and ETC to Present Virtual Reality Summit in Las Vegas
NAB and the Entertainment Technology Center at USC are coproducing a Virtual Reality Summit at the annual NAB Show on Wednesday, April 20, from 1:00-5:00 pm at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The half-day summit will address key concepts and lessons learned regarding VR production. Hands-on practitioners will discuss the technical and business aspects of producing content in this emerging marketplace, which some consider to be a new media type and art form. You can register for the Virtual Reality Summit and learn more about the NAB conference at the event’s website.
Virtual Reality is climbing the hype cycle. There are daily stories about the funding and star power behind a new VR experience — or the VR content development plans of an Internet company, equipment startup, gaming house or production studio.
The summit at NAB will provide important insights involving this compelling new space. Check out the schedule below.
1:00 pm — The Current State of VR: Market projections, recent hardware and software developments, and perspective on business opportunities for content creators.
Philip Lelyveld, VR/AR Initiative program lead, Entertainment Technology Center at USC
1:30 pm — Live Streaming VR: Producers with hands-on experience in a variety of live VR streaming situations will discuss their victories, pitfalls to avoid, and lessons learned.
Chris Blandy, EVP Technology Solutions, Fox (Moderator)
DJ Roller, Co-Founder, NextVR
Juan Santillan, Co-Founder and CEO, Vantage.tv
Mike Davies, SVP of Field and Technical Operations, Fox Sports Media Group
Jason Farkas, Executive Producer, CNN
2:30 pm — The Business of VR: Business people will have a lively discussion of market projections, company valuations, and how individuals expect to make money.
Scott Lenet, President, Touchdown Ventures (Moderator)
Tony Mugavero, CEO, LittlStar
Brandon Zamel, CEO, Springbok Entertainment
Marco DeMiroz, General Partner, The VR Fund
3:30 pm — VR Audio: We can only see what is in front of us, but we hear and can identify sounds from every direction. Audio is a key component of the emerging language of VR, with unique challenges impacting capture, production, and end-user experience. This panel will focus on this extremely important yet rarely covered topic.
Jacqueline Bosnjak, CEO & Partner, Q Department | Mach1 (Moderator)
Martin Walsh, Vice President, R&D, DTS, Inc.
Nicolas Tsingos, Director of E-media Technology, Dolby Laboratories
Jean-Pascal Beaudoin, President and Lead Creative Sound Director, Headspace Studio
Jyri Huopaniemi, Head of Formats and Platforms, Digital Media Business Unit, Nokia Technology
Tim Gedemer, President, CEO of Source Sound, Inc.
See the original post here: http://www.etcentric.org/nab-and-etc-to-present-virtual-reality-summit-in-las-vegas/
Augmented Reality, Not VR, Will Be the Big Winner for Business
The introduction of AR let Lockheed Martin engineers work up to 30 percent faster.
Meanwhile, at Boeing, several teams are looking at using AR systems to perform running quality control of parts for several aircraft, including the 787 Dreamliner. AR systems also allow maintenance crews to carry out full airplane checks much quicker than was previously possible.
“Traditionally, these tasks are carried out consulting manuals and using paper and pen,” says Barry Po, director of product management at NGrain. “Using AR-systems lets you overlay any needed information, while you have both hands free, and our visual inspection and damage assessment software can make it much quicker to identify potential issues. The result is that the time it takes to do a full plane check can go from several days to a matter of hours.”
While AR in enterprises has shown impressive results, most of these come from initial pilot projects, using a limited number of devices.
AR is also facing a number of challenges, including a lack of industry standards which can make integrating AR units and software within current enterprise IT ecosystems difficult.
“Traditional software systems like ERP or WMS are not necessarily ready to integrate fully with the new technologies, like AR, that make up Factory 4.0,” Pete Wassel, CEO of Augmate, says.
AR’s Stealth Mode About to End
Enterprises are quickly becoming aware of the potential of AR, with two-thirds of companies recently interviewed by Tech Pro Research saying they were considering integrating AR solutions.
At the same time, the number of use case scenarios for AR is growing rapidly.
Training, maintenance, warehouse management, emergency response at breakdowns, co-worker location, damage assessment, work order creation, assembly product design, and marketing and sales are all being augmented.
One of the biggest use cases across industries is remote maintenance and inspection. Using AR systems, experts will be able to give advice to on-site personnel in any of a number of situations. This would not only eliminate having to fly key personnel around the world but dramatically improve response times.
“It makes it possible to create what I call ‘John Madden’ guides, where experts are able to draw instructions and point things out in real time,” Pete Wassel says.
A Future Beyond the Factory
As a species, we build knowledge on what was discovered by previous generations. We quickly realized it was impractical to rely on memory alone to do this, so we invented the printed word.
See the full story here: http://singularityhub.com/2016/04/06/augmented-reality-not-vr-will-be-the-big-winner-for-business/
Virtual reality ‘sex suit’ lets men experience realistic intercourse all on their own
The Full Body Virtual Interface "can send impulses all over the wearer’s body to make it feel like another human being is touching them," ir.net reports .
At £300, it is just for men at the moment, who can remain fully clothed while they experience intimate time with a virtually non-existent partner.
See the full story here: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/virtual-reality-sex-suit-lets-7698685
How We Immersed 7 Artists Inside Virtual Reality
This is only the beginning. With the HTC and Tilt Brush now available to the public, artists will begin to get comfortable with the app. We expect incredible creations to begin coming from the app from professional and amateur artists alike.
See the full story here: http://time.com/4282786/how-we-immersed-7-artists-inside-virtual-reality/
Here’s where the big money will be made in virtual reality
See the original graphic here: http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-vr-and-ar-market-size-and-segmentation-2016-4?nr_email_referer=1
Huawei outs dual-lens flagship smartphones, co-branded with Leica
The third largest smartphone maker by global marketshare, China’s Huawei, has just unveiled two new flagship handsets — announcing the 5.2 inch P9 and 5.5 inch P9 Plus at an event in London today.
The most notable feature of both are dual lenses on the rear, sitting next to the Leica brand. Huawei says the camera has been “co-engineered” with the veteran optics maker. Although that does not, apparently, mean the lenses themselves are Leica lenses.
dual-lenses rather being put to work to — Huawei claims — enhance photography via improved color/clarity, and to support features such as refocusing after the fact (as Lytro previously tried with dedicated camera hardware; but as ever if it can become a feature on a smartphone it will… ).
It also says the twin lenses support a wide aperture mode that lets in more light — and more light typically means better photos.
See the full story http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/06/huawei-outs-dual-lens-flagship-smartphones-co-branded-with-leica/?ncid=tcdaily
Step into Distant Lands With ‘Realities’, Launching Free on HTC Vive April 5th
Realities is a collection of incredibly detailed virtual environments created with a technique called photogrammetry.
Realities has gone far beyond objects though; the team has used the technique to capture entire rooms and complexes with such detail that at times you might think you’re looking at a picture. Compared to a 360 degree photo or video though, Realities is actually creating the scene as 3D geometry, allowing you to navigate and explore rather than being stuck with one perspective.
The team is bringing their photogrammetric captures to SteamVR through the Realitiesapp for free on April 5th, the Vive’s launch day. You’ll be able to download and explore for yourself, provided you’ve got an HTC Vive. (The team tells us Rift support through SteamVR is coming soon).
The Realities team says the app will launch with five or so different locations to start, and further say that they want to “fill the globe with interesting places all over the the world.”
See the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/realities-launch-trailer-htc-vive-steamvr-april-5-free/
Review: HTC Vive
I’ve had a chance to show the Vive consumer version to my VR virgin friends and responses have rarely deviated from them saying the Vive is the coolest piece of technology they’ve ever seen.
The consumer Vive may hold that crown for me as well. It certainly bests the Rift in terms of immersion and is already developing an ecosystem that looks as though it is going to attract non-gamers particularly well in the coming months. It’s a bit less-refined and intuitive in terms of its feature set, but it nails so many of the futuristic pursuits it reaches beyond reality to find.
The setup of this system is a bit of a doozy.
With the Vive, physical space is a pretty precious commodity. The system’s room-scale tracking, which sees you as you move through space, requires a decent amount of room that you may have to get creative to find.
Mounting the two Lighthouse sensors (which track your headset and controllers) in opposite corners of the room was mostly painless. The lighthouse infrared cameras don’t need to connect to each other or the PC so that made things much easier.
...chaperone system to remind you of the physical borders of your measured space if you’re ever about to put your controller through a wall while in VR. It does so through a couple ways. First, a physical grid that pops up clearly showing your boundaries, and second, if you have the Vive’s head-mounted camera enabled, a 360-degree 2D image of the objects in your immediate vicinity pops up.
e interesting thing I noticed from trying out the various launch titles is how effectively game developers are aligning their designs of in-game tools to the real-world form factors of the controllers. What results is a level of immersion that makes you believe you might actually be picking up a gun when you grab the controllers off your desk while inside the environment.
I found myself missing the Rift’s integrated headphones. The Vive allows you to easily use whatever headphones you have at your disposal but I generally found that having another cord in the way was annoying and most of my headphones are quite heavy so I ended up just using the included earbuds, which weren’t all that awesome but performed fine.
Speaking of cords, the Vive is still a tethered experience.
The quality of the launch titles is another point. I got a chance to play about half of the roughly 70 launch titles that will be live on Steam today. The launch titles are certainly diverse but I struggled to find a standout experience. Indeed, the titles that ship with the Vive: Fantastic Contraption, Job Simulator and Tilt Brush are fairly representative of the type of content that succeeds on the platform.
Like
Magical room-scale tracking. Surprisingly useful camera. Quality optics. Top-notch motion-tracked controllers.
No Like
Bulky headset design. Large amount of floor space needed. General UI bugginess. Thick cord that easily tangles. No blockbuster launch titles.
Bottom Line
If there were a word I’d use to describe this piece of hardware, it would be ambitious. It tries so many damn things, and it gets most of the things so right, though not every feature is a home run. $799 is a lot of cash, but it really feels worth it here. The experience is in a lot of ways so much richer than any other headsets out there, including the Rift. Because of this, it may be a bit easier to point out flaws when they come up, if only because there’s just so much going on with this crazy piece of tech.
See the full story here: http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/05/review-htc-vive/?ncid=tcdaily