philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Step Needed to Make Virtual Reality More Real

Eyefluence is building eye-tracking technology that it believes will be good enough to let you do anything in virtual reality, from hitting subterranean mammals to navigating different menus and apps, all by simply looking around.

“People are now really starting to see that interaction in VR is far from a solved problem,” says Evan Suma, a research assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. “This is something the VR research community has been looking at for a number of years, going back decades.”

Oculus and HTC have some solutions. Oculus plans to ship its headset with a wireless Xbox One controller, and to release a more immersive set of button-bedecked, hand-held trackable controllers called Oculus Touch later in the year. HTC’s headset will come with a pair of wand-shaped controllers. But such controllers are not always ideal because they don’t match the ways you use your body when, say, exploring the dark depths of a cave (no buttons to press there, in my experience).

A startup called Gest is trying to take advantage of another body part: your fingers. The San Francisco startup is building a motion-sensor-filled device that wraps around your palm and includes rings that slide around four of your fingers (see “Get to Grips with Virtual Objects Using This Stripped-Down Glove”).

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/543316/the-step-needed-to-make-virtual-reality-more-real/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20160201

Canadian Company ConVRter Beats NASA to Pluto in Virtual Reality

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ConVRter Technologies Inc. announced today that it has made a virtual reality version of the Pluto flyby in full stereoscopic 360 where the viewer can experience the distant dwarf planet as if they were sitting on the New Horizon's space craft itself. "Everyone in the company is a bit of a tech nerd and we had been working on VR space content for a while so when Pluto was finally imaged up close I don't think watching it on TV was quite the experience we were after," said Jonathan Kitzen, CEO, "so we went for a full VR experience. We all wanted to have that feeling of floating in space and seeing a planet as if we were there."

The app, titled Pluto Flyby VR, is part of a series that recreates the entire solar system in Virtual Reality called Space: the Final Frontier and it is being offered for free in iOS for Google Cardboard for a limited time. The full solar system version is on sale now with new planets added all the time – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter are all scheduled for the first week of February. "Because it is an app we can continuously update and add to it so unlike traditional media it is always current," explained Kitzen, "this is the power of applications."

The App is now available on Itunes, Google Play, and a non-app version which is not in 3d is available on YouTube 360, links to all forms of media are on http://www.conVRter.net including versions suitable for 3D viewing on Sony Playstation and other games supporting Virtual Reality and 3D.

Read the full story here: http://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/16/01/p6190596/canadian-company-convrter-beats-nasa-to-pluto-in-virtual-reality

Apple just bought Flyby, a company working on some impressive augmented reality tech

Flyby says its technology can be used for "indoor mapping and navigation, autonomous navigation for drones and automotive vehicles, and advanced tracking for Head Mounted Display (HMD) systems."

Flyby is best known in the tech world for powering Google's Project Tango, a 3D motion tracking initiative intended to help mobile apps understand their relation to physical space.

Flyby's tech is all about tracking the 3D motion of an object and has been applied to indoor mapping, an area Apple is certainly interested in.

The core of its tech is called "VFusion" and can track "drone and car-based systems at distances of up to 10 miles."

See the full story here: http://www.techinsider.io/apples-flyby-media-does-augmented-reality-indoor-mapping-2016-1

Apple Building Secret Team To Work On Virtual Reality

Customers enter the Apple store on 5th Avenue beneath an Apple logo in the Manhattan borough of New York City, July 21, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Segar -

Apple Inc has assembled a large team of experts in virtual and augmented reality and built prototypes of headsets that could one day rival Facebook’s Oculus Rift or Microsoft’s Hololens, the Financial Times reported.

A secret research unit, housing hundreds of staff assembled from acquisitions or poached from other companies, is working on next-generation headset technologies, the FT reported, citing people familiar with the initiative.

See the full story here: http://www.oann.com/apple-building-secret-team-to-work-on-virtual-reality-ft/

and here: http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/apple-vr-ar-team-development-1201692104/

Reggie Watts’ VR Project Is as Hilariously Bizarre as You’d Expect

Waves is one the first VR projects to offer a glimpse into what humor will look like in VR, where nuance is even more necessary than it is for comedy IRL.

“I think the first thing that we talked about that made us laugh hysterically was that once you get inside the VR piece you have to put another VR helmet on,” Dickinson says. “That’s so dumb!”

And Wevr needed them to get as weird as possible. The California startup, which hopes to be a player and platform for VR creators to share their work, wanted Watts and Dickinson’s project to push the limits of what its technology could do. “We had to have them push the creativity to the edge so that our technology could meet them there,” says Wevr co-founder Anthony Batt.

See the full story here: http://www.wired.com/2016/01/reggie-watts-comedy-vr/

A Hacker Made This Augmented Reality Ultrasound With 80s Tech

“I thought that it wouldn’t be that hard [to make an AR ultrasound], that there wouldn’t be much coding involved,” said Skobov, who converted the video signal from the ultrasound machine in Unity Engine, before projecting that image in augmented reality from the physical machine’s prode.

Skobov envisions that this kind of contraption, if taken up commercially, could be used by medical staff as an enhanced monitoring system. “Maybe it could be some kind of patch that could always be on the patient, and doctors could take a look at it to know what is going on,” he said.

Watch the video here: videoplayback

See the full story here: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-hacker-made-this-augmented-reality-ultrasound-with-80s-tech

Retail applications of VR

Luxury boutique retailer The Line is already experimenting with the Samsung Gear VR headset. Shoppers can currently tour the brand’s Manhattan store, The Apartment, using the 3D video technology – even if they are halfway around the world. Similarly, VR developers Sixense and marketing agency SapientNitro recently showed Reuters a demo of a consumer virtually browsing shoes from a display, “picking them up” and trying them on an avatar, and making a purchase. The ultimate goal is for these platforms to learn a shopper’s preferences so the experience becomes more personalized with each visit. In addition, in select stores around the world, shoppers can watch Tommy Hilfiger’s fall 2015 catwalk show with a Samsung Gear VR headset – “a 360-degree, three-dimensional version of the runway as though they’re sitting in the front row.”

See the full story here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/currentaccounts/2016/01/28/virtual-reality-coming-soon-to-a-clothing-store-near-you/#7836452410ed

The best virtual reality from the 2016 Sundance Film Festival

[Philip Lelyveld comment: this is a great collection of Sundance VR Experience summaries and recommendations.]

I went to Sundance 2016 for the express purpose of covering virtual reality, and over the past week, I tried out all but a handful of the 30-plus VR-related experiences at its experimental New Frontier show. New Frontier is obviously just one part of the festival, but since last year, virtual reality has been big enough to merit a collection of the weirdest, darkest, and most sublime excursions that we’ve taken into other worlds. Here are some of the most interesting moments from my show — I've chronicled several more over the course of our Sundance coverage.

See the full story here: http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/29/10871384/sundance-film-festival-2016-best-vr

TED 2016 Attendees Will Step into THE VOID’s Mixed Reality World

The Void, which merges virtual reality experiences with a large physical stage, has created a stage and experience that will be deployed at TED 2016 conference next month where several thousand attendees will have the opportunity to step inside. The company teases the experience: “TED attendees will be able to feel the mist of ancient caverns, use a torch to light their way through mystical puzzles and discover a legend all while exploring the dangers and mysteries of an ancient temple.”

See the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/ted-2016-attendees-will-step-into-the-voids-mixed-reality-world/

ATHENS VIRTUAL REALITY THEATER PRESENTS HAGIA SOPHIA HISTORY

The 1,500-year-old history of Hagia Sophia, the iconic world cultural heritage site and the most spectacular Orthodox cathedral in eastern Christendom, is showcased in a new 45-minute show at the Hellenic Cosmos Cultural Centre’s dome-shaped Virtual Reality Theatre, ‘Tholos’, in Athens.

The interactive presentation tells the cathedral’s history which starts in 532, when Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian commissioned the temple to architects Anthemios and Isidorus, and weaves in elements of subsequent Byzantine history and culture.

The presentation explores the challenges faced by the architects in carrying out their ground-breaking and ambitious construction, the problems they had to overcome, and also shines light on the intricate decorations of the interior.

See the full story here: http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/90029.htm