Zombies, zip lines and virtual reality score big at this year’s IAAPA expo
Extreme Engineering stood out on the show floor this year with their Cloud Coaster, a full-circuit zip line that pulls dangling riders uphill before releasing them into a course of curves and drops.
Zombie-inspired products at this year's IAAPA expo ranged from plush toys to a paintball-gun-festooned hayride truck, and animatronic lurchers sprayed "blood" in my mouth inside two separate haunted houses.
new Maestro technology, which uses a Kinect-esque sensor to let you fling bolts of 3-D lightning with a flick of your fingers. When finished, guests will glide past sets and video projections, waving their arms to launch colorful blasts at the blocky bad guys. It took a bit of trial and error to calibrate my aim (hopefully you'll be able to practice in the queue before boarding), but Maestro could be the most exciting advancement in interactive rides since Disney's Toy Story Mania.
Mack Rides blew everyone else out of the expo by sending them up I-Drive to Fun Spot, where they temporarily rigged the Freedom Flyer suspended steel coaster with Samsung VR headsets. I took it for a spin, and was immersed in a sci-fi CGI cityscape under attack by a giant robot. As the coaster soared and swooped, I seemed to evade explosions and dodge collapsing buildings, turning a tame family coaster into an epic E-ticket. If this is the future of attractions, beam me up!
See the full story here: http://www.orlandoweekly.com/orlando/zombies-zip-lines-and-virtual-reality-score-big-at-this-years-iaapa-expo/Content?oid=2452869
Nonny de la Peña: Journalist. Virtual reality pioneer. Occasional painter.
De la Peña is the founder and CEO of Emblematic Group, a company focused on immersive, journalistic storytelling based in Los Angeles.
She's originally from California, and went to Harvard University where she majored in sociology and visual and environmental studies. She worked as a journalist for years, including as a correspondent for Newsweek.
After building a version of Guantanamo Bay Prison on Second Life eight years ago, she started thinking how VR could be used to tell news stories.
While collaborating on a project at the University of Barcelona, she got to try a piece dealing with the bystander effect that put the viewer in the middle of a bar fight. Since then, De la Peña's worked to create immersive narratives in VR.
Hunger in Los Angeles took two years to build and $700 of De la Peña's own money. The prototype she used came from USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, specifically Mark Bolas, now-Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, Thai Phan, and Evan Suma.
The piece premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014. Actor Gina Rodriguez, who won the 2014 Golden Globe for best actress for her CW show Jane the Virgin, stopped by.
"I didn't know how people were going to behave and that moment when the goggles came off and she was bawling—you could hear her voice and it's just like, 'You're crying, oh my God, you're crying,'" De la Peña said, "That's happened over and over again and that's the moment where I'm like 'I'm really on to something.'"
See the full story here; http://www.techrepublic.com/article/nonny-de-la-pena-journalist-virtual-reality-pioneer-occasional-painter/
Google Glass to Project Aura: aiming for HoloLens and the Enterprise
As the year is coming to an end, Google Glass resurfaces as Project Aura, the augmented reality headset. In a patent awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to Google, we get an early glimpse into what Google engineers have been working on in the past 5 years or so. The new version of Glass, now interestingly named Project Aura, is still an awkward-looking device that won’t go unnoticed, but it will be much more refined than the original Explorer consumer version ever was. In a bid to give Microsoft’s HoloLens a real competitor, Project Aura aims to vastly improve upon the hardware and software capabilities of Google Glass by using higher-end technology and a well-developed software.
With a design based around the usage pattern of a monocle, Project Aura looks just as ridiculous as Google Glass, but smaller. Although the monocle design with the rectangular hardware, positioned to cover the wearer’s eyebrow, seems like a more minimalist and practical approach than the glasses approach of the first generation, it still looks futuristic and alludes to how one would imagine security officers in a post-apocalyptic 1984 monitored wirelessly by a tyrant government. Nonetheless, it’s a step in the right direction.
Project Aura will be made with designing, architecture, management, financial and maybe even journalism purposes in mind, leaving little room for the wearable to fulfill tasks like social media, entertainment or casual media consumption and interaction.
See the full story here: http://www.geeksnack.com/2015/11/29/google-glass-to-project-aura-aiming-for-hololens-and-the-enterprise/
Breaking Down Billion-Dollar AR/VR Investment In The Last 12 Months
Last quarter alone saw more than 6x the investment in the market from Q2 2014.
Magic Leap took more than half the money in the last 12 months, and there are reports that they’re raising another billion. VCs and corporates have also become excited beyond our Floridian friends, with an impressive diversity of investment in a market that hasn’t really launched yet.
Read the full story here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/27/breaking-down-billion-dollar-arvr-investment-in-the-last-12-months/
Meet the Camera That Could Bring Virtual Reality to the Masses
The LucidCam is part FlipCam, part GoPro, with the look and feel of a slim smartphone. It's meant to be a point-and-shoot camera for capturing virtual-reality content on the go. It's portable and mountable, and makes it possible to create high-quality content from a first-person perspective. With its 180-degree field of view and true depth perception, the camera creates the sensation that you really are there. You can then watch this virtual-reality content on your smartphone, with or without a special viewer, or on a virtual-reality headset.
LucidCam has gone through a number of iterations and prototypes, and the next step is to take it to mass production. To make that possible, LucidCam is in the middle of raising $100,000 (roughly Rs. 66,35,000) on the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo.
With 45 days to go, the product has already pulled in more than $90,000 (roughly Rs. 60,00,000).
The best content, Jin said, is still being made by professionals, not amateurs. Companies such as JauntVR are applying Hollywood-style production techniques to creating cinematic, immersive virtual-reality experiences.
See the full story here: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/cameras/features/meet-the-camera-that-could-bring-virtual-reality-to-the-masses-768518
Bankrolling the 10 Breakthrough Technologies: Magic Leap
Abovitz founded Magic Leap in 2010, and it became his full-time gig in December 2013 after he sold his previous business, the medical-device maker MAKO Surgical, for $1.65 billion. Nagraj Kashyap, senior vice president at Qualcomm Ventures, attributes much of his firm’s enthusiasm for Magic Leap to Abovitz’s track record building successful technologies and cultures. But he also sees good reason to believe that Magic Leap’s technology will create something new, a “pervasive and persistent” form of augmented reality.
Although virtual reality is not new, investors have been drawn back to it because of a substantial decrease in costs. Virtual-reality headsets that existed 20 years ago cost $20,000 to make, says Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life and High Fidelity. Because it was so expensive, he says, “virtual reality in general has been a dream always five years in the future.”
In contrast, today “90 percent of the hardware in a virtual-reality headset is already in a cell phone,” says Nabeel Hyatt, a partner at Spark Capital, the original backer of Oculus VR, the virtual-reality headset maker Facebook bought in 2014 for $2 billion.
Spark Capital professes to like investing in markets so new their size can’t yet be determined. Even so, Hyatt says his firm believes the augmented reality of Magic Leap is still too far off to warrant investment. Significant technological puzzles still have to be solved in computer vision, 3-D rendering, strategies for mapping a room in real time, and other areas, Hyatt argues. “I am bullish on that,” he says, “but over the very long term.”
See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/543386/bankrolling-the-10-breakthrough-technologies-magic-leap/