IU football building library of virtual reality plays
Kevin Wilson and Indiana’s two-person virtual reality staff have begun creating what Wilson called a “library” of plays. Thanks to the three-dimensional nature of virtual reality, Wilson, his staff and his players can study plays not just from different angles, but from the viewpoints of different players on the field.
“It really submerses you, like you’re in it,” Wilson said after practice Wednesday. “If the play’s moving, it’s kind of a lot going on. … What you want to do is freeze it and then look around and talk.”
Several college athletic departments, including IU and Michigan, have begun to incorporate virtual reality into daily work, whether it be training or recruiting.
Director Randal Kleiser Kicks Off Virtual Reality Narrative Short ‘Defrost’
A technically-savvy director, Kleiser was excited to experiment with the format. In the story, told in the first-person, the viewer "plays" Joan Garrison, who awakens after being cryogenically frozen for 30 years. As the story begins, Joan's in a wheelchair, being led down a hospital hall as the doctor (Carl Weathers) explains to you what has happened, given you the sense of disorientation that “Joan” would feel. You then meet your family, and one by one they reintroduce themselves. It ends with the doctor asking if you’d like to see what you look like, and holds a mirror up to you (the camera) for the reveal.
“It’s a first person experience and you can make the viewer a character,” Kleiser told The Hollywood Reporter of his impression of the new medium. “I came up with the idea of the wheelchair ... as well as making her speech not possible due to the defrosting process. [This is because in VR] you couldn't talk to the characters, but they could talk to you."
Defrost’s production company is VR firm IM360, a joint venture between VFX house Digital Domain and VR technology developer Immersive Media. IM360 also provided its 360-degree VR camera system for the production.
See the full story here: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/director-randal-kleiser-kicks-virtual-816092
Google and Intel combine 3D technologies to demo the ultimate augmented reality smartphone
Google and Intel have developed what looks like the ultimate augmented reality smartphone, combining Google’s Project Tango tech to map and track 3D environments with Intel’s RealSense camera sensor, which isolates and scans 3D objects within those environments.
Engadget reports that the two companies have so far produced a developer prototype of the smartphone, with a consumer device expected to be released further down the line.
See the full story here: http://9to5google.com/2015/08/19/project-tango-with-intel-realsense/
Will Virtual Reality Get Lost in the Uncanny Valley Of Sound?
Visuals get the front page (for obvious reasons), but we’re quietly entering an age of more advanced speaker technology. Binaural audio, for instance, puts a microphone close to each ear and drastically increases the numbers of loudspeaker in sound systems. Rumsey, the technical chair of the Audio Engineering Society and the director of sound consulting company Logophon, tells Inverse that this represents progress, but not a breakthrough. “In many cases what we would call the timbral quality of sound — that’s the sound of color, and what novices think of as sound quality — has not necessarily increased correspondingly,” he explains. “And that led me to wonder whether there was something rather similar to what has happened in the video animation field.”
The best systems out there right now use surround sound or wave field synthesis systems, which use a large number of loudspeakers to simulate movement and the audio effects of environment. According to Rumsey, “the results are not as convincing as we’d hope them to be.”
Binaural audio and other virtual reality sound reproduction methods have the potential to be very good, “but also potentially very odd and disturbing if they’re not done absolutely perfectly.”
The uncanny valley isn’t a completely mapped-out psychological landscape — some researchers doubt its existence or think that it might disappear with conditioning, but other scientists have proposed an uncanny cliff, in which attempts to go back up the other side to human ultimately fail.
In the 2009 paper “The audio Uncanny Valley: Sound, Fear and the Horror Game,” music professor Mark Grimshaw, then at the University of Bolton in the U.K., proposes that freaky sounds are desirable in certain settings.
When it comes to 3D spatial sound, you could mess with the binaural phase so that “the sound to one ear is pushing where the other one is pulling,” according to Rumsey. Otherwise, intentionally altering voices to make them artificial or odd (the Bane effect) isn’t really a new idea. “People have done that forever,” Rumsey says. He’s worried more about our unintentional flubs, because the auditory equivalent of rubberized Tom Hanks is all the more disturbing when you’re least expecting it.
See the full story here: https://www.inverse.com/article/5365-will-virtual-reality-get-lost-in-the-uncanny-valley-of-sound
This Dubai hotel entices would-be guests with virtual reality experiences before they ever book
You don’t have to fly to the Middle East to plummet down the world’s largest water slide or zipline across an island oasis. Atlantis, The Palm – Dubai’s luxury hotel island – has deployed a virtual reality headgear program to entice would-be guests into making the journey across the globe to experience these attractions and more.
The headsets have been making their way across the world on the travel industry conference circuit this summer, popping up in the Middle East and Los Angeles.
The technology doesn’t stop once guests have booked a stay. The Palm has deployed interactive Apple iBeacons — electronic beacons that communicate with guests when they pass certain points — throughout the property. Guests can even play a mobile explorer game when they visit the resort’s massive Lost Chambers Aquarium and travel through resurrected ruins of the mythical lost city of Atlantis. Liam Findley, vice president of marketing for Atlantis, The Palm says the industry is only just getting started adopting this type of technology.
Learn Immersive raises money to build out language learning concept
[Philip Lelyveld comment: Great idea, but curious implementation. I'd suggest piggybacking on Periscope / Meerkat and creating live language sessions with strangers.]
To Tony Diepenbrock, the best way to learn a new language is to travel to a country where that language is spoken and try to make life work there. Just drop into the middle of France or Spain and learn how to buy groceries or park your car by reading signs, asking questions and responding to native speakers. However, Diepenbrock and Learn Immersive co-founder Charles Moyes raised a $400,000 angel round to build out their immersive language learning platform that can extend from the browser to room-scale VR. They hope a 3D environment and the feeling of presence people experience in VR will provide the same kind of exploratory learning experience as actually being there along with the sink-or-swim motivation to absorb information, all without spending the time and money to relocate.
The pair started Learn Immersive and they’ve built out a basic concept in Unity that allows teachers to use a drag-and-drop interface in an Internet browser to build out a virtual scenario for students learning a language with questions, answers and audio cues. They call it “Blueprint” and hope that by starting in the browser it will give people without access to head-mounted displays a way to use the platform to build out scenarios that can teach English, French or Spanish. However, they are banking on the idea that a more powerful learning experience is possible with high-quality, low-cost VR like the Rift and Vive giving people the sensation of reaching out and grabbing objects.
See the full story here: http://uploadvr.com/learn-immersive-language/?mc_cid=78762c11fd&mc_eid=cd6a4d9ecf
SIGGRAPH 2015: More on VR and 360 Degrees of Experience
August 17, 2015
Last week we reported that beneath the aura of excitement generated this year at SIGGRAPH 2015 by the prevalence of virtual reality, a number of compelling panels examined the nuts and bolts of creating VR experiences, including managing workflow and assets. Part 2 of our report on SIGGRAPH VR panels continues with coverage of the VR Village sessions Creating on the Edge and Convergences in Film and Games Technologies, featuring perspectives from professionals in production, post production, visual effects, gaming and journalism.
Creating on the Edge featured case studies from VR creators that, the conference program guide defined, “illustrate the power of the VR/AR/immersive medium and convey a vision of its potential impact on our lives.”
Emblematic Group’s Nonny de la Pena, who develops Immersive Journalism VR experiences, responded to the question about the need for photorealism by saying that we are hardwired to accept representations of ourselves. We can accept abstract representations as long as the experience feels real.
Jaunt Studios head Grant Anderson tackled some of the practical lessons of shooting VR. “Consider splitting the 360 degree camera shoot into two 180 degree shoots until we learn how to handle it better,” he suggested. This is one way to get around the need to find ways to hide the crew, such as making them costumed background players or hiding them behind rocks and trees.
Anderson, who brings many years of experience as a 3D supervisor also pointed out that while a “close-up” is a “big-up” in 3D, it is an “in your face” in VR.
Walt Disney Imagineering’s Mike Mine noted that Disney had to address the creative issues linked to a 360 degree viewing experience decades ago with Circle-Vision. They found that the audience felt like they had to look everywhere, which could feel like work to them.
Workflow and asset management were themes at the Convergences in Film and Games Technologies panel.
Bill Polson, director of Industry Strategy at Pixar, noted that there is now a sharing of production tools and techniques between games and film. But, he added, once you get to post production, the nomenclature changes. He is wrestling with the problem that asset creation and labeling is still a very one-off process. A coffee cup may be one object or a group of components. Asset management is based on the structure of the organization, and must be able to accommodate multiple representations of the same artistic creation, he said.
Rob Bredow, an award-winning visual efforts supervisor and technologist now leading the forward-thinking ILMxLAB, noted that you need to think in terms of systems and content rather than shots. In a CG-rendered VR experience, it is “a 12 hour show. You can’t noodle individual scenes.”
Colin Penty of The Coalition, the team at Microsoft Studios responsible for the blockbuster “Gears of War” franchise, pointed out that game engines must run complex systems that interact. That interaction can reveal story, so game engine design should be viewed as another creative VR storytelling tool.
Today the metrics for CGI-rendered movies and rendered games are very different, Penty noted. A single frame in an animated movie may take over one hundred hours to render, but he measures render time for photorealistic games in milliseconds.
In his closing comments, Pixar’s Polson said that VR is a chance to reinvent workflow.
ILMxLAB’s Bredow said that in Hollywood, content is king. In gaming, fun is king. But in VR we are converging on a place where the story behind the fun is increasingly important.
For more of our VR coverage from SIGGRAPH 2015, check out Part 1 of this story.
See the original post here: http://www.etcentric.org/siggraph-2015-more-on-vr-and-360-degrees-of-experience/#more-95249
8i Introduces 3D Video #100humans Portrait Series
With the likes of Samsung, Nokia, and Google touting their latest 360-degree cameras, 8i is moving forward with a different approach and taking off-the-shelf video cameras to create 3D videos that can be viewed from different angles. 8i is basically transforming flat video into rich 3D experiences that will mesh with VR devices like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive.
8i is not just testing this on just a few subjects either. Over the past month, they have opened up a studio in LA and have been inviting artists, athletes, educators, social media influencers, and even a few familiar veteran VR faces, to stand in for their #100humans portrait series.
See the full story here: http://vrscout.com/projects/8i-introduces-3d-video-100humans-portrait-series/