New VR Theme Parks from Landmark Entertainment Group to “Fuse Art, Culture, and Retail with Virtual Reality”
Landmark’s so called L.I.V.E. Center (Landmark Interactive Virtual Experience) is going to offer park-goers a “mixed reality entertainment destination,” that promises to “fuse art, culture and retail with virtual reality, augmented reality and themed architecture and design.”
The first Center, which plans to break ground in China in the next 12-18 months with the help of a Chinese investor group, will include an interactive museum, a virtual zoo, a virtual aquarium, a digital art gallery, a live entertainment stage, an immersive movie theater, and themed experience retail spaces. There’s no word yet on what specific headsets or systems they have in mind for these VR/AR spaces.
...the center represents a large step not only for the Chinese market into virtual reality spaces, but for out-of-home VR locations in general like newly planned out-of-home park, The Void, currently in development just outside Salt Lake City in Pleasant Grove, Utah.
See the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/vr-theme-park-landmark-entertainment-group-to-fuse-art-culture-and-retail-with-virtual-reality/
Augmented reality nail art
The project is an initiative of Metaverse Makeovers, a start-up comprising artists, technologists and engineers based in Melbourne, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Thea Baumann, Metaverse’s founder and chief executive officer, says its ethos is “collaborative and female-led”. “We’re artists as engineers, which gives us a different way to bring our technology directly into the hands of young women,” she says.
Metaverse Nails’ dizzying synthesis of artifice and reality is what makes the app so addictive. Baumann admits the project is probably a little too sparkly for the mainstream Australian market, so the company is instead conducting on-the-ground research for entry into the lucrative Chinese market, where the popularity of nail bars may make it more of a natural fit.
...the company has already received $750,000 from venture capital group Melbourne Angels, as well as funding from Queensland University of Technology’s Creative Enterprise Fund and a number of investors in China.
Salvador Dali is widely acknowledged as one of the first artists to explore holography as an artistic medium in 1973, when he depicted a rotating, three-dimensional image of a bejewelled Alice Cooper cradling a miniature statue of the Venus de Milo while a plaster sculpture of Cooper’s brain, adorned with an eclair crawling with live ants, loomed in the background.
See the full story here: http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2015/06/06/augmented-reality-nail-art/14335128001958#.VXHo4GBiBrg
Gloves Add Touch to Virtual Reality
[Philip Lelyveld comment: it is only a kickstarter program, but the feature set it interesting.]
The gloves also include a 9-Axis inertial measurement unity (IMU) sensor, which can be placed beneath the gloves. An IMU sensor, often used to maneuver satellites or other aircraft, can record velocity, orientation and gravitational forces using accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers.
In the Glovone, the IMU sensor will tracking your hands within the virtual world to offer a more realistic experience. However, right now the gloves do not offer movement resistance.
On the Kickstarter page, the company describes the sensation of wearing these gloves as a “realistic perceptual illusion,” meaning that you can’t feel the weight of a virtual object the same as it is in real life, but you can compare weights within the virtual world.
The gloves, which people can buy fitted in three sizes. Each "antibacterial, sweat-proof" pair features a Bluetooth wireless connection, and should offer more than 4 hours of battery life.
See the full story here: http://news.discovery.com/tech/gear-and-gadgets/gloves-add-touch-to-virtual-reality-150605.htm
Startup Sketchfab is bridging the gap between today’s web and tomorrow’s virtual reality
Sketchfab, a platform for publishing, discovering, and sharing three-dimensional renderings of objects...
"Every big brand in tech is figuring out how to get into this area," says Denoyel. "We are ideally positioned for this, because we have been working on optimizing 3D files so you can embed them anywhere." The company’s big vision is to enable seamless sharing across VR, AR, and the web, a bridge between today's computing and the platforms of the future.
Sketchfab has pivoted not just its focus, but its business model as well. "We’ve pretty recently shifted to be a content platform, not a tool. Originally it was going to be a software as a service business where we charged users to upload files. But as we grew, it became clear there was more value in helping to distribute this content than charging people to host it." The company removed the barriers to upload and no longer charges for storage, except on its pro version for private files. "We have doctors using Sketchfab to share scans of teeth and stuff like that, they want to keep confidential, and we can monetize a little."
Microsoft imagines people will sculpt and shape objects and then share them with fellow designers.
In the last few months, big name brands like HTC and Activision Blizzard have begun using Sketchfab to share 3D models of their new phones and game characters on Facebook. In the future, AR is expected to be a hotbed for commerce, with people browsing through holographic items in their own living room instead of heading for the mall.
Sketchfab has a big dream, this technology that can bridge the gap between the web we use today and the various realities that are in the near future. "It’s not going to be as easy as they make it sound," says Taussig. "But the long-term vision makes a lot of sense."
See the full story here: http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/4/8727497/sketchfab-hololens-virtual-augmented-reality-3d
Virtual Reality Home Gym Means Bodybuilding on Different Planets
Icarus, a virtual reality-enabled workout station created by German design firm HYVE to work seamlessly with a VR headset, simulating flying, rollercoasters, and deep sea dives all while burning calories and toning muscles.
The simple design works on balance alone, with accelerometers sending your movements within the machine into the virtual world, effectively tricking your brain into beliving the virtual scenarios designed by HYVE's companion animation studio, Lumacode. "When you are doing a steep descent in VR you are also doing it in reality, blood rushes into your head and you are sucked into the virtual environment. This enables people to stay in virtual worlds longer, without getting 'simulator sick.'"
QuantVR wants to turn stock market data into immersive virtual reality experiences
...the high percentage (70%) of trades that are done with algorithms, and they occur in a fraction of a second.
"3D graphs that represent stock price over a day or over a few hours, they fundamentally fail in their ability to represent what's actually happening in the market," he said.
The idea behind Visual Order Book is to allow for representation of those split second timescales. "It's really the first time that you can actually see the stock market from the point of view of an algorithm," he said
There's also Stockscape. It does two things: Lets users set up multiple screens, and also creates a large, navigable graphic that looks like a city where the 2,000 most highly-traded stocks on the US exchanges are divided by industry sector, subdivided into industry groups, and further subdivided into high performing, mutually performing, and poorly performing stocks. The height of individual stock blocks represent different metrics like market cap, volatility, and price.
Alpha Canvas allows users to enter a trading strategy in the form of a graphical element. Greenbaum said that for traders who want to design an algorithm, but don't know how to code, they can draw a filter that will function like an algorithm.
See the full story here: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/quantvr-wants-to-turn-stock-market-data-into-immersive-virtual-reality-experiences/
Google’s ‘Project Soli’ Radar Hand Tracking and How VR and AR Might Use it
Project Soli uses radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging) to detect micro-movements in your hands and fingers. The pipeline translates reflected signals from you, say, rubbing your index finger and thumb together and recognises that as a gesture or action and redirect that gesture as input to an application.
The technology has thus far been developed to enable the hardware transmitting and receiving these radio waves to fit onto a single chip, embeddable into mobile devices or any other type of hardware.
[this could be used to fine-tune a graphic image, once the broad strokes have been created using other tracking systems.]
See the full story here; http://www.roadtovr.com/googles-project-soli-radar-hand-tracking-and-how-vr-and-ar-input-might-use-it/