GE Marks $500M Subsea Research Project Launch With VR Experience from Studio Kite & Lightning
[Philip Lelyveld comment: this is a virtual world simulation like Second Life. I guess the new aspect is the level of detail.]
GE (General Electric) are celebrating the launch of a brand new $500 million facility in Rio, Brazil dedicated to researching the future of ‘subsea factories’ to mine oil and gas. The company decided to commission virtual experience auteurs Kite & Lightning (of Senza Peso and other well-known VR experiences) to build a VR experience to illustrate some of the extreme challenges involved.
They commissioned renowned virtual reality pioneers Kite & Lightning to create an experience which plunges the player to the sea floor at depths of 4 miles in a futuristic submersible. The journey is filled with snatches of information and facts on the kinds of pressures underwater equipment has to withstand at these depths and ideas on how the underwater factories might function in the future.
This is ostensibly an educational ‘on rails’ theme park ride and its subject matter could have potentially erred on the side of dull if handled poorly, but by plunging the the player’s virtual body miles below the sea, it somehow focuses the mind wonderfully. The busy interior of the pod buzzes with snippets of video as augmented reality style heads-up information is overlaid atop the scene beyond the submersible’s glass. It’s all rather effective.
Virtual reality’s innate ability to focus the mind and present information in new and hitherto unimaginably effective ways really shouldn’t be underestimated.
See the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/ge-marks-500m-subsea-research-project-launch-kite-lightning-vr-experience/
Comcast NBCUniversal Hosts Hackathon in Hollywood, VR Demos Emerge
Challenges were organized by sponsors that included several large media-related companies interested in what the local development community could put together in a day or so. Corporations like the movie ticketing platform Fandango, the American Spanish television network Telemundo, and the science fiction franchise Battlestar Galactica offered up cash and a variety of goodies for those who had the best ideas. The grand prize was $15,000 and the opportunity to pitch NBCUniversal Media Labs to continue development of the winning prototype.
NBCUniversal provided five Oculus Rift DK2’s which could be used by developers to build their ideas.
Team Rules: Fast Oculus 7
This trivia VR game was developed by a group of University of Southern California students. The idea was to increase engagement with brands of television shows and films from Universal Pictures. The experience put individuals into a virtual room with red psychedelically patterned carpet. Various video clips played on the walls as questions appeared in front of the player which would ask general ‘What would you do if this happened?’ style scenarios. ...
Two female fans produced an amazing ‘second-screen’ experience for the Battlestar Galacticaseries that puts the user inside the futuristic world of the show. ...
During the Q&A part of their presentation, Peter Marx (CIO of the city of Los Angeles, and one of the judges) asked, “what would you do if you had a show that was actually shot to be used in VR?” This got everyone in the room thinking, ...
a developer at the hackathon named Partha created a game where players could drive the actual cars seen in the forthcoming Fast & Furious movie, Furious 7 (2015).
His program was coded in Unity and utilized a couple of vehicles downloaded from the asset store. The goal was create something that could be installed inside movie theaters before the release of the film. ...
The other experience was a virtual reality program that interfaced with a gesture control input system known as Myo. As seen in Battlestar Galactica, futuristic warships are controlled through a central operated command area known at the Combat Information Center (CIC). This faintly-circular room was recreated virtually by the mentors at the hackathon who utilized the interconnected Myo device, which senses electrical pulses being sent through the body when flexing certain muscles in the arm. The armband gadget would be strapped on, along with the Oculus Rift, and could be used activate items within the room. ...
See the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/comcast-nbcuniversal-hosts-hackathon-hollywood-vr-demos-emerge/
How Magic Leap Is Secretly Creating a New Alternate Reality
...if you're already firing light down a vibrating optical fiber in a spiral pattern to form an image, that exact same system can double as a fiber optic projector. And that's where things get interesting.
Seibel's team was working on just such a projector. They even tried it out in some prototype head-mounted displays. They found that it could be way more practical and cheaper than tiny LCD or OLED panels, with the added benefit that you can run the fibers down to a pocket-sized pack instead of wearing them on your head. They theorized that it could even get small enough to fit inside a pair of glasses.
Which is probably why Magic Leap hired Seibel's research partner Brian Schowengerdt. And also probably why Schowengerdt helped Magic Leap win a $150,000 grant from the Department of Defense to create an ultra high-res 4K version of the fiber-scanning display tech. And lastly, it's almost definitely why many of Magic Leap's patent applications are about how to bounce the light from those fibers into your eyes in a convincing way.
Because you need to see the real world, you obviously can't have a projector covering the front of the glasses: that light has to be bounced in from the side, which generally results in a narrow field of view.
And of course, you need some way to track your head and your surroundings so that CG objects appear to occupy a real place in the world, instead of looking like a flat image...
Magic Leap's patent applications cover potential solutions for all these issues. This one explains how the company could use an LCD "occlusion mask" to block light from the real world at exactly the same places as the CG objects, so those objects won't appear ghostly. This one is for a waveguide which can allegedly bounce light across nice big eyeglass-sized lenses, letting you theoretically see those CG animals anywhere in your field of view.
This one, licensed from NASA, is all about letting the software know where you are in the real world with only a pair of externally mounted cameras, and this one is about changing how the CG objects look depending on where they are in your field of view. So if Magic Leap shows you a shark floating in midair, you might be able to walk around it and view it from any angle without the software losing track of you.
This one describes how Magic Leap could use a pair of cameras inside the glasses to track your eyes and figure out where they're focusing, which could help enable the most important thing Magic Leap wants to do: use digital light field technology to make CG objects appear to take up real depth inside the real world.
Using fancy optical hardware like microreflectors or diffraction patterning devices or perhaps deformable membrane mirrors—which Schowengerdt had been successfully experimenting with for some time—Magic Leap apparently believes it can let you focus your eyes on a virtual 3D object the same way they focus on objects in real life. Seemingly, it'll do so by cutting its 3D objects into slices corresponding to the depth of your gaze, and showing the appropriate one based on where your eyes are actually looking.
Last but not least, there's also this patent application for a "tactile glove" which lets you literally rub two fingers together to steer a pair of robots while using the headgear, which could more generally be a way to let you interact with the things Magic Leap lets you see. Among Magic Leap's patent filings, this one is especially intriguing; it admits that the company has actually already built and tested this glove in a research study. Plus, it mentions how the headgear can transition between a see-through augmented reality mode and an opaque one for virtual reality. We could be looking at Google Glass and Oculus Rift competitors in a single device.
See the full story here: http://gizmodo.com/how-magic-leap-is-secretly-creating-a-new-alternate-rea-1660441103?curator=MediaREDEF
DreamWorks Reveals Glimpse of 360 Degree ‘Super Cinema’ Rendering for VR Films (video)
Though they’ve produced several real-time VR experiences, the studio’s bread and butter is high-fidelity pre-rendered CGI. But how to bring that level of quality to virtual reality? One approach may be pre-rendered 360 degree 3D CGI footage which the company calls ‘Super Cinema’.
One option to hop this hurdle is to pre-render 360 degree 3D frames, then project them onto a virtual sphere around the user, affording the headtracking interactivity that’s critical to VR while not requiring each viewer to own a supercomputer for real-time rendering of those complex scenes.
By my understanding, Super Cinema would also necessarily lack positional tracking (the ability to track a user’s head in 3D space). ... For instance, if you leaned around an open doorway, you’d expect to be able to see through it. With pre-rendered frames, this isn’t possible.
See the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/dreamworks-reveals-video-360-degree-virtual-reality-super-cinema-format/
3-D-Printing Bio-Electronic Parts
To broaden the 3-D-printing palette, McAlpine’s group built its own printer; most of the ones on the market today are only designed to print plastic. “If you try to put other stuff in it, it will jam,” he says. They also needed to be able to print at a higher resolution. The bionic ear, for instance, had features on the millimeter scale—and to make LEDs they had to go to the micrometer sale.
To make the LED, the Princeton researchers chose quantum dots—semiconducting nanoparticles that emit very bright light in response to electrical current. They also used two kinds of metal to make electrical leads and contacts for the devices, as well as polymers and a silicone matrix to hold it all together. One challenge when printing with so many inks is the risk that they will bleed into each other. So the researchers had to make sure to suspend each material in a solvent that would not mix with any of the others.
McAlpine is using the new technique to make customized biomedical devices, some of which are being tested in animal studies. He declines to share the details of this unpublished work, but he adds that he’s also started making complex electronic devices using living cells.
Rohinni’s Lightpaper Is Incredibly Thin, And Printable
In its current state, Lightpaper is manufactured by mixing ink and tiny LEDs together and printing them out on a conductive layer. That object is then sandwiched between two other layers and sealed. The tiny diodes are about the size of a red blood cell, and randomly dispersed on the material. When current runs through the diodes, they light up.
Rohinni isn't interested in the entrenched TV market. The company would rather put the technology to use where it can make a big difference soon; everything from illuminating a logo on a mobile phone to providing headlights for a car. A few companies are already working on Lightpaper implementations, but Smoot wouldn't name any.
Consumers should start to see Lightpaper in the wild around the middle of 2015. But Rohinni won't be aiming at the home hobbyist market until after it takes hold in the commercial and industrial space.
The big problem with the product's current, version one, is how it places the LEDs when printed. Right now, they aren't distributed evenly on the printed surface. This can cause a shimmering, or starry night effect. Smoot explained that for a lot of applications, this won't matter, but the challenge being worked on currently is to get specific placement of the diodes—to produce completely even light. Not an insurmountable task, a second version of Lightpaper is likely a few months out.
"The magical thing about this solution is it's brighter, it's thinner, it's flexible, it's addressable, and programmable. You can address the sections of the diodes, which is a whole other space when you start thinking about solutions of light that you can address sections of."
See the full story here: http://www.fastcolabs.com/3038890/rohinnis-lightpaper-is-incredibly-thin-and-printable
Seattle Cinerama to Reopen November 20
Seattle's Cinerama will reopen on November 20 for the premiere of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1. The theater, owned by philanthropist and entrepreneur, Paul G. Allen, has been upgraded to a world-class theater with the best sight and sound offerings available.
The Christie 6P laser projector at Cinerama is the first to be installed in a commercial theater. Featuring a scalable laser light source and a dual-head system architecture, the projector achieves the best resolution, color and brightness levels on the largest premium screens.
Specifically designed for 3D, the Christie dual-head system delivers both left and right eye images simultaneously to the viewer, reducing the eye strain and fatigue that some people experience when viewing 3D content from a single-head projector. Cinerama maintains state-of-the-art equipment for showing movies in all formats, from the latest 2D and 3D blockbusters to classic 35mm, 70mm, and original 3-strip Cinerama films.
Dolby Atmos and Meyer Sound technology have also been incorporated into the theater. Cinerama's debut film, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1, is mixed in Dolby Atmos. Surround-sound loudspeakers provided by Meyer Sound will array the walls and ceiling of the theater and five Meyer Sound Acheron main screen channel loudspeakers will be used to enhance the acoustic experience.
Cinerama's new Matt Plus screen by Harkness has a white surface and low gain to increase picture uniformity, color accuracy and contrast. The signature Cinerama curved screen will remain functional and stay stored behind the main screen.
See the full story here: http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/article/seattle-cinerama-reopen-november-20#.VHNa94tiBrh
CastAR Ship First Sets of ‘Early’ Glasses to Backers
castAR from Technical Illusions is a unique augmented reality gaming system that uses device mounted projectors and retro-reflective surfaces to achieve a holographic style experience for users. It was borne from the bowels of Valve’s R&D labs and had a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign last year – pulling in over $1M in backer support.
The ‘boxing’ video shows contents that early tier backers can expect to receive; CastAR Glasses, Video Interface / Breakout box, Power Supply, IR Tracking Marker, Video cables, some Sweets and (as a reward for taking the ‘not quite final’ glasses and assisting with testing) a personalised letter from Jeri and Rick – all in a neat carry case. Interestingly, early adopters don’t receive one retro-reflective sheet but 3. Again, the team really want to heat feedback from early users on which they think is the best want some feedback.
The early units do not include the still-in-development VR clip-on attachments, which supposedly provide a high FOV virtual reality experience, reflecting the projected light back to the user. This aspect of the castAR is still a relative unknown, but if it works well rounds out a quite compelling immersive entertainment package.
see the full story here: http://www.roadtovr.com/castar-ship-first-sets-early-glasses-backers-video/