Tag Archives: vr

The Promise, The Power, Perils and Possibilities of Virtual Reality – An Introduction

What is Virtual Reality – “VR” – and Why Should I Care?

Nintendo LABO VR? Facebook Spaces? CNN 360? Now ‘Oculus Quest’ and ‘Valve Index’ – what’s it all mean, Billie Jean?

If you are wondering what all the fuss is about with this thing called VR, but have no real idea what it’s about, this article is for you.

Labo_VR_Kit
Nintendo LABO VR Kit – a poor implementation, but at the very least a broadcast of the idea of Virtual Reality to a wider audience

Who in their life hasn’t, at some point, wished they could fly, or perhaps climb Mount Everest, swim in the great blue hole of Belize, or perhaps explore remote parts of the world unreachable by standard travel?

Or perhaps you wished to become a doctor and wanted to train on your patient’s specific body part many times before you actually faced them, with quivering hands, in the operating room? Perhaps you are a construction worker and want to understand the various design and build stages of a new project long before the first brick or girder has been laid.

Maybe you are far away from your loved ones, friends or co-workers, or possibly a new client, and you have always felt that normal telephone or even video conferencing isn’t quite the same a being in the “presence” of the other. Maybe they are dead and you wish to stand in their presence, one more time. Or many more.

All of these things are possible with the new medium of Virtual Reality.

Seeing is Believing

This medium is one that truly must be experienced first hand in order to fully grasp its power and potential, and to understand why it has become the tech world’s buzz word for the past five years (writing this in 2019, the holy year of Blade Runner), attracting massive investments from Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, HTC, Apple, HP, Acer, ASUS, AMD, Nvidia and many more.

What is the difference between “VR” and the media we already know – like radio, television, and even 3D movies?

Inward, Within

Imagine that, instead of simply the width of a widescreen TV, you also extend it vertically. Now imagine that the experience surrounds you completely, on all sides. And when you turn your head or lean forward or back, or lean side to side, the horizon, or the floor, the floor or horizon maintain their position.

Now also imagine that because of this effect things feel as though they have an actual dimension proportional to you. So a table looks and “feels” as though it is in front of you at the correct size and scale. Of course – you could enlarge it or shrink it down if the application allows, but for the sake of my explanation – imagine that it feels correct – a 1:1 size to your own body.

Now imagine that you could walk all the way around that table and that it would maintain its size and position, even while you encircle it. Your brain is fooled very quickly into believing that it might be real.

In fact, it only takes a minute or two, before you have completely become unaware of what is happening outside of the headset you are wearing to experience this.

More Than Meets the Eye

Now, privacy issues aside, imagine that anything could be created or represented inside of such a world – a fully interactive world that can convince your brain, and the vestibular system that helps you keep your internal sense of position, movement and balance, that it is present.

You could, instead of showing children boring pictures of the pyramids at Giza, put them INSIDE of the pyramids, where they could feel the enormity and layout of the these marvelous, ancient tombs.

You could bring the classroom to any city, town, village, forest, mountain, time, in the world or civilization and give them a memory that they could feel as if they were there in person. Using satellite imaging, photogrammetry, volumetric technology, machine learning and computer vision, almost any part of the world can be extruded into a three-dimensional location you can fly through. Some authors have used Google Earth VR to virtually visit the locations they write their novels about, never having set foot in the place, while being so convincing that their friends ask them why they didn’t stop by for tea.

VRTO - Child using VR - photo by Christian Bobak
VRTO – Child using VR – photo by Christian Bobak

With this incredible power to create spatialized, embodied experiences, comes great responsibility of course. Just as we are able to amuse, astound, educate and impress others with the media, we can also wound, terrify, scar and indoctrinate them.

The Problem With Empathy

In the early stages of VR, many wistfully referred to it as an ‘Empathy Machine” – with the positive connotation that it might help us to feel something – perhaps compassion and sympathy, for others in less fortunate positions. Of course, this is a risky assumption to make, for it could just as easily create “empathy” for dark and evil ideologies. Empathy, of course, means to understand another’s situation, feelings, and motives.

VR could be used for real torture, and it could be used to train the next Olympic champions.

Furthermore, though videogames may be full of violence, many academic studies have shown that such acts do not, in fact, have a correlation to real-life acts of violence. In fact, for many, they can serve as a healthy examination of feelings, a way to vent stress and anger, and also learn methods for managing failure and frustration while also building camaraderie.

Out of Body Experience

Does this change, however, when we are inside of an embodied experience? The data would suggest that no, it would not make us more violent, but it might make us more affected by the acts of violence. We may, for example, process every zombie we kill differently in VR than in a traditional TV frame. We may hesitate, before we fire our weapons at people in VR, than we would playing Call of Duty or Borderlands in traditional TV frames.

There is a lot of data that we take in every day that we are not conscious of. Though we see and hear and smell thousands of things every day, our prefrontal lobe only registers some of these data. VR and 360-degree video are similar – by surrounding us with data, we are processing more information than we necessarily register at first. But the body remembers, and so does our subconscious. What experiences will we create the will remain with the receiver, perhaps for a lifetime?

Perhaps more importantly, what could YOU share about YOUR experience? What can we learn, from you? What part of your dream could you transfer, so that others, now or not yet alive, could better understand about the human experience?

After 5 years of rapid iteration, jagged market awareness, failures and successes, in 2019 we have moved from clunky and cumbersome setups to all-in-one, wire-free (“tetherless”), self-contained and motion-tracked VR that can be had for the Facebook-subsidized price of only USD$400.

And yes, a pair of them will empower you and your loved ones to simultaneously experience these worlds in tandem from your living room, without the need of a desktop computer, tripods or other complex setups.

In 2015 I created the FIVARS Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories to investigate how this new media could be used to tell stories in new ways. In 2016 I created the VRTO Virtual & Augmented Reality World Conference & Expo to explore the ethics, best practices and industry that would define these media and advancements for future generations.

I hope you will join me at these events in Toronto this year, 2019, to learn more.

Keram Malicki-Sanchez
Los Angeles, April 30th 2019

VRTO - Pimax Special Event - Toronto - event poster

VRTO Presents PIMAX’s “VR 2.0 – In Dreams We Live” Canada Exclusive Engagement + Special Talks January 2019

VRTO proudly presents a special event
in partnership with House of VR and the Canadian Film Centre/ideaboost 

PIMAX’s
Exclusive Canadian Engagement

The Pimax “8K” headset was the result of VR’s most successful Kickstarter campaign, beating out all others, including Oculus, with $4.23M raised when the campaign concluded in November 2017. It’s primary claims to fame were its impressively wide FOV, high-resolution panels, and incorporation of SteamVR tracking. ~ RoadToVR

pimax fov

VRTO is back for its first meetup in 2019! Join us for the exclusive launch of Pimax VR in Canada. Coming straight from CES 2019 with a series of new announcements about the direction of their envelope-pushing head-mounted Virtual Reality displays.

Kevin Henderson, Head of US Operations of Pimax VR, will be joining VRTO in Toronto to showcase the latest version of the 5K and 8K headsets at the House of VR in an exclusive for the country. Henderson says:

“As a contributor to VR 2.0, we are closely working with our partners to bring innovation to the industry and finally give VR enthusiasts and gamers what they have been dreaming of”, he continued.

“VRTO is delighted to continue hard to bring international companies together with local producers, developers and startups,” says Keram Malicki-Sanchez, founder and executive director of VRTO. “We are grateful for the faith Pimax have put in us to handle this special event.”

In addition to the demonstrations of the Pimax 8K series and 5K+ head mounted displays (for the first time in Canada), the evening will feature 4 information packed presentations and we will be joined by Kevin Henderson, Head of US Operations from Pimax who will be making a special trip out to our event to meet the community, crowdfunders, potential partners and most importantly content developers for their technology.

An animated GIF of Pimax Users

We have given some of our speakers advance time with the units so that they can report on their discoveries, musings and advice for building content at this resolution, along with insights about how they are pushing the limits with their own ongoing projects.

We will also be offering a special discount off these headsets only at this event for attendees.

Here is the schedule for the evening. As you can see, it is ambitious and we need everyone’s cooperation to maximize the time.

Event Agenda

7pm | Registration (Name Tag Required)
7:15 | Pimax Demos Open
7:45 – 8:00 pm | Opening Remarks – Stephanie Greenall, Michael Hoang (VRTO) – Kevin Henderson, Head of US Operations from Pimax
8:00 – 8:20 pm | Priam Givord, Designer of Small Wonders, the VR Experience
8:30 – 8:50 pm | Gabriela Kim Passos, Creator of Yumi & Boom
8:50 – 9:00 pm | Break
9:00 – 9:15 pm | Blair Renaud, Creator of Technolust, and Technolust 2
9:20 – 9:35 pm | Joanne-Aśka Popińska, Founder of Tribe of Pan
9: 35 – 10: 00 pm | PIMAX Demonstrations and Networking Continue

Thank you to House of VR, our host for the event and to our innovation partner the Canadian Film Centre / ideaboost.

The event is free of charge, as always, thanks to the support of our sponsors, partners and volunteers. Please be aware that there are only 100 initial spots available for the talks and 5 minute demos (with 5-minute turnover) will be on a first come first serve basis from a sign-up sheet onsite.

All guests must register individually–so do not delay in signing up!

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @VRToronto  for social details leading up to and around the event, and please make sure to sign up for our VR industry newsletter for further details and insights.

Signup for this Meetup Now!
https://www.meetup.com/virtualrealityto/events/257626657/

 

Thank you to our event partners!
House-of-VR CFC ideaboost logo

Update:

Here are some photos from the event! We had a terrific turnout and thank everyone who came and worked so hard on this!

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Keram’s Siggraph 2018 Report

Siggraph 2017 saw a strong rally for a conference that had been struggling to find its footing in the wake of a surge of new tech and media conferences that had sprung up at every corner.

But boy, do they ever have their groove back. Siggraph 2018 – set in beautiful Vancouver – was a densely packed, uncompromising deep dive into the 5-seconds-from-now zeitgeist of media creation. It completely reversed any concern that may have arisen from the cautious mood at NAB 2018’s VR pavilion.

Out of all conferences I attend throughout North America, Siggraph by far introduces me to the most meaningful, deep, novel and significant new ideas and research in the media and tech space. There is no holdback. All in. I find that the Emerging Technology pavilion is often the most rewarding.

But I did really enjoy the Syd Mead gallery featuring his original paintings. Design. Design. Wow, what a difference a grand industrial designer/visionary can make.

Oh and Lightform‘s AR projection mapping solution? Game-changer. Imagine crossing your house with the Haunted Mansion, Peewee’s Playhouse and lysergic acid diethylamide. It is hard to believe when you first see it in person.
Ivan C Sutherland 50th Anniversary
Ivan C Sutherland - Siggraph 2018
Ivan C Sutherland – Siggraph 2018

Crossing another item off my bucket list – I had the pleasure of attending a 50 year retrospective of the venerable Ivan Sutherland’s work, ideas, career – accompanied by his colleagues of 50 years who developed the Ultrasonic and Sword of Damacles. They were all very modest about their work, and I almost believed them that it was no thing, until they started breaking down the many algorithms and innovations that practically came out of thin air, and rich pedigree to manifest these complex systems.

I only wish Doug Englebart was there with them to fill in an important and significant gap. But wow, what a a lineup.

Then Google showed up with their new lightfield-capture array of GoPros – a mutation of their Jump configuration, but using wholly new ideas to render lightfield/volumetric data – to capture the lineup of All-Stars.

Hp Mars Expedition VR - Siggraph 2018

HP created a leadership initiative program that invited students, hobbyists, enthusiasts, designers, scientists and beyond to imagine Mars once it has 1 million inhabitants. Over 9000 (heh) groups submitted entries and the results were cherry picked in aggregate to form a unified fly-through of an imagined future spaceport welcoming you to the Red Planet.

Powered by the little success story that are Positron chairs, I enjoyed the 15 minute ride along red carpeted museums and Star Trek-like tunnels to survey various ships and historic fictional fragments. It was like being on Disney theme part ride at Epcot. A few dropped frames here and there surprised me, especially since we are AT the HP booth AT Siggraph, but nothing another few optimization passes couldn’t fix.

But c’mon VR community – we have to stop with the glitches and dropped frames when it is proper public showtime. No excuses.

VR Arcade - Siggraph 2018

Yes there was a VR arcade and a VR Theater and even a VR museum, all of which were full and sold out all the time. They were…fine. And popular: Good pieces, many of which are currently freely available, and some of which we featured at FIVARS in previous years.

Virtual Reality Research HMD

It is a reminder that only a supremely tiny portion of the population has ever had any exposure to most of these pieces and will still wait for an hour and a half, or get to the box office at 730am just to get a look.

And when we talk about VR “games” we are talking more about interactive media, rather than a hair-raising Metroidvania-like that will have you throwing your gamepad against the cat.

Which I will use as a seque:

VR Games Are Coming into Their Own

so, as a separate packet I want to upload from my brain this week – VR games are just getting better and better. Even though some of us know that VR is going through its fourth fifth or even sixth rebirth/renaissance whatever, it is important to also remember how some things are kinda new.

Games are far richer and more visually complex than ever before, and this is exponentially amplified by the huge leaps being made in render, ray trace, AI and overall GPU technologies.

But also, we are now moving beyond the trial and error, “short quick demo of a mechanic” phase, where smaller objects, cluster with others to become more complex and evolved systems, and then those conjoin and mutate and evolve to form richer, better integrated mutlicellular experiences.

Here are some recent examples:

These are not your standard zombie shooters.

Now, with all that said, understand that we have spent a year trying to pull together a showcase of the best the Immersive media space has to offer on a global scale – so go buy your preciousFIVARS tickets and keep this thing growing.

Keram

Here are articles I thought were important from the week.