Todays virtual reality technologies build upon ideas that date back to the 1800s, almost to the very beginning of practical photography. In 1838, the first stereoscope was invented, using twin mirrors to project a single image. That eventually developed into the View-Master, patented in 1939 and still produced today.

The use of the term virtual reality, however, was first used in the mid-1980s when Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research, began to develop the gear, including goggles and gloves, needed to experience what he called virtual reality.

Even before that, however, technologists were developing simulated environments. One milestone was the Sensorama in 1956. Morton Heiligs background was in the Hollywood motion picture industry. He wanted to see how people could feel like they were in the movie. The Sensorama experience simulated a real city environment, which you rode through on a motorcycle. Multisensory stimulation let you see the road, hear the engine, feel the vibration, and smell the motors exhaust in the designed world.

Heilig also patented a head-mounted display device, called the Telesphere Mask, in 1960. Many inventors would build upon his foundational work.

By 1965, another inventor, Ivan Sutherland, offered the Ultimate Display, a head-mounted device that he suggested would serve as a window into a virtual world.

The 1970s and 1980s were a heady time in the field. Optical advances ran parallel to projects that worked on haptic devices and other instruments that would allow you to move around in the virtual space. At NASA Ames Research Center in the mid-1980s, for example, the Virtual Interface Environment Workstation (VIEW) system combined a head-mounted device with gloves to enable the haptic interaction.

Todays current virtual reality gear owes a debt of gratitude to the pioneering inventors of the past six decades who paved the way for the low-cost, high-quality devices which are easily accessible. Be sure to visit the VR stations at The Franklin Institute to experience a virtual environment yourself!

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History of Virtual Reality | The Franklin Institute

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: March 3, 2017.

You'll probably never go to Mars, swim with dolphins, run anOlympic 100 meters, or sing onstage with the Rolling Stones. But ifvirtual reality ever lives up to its promise, you might be able to doall these thingsand many morewithout even leaving your home.Unlike real reality (the actual world in which we live),virtual reality means simulating bits of our world (or completelyimaginary worlds) using high-performance computers and sensoryequipment, like headsets and gloves. Apart from games andentertainment, it's long been used for training airline pilots andsurgeons and for helping scientists to figure out complex problemssuch as the structure of protein molecules. How does it work? Let's take acloser look!

Photo: Virtual reality means blocking yourself off from the real world and substitutinga computer-generated alternative. Often, it involves wearing a wraparound headset called a head-mounted display, clamping stereo headphones over your ears, and touching or feeling your way around your imaginary home using datagloves (gloves with built-in sensors). Picture by Wade Sisler courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center.

Virtual reality (VR) means experiencing things through ourcomputers that don't really exist. From that simple definition, theidea doesn't sound especially new. When you look at an amazingCanaletto painting, for example, you're experiencing the sites andsounds of Italy as it was about 250 years agoso that's a kind ofvirtual reality. In the same way, if you listen to ambientinstrumental or classical music with your eyes closed, and startdreaming about things, isn't that an example of virtual realityanexperience of a world that doesn't really exist? What about losingyourself in a book or a movie? Surely that's a kind of virtualreality?

If we're going to understand why books, movies, paintings, andpieces of music aren't the same thing as virtual reality, we need todefine VR fairly clearly. For the purposes of this simple, introductory article,I'm going to define it as:

Putting it another way, virtual reality is essentially:

Artwork: This Canaletto painting of Venice, Italy is believable and in some sense explorable (you can move your eyes around and think about different parts of the picture), but it's not interactive, computer-generated, or immersive, so it doesn't meet our definition of virtual reality: looking at this picture is not like being there. There's nothing to stop us making an explorable equivalent in VR, but we need CGInot oil paintsto do it. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

We can see from this why reading a book, looking at a painting,listening to a classical symphony, or watching a movie don't qualifyas virtual reality. All of them offer partial glimpses ofanother reality, but none are interactive, explorable, or fullybelievable. If you're sitting in a movie theater looking at a giantpicture of Mars on the screen, and you suddenly turn your head toofar, you'll see and remember that you're actually on Earth and theillusion will disappear. If you see something interesting on thescreen, you can't reach out and touch it or walk towards it; again,the illusion will simply disappear. So these forms of entertainmentare essentially passive: however plausible they might be, theydon't actively engage you in any way.

VR is quite different. It makes you think you are actually livinginside a completely believable virtual world (one in which, to usethe technical jargon, you are partly or fully immersed). It istwo-way interactive: as you respond to what you see, what you seeresponds to you: if you turn your head around, what you see or hearin VR changes to match your new perspective.

"Virtual reality" has often been used as a marketing buzzwordfor compelling, interactive video games or even 3D movies andtelevision programs, none of which really count as VR because they don't immerseyou either fully or partially in a virtual world. Search for "virtualreality" in your cellphone app store and you'll find hundreds ofhits, even though a tiny cellphone screen could never get anywherenear producing the convincing experience of VR. Nevertheless, thingslike interactive games and computer simulations would certainly meetparts of our definition up above, so there's clearly more thanone approach to building virtual worldsand more than one flavor ofvirtual reality. Here are a few of the bigger variations:

For the complete VR experience, we need three things. First, aplausible, and richly detailed virtual world to explore; a computer modelor simulation, in other words. Second, a powerful computer thatcan detect what we're going and adjust our experience accordingly, inreal time (so what we see or hear changes as fast as we movejustlike in real reality). Third, hardware linked to the computer thatfully immerses us in the virtual world as we roam around. Usually,we'd need to put on what's called a head-mounted display (HMD) withtwo screens and stereo sound, and wear one or more sensory gloves.Alternatively, we could move around inside a room, fitted out withsurround-sound loudspeakers, onto which changing images are projectedfrom outside. We'll explore VR equipment in more detail in a moment.

A highly realistic flight simulator on a home PC might qualify asnonimmersive virtual reality, especially if it uses a very widescreen, with headphones or surround sound, and a realistic joystickand other controls. Not everyone wants or needs to be fully immersedin an alternative reality. An architect might build a detailed 3Dmodel of a new building to show to clients that can be explored on adesktop computer by moving a mouse. Most people would classify thatas a kind of virtual reality, even if it doesn't fully immerse you.In the same way, computer archaeologists often create engaging 3Dreconstructions of long-lost settlements that you can move around andexplore. They don't take you back hundreds or thousands of years orcreate the sounds, smells, and tastes of prehistory, but they give amuch richer experience than a few pastel drawings or even an animatedmovie.

What about "virtual world" games like Second Life and Minecraft? Do theycount as virtual reality? Although they meet the first four of ourcriteria (believable, interactive, computer-created and explorable),they don't really meet the fifth: they don't fully immerse you. Butone thing they do offer that cutting-edge VR typically doesn't iscollaboration: the idea of sharing an experience in a virtualworld with other people, often in real time or something very closeto it. Collaboration and sharing are likely to become increasinglyimportant features of VR in future.

Virtual reality was one of the hottest, fastest-growingtechnologies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the rapid rise ofthe World Wide Web largely killed off interest after that. Eventhough computer scientists developed a way of building virtual worldson the Web (using a technology analogous to HTML called VirtualReality Markup Language, VRML), ordinary people were much moreinterested in the way the Web gave them new ways to access realrealitynew ways to find and publish information, shop, and sharethoughts, ideas, and experiences with friends through social media.With Facebook's growing interest in the technology, the future of VRseems likely to be both Web-based and collaborative.

Photo: Augmented reality: A heads-up display, like this one used by the US Air Force,superimposes useful, computer-based information on top of the things you see with your own eyes. Picture by Major Chad E. Gibson courtesy of US Air Force.

Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have put what used tobe supercomputer power in our hands and pockets. If we're wandering round the world, maybe visiting a heritage site like the pyramids or a fascinatingforeign city we've never been to before, what we want is typicallynot virtual reality but an enhanced experience of the excitingreality we can see in front of us. That's spawned the idea ofaugmented reality (AR), where,for example, you point your smartphone at alandmark or a striking building and interesting information about itpops up automatically. Augmented reality is all about connecting thereal world we experience to the vast virtual world of informationthat we've collectively created on the Web. Neither of these worldsis virtual, but the idea of exploring and navigating the twosimultaneously does, nevertheless, have things in common with virtualreality. For example, how can a mobile device figure out its preciselocation in the world? How do the things you see on the screen ofyour tablet change as you wander round a city? Technically, theseproblems are similar to the ones developers of VR systems have tosolveso there are close links between AR and VR.

Close your eyes and think of virtual reality and you probablypicture something like our top photo: a geek wearing a wraparoundheadset (HMD) and datagloves, wired into a powerful workstation orsupercomputer. What differentiates VR from an ordinary computerexperience (using your PC to write an essay or play games) is thenature of the input and output. Where an ordinary computer usesthings like a keyboard,mouse, or (more exotically)speech recognition for input, VR uses sensors that detect how your body ismoving. And where a PC displays output on a screen (or a printer), VRuses two screens (one for each eye), stereo or surround-soundspeakers, and maybe some forms of haptic (touch and body perception)feedback as well. Let's take a quick tour through some of the morecommon VR input and output devices.

Photo: The view from inside. A typical HMD has two tiny screensthat show different pictures to each of your eyes, so your brain produces a combined3D (stereoscopic) image. Picture by courtesy of US Air Force.

There are two big differences between VR and looking at anordinary computer screen: in VR, you see a 3D image that changessmoothly, in real-time, as you move your head. That's made possibleby wearing a head-mounted display, which looks like a giant motorbikehelmet or welding visor, but consists of two small screens (one infront of each eye), a blackout blindfold that blocks out all otherlight (eliminating distractions from the real world), and stereoheadphones. The two screens display slightly different, stereoscopicimages, creating a realistic 3D perspective of the virtual world.HMDs usually also have built-in accelerometers or position sensorsso they can detect exactly how your head and body are moving (bothposition and orientationwhich way they're tilting or pointing) andadjust the picture accordingly. The trouble with HMDs is that they'requite heavy, so they can be tiring to wear for longperiods; some of the really heavy ones are even mounted on standswith counterweights. But HMDs don't have to be so elaborateand sophisticated: at the opposite end of the spectrum, Googlehas developed an affordable, low-cost pair of cardboard goggleswith built-in lenses that convert an ordinary smartphone into a crude HMD.

An alternative to putting on an HMD is to sit or stand inside aroom onto whose walls changing images are projected from outside. As youmove in the room, the images change accordingly. Flight simulatorsuse this technique, often with images of landscapes, cities, andairport approaches projected onto large screens positioned justoutside a mockup of a cockpit. A famous 1990s VR experiment calledCAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), developed at theUniversity of Illinois by Thomas de Fanti, also worked this way.People moved around inside a large cube-shaped room withsemi-transparent walls onto which stereo images were back-projectedfrom outside. Although they didn't have to wear HMDs, they did needstereo glasses to experience full 3D perception.

See something amazing and your natural instinct is to reach outand touch iteven babies do that. So giving people the ability tohandle virtual objects has always been a big part of VR. Usually,this is done using datagloves, which are ordinary gloves with sensorswired to the outside to detect hand and figure motions. One technicalmethod of doing this uses fiber-optic cables stretched the length ofeach finger. Each cable has tiny cuts in it so, as you flex yourfingers back and forth, more or less light escapes. A photocell atthe end of the cable measures how much light reaches it and thecomputer uses this to figure out exactly what your fingers are doing.Other gloves use strain gauges, piezoelectric sensors, orelectromechanical devices (such as potentiometers) to measure fingermovements.

Photos: Left/above: EXOS datagloves produced by NASA in the 1990s had very intricate external sensorsto detect finger movements with high precision. Picture courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC).Right/below: This more elaborate EXOS glove had separate sensors on each finger segment, wired up to a single ribboncable connected up to the main VR computer. Picture by Wade Sisler courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center.

Artwork: How a fiber-optic dataglove works. Each finger has a fiber-optic cable stretched along its length. (1) At one end of the finger, a light-emitting diode (LED) shines light into the cable. (2) Light rays shoot down the cable, bouncing off the sides. (3) There are tiny abrasions in the top of each fiber through which some of the rays escape. The more you flex your fingers, the more light escapes. (4) The amount of light arriving at a photocell at the end gives a rough indication of how much you're flexing your finger. (5) A cable carries this signal off to the VR computer. This is a simplified version of the kind of dataglove VPL patented in 1992, and you'll find the idea described in much more detail in US Patent 5,097,252.

Even simpler than a dataglove, a wand is a stick you can use totouch, point to, or otherwise interact with a virtual world.It has position or motion sensors (such as accelerometers)built in, along with mouse-like buttons or scroll wheels. Originally,wands were clumsily wired into the main VR computer; increasingly,they're wireless.

Photo: A typical handheld virtual reality controller (complete with elastic bands), looking not so different from a video game controller. Photo courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center.

VR has always suffered from the perception that it's little morethan a glorified arcade gameliterally a "dreamy escape" fromreality. In that sense, "virtual reality" can be an unhelpfulmisnomer; "alternative reality," "artificial reality," or"computer simulation" might be better terms. Thekey thing to remember about VR is that it really isn't a fad orfantasy waiting in the wings to whistle people off to alternativeworlds; it's a hard-edged practical technology that's been routinelyused by scientists, doctors, dentists, engineers, architects,archaeologists, and the military for about the last 30 years. Whatsorts of things can we do with it?

Photo: Flight training is a classic application of virtual reality, though it doesn't use HMDs or datagloves. Instead, you sit in a pretend cockpit with changing images projected onto giant screens to give an impression of the view you'd see from your plane. The cockpit is a meticulous replica of the one in a real airplane with exactly the same instruments and controls. Photo by Javier Garcia courtesy of US Air Force.

Difficult and dangerous jobs are hard to train for. How can yousafely practice taking a trip to space, landing a jumbo jet, making aparachute jump, or carrying out brain surgery? All these things areobvious candidates for virtual reality applications. As we've seenalready, flight cockpit simulators were among the earliest VRapplications; they can trace their history back to mechanicalsimulators developed by Edwin Link in the 1920s.Just like pilots, surgeons are now routinely trained using VR. In a2008 study of735 surgical trainees from 28 different countries, 68 percent saidthe opportunity to train with VR was "good" or "excellent"for them and only 2 percent rated it useless or unsuitable.

Anything that happens at the atomic or molecular scale iseffectively invisible unless you're prepared to sit with your eyesglued to an electron microscope. But suppose you want to design newmaterials or drugs and you want to experiment with the molecularequivalent of LEGO. That's another obvious application for virtualreality. Instead of wrestling with numbers, equations, ortwo-dimensional drawings of molecular structures, you can snapcomplex molecules together right before your eyes. This kind of workbegan in the 1960s at the University of North Carolina at ChapelHill, where Frederick Brooks launchedGROPE, a project to develop a VR system for exploring the interactions between protein moleculesand drugs.

Photo: If you're heading to Mars, a trip in virtual reality could help you visualize what you'll find when you get there. Picture courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center.

Apart from its use in things like surgical training and drug design,virtual reality also makes possible telemedicine (monitoring,examining, or operating on patients remotely). A logical extension ofthis has a surgeon in one location hooked up to a virtual realitycontrol panel and a robot in another location (maybe an entirecontinent away) wielding the knife. The best-knownexample of this is the daVinci surgical robot, released in 2009, ofwhich several thousand have now been installed in hospitalsworldwide. Introduce collaboration and there's the possibility of awhole group of the world's best surgeons working together on aparticularly difficult operationa kind of WikiSurgery, if youlike!

Architects used to build models out of card and paper; now they'remuch more likely to build virtual reality computer models you canwalk through and explore. By the same token, it's generally muchcheaper to design cars, airplanes, and other complex, expensivevehicles on a computer screen than to model them inwood, plastic, orother real-world materials. This is an area where virtual realityoverlaps with computer modeling: instead of simply making animmersive 3D visual model for people to inspect and explore, you'recreating a mathematical model that can be tested for its aerodynamic,safety, or other qualities.

From flight simulators to race-car games, VR has long hovered onthe edges of the gaming worldnever quite good enough torevolutionize the experience of gamers, largely due to computersbeing too slow, displays lacking full 3D, and the lack of decent HMDsand datagloves. All that may be about to change with the developmentof affordable new peripherals like the Oculus Rift.

Like any technology, virtual reality has both good and bad points.How many of us would rather have a complex brain operation carriedout by a surgeon trained in VR, compared to someone who has merelyread books or watched over the shoulders of their peers? How many ofus would rather practice our driving on a car simulator before we setfoot on the road? Or sit back and relax in a Jumbo Jet, confident inthe knowledge that our pilot practiced landing at this very airport,dozens of times, in a VR simulator before she ever set foot in a realcockpit?

Critics always raise the risk that people may be seduced byalternative realities to the point of neglecting their real-worldlivesbut that criticism has been leveled at everything from radioand TV to computer games and the Internet. And, at some point, itbecomes a philosophical and ethical question: What is real anyway?And who is to say which is the better way to pass your time? Likemany technologies, VR takes little or nothing away from the realworld: you don't have to use it if you don't want to.

The promise of VR has loomed large over the world of computing forat least the last quarter centurybut remains largely unfulfilled.While science, architecture, medicine, and the military all rely onVR technology in different ways, mainstream adoption remainsvirtually nonexistent; we're not routinely using VR the way we usecomputers, smartphones, or the Internet. But the 2014 acquisition ofVR company Oculus, by Facebook, greatly renewed interest in the areaand could change everything. Facebook's basic idea is to let peopleshare things with their friends using the Internet and the Web. Whatif you could share not simply a photo or a link to a Web article butan entire experience? Instead of sharing photos of your wedding withyour Facebook friends, what if you could make it possible for peopleto attend your wedding remotely, in virtual reality, in perpetuity?What if we could record historical events in such a way that peoplecould experience them again and again, forever more? These are thesorts of social, collaborative virtual reality sharing that (we mightguess) Facebook is thinking about exploring right now. If so, thefuture of virtual reality looks very bright indeed!

So much for the future, but what of the past. Virtual reality hasa long and very rich history. Here are a few of the more interestinghighlights...

Artwork: The first virtual reality machine? Morton Heilig's 1962 Sensorama. Picture courtesy US Patent and Trademark Office.

Excerpt from:

What is virtual reality? - A simple introduction

Police in the United Kingdom have started taking advantage of virtual reality technology to train officers. Gwent Police, located in Wales, recently launched the new VR training system, becoming the first police force in the U.K. to do so.

The technology makes it possible to train officers to deal with situations that they may encounter on the streets, and to test how they react to various scenarios, which is difficult to ascertain under routine training conditions, but can potentially be replicated (or replicated as closely as possible) by using immersive VR.

The scenario used for training involves a 280-degree VR scene in which the officer moves an avatar around, interacts with other characters, uses handcuffs, carries out arrests, and enters properties in a branching narrative.

[Virtual reality] provides the ability of a safe learning environment, which promotes open conversations about opportunities for options for action, investigation and safeguarding, Superintendent Vicki Townsend told Digital Trends. Often within policing, there is no right or wrong answer to how a situation is managed. Its about understanding what you would do, the power and legislation you utilize to take that action, and why you have done it. The scenarios provide the opportunity as a group to maximize this learning by focusing on the decision-making model, and allows the development of officers from peers with more or different experiences.

The use of virtual reality as a training technique is something that has already been explored by military medics, astronauts, surgeons, and a range of other professions where its important to get hands-on experience. VR enables them to test skills in a safe environment, where the chance of physical risk (to themselves or others) is lessened.

As VR technology matures further, more and more sectors and professions will likely adapt these tools to their own purposes and requirements.

We are currently delivering the training as part of the force training days to frontline officers, Townsend said. Forty officers get an input [each] week. This started in January and is due to finish in May. This is is the first scenario that we built. We have planned to build 10 scenarios We are also hoping to build multi-agency-based scenarios.

Continued here:

Welsh police force is first in UK to use virtual reality to ...

With construction going steady on the new Cleburne High School project, Corgan Architects are finding new ways to update the district on its progress.

Using virtual reality, the Cleburne ISD board of trustees walked the halls of the new school during Monday nights special called work session.

As the plans for the school are created and updated, Corgan Vice President and Project Manager Doug Koehne said they will update the VR experience so others can see what the school will look like and how the space will be used.

Local community members, parents and students were able to participate in the VR experience during the second annual CHS Career & Technical Education showcase on Feb. 15, and Koehne said they received some great feedback.

After experiencing the virtual reality program, board Vice President John Finnell said the artist renderings looked great and he cant wait until the school opens in December 2019.

While interviewing district staff before the project began, Koehne said some of the things that were important to include in the schematics was to have circulation throughout the building and natural light.

There is more than one way to get from one area of the school to the other, he said. There will also be lots of windows for more natural light to come in.

Also throughout the school, there will be opportunities for students to showcase their work in their various classes, he said.

CISD Superintendent Kyle Heath said the school is not only for the students to enjoy but also for the teachers and staff to enjoy.

Other business

With half the school year already completed, district officials updated the board on several goals and projects they hope to accomplish over the next few years.

CISD CTE Director Mark McClure gave trustees a continuous improvement plan for his department.

He said his goal is to develop more business relationships with local industry partners to provide students internship opportunities when they take CTE courses so they can succeed in the workplace after graduating.

McClure has visited other school districts in the area to see their CTE programs and how they partner with local industries.

Whether the students want to go into construction, public safety or the health sciences field, he said its important for them to have internship opportunities, paid or unpaid.

In other news, two other district officials updated trustees on the progress theyve made in their respective departments.

CISD Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Andrea Hensley gave trustees an update on instruction within the district and how their goal is to implement district-wide curriculum to ensure students are learning what they are suppose to learn in the classroom in every grade.

CISD District Operations Executive Director Barry Hipp gave trustees an update on the departments long-range facilities plan, which was established in 2012, to ensure they kept up with maintenance needs throughout the district.

Since the plan was created, Hipp said theyve scheduled maintenance in many areas, including HVAC systems, roofing, painting, flooring and parking lots.

To view a video of Finnell participating in the VR experience, visit http://www.cleburnetimesreview.com. For more information and updates on the CHS project, visit http://www.c-isd.com and click on 2016 Bond.

Administrators give department updates

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Experiments with VR motion controllers show improving immersion increases the risk of VR sickness and that the ill effects are a varied and complex matter.

One of the joys of working in the R&D Labs at Tapptic is the excuse to spend a week playing with new gadgets, but all good things can turn sour. And our experiments testing new hand-held motion controller systems and pushing the boundaries of virtual reality motion to the limits isnt one wed recommend, because it caused some of our human guinea pigs to feel severe discomfort and nauseous.

This article will describe our experiments, explain how they made us feel sick, and how we tried to reduce nausea and other ill effects. It will also outline our consequent analysis of VR sickness syndrome and conclusions that both the causes and the symptoms of VR sickness are more complex, profound and varied than many VR motion studies suggest.

While wandering around the Electronic Entertainment Expo Los Angeles last year, a motion controller system caught our attention. People were testing a VR game calledSprint Vector, clutching special handheld controllers that enabled them to run and jump in a VR simulation by swinging their arms back-and-forth, like a soldier on a speed march, and throwing both arms up in the air to make their avatar jump while the players real legs remain stationary.

For those who havent played a VR game before, the usual method of in-game locomotion is teleportation, where the player looks and points with the controller toward where they want to go and presses a button to move there. Teleportation came about as a way to avoid motion sickness, commonly experienced when using a joystick or keyboard directional buttons in VR games, but this lacks the immersive nature of being able to actually walk or run and to move forward while looking right or left in your virtual world.

Above: HTC Vive factory

So lets teleport to Poland. Micha Owsianko, the VR expert at Tapptic, built a simulation to test the HTC Viveheadset with the handheld motion controllers. We conducted a number of experiments including walking and running using the handheld controllers, with the avatars direction of movement determined by, first, the way users head was facing, and subsequently, the way the torso was facing. We also examined what happens when the avatar walks/runs through virtual objects such as walls.

Ten people took part in the study. All were affected in some way, but some were unconcerned, while for others the effects of VR sickness were severe and prolonged, and in one case did not kick in until long after the experiment had finished.

Before we discuss the experiments, lets explore the causes and symptoms of VR sickness.

The common symptoms of VR sickness are disorientation, lack of balance, headaches, and eye fatigue, as well as feeling sick, even retching and vomiting. These are similar to motion sickness, like car, seasickness, and simulator sickness (a long-time problem with Air Force flight simulators). Some of the causes are also similar, but with one major difference: You dont need physical motion to experience VR sickness.

Like motion sickness, VR can cause nausea when there is a disconnection between your external sensory information (what you see and hear) and your internal sensors, known as the vestibular system. This means: if what you see and what you feel doesnt match, you will feel ill and can actually vomit. Not everyone will be affected in this way, but its one of the main reasons why VR sickness happens.

But there are other causes of VR sickness that have nothing to do with motion. One of these is the eyes. Serious gamers claim that higher frame rate, such as 60 frames per second (FPS), delivers a much better gaming experience than 30 fps (for reference, the fps of a standard movie is shot at 24 fps, high-definition HD film doubles this, at least).

Perhaps there is biological reason for this: In order to minimize eye fatigue and disorientation, you need a smooth and consistently high frame rate. Expert opinion varies on what fps is acceptable for VR, but at Tapptic we believe 60 FPS per eye is the minimum requirement for VR (and 120 FPS for full HD resolution). This means you need powerful machines to run VR or settle for simpler simulations.

Another ingredient for the visual disorientation is field of view. Interestingly, this is more acute for women than men. Did you know that women tend to have better peripheral vision than men? So women see a more panoramic view, while men tend to have better straight-ahead distance vision. This means that women need a bigger field of view in VR to avoid feeling nauseous.

Then theres the full array of proprioceptors in our body. These are muscle spindles that are located in muscle fibres throughout the body. They inform us where each limb is, how the joints are positioned and how much pressure each part of the body is experiencing, without the eyes needing to see them. If the messages stop or if the eyes and proprioceptors tell you different things, it may result in an out of body experience.

This mismatch between what the proprioceptors tell you is happening (real world) and what your eyes tell you is happening (VR world) can cause sickness. Our studies reveal this is particularly likely to occur when the VR simulation allows you to walk through objects. So if the VR avatar walks through a wall, the brain expects proprioceptors to report that you have hit a wall. And, we suspect, prior to impact the brain may warn the body to brace and/or prevent impact. When your real body feels no impact from the VR collision because there is no haptic feedback, it does funny things to your brain and stomach.

Most studies focus on the frame rate (vision) and motion orientation (vestibular system), suggesting that the impact of proprioceptors is not fully appreciated.

Above: HTC Vive refinery

The psychological implications of VR sickness are often overlooked.

When writing his 1987paper on flight simulator sickness, J.S. Crowley identified that airmen who had experienced physical symptoms of simulator sickness feared repeating training sessions in the simulator. While flight simulators are different to modern VR headsets, the physical symptoms are very similar to VR sickness i.e. eye fatigue, disorientation, nausea, vomiting, etc.

My own experience suggests there are psychological implications of VR also. It might sound silly, but after my severe and delayed reaction to the VR experiments, even a week on, I felt some fear about taking part in more VR testing.

Despite prolonged experimentation with the Vive VR system, the effects didnt hit me right away. They appeared several hours after I finished, and when they kicked in, I felt terrible. I could no longer work, had to leave the office early, go home, and sleep off the effects for a couple hours. This delayed reaction is concerning. If the negative effects are triggered during the simulation, then it makes it extremely difficult to manage when to stop.

A generally good rule of thumb is this: If your face or ears are getting hot or you get disoriented, stop right away. If you ignore these warning signs and continue using VR, then you risk going to a deep sickness state, which can last for hours and give you a headache that strong painkillers wont shift.

It took Micha, our VR expert, a couple of hours to put together a demo for the HTC VIVE system, and a few more hours of refinement, polishing and testing, to have a working system. This enabled us to move around the VR world, holding the Vive handheld controllers, while swinging our arms to simulate the walking of the virtual avatar. The faster you swung your arms, the faster the avatar moved.

The two of us tested it for some time with no obvious ill effects. Then we invited some colleagues to take part, several of whom began to feel nauseous very quickly.

We tried a number of refinements:

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How and why our experiments with virtual reality motion made ...

Virtual reality is taking journalism and storytelling to a new level by giving consumers the sensation of being in the middle of an event or story.

During the Winter Olympics in South Korea, NBC featured VR for 30 events, giving audiences 360-degree views of competitions.

The New York Times has also integrated VR into its journalism, not only giving readers a new perspective on the Olympics and its athletes, but also putting them in the middle of a battle with ISIS in Iraq, for example.

The Times has also launched what it is calling an augmented reality experience, which it describes as a bridge between the physical and digital world. The first experiment puts a New York Times honor box within your physical space via an app and your cellphone camera. The digital reproduction allows you to walk around it as well as to look at it from above and behind.

Our WTTW colleague and filmmaker Barbara Allenworkedwith Stanfords virtual reality labto build a VR experience around the flooding and devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

I think people saw what happened, but didnt really understand the feeling of what happened to those people, Allen said. With the virtual reality experience, it allows you to have a more empathetic feeling and understand of what those people went through.

(HammerandTusk / Pixabay)

Allen also created a VR experience with the Joffrey Ballet for BuzzFeed. It puts the consumer in the middle of dance rehearsals, allowing them to move the camera around the space to follow any and all of the dancers.

Besides storytelling, VR has many practical applications including training pilots, surgeons, firefighters and even interior decorating. It even helped Allen conquer her fear of heights.

Allen joins us in discussion.

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Virtual Reality and the Future of Journalism | Chicago ...

This Ready Player One fan, who wasn't an admirer of virtual reality, test drives the Seattle-based Haptx haptic glove. The experience converts him into a VR "believer." The Haptx glove isn't yet on the market, but according to their press release, will be available to "select customers" this year.

Ive heard good things about Scrimish, an epic 10 minute battle of strategy, memory, and misdirection. Its on sale on Amazon for $7 (regularly $15) so I just bought it. The sale ends today. Ill review it after we play a few rounds.

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Watch a virtual reality Haptx glove in action / Boing Boing

Virtual Reality is clearly a very powerful medium. Its capacity for illusion is so strong that, for example, one is able to help patients with phantom limb pain. Thrive Global posted an article earlier this summer that inquired into the possibilities of using VR for mental health.

Its really about illusion, Alex Miller, a computer scientist creating virtual realities for the neurology department at the University of Pennsylvania, says: you manipulate what a patient sees in their virtual self and their virtual world, and their brains will literally incorporate these things into the body image. While still early, results indicate that using the Penn neurology games does indeed reduce the intensity of phantom limb pain.

Oxford psychiatrist and VR specialist Daniel Freeman told Thrive Global: VR could become the method of choice for psychological treatment out with the couch, on with the headset.

When in the VR environment, because of the embodied quality mentioned above the power resides in its unique ability to immerse. In other words one embodies the experience one sees. However, what are the pitfalls of such possibilities?

What is the possible dark side of VR/AR in conjunction with AI especially? How can we manage these more difficult and potentially risky aspects?

To answer some of these concerns please find below another snippet from the event at AWE ( Augmented World Expo in Silicon Valley) of Techforgood under the auspices of the Virtual World Society (organization founded by the grandfather of VR Tom Furness focused on building better lives with VR) and DigitalRaign (new tech impact community and accelerator focused on Tech for good) .

Phil Lelyveld of the USC Entertainment Technology Center was also a part of the special tract at AWE on Tech for Good. In his presentation he pointed out that Artificial Intelligence will inform our world view from here on out. And therefore, it will also reshape Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality as it already is: Facebook is already integrating AI into AR (article in Wired for more details). Additionally the Internet of Things will also be connected to VR/AR/MR and AI, which in turn therefore will also inform the robotics sector. Because of the sheer scope of the movement, and the many businesses employed in the new technologies sector, it is crucial to understand that there may be an incredible lack of security protections in the field of VR/AR/MR. This lack of security may be relevant to everyone in the very near future, if not already now. This challenge may in turn add complexity and cost, factors that up until now Phil points out, have not been properly addressed.

What are possible solutions to this complex set of challenges?

-give people control over their own data

-create a marketplace for the exchange of data

-make privacy and anonymity a starting point

Most urgently the concern rests with the possible impact of AI and VR/AR/MR.

Here Philip suggests various possibilities:

is the data used good, reliable and reasonable?

what is the goal for the data?

is there a discrepancy caused by diversity or are there errors in assumptions and design that could help or hurt specific populations?

Is there a long term monitoring set up that will check for feed back loops that may bloom into biases over long term use?

AI is a new technology and whilst it has been established that machines can now learn to learn no one really knows the outcome yet: we can build these models but we dont know how they work. (Joel Dudley, Deep Patient team leader, Mount Sinai Hospital, NY from MIT Technology Review).

Why is this important? It leaves the human being open for emotional manipulation in VR/AR/MR. Research shows that the concept of the self is very fragile, through embodiment and through the impact of these platforms on self image and self worth (Mel Slater, ICREA, Research Professor at University of Barcelona, Spain. Leader of the Experimental Virtual Environments- EVENT Lab for Neuroscience and Technology).

The factors that make VR/AR/MR so appealing to use in therapeutic settings make it equally vulnerable to this dark side of manipulation or abuse of data for gain. The AI audit proposed by Phil Lelyveld is a clear start to setting up necessary boundaries and checks in the field.

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The Power of Virtual Reality - HuffPost

In case being a fast-food employee wasnt hard enough, KFC is now putting its workers through a bizarre initiation rite: a creepy BioShock-esque virtual reality escape room replete with narration from an omnipresent, mildly demonic-sounding Colonel Sanders. Cool!

Per a press release, the chain is incorporating the VR environment experienced via Oculus Rift headsets into its employee training program to show trainees how to make its signature Original Recipe fried chicken. In order to get out of the virtual escape room, employees will have to play as a pair of disembodied hands to demonstrate (virtual) mastery of the five-step cooking process inspecting, rinsing, breading, racking, and pressure-frying all the while being cajoled by a cackling Colonel.

But why? The press release notes that this VR exercise takes workers through the chicken cooking process in just 10 minutes, as opposed to the 25 minutes it takes IRL, so perhaps the idea here is to speed up the training process (and to avoid potentially wasting product). Or hey, maybe somebody at KFC HQ just got a really good deal on a whole pallet of Oculus Rifts.

KFC has delved into plenty of weird tech recently see the takeout box that also functions as a phone charger and the chicken bucket that incorporates a photo printer but those are typically limited availability items that serve more as publicity stunts, rather than demonstrations of new technology the company is actually incorporating.

Experience KFCs fast-food dystopian nightma err, virtual reality training environment, below:

9 of the Weirdest Things KFC Has Done to Sell Chicken [E]

Originally posted here:

KFC's New Employee Training Game Is a Virtual Reality Nightmare ... - Eater

Today, Samsung showed off its flagship Note 8, the device has a big, beautiful screen, the S Pen and a battery thats a little bit smaller. The company also announced that theres a new $130 Gear VR on the way that youll have to buy if you want to try Samsungs brand of VR on the Note 8.

Whats new over past models? Not much.

Samsung has made several upgrades to the Gear VR headset since the device, which was built in conjunction with Oculus, was first introduced in 2015. The company added a little controller earlier this year and has continued shuffling buttons around, but for the most part these updates have just been focused on supporting the expanding sizes of new Samsung smartphones.

While headsets like the Daydream View from Google (Which Samsung launched S8 support for last month) are fairly future-proof when it comes to new devices thanks to NFC communication being used to perform the calibration, the flush physical connection through the phones bottom port on the Gear VR has required users to buy new headsets or connectors for bigger Samsung devices with different ports.

Googles Daydream View

Its not a big deal at all for those who are buying the headset for the first time but for those on a yearly upgrade cycle with the Galaxy or Note, its really annoying.

Youve seen the writing on the wall, the VR market is struggling as investors and founders deal with headset sales that arent meeting expectations. Its hard enough to get consumers to buy a headset once, Samsung expecting its die-hard customers to do it multiple times is a tall order.

Its obviously unwise to base the form factor of a major flagship device based on what can fit inside a mobile VR headset, but its also a little shortsighted for Samsung to have even forced that choice on itself. NFC would be great move if the platform could grow to support it. Something like a flush external cable may look a bit junky, but how sexy does a plastic headset you snap your phone into really have to be?

In January, the company announced that it had shipped 5 headsets and a lot of those were giveaways. Samsung shipped free Gear VR headsets with pre-orders for both the Galaxy S7 and S8 line and had a number of deals over the past couple years attempting to brute force their way into the VR market through giveaways.

As its smartphone upgrades shovel its old Gear VR headsets into obsolescence, it seems that Samsung is pretty much wasting a lot of these previous efforts. The Gear VR is due for a real upgrade to bring in a number of VR features, but its hardware also needs to mature to the point where its not alienating those who upgrade their Samsung phone every year or two.

Read more from the original source:

Samsung's virtual reality strategy has an upgrade problem - TechCrunch

Aug.22.2017 / 2:13 PM ET

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Think virtual reality is just about gaming and the world of make-believe? Get real. From product design to real estate, many industries have adopted VR and related technologies and nowhere are the benefits of VR greater than in healthcare.

We are seeing more and more of this incorporated faster than ever before, said Dr. Ajit Sachdeva, Director of Education with the American College of Surgeons. VR has reached a tipping point in medicine.

As NBC News MACH reported previously, psychologists have found VR to be good for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. And stroke doctors, pain specialists, surgeons, and other medical practitioners have found their own uses for VR. In some cases, medical VR involves the familiar headsets; in others, 3D glasses and special video screens give a VR-like experience.

The use of VR and 3D visualization technology in medicine isnt brand-new. Medical researchers have been exploring ways to create 3D models of patients internal organs using VR since the 1990s. But advances in computing power have made simulated images much more realistic and much faster to create.

X-rays, CT scans, and MRI scans can now be turned into high-resolution 3D images in under a minute, said Sergio Agirre, chief technology officer of EchoPixel, a Mountain View, California firm whose visualization software is being used in hospitals across the U.S. Twenty years ago, it would probably take them a week to be able to do that.

These days, common surgical procedures like appendectomies or cesarean sections are often pretty routine one case is similar to the next. But some especially complicated procedures including the separation of conjoined twins present unique challenges that can be met only with meticulous planning. For these, 3D visualization is proving to be a game-changer.

Recently, VR played a vital role in the successful separation of conjoined twins at Masonic Childrens Hospital in Minneapolis. The three-month-old twins were joined far more extensively than some other conjoined twins, with intricate connections between their hearts and livers. That meant the surgery to separate the twins would be unusually complicated and potentially very dangerous for the twins.

Before surgery, the surgical team took CT, ultrasound, and MRI scans and created a super-detailed virtual model of the twins bodies and then ventured inside their organs to identify potential pitfalls and plan how these would be avoided during surgery.

You look through the 3D glasses, and you can basically walk through the structure, peeling apart parts so you can look at exactly what you want to, said Dr. Anthony Azakie, one of the surgeons who separated the twins. He said the high-resolution visualization helped minimize the number of surprises that we were potentially dealing with.

VR technology is also being used by vascular specialists like Dr. In Sup Choi, director of interventional neuroradiology at Lahey Hospital & Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts. When he uses interactive 3D visualizations to prepare for procedures to fix aneurysms and blocked arteries, he said, he gets a better idea of what types of devices we have to use and what approach might work best.

If doctors are donning VR gear, so are their patients. Theyre using the headsets to immerse themselves in a peaceful virtual world that takes their focus off discomfort associated with medical problems and treatments.

Because anesthesia and sedation can be risky for some patients, including those who are frail or very elderly, some hospitals are offering these patients VR headsets as a way to help control pain during minimally invasive procedures. Its still experimental at this point, but the results so far have been successful.

Similarly, VR has been shown to reduce anxiety in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy infusions. VR is even making injections and other painful or potentially frightening procedures less distressing to children.

But burn patients may be some of the biggest beneficiaries of VR technology. From daily cleaning and bandaging of burns to skin grafts, severe burn patients experience some of the most painful procedures in medicine, said Dr. Hunter Hoffman, a University of Washington scientist with expertise in the use of VR for pain relief. Pain medications help, but theyre often not strong enough.

For these patients, Hoffman helped create the VR game SnowWorld, which features imagery designed specifically to distract burn patients from pain. Patients who play the game during treatment report up to 50 percent less pain than similar patients not playing the game, according to preliminary research. Other research suggests that patients playing the game actually show changes in the brain that indicate theyre feeling less pain.

SnowWorld is now being evaluated in clinical trials at four sites in the U.S. and at two international sites.

VR shouldnt be considered a replacement for pain-killing medication, Hoffman said, adding that combining drugs and VR could be especially effective.

VR is also helping patients overcome balance and mobility problems resulting from stroke or head injury.

Using VR, I can control whats going on around the patient and measure what kind of impact its having on that patients ability to change, said Emily Keshner, a professor of physical therapy at Temple University in Philadelphia. We expose them to this repeatedly and we give them feedback about how they can respond to prevent themselves from falling.

Research has shown that VR-mediated rehabilitation can speed the pace at which these patients regain physical abilities. Theres a long way to go in conducting all the research needed to validate these results and make these techniques part of routine practice, Keshner said but its on the way.

One study of stroke patients showed that VR rehab led to more improvements in arm and hand movement compared to conventional rehab after four weeks of therapy. The VR-assisted patients had better mobility when the doctors checked in two months later. Other research has shown similarly successful outcomes for patients with cerebral palsy undergoing rehab for balance problems.

The power of VR [for therapy] is that youre really changing the way people perceive the world, Keshner said. They learn how to respond. And after practicing in that virtual world, they are much more confident and capable.

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Astronauts arent made in a day. To first qualify for a mission assignment in space, NASAs astronaut candidates typically have to complete up to two years of training here on Earth. And that includes a rotating roster of activities, workouts, and assignments that change every single day.

Perhaps the biggest aspect of astronaut training is learning to work in simulated space environments, something we explore in the second episode of Space Craft. For NASA, a crucial asset is the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, a giant pool located at the Sonny Carter Training Facility in Houston, Texas. It measures 202 feet long and 102 feet wide a little less than half the size of a football field. It also stretches 40 feet deep and houses a full-scale replica of the International Space Station inside. Working in the pool is one of the best ways to train for future spacewalks, since its a pretty fair representation of how it feels to work in microgravity outside the ISS.

Perhaps the biggest aspect of astronaut training is learning to work in simulated space environments

But there are other ways to simulate spacewalks apart from diving into the NBL. NASA was an early adopter of virtual reality, using the technology over the last decade to help astronauts train for upcoming space missions. NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston is home to the Virtual Reality Lab, where astronauts plan out their future excursions inside and outside the International Space Station.

VR is a useful tool for better understanding the scope of a spacewalk, for instance. It gives astronauts a sense of how far apart segments are going to be on the outside of the station, as well as how theyll need to grip handrails or twist their arms to properly scale the ISS modules. Astronauts who are assigned to missions in space usually plan months to years in advance for any of their spacewalks. And at the Virtual Reality Lab, they can simulate the exact spacewalk scenario that they need to practice over and over, before doing the real thing in lower Earth orbit.

While VR is good for making plans in advance, its also critical for preparing astronauts for the remote possibility of those plans failing. In the VR Lab, astronauts can also experience virtually what its like to get disconnected from the ISS during a spacewalk. Such a scenario has never happened accidentally before; astronauts are always tethered to the station when they do their spacewalks, but NASA likes to prepare for the remote possibility of an astronaut floating away freely. To get back to safety, astronauts can operate a jet backpack called SAFER, which uses tiny thrusters to propel someone through space. Its not the easiest tool to maneuver, however, and VR is great at demonstrating the difficulty of using SAFER in an emergency scenario.

The Johnson Space Center doesnt train astronauts with just VR technology. Its also home to the Systems Engineering Simulator, a facility that contains mock-ups of space vehicles that astronauts may be tasked to operate in the future. For instance, astronauts can train how to work in the future space capsules that SpaceX and Boeing are building, which will be carrying astronauts to the space station in the next couple of years. The facility also has mock-ups of rovers that can traverse other worlds, like Mars. Its a vehicle that astronauts probably wont be driving on Mars for decades, but thanks to the SES facility, at least theyll be somewhat prepared.

Excerpt from:

Walking through space in NASA's Virtual Reality Lab - The Verge

August 23, 2017 by Phyo Hein Kyaw The data recorded by drones allows those with virtual reality headsets to explore Myanmar's temples,their crumbling centuries-old walls so close it feels like you can touch them

Gasps echo across the hall as the Myanmar school kids trial virtual reality goggles, marveling at a device that allows some of Asia's poorest people to walk on the moon or dive beneath the waves.

"In Myanmar we can't afford much to bring students to the real world experience," beamed Hla Hla Win, a teacher and tech entrepreneur taking virtual reality into the classroom.

"If they're learning about animals we can't take them to the zoo... 99 percent of parents don't have time, don't have money, don't have the means," she added.

Few countries in the world have experienced such rapid discovery of technology than Myanmar which has leapfrogged from the analogue to the digital era in just a few years.

During the decades of outright junta rule, which ended in 2011, it was one of the world's most isolated nations, a place where a mobile phone sim card could cost up to $3,000.

For half a century its paranoid generals cut off the country, restricting sales of computers, heavily censoring the Internet and blocking access to foreign media reports.

But today phone towers are springing up around the country and almost 80 percent of the population have access to the Internet through smartphones, according to telecoms giant Telenor.

Budding startups

Tech startups are emerging around the commercial capital Yangon, many seeking to improve the lives of rural people, most of whom still live without paved roads or electricity.

"The increase in activity from last year till nownew startups, more people determined to become entrepreneurs and working in the tech sector in generalis significant," said Jes Kaliebe Peterson, CEO of community hub Phandeeyar.

Virtual reality is the latest advance to cause a stir, with a handful of entrepreneurs embracing tech for projects including preserving ancient temple sites to shaping young minds of the future.

The Phandeeyar incubator works with more than 140 startups. Among them Hla Hla Win's virtual reality social enterprise 360ed which is using affordable cardboard VR goggles attached to smartphones to break down barriers in Myanmar's classrooms.

She founded the non-profit last year after 17 years working in the woefully underfunded education system in a bid to bring learning to life.

"I see it as an empathy machine where we can teleport ourselves to another place right away," she told AFP.

And it's not just school children who benefit from stepping into places they could only ever dream of visiting.

360ed has used virtual reality to help Myanmar teachers attend training courses in Japan and Finland and is working on setting up deals with schools in India, Pakistan, China and Bangladesh.

"With VR there's no divider, there's no distance," Hla Hla Win said.

Mapping the past

While 360ed is thinking about the future, Nyi Lin Seck is obsessed with the past.

Some 600 kilometres (372 miles) north of Yangon, the budding tech entrepreneur and founder of 3xvivr Virtual Reality Production launches a large drone into the skies above Bagan, one of Myanmar's most famous tourist sites.

The drone, which carries a 360-camera, circles one of the many ninth-to-thirteenth century temples that dot the landscape of what was once a sprawling ancient city.

The data it records allows those with virtual reality headsets to explore the temples, their crumbling centuries-old walls so close it feels like you can touch them.

A former head of the local TV station, Nyi Lin Seck says he makes most of his money providing virtual reality footage for hotels and luxury apartments.

But after an earthquake damaged the Bagan site last year, he vowed to use the tech to preserve a digital replica of Myanmar's archaeological treasures.

"A lot of artworks on the pagodas collapsed and were lost. Using this technology, we can record up to 99 percent of the ancient art," he says.

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Myanmar's startups map past, shape future with virtual reality - Phys.Org

Theyre already home to two of Europes most vibrant film industries. Now France and Britain are leading the way in the region in creating VR content.

SEE MORE: From the August 22, 2017, issue of Variety

Between them, the two countries have eight of the 22 titles competing in the upcoming Venice Film Festivals new virtual-reality section the worlds first competitive VR strand at a film festival. Add in an entrant apiece from Italy and Denmark, and the number of European titles in the competition exceeds that of the U.S.

The VR industry is booming in Europe, which is great for all of us, said Sol Rogers, CEO and founder of Rewind, the British creator of Ghost in the Shell VR, with U.S. banner Here Be Dragons, and Home: A VR Spacewalk, which just picked up an award at Cannes Lions.

A report in August identified 487 virtual-reality companies operating in Europe, up from the 300 recorded in February.

But in contrast with the U.S., where virtual-reality creation is mainly being funded by deep-pocketed corporations and private investors, the VR industry in France and Britain is being driven in large part by public broadcasters, TV channels, government institutions, independent producers and tech studios.

In France, where the entertainment industry is highly subsidized, the National Film Board has funneled more than 3.5 million ($4.1 million) into VR projects via two schemes: one for writing, development and production and another for technology expenses. The board backed 33 VR projects in 2016, compared with just one in 2014.

Okio, one of Frances top VR companies along with Agat Films (Notes on Blindness) and Camera Lucida (The Enemy), has raised about a third of its budget from subsidies. Most of the money is allocated to development.

The company premiered I, Philip at the Cannes Film Market and will be attending Venice to pitch its upcoming VR experience Lights. It is also developing a segment for an eight-part VR series commissioned by Arte. The segments budget is 120,000, two-thirds of which comes from Arte and the rest from government subsidies.

Antoine Cayrol, producer at Okio, said that steering the subsidies into development is what makes the French virtual-reality experience so original and ultimately popular among festival programmers and platforms. Were able to hire skilled creatives and crews [and] spend time on the graphic bible, the script, said Cayrol. So when we start pitching Arte, Amazon, Oculus or Hulu, we have a well-developed proposition.

I remember someone at Oculus who once told me, We get a lot of people in the U.S. who send us three pages and ask for $3 million, and in France, producers send us treatments of 25 pages and ask for $25,000, Cayrol quipped.

A handful of pure VR players, such as HTC and Oculus, are starting to invest in content creation overseas and can help finance bigger-budget, more ambitious projects. Facebook-owned Oculus is developing projects with Agat Films and Okio. It also pre-bought Okios latest experience, Alteration, and made up 30% of the projects budget, Cayrol said.

Broadcasters such as the BBC, Arte, France Televisions and Germanys ZDF are considered VR pioneers in Europe and have been key in pushing for strong VR-native content. More channels are following suit, including Frances TF1, which recently launched an app dedicated to the technology and commissioned its first VR experiment, Sergeant James.

The channels see their investment as a way to nurture emerging talent, attract younger audiences and boost their brands. It also equips them to compete with Hollywood and Asia. If we dont invest in VR today, in a few years the VR landscape will be fully dominated by American or Asian content, said Gilles Freissinier, Artes head of digital.

In Britain, VR players can apply for funding from government body Innovate U.K. and have access to a strong talent pool of post-production experts, FX specialists and other creatives who have flocked to London and the British entertainment industry.

Theres brilliant stuff from institutions, and from the BBC with Taster, but also a huge amount from the private sector as people work out what VR is, what the business model is and how we can make the experience different and superior to TV or standard games, said John Cassy of VR studio Factory 42, which is developing a hologram project with Sky, Londons Natural History Museum and David Attenborough.

The challenge is to make the VR industry scalable enough to sustain it, said Tom Burton, head of interactive and VR at BBC Studios. So far, there is no return on investment, he noted. Its a medium thats barely a few years old.

Alchemy VR is working with Londons publicly funded Science Museum on Space Descent, which re-creates British astronaut Tim Peakes journey back to Earth from the International Space Station.

There is no template or set business model for VR, said Emily Smith, Alchemys director of marketing and business development. Its a mixed economy. With Space Descent, the Science Museum had the Soyuz capsule and commissioned us to make a visceral VR experience. We also have pay-to-download experiences on the PlayStation Store. There are different models for different projects.

While prospects for monetization remain limited in Europe, one emerging revenue stream is location-based VR. MK2, one of Frances biggest film companies, recently opened Europes largest permanent virtual-reality facility in Paris.

Location-based VR is crucial to give virtual-reality content a commercial life, create a business model and a chain of revenues for right holders, as well as initiate consumers to the technology and have them embrace it before it hits the mass market, said Elisha Karmitz, managing director at MK2.

The company kicked off international sales of its VR content at the Cannes Film Festival. And one of its films is competing in the VR section at Venice: Franois Vautiers aptly named I Saw the Future.

Continued here:

France, Britain Lead Europe's Foray Into VR Content Creation - Variety

Scientists have devised a virtual reality platform for lab animals. Let that sink in.Zebrafish have swum with the aliens from the video game Space Invaders, mice were afraid of virtual heights, and fruit flies circled illusory obstacles.

This new holodeck for animals can help researchers see how freely-moving animals respond to a variety of illusionswork that could help scientists better understand human genes and brain circuitry, researchers say. The researchers, from the Vienna Biocenter in Austria, detailed their findings in todays edition of the journal Nature Methods.

FreemoVR, immersed animals in arenas where the walls or floors were computer displays. Each screen depicted photorealistic images that accounted for each animals perspective as it walked, flew, or swam.

Up to 10 high-speed cameras monitored the precise 3D position of each animal. FreemoVR then updated its video imagery within milliseconds of each animal's movements to create the 3D illusion that they were moving in environments that changed in response to their actions.

The researchers compared FreemoVR to the holodeck, a fictional environment in [the TV show] Star Trek in which humans enter a computer-controlled virtual world, says Andrew Straw, a neurobiologist at the Vienna Biocenter who was co-senior author of a paper detailing the study. They can freely move, have no need to wear special clothing or headgear, and are immersed in a computer-controlled environment, which can be made completely realistic or arbitrarily unrealistic.

The researchers tested FreemoVR on mice, fruit flies, and zebrafish, three species commonly used in lab research. The virtual landscape with which these animals interacted included vertical pillars, floating rings, checkerboard floors, virtual plants, and a swarm of digital aliens from Space Invaders. They even had distinctive portals that could instantly alter the virtual environments to make it seem as if zebrafish swimming into them had teleported elsewhere.

The animals apparently found the illusions realistic. For instance, fruit flies circled virtual pillars just as they did real ones placed in the platforms. Moreover, mice generally avoided tracks that looked as if they were suspended at great heights, just as they would in real life.

The animals also changed their behavior in response to illusory animals. For example, zebrafish normally circled the periphery of their fishbowl near the screens, but when teleported into settings with swarms of Space Invaders, the zebrafish tended to move toward the middle of the fishbowl.

We wanted to study collective behavior because that is something incredibly difficult to do with real animals or with robots, Straw says. "We wanted to show how real fish respond to the motion of a swarm of simulated agents and to show that we could create a hybrid biological-computational swarm.

In addition, the researchers developed a photorealistic model of a swimming fish, and showed that real zebrafish most reliably followed the digital fish when the virtual animal matched its swim direction to the real fish. The fact that researchers can vary the appearance of virtual animals from cartoonish to realistic will allow experiments to test how important the exact visual appearance of other animals is as opposed to, say, the pattern of motion, Straw says.

This new platform will let scientists investigate animals as they behave relatively naturally and unrestrained by conventional VR gear in realistic virtual environments they can manipulate extensively. By tinkering with animal DNA or brains in such experiments, the researchers can learn what role certain genes or brain circuits play in these animals, and potentially in humans as well. Brains evolved in the real world, and to understand how and why neural circuits process information in the way they do, we need to understand them in this context, Straw says.

Straw notes that humans would notice several imperfections with FreemoVR. Primary amongst those is that our system does not create two distinct views for the two eyes, and thus the stereo cues important for depth perception would be gone, he says. However, Straw notes this is not a major concern with the animals they are experimenting with; the eyes of these animals are so close together that the differences between the view from each eye are limited.

Straws lab is now conducting experiments where they can silence the activity of single brain cells in fruit flies and examining the roles these cells play in the insects behavior in virtual erality.

IEEE Spectrums biomedical engineering blog, featuring the wearable sensors, big data analytics, and implanted devices that enable new ventures in personalized medicine.

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Think virtual reality is just about gaming and the world of make-believe? Get real. From product design to real estate, many industries have adopted VR and related technologies and nowhere are the benefits of VR greater than in healthcare.

We are seeing more and more of this incorporated faster than ever before, said Dr. Ajit Sachdeva, Director of Education with the American College of Surgeons. VR has reached a tipping point in medicine.

As NBC News MACH reported previously, psychologists have found VR to be good for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. And stroke doctors, pain specialists, surgeons, and other medical practitioners have found their own uses for VR. In some cases, medical VR involves the familiar headsets; in others, 3D glasses and special video screens give a VR-like experience.

The use of VR and 3D visualization technology in medicine isnt brand-new. Medical researchers have been exploring ways to create 3D models of patients internal organs using VR since the 1990s. But advances in computing power have made simulated images much more realistic and much faster to create.

X-rays, CT scans, and MRI scans can now be turned into high-resolution 3D images in under a minute, said Sergio Agirre, chief technology officer of EchoPixel, a Mountain View, California firm whose visualization software is being used in hospitals across the U.S. Twenty years ago, it would probably take them a week to be able to do that.

These days, common surgical procedures like appendectomies or cesarean sections are often pretty routine one case is similar to the next. But some especially complicated procedures including the separation of conjoined twins present unique challenges that can be met only with meticulous planning. For these, 3D visualization is proving to be a game-changer.

Recently, VR played a vital role in the successful separation of conjoined twins at Masonic Childrens Hospital in Minneapolis. The three-month-old twins were joined far more extensively than some other conjoined twins, with intricate connections between their hearts and livers. That meant the surgery to separate the twins would be unusually complicated and potentially very dangerous for the twins.

Before surgery, the surgical team took CT, ultrasound, and MRI scans and created a super-detailed virtual model of the twins bodies and then ventured inside their organs to identify potential pitfalls and plan how these would be avoided during surgery.

You look through the 3D glasses, and you can basically walk through the structure, peeling apart parts so you can look at exactly what you want to, said Dr. Anthony Azakie, one of the surgeons who separated the twins. He said the high-resolution visualization helped minimize the number of surprises that we were potentially dealing with.

VR technology is also being used by vascular specialists like Dr. In Sup Choi, director of interventional neuroradiology at Lahey Hospital & Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts. When he uses interactive 3D visualizations to prepare for procedures to fix aneurysms and blocked arteries, he said, he gets a better idea of what types of devices we have to use and what approach might work best.

If doctors are donning VR gear, so are their patients. Theyre using the headsets to immerse themselves in a peaceful virtual world that takes their focus off discomfort associated with medical problems and treatments.

Because anesthesia and sedation can be risky for some patients, including those who are frail or very elderly, some hospitals are offering these patients VR headsets as a way to help control pain during minimally invasive procedures. Its still experimental at this point, but the results so far have been successful.

Similarly, VR has been shown to reduce anxiety in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy infusions. VR is even making injections and other painful or potentially frightening procedures less distressing to children.

But burn patients may be some of the biggest beneficiaries of VR technology. From daily cleaning and bandaging of burns to skin grafts, severe burn patients experience some of the most painful procedures in medicine, said Dr. Hunter Hoffman, a University of Washington scientist with expertise in the use of VR for pain relief. Pain medications help, but theyre often not strong enough.

For these patients, Hoffman helped create the VR game SnowWorld, which features imagery designed specifically to distract burn patients from pain. Patients who play the game during treatment report up to 50 percent less pain than similar patients not playing the game, according to preliminary research. Other research suggests that patients playing the game actually show changes in the brain that indicate theyre feeling less pain.

SnowWorld is now being evaluated in clinical trials at four sites in the U.S. and at two international sites.

VR shouldnt be considered a replacement for pain-killing medication, Hoffman said, adding that combining drugs and VR could be especially effective.

VR is also helping patients overcome balance and mobility problems resulting from stroke or head injury.

Using VR, I can control whats going on around the patient and measure what kind of impact its having on that patients ability to change, said Emily Keshner, a professor of physical therapy at Temple University in Philadelphia. We expose them to this repeatedly and we give them feedback about how they can respond to prevent themselves from falling.

Research has shown that VR-mediated rehabilitation can speed the pace at which these patients regain physical abilities. Theres a long way to go in conducting all the research needed to validate these results and make these techniques part of routine practice, Keshner said but its on the way.

One study of stroke patients showed that VR rehab led to more improvements in arm and hand movement compared to conventional rehab after four weeks of therapy. The VR-assisted patients had better mobility when the doctors checked in two months later. Other research has shown similarly successful outcomes for patients with cerebral palsy undergoing rehab for balance problems.

The power of VR [for therapy] is that youre really changing the way people perceive the world, Keshner said. They learn how to respond. And after practicing in that virtual world, they are much more confident and capable.

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3 Ways Virtual Reality Is Transforming Medical Care - NBCNews.com

Virtual reality (VR) is providing intriguing opportunities for companies to create new products.

This emerging technology has yielded applications in healthcare, where aspiring physicians can view realistic simulations to prepare themselves for surgeries. Entertainment has become another area of growth for VR, and a swath of tech firms and movie studios have developed immersive experiences where users can further explore the worlds found in their favorite movies.

However, one startup in Australia called Lithodomos VR has taken a different approach to harnessing this enterprising technology.

The firm is utilizing VR to recreate historical archaeological sites like Acropolis in Athens, Greece, and the Colosseum in Rome. Lithodomos VR offers a fulll library of content featuring historical landmarks that be viewed via VR.

Lithodomos VRs software can be used at a historical site to make the experience more immersive, or as an educational tool elsewhere.

Today, many of the ancient worlds secrets lie buried or destroyed. For most people, seeing a pile of ruins is hard to contextualize and visualize what was once there,said Dr. Simon Young, the co-founder and CEO of Lithodomos VR, to R&D Magazine. Virtual Reality is the perfect tool to reconstruct these ancient places and spaces, allowing people to explore them in a 3D environment when they are on site, or from thousands of miles away in their own home or classroom.

To view these digital restorations, users can either pay a one-time royalty fee anytime they want to access the archive for a tour or pay a small fee to set up a recurring subscription. Significant effort goes into creating each virtual reconstruction, said Young.

Our reconstructions stem from academic publications and researchto ensure experiencesareas accurate, realistic and enthralling and engaging aspossible.This practice rests upon the foundation of a long tradition of archaeological reconstruction practices. First, detailed published archaeological reports are gathered, and these form the basis of our scope. Next, archaeologists work intensively with our team of 3D artists to direct the meshing and texturing of the project. Finally, the scenes are signed off by the lead archaeologist and delivered to our library. The time needed for the process varies a great deal depending on the complexity of the scene, but on average, a few weeks, explained Young.

Their offerings can be downloaded through Google and Apples respective app store.

Putting history in perspective

Young said that the goal of his venture is to offer people the ability to instantly form a connection with the place they are in.

Some ancient sites attract thousands of visitors every day, but most of the time these visitors cant connect on a personal level to the ruins, he continued.

The mobile VR headsets used to view these locales are intended to be like, binoculars into the past, which can enhance and enrich each viewpoint from a variety of locations.

Young acknowledged that visitors have an obvious fascination with big ticket destinations like Rome and Athens, but he noted Lithodomos also sees immense value in building models of archaeological sites that are less well-understood.

One example in Lithodomoss library is the Odeion of Agrippa located in Athenian Agora.

This destination was once a concert hall that would have once hosted events like musical performances, poetry recitations, and exhibitions of rhetorical skills. It was constructed around 15 B.C. with a seating capacity of about 1,000. It was built by a member of the Roman elite that Young felt was viewed as a symbol of Romes respect for contributions the Greek culture made to humanity.

Today it is mass of ruins that visitors pass by without a second thought, Young noted adding that his company brought the location back to life in its full glory.

The Future for Embracing the Past

There are a lot of advantages for using VR in providing deeper insights into history, but there are some disadvantages as well.

Young said that when the content creation process is taken up by non-specialists, the results can lack scientific rigor and accuracy.

As content creators of cultural heritage materials, we have a responsibility to strive to ensure that the information presented to viewers is correct and backed up by solid research, he explained.

Young noted his company is always looking for new frontiers and opportunities where they can expand their content library including potential sites in China, India, and South Korea. Also, they are finishing work on their distribution platform so customers can undertake self-guided tours of any place with enhanced audio capabilities.

Ultimately, Youngs thoughts on the future of VR is that the wave of popularity is building, but will crash down in the future.

In time, everyone will have a VR headset, but penetration rates are slower than originally anticipated. Many have taken this as a sign that VR will peter out it will not, said Young.

Excerpt from:

Recreating the Past with Virtual Reality - R & D Magazine

HTC cut the price of its Vive virtual reality system by $200 in a move that follows discounting by Facebook's Oculus Rift.

In a blog post, HTC said it would offer its Vive system for $599. That bundle includes headset, sensors, and motion controllers. Oculus in July said that its Rift and Touch were available for $399 for a limited time. Both Oculus and HTC are chasing Sony's Playstation VR, which has sold more than a million units so far and goes for $399.

If you're looking at the consumer market, it's easy to argue that HTC's price cut doesn't do much. However, HTC noted that the Vive hardware has attracted enterprise partners such as Intel, UPS, Volkswagen, and Salesforce as enterprise partners.

UPS has outlined how it is using virtual reality and Vive for driver training. At $599, the Vive has become more affordable for businesses looking at proof-of-concept pilots.

HTC added that more global brand partners will be announced in the second half of the year.

Certainly, Vive hopes to play in the gaming space, but the win for HTC may be the enterprise. Yes, augmented reality will initially have more use cases, but HTC Vive can garner traction for training, maintenance ,and other enterprise tasks. Indeed, developers are already gravitating toward Vive and Rift.

Another key reason HTC has a shot in the enterprise: It is one of the few early players focused on corporate uses. Microsoft HoloLens rhymes with virtual reality, but is more augmented reality. Google Glass is more augmented than virtual reality.

Add it up and HTC's price cut may be more about business than landing a mass of consumers.

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LCD Soundsystem has teamed up with the Amsterdam-based design studios Puckey and Moniker as well as with Googles data arts team to produce a kind of abstract, interactive music video for their latest single Tonite. Dance Tonite, as the piece is called, lets owners of high-end VR headsets dance to the singles music, capturing their motions and then broadcasting them to anyone visiting the projects website with their computer, phone or Daydream VR headset.

Its a fun idea thats hard to put in words, which is why Google produced a video to show what Dance Tonite is all about:

The uncanniness of the Dance Tonite experience is super entertaining and weird, and I really enjoy it. I didnt expect to enjoy it, said LCD Soundsystems James Murphy. I like the simplicity of it.

Dance Tonite uses WebVR, a technology that makes it possible to develop VR experiences for the web, where they can be consumed with any browser. Anyone visiting the experiences website with a capable device can switch to VR mode, and enjoy it as a spectator or even participant.

We wanted to see if we could treat a VR device as a tool for self-expression and Dance Tonite fits perfectly within a series of participative interactive music videos which weve directed over the years, said project creator Jonathan Puckey. Taking a piece of music likeLCD Soundsystems Tonite as a starting point can act as the perfect scaffold to create something within.

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LCD Soundsystem's Latest Music Video Is an Interactive Virtual Reality Dance Performance - Variety

Enlarge / Look all you want... in VR, this kind of view of the Sun is completely safe to stare at.

I've been told that being present for a total eclipse of the Sun is a life-changing experience. But I wasn't able to get my act together to travel to the path of totality for today's event. Luckily, I am part of the first generation to be able to experience an eclipse vicariously through the magic of virtual reality. While seeing a total eclipse in VR wasn't exactly a life-changing experience, it was one of the best examples I've seen of the power and promise of live, 360-degree video.

I first tried to view CNN's 360-degree Facebook Live video coverage of the eclipse on my Oculus Rift. Despite numerous tries, though, the livestream never showed up as a choice on the list of "New" or "Top Pick" videos available on the Oculus Video app. Without a built-in search function or any way to navigate to a specific URL or some such, viewing the eclipse on the Rift was a bust.

As a backup, I dug out the latest Samsung Gear VR headset and a Galaxy S7 Edge. While I waited for some necessary updates to download, I was able to watch CNN's "VR" coverage in a simple Web browser window. I used the mouse to tilt the virtual camera between the people on the ground and the Sun in the sky. Having control of the viewpoint was nice, but watching through a small window on a laptop screen didn't really feel all that different from watching similar coverage on TV.

I finally got the stream working on the Gear VR in time for the eclipse to hit Wyoming, the third of seven eclipse locations CNN was covering in VR. The video started out extremely grainy, but it got a bit sharper as the bandwidth caught up with itself. Even with the highest-quality stream from the 4K cameras, though, the relative image I saw on the Galaxy S7's 1440x2560 screen was much blurrier than the same stream viewed on my Macbook Air screen.

In VR, facial features of people are hard to make out if they were more than a few feet from the camera, and details on the horizon almost completely lacked definition. There was also none of the "stereoscopic 3D" effect you usually get from most other apps in virtual realitythis was more like looking at a 2D video projected on a 360-degree dome surrounding me.

This adorable Girl Scout group in Missouri was looking up at the eclipse with me in VR (all these images are taken from the Facebook Live 360 video feed on a laptop, but the same content was viewable in the Gear VR).

A few onlookers in Wyoming look up with me just before totality.

While the Sun was just a small dot in the VR sky, CNN's zoomed-in "eclipse cam" gave me the detailed crescent Sun view I craved.

That tiny white dot is all I could see of the Sun in VR during totality.

A cloudy Nashville main street a few minutes before totality.

The same Nashville street lit up during the total blackness of the total eclipse.

The VR image also had a fair share of compression artifacts, especially when the sky grew dark and the streaming algorithms struggled to differentiate between the small gradations of black. While people live on the ground started talking about seeing individual stars and even planets in the darkened sky, I could only see large, color-banded blobs of different shades of black. It reminded me of nothing so much as watching grainy RealVideo streams in the early 2000s, only with a viewing "window" that surrounded me completely.

What the VR experience lacked in sharpness, it made up for in its overwhelming, all-encompassing nature. Watching the eclipse in VR, I could really get the sense of the sky darkening quickly all around me as totality approached. I got the sense of a rapid dawn when the Moon's shadow started to recede. It was incredible being able to turn in place and see a virtual, eclipse-generated "sunset" in all directions on the horizon from the comfort of my own kitchen. Hearing the whoops and hollers of onlookers alongside the confused chirping of birds and crickets picked up by the microphones only increased the immersion.

I also appreciated the variety of eclipse locations CNN was able to cover over a two-hour span, from a wide-open field in Idaho, to a neon-covered street in Nashville, to the seat of a helicopter floating above Charleston. Through it all, a variety of hosts and guests rambled, repeating themselves quite often about the "once in a lifetime" grandeur of it all and the way ancient humans were awed by what is now an utterly predictable astronomical occurrence. CNN also superimposed some ethereal "space music" on top of pretty much any eclipse moment, which was a bit distracting.

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I was one of the first humans to see a solar eclipse in virtual reality - Ars Technica