Daily Archives: February 15, 2017

Richard Gelfond, chief executive of big-screen company Imax Corp.,unveiled his new virtual reality center Tuesday with a bullish plan to turn the nascent VR industry into a mainstream art form just like movies and video games.

It wont be easy. The VR business, Gelfond said, remains stuck in its early stages for now and badlyneeds a jump-start.

Though Hollywood and Silicon Valley have been touting virtual reality as the next big thing for several years, there are huge hurdles to its adoption in the entertainment industry. A major one is that the headsets and computing equipment the games require can cost thousands of dollars. Another problem: There arentenough compelling games to make VR worth the price.

Whether its the lack of content orconsumer access to headsets, the industry has been in a holding pattern, slow to go mainstream, Gelfond told reportersat Imaxs VR Experience Centre in Los Angeles.Its a complex ecosystem thats in need of a jump-start, and were here to start to provide the spark.

Gelfond and Imax are hoping to help fix those problems by makingbig bets on VR. The companyplans to open six pilot centers this year, including the Los Angeles location, which opened to the public last month.

The idea is to give people a place to play around with virtual reality games without having to pay that massive upfront cost of a full-on at-home setup.Customers pay $7 to $10 for a virtual reality experience, including games based on movies such as Lionsgates John Wick and TriStars The Walk, which allows daring customers to step on the virtual tightrope between the Twin Towers just like Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the Robert Zemeckis film.

While VR may not be entirely ready for prime time at this moment, were excited about the opportunity, Gelfond said.Someone needs to shake things up.

Imax has made deals to build pilot centers in multiplexeswith AMC Theatres and Regal Entertainment Group to test whether such attractions will help bring young people back to movie theaters. Each center costs Imax $250,000 to $400,000 to create, not counting real estate spending, Gelfond said. Imax has additional centers planned for Britain and China and is eyeing projects in Japan, the Middle East and Western Europe.

Imax has also made moves to fix the industrys content shortage. The company recently started afund with companies including Acer and CAA to finance new games for virtual reality headsets, totaling $50 million. In addition, Imax is working with Google to develop a newcinema-quality virtual reality camera.Hollywood has shown a lot of interest in virtual reality, but not for full-length movies made for headsets. Virtual reality experiences are meant to last up to 15minutes at the Imax center.

The company on Tuesday announced deals with David Ellisons production company Skydance Media and game publishing giant Ubisoft to provide content to the new centers. Skydances upcoming games include ascience-fiction first-person shooter called Archangel and Life VR, an experience tied to the companys upcoming space station thriller Life.Similar to the movie industry, Imax will share ticketing revenue with the gaming studios.

While the games will be available for at-home headsets, Ellison said locations such as the Imax centers are necessary to get the industry off the ground, much like arcadeswere in the early days of the video gaming industry.

The place most people are going to experience VR for the first time is going to be in places like Imax, Ellison told The Times.We very much want to be a first-mover and we hope to establish a brand with what were doing here.

The flagshipImax VR Centre, located across the street from the Grove shopping center, opened with a soft launchJan. 6. Gelfond said it has so far attracted 5,000 customers, and sales have steadily grown. But, he admits, the companys involvement with VR is still in very experimental stages.

These pilots are really going to be the testing ground, Gelfond told The Times.I look at this as a very flexible platform that is intended to be Imaxs flag in the ground and will evolve as we go along.

ryan.faughnder@latimes.com

@rfaughnder

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Originally posted here:

Virtual reality industry 'in need of a jump-start,' Imax CEO says at new VR center - Los Angeles Times

Teacher William Parker and a 10th-grade student from Boyd County High School in Kentucky immerse themselves in One World, Many Stories: Amman, Jordan.

Global Nomads Group

In November 2015, middle school students from Westchester County, New York, found themselves on a windswept field in South Sudan mingling with a crowd of refugees fleeing civil war. Suddenly, they heard the deafening roar of low-flying military cargo planes overhead, followed by large bags of grain thudding to the ground all around them.

The kids were jumping back from those bags dropping at their feet, recalled Cayne Letizia, the teacher who used immersive virtual reality to transport his class into this emergency food drop featured in the New York Times 360-degree video series about refugees. Count Letizia among VRs burgeoning fan base in education, where the spread of high-quality content and more affordable hardware (especially Googles $15 Cardboard viewer) give students myriad ways to briefly inhabit what theyre learningfrom wandering the streets of ancient Rome to touring the International Space Station.

So much of the technology our kids use removes empathy. [Virtual reality] breaks that distance down.

Education researchers caution that immersive VR, like any technology, may be perfect for some kinds of learning and superfluous, or even counterproductive, for others. Studies of immersive classroom VR are still scarce. But emerging evidence suggests that one of VRs biggest strengths is its ability to tap student emotions, notably empathy and the can-do confidence known as self-efficacy.

The power of VR to stoke empathy is the focus of research at Stanford Universitys Virtual Human Interaction Lab, led by communications professor Jeremy Bailenson. In the labs Empathy at Scale studies, people who inhabit avatars of a different race in a virtual world later score lower in tests of subconscious racial bias, and young people who wear an elderly avatar are then more inclined to save for retirement. Charities, including the International Red Cross, have made VR films to counteract compassion fatigue and boost donations.

Empathy isnt a subject in most schools, and its not an explicit part of the Common Core standards, noted Letizia, an English teacher who parlayed the emotional connections of immersion into reading and writing lessons in the power of narrative and authorial point of view. Still, he thinks empathy needs to be taught, especially (and perhaps ironically) due to how much time we spend interacting digitally.

My students live and die by their phones. They like somebodys Snapchat and move on. Its so temporary and removed, he said. So much of the technology our kids use removes empathy. But in this case, by placing kids in the moment, [VR] breaks that distance down.

Another middle school teacher who dropped his students into the virtual lives of refugees was Charles Herzog in Londonderry, Vermont, whose class tried VR in December near the end of a unit about forced migration. The Google Cardboard viewers that Herzogs students used were bought by his partner in the project, the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education at the University of Vermont. According to Tarrants professional development coordinator, Rachel Mark, empathy education fits into Vermonts required Transferable Skills, specifically Responsible and Involved Citizenship, which includes the ability to demonstrate ethical behavior and the moral courage to sustain it.

Marks blog post about teaching empathy mentions both the refugee VR video and one about the lives of police in Flint, Michigan. In other forms of media, people may see conflicts as black and white, she said. By bringing in the perspective of human beings living through this, it might make you, as a fellow human being, reconsider the topic through someone elses eyes.

Thats the idea behind a new VR-based curriculum called One World, Many Stories by the nonprofit Global Nomads Group, which produced a series of 360-degree autobiographical videos from the perspective of a boy in eastern Kentucky; a young man in Amman, Jordan; and a young black woman in New York City.

Last fall, when Daniel Gross, a sixth-grade teacher in Los Altos, California, heard about One World, Many Voices, he jumped at the chance to pilot it. We discuss current events on a weekly basis, said Gross, and inevitably that ends up with us talking about perspective-taking and empathizing with others.

The four-minute dips into the lives of these young people are interwoven with paper-and-pencil class activities and discussions about the mix of individual and communal identities and the importance of perspective. A post-VR worksheet, for instance, asks students what preconceived ideas they had about the people in each video that were either bolstered or changed after being immersed in their worlds. Finally, students storyboard the scenes that they would include in their own 360-degree videos.

We have always used technology to help connect young people who would otherwise not have a way to connect, to promote global awareness, curiosity, and critical thinking, said Abigail Finck, the marketing manager for Global Nomads. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has fostered discussions between young people from different cultures via webcasts, and one of thesea 2015 exchange between teenagers in South Los Angeles and Syrian refugees living in Amman, Jordanfirst showed the potential of VR to further Global Nomads mission. Before the two groups met online, the kids from Los Angeles visited the lab of VR pioneer Nonny de la Pea to walk a mile through a simulation of war-torn Aleppo, Syria.

When the students finally did sit for their webchat, along with translators, the two groups of young people soon felt comfortable enough with each other that the discussion moved from the violence afflicting Syria to the food deserts of the inner-city neighborhood where the Los Angeles students lived.

The refugees asked, Why dont you have a garden? Finck recalled. We dont have a home, but of course we have a garden, because thats how we survive. Soon after, the students from Los Angeles started a community garden at their school.

In addition to sparking connections with others, there is evidence to suggest that embodying a VR avatar can change a students self-perception as well.

I believe that immersion is very important and powerful, which is why I started working in it 25 years ago, said Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard Universitys Graduate School of Education who is editing a book about VR and learning. But VR isnt magic. Its a very specialized tool.

Dedes research focuses on both VR and less-immersive augmented reality for science learning. On the fully immersive end of the spectrum, Dede and his team created a VR science game called EcoMUVE, in which students are immersed in a pond or forest ecosystem where they have to solve the mystery of a species collapse. Studies of EcoMUVE indicate that spending time working as a scientist in a virtual world may bolster a students confidence in her ability to be a scientist in the real world.

Were not just interested in what students are learning intellectually, but also in their degree of engagement and self-efficacy, so when the going gets tough, they will have confidence in themselves and keep trying, said Dede. In our virtual ecosystems, we want to help students believe that they, too, can be ecosystem scientists.

This story was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Future Tense is a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate.

Excerpt from:

Can Virtual Reality Teach Empathy? - Slate Magazine

HTC will soon launch a new virtual reality toy you can use on the go.

The device will be compatible with HTC's new flagship phone, the U Ultra. But HTC says it won't be just a simple headset like Samsung's Gear VR.

VR, which puts headset wearers into a computer-generated digital world, has swept across the tech industry over the last few years. HTC bet on the high end with its Vive system, which requires a pricey, powerful PC to run. But there are more affordable options like the Gear VR and the Google Daydream View that work by plugging in your phone to a cheap headpiece. HTC's follow-up to the Vive could could bridge the gap between these two types of system.

"We have a good plan in terms of combining mobility with VR," said Chia-lin Chang, HTC's president of global sales, in an interview at the HTC U series launch event in Singapore.

"Vive is very top end, and in the coming months you'll see our plans in terms of mobility and VR, and it's not a phone slapped onto a headset," he said. "It'd be a different thing."

Chang added that the mystery VR product would launch before the end of the year.

"We're a VR company, we're going to have something," he said.

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HTC U Ultra and Play shine on in glass

HTC's shift in focus to VR comes as the company continues to stumble with its core phone business. The Taiwanese company put its marker down on virtual reality in 2016 with the launch of the Vive, which went up against the Oculus Rift system from Facebook and against Sony's Playstation VR. Chairwoman and CEO Cher Wang highlighted the VR efforts in a statement when HTC disclosed poor financial results in its fourth quarter on Tuesday.

The company reported an operating loss of NT$3.6 billion (about $116 million) with revenue falling 14 percent to NT$22.2 billion (about $722 million) despite "robust sales performance."

While HTC remains high on virtual reality, critics question whether the technology has lived up to the hype set last year with the debut of most of the big-name VR systems. The amount of fresh VR content that appeared at CES was underwhelming, although filmmakers are trying to find ways to draw you in.

HTC is working to foster that content as well.

"We have learned much from our entrance into the world of virtual reality," Wang said, "and we believe our focused approach to building the ecosystem is the right strategy to enable the whole industry to expand through the creation of compelling content and rich experiences."

Life, disrupted: In Europe, millions of refugees are still searching for a safe place to settle. Tech should be part of the solution. But is it?

Virtual reality 101: CNET tells you everything you need to know about VR.

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HTC will launch mobile VR device as follow-up to Vive - CNET

On May 25th, 2017, bride and groom Elisa Evans and Martin Shervington will get together with friends and family at one of their favorite hangout spots: a quirky florist that doubles up as a bar in the Welsh city of Cardiff. They will then don their HMDs, and join the remainder of their guests scattered all around the globe for the worlds first official VR wedding ceremony of its kind.

The value of VR is its ability to allow people to connect emotionally with one another, says Gerald Gottheil from AltspaceVR, the social platform which is facilitating this. Whats interesting about doing a wedding is that while other social VR events might bring people together, theyre focused on the event itself were watching a film, a show, playing a game in a wedding the whole purpose of having this event is to connect emotionally by showing support between friends and family for the couple who are making that commitment to each other. Its the purest example of using VR to connect people.

The ceremony will be officiated by AltSpaceVRs Community Manager and Social VR Content Creator Lisa Kotecki, who will be 5,000 miles away on the other side of the world in San Francisco. Shes certified to lead civil ceremonies in America, but in the UK the marriage certificate must specify the physical location where the wedding took place, and this needs to be a certified wedding venue. This is why the bride and groom are in the process of registering their local florist-bar as such, and booking a registrar to make it official after the VR ceremony takes place. When I spoke to Shervington, he was relaxed about the arrangements, happy to do whatever it takes for us to legally end the day married.

While there are plenty of examples of people using VR to construct creative and rather moving ways of proposing to their loved ones, Kotecki believes that this is the first time that a Social VRplatform will host a full-blown wedding ceremony and reception like this.

Its certainly a first for there to be VR guests, and for it to be a proper marriage and for it to be recorded in this way, says Shervington, alluding to the way that guests will not only be able to share into the live event through VR, but also continue to revisit it afterwards. By employing an AltspaceVR feature called encore (which the company already uses for live events such as comedy shows) the ceremony will actually be filmed in VR. Its entirely different from seeing a movie or watching a video, he says, because youre enabling people to experience a special moment in time, as often as they like.

As soon as I saw this I thought crikey because this is something that people can keep revisiting, says Shervington. I can go back as an avatar, or as myself, and go live it all again. For something as personal as a wedding, that adds another very interesting psychological layer.

Avatars can indeed help enhance the sense of presence in VR, and in this case even though they were using standard, off-the-shelf avatars they helped provide Shervington with another level of psychological connection with his wife-to-be when they first met in the virtual space where they were going to be married.

You know, I quite like the idea of not being a humanoid, explains Shervington. Shes a pink and white robot and Im a blue one. The psychological connection is not only the physicality and its not only environmental, its about subtle things like your voice and your tone, and you layer that familiar physical presence you know onto that avatar. It was different meeting her in VR to what I expected. I looked at her, with those big eyes, the way the head moves, and the lights go on and off as she speaks, and its cute! And its because shes behind there. I love her, so why wouldnt I love the representation of her?

Shervingtons background in organizational psychology is what got him into VR initially, as he explored how the medium could facilitate better communication and social interaction. He then went on to work with Wearevr on a project and became an early adopter of AltspaceVR. Next month, he tells me, he will combine that interest in VR with a passion for stand-up comedy and debut a show on the platform he describes as comedy in VR about VR.

So after him and his fiance announced they were engaged, it seemed natural when a friend suggested they should do a VR wedding. Were not church-goers, and as far as Im concerned marriage is in your heart, you make a decision, if youre going to be with someone thats what matters, says Shervington, who approached AltspaceVR with the idea.

It all unfolded very organically from there, recalls Kotecki, who arranged for them to get special permission from the owner of an exclusive nightclub space in the platform called the Spire, which features, among other things, a lava lake. You get an immediate psychological lift by being there, says Shervington. its great fun to be able to hang out in there and have a bit of an after party, we wanted to add something through the VR experience that we couldnt get with a real-world venue, he explains.

Theyre not yet sure about the number of people that will attend the VR portion of the event, but there is capacity for about 150 guests, and the invites have started going out to the couples friends and family all over the world, including some who would not have been able to attend otherwise. Guests receive formal invitation and theres a process in place to manage RSVP and registration to make sure it all comes together. The couple are also making a range of Samsung GearVR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets available to guests so that people in Cardiff can join the Spire party too.

Unlike Linden Lab which has already started enabling some monetization on Sansar, AltspaceVR are not looking for these types of event as a revenue stream for themselves or their users yet. In the future, however, they do see multiple business opportunities emerging.

Maybe this is where the wedding planners of the future will work, Gottheil speculates.

There will also inevitably be legal issues to sort out as more people choose to go down that route and express their love and commitment in this way. This is, after all, uncharted territory, and the law often takes a while to catch up with technology so well eventually have to wrap our heads around how exactly this is going to change relationships in the virtual age. But in the meantime, platforms like AltspaceVR are content with providing a place for couples like Martin and Elisa to get together with their friends, and have an awesome party in the process.

Tagged with: altspacevr, marriage, Valentine's Day, wedding

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AltspaceVR To Host World's First Virtual Reality Wedding - UploadVR