Daily Archives: March 10, 2017

Hollywood visual effects firm Magnopus made sure the virtual ISS is as close to reality as possible by basing its design on NASA models and astronaut descriptions. It also got some help recreating the spacecraft's details from NASA Johnson Space Center's VR Laboratory. Mission:ISS is completely free and is now available from the Oculus Store. But since very few people have a Rift, Oculus has also launched a pilot program in the US that gives high school students the chance to try the experience for themselves.

In addition to announcing Mission:ISS, the company has also revealed that it's sending a Rift headset to the actual space station through the French Space Agency. European astronaut Thomas Pesquet will use it to test the effects of zero G on our spatial awareness and balance. Its results will help us understand how our body could respond to future long-term missions that will take humans farther than LEO and the moon.

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Visit the ISS in virtual reality with an Oculus Rift - Engadget

Adam Tischler and Adam Wartel took turns taking in a virtual reality experience at Westerville South High School Thursday afternoon.

"It's a headset and it has a screen inside of it and you put it on and you look around and you can see things," Tischler said.

The students are playing with the school's Virtual Reality system.

"Right before thanksgiving [a teacher] did a demo for our academic boosters," said Debbie King, library specialist for Westerville South. "They were so impressed that they wrote a check right then, sent him to my center and he bought this for us."

The students are able to visit any place throughout the world thanks to Google Earth. The device also offered various programs in biology and art.

"Because it's 3D you are actually able to see it like you do in person," said King. "So, perhaps we are not able to go to the cadaver lab at OSU to actually see a real autopsy. But now, the kids can kind of get their hands on a body."

Virtual reality allows students to work on projects they may be exposed to on the college level.

"I'm actually going to be majoring in computer science," said Tischler. "I get the opportunity to see it first hand. I get to work with it. I get to use it."

Wartel said the program has broadened his perspective about education.

"There's definitely more! And there's always going to be more," he said.

Westerville City School officials said they hope more schools in the district are exposed to similar technology.

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Virtual reality sends Westerville students across the world - 10TV

How do you think virtual reality will improve over the next few years? Youre probably hoping for better ways to see, hear and touch virtual worlds. Michael Abrash, chief scientist at Oculus, seems to agree: when he outlined his predictions for the next five years of VR last October, he focused on these three senses.

But one sense Abrash didnt mention was smell. Using your nose in VR might sound slightly unnecessary, superfluous even an optional extra once visuals, audio and haptics have been perfected.

Yet smell is central to how we perceive and remember the world, and without it VR will arguably always be a bloodless imitation of reality. Anosmics, as those without a sense of smell are called, have been found to suffer from a reduced quality of life and even severe depression. Describing the misery of losing her sense of smell, the documentary maker Elizabeth Zierah explained how she felt dissociated from the world around her. It was as though I were watching a movie of my own life, she wrote, and found anosmia far more traumatic than the effects of a stroke that had left her with a limp.

Smell is also the only sense directly linked to the amygdala, part of the brain closely involved in our feelings, meaning that scents can be particularly evocative of powerful emotional memories. Many of us have had the sensation of catching a whiff of something that takes us back to a particular time, place, and emotional state something impossible in current VR.

Benson Munyan III, who researches smell and VR at the University of Central Florida, recalls driving out to his grandmas house as a child. And as soon as we arrived we would see rose hedges that were on her driveway. So getting out the car the first thing we would smell was rose. That has stuck with me until today.

Munyan is one of a handful of scientists finding out how we can smell our way around VR. Having served with the US military in Iraq, Kenya and Djibouti, one of his key research interests is getting former soldiers to don VR headsets so they can face up to, and overcome, their traumatic memories. Smell has been used in VR PTSD treatment previously, he explains, but until now the difference it makes to immersion has not been quantified.

Along with colleagues, he created a VR experience where you have to search a creepy abandoned carnival at night for your keys. In the same room, they set up a Scent Palette, a $4,000, shoebox-sized silver box that fires out certain smells at the right moment during the experience so smoke when a ride crashes and bursts into flame; garbage from an overturned bin; and the more pleasant odors of cotton candy and popcorn.

They found that piping in smells gave participants a greater sense of presence as they made their way around the spooky carnival, while removing odors caused their sense of being there to plummet.

But there is a problem: pump too many different smells into a room for too long, and you end up with a very weird mixture of pongs. After lengthy sessions, that room can smell of smoke, or garbage, or diesel fuel or whatever the combination is, Munyan says.

Not only might this confuse your nose, but a consumer version would mightily annoy anyone who wants to use the living room after you without it smelling of candyfloss and garbage. Odors also need to be synchronized with your VR experience, but it takes time for a smell to reach you from a box in the corner of the room. By the time you smell smoke, you may have already moved away from a fire in the virtual world.

Some companies are already working on these problems. Olorama, a Valencia-based company, produces kits(cost: $1,500) that they say quickly deliver up to ten smells toward headset-wearing users. Their scents include pastry shop, mojito, anchovies and wet ground (gunpowder, blood and burning rubber are coming soon). They say that their aromas are based on natural extracts, suggesting they dissipate more rapidly that standard chemical-based scents.

Another solution might be to have a smell machine incorporated into a VR a headset, meaning odors reach your nose almost immediately and dont stink out the entire room. Such an idea has already been prototyped: the FeelReal mask, launched on Kickstarter in 2015, promised not only to release smells but also vibrate and blast your face with hot or cold air and mist.

The mask was not a success, however, and joined an already long list of failed products like Smell-o-Vision and the iSmell. The Verge described wearing a FeelReal mask as like putting an air freshener in a new car on a hot day. Then imagine burying your face in one of the cars plastic seats. Then imagine the cars driver is navigating some tight curves very quickly. It failed to raise even half of its $50,000 Kickstarter target.

But other contraptions are in the works. A Japanese lab last year came up with a prototype smell machine small enough to hook over an Oculus Rift and sit just below the nose (see video), leaving the lower half of your face uncovered. Rather than using a fan, it atomises smelly liquids by blasting them with acoustic waves so that they waft upward into your nostrils. The lab says that because this does away with tubes, the machine doesnt continue to smell when its not supposed to one of the problems that has plagued previous devices.

One crucial feature of this device is that it can vaporize several liquids at the same time, in different concentrations, and so could potentially combine different smells to make others. The holy grail of VR smell research is a basic palette of smell components that could be mixed to make thousands of other odors, rather like a headset screen can create any color from a few basic ones. But this will be a considerable scientific challenge.

Takamichi Nakamoto, head of the lab at the Tokyo Institute of Technology which created the device, says a huge amount of data are required to establish odor components [of different smells]. We can collect them to some degree but it is not so easy.

Consciousness-altering smells, for example the smell of fear present in the sweat of someone very afraid or scared, are complex mixtures and no-one knows the composition and they will not be synthetically recreated in a hurry, says Tim Jacob, a smell expert at Cardiff University. Smell is not like vision where from a primary color palette you can mix all colors.

So there are a list of daunting technological challenges to solve before we can incorporate smell fully into VR. But the psychological hurdles may be even higher, because of the idiosyncratic way we all experience smell.

This is well illustrated by another experiment, published last October, where participants were told to hunt for a murderers knife in a VR house. Those who were exposed to the unpleasant smell of urine as they entered the virtual kitchen rated the experience as more presence-inducing providing further evidence that smell helps us feel VR is more believable.

But participants often misidentified the urine smell as something else entirely. Some thought it was fish, others garbage, the bad breath of the killer, or the body of the victim, explains Oliver Baus, a researcher at the University of Quebec. Some even thought it was a pleasant smell because it evoked happy memories.

We had one participant who said when they were young, they drove to school past a farm, and thats what it smelled like, he says.

In other words, our reaction to a particular smell is highly dependent on the context, or our previous experiences. Although some cultural consistency in response to certain odors can be assumed to some degree, because the associations we each have acquired to odors is idiosyncratic, it cannot be assumed on the individual level and therefore cannot be used in a predictive fashion, says Rachel Herz, adjunct professor at Brown University and author of The Scent of Desire, which explores smell.

If VR developers want to ever include smell in a game, says Baus, they are therefore going to have to give a lot of visual cues to tell players exactly what they are smelling. The visual is dominant, he says.

For now, smell in VR is seen as something of a bizarre joke, like the moldy timber and blood scented candle you can light while playing Resident Evil 7. But without using this overlooked sense, VR may never be able to pack the emotional, visceral punch of our real lives. For that reason, incorporating smell may become one of the biggest tasks facing the industry over the coming decades.

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Why Smells Are So Difficult To Simulate For Virtual Reality - UploadVR

Virtual reality and the arts arent typically two subjects that are known for going hand in hand. However, on March 2, the Dancz Center for New Music at the University of Georgias Hugh Hodgson School of Music served as an open forum for discussion about all things extended reality.

Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) hosted the event, which included a panel discussion between three professors at the university as well as a showcase of the some of the latest virtual reality technologies.

The panel featured Dr. Grace Ahn, an assistant advertising professor who conducts research in the universitys Virtual Environments Lab.

Ahn brought a unique perspective on the implications of virtual reality as much of her research focus is on how corporations might use virtual reality for advertising as well as how the medium may have an effect on human empathy, possibly allowing users to experience how it might feel to be in the shoes of someone like a Syrian refugee.

Also present was professor of geodesign Brian Orland. Orland, a landscape architect, discussed how he uses virtual reality in his research to create and study virtual forest environments.

Dr. Kyle Johnsen, an associate professor of engineering, rounded out the panel, representing the technological side of virtual reality research.

Together, the three panelists discussed their personal experiences with the emerging medium of virtual reality.

When asked how she first got into studying virtual reality, Dr. Ahn recalled with laughter being asked during a discussion early in her career, as a woman, why are you studying virtual reality?

My ovaries didnt make that decision, Ahn said.

She said that she saw a lot of potential in virtual reality at a time when many were skeptical about its usefulness due to its high cost and low quality.

Ahn discussed the potential issues posed by virtual reality, such as users having memories of an experience that never actually happened in real life.

Interactive experiences can change the way you experience things in the real world, Ahn said.

Orland discussed how he uses virtual reality to connect overarching views of landscape planning with the ground view in order to gain a more complete understanding of various projects.

The discussion also touched on whether virtual reality would be beneficial for education, an idea the panelists doubted due to the effects of sensory overload.

Johnsen shared his view that virtual reality will be more valuable to instructors, rather than students, to discover more effective teaching methods.

The panelists promoted increased discussions and unity among the various departments at UGA.

They discussed the benefits of teamwork between different departments and taking an interdisciplinary approach to researching virtual reality, a sentiment that was emboldened by the fact that the technological discussion took place in the school of music.

After the discussion, the audience was invited to try out different virtual reality set ups.

Participants tried out the HTC Vive by putting on a headset and using two controllers to play catch with a virtual dog.

Onlookers watched what the users experienced on a nearby computer screen. The users, totally entranced by the virtual world, had no clue what they looked like or where they were standing relative to the onlookers, causing many near collisions and quite a few laughs.

Users were also able to put on the Oculus Rift headset and take an immersive, virtual look at various sites around Washington, D.C. The participants took in 360-degree views of sharp images of the district as if they were actually there.

The panelists reflected on many issues and moral questions presented by virtual reality that havent been answered yet. However, if the delight of participants at Thursdays panel is any indication, the excitement and interest in virtual reality only continues to grow.

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Ideas for Creative Exploration hosts virtual reality panel - Red and Black

March Madness finally has arrived, and two of college basketballs major conferences are allowing fans to watch tournament games in amazing ways.

As part of a partnership with EON Sports VR, the Atlantic Coast Conferenceis broadcasting its tournament games in virtual reality, according to CNET. And starting Thursday the Big East will broadcast its tournament games in VR for the second straight season.

Fans can watch ACC games in VR by downloading the ACC VR app, whereas Big East games once again are available through the FOX Sports VR app. Both services allow the games to be viewed without a VR headset, though true virtual reality is achieved through using either a Samsung Gear VR headset or Google Cardboard.

While using a VR headset, users can choose from a variety of angles.

If you ask us, theres nothing quite like watching a great college basketball game in person, but virtual reality is a pretty amazingalternative.

Thumbnail photo via Pexels

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Virtual Reality Lets Fans Experience March Madness Like They're Really There - NESN.com