Daily Archives: April 21, 2017

Socialising in Facebook Spaces via VR

Facebook

By Victoria Turk

You finally managed to get everyone together in one place. Friends you havent seen for ages, scattered around the world, smile and talk to each other across a table a virtual table, in a virtual world, seen through a virtual reality headset. This is the future of socialising, according to Facebook.

The social network announced several new products at its F8 Developer Conference in San Jose this week, with a strong focus on virtual and augmented reality.

Facebook Spaces, its new VR app, lets you chat with friends in a 3D virtual environment. Its the first real glimpse of how Facebook plans to make virtual reality a social tool after buying Oculus VR in 2014.

VR is a technology that gives us something no other technology has before a magical feeling of presence, the sense that were really there together even when were apart, said head of social VR Rachel Franklin as she announced the app.

To create this feeling, Facebook Spaces lets you customise a cartoon avatar to represent you in the virtual world based on one of your Facebook photos. You can bring multiple people into the virtual space at the same time and chat as you usually would, using Oculus Touch controllers to move your avatars arms.

The VR app also draws on the wealth of content connected to your Facebook profile. You can overlay 360 images or videos from your Facebook feed onto the virtual space to plunge you and your avatar friends into a personalised environment, and flick through 2D photos with them.

Friends who dont have Oculus Rift- and the headset is pretty expensive at around 500 can be added to the conversation through video chat on Facebook Messenger. Theres also an MS Paint-style drawing tool so you can doodle in the air, though the focus of the app is on just hanging out and chatting.

This kind of social VR is essentially a fancier version of Skype, says Antonia Hamilton, a social neuroscientist at University College London. VR offers an advantage over video messaging, she says, because it can let us more easily communicate using nonverbal cues such as facial expressions and gestures.

But consumer headsets dont capture motion or expressions well enough to make it look realistic in the virtual world. Without capturing faces, you get VR characters which look very wooden and people often dont like them, says Hamilton.

In addition to virtual reality, Facebook is banking on augmented reality playing a role in our future communications. While its new AR tools are little more than Snapchat-like filters for your smartphone camera, the company clearly envisages a transition to wearable AR devices. We want glasses, eventually contact lenses, that look and feel normal but let us overlay all kinds of information and digital objects on top of the real world, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the conference.

With developments in AI, augmented reality will ultimately be so good that you wont be able to tell augmented visuals from reality, says Hao Li at the University of Southern California.

But there needs to be a hardware revolution before social VR and AR can become mainstream, he says. Headsets are still expensive and uncomfortable, and cause some users to feel dizzy or nauseous. Until this has been solved, I find it hard to believe that the content would be so good and so engaging that people would want to use it on a daily basis, says Li.

And it remains to be seen how much social value these tools can really provide. At one rather poignant moment in the conference, Zuckerberg demonstrated using AR to add a second coffee cup into an image of a dining table so it doesnt look like youre having breakfast alone.

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Facebook banks on virtual reality as the future of socialising - New Scientist

Watch a demonstration of Facebook Spaces here:

Of course, youll need certain virtual reality gear before you can even visit Spaces. For now, its available only to people who own the Oculus Rift headgear, and Facebooks teaser videos show people also wearing Oculus Touch handsets, which allow participants to manipulate objects in VR.

Virtual reality currently occupies a fairly small niche among consumers, but analysts expect it to go mainstream soon, and with Spaces, Facebook aims to be ready. The company is also positioning itself at the forefront of augmented reality, which, instead of building a virtual world, allows users to manipulate the physical world around them using the Facebook camera app and their smartphone. AR has proved a tough nut to crack (remember the now-discontinued Google Glass?), but last summers Pokmon Go phenomenon revealed its huge potential, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions many uses.

Think about how many of the things around us dont actually need to be physical, Zuckerberg told the New York Times this week. Instead of a $500 TV sitting in front of us, whats to keep us from one day having it be a $1 app?

The virtual and augmented-reality ventures point toward Facebooks future, but the company announced updates to its Messenger chat application, too, that will go into effect immediately.

Read more:

Facebook: Not Just a Social Network Anymore - AARP News

Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality is available today for Oculus Rift (Touch) and HTCVive

Whether you watch the Adult Swim animated series Rick and Morty or not, the new VR game based on the series is worth checking out. In one of the most fitting matchups of fictional property and game developer from recent memory, the masters of VR funny at Owlchemy Labs (Job Simulator) teamed up with the series' creators to make the hilarious and immersive Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality, out today on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. We've been playing the surprisingly deep game all this week.

If you've seen clips from Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality and you own a Vive or Rift, your first thought was probably something like "this looks exactly like Job Simulator." I certainly went into this expecting a somewhat predictable mashup of Job Simulator + popular fictional property. What I found, though, were unexpected layers of creative gameplay that far surpass what we saw in Owlchemy's hilarious 2016 VR classic.

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An Owlchemy Labs representative told us the company was able to take Job Simulator's existing interactions and physics and use them as merely the groundwork for Rick and Morty. The developers were then able to focus development for the new game on diving deeper with puzzles and narrative. It shows.

In that sense, it's less a companion to Job Simulator, and more like a sequel one which just happens to be set in the world of one of the most popular animated series today.

Job Simulator was mostly about manipulating everyday objects using motion controls a great intro-to-VR experience from early 2016, but not necessarily gameplay that would translate as well into a Year-Two VR game. Rick and Morty takes that game's "you can pick up and play with anything around you" approach, but adds mobility (both through teleporting around Rick's garage, and opening portals to environments ranging from alien planets to a bathroom) and a more unpredictable, less formulaic series of events as the story unfolds.

The result is one of my favorite VR games to date. While other top choices like Robo Recall and Arizona Sunshine bring the classic shooter genre to VR, Rick and Morty feels like an entirely new style of game that wouldn't work anywhere but VR. It's less like a classic game and more like being sucked into an episode of the quirky Cartoon Network series. (While there are plenty of inside references for fans of the show, it's still plenty fun and funny if you've never seen it.)

Gameplay revolves around puzzles just like Job Simulator only more advanced, with extra layers. While in Job Sim, you may have been tasked with grabbing the requisite items to cook a meal or fix a car, a typical Rick and Morty puzzle invites more time, thought, movement and exploration. You might start by figuring out which one of the many objects from Rick's workbench or storage shelf you need, take it through a portal to another dimension, experience a cinematic sequence with Rick and Morty that climaxes in a shootout with aliens, then collect something else you need before returning to the shop. Each puzzle takes longer than Job Sim's equivalents, is harder (in a good way) and varies more from one to the next.

While they aren't always physically present in your space, you also get plenty of interactions with the show's title characters. (You actually play the role of a Rick-created Morty clone.) These non-player character interactions are much more lifelike and immersive than the floating robot overlords giving you instructions in Job Simulator.

The cartoon style might make the NPCs (non-player characters) more believable than characters in VR games striving for a more realistic visual style. Because VR graphics and displays aren't to real-life levels yet, your mind can more easily believe that you're living inside a cartoon vs. a real-world environment.

It shouldn't be surprising that the game will make you laugh out loud many times. Expect the same sharp, satirical, nonsensical and adult-focused humor from the show. (What I would have given to have been a fly on the wall during the brainstorming sessions for this game I can only imagine the jokes and tasks that they ultimately decided went too far.)

Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality launches today for Oculus Rift (Touch controls required) and HTC Vive. We highly recommend it to anyone with a PC-based VR setup and a funny bone. If you appreciate satire that's as razor-sharp as it is silly and quirky, it's the funniest game in VR, with immersive and creative gameplay that blends puzzle, narrative and adult humor about as seamlessly as possible.

Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality costs US$30 in the Oculus Store and Steam. We reviewed it using an Oculus Rift with three-sensor/360 setup. Check out the launch trailer below.

Product pages: Adult Swim, Owlchemy Labs

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Rick and Morty's virtual reality debut is a hilarious step forward for ... - New Atlas

In a very appropriate development for a day like today, a new virtual reality experience called Weed VR has been announced. The project is blazing a trail to be the worlds first virtual reality dispensary for marijuana. It will allow customers the chance to inspect and shop for various strains from the comfort of their home and place orders from partner retailers.

According to the Weed VR team: We provide a custom service for licensed producers by creating realistic 3D representations of [their]products. [Interested retailers should] contact us today to reserve your virtual shelf space or request a demo.

The full description for Weed VR on its newly launched website reads:

Welcome to the world of WEED VR.Yep, thats right WEED VR!

Fasten your headset, grasp your hand controllers and explore our curated collection of highly detailed virtual buds. Browse, touch, inspect, select, grind, roll,even place an order with your favorite retailer. Hang out in the lounge and sample your selection.Well even roll it for you.

How about we teleport you to the couch now? Yeah, you heard right teleport.

Immerse yourself in our intimate virtual dispensary space.No lineups, no hassles, with the freedom to browse at your leisure.

This service comes at a time in the US when more and more states are approving marijuana for both medical and/or recreational use.This increased legality is creating fertile soil for new startups and creative business ideas involving weed to take root.

Dispensaries are getting much nicer in those parts of the country where weed is embraced, but youll still see the occasional terrifying storefront with armed guards standing outside, according tofriends. The chance to shop for your product of choice at home without sacrificing the ability to inspect it maytherefore be an opportunitycustomers will jump at.

Weed VR is not yet available and will be coming soon to both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive; or, should we say, the THC Vive.

Would you buy weed in VR? Let us know in the comments below.

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Shopping For Weed In Virtual Reality Is About To Be A Thing - UploadVR

A Lockheed Martin engineer manipulates components in VR. Photo: Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed Martin is saving $10 million a year by implementing Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR) tools in the production line of its space assets. And a lot of folks would say thats a conservative estimate, including myself, Darin Bolthouse, engineering manager at Lockheed Martin, said in an interview with Via Satellite.

Bolthouse, who heads up the companys Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory (CHIL), mentioned that it cost just $5 million to set up the lab back in 2010, and so the company has seen a significant (and continually increasing) return on its original investment.

Lockheed Martin first toyed with the idea of VR during the development phase of the F-22 and F-35 programs at its lab in Fort Worth, Texas. In those cases they were focused on maintenance applications, Bolthouse said. Since then, the company has expanded those same tools and techniques to nearly all of its initial product, tooling and facility designs.

Specifically, Lockheed Martin uses 3D imaging in VR to catch engineering missteps before the asset hits the production floor, saving time and money by correcting those errors sooner rather than later. It also helps accommodate for human factors, Bolthouse said, such as ensuring a particular component can be reached by hand. The whole goal is to reduce any mistakes That way when you do it for real on the shop floor, youve optimized what it is youre trying to do, he said. Thats the bulk of where the [savings] estimate comes from.

Before 2010, in order to do a thorough design review Lockheed engineers would have to build and handle a physical prototype. But that, of course, costs time and money. Streamlining that process was one of CHILs primary objectives at its inception. For Bolthouse, bringing that work into a VR environment seemed like the logical next step. One thing to understand is this is an extension of doing design review with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools, Bolthouse said, pointing out that engineers have evolved from sketching on a drafting board to constructing 3D models on the computer. Weve got this wealth of 3D data already out there The ability to bring that into an immersive VR environment allows our engineers to see that in full scale, he said.

CHIL features two distinct technologies. Engineers can step into the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE), where they can manipulate full-scale, 3D models that float holographically in space. Or they can don an array of body sensors in the motion capture area and run design procedures as a digital avatar in a virtual world.

CHILs motion sensing area. Photo: Lockheed Martin.

What is perhaps most interesting about CHIL is that most of its tools are just standard consumer devices many gamers are already familiar with, such as Facebooks Oculus Rift headset. While the companys engineers do some integration to get all the pieces to work together smoothly, Bolthouse noted that sticking with consumer-grade devices eases the learning curve for design review participants, and also costs less than building their own customized systems. We want it to be as easy as possible to use, he said.

Lockheed Martin has applied these VR and AR capabilities to the manufacturing process for both the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and the GPS 3 satellite system. Two or three times a year the company conducts what Bolthouse calls deep dive reviews, where a team of design, manufacturing and safety engineers rehearse the buildup of the vehicles from start to finish. Hosted entirely in a virtual environment, the engineers assemble the thousands of parts in the same order theyll be built on the production floor, trying to identify any issues or potential improvements. Bolthouse said engineers also run simulations focused on specific components a dozen or so times a year, experimenting with the most efficient ways to install harnessing or the propulsion system, for example.

For the future, Bolthouse is hoping to further build upon CHILs remote capabilities. Up until last year, you had to visit the lab based near Denver, Colorado, if you wanted to participate in design reviews. Now, the company has developed a network platform to allow anyone to connect to the VR system from any location. Thats going to save us money for travel costs and time, and allow us to improve our designs at a faster rate, Bolthouse said.

[VR] is already pretty real in terms of the look and feel, but that performance is just going to improve, he added. Were continually going to be pushing the envelope of how we can make that virtual world more representative of the real world.

See more here:

Lockheed Martin on Cutting Costs with Virtual Reality - Satellite Today

Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Virtual Reality Films Push Into Mainstream - WSJ Wall Street Journal (subscription) Kathryn Bigelow, Alejandro G. Irritu and Megan Ellison are behind a wave of new VR projects. and more »

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Virtual Reality Films Push Into Mainstream - WSJ - Wall Street Journal (subscription)

For years, people all across the globe have tuned into Sir David Attenboroughs documentaries and TV shows to learn more about living things on Earth, whether ancient or currently roaming about. Now fans of the Planet Earth narrator will soon be able to have an up close and personal journey of their own with the renowned naturalist via a hologram of Attenborough that willguide users through a virtual reality experience atthe Natural History Museum in London.

The Hold the World VR experience from British broadcasting giant Skycombinesinteractive game technology with Attenborough's documentaries. Itwill lead users through a tour of the museum, giving the public first-hand access to fossils, skulls and bones as Attenboroughs hologram discusses the museums excavation sites andthe animals behind the fossils.

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In a statement, 90-year-old Attenborough said the partnership with Sky would give VR users an intimate view of rare objects that most peoplenever get to see up close. The product isslated to go into production later this year.

"Hold The World offers people a unique opportunity: to examine rare objects, some millions of years old, up close. It represents an extraordinary new step in how people can explore and experience nature, all from the comfort of their own homes, he said.

All users need to join the experience is the Sky VR phone app, a VR set and a controller.

Sir Michael Dixon, director of the Natural History Museum, said the VR tour was one of the more innovative ways the museum was looking to share artifacts in its collection.

Objects in the museum collection offer invaluable insight about the origins of life, the Earth and our solar system - stories that are key to understanding how we can best protect our planet's future, he said in a statement.

The Hold the World experience is just one of Skys latest projects to boost use of VR technology. The company recently announced 12 VR film projects, two of which are in conjunction with Skys Formula One Coverage, which transports VR users to a Formula 1 testing site in Barcelona where they can explore the pit lane and team garages and even get behind the wheel of the race car.

Sky Chief Executive Jermy Darroch told The Guardian that projects like Hold the World and Formula One Coverage have the potential to become big hits with audiences as VR technology becomes more popular.

VR and augmented reality have good long-term potential in the market, he said.

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Ancient Animals Come Alive in New Sir David Attenborough Virtual Reality Experience - Newsweek