Daily Archives: July 25, 2021

POCONO MOUNTAINS, Pa., July 22, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --To celebrate National Waterpark Day next week, Kalahari Resorts and Conventions partnered with BallastVR to launch America's first and only virtual reality waterslide. Ballast's patented VRSlide technology enables riders to experience virtual reality worlds while riding down Kalahari's thrilling Anaconda waterslide. As riders race down unique drops and twisting curves wearing a VR headset, the sensation fully immerses them in one of three experiences: adventuring on an action-packed African safari, chasing aliens through outer space or flying through castles surrounded by fire-breathing dragons.

To celebrate National Waterpark Day, Kalahari Resorts debuts America's first virtual reality waterslide.

"We wanted to do something extraordinary to celebrate the 5th annual National Waterpark Day and what better way than to introduce America's first virtual reality slide?" said Cary Brandt, Corporate Creative Director Entertainment at Kalahari Resorts and Conventions. "Our guests will be truly blown away by the experience offered by Ballast's VRSlide technology, and we're proud to continue to innovate the waterpark experience to bring our guests the best in entertainment."

Ballast engineers thoroughly match each piece of content to the exact slide layout to maximize the experience for each guest.

"There's a magical combination that comes from merging immersive virtual reality worlds with the thrill of riding down a real waterslide. At Ballast, we've been committed to bringing that magic to waterparks for the last four years with VRSlide and we couldn't be more pleased to debut this system in America with Kalahari Resorts," said Stephen Greenwood, CEO and Co-Founder of Ballast VR. "To date, we've had over half a million riders of VRSlide at prior installations overseas it's a system that has proven to be safe for riders and profitable for our clients and partners. The Anaconda at Kalahari is the perfect match for VRSlide and the result is an incredible guest experience that can be repeated over and over, without getting old. We're deeply appreciative of Kalahari's vision for innovation and their leadership in the immersive entertainment space."

National Waterpark Day

Kalahari Resorts, home to America's largest indoor waterparks, founded National Waterpark Day on July 28, 2017, to celebrate the fun and lasting memories families create at waterparks every summer. In addition to the new waterslide attraction, Kalahari will celebrate the holiday with a special summer savings offer available at http://www.kalahariresorts.com/celebrate.

About Kalahari Resorts and Conventions

Kalahari Resorts and Conventions in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, Sandusky, Ohio, the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania, and now open in Round Rock, Texas, deliver a beyond-expectations waterpark resort and conference experience all under one roof. The authentically African-themed Kalahari Resorts, privately owned by the Nelson family, are home to America's largest indoor waterparks. All Kalahari Resorts feature well-appointed guest rooms, full-service Spa Kalahari, a fun-filled family entertainment center, on-site signature restaurants, unique retail shops and a state-of-the-art convention center. Kalahari Resorts and Conventions frequently receives awards and accolades for its guest and convention services. Recognition includes: Cond Nast Traveler's #1 World's Coolest Indoor Waterparks, Sensory Friendly Certified in 2020 (Ohio), Best Family-Friendly Meeting Hotel and Resort in Smart Meeting's 2020 Smart Stars Awards, Parents' Magazine 2019 Kids' Travel Award Winner and TripAdvisor's 2018 and 2017 Travelers' Choice Awards. For reservation and guest information, call 1-877-KALAHARI (525-2427) or visit KalahariResorts.com. To learn more about Kalahari Resorts and download images and b-roll, members of the media are encouraged to visit KalahariMedia.com.

About Ballast VR

Ballast VR is the first company in the world to bring the magic of virtual reality to the unique environment that water parks and resorts offer. In the past four years, Ballast VR has introduced several new attractions that heighten the thrill of virtual reality by merging out-of-this-world visuals with incredible physical sensations. For waterpark operators, these systems offer new possibilities to add dynamic attractions that can be updated seasonally while establishing new revenue streams on top of existing waterslide and swimming pool infrastructure. VRSlide is a system that safely allows riders to be immersed in VR worlds while riding down real waterslides. With multiple content experiences that are tailored to each unique waterslide path, guests love the ability to re-ride the same slide and have a new adventure with each different VR experience. Every drop, turn and burst of speed is augmented inside the VR worlds, resulting in new sensations that make VRSlide a must-try experience. DIVR is a system that safely allows guests to snorkel in shallow water while wearing a unique underwater VR headset. The unique sensation of being in neutral buoyancy in VR makes guests believe they can float in space, dive with whales or soar over cliffs alongside wingsuit skydivers. These groundbreaking attractions have been enjoyed by over 700,000 happy customers in 15 countries across the world. By creating incredible and eye-catching guest experiences that generate new revenue streams, Ballast has grown quickly to become the unquestioned world leader in this new form of entertainment technology. To learn more, visit BallastVR.com.

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SOURCE Kalahari Resorts and Conventions

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America's First Virtual Reality Waterslide Opens at Kalahari Resorts and Conventions - WFMZ Allentown

For an audience member in a proscenium theater, watching ballet unfold onstage is a big picture experience. As you sit quietly in the dark, you can shift your vision side to side, up and down, but the perspective stays basically the same, and theres a definite sense of remove between viewer and performer.

With its new virtual reality project, Dance in VR Series on Facebook, Boston Ballet explodes the 4th wall, offering viewers at home a way to step into the middle of all the action. Dancers seem to jet over your shoulder, and you can almost feel the breeze from a flurry of pirouettes that unfurl as if just inches away. Its an intimate, visceral, immersive, and interactive experience. And since the company wont be performing live at the Opera House until The Nutcracker, it may be the next best thing to sitting in the audience this summer.

You can experience performance at your house as if youre sitting in the middle of the [performance space], seeing everything from within, says Ernesto Galan, Boston Ballets videographer for the past 12 years. Its like being transported to another world.

For the new series, the company commissioned three works designed specifically for VR Ken Ossolas Zoom In, adapted from his work of the same name for the recent Process & Progress program, a newly tweaked version of Helen Picketts acclaimed Petal, and a new work by company dancer MyKal Stromile, On (my) line, In (my) mind, filmed in December in a large industrial warehouse in New Bedford. The three pieces are choreographed to be viewed through a high-end Oculus headset, but even some gaming headsets can give you a glimpse into this new way of looking at dance. (If your only option is your tablet or smartphone, your best bet is to sit on a swivel chair in a darkened room. You change perspective by moving your device.)

Virtual and augmented reality in dance have been around for awhile, but Boston Ballet believes its the first major company to delve so deeply into the technologies with ballet. The project builds on inroads made over the past year during the companys first ever virtual season, which not only expanded outreach to audiences around the world but strengthened understanding of technology.

Boston Ballets artistic director Mikko Nissinen says it is part of being a living theater for contemporary audiences. I didnt want to be a museum or church, but part of todays society moving forward, he explains. We explored this technology five or six years ago, but the limitations of viewership were so narrow I thought there was no point jumping on the bandwagon. Now that technology has grown by leaps and bounds, its opened so many possibilities. In the future, it could be almost a new art form for people to experience dance, music, theater. This is just the beginning.

Its not a simple or inexpensive process. The dances are filmed with a globe-like contraption embedded with six different cameras placed in the center of the space to capture a 360-degree surround. Footage from each camera then gets stitched into a seamless flow that the viewer controls. Though each dance was filmed in a day, the editing process for each was an intensive week of post-production that Galan says pushed his system to the limit.

However, he says he is excited to be a part of the companys exploration of new vistas for ballet. And he can imagine moving beyond virtual reality into augmented reality once that technology is more developed. In the future, you could be in the Opera House watching a performance, put on AR glasses and see Swan Lake [performed] on a lake, or Corsair could actually be on a pirate ship going through the ocean. It could really enhance the performance.

For the current VR series, the choreographers challenge was to tailor the dance so viewers could look in any direction at any time and see dancing. Ossolas approach keeps some of the tradition of putting important material, such as duets, in the forefront. Stromiles choreography draws the eye around the space in a circular manner. Picketts work, however, filled every corner of the space with simultaneous movement. For the dancers, that meant treating every phrase like a solo in case someone chose to look their way, and it was a cardiovascular feat to dance full-out continuously for the pieces full length every take the technology couldnt be edited for starts and stops.

Normally in a theater, you could go offstage and catch your breath, explained Stromile, who danced in Picketts work in addition to choreographing his own piece. But we had to fill in all the holes and do it all the way through at one time. We dancers made an agreement that if anything happened, we just keep going!

Stromile thinks embracing new technology could be a way to bring more people into the Opera House for the real thing in person, he says, adding hed like to see the company provide a range of interactive virtual experiences, including previews and glimpses behind the scenes. It gives people who are not your typical avid ballet-goers another way into the ballet world. People are really interested in getting that inside look. You could get funding to get some VR goggles and turn the whole building into an interactive space for people, who would then go buy tickets to see the live performance. I think were really on the brink of something incredible that puts us on the forefront and definitely makes Boston Ballet a leader in the field.

We like to explore the boundaries and go over the boundaries, Nissinen claims. When theres nobody to follow, you have to lead.

Karen Campbell can be reached at karencampbell4@rcn.com.

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Boston Ballets Dance in VR Series breaks the wall between viewer and performer - The Boston Globe

In Virtual Reality News

July 20, 2021 Moth+Flame, a developer of immersive training technology, has recently announced that its Virtual Reality (VR) sexual assault prevention and response (SAPR) training platform has been officially deployed by the United States Air Force (USAF).

Utilizing Moth+Flames VR training platform, the immersive training program was first introduced to Airmen at Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina. According to Moth+Flame, the three-part multifaceted curriculum is designed to tackle many sides of a complex issue, including intervention skills, victim advocacy, and reporting protocols.

We take a great deal of pride in helping the armed forces develop smarter, safer, and more responsive teams through immersive training. This is such an important issue, and by bringing people into environments where they have to confront difficult situations, we can help prepare them for when these scenarios arise in the real world, said Kevin Cornish, CEO and Founder of Moth+Flame. The Air Force has been a tremendous partner in working with us to address these complex and serious issues head on with training that improves how people respond to these types of situations.

The sexual assault prevention and response training features conversational simulations that leverage natural language processing technology, allowing virtual trainees to respond in real-time to spoken dialogue. The solution helps to train Air Force personnel to physically say out loud the right words in difficult conversations, as opposed to selecting a text-based answer from a list of options, which Moth+Flame states offers a more effective style of learning. The company added that the training comes at a crucial time as the most recent annual report from the Department of Defense indicates that the Air Force received a total of 1,661 reports of sexual assault in 2020.

The future of sexual assault prevention and response training should be innovative and creative. Virtual reality as a training tool puts Airmen into real world life situations where they can build knowledge, skills and abilities, commented Carmen Schott, Air Mobility Command Sexual Assault Prevention & Response Program Manager. Through experiencing SAPR training in the virtual world, the Airmen have to be present and connected to the experience. Our mission is collect relevant data to show that Airmen prefer this type of training over normal classroom training and that we can track to see that they enhance comprehension of key sexual assault reporting options and resources to better equip them to intervene and help other Airmen in need. We want to show that this type of training is not only relevant but effective in educating our Airmen on sexual assault prevention and response reporting options and resources.

The trainings content modules will include:

The contract for the training was awarded through the AFWERX Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, and follows on from a successful pilot training program Moth+Flame recently completed at Sacramentos Travis Air Force Base in military suicide prevention.

The content of the training was developed in conjunction with Air Mobility Commands Integrated Resiliency Team. Moth+Flame added that the training is expected to be utilized at Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas later this summer. For more information on Moth+Flame and its VR training solutions, please visit the companys website.

Image credit: Moth+Flame / US Air Force

About the author

Sam Sprigg

Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he covers news articles on both the AR and VR industries. He also has an interest in human augmentation technology as a whole, and does not just limit his learning specifically to the visual experience side of things.

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Moth+Flame partners with US Air Force to launch Virtual Reality sexual assault prevention and response training - Auganix

The Impact and Role of Social Media at the Olympics

In this episode of Michigan Minds, Scott Campbell, PhD, Communications and Media Department Chair and Constance F. and Arnold C. Pohs Professor of Telecommunications, discusses the impact and role of social media at the Tokyo Olympics. He also talks about the presence that newer technologies like 5G and augmented reality will have on spectator events.

Campbell says that the way people experience the Olympics is continually evolving, through communications media like radio, television, and internet streaming.

Whats going on right now is interesting, because the telecom companies are trying to get us to shift to a new fifth generation of infrastructure with mobile media, and what Im paying attention to when it comes to the Olympics is the advertising of that media, he says, adding that 5G is supposed to offer a new level of low latency, or more instantaneous processing of livestreamed data.

Theyre offering all kinds of new ways to connect with the Olympics so that spectators can take part through augmented reality and through virtual reality.

He notes how social media has the ability to bring people from around the world right into the Olympics.

We are intimately and immediately involved in gossip, rumor, updates, and news.

The way that social media provides a platform for athletes to amplify their voices has a great impact on society, Campbell says.

Olympic athletes and professional and amateur athletes can use social media to put themselves on a stage, to represent who they are, to represent their values beyond just their skills. Because they are role models, he says. It also makes them more vulnerable. These are young people and the dynamics on social media are so very hard to keep up with.

After more than a year of living through a global pandemic in which individuals connected virtually rather than in person to follow public health and safety guidelines, Campbell believes people will be even more comfortable engaging through social media.

The Olympics is a global event, and for people to participate in this together, it does take these kinds of resources. It does take this kind of media to bring people together at the same time, in the same place. And thats what the Olympics is all about. So I do think were going to see more people living their lives in the digital realm. Theyre more accustomed to it. Its more acceptable, he says.

Throughout the 2021 Tokyo Olympic events, and after, Campbell will be watching the mobile and social spaces to see how they progress. His prediction? More hybrid experiences of the Olympics where people have opportunities to be there, immersed with digital information to enhance that experience. He notes that the movement is toward visuals, and that will continue to grow.

The internet was very text-based 25-30 years ago, very text-based. From there, picture sharing has become more prominent and people are trying to use fewer words and more pictures and more images. From there, I think were seeing more videos nowmore streaming content now. And from there, I think were going to see more immersive content where its a hybrid space.

Read the rest here:

The Impact and Role of Social Media at the Olympics | Public Engagement - University of Michigan News

Earlier this week, Superhot VR received an update that removed all scenes that involved the player-character hurting or killing themselves. The devs explained that these scenes had no place in the game and apologized for taking so long to remove them. In response, hundreds of gamers yelled at them and began review-bombing the game on Steam.

The update for Superhot VR went live on July 21 and with it, the devs at Superhot Team explained in a short post why the scenes featuring self-harm had been totally removed from the game. The removed scenes involved the player shooting themselves and jumping off of a building.

Skip disturbing scenes toggle was added in a previous update. Considering [the] sensitive time were living in, we can do better than that. You deserve better. All scenes alluding to self-harm are now completely removed from the game. These scenes have no place in superhot virtual reality. We regret it took us so long. Were [committed] to shipping this update to all vr platforms.

As you might expect, numerous Steam users responded with anger and hostility to news of the update. Many upset by the update began to give Superhot VR negative reviews, triggering Valves anti-review-bombing tech to kick in and filter out the flood of bad-faith evaluations.

Reading the comments under the Superhot developers update note is like scrolling through a warzone, with participants flinging angry attacks at the devs, the game, and society as a whole. One popular comment suggested that Snowflakes were to blame and predicted that Grand Theft Auto games will have all their blood and violence removed next.

G/O Media may get a commission

If that seems like an overreaction to a developer making a small change to their own game, youd be correct. There was no evil cabal forcing the devs to update a four-year-old game to remove a few scenes featuring acts of self-harm. The reality is that people change, and the devs might have looked back at what they made and felt uncomfortable today, in 2021, having their name attached to a piece of content that depicted self-harm. So they decided to remove it.

Kotaku has reached out to Superhot Team about the removal of the scenes.

Currently, only the Steam version of the game has had these scenes removed. However, the team mentioned in its note that Superhot VR on other platforms, like the Oculus Store, will be updated in the future to also remove these scenes.

Anyway, yeah, it is happening again: The gamers are angry because some developers have decided to change their own game. This isnt the first time this has happened and sadly it probably wont be the last.

Link:

Superhot Game Gets Review-Bombed After Removing 'Depictions Of Self-Harm' - Kotaku

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In 2017, I took a trip to Paris, where I greedily took in as much art as I could. In one of the cavernous chambers of the ornate Muse dOrsay was the van Gogh exhibition, his framed works (Starry Night Over the Rhne, Bedroom in Arles, The Church at Auvers, a number of his self-portraits) set against a brazen sapphire background rather than the usual chaste white museum walls.

Ive had a poster of Starry Night, gifted to me by a college friend, since my undergraduate dorm days. It hangs framed in my bedroom today. At Muse dOrsay I stared at his restless skies and fields, stood for long stretches in front of his self-portraits, rooted in place by the depth of his gaze. And I cried suddenly, violently. I rushed out. I had never before had such a fierce reaction to a painting, and I have never again since.

What does it mean to build intimacy with an artist even one separated by over a century of history? And can an artists work be reimagined to give an audience in modern times an even more intimate contemporary relationship with the art?

These questions occurred to me as I visited the two competing immersive van Gogh exhibitions in Manhattan, Immersive Van Gogh at Pier 36 on the East River and Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience at Skylight on Vesey. Unlike my emotional high at Muse dOrsay, these shows left me feeling largely indifferent; in fact, the strongest reaction I had was an alarming sense of intrusion and a disingenuous connection with the artist and his work.

Immersive art installations and especially immersive theater trigger my sense of play and activate both the critic and artist in me. Theres a large difference between art conceived to be immersive, though, and art strong-armed into an immersive medium.

But first there was a beautiful translation of van Gogh: The entry ceiling of Pier 36, an imaginative 3-D recreation of Starry Night by the designer David Korins, featuring thousands of painted brushes, felt like a beautiful homage an artist taking on another artist in a work that invites a new perspective, channeling the original works style and motifs without aiming to be an exact reproduction.

And yet that just was an appetizer to the main show, a series of connected rooms where people lie and sit and stand watching a video of van Goghs works projected in all corners of the room, and that left me numb. And what got to me wasnt the young women posing for selfies or the older tourists lounging as if at a beach or the restless children scurrying around and climbing on Korinss large abstract monuments, their reflective surfaces catching all the sunflowers and stars Ive encountered much of the same in traditional museum exhibitions of van Goghs work.

It was the brevity of the paintings in the video sequence how quickly they appeared and disappeared. And it was the animations his mighty cypresses manifesting like apparitions from the mist so that the magic of the work is rendered literally. Theres no room for subtlety or implication here. The beauty of being swallowed by projections of van Goghs multicolored fields was subdued by the sloppiness of the translation. I stood off to one side to examine the projections and lost the resolute brush strokes and tiny gradients of color in the fuzziness of the digitization.

I quickly realized that for a good number of those in the audience, those details didnt matter. The goal was to use the art as a backdrop for a kind of theatrical experience.

It was precisely this experience that made me uneasy. How do you make theater out of art that is so explicitly contained and individual to van Goghs perspective? Despite all the color and character in his work, it would be inaccurate to restyle his paintings as scenery on the quasi-stages that these exhibitions create for audiences to explore not as admirers but active participants.

No matter how many times I toured the chambers, I had the itching sense that it was dishonest to expand a 2 by 3 foot painting to fit the horizons of a 75,000-square-foot space. The images are expanded and duplicated to create a repetitive panoramic. But theres a reason for the size of the original work; what the painter wanted to obscure, what parts of the world were allowed to see and what were left to imagine. A painting hanging on a museum wall is a declarative statement, the artist saying, Heres a piece of a world of color, style and form that Ive given you.

To try to introduce new depth and interactivity in the artists work is to imply that van Goghs originals his brush strokes, his swaying fields and torrents of blues or the bowing heads of his oleanders didnt breathe.

The van Gogh show at Vesey similarly used projections along with 3-D deconstructions of his paintings, and I felt more at ease with these impressive life-size recreations of works like Bedroom in Arles in an exhibition that styled itself a virtual museum. But my eyes glossed over the canvas reproductions of the work, so inferior to the real thing: The colors were dull, the textures nonexistent, and the fibers of the canvas shone artificially in the exhibit light.

Not the van Gogh works I remember but at least here was the art, standing still and on its own, and without interruption. And here was the artist a timeline of his life, blurbs about his career.

However, I found the final part of the exhibition a journey via virtual reality headset through some of the landscapes on which his paintings were based off-putting. In this digital world I floated through van Goghs house, then out into the street among people milling around, working and chatting. Every once in a while a frame would appear in front of my field of vision, and the scene would transform, to match its painted counterpart. Were meant to see the difference between the real world and van Goghs world as seen by a mind-reading illustrator. But can any scenic designer really step into the artists shoes? Are some chambers in the impenetrable mind of an artist better left untouched?

Of course theres no way to resurrect the artist, not through the Vesey van Gogh recreation of his world, nor the Pier 36 exhibition (which also offers an A.I. van Gogh who will write you a letter; an algorithm recycles words and phrases from his real-life letters and delivers them in his own handwriting).

In search of the real van Gogh, I made my first post-pandemic museum outing to the Met. I spent several minutes mesmerized by the wild, almost sensual, twists and curls of the dark leaves in Cypresses, in contrast to the powdery blues and whimsical pinks pirouetting in the sky. A group of eager art students in cutoff jeans and Doc Martens gushed about what theyd learned from Wheat Field With Cypresses while I studied the paintings sea-green bush leaning to the left as though eavesdropping on a conversation outside of the frame.

As I spent time with Self-Portrait With a Straw Hat, I heard someone behind me say, What a sad little man. And of course they were right. The paintings fleshy pinks and reds give it a more bodily emphasis than his signature cool blue observation of the natural world. The same sunny yellows and fern greens that look unassuming in his coat and hat make his face look sickly and jaundiced.

What a sad little man yes, van Goghs personal story is a large part of what we relate to, and especially as we come out of a year and a half of pandemic: his life of hardship, including isolation and depression. And, in his case, there was also poverty and ultimately suicide. The van Gogh I met in Paris made me cry, not only because of the beauty of the work but also because I related to his insecurity and self-doubt, his struggle with mental illness. The myth of the tortured artist is so seductive, I clung to it for dear life.

But what the two van Gogh immersive exhibitions made me realize is how I also made unfounded presumptions of the artist and his work in 2017. I can never pretend to understand the way he thought and saw the world. I only know what Ive read, and thats not enough to comprehend the entirety of a life. What I do know is the way his works tap something beautiful and unfathomable in me the critic, the art-lover, the poet. Because at the end of the day, we cant pretend to know van Gogh, just like we cant pretend his work can be projected on walls as though its the same experience. All we have are the paintings in the frames, but those nights, those cypresses, those sunflowers theyre more than enough on their own.

Read the rest here:

Paintings, Projections, V.R. Starry Nights: Can We Ever Know van Gogh? - The New York Times