Category Archives: Virtual Reality

Virtual reality game publisher Vertigo Games announced new features for first-person shooter After the Fall and two of its upcoming games during Gamescom event week.

Multiplayer shooter After the Fall will be launching a new season of content starting next month on Sept. 15. The "Reclamation Season" will be free for all players and adds new weapons, modes, several maps, and quality of life features. The game's last major update in April had brought many changes, fixes, and hardware optimizations.

After the Fall launched for Oculus Quest 2, SteamVR, and PlayStation VR late last year, and Vertigo Games revealed it has over 55,000 monthly active users. The publisher said the game, one of the best Quest 2 games, is now supported on Pico Neo headsets and can be played at Gamescom.

Vertigo Games also announced that VR puzzle platformer PathCraft will now be coming exclusively to Meta Quest 2, though no release window has been announced. PathCraft will feature over 80 puzzles, but players will be able to make their own levels with a level editor. The game will also take advantage of the headset's hand-tracking 2.0 feature at launch.

The final news from the publisher is that Hellsweeper VR will receive a new trailer later this week on Aug. 25. The trailer for the roguelike first-person VR game will show off the game's movement and combat systems. The game will feature fast movement, magical abilities, and co-op with a friend. Hellsweeper VR is scheduled to launch sometime in Q4 2022.

The Meta Quest 2 offers increased power, resolution, and flexibility over the original virtual headset. It is a complete, all-in-one headset that does not need to be tethered to a PC or smartphone in order to work.

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After the Fall VR gets new season next month, PathCraft coming to Oculus Quest 2 - Android Central

Virtual reality has plenty to offer those gamers looking for a truly immersive experience. However, one issue can force many players to stop in their tracks and return to the real world: motion sickness. The researchers behind HyperJump think they might have found a solution, though.

At Siggraph 2022 a tech conference in Canada celebrating some of the latest developments in VR I had the opportunity to try out HyperJump for myself, and I can comfortably say Id love for this movement system to come to my Oculus Quest 2 as soon as possible.

If you want to move around a VR world, you typically have one of three methods from which to choose. The first is to literally walk around in the real space that youre in. This method is the most immersive, it doesn't require a controller, and provided theres very little latency it's the least unsettling. However, a clear downside is that you require a lot of physical space, or you'll only be able to play a game that's set in a very restricted play area.

As a result of this, most games also rely on one of the other two methods: teleportation or smooth movement. As you can probably decipher from the names, teleportation movement sees you hop around the space in a staccato manner, while smooth movement has you use the control sticks to move around fluidly like a lot of other video games.

Teleportation is my preferred option, since even after a year with VR, smooth movement can force me to quit a game in seconds. However, smooth movement is generally more immersive, and its far less easy to become disoriented and lost than it is with teleportation.

HyperJump looks to blend the best of teleportation and smooth movement, creating a new form of VR motion thats better than the sum of its parts.

Motion sickness is typically caused by competing signals arriving from the eyes and inner ear to your brain. Lets say youre reading in a moving car. Your eyes will be focused on the stationery book and other fixed points around you, indicating to your brain that youre not moving. Meanwhile, the fluid in your inner ear is being jostled around, telling your brain that youre in motion. Your brain doesnt know which organ to believe, with the end result that you'll start to feel nauseous.

With VR, it's the reverse of the example above that's happening; your eyes perceive that youre moving, while your ears believe youre standing still. The result is the same, though: the competing information makes you want to barf.

To help get around this, HyperJump forces players to tilt their bodies in the direction they want to travel. Lean forwards to go ahead; lean back to reverse; couch to sink to the ground; or go on your tiptoes to fly. If you want to change the direction in which youre heading, you have to physically turn your body. This makes your brain think that youre in motion, but without the need to have lots of physical space in which to move around.

HyperJumps second trick is to automatically switch from smooth movement to teleportation when players reach speeds that induce motion sickness. This helps maintain your momentum while also keeping you from feeling ill.

Lastly, to combat the disorientation that can come with teleportation, HyperJump shows you the path youre currently traveling along, playing a faint beat in the background that matches with your jumps, so you know when the next one is coming.

When I first stepped into the HyperJump booth, I was more than a little worried about what I was getting myself into. In the past, VR movement has made me feel super ill, and the jet lag I was suffering from having traveled to Canada from the UK the day prior wasnt helping. However, I quickly learned my fears were unfounded; I completed each of the tests flight paths over the virtual streets of Vancouver, and even spent some time thereafter adventuring freely without feeling sick at all.

When the tester switched me back to typical VR movement, I found myself flying around far more slowly and within 30 seconds, I was asking to finish the test.

HyperJumps settings are still being trialed and fine-tuned; but, hopefully, it wont be long before its ready to be adopted by the best VR games. Its easily one of the best forms of VR movement Ive used, and while it might not work for every game, there are some such as Lone Echo 2 that would definitely benefit from its inclusion.

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HyperJump wants to cure the motion sickness caused by your Oculus Quest 2 - TechRadar

Imagine going to a restaurant and instead of asking the waiter what a certain dish like Pok means (I googled it too; it is a famous Hawaiian raw fish salad), you can see on your table what the dish looks like and then take the decision if you want to order it or not.

The virtual reality(VR) and augmented reality(AR) industries are today worth more than 100 billion dollars and have revolutionized several industries. Fromhealthcare sector tothe social media world, it has shown its presenceeverywhere.

The restaurant and hotel business, for example, is very lucrative and has a future thatamalgamates with VR and AR. Several restaurant owners have started using VR and AR to engage with their customers and give them an experience to remember.

Let's take some examples, but before that, watch this video:

This video is from a New York-based Magnolia Bakery that has changedthe experience for their customers for ordering a cake.They have deployed an AR technology that has enabled the bakery to present the cakes listed on their menuvirtually. The visualisation is so real that it is difficult to differentiate between a real cake and the virtual one. Hence, customers can 'feel' every cake on the menu and order their perfect choice.

Magnolia was one of the first restaurants to do so. Today, however, there are several new restaurants coming up using VR/AR not only in their menu but to change the experience of dining altogether.

Many restaurants in India, today, use QR codes which when scannedtakes youdirectly to the restaurant's digital menu. (also an application of AR).

How is it useful?Using VR and AR has several benefits for the restaurant's owners apart from making a comprehensive experience for the customers. It helps in:

Overall, if the technology becomes more available and affordable, we are not far away from having a full 360-degree experience of exquisite dining which canevoke all our senses.

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Your dining experience is changing. Thank restaurants using augmented and virtual reality - DailyO

With all due respect to the Van Gogh Immersive Experience playing out in various cities throughout the country, it's time for Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera to shine.

"Mexican Geniuses" - A Frida & Diego Immersive Experience is an original exhibition created by Fever and Brain Hunter to portray the life and work of two legendary Mexican artists.

The exhibit is a personalized experience that places the minds of Kahlo and Rivera at your fingertips. You are taken into their world, their dreams and how they grew as people and artists. In the exhibition, you will see many replicas of Kahlos and Rivera's works of art through the years.

You first enter the exhibit through a replica of Riveras and Kahlo's Blue House in Coyoacan, Mexico and are able to explore Rivera's studio. The huge digital fresco depicted on the screen shows everyone the large scale of his artwork in comparison to Kahlos. Rivera had a collection of "Judas Sculptures. The tradition of "Burning the Judas" on Holy Saturday was introduced during Mexico's colonial period.

Walking into Kahlo's space you will see that all of her art is to scale. One work, "The Wounded Table is a masterpiece that went missing in 1955 and is still unrecovered to this day. Her infamous piece, "The Two Fridas" was acclaimed much attention during the exhibit. Her space places you in an emotional rollercoaster where you ride with her to the apex of her artistic vision while being reminded of the plunge ahead with the leather corset and wheelchair nearby. She used both items towards the last decade of her life as her health worsened.

In the kitchen, you can experience the interactive tables, photographs of the couple and paintings of Kahlo that give the room its warmth and love. You will also see the menu for their wedding and Kahlo's recipe for Mole Poblano that was actually from Rivera's second wife, Lupe Marin.

Once out of the kitchen, you walk into the immersive gallery. The immersive gallery is made of 20 projectors and more than 300 images that combined the original artworks of both artists and photographs that were from more than 100 collections. Hearing the rendition of Kahlo's voice, fused with her artwork struck an emotional chord of pride with some of the visitors.

Children are encouraged to come and partake in the exhibition. There is a section called mural room where there is a life-size replica of the fresco, "Dream of a Sunday afternoon in Alameda Central Park." Anyone can grab a marker color of their choice and channel their inner Frida or Diego on the canvas. The characters in the fresco are based on real people or icons from Mexican culture, such as Catrina from the Dia de Los Muertos.

When you think you have seen it all, let's now visit Kahlo and Rivera in the afterlife. Wait. The Afterlife?

When you step into the VR room, you can embark on a journey into the afterlife. This narrative experience was created by 3D modeling artists and VR experts to celebrate the reuniting of the two artists to celebrate Dia de los Muertos and relive their past life.

The Frida and Diego Immersive Experience truly takes you on an emotional, spiritual and cultural journey into the lives of these world-renowned artists. Make time to come down to the DMV and check out the exhibition. The exhibition hours are Tuesday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and will end its run in December.

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Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera make their Virtual Reality debut in the United States - AL DIA News

Things are moving fast in the metaverse, and in the wider world of Web3 as a whole. Depending on who you ask, this futuristic, blockchain-based space is either the next big thing for marketing and for almost everything else or an overhyped fad. Heres what you need to know from this past week:

The Chinese tech giant Tencent has stopped selling NFTs in response to regulation concerns from the Chinese government, according to Reuters. Current NFT holders will still be allowed to keep and display their tokens, or they can put in a request for a refund.

The term NFT itself has become slightly taboo and rarely used throughout the broader Chinese corporate world, due at least in part to its direct ties with cryptocurrency, which is illegal in China.

A new technological age is dawning. / Adobe Stock

Last month, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it would seek to prevent Meta and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg from acquiring the company Within, maker of the popular VR fitness app Supernatural. The FTC claimed on its website that Meta, already a key player at each level of the virtual reality sector, is planning to expand [its] virtual reality empire with this attempt to illegally acquire a dedicated fitness app that proves the value of virtual reality to users. The FTCs Bureau of Competition deputy director John Newman said that Meta is trying to buy its way to the top in its planned acquisition of Within.

On Monday, Forbes reported that the legal battle between Meta and the FTC has been scheduled for this December. Meta has reportedly agreed to delay the finalization of iots acquisition deal until January 1, 2023, or until the district judge presiding over the case makes a ruling whichever happens first.

Get the best of The Drum by choosing from a series of great email briefings, whether thats daily news, weekly recaps or deep dives into media or creativity.

Federal Reserve issues guidelines for crypto banks hoping to access national banking system

The Federal Reserve the United States central banking system released new guidelines earlier this week that suggest that American banks may soon be able to deal both in crypto and in traditional currency. The 49-page Guidelines for Evaluating Account and Services Requests states that institutions with novel charters, such as cryptocurrency custody banks, and their trade associations may soon be granted access to master accounts, which enable access to the Federal Reserve.

In June, the crypto bank Custodia sued the Federal Reserve for failing to process Custodias master account application for 19 months. Kraken is another crypto bank that's applied for a master account with the Fed. The publication of the new guidelines appear to be aimed, in part, at streamlining the process of approving applications for master accounts to crypto banks like Custodia and Kraken. The new guidelines also emphasize that any American bank looking to become involved with crypto will need to receive approval from the Fed beforehand.

Mark Zuckerberg just cant seem to strike the right chord with the rest of the Web3 community. It seems like nearly every time the Meta chief executive tries to advertise something new about his companys vision for the metaverse, it ends up backfiring. Even his decision to change the companys name to Meta back in October of last year made many Web3 professionals cringe.

Earlier this week, he posted what appears to be a selfie of his Horizon Worlds avatar standing in front of a virtual Eiffel Tower and La Sagrada Familia to advertise the launch of the platform in France and Spain. Twitter, predictably, has not been kind. People made fun of Zucks avatars blank expression and Horizon Worlds as a whole, which still includes legless avatars. Paul Tassi had this to say in Forbes: This is just embarrassing, and yet Zuckerberg seems entirely immune to the embarrassment, or really just does not understand how bad this looks, both literally, the graphics are garbage and its bizarre no one has legs after five years of this, but also for him and his company and his grand vision of the metaverse, which he seems to understand less than all of his competition. This is not going to go well for him or Meta if he continues down this path.

Invisalign has made its metaverse debut with a new campaign in Roblox. Launched on August 12, the brands virtual, gamified experience was built into Livetopia, a hugely popular game on Roblox that has been visited more than 2.3bn times, according to its website. The so-called Invisalign Hub inside Livetopia features a virtual dentist office and branded games. Visitors can also, of course, check out some virtual recreations of Invisalign aligners. The brand has partnered with TikTok star Lana Rae to promote its new Roblox campaign, following another partnership with Charli Damelio currently the second-most popular creator on TikTok back in 2020.

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This Week in the Metaverse: Tencent ditches NFTs, FTC prepares to challenge Meta's 'virtual reality empire' - The Drum

Metaverse is a virtually ubiquitous buzzword nowadays. With Meta, ne Facebook, and other tech companies pushing the benefits of Web 3.0 and the metaverse, very few of us actually comprehend what that digitized future actually looks like. But for users of VRChat, the metaverse is already part of their everyday lives and its only getting better

HBOs new documentary We Met In Virtual Reality introduces viewers to a cast of characters who represent the ideal of what the metaverse can offer, yet it makes glaring omissions about the issues plaguing the platform. For the uninitiated, the film is a kind portrayal of how humans build relationships in tough times, but We Met In Virtual Reality fails to fully engage with the full spectrum of digital life.

We Met In Virtual Reality begins in 2020, with a world fully in the midst of a global pandemic. What better time to try out virtual reality?

Over the course of the HBO documentary, we are introduced to a small group of people who use virtual reality as an escape during the pandemic. Dust Bunny is a dancer who teaches lessons in VRChat while also maintaining a relationship with her partner Toaster. Characters IsYourBoi and DragonHeart plan their in-game wedding. Then theres Jenny and Rey who work to teach sign language in virtual reality to make the space more accessible. Director Joe Hunting shot the film entirely in VRChat, one of the most popular VR games around. The ambitious film immerses the viewer into this world and effectively conveys why these players are so invested in what it has to offer.

Much like the 2021 animated film Belle, We Met in Virtual Realitys main interest in the digital world is how it gives people an escape from real life. But while Belle fails to acknowledge the value of living a digital double life, We Met in Virtual Reality almost exclusively revels in the joy of building relationships in VR. Rather than focus on individual characters, three main stories play out that focus on pairs of players and what VRChat has meant for their relationship (romantic or not).

The communitys highlighted in the documentary show virtual reality in the best light.HBO

While each story helps make the case for how the metaverse can help people in a myriad of ways, the heart of We Met In Virtual Reality is the story of Jenny and Rey.

They help run a digital school for sign language in VRChat called Helping Hands. Jenny shares how being a part of this community made her realize there were people in the world who she cared for and who cared about her in return, something that helped her recover from a previous suicide attempt. Rey is a deaf player who communicates through American Sign Language (ASL) in VRChat, something that has allowed him to make friends in the metaverse at a time when he was dealing with the death of his brother.

In one of the documentarys most touching scenes, Rey and Jenny light a lantern for Reys brother in VRChat and send it into the sky as Rey says goodbye. The tangible emotions that come across in moments like this are enough to bring tears to my eyes. Its a testament to the fact that despite its absurd aesthetics, the virtual world can offer genuine human connection and emotion.

The metaverse as envisioned by big tech does not include the freedom of VRChat.Meta

As a film aimed at those unfamiliar with virtual reality, We Met In Virtual Reality succeeds. Most people will come away thinking that VRChat is a little weird but filled with kindness. In many ways, the 91-minute film is a perfect advertisement for the metaverse promises made by tech companies like Meta. Yet the film never engages with the many issues that are actively facing VRChat, a fact that makes the films attempt to be immersive feel more voyeuristic and detached from its subjects than intended.

The plethora of anime cat girls, furries, and pop culture characters like Kermit the Frog are never given an explanation. There is an inherent absurdity to this that feels akin to how Ready Player One was full of cameos from every entertainment franchise possible. But while some people might come in expecting to see the promise of a virtual future, they might come away disappointed by the prominence of glitchy character models and animation that persists throughout the documentary.

Despite these flaws, virtual reality still seems like a freeing space, something that only rings true for independent projects like VRChat.

The future of the metaverse as envisioned by big tech is filled with regulation, censorship, and monetization. The current state of VRChat represents an early internet-like state, one on the edge of being ruined by corporate intrusion. Those who use VRChat are currently worried the game will change irreparably with the announcement that it will soon include Epic Games Easy Anti Cheat software. This would make all third-party software incompatible with the game. For players with accessibility issues like Rey, this would mean necessary accessibility features would disappear overnight.

Director Joe Hunting fails to add much-needed context.HBO

We Met in Virtual Reality portrays VRChat as a very accepting community, one that welcomes anybody. This is hopeful at best and deceptive at worst. VRChat does have incredible communities within its wider universe, as the spotlighted players show, but it also has a rampant problem with racism and other problematic behavior. The documentary chooses to prioritize the stories of people without giving much-needed context. A necessary companion piece to this documentary is a People Make Games video that investigates and explains the cultural workings of VRChat and the uncertain future the game faces.

While We Met in Virtual Reality does not fully engage with the complexities of its subject, the deeply emotional stories that are depicted make the case for the benefits of a virtual world. It may be an overly hopeful view, but sometimes hope is what the world (virtual or real) needs.

We Met In Virtual Reality is available to stream on HBO Max.

LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY.

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'We Met In Virtual Reality': HBO documentary offers a flawed vision of the metaverse - Inverse

Despite Zuckerberg & Co. spending billions of dollars on virtual reality tech every fiscal quarter, the wider VR startup ecosystem has been having a tough few years coming down from the highs of 2016, when investors dumped money into the sector expecting Oculus-sized returns only to see most of their investments slowly wilt away.

This makes it fairly notable news whenever a big institutional investor makes a bet in a VR startup these days even just a seed round. Earlier this week I sat down with the folks at basketball virtual reality app Gym Class, which just closed an $8 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz. Other backers include Founders, Inc., Todd and Rahuls Angel Fund and Balaji Srinivasan.

Gym Class is what they call a VR pure-play the experience relies on the hardware, and the mechanics only make sense in VR. So, in theory, a bet in the company isnt just a bet on the ability of the team, but the near-term viability of the space theyre operating in. Its a safer bet in a world where Meta and Apple are investing heavily in the sector, but still risky given uncertainty around the timing of further headset adoption.

Even among other VR titles, the game itself is early Gym Class isnt even available in Metas Quest Store yet. To date, the nearly 1 million downloads of the free app have taken place on Metas App Lab storefront, a hub for games that show early promise but may have a good deal of development ahead of them before theyre ready for prime time. So far, Gym Class has gotten quite a bit of attention before even landing on the official Quest store largely due to TikTok shares of gameplay footage.

Image Credits: Gym Class

Gym Classs product head Paul Katsen tells TechCrunch that the startup is thinking about the experience as more of a social hub than a simple game, one that allows people to hop into a virtual space and bond over the sport and culture around basketball. Gym Class is tightly focused on basketball for the time being, the company says, and doesnt have any near-term plans to build out a wider offering of sports experiences.

The companys upcoming official Quest Store launch is a big moment for the company, but cements just how critical Metas platform remains for any and all virtual reality developers. Late last month, Meta made a stir by announcing a price increase of their long-available Quest 2 headset, citing a need to recoup investment in the low-margin device.

If you become reliant on these platforms for distribution, you dont build your own distribution platform, Katsen says, When we see prices are going up by $100, yeah thats a bummer, but still the trajectory at which its growing its outselling consoles.

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YC and a16z back virtual reality basketball app Gym Class - TechCrunch

Google first announced its Immersive Stream technology back in March, and since then, the white label B2B solution has been the center of much controversy regarding the consumer-facing version of Stadia. However, the company has made it clear that the new initiative isnt really new at all, has always been the plan, and does not interfere with the future of your games library. Well, at least not in the immediate future.

A few months later, Google announced that it would be expanding Immersive Stream into XR territory. For those unfamiliar, XR stands for Extended Reality and encapsulates both Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). That is to say that digital elements both replace and overlay reality. Microsoft calls this Mixed Reality, for example, but regardless, its the next frontier for sure.

You can actually already test XR via Chrome, Android, and iOS, and while its still quite early on, the results you can achieve via tests with a headset are promising. The most common use case for it right now is probably shopping. Take a digital 3D model of what youd like to fit into your home, and drop it to see how its real dimensions work with your living space, for example, and your shopping experience drastically improves.

This past week, Google Cloud hosted a few XR-related streams, and as you can see below, the technology that Ill again remind you originated with Google Stadia is now being prospected for use with other industries. It would seem that the company hopes to utilize instantaneous cloud-driven experiences via Stadias infrastructure to plop educators and students, designers, tourists, healthcare professionals, and more into digital playgrounds to create, play, and work while wearing a headset.

According to rumors, Google is, in fact, working on an Augmented Reality headset for release in 2024 which will be codenamed Project Iris, have a custom chip (Tensor, perhaps?), and utilize cloud streaming to host the experiences. To me, it truly does sound like Daydream VR had to die so that such a future that spans much further than gaming alone and uses Stadias incredible tech to drive the entire thing could come to fruition.

Imagine for a second a Daydream-style XR headset (but much more lightweight) that needed little internal horsepower and just used a Wi-Fi connection to cloud stream any AAA game, industry professional app, and more straight to your eyeballs. While we dont know much about what the future holds at this point, Im sure news of Immersive Stream for XRs future is not far away.

To be absolutely clear, while this technology originated from Stadias creation, Stadia itself was not really mentioned in the video, aside from the mention of Augmented Reality Sports, which could be game related. Other use cases for XR could include more intentional and effective employee training for car repairs, surgeries, and more. If this is sounding a lot like Google Glass (which also went the industry route after a failed consumer experience) mixed with Google Daydream mixed with Google Stadia, then thats because it probably is.

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Stadia's technology to be used for immersive AR and VR headset experiences - Chrome Unboxed

Astronomers have many tools for studying the cosmos: telescopes, satellites, interplanetary spacecraft, and more. The humble human eye is a critical part of this toolkit, too, as it can often spot patterns or aberrations that algorithms miss. And our visions scrutinizing power has been bolstered recently by virtual reality (VR) as well as by thousands of eyes working in tandem thanks to the crowdsourcing power of the Internet.

Researchers at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center recently announced the discovery of 10 stars surrounded by dusty debris diskswhirling masses of gas, dust and rock left over after the earliest phases of planet formation. This result, enabled by VR and the help of citizen scientists, was recently published in the Astrophysical Journal. The findings could help astronomers piece together a time line of how planetary systems are built.

Debris disks encompass various stages of planet formation, including the youthful eras in which worlds are still embedded in the detritus from the messy, chaotic processes of their birth. Although astronomers have managed to see a few directly, most of these young planets are beyond the reach of current telescopes. Making a planetary system takes millions of years, so each debris disk observers see is just a brief snapshot of one moment in that systems life. To uncover the whole story, astronomers search for many disk-wreathed planetary systems at different stages of evolution, gathering multiple snapshots to piece together in a time line.

To hunt for debris disks, observers usually start by looking for stars that appear especially bright in the infrared; that abnormal brightness typically comes from a surfeit of starlight-warmed dust in a disk around a star. NASAs infrared telescope WISE (Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer) surveyed the entire sky, creating what in some respects is the most comprehensive catalog yet of stellar infrared measurements. With tens of thousands of data points to be analyzed and many debris disks likely hidden within the WISE catalog, whats a scientist to do?

Its a great example of how so much of modern astronomy involves searching massive data sets for the proverbial needle in the haystack, says Meredith Hughes, an astronomer at Wesleyan University, who was not involved in the study. Even with machine-learning algorithms, its still hard to train computers to do this complex work of identifying noisy patterns and noticing subtle deviations from expectations, which is where the collective brainpower of citizen science comes in.

A project called Disk Detective trained citizen scientistsregular people who want to help out on research in their spare timeto look at WISE images and compare them to those from other astronomical surveys, such as the SkyMapper Southern Sky Survey, the Pan-STARRS survey and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), with the goal of confirming the presence of disks around each candidate star. Since the projects start in 2014, citizen scientists have found more than 40,000 disksthats 40,000 snapshots of the history of how planets form.

To put these into a time line, though, astronomers need to figure out where each snapshot belongs. In other words, scientists need to know the ages of each star and its debris disk. When we know the ages of stars and planets, we can place them in a sequencefrom baby to teen to adult, if you like, says Marc Kuchner, a NASA astrophysicist and co-author of the new study. That allows us to understand how they form and evolve.

Pinning down a stars age with any substantial precision is a notoriously tricky problem in astronomy. One solution is to match up a star to its siblings, in an association known as a moving group. Stars often form in clusters from one giant cloud of gas, but many of these once-close stellar families drift apart as they age, their individual members spreading out across the Milky Way. By carefully measuring stars locations and velocities, researchers can determine which stars display the telltale motions that, traced backward, reveal they were collectively born at the same time and place. Once astronomers know stars in a group are related, its straightforward to calculate their age based on established knowledge of how stars grow and evolve.

Finding new moving group members isnt easy. To do so, astronomers traditionally rely on analyzing preexisting lists of moving-group stars, flagging potential new members via sophisticated mathematical models. The team behind the new project wanted to try something different and more visceral: it used a VR program to zoom around the stars and get a clearer, three-dimensional perspective on how things move.

I thought I would scare [NASAs VR scientists] away when I said I wanted to visualize the positions and velocities of four million stars, Kuchner says. But they didnt bat an eyelash! To create this virtual stellar cornucopia, the team used data from Gaia, a European Space Agency satellite that provides the best available measurements for the positions and velocities of stars in our galaxy. The resulting VR simulation served as a sort of time machine, tooknowing how fast and in what direction a star was moving allowed Kuchner and colleagues to trace its movement backward and forward in time.

While serving as a visiting researcher at NASA, lead study author Susan Higashio strapped on a VR headset to fly around the simulations millions of stars. She examined where the stars with disks were in relation to known moving groups and extrapolated the stars motions forward and backward in time to test their potential associations. It was so exciting when the four million stars appeared in VR, but it felt a little dizzying when they all started to swirl around me, she recalls. It was a really fun and interactive way to conduct science.

Higashio traced 10 of the debris disks from Disk Detective back to their moving-group families. The team then found the estimated ages of these disks, which ranged from 18 million to 133 million years old. All of them were extremely young, compared with our home solar system, which is around 4.5 billion years old. The researchers also identified an entirely new moving group called Smethells 165, after its brightest star. Whenever we find a new moving group, thats a new batch of stars whose ages we know more precisely, Kuchner explains.

The astronomers also found one strange, extreme debris disk around a star nicknamed J0925 that doesnt quite fit into their expected time line of planet formation. Its much brighter in the infraredmeaning it has more dustthan expected for a star of its age. As debris disks get older, some of their dust spirals into the star or is blown away by stellar winds. J0925, however, seems to have just gotten a fresh new delivery of hot dust, possibly from a recent collision between two protoplanets. Hughes highlights this star as the most interesting object uncovered in the study. Extreme debris disks are still a bit mysterious, but they are probably similar to what our solar system would have looked like during the giant impact that formed the Earths moon.

Disk Detectives citizen-science work is still ongoing, now upgraded to use Gaias most recent batch of data. The team hopes to identify even more members of moving groups and new disks with their unique VR method. Lisa Stiller, one of the many citizen scientist co-authors of the study, offers encouragement for prospective volunteers. Dont hesitate to help out in a citizen-science project, she says. Your help will be needed in whatever form you choose or amount of time you choose to dedicate yourself.

Anyone with an Internet connection can still join the Disk Detective project, no experience needed. More than 30,000 citizen scientists have contributed, Kuchner says. The Disk Detectives are still working their way through hundreds of thousands of WISE imageswe still need your help.

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Planetary Debris Disks Discovered with Citizen Scientists and Virtual Reality - Scientific American

DES MOINES, Iowa Theres a newway to experience the Iowa State Fair this year, through augmented reality.

Zirous, a West Des Moines technology firm, designed an app called Blue Ribbon Rescue.

The conceptis similar toPokmon GO. Thegoal is to collect as many blue ribbons throughout two of the thrill parks,Thrill Ville and Thrill Town. If youcollect enough, you can be entered to win prizes.

Developers of the app hope this brings something unique to the summertime tradition.

Obviously, the fair itself is a lot of fun and this just enhances the experience of being able to walk around being able to see things from the fair,Luke McDermott, senior application developer with Zirous, said. And then you get to experience all the fun things that like make Iowa what it is like pigs, a cup of cookies, lemonade, and Fairfield.

Every day of the fair, one person will winan Oculus Quest II virtual reality headset.

You can download the Blue Ribbon Rescue app for free on the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

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Experience the Iowa State Fair through augmented reality - WHO TV 13 Des Moines News & Weather