Category Archives: Virtual Reality

LA 2024 knew it couldnt bring every member of the International Olympic Committee to UCLA.

So it brought UCLA to the IOC.

LA 2024 which, following a deal with the committee, is now LA 2028 gave a presentation at IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland last month and brought a virtual reality video with it. The goal was to convince the committee that Los Angeles was games-ready because the facilities at UCLA will serve as the Olympic Village.

The video takes the viewer around UCLAs sports and living facilities in 360 degrees, seamlessly transitioning from spots like the basketball courts at the John Wooden Center to the dining room at Bruin Plate.

We wanted to be able to showcase this and really put people on UCLAs campus and in the middle of the village, even if they couldnt be here, said LA 2028s director of marketing, Matt Rohmer. With the latest developments in (virtual reality), we were able to develop a VR film that literally puts you on the middle of campus.

The video came out of a joint effort between LA 2028s team and two other companies: advertising agency 72andSunny and virtual reality team Jaunt.

The partnership between 72andSunny and LA 2028 has lasted for the last three years, with the two working together to develop a brand for the movement. 72andSunny was the first team to come up with the idea to use VR.

Sean Matthews one of two creative directors at 72andSunny said developing an athletes village is one of the main challenges of creating an Olympic bid, so a key message in the video was that Los Angeles already has a fully equipped facility. With the village ready to go, there will be no need to invest billions of dollars in building one.

Paris has plans to build a city, or to build this Olympic Village, Matthews said. You can put on this headset and well actually show you how an athlete will train, will live and will dine. Instead of showing you renders and blueprints, lets just show you the real thing.

From there, LA 2028 and 72andSunny reached out to Jaunt, which started as a Silicon Valley technology company four years ago, but has since started Jaunt Studios, a content-driven, cinematic VR producer located in Santa Monica.

When 72andSunny approached us, (the company) had a very tight deadline to create a very high-end piece of immersive content to help seal the deal for (its) bid, said Jaunt Studios creative director Patrick Meegan.

Jaunt had less than six weeks to shrink UCLAs campus down to the size of a VR headset. The approaching summer break accelerated its timeline even more, since it was crucial that the campus be populated with students.

On the timeline we were doing, this would have been very difficult a year ago, Meegan said. You could have done it potentially a year ago, but definitely not five years ago or even two years ago.

Meegan said technologies that Jaunt developed in the past year allowed them to meet the deadline. Jaunt used hardware like waterproof cameras, drones, remote control cameras and cable cams in addition to recently developed software to help ease the transitions between scenes.

Though the IOC was LA 2028s initial target audience, the video has been shared on Facebook, amassing more than 340 thousand views, 7,000 reacts and 1,000 shares, many of which came from within the UCLA community.

Meegan added she thinks VRs ability to make an empathetic connection, and how the new medium lends itself to a certain type of honesty and authenticity, allows the campus to speak for itself.

With a 360 view, you cant hide anything, Meegan said. I think that part of why it resonates with UCLAs current students and alumni is that youre very much put back there; its very familiar.

Even with all the outside people LA 2028 had to bring in to make the video, it didnt have to look far to find athletes. UCLA swimmers, divers and track and field runners participated in the production of the video and even made the final cut.

UCLA has such an amazing athletics program; we could really get the highest caliber of athletes to do set pieces with us, Meegan said.

One of those athletes was diver Annika Lenz, who holds the UCLA record with a platform score of 323.15. At one point Lenz was atop Spieker Aquatics Centers 10-meter platform, eye-to-eye with a drone camera hovering above the pool.

Ive always loved the Olympics, Lenz said. Ive wanted to go to the Olympics. I mean, Ive been to Olympic trials, but I didnt qualify, so I think its great to be part of the Olympic spirit that brings us all together.

The best part about the video, though, is that it worked. The IOC was convinced.

Los Angeles was officially named the host of the 2028 games July 31. In just 11 short years, UCLA will be the site of the Olympic Village in more than just virtual reality.

See the article here:

Virtual reality video showcases UCLA campus as 2028 Olympic ... - Daily Bruin

Words matter. And as a stickler for accuracy in language that describes technology, it pains me to write this column.

I hesitate to expose the truth, because the public is already confused about virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR), 360-degree video and heads-up displays. But facts are facts. And the fact is that the technology itself undermines clarity in language to describe it.

Before we get to my grand thesis, let's kill a few myths.

Silicon Valley just produced a mind-blowing new virtual reality product. It's a sci-fi backpack that houses a fast computer to power a high-resolution VR headset. Welcome to the future of VR gaming, right?

Wrong.

While the slightly-heavier-than-10-pound backpack is conceptually similar to existing gaming rigs, it's actually designed for enterprises, as well as healthcare applications. It's called the Z VR Backpack from HP. It works either with HP's new Windows Mixed Reality Headset or with HTC's Vive business edition headset, and houses a Windows 10 Pro PC, complete with an Intel Core i7 processor, 32GB of RAM and, crucially, an Nvidia Quadro PS2000 graphics card. It also has hot-swappable batteries.

Will HP's new enterprise-ready VR backpack deliver mixed reality, augmented reality or virtual reality? The answer is yes!

To me, the biggest news is that HP plans to open 13 customer experience centers around the world to showcase enterprise and business VR applications. If that surprises you, it's because the narrative around VR is that it's all about immersive gaming and other "fun" applications. It's far more likely that professional uses for VR will dwarf the market for consumer uses.

All of these technologies have been around for decades, at least conceptually. Just now, on the brink of mainstream use for both consumer and business applications, it's important to recognize that different people mean different things when they use the labels to describe these new technologies.

A Singapore-based company called Yi Technology this week introduced an apparently innovative mobile gadget called the Yi 360 VR Camera. The camera takes 5.7k video at 30 frames per second, and is capable of 2.5k live streaming.

Impressive! But is 360-degree video "virtual reality"? Some (like Yi) say yes. Others say no. (The correct answer is "yes" more on that later.)

Mixed reality and augmented reality are also contested labels. Everyone agrees that both mixed reality and augmented reality describe the addition of computer-generated objects to a view of the real world.

One opinion about the difference is that mixed reality virtual objects are "anchored" in reality they're placed specifically, and can interact with the real environment. For example, mixed reality objects can stand on or even hide behind a real table.

By contrast, augmented reality objects are not "anchored," but simply float in space, anchored not to physical spaces but instead to the user's field of view. That means Hololens is mixed reality, but Google Glass is augmented reality.

People disagree.

An alternative definition says that mixed reality is a kind of umbrella term for virtual objects placed into a view of the real world, while augmented reality content specifically enhances the understanding of, or "augments," reality. For example, if buildings are labeled or people's faces are recognized and information about them appears when they're in view, that's augmented reality in this definition.

Under this differentiation, Google Glass is neither mixed nor augmented reality, but simply a heads-up display information in the user's field of view that neither interacts with nor refers to real-world objects.

Complicating matters is that the "mixed reality" label is falling out of favor in some circles, with "augmented reality" serving as the umbrella term for all technologies that combine the real with the virtual.

If the use of "augmented reality" bothers you, just wait. That, too, may soon become unfashionable.

And now we get to the confusing bit. Despite clear differences between some familiar applications of, say, mixed reality and virtual reality, other applications blur the boundaries.

Consider new examples on YouTube.

One video shows an app built with Apple's ARKit, where the user is looking at a real scene, with one computer-generated addition: A computer-generated doorway in the middle of the lane creates the illusion of a garden world that isn't really there. The scene is almost entirely real, with one door-size virtual object. But when the user walks through the door, they are immersed in the garden world, and can even look back to see the doorway to the real world. On one side of the door, it's mixed reality. On other side, virtual reality. This simple app is MR and VR at the same time.

A second example is even more subtle. I'm old enough to remember a pop song from the 1980s called Take On Me by a band called A-ha. In the video, a girl in a diner gets pulled into a black-and-white comic book. While inside, she encounters a kind of window with "real life" on one side and "comic book world" on the other.

Someone explicitly created an app that immerses the user in a scenario identical to the "A-ha" video, wherein a tiny window gives a view into a charcoal-sketch comic world clearly "mixed reality" but then the user can step into that world, entering a fully virtual environment, with the exception of a tiny window into the real world.

This scenario is more semantically complicated than the previous one because all the "virtual reality" elements are in fact computer-modified representations of real-world video. It's impossible to accurately describe this app using either "mixed reality" or "virtual reality."

When you look around and see a live, clear view of the room you're in, that's 360-degree video, not virtual reality. But what if you see live 360 video of a room you're not in one on the other side of the world? What if that 360 video is not live, but essentially recorded or mapped as a virtual space? What if your experience of it is like you're tiny, like a mouse in a giant house, or like a giant in a tiny house? What if the lights are manipulated, or multiple rooms from different houses stitched together to create the illusion of the same house? It's impossible to differentiate at some point between 360 video and virtual reality.

Purists might say live, 360 video of, say, an office, is not VR. But what if you change the color of the furniture in software? What if the furniture is changed in software to animals? What if the walls are still there, but suddenly made out of bamboo? Where does the "real" end and the "virtual" begin?

Ultimately, the camera that shows you the "reality" to be augmented is merely a sensor. It can show you what you would see, along with virtual objects in the room, and everybody would be comfortable calling that mixed reality. But what if the app takes the motion and distance data and represents what it sees in a changed form. Instead of your own hands, for example, it could show robot hands in their place, synchronized to your actual movement. Is that MR or VR?

The next version of Apple maps will become a kind of VR experience. You'll be able to insert an iPhone into VR goggles and enter 3D maps mode. As you turn your head, you'll see what a city looks like as if you were Godzilla stomping through the streets. Categorically, what is that? (The 3D maps are "computer generated," but using photography.) It's not 360 photography.

The "blending" of virtual and augmented reality is made possible by two facts. First, all you need is a camera lashed to VR goggles in order to stream "reality" into a virtual reality scenario. Second, computers can augment, modify, tweak, change and distort video in real time to any degree desired by programmers. This leaves us word people confused about what to call something. "Video" and "computer generated" exist on a smooth spectrum. It's not one or the other.

This will be especially confusing for the public later this year, because it all goes mainstream with the introduction of the iPhone 8 (or whatever Apple will call it) and iOS 11, both of which are expected to hit the market within a month or two.

The Apple App Store will be flooded with apps that will not only do VR, AR, MR, 360 video and heads-up display content (when the iPhone is inserted into goggles) but that will creatively blend them in unanticipated combinations. Adding more confusion, some of the most advanced platforms, such as Microsoft Hololens, Magic Leap, Meta 2, Atheer AiR and others, will not be capable of doing virtual reality.

Cheap phones inserted into cardboard goggles can do VR and all the rest. But Microsoft's Hololens cannot.

All these labels are still useful for describing most of these new kinds of media and platforms. Individual apps may in fact offer mixed reality or virtual reality exclusively.

Over time we'll come to see these media in a hierarchy, with heads-up displays at the bottom and virtual reality at the top. Heads-up display devices like Google Glass can do only that. But "mixed reality" platforms can do mixed reality, augmented reality and heads-up display. "Virtual reality" platforms (those with cameras attached) can do it all.

Word meanings evolve and shift over time. At first, alternative word use is "incorrect." Then it's acceptable in some circles, but not others. Eventually, if enough people use the formerly wrong usage, it becomes right. This is how language evolves.

A great example is the word "hacker." Originally, the word referred to an "enthusiastic and skilful computer programmer or user." Through widespread misuse, however, the word has come to primarily mean "a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data."

Prescriptivists and purists argue that the old meaning is still primary or exclusive. But it's not. A word's meaning is decided by how a majority of people use it, not by rules, dictionaries or authority.

I suspect that over time the blurring of media will confuse the public into calling VR, AR, MR, 360 video and heads-up display "virtual reality" as the singular umbrella term that covers it all. At the very least, all these media will be called VR if they're experienced through VR-capable equipment.

And if we're going to pick an umbrella term, that's the best one. It's still close enough to describe all these new media. And in fact only VR devices can do it all.

Welcome to the fluid, flexible multimedia world of heads-up display, 360 video, mixed reality, augmented reality and virtual reality.

It's all one world now. It's all one thing. Just call it "virtual reality."

See the rest here:

How to differentiate between virtual and augmented reality - Computerworld

Dawn Jewell recently treated a patient haunted by a car crash. The patient had developed acute anxiety over the cross streets where the crash occurred, unable to drive a route that carried so many painful memories.

So Jewell, a psychologist in Colorado, treated the patient through a technique called exposure therapy, providing emotional guidance as they revisited the intersection together.

But they did not physically return to the site. They revisited it through virtual reality.

Jewell is among a handful of psychologists testing a new service from a Palo Alto startup called Limbix that offers exposure therapy through Daydream View, the Google headset that works in tandem with a smartphone.

It provides exposure in a way that patients feel safe, she said. We can go to a location together, and the patient can tell me what theyre feeling and what theyre thinking.

The service re-creates outdoor locations by tapping into another Google product, Street View, a vast online database of photos that delivers panoramic scenes of roadways and other locations around the world. Using these virtual street scenes, Jewell has treated a second patient who struggled with anxiety after being injured by another person outside a local building.

The service is also designed to provide treatment in other ways, like taking patients to the top of a virtual skyscraper so they can face a fear of heights or to a virtual bar so they can address an alcohol addiction.

Backed by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, Limbix is less than 1 year old. The creators of its new service, including its chief executive and co-founder, Benjamin Lewis, worked in the seminal virtual reality efforts at Google and Facebook.

The hardware and software they are working with is still very young, but Limbix builds on more than two decades of research and clinical trials involving virtual reality and exposure therapy. At a time when much-hyped headsets like the Daydream and Facebooks Oculus are still struggling to find a wide audience in the world of gaming let alone other markets psychology is an area where technology and medical experts believe this technology can be a benefit.

As far back as the mid-1990s, clinical trials showed that this kind of technology could help treat phobias and other conditions, like post-traumatic stress disorder.

Traditionally, psychologists have treated such conditions by helping patients imagine they are facing a fear, mentally creating a situation where they can address their anxieties. Virtual reality takes this a step further.

We feel pretty confident that exposure therapy using VR can supplement what a patients imagination alone can do, said Skip Rizzo, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California who has explored such technology for 20 years.

Barbara Rothbaum helped pioneer the practice at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, and her work spawned a company called Virtually Better, which has long offered virtual reality exposure therapy tools to some doctors and hospitals through an older breed of headset. According to one clinical trial she helped build, virtual reality was just as effective as trips to airports in treating the fear of flying, with 90 percent of patients eventually conquering their anxieties.

Such technology has also been effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans. Unlike treatments built solely on imagination, Rothbaum said, virtual reality can force patients to face their past traumas.

PTSD is a disorder of avoidance. People dont want to think about it, she said. We need them to be engaged emotionally, and with virtual reality, its harder for them to avoid that.

Now, headsets like Googles Daydream, which works in tandem with common smartphones, and Facebooks Oculus, the self-contained $400 headset that sparked the recent resurgence in virtual reality technologies, could bring this kind of therapy to a much wider audience.

Virtually Better built its technology for virtual reality hardware that sold for several thousands of dollars. Today, Limbix and other companies, including a Spanish startup called Psious, can offer services that are far less expensive. Now Limbix is beginning to offer its tools to psychologists and other therapists outside its initial test. The service is free for now, with the company planning to sell more advanced tools at some point.

After testing the Limbix offering, Jewell said it allowed patients to face their anxieties in more controlled ways than they otherwise could. At the same time, such a tool can truly give patients the feeling that they are being transported to a different locations at least in some cases.

Standing atop a virtual skyscraper, for instance, can cause anxiety even in those who are relatively comfortable with heights. Experts warn that a service like the one offered by Limbix requires the guiding hand of trained psychologists while still in development.

Limbix combines technical and medical expertise. One key employee, Scott Satkin, is a robotics and artificial intelligence researcher who worked on the Daydream project at Google. Limbix also works with its own psychologist, Sean Sullivan, who continues to run a therapy practice in San Francisco.

Sullivan is using the new service to treat patients, including a young man who recently developed a fear of flying, something that causes anxiety simply when he talks about it. Using the service alongside Sullivan, the young man, who asked that his name be withheld for privacy reasons, spent several sessions visiting a virtual airport and, eventually, flying on a virtual plane.

In some ways, the young man said, the service is still less than perfect. Like the Street View scenes Jewell uses in treating her patients, some of this virtual reality is static, built from still images. But like the rest of the virtual reality market, these tools are still evolving toward more realistic scenes.

And even in its current form, the service can be convincing. The young man recently took a flight across the country here in the real world.

Cade Metz is a New York Times writer.

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A new way for therapists to get inside heads: virtual reality - SFGate

Rainbow Crow

Virtual Reality Toons Steal the Spotlight at SIGGRAPH

Working in VR is like jumping out of a plane, said acclaimed animation director Jorge Gutierrez (The Book of Life, El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera). Then, when you pull the parachute, rats come out! That was one of the many wise and hilarious insights shared by Gutierrez and several other animation directors who are working with the Virtual Reality format at this past weeks SIGGRAPH Confab in Los Angeles.

The Virtual Reality Theater, which was booked solid each day and had eager fans lining up early in the morning to score tickets, proved to be one of the highlights of the popular event. Among the cutting-edge projects selected for this program were Eugene Chungs Ardens Wake (Penrose Studios), Tyler Hurds Chocolate (Gentle Manhands), Saschka Unselds Dear Angelica (Oculus Story Studio), Eric Darnells Rainbow Crow (Baobab Studios), Jorge Gutierrezs Son of Jaguar (Google ATAP), Scot Stafford and Chromospheres Sonaria (Google ATAP), and Dan Efergans We Wait (Aardman Animations).

On Wednesday (August 2), four of the programs talented directors discussed the challenges and rewards of creating animated content in the brave, new world of VR animation. Working in this new format is all about speaking a new language, which were making up as we go along, said Chung, director and founder of Penrose Studio. Its as if youre trying to speak Swahili, but you only know how to speak French. Of course, its even harder, because Swahili exists, but were just inventing this new [VR] language.

Darnell, a DreamWorks veteran whose many feature credits include Antz and the Madagascar movies, praised the new possibilities of the medium. When you go to a movie or a play, its a very passive experience, compared to gaming, where youre the main character in the entire universe, said the director of Baobab Studios Rainbow Crow project. VR is more like real life. You get invested in the immersion that it brings to the world. You can still be the main character in your life story, but there could be bigger things happening around you. We can create this experience where the interactivity is fueled less by winning but more about empathy and caring for the characters, so you want to help them. I hope that we can start to approach that kind of inspired interactivity, which is closer to real life.

Trials and Errors

The experimental nature of the relatively new medium is both a blessing and a curse. On the technical side, you need to get all that data through the tiny pipeline of real-time rendering. Its a real challenge, especially when you are pushing very complex rigs and very complicated, subtle animation capabilities, explained Darnell. On Rainbow Crow, we had a monumental engineering challenge and effort, which took our scientists months to develop, because we are trying to create a storybook quality to make all the surfaces feel soft and connected.

Opening new venues for exploration is also one of the biggest benefits of the medium.

Chocolate is a music video that allows you to participate in it in a limited capacity, said the shorts director Hurd. It makes you feel like youre immersed. What I learned from the previous short I did is that the audience wants to explore, they dont want to sit and watch something passively. What I took from that is that you shouldnt make them focus too much. Let them explore and do whatever they want. Give them rewards for exploring and offer them fun moments. It is all about trying to stir this joyful feeling out of the viewer as much as possible.

Gutierrez, who is putting the finishing touches on his short Son of Jaguar, pointed out that when he first starting working in VR, he felt that the art has to come before the user experience. I thought if the audience isnt looking at the right place, then f*** you, audience, he joked. Obviously, that wasnt the right approach, and we all started learning. The way I approached it was to look to the past. Think of it as a play, and you get to have the best seat in the house We were told dont move the camera, dont cut it a certain way, but we said f*** that! Lets do what were not supposed to do. Sure enough, some of the things we did were too crazy and people got really upset, so we learned from those mistakes.

Whats amazing about this medium is that you do these things, and you get instant reactions. Instant vomit makes you realize that maybe you shouldnt do something. We wanted to make everything feel organic. Its like you get extra dessert if you do it right!

Both Darnell and Chung mentioned the importance of reviewing all the details of a project in the VR format. You can look at something in Maya, and you think that the characters are all in the right positions, said Darnell. Then you get the VR headsets and realize the characters are actually ten feet away from you. Its really impossible to know what you are getting until you get it all done. Working with conventional storyboards for VR helps you much less than it does for traditional films. As the industry grows, we can build bigger tool kits and find new ways to grow. I dont even know how long an audience will tolerate being in these headsets. So, keeping them short makes sense for us right now.

As always, Gutierrez got a big laugh from the crowd with another one of his perfect and hilarious analogies. We have about 30 people working in Son of Jaguar right now, he said. Were still not done. I feel like the baby is coming out, but the baby is wearing golf shoes and kicking hard and theres blood everywhere. The mom may not make it, but the baby is going to be beautiful!

Heres Gutierrez talking about Son of Jaguar at Annecy:

Behind the Scenes of Baobab Studios Rainbow Crow

Maestro by Penrose Studios

Tyler Hurd on making Chocolate

Son of Jaguar

Rainbow Crow

Ardens Wake

Chocolate

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Virtual Reality Toons Steal the Spotlight at SIGGRAPH - Animation Magazine

Photo Lucasfilm and the Void, a Utah start-up, plan to build Star Wars virtual-reality experiences at Disney shopping malls. Credit ILMxLAB

LOS ANGELES Disney is already building lavish new Star Wars rides at its theme parks. On Thursday Disney unveiled additional plans for immersive Star Wars attractions at its shopping malls.

Lucasfilm, the Disney division that manages everything Star Wars, and the Void, a Utah start-up focused on walk-through virtual-reality experiences, plan to offer an attraction called Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire at Downtown Disney in Anaheim, Calif., and Disney Springs, which is part of Walt Disney World outside Orlando, Fla. The companies said the experience would open beginning this holiday season.

The companies gave few additional details, omitting how much tickets would cost or exactly what participants would encounter. The Void described Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire this way in a news release, Guests will move freely throughout the untethered, social and multisensory experience as they interact and engage with friends, family and Star Wars characters.

The attraction will probably be similar to one the Void created last year at Madame Tussauds in New York. Featuring a Ghostbusters story line and costing $20 a person, that experience allows participants outfitted with special virtual-reality gear to feel as if they are searching for ghosts in a New York apartment building. Each person (four people can participate at once) carries a plastic gun that becomes a functioning proton pack, just like in the Ghostbusters films, through the magic of virtual reality.

It is easy to imagine the Void creating Star Wars lightsaber fights using the same technology. The Void, which participates in Disneys accelerator program and prefers to call its offerings hyper-reality, is collaborating with Lucasfilms immersive entertainment division, ILMxLAB, on the Secrets of the Empire project.

The Void is a leader in an area of entertainment that big media companies like Disney see as growth opportunity. Imax has also opened virtual-reality locations that offer multiple experiences like the video arcades of yesteryear and a start-up called Dreamscape Immersive, run by a former Disney executive, plans to unveil virtual reality experiences in the fall.

A version of this article appears in print on August 4, 2017, on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Immersive Star Wars Attractions Due at Disney Malls.

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Virtual-Reality 'Star Wars' Attractions Coming to Disney Malls - New York Times

Learning Delivery

You can have top-notch design and the best trainers possible but the fact remains that most effective learning happens on the job. The ideal situation is to put employees to work right away but minimize the risk of mistakes. Virtual reality training programs are beginning to make that possibility a reality.

In late July, Google experimented with training with virtual reality by pitting two groups against each other to make the best cup of espresso. One group put on VR headsets and the other watched training videos on YouTube. In the end, neither made a great cup of coffee but the VR group did make fewer mistakes while brewing their cup in less time.

So is training with virtual reality still futuristic dreaming or reality? It depends on the industry.

VR More Than Just PR

In the construction industry, companies like Hong Kong-based Gammon Construction Ltd. and San Francisco-based Bechtel are already using VR to train their employees. Bechtel works with wearable technology company Human Condition Safety to improve site safety, prevent injuries and make training more fun for construction workers.

VR creates a much more immersive and engaging environment for training the workforce, said Chris Bunk, HCS chief operating officer.

Bunk said they have created four training modules and are launching a new one roughly every month and a half. Modules cover topics like hazard identification, forklift training, scaffolding training and iron worker training. Safety is the biggest benefit, he said.

People go up on a high rise doing iron work and when they get out on the beam for the first time the heights get to them more than they expected and they may feel like they have to cling to the beam or use their fall protection, Bunk said. We give them the opportunity to get acclimated to that environment beforehand.

Similarly, in forklift training VR gives employees an opportunity to practice on a test course.

The course has hazards like somebody walking up right in front of you, Bunk said. Thats the type of thing thats very difficult to simulate in real training because you dont want someone to accidentally get hit.

Another benefit of VR training is that employees like it. When set up in a classroom, the rest of the class can see on a screen what the person who is using the VR sees.

Everyone is very engaged, sometimes even friendly competitive, Bunk said. You go from people fumbling with their phones, half falling asleep from archaic PowerPoints to something where people are getting up, engaged and enriched in the material.

Bunk said word is spreading through the construction industry and those who havent tried VR yet are eager to do so. Its to the point where training is now something that someone is asking for which is very rare in a lot of industries, Bunk said.

But VR hasnt progressed as quickly in other industries like health care.

No VR for the ER Yet

While many hospitals and medical centers use simulations, the lack of money available for training is holding the industry back from investing in VR training.

Lynne Bamford, chief learning officer at Northshore University Health System in Chicago, said theres powerful potential for VR in training but also sensitivity to spending money since revenues across the health care industry have dropped. Budgeting for learning is an ongoing balancing act, she said.

Our budgets are in really bad shape. So its very difficult to say I want to spend more money on a virtual reality training session, she said.

Bamford said she could see VR being used for simulation training to be able to acculturate people to what their setting is going to be, simulate real operations and develop employee confidence. Shes skeptical about its use in more interactive scenarios.

For leadership development, sometimes you have to have difficult disciplinary conversations, she said. Theres constant need to upskill people in that area but I dont think VR is the place for that.

Despite that, HCS Bunk said virtual reality holds real promise as it continues to mature and become more realistic.

People are realistically believing they are in these environments, almost forgetting that its virtual reality, Bunk said. You can leverage that and be able to train people in ways that you never imagined.

He predicts that VR is going to be ubiquitous in industrial training within the next 10 years and the result will more efficient, engaging and safer training.

While Bamford sees limitations in its current form, if VR training can become more interactive, the sky is the limit. More investment and effort into VR will have implications but she isnt sure what the effects will be and how long they will take to happen. Those are the big questions, she said.

Despite that hesitation, some organizations are making significant investments. The University of Nebraska Medical Center spent $118.9 million on a VR training facility that will train students using simulations, VR, augmented reality and holographic technology. It is set to open in the fall of 2018.

Tags: Construction, health care, training, virtual reality

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Virtual Reality in Training Slowly Becoming a Reality - Chief Learning Officer

AltspaceVR, the biggest social virtual reality app for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, will close today. The developers posted a farewell letter late last week explaining that "the company has run into unforeseen financial difficulty" and can't keep the service online after today.

"We had a supportive group of investors that last gave us money in 2015," wrote AltspaceVR. "It looked like we had a deal for our next round of funding, and it fell through. Some combination of this deal falling through and the general slowness of VR market growth made most of our investors reluctant to fund us further. Weve been out fundraising but have run out of time and money."

The lack of money is not for lack of players, according to the company, which says it brings in "around 35,000" monthly users, with a thousand attendees showing up for big events.

The future of AltspaceVR is now uncertain. "Wed love to see this technology, if not the company, live on in some way, and were working on that," reads the blog post. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey suggested on Twitter that he may be able to save the game, and received a response from an Altspace co-founder, but neither has said more about any attempt at resurrection.

The developer is hosting a farewell party in the game at 5 pm Pacific today before the servers shut down. It's a sad loss, as many including myself believe that VR is best used as a tool for socialization.

Continued here:

Popular virtual reality social app AltspaceVR closes today - PC Gamer

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are becoming more important as improved hardware is becoming readily available. The challenges are similar between AR and VR, but VR tends to require significantly higher resolution and processing power to deliver a good experience. AR solutions can often be implemented as part of the googles needed for hands-free AR applications. Smartphones usually have sufficient processing power to support this.

At the other end of the spectrum are VR platforms that typically require PC performance, often at the top end of the spectrum along with high performance graphics support. Resolutions of 1080p/eye are common, along with high frame rates.

Hewlett-Packards (HP) Z VR Backpack G1 Workstation and docking station (Fig. 1) targets mobile virtual reality applications. The G1 uses NVidias Quadro P5200 graphics subsystem with 16 Gbytes of video memory. It uses an Intel Core i7 vPro-based processor that makes remote management easier, and TPM 2.0 security hardware is included, as well. The backpack unit unsnaps from the harness and plugs into the docking station. The backpack harness also has quick release straps. The docking station supports up to two displays.

1. Hewlett-Packards Z VR Backpack G1 Workstation is ideal for mobile virtual reality scenarios. The unit plugs into a docking bay for development and updates.

The backpack unit running Microsoft Windows 10 is paired with a head-mounted display (HMD) like the HTC Vive (Fig. 2). HP is selling the business version with the backpack. The combination addresses major VR concerns, including performance, run time, and manageability.

2. The HP Z VR Backpack G1 Workstation can be combined with VR goggles like the HTC Vive.

The backpack unit has a pair of hot swap batteries. The HP Z VR Backpack G1 Workstation is priced at $3,299. The HTC Vive business edition is available separately. It is priced at $1,200.

There are a number of advantages to using the backpack approach in addition to the lack of a tether. The batteries can be larger, providing significantly longer run times. The higher-performance processing platforms allow for better VR rendering. In addition, the backpack enables more sophisticated applications such as collaborative design visualization and virtual reality showrooms.

HP also announced the HP Mars Home Planet project (Fig. 3) in conjunction with NVIDIA, Technicolor, Fusion, Autodesk, Unreal, Launch Forth and Vive. The idea is to create a global online co-creation VR community to reinvent life on Mars.

3. HP Mars Home Planet project will be a global online co-creation VR community to reinvent life on Mars.

Virtual reality applications are currently dominated by gaming applications where 3D environments are already available. Utilizing them in a VR presentation mode is a comparatively easy task. Commercial and industrial applications tend to be harder to generate, as ease of use and presentation quality take precedence over fast-moving game play.

There are other wearable PC solutions, but the HP Z VR Backpack G1 Workstation has a number of advantages such as its management oriented processing platform and dual, hot-swappable batteries. These can be used for AR or non-AR/VR applications as well. All it takes is a little imagination.

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HP Delivers Virtual Reality Backpack - Electronic Design

London startup Gravity Sketch has officially launched its virtual reality sketching software that lets users create and manipulate three-dimensional objects in mid-air.

Now available on Steam, the tool is intended to make 3D design more accessible for a wider audience, requiring none of the expertise that complex CAD software typically needs. It works via HTC Vive or Oculus Rift virtual reality headsets, through which users are presented with an empty environment that they can fill with models.

Gravity Sketch VR allows for free-hand drawing, but also has additional tools that lets surfaces and symmetry be manipulated, as well as control-point editing.

The virtual-reality environment allows users to change their models in three dimensions, easily shrinking and altering parts of them. Once designs are finished, they can then be transferred to CAD software for usersto work with further.

A beta version of Gravity Sketch VR was launched in January 2017, to give a small set of users a chance to test the software and provide feedback.

The team behind the software used the beta testing phase to focus particularly on vehicle and product design, and to further understand the physical side of prototyping, and how the software could support this.

"A great example of this is the curve surface tool, which was inspired by clay modelling in the automotive industry," said co-founder Oluwaseyi Sosanya, who developed the software in 2014 alongside several other Royal College of Art graduates.

"Sculptors will often use a thin piece of metal and bend it with both hands as they scrape clay across a surface to find form. We created our digital tool in the same manner using a virtual piece of metal and two-handed gesture, allowing users to extrude surfaces and manipulate them after," he told Dezeen.

Five hundred beta testers from automotive designers to architects, animators and concept artists have provided feedback on the software. The Gravity Sketch team chose professions that rely heavily on creating 3D models, and use existing design tools on a regular basis.

The team found product and car designers used Gravity Sketch VR for much of the design process, exporting files only to render them, while architects used the tool to lay out proportions and volume.

"VR hasn't reached many design studios due to the lack of VR hardware and software," said Sosanya. "When this hardware fully penetrates the industry, immersive design is bound to become an agent of change in workflows."

"We really saw how potentially disruptive this tool could be in terms of people completely doing away with a 2D workflow altogether, and starting off with concept sketches directly in 3D, in VR."

"There has been loads of effort put into creating hardware that allows for a more human touch, but nothing has really taken off or has come close to eclipsing the mouse," he added. "What AR and VR allows is the complete removal of the perspective interpretation our brains must do when we work in 3D through paper and 2D screens."

Gravity Sketch is also working on professional and enterprise versions of the software based on the beta testing feedback, which will have extra features tailored towards the end user.

The professional version will allow users to export design files into other software, and include advanced settings for importing content, editing the environment, as well as precision snapping, scaling and movement of geometry within the tool.

Enterprise versions will have the same features as the professional version, however Gravity Sketch plans to work closely with companies to understand their own workflow needs, and tailor the tool accordingly.

London studio Seymourpowell has also created a virtual reality tool aimed at automotive design, and VRtisan has also claimed to be developing VR software that lets architects creating buildings in 3D space around them.

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Originally posted here:

Gravity Sketch launches its virtual reality 3D-drawing tool to the public - Dezeen

The Mill at Broadway is using a different tool to get people interested in moving there.

Ananda Rochita, KXTV 11:15 PM. PDT August 01, 2017

The Mill at Broadway is using a different tool to get people interested in moving there.

"The virtual reality gives it that cool factor and that sense we're on the cutting edge," Kevin Smith, Project Manager, Mill at Broadway, said.

They're trying to sell a completely new neighborhood which is hard. The area is known for being industrial.

Virtual reality takes people to what the community will look like from the inside of homes to the streets.

"Being able to see the view and look out what we were able to see was really kind of nice," said AllanDudding, homeowner.

This kind of technology is really new in real estate but some brokers say they don't bother with it since homes, neighborhoods, and reputations sell themselves.

However, in this new community off of Broadway, reality is best seen through goggles.

2017 KXTV-TV

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Virtual Reality: The future of real estate for developments on the rise - ABC10