Category Archives: Virtual Reality

Jul 11, 2017, 3:29 pm EDT |By Samuel Rae, InvestorPlace Contributor

Recent analysis suggests that the global augmented and virtual reality market will reach nearly 100 million annual units sold during 2021. For perspective, less than 10 million units were sold during 2016, meaning the space will grow at a CAGR of more than 57%. Its an explosive industry, sure, but ask someone to name the top virtual or augmented reality stocks available today and youll no doubt get the same standard response Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and Sony Corp (ADR) (NYSE:SNE).

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Facebooks Oculus Rift hashaving sold just shy of 250,000 unitsby the end of 2016, and Sony just announcedthat it has topped 1 million sales of PlayStation VR. Both companies are indeed some of the front runners in the space, pioneering what amounts to a brand new industry and doing so with some degree of success.

These arent the only exposures available to an investor looking to get in on the action, however.

Here are three companies set to benefit from the growth of the VR/AR market, none of which are Facebook or Sony.

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Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, http://investorplace.com/2017/07/three-virtual-reality-stocks-arent-facebook-sony/.

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3 Virtual Reality Stocks (That Aren't Facebook or Sony) - Investorplace.com

Adoption of virtual reality (VR) headsets hasnt grown by leaps and bounds. For one, the devices arent cheap. While there are affordable options out there, some can leave a substantial dent in a consumers wallet.

And many consumers dont want to shell out money for a device they feel doesnt have enough content. But video may change their perception.

A study of VR device users worldwide by Ericsson found that more than half (54%) of respondents felt that VR devices will be the new screens for video. And almost as many (53%) said video will be one of the most popular uses of VR.

Just over half of respondents think video in VR will become popular because it will combine with social networking.

But not everyone had a positive attitude toward video in VR. In fact, over a third of respondents (38%) felt that watching video via a VR headset was restrictive, because they would only watch it alone and not share the experience with anyone else.

And theres also the question of quality. A third of VR device users felt their video experience via a headset would be restricted because of poor resolution.

VR has been slower to catch on in the US, and will not reach mass adoption in the foreseeable future, according to eMarketer.

eMarketer expects just 22.4 million people in the US will engage with a form of VR at least monthly this year, with that figure increasing to 49.2 million by 2019.

But while VR headsets provide a more immersive experience, engagement will remain low due to their often high cost. This year, only 2.9% of the US population will use a VR headset at least monthly, eMarketer estimates, with that number growing to just 5.2% by 2019.

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Is Video a Game Changer for Virtual Reality? - eMarketer

By RONALD BLUM, AP Baseball Writer

MIAMI BEACH Nicholas Montes put on goggles and a catcher's mitt and crouched.

The 13-year-old will never catch a 104 mph pitch from Aroldis Chapman. But at the All-Star FanFest, he felt what it's like to be Buster Posey snagging virtual strikes.

"It like I was actually in the game. When I was catching, I felt the ball move and everything," the 13-year-old from Miami said enthusiastically Sunday. "And then when I saw it go in my glove, I tried touching the ball, but I felt the remote control thing. So it was pretty cool."

Developed by GMR Marketing, the Esurance Behind The Plate With Buster Posey VR Experience allows fans to "catch" fastballs, curveballs and sliders from a generic pitcher at velocities ranging from 86-93 mph.

"I've always said that I thought it would be cool for the average fan to either step in the box or like this get behind the plate and get the same sense of what it's like to see a 90-plus, 95-mile an hour fastball coming your way," Posey explained last week.

Esurance Insurance Services Inc., a subsidiary of Allstate Corp., became a sponsor of Major League Baseball in 2015 and signed Posey as a brand ambassador. The company had a 180-degree photo experience at the 2015 FanFest in Cincinnati, then provided 360-degree videos of fans taking swings last year in San Diego.

In a dual setup at FanFest, which opened Friday and runs through Tuesday, people get to signal for three pitches over about 90 seconds as Posey's recorded voice offers tips. They can choose the pitch type by pointing their glove toward an icon on the screen, triggering a sensor. When a pitch is successfully caught, the person hears and feels the mitt snap.

"It is as real as it can be," Danny Devarona, a 48-year-old who coaches youth baseball in Miami Lakes, said after taking his turn.

Commercial and social media content was shot over two days during spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Posey's San Francisco Giants train. Posey's voice-over was recorded after the season started.

"Are you ready? All right, let's see what you've got," Posey's voice tells fans. "This guy throws a nasty curve. The trick is to keep your glove below the ball and your eye on it. ... Keep your chin down and be ready to slide to your right, because this one might hit the dirt."

"Nice job! Right in the pocket," he tells fans when they succeed.

"Yeah, that was a tricky one," he says when they fail.

Based on PITCH f/x data, breaks of 38-to-52 inches are simulated.

"Fans will receive a social-sharable video for them that they can then distribute to their friends," said Kristen Gambetta, Esurance's brand partnerships manager. "With VR, there's something really entertaining about seeing people's facial reactions and kind of seeing their movements and how they react to having a ball flying at their face."

Several thousand fans were expected to put on the electronic "tools of ignorance" over the five days. And unlike real catchers, they won't have to stuff sponges in the glove to absorb the impact.

"Let's just say I'm pretty impressed. I don't think I can ever catch or hit for that matter a Major League Baseball curveball," said Pablo Souki, a 38-year-old from Venezuela who lives in Miami. "That was pretty eye-opening."

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Virtual reality baseball a hit at the All-Star FanFest - Daily Commercial

A team at NPR is the winner of a grant to develop virtual-reality stories that will transport listeners to audio-rich soundscapes.

The NPR project is among 11 winners of the Journalism 360 Challenge awards announced Tuesday. Presented by the Knight Foundation, Google News Lab and the Online News Association, the grants of $15,000$30,000 support the use of immersive storytelling in news.

Other winners include efforts to make immersive storytelling more accessible to community and ethnic media and to help journalists and others create location-based data visualizations in a virtual-reality format.

NPRs video team includes Bronson Arcuri, CJ Riculan, Maia Stern and Nick Michael, who worked on the Knight Foundation grant application.

NPRs team is receiving $15,000 to develop best practices for immersive storytelling audio by producing two virtual reality stories with a particular focus on sound-rich scenes, according to a statement from the grantors.

Place is important in 360-degree video, NPR Video Producer Nick Michael told Current. And audio is also crucial for understanding; spatial audio allows users to see and hear themselves in space. 360 experiences tend to focus on digital immersion, Michael said, but audio immersion has lagged behind. That gives NPR and the world class audio experience in our building an opportunity, Michael said.

NPR has already been dabbling in 360 experiments. Last year, NPR Music partnered with immersive media company RYOT to produce a 360-degree Tiny Desk concert featuring the band Wilco.

A not-yet-published experience for the program Jazz Night in America captured an immersive field-recording performance in Glendora, Miss., with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith playing at the site where Emmett Tills murderers dropped the youths body into a river. Smith, a Mississippi native, played a selection from a songhe had written in Tills honor. The trumpeterfloated down the river in a canoe at sunset.

Los Angeles NPR station KCRW has also experimented with 360 music performances.

Most virtual reality experiences dont include audio that changes, Michael said. A little over a year ago, YouTube introduced spatial audio for 360-degree and virtual reality videos.

Thats really valuable for locating people in a scene, Michael said. But a work of journalism may want to add a host or reporters voice. Unless that person is physically in the environment talking to the viewer, it doesnt make sense for their voice to be in the space, Michael said.

Producers can work with both spatialized and non-spatialized audio fields, according to Michael. One challenge they face is how to set up audio and video in editing software when one field is spatialized and the other is not.

Weve been interested in trying to figure out lower-touch ways to do 360, and as an audio organization, were particularly interested in how these different spatial and traditional audio components might mix together, Michael said.

NPRs team isnt the first to experiment with dual audio fields, Michael said, but it aims to figure out how to easily gather audio and process it via dual fields. The team plans to share its findings through NPR training team sites and other mediums.

NPR is also considering the level of resources to devote to 360 presentations. Its very cool, but even as a team internally, weve been asking ourselves, in theory, How many stories have we seen that can only be told through 360, as opposed to flat video? Michael said.

Theyve concluded most stories dont need 360 but do benefit from the technology. Stories about energy lend themselves to 360 one could transport listeners to the installation and maintenance of wind turbines. But the team has yet to settle on stories to experiment with.

NPRs team also wants to discover and standardize production practices so the work feels less experimental.

Michael expects the team will include three producers, possibly one reporter, and a larger crew that reviews and troubleshoots. Audio engineers may also consult and travel.

Grantees will build on their ideas over the next six to 12 months, attend the ONA conference in Washington, D.C., in October and share their findings at a demo day early next year.

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NPR wins award to experiment with virtual-reality audio - Current

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. Nicholas Montes put on goggles and a catchers mitt and crouched.

The 13-year-old will never catch a 104 mph pitch from Aroldis Chapman. But at the All-Star FanFest, he felt what its like to be Buster Posey snagging virtual strikes.

It was like I was actually in the game. When I was catching, I felt the ball move and everything, the Miami teen said enthusiastically Sunday. And then when I saw it go in my glove, I tried touching the ball, but I felt the remote control thing. So it was pretty cool.

Developed by GMR Marketing, the Esurance Behind The Plate With Buster Posey VR Experience allows fans to catch fastballs, curveballs and sliders from a generic pitcher at velocities ranging from 86-93 mph.

Ive always said that I thought it would be cool for the average fan to either step in the box or like this get behind the plate and get the same sense of what its like to see a 90-plus, 95-mile an hour fastball coming your way, Posey explained last week.

Esurance Insurance Services Inc., a subsidiary of Allstate Corp., became a sponsor of Major League Baseball in 2015 and signed Posey as a brand ambassador. The company had a 180-degree photo experience at the 2015 FanFest in Cincinnati, then provided 360-degree videos of fans taking swings last year in San Diego.

In a dual setup at FanFest, which opened Friday and runs through Tuesday, people get to signal for three pitches over about 90 seconds as Poseys recorded voice offers tips. They can choose the pitch type by pointing their glove toward an icon on the screen, triggering a sensor. When a pitch is successfully caught, the person hears and feels the mitt snap.

It is as real as it can be, Danny Devarona, a 48-year-old who coaches youth baseball in Miami Lakes, said after taking his turn.

Commercial and social media content was shot over two days during spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Poseys San Francisco Giants train. Poseys voice-over was recorded after the season started.

Are you ready? All right, lets see what youve got, Poseys voice tells fans. This guy throws a nasty curve. The trick is to keep your glove below the ball and your eye on it. Keep your chin down and be ready to slide to your right, because this one might hit the dirt.

Nice job! Right in the pocket, he tells fans when they succeed.

Yeah, that was a tricky one, he says when they fail.

Based on PITCH f/x data, breaks of 38-to-52 inches are simulated.

Fans will receive a social-sharable video for them that they can then distribute to their friends, said Kristen Gambetta, Esurances brand partnerships manager. With VR, theres something really entertaining about seeing peoples facial reactions and kind of seeing their movements and how they react to having a ball flying at their face.

Several thousand fans were expected to put on the electronic tools of ignorance over the five days. And unlike real catchers, they wont have to stuff sponges in the glove to absorb the impact.

Lets just say Im pretty impressed. I dont think I can ever catch, or hit for that matter, a Major League Baseball curveball, said Pablo Souki, a 38-year-old from Venezuela who lives in Miami. That was pretty eye-opening.

Read more from the original source:

Take me out to the screen: Virtual reality baseball a hit - Savannah Morning News

"I believe the most important use for this technology is simulating difficult situations for inmates that they must work through on their own, while still having a safety net," said Dr. Turner Nashe, GTL Senior Vice President of Educational Services. "An inmate with anger issues could be placed in a situation where they must deal with that emotion. There would still be controls to manage the situation if the inmate's anger gets out of control. They can also continually work through their issues until they are able to control their reactions."

GTL's virtual reality content could also be used to:

"The possibilities are exciting," continued Dr. Nashe. "Virtual reality provides the ability to positively influence an inmate before re-entry. It's a great way to better help inmates reintegrate in society."

About GTLGTL leads the fields of correctional technology, education, and government payment services with visionary solutions and customized products that integrate seamlessly to deliver security, financial value, and ease of operation for its customers and aid in rehabilitation and the reduction of recidivism rates for inmates. As a trusted industry leader, GTL provides services to 32 state departments of corrections, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and 79 of the 100 largest city/county facilities, including 40 of the top 50, which comprise 1.8 million inmates nationwide. To learn more about GTL, please visit http://www.gtl.net or our social media sites on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Press Contact: Vinnie Mascarenhas 703-955-3894 vinnie.mascarenhas@gtl.net

View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gtl-releases-virtual-reality-platform-for-corrections-300485211.html

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GTL | The Corrections Innovation Leader | Home

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GTL Releases Virtual Reality Platform for Corrections - PR Newswire (press release)

It is the harsh reality of motoring that no-one ever wants to experience.

But young drivers in Carmarthenshire have been given a shocking insight into the events before, during and after a fatal car crash - using virtual reality technology - to help drive home the road safety message.

Aimed at young people who are about to the begin driving or have already passed their test, the event used immersive 360 goggles that play a film which features a car journey taken by a young driver and his friends.

The viewer has a 360-degree point of view from the front passenger seat.

During the journey the viewer experiences certain behaviours and factors that contribute to road traffic collisions with the consequences proving fatal for one of the other passengers.

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The initiative, organsied by the Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service along with Go Safe Cymru, Dyfed Powys Police , Welsh Ambulance Trust and the Institute of Advanced Motoring was featured at a Pre-Drivers Safety Event at Parc y Scarlets, Llanelli.

Road safety watch manager Emyr Davies said: The film that feature on the Immersive 360 Goggles is very effective and accompanies a lesson plan, that we as partners deliver, and centres around behavioural change.

New and young drivers are good drivers, otherwise they wouldnt pass their driving test. What the statistics show is that a higher proportion of young drivers will experience a road accident with one or more passengers in the vehicle.

The learning outcomes from these events are to make young people aware of the dangers of peer pressure and to resist certain pressures to drive faster or be distracted by a number of factors, such as using mobile phones.

Certain peer pressures can be positive; our message to passengers is to encourage responsible driving to maintain their own safety as well as other road users.

By working in collaboration with our partners, we are promoting the Fatal 5 messages - Dont drink and drive; kill your speed; dont get careless; wear your seat belt and switch off your mobile phone before driving a vehicle.

Statistics released by the Welsh Government revealed that young people aged between 16 and 24 represented 12 per cent of the population of Wales in 2015, but between 2011-2015, the group accounted for around a third of all passenger casualties.

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Virtual reality is being used to show young Welsh drivers the shocking reality of a fatal car crash - WalesOnline

As we enter the era of self-driving vehicles, one vital but slightly morbid area of research concerns the ethical codes these vehicles should follow when making the kind of life-or-death choices every driver dreads: whether to steer off the road at speed rather than hit a child, for example, or make a deliberate crash into one vehicle to avoid causing a pile up at a junction.

Instinctively, most of us will have strong and complex feelings about thisone of the best known studies, conducted at MIT in 2015, found that people wanted self-driving cars to make utilitarian decisions that would minimize death toll even if it sacrificed the car's occupants, so long as they weren't personally occupying the car. The difficulty is incorporating these preferences into algorithms that will be both acceptable to vehicle consumers and compatible with the highest levels of public safety.

Now, a team of German researchers have put test subjects into virtual reality and had them make split-second decisions between crashing into adults, children, animals, and inanimate objects to see if understanding the way we make tough decisions in a simulated environment will help build a model of human behavior in the real world.

In the study, published last week in Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience, volunteers put on an Oculus Rift headset that simulated driving a vehicle down a suburban street. In front of the car, a pair of obstaclessometimes people or animals, sometimes inanimate objectswould appear in two lanes, and the subject had to steer the vehicle into one of them, sacrificing it to preserve the other. (Human characters were mostly static to avoid suggesting they would move out of the way.) After multiple test runs with more than a hundred subjects, the researchers put together a hierarchy of how things were valued in relation to one another. The results were mostly unsurprising: Drivers would save a human rather than an animal, and run over an adult rather than a child.

An illustration of the trolley problem, where the subject must decide whether to pull a lever and cause fewer deaths while taking responsibility for one. Image: McGeddon/Wikimedia Commons

But according to the study's authors, the specific results are less important than assessing the general suitability of VR for testing ethical scenarios. Classical studies of ethics usually rely on descriptions of abstract situationsthe "trolley problem" being one of the most iconic (and now memeworthy)but the authors' claim is that immersive digital environments can give more realistic results by presenting situations in a more visceral way.

"I think virtual reality is a breakthrough for empirical ethics, because without this there really is no way to reproduce in a controlled setting an experiment which really touches upon matters of life and death," said Leon Stfeld, PhD candidate in cognitive science at Osnabrck University and lead author of the study, in a call with Motherboard. "Studies show that there are vast differences between abstract situations and behavior in more realistic scenarios, so I think that VR will be a very useful, broadly used tool in the future."

Stfeld says that the findings point to the fact that a simple "value-of-life" model, in which different classes of people or objects are ranked higher or lower in a potential crash situation, is a good approximation to the way humans make decisions, while also being easy to convey to the public.

The question of whether we should choose easily explainable solutions over a minimization-of-death solution when designing automation is open to debate, as is the overall validity of using virtual reality to approximate real life, especially when other factors like the human instinct for self-preservation have been left out.

But when algorithms do start to make decisions in life-or-death situations, designing for transparency and accountability is an important value in itself.

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Self-Driving Cars Will Get Ethics Lessons in Virtual Reality - Motherboard

London: Scientists have developed a new virtual reality (VR) app that enables users to see Scotlands capital city Edinburgh as it may have been in the 16th century.

The smartphone app, developed by researchers from the University of St Andrews in the UK lets visitors explore the city, Edinburgh castle and its surrounding landscape.

It is striking how the cityscape is both familiar and different from the city today. Instead of the new town there stands a great loch yet the castle stands guard over the city much as it does now, said Sarah Kennedy, digital designer of the University of St Andrewss spinout company Smart History.

Virtual Time Binoculars: Edinburgh 1544 provides a unique window into the capital around the time of the birth of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Visitors will experience the digital reconstruction through a virtual reality app that hosts a range of virtual reality headset usage, as well as a web resource.

We intend for it to be the first of many Virtual Time Binocular apps with depictions of St Andrews and Perth already in the pipeline, said Alan Miller, director of Smart History.

We have had interest from across Europe and Latin America, so we expect our virtual time travel platform to go global, said Miller.

Using their mobile phones and VR headsets, users will become virtual time-travellers as they are immersed in historic scenes, stereoscopic video and 360 degree images.

Visitors will be able to explore present day St Giles Kirk and the Grassmarket as they learn more about their 16th century equivalents in parallel. Guided virtual tours of the Royal Mile will allow virtual time-travellers to compare Edinburghs past to its present.

The app allows users to view the reconstructions either in full screen mode or through more immersive virtual reality mode. Hotspots highlight the scenes with more facts and historical images for users to learn about the location.

The digital reconstruction is inspired by a drawing created by the English military engineer Richard Lee, who accompanied the Earl of Hertfords May 1544 expedition.

Lees drawing, now held by the British Library, is one of the oldest surviving depictions of Edinburgh, and became the defining English impression of Scotlands capital.

St Andrews researchers supplemented the information from Lees plan with archaeological evidence, 16th-century written sources, and information about the geography of the modern city, to create an updated reconstruction of Edinburgh.

The Virtual Time Binoculars project is ground breaking for digital reconstruction because it uses technology already in peoples pockets, said Iain Oliver, head of Systems for Smart History.

We have developed a software framework which will enable us to continue to send people back in time, Oliver said.

First Published: Sun, Jul 09 2017. 01 59 PM IST

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New virtual reality app lets you visit 16th century Edinburgh - Livemint

Smaller than a golf ball, a miniature boxwood prayer bead from medieval Holland, depicting heaven and hell, is now in another avatar: A virtual reality display, where a user can walk through its layers, taking in details of the minute carvings at multiple angles, look at the face of one figure that, in real life, would be the size of a pinhead.

This was among the exhibits at the recent Virtual and Augmented Reality Conference and Expo (or VRTO).

Featuring nearly 100 speakers and 50 exhibitors, VRTO was in its second year and brought bleeding-edge technology to the space at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Enhanced acceptance of VRTO has obviously pleased its founder and executive director Keram Malicki-Sanchez, as he said, It has doubled in terms of the number of attendees and my effort to get those people through the door is probably half.

VRTO founder and executive director Keram Malicki-Sanchez. (Captive Camera)

Those at VRTO represented tech majors like Google, Microsoft, IMAX, AMD, with participants from NASA Ames Research, and various universities.

This was where you could experience VR in a 360 environment, literally, in what is described as IglooVision, while watching a immersive short feature starring Godzilla and made by Google, as a haptic harness created a sense of motion, feeling tremors and shakes.

VRTO provided an inkling of the sectors that resurgent VR tech may impact in the near future: From medicine to manufacturing, movies and gaming, to research.

Or even philanthrophy, as with GivLuv, which allows viewers to virtually experience the stories of people impacted by charities across the world and for the first time make a contribution through their headsets.

All of this matches Malicki-Sanchez vision for VRTO to see it at the very dawn of a medium which is finally coming into its own, steer the conversation towards true discovery, true experimentation, broad thinking.

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Canada conference and expo helping virtual reality gain widespread acceptance - Hindustan Times