Category Archives: Virtual Reality

by Elizabeth Tyree & Priscilla Kaiser

Emma Elliott created her own virtual reality complete with sound effects (Photo: Priscilla Kaiser)

LYNCHBURG, Va. (WSET) -- It's one thing to learn how to master a virtual reality game and another to build one, but that's the project one senior at Lynchburg College decided to take on as her final project.

Emma Elliott created her own virtual reality complete with sound effects.

"I told the game to do that. I wrote the code to do that," she said. "Most of it I was learning on my own, it was kind of uncharted territory," Elliott said.

As a senior at Lynchburg College she decided to create the virtual reality video game for her final computer science project.

Elliott said she used software to help her create the space station scene she had hoped for that she calls "Puzzles in Space."

"You have to explore the maze to find three different buttons and that opens the door to get out and go to the next level," she said.

Elliott's professor, Doctor Joe Meehean said she's the one who took the project to the next level.

"Every computer science student does a year-long project, but not every student puts in the time and dedication that Emma does," said Dr. Meehean.

And, it took her every bit of time to master the program and bring her vision to reality.

"I'm a bit surprised, I think we're a both bit surprised at how well it had turned out," Dr. Meehean said. "She got an A, yeah, she got an A."

Also interested in the arts, especially theater, Elliott believes those skills has helped set her game apart.

"I find video games as well as virtual reality just another platform to tell a story on," she said.

Elliott says she plans to look for jobs in Engineering or Gaming when she graduates next month, and she said she wasn't sure she'd enjoy coding and building a game as much as she did.

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Lynchburg College senior creates virtual reality game - WSET

Expect VR to play a major role at CES 2016.Bloomberg Bloomberg via Getty Images

A London bar has devised a cocktail with an unusual twist, it allows the drinker to escape the city for the Scottish hills.

The whisky-based "Origin" cocktail comes with a virtual reality headset that transports you to the distillery where the spirit is from.

At 18 pounds ($23) a shot, the drink is made with 12-year-old Dalmore whisky, while the accompanying virtual reality experience aims to show guests at the bar in the One Aldwych hotel the origin of its ingredients.

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Drinkers get a tour of sweeping Scottish fields and babbling brooks where the cereal and water used in the whisky is sourced.

"We get a lot of people saying 'oh I have goose bumps' because it is happening in front of you," bar manager Pedro Paulo, who came up with the idea, told Reuters.

"When you take (the headset) off and the drink is actually right in front of you it gives people that sense of uniqueness, they feel unique," he added.

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London Bar Serves $23 Whisky Cocktail Alongside a Virtual Reality Headset - Fortune

The Hindu

Virtual reality of emptiness The Hindu At the turn of the 1970s, Gene Youngblood was dreaming up a super-concentrated form of media power through the idea of Expanded Cinema. Expanded Cinema, he fantasised, would bring together at a single node, telephones, television, cinema, ...

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Virtual reality of emptiness - The Hindu

By Charline Jao

Hollywood is embracing virtual reality, with big-named directors incorporating the medium into their body of work, and and festivals showcasing these films. Movie franchises are also using VR in campaigns and tie-ins as well, as expensive headsets like Oculus Rift and inexpensive options such as Google Cardboard as growing in popularity.

One of the better known VR movies includes Patrick Osborne's Pearl, the first VR film to earn an Academy Award nomination. In Pearl, the viewer's perspective is fixed in the passenger seat of a car as they follow the musical journey of a girl and her dad. Capturing an entire story from one fixed setting worked well for Pearl, and abrupt transitions to show time passing made what wasn't showed just as intriguing as what was.

Pearl is the first virtual reality movie to be nominated for an Oscar.

It's not a story that "had" to be in VR, but picturing it as a typical animated short with different angles and cuts reveals how restricting the view of the audience allows for another layer of interaction. Are you more curious about who's in the driver seat or in the back? Do you want to just gaze outside the window for a while and enjoy the music? Giving the viewer this freedom replicated that car ride experience, where each viewer takes their own personalized journey.

VR is certainly an exciting and new technology. But just because something is different and futuristic, doesn't mean it'll necessarily revolutionize the way we watch and make films. Are there amazing films that work amazingly in 3D and make great use of that medium? Yes (shout-out to Gravity and Up). Still, any trip to the movie theatre will no doubt include background complaints about how 3D (and VR) will make viewers dizzyand feel like a rip-off for the undoubtable increase in ticket prices. The same goes for VR now: it can be an exciting revolution without pushing "regular" film aside.

Virtual marketing

Hollywood's marketing arm is also clearly enthusiastic for virtual reality, pushing full-steam into the technology. Take Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, which developed a VR experience where curious fans could visit Allerdale Hall, the gothic mansion from the movie. A fantastic campaign, the VR short successfully captured the atmosphere and fostered curiosity about the film in only one and a half minutes. It also allowed viewer to whet their appetites, so to speak, for the full feature without giving anything away.

Crimson Peak's VR experience sent terrified viewers through a haunted hall.

For the launch of the Fantastic Beasts franchise, Harry Potter fans were able to enter a magical realm while introducing them to the new film's creatures, the dream of any Potterhead. Adult Swim's popular show Rick and Morty not only launched with VR campaigns, they've even developed a game for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. With franchises utilizing VR, more fans are likely to pick up a headset, if only out of curiosity.

Still, as much as virtual reality can transform a movie-going experience into something magical, viewers may not be so eager to toss aside what they're used toespecially when you consider the cost of VR headsets, the accessibility of VR filmmaking, or even the general persistent nausea. And use of VR doesn't mean a film or campaign will be a success. Just like with 3D, just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Adult Swim developed a VR game for its popular show "Rick and Morty"

Infinite points of view

Novelty and visuals can only make up for narrative so much, and better immersion doesn't necessarily equal better storytelling. That's a challenge VR has to confrontand certainly filmmakers, animators and others are developing pieces that try to see where VR can take them in storytelling.

There's a term in narratology known as the "focalizer." The focalizer is the person who has the main point of view, through whom the story is told. With VR, the viewer can fully occupy the body of their focalizer (not necessarily the narrator)which changes the entire way a story is told. Here, you can be a particle of dust, or even Drake.

For the horror genre this is a boon, enhancing an already scary situation for more thrills. Jaunt VR had a series of horror shorts prepared for Halloween last year. They make use of multiple perspectives, giving viewers a sense of dread that's much easier to create when you're the one walking through a creaky and dark hallway. It's therefore no surprise that the first project for Ridley Scott's RSA Films new virtual reality division is a VR companion to Alien: Covenant, as reported by the Hollywood Reporter.

VR films are also having a lot of fun playing with first-personnot only as an innovative new form for scares, but also in the field of social change. Academy Award winners Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu and Emmanuel Lubezki made headlines for their VR installation "CARNE y ARENA (Virtually present, Physically invisible)," the first VR project to be chosen for Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival.

The Cannes Film Festival will showcase its first VR Official Selection in May.

The filmmaker described the medium, and praised its ability "to allow the visitor to go through a direct experience walking in the immigrants' feet, under their skin, and into their hearts," as they told Similarly, Planned Parenthood put viewers "in the shoes of a patient entering a health center" with Across the Line, citing the critical moment we're in now regarding reproductive rights. With efforts to make change, it feels appropriate that innovative and new technology plays alongside that protest.

Whether you're looking for animated feel-good stories, a good scare, or an emotional journey in the steps of another, now's a great time to grab a headset and catch the VR wave.

-Charline Jao, GearBrain's VR intern, last reviewed the Spirit Board VR app. She's passionate about VR and how the technology is challenging the idea of narrative and filmmaking.

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Hollywood eagerly embraces virtual reality - Gearbrain (blog)

Watch a demonstration of Facebook Spaces here:

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

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

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

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

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Facebook: Not Just a Social Network Anymore - AARP News

Socialising in Facebook Spaces via VR

Facebook

By Victoria Turk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twelve months ago the Virtual Reality World Congress in Bristol, England, was a sell-out show, with over 750 attendees gawping over the latest VR hardware and production techniques.

This year's event, which took place last week, attracted even more participants -- more than 1,200 over three days -- but the mood felt decidedly less upbeat. Virtual reality, it seems, has been mugged by reality.

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Sales of VR hardwarehave fallen 40 percent behind forecasts, CCS Insight, a technology research group, said in a February report. And the VR hardware that is selling has mostly been relatively inexpensive goggles that allow people to experience VR through their smartphones, such as Samsung'sGear VR and Google's Daydream, not higher-end, dedicated headsets such as those made by Sony Corp, Facebook Inc.'s Oculus and HTC Corp.

"Some people have said that 2016 was not a very good year for VR, that perhaps virtual reality is not where we would have hoped,"Roy Taylor, vice president for alliances at semiconductor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices Inc., acknowledged in his keynote address at the conference, before going on to disputethis conclusion.

He listed a series of virtual reality achievements in 2016, including the first uses of the technology for surgery and in a courtroom, as well as several significant VR games and films.

And yet, talking to exhibitors at the conference, there was a distinct sense that virtual reality has entered the dreaded "trough of disillusionment." That's the bust part of the boom-and-bust in publicexpectationsthat precedes mass adoption of a new technology in research firm Gartner's famous "hype cycle."

"I think the problem was about hype and expectation versus reality," Stuart Gallop, Chief Executive Officer of ARiVR, a U.K. company working on product placement for brand marketing within virtual reality environments such as games and movies.

Many working in VR have run up against the hard economic reality of trying to produce content for a technology that remains, at least for the moment, fairly niche.

Daniel Kihlgren Kallander, a developer and programmer for the Swedish virtual reality startup SvrviveABAB, estimates that his company lost money on its first VR game, also called SVRVIVE, which it released for HTC's Vive platform last year. "This is a very small market right now," he said. "We need a bigger market to sustain ourselves."

This is doubly true for those working on virtual reality films, as opposed to computer games. Edward Saatchi, CEO and co-founder of Oculus Story Studio, a VR movie studio owned by Facebook's Oculus, compared early experiments in VR films to the transition from silent movies to talkies in the late 1920s, except, he said of those pioneers in sound, "at least they had a business model."

As disappointment is setting in for virtual reality, expectations are building around its less glamorous cousin, augmented reality, which is also sometimes called mixed reality because it places digitally-rendered elements in the real observed environment. In 2016, Pokemon Go, which is an augmented reality game played on smartphones, became a worldwide phenomenon. Microsoft launched its high-end AR headset, HoloLens, which has found customers mostly among industrial and business users -- such as aeronautical engineers and architects. Snap Inc.'s AR photo filters are one of the most popular features of its messaging service and Facebook has announced a big push into the field with its own AR camera filters. Many now expect Apple Inc. to introduce an augmented reality product in the next year, which might help AR to leapfrog VR to achieve mass adoption.

"Apple has not made a play yet in this space and I think they will and that it will be huge," said ARiVR's Gallop.

Technology company ABI Research says that virtual reality currently generates about 50 percent more revenue than augmented reality but that it relies heavily on hardware sales. Augmented reality, by contrast, relies more on software and in manycases can be experienced by users with their existing smartphones. ABI forecasts that AR revenues will surpass VR sales by 2019.

Virtual reality true believers, like Taylor, are dismissive of the idea that AR might outrun VR as ablockbuster consumer technology. Augmented reality requires too much training for the average consumerto learn how to integrate the digital images into the real world, Taylorsaid. "Mixing the virtual world and the real world is less natural," he said. Simply popping on a headset and diving into a completely virtual environment is, somewhat counter-intuitively, easier, he said.

ABI Research still forecasts that virtual reality device shipments will reach 110 million units by 2021 -- huge growth considering only about 6.3 million such devices were shipped last year, according to tech research company Super Data.

Taylor predicts that the virtual reality video game Fallout 4 VR, which Bethesda Softworks, a division of Rockville, Maryland-based ZeniMax Media Inc., is expected to release this year will be the event that catalyzes widespread adoption of home-based virtual reality hardware much as the game Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog helped drive adoption of Nintendo and Sega home gaming systems.

VR enthusiasts think the current "trough of disillusionment" is -- as the Gartner model would predict -- merely a temporary setback on the road to virtual reality becoming a mainstream technology-- and a cash cow. The question though, is how long the field will have to wallow in the trough.

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Virtual Reality Companies Navigate 'The Trough of Disillusionment' - Bloomberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Product pages: Adult Swim, Owlchemy Labs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHILs motion sensing area. Photo: Lockheed Martin.

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

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

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

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

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Lockheed Martin on Cutting Costs with Virtual Reality - Satellite Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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