Category Archives: Virtual Reality

Most people expect big things from the market for virtual reality (VR) gear. After all, when Facebook Inc. (FB) paid $2 billion for Oculus Rift in 2014, that pretty much put the stamp of approval on the technology and its future.

Marketing intelligence firm Tractica noted in February that the global market for VR hardware and content totaled just $592.3 million in 2016. The firm expects that total to rise to $9.2 billion by 2020.

There are a couple of hurdles, though. First is price. Facebook just dropped the price of the Oculus headset and Touch motion controllers by a total of $200 to $499 for the headset and $99 for the controller. But that's still pretty steep. There are cheaper VR devices, but Oculus has established itself as the premium player.

ALSO READ: Connected Home Technology Still Limited to Early Adopters

Another issue is connectivity. While many headsets do not require a wired connection to the PC, without such a connection performance suffers. Oculus, for example, not only requires a cable connection to the PC but to get the best VR performance out of the VR gear, you need a souped-up PC.

And once you've spent the money, what can you do with VR? Best Buy Co. Inc. (BBY) offers a list of five applications and experiences you can use right now with your new VR setup:

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5 Things You Can Do With Virtual Reality - Yahoo Finance

Easing dental worries with virtual reality

Chris Hrapsky and KARE , KARE 3:59 PM. EST March 12, 2017

Imagine being on a beach...during a root canal. One Twin Cities dentist is embracing the possibility. (Photo: KARE 11)

WAYZATA, Minn. Hattie Martinson is lying back, paper apron on and a drill buzzing away at her tooth.

The Lake Minnetonka Dental employee is doubling as a test patient. She's getting a routine filling, but she's doing it on a beach in New Zealand.

Im on a beach and theres some little boys and theyre running around in their wetsuits surfing away, said Martinson.

She is one of the first patients to test virtual reality as a way to ease pain and anxiety in the dental chair.

Traditionally, there have only been a few ways to curb these problems: local anesthetics, nitrous oxide, or general anesthesia.

Dr. Bryan Laskin of Lake Minnetonka Dental is trying out the new option after listening to a virtual realityconference and studying its correlation to pain management.

I like to think of virtual reality like digital nitrous, said Laskin. I think that VR in health care is going to take a different path than in the entertainment and gaming industry and I think we are the right people to chart that path.

There is already abundant research showing how virtual reality can help in health care. One study shows it can enhance therapy for patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Other studies claim virtual realityreduced the amount of pain burn victims experienced during treatments by up to 50 percent, and also reduced the amount of pain surgery patients felt compared to a control group.

There's all the academic research but sometimes someone's face is all you need to see to understand that this has an impact and really impacts your brain, said Chuck Olsen, CEO of Visual, a virtual realityapp and 360 video company.

Laskin says the virtual realityheadsets will be available for patients in about a month, and there is no added cost associated with it for the patient.

2017 KARE-TV

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Dentist Embraces Virtual Reality - WFMYNews2.com

Forbes

The Legal Reality Of Virtual Reality Forbes Many of the legal issues that arise (or will arise) in connection with virtual reality are tried and true intellectual property issues that are not unique to VR, but many have a unique spin given the unexplored U.S. legal terrain of the technology. 1 ...

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The Legal Reality Of Virtual Reality - Forbes

Technology companies left and right are developing new gadgets to advance virtual reality as an immersive entertainment and gaming platform. Others however, like VR producer Chris Milk, have hopes that the technologys potential will extend far beyond sheer entertainment.

One way this is being achieved is by using VR to transport viewers into the lives of others to create empathy and understanding, which weve seen in films such as Clouds Over Sidra and with New York Times The Daily 360.

Now, tech giant Google has taken on this challenge in their recent VR project, Rio: Beyond the Map, an effort to map Rio de Janeiros legendary favelas, which they launched at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

More than 1.5 million Rio residents live in the favelasequivalent to one in every five people in the city. But for many locals and tourists alike, the favelas remain an unmapped and mysterious area.

In an attempt to breakdown this invisible wall that divides Rio, Googles Beyond the Map video experience uses 360-degree footage and a virtual host whos a favela resident to take viewers on a tour to explore the favelas and tell some of the stories of the individuals who live there.

Beyond the Map began as a project called T No Mapa (Its On the Map in English), where the company worked with a local nonprofit AfroReggae to train 150 favela residents in digital mapping techniques. These efforts over the last two years have helped Google map over 26 favelas and 3,000 local businesses. The project also helped some favela residents gain a mailing address for the first time.

A narrator in one of Googles 360 videos of the favelas says, Most people only know the favelas through the newscrime, poverty, and violence. But thats only a small part of the storythe favelas are not simply a place, they are a people, and to understand them, you must go inside and see for yourself.

She later says, When you arent on the map, you dont exist. But we do exist.

Beyond the Map is just one example of how technology like VR can amplify otherwise unheard voices and stories from around the world. As VR becomes more sophisticated and affordable, more impactful and creative projects will unfold.

Image Source: Shutterstock

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How Google Is Revealing Unmapped Areas of the World in Virtual Reality - Singularity Hub

Ready to get social in virtual reality? Then hold onto your headset.

Oculus has announced a number of new features today that have everything to do with social interaction, plus added voice controls for even more convenient VR usage.

First up is Facebook Livestreaming for Gear VR. You read that right: users of the Samsung headset can stream what they're experiencing to a viewing audience.

To get streaming, look for the "Livestream to Facebook" option located in the Universal Menu. Click on this, and your livestream will launch right away, beaming out to all your pals on the world's largest social media network.

There is one small catch: Only Samsung Gear VR users outside the US can livestream right now, however Oculus says Facebook Livestreaming will arrive for every Samsung phone running the latest version of Android in the coming weeks.

Among Oculus' other announcements are new ways to be more social within a virtual reality experience and use your voice for search.

Social interaction is one of the sticking points of VR - it is an inherently isolating experience - so introducing more ways for users to interact with one another is key to headsets like the Oculus Rift's long-term success.

To that end, Oculus Rooms 1.2 is an update to the Rooms feature that lets you meet up with others in a virtual room to hangout and do things like watch Vimeo music videos.

With Rooms 1.2, users can also watch 360 videos, or videos shot to provide more immersion than a standard 2D clip. The Rooms update also includes voice search, letting you vocalize a request to find specific content.

To use voice search in Rooms, select Search in the TV zone and hit the microphone button.

Speaking of voice search (heh), a new addition by the name of Oculus Voice is now available to English speakers of both the Oculus Rift and Gear VR. You can now conduct searches from Oculus Home to find games, apps and other VR experiences with voice commands.

Depending on how well the voice recognition really works, this could be a convenient way to navigate around a VR world without needing to employ your hands. Oculus says more voice-enabled functions are on the way, such as looking for online friends and sending out game invites.

Finally, Oculus is breaking the champagne on a new feature called Oculus Events. Akin to Facebook Events, these let you locate (who else) friends and join a virtual reality experience as a group.

These events are public, and highlighted happenings will be featured in the Oculus Home. A new Events tab will list all Oculus Events for you to peruse and choose to join.

What kind of events are we talking here? Oculus says they entail everything from multiplayer games, tournaments, tech talks and trivia.

Will these new features entice more people to buy a Samsung Gear VR or Oculus Rift? Perhaps not on alone, but they definitely provide some fun new uses for the VR headsets, serving to bolster the ecosystem as competitors continue to crop up.

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Ready to get social in virtual reality? Here's what's coming to Gear VR and Oculus Rift - TechRadar

Imagine if you could be transported to a different place and time. Where would you go? For Daniel Gaucherand his film crew, that place is Smuttynose Island, off the New Hampshire coast. And the time? 1873, the year of the infamous Smuttynose Island murders. And they want you to be there, too, through the power of virtual reality. But filmmakers have a lot to learn when it comes to using this technology.

Its a frigid winter day. The sky is a brilliant blue. Its gusty, and the ocean looks choppy and cold. And in the distance, a lighthouse shines bright white on the rocky coast.

This is exactly the kind of place Daniel Gaucher was looking for. "I was looking for something that said New England, and had a sense of place," he says.

Gaucher is the director and co-creator of a film called Marens Rock." It's based on the true story of Maren Hontvet, who in 1873 was able to hide from a man who had already murdered two people in an incident known as the Smuttynose Island murders.

"Maren, in her night clothes in March with her tiny little dog, was able to hide in the crevice of a rock and elude this murderer all night long," Gaucher says.

But Marens Rock isn't just a historical New England horror story. Its a 360-degree immersive virtual reality (VR) film. It puts you right in the time and place of the story, and theres no turning away.

Its great in VR to have that sense of fear, that sense of whats behind you and things you dont know. A sense of dark spaces. And VR is the kind of medium that will put you right in there and tap right into those basic emotions.

Gaucher explains that during a traditional film, horror or otherwise, you can escape. If you're scared or upset, you can look away or grab onto the person next to you.

"But when you're immersed in VR, you do have to be a little bit aware of the audiences level of sensitivity because there is no escape."

And if you're not careful, a really horrifying film might have the potential to become really, truly horrific in VR.

"We're not sure that it's potentially more traumatizing than in other media, but I think if we look at the results so far and if we look at these strong illusions, there are good reasons to think that it could be traumatizing."

Thats Dr. Michael Madary. He is a post-doctoral researcher at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and is co-author of the first code of ethical conduct for using and consuming VR technologies.

While he emphasizes that they don't know for sure if VR has more potential to traumatize than traditional media, he says creators who do use VR have a lot of responsibility.

"I guess what filmmakers might want to keep in mind is that they're using a new technology, and in effect what they're doing is running experiments."

And "Maren's Rock" certainly is an experiment. Gaucher has 20 years of professional experience under his belt, but he says just about every step in the VR filmmaking process has been like a blank slatewhether it's finding the line between what's scary and what's potentially traumatizing, or trying to direct a scene without getting in the 360-degree shot.

"The rules for the medium haven't been written yet. This is 100 years of film/AV language, and this is a whole new chapter. Were talking about having to completely re-address everything we've been taught. EverythingIve learned for 20 years is going to be different now."

But he says the uncertainty, as well as the creative and intellectual challenges that come with this new technology, is what's driven him to really delve into the medium.

"I just realized the impact that shooting in VR was going to have, specifically on post-production industry. And that as editors, we were going to have to learn a whole new language of what was acceptable and effective, and what was just too much in VR."

Gaucher is currently teaching a course on VR film production at Emerson College in Boston.

And as "Maren's Rock" makes its way through post-production, Gaucher says he and his collaborators aren't even close to finished with virtual reality.

"Theres lots of other things that are begging to be experienced, and I'm dying to keep pushing this thing forward."

Marens Rock is on track to be released around mid-May, possibly on Samsung Gear.

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Virtual Reality Filmmakers Tackle Smuttynose Island Murders - New Hampshire Public Radio

Hollywood visual effects firm Magnopus made sure the virtual ISS is as close to reality as possible by basing its design on NASA models and astronaut descriptions. It also got some help recreating the spacecraft's details from NASA Johnson Space Center's VR Laboratory. Mission:ISS is completely free and is now available from the Oculus Store. But since very few people have a Rift, Oculus has also launched a pilot program in the US that gives high school students the chance to try the experience for themselves.

In addition to announcing Mission:ISS, the company has also revealed that it's sending a Rift headset to the actual space station through the French Space Agency. European astronaut Thomas Pesquet will use it to test the effects of zero G on our spatial awareness and balance. Its results will help us understand how our body could respond to future long-term missions that will take humans farther than LEO and the moon.

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Visit the ISS in virtual reality with an Oculus Rift - Engadget

How do you think virtual reality will improve over the next few years? Youre probably hoping for better ways to see, hear and touch virtual worlds. Michael Abrash, chief scientist at Oculus, seems to agree: when he outlined his predictions for the next five years of VR last October, he focused on these three senses.

But one sense Abrash didnt mention was smell. Using your nose in VR might sound slightly unnecessary, superfluous even an optional extra once visuals, audio and haptics have been perfected.

Yet smell is central to how we perceive and remember the world, and without it VR will arguably always be a bloodless imitation of reality. Anosmics, as those without a sense of smell are called, have been found to suffer from a reduced quality of life and even severe depression. Describing the misery of losing her sense of smell, the documentary maker Elizabeth Zierah explained how she felt dissociated from the world around her. It was as though I were watching a movie of my own life, she wrote, and found anosmia far more traumatic than the effects of a stroke that had left her with a limp.

Smell is also the only sense directly linked to the amygdala, part of the brain closely involved in our feelings, meaning that scents can be particularly evocative of powerful emotional memories. Many of us have had the sensation of catching a whiff of something that takes us back to a particular time, place, and emotional state something impossible in current VR.

Benson Munyan III, who researches smell and VR at the University of Central Florida, recalls driving out to his grandmas house as a child. And as soon as we arrived we would see rose hedges that were on her driveway. So getting out the car the first thing we would smell was rose. That has stuck with me until today.

Munyan is one of a handful of scientists finding out how we can smell our way around VR. Having served with the US military in Iraq, Kenya and Djibouti, one of his key research interests is getting former soldiers to don VR headsets so they can face up to, and overcome, their traumatic memories. Smell has been used in VR PTSD treatment previously, he explains, but until now the difference it makes to immersion has not been quantified.

Along with colleagues, he created a VR experience where you have to search a creepy abandoned carnival at night for your keys. In the same room, they set up a Scent Palette, a $4,000, shoebox-sized silver box that fires out certain smells at the right moment during the experience so smoke when a ride crashes and bursts into flame; garbage from an overturned bin; and the more pleasant odors of cotton candy and popcorn.

They found that piping in smells gave participants a greater sense of presence as they made their way around the spooky carnival, while removing odors caused their sense of being there to plummet.

But there is a problem: pump too many different smells into a room for too long, and you end up with a very weird mixture of pongs. After lengthy sessions, that room can smell of smoke, or garbage, or diesel fuel or whatever the combination is, Munyan says.

Not only might this confuse your nose, but a consumer version would mightily annoy anyone who wants to use the living room after you without it smelling of candyfloss and garbage. Odors also need to be synchronized with your VR experience, but it takes time for a smell to reach you from a box in the corner of the room. By the time you smell smoke, you may have already moved away from a fire in the virtual world.

Some companies are already working on these problems. Olorama, a Valencia-based company, produces kits(cost: $1,500) that they say quickly deliver up to ten smells toward headset-wearing users. Their scents include pastry shop, mojito, anchovies and wet ground (gunpowder, blood and burning rubber are coming soon). They say that their aromas are based on natural extracts, suggesting they dissipate more rapidly that standard chemical-based scents.

Another solution might be to have a smell machine incorporated into a VR a headset, meaning odors reach your nose almost immediately and dont stink out the entire room. Such an idea has already been prototyped: the FeelReal mask, launched on Kickstarter in 2015, promised not only to release smells but also vibrate and blast your face with hot or cold air and mist.

The mask was not a success, however, and joined an already long list of failed products like Smell-o-Vision and the iSmell. The Verge described wearing a FeelReal mask as like putting an air freshener in a new car on a hot day. Then imagine burying your face in one of the cars plastic seats. Then imagine the cars driver is navigating some tight curves very quickly. It failed to raise even half of its $50,000 Kickstarter target.

But other contraptions are in the works. A Japanese lab last year came up with a prototype smell machine small enough to hook over an Oculus Rift and sit just below the nose (see video), leaving the lower half of your face uncovered. Rather than using a fan, it atomises smelly liquids by blasting them with acoustic waves so that they waft upward into your nostrils. The lab says that because this does away with tubes, the machine doesnt continue to smell when its not supposed to one of the problems that has plagued previous devices.

One crucial feature of this device is that it can vaporize several liquids at the same time, in different concentrations, and so could potentially combine different smells to make others. The holy grail of VR smell research is a basic palette of smell components that could be mixed to make thousands of other odors, rather like a headset screen can create any color from a few basic ones. But this will be a considerable scientific challenge.

Takamichi Nakamoto, head of the lab at the Tokyo Institute of Technology which created the device, says a huge amount of data are required to establish odor components [of different smells]. We can collect them to some degree but it is not so easy.

Consciousness-altering smells, for example the smell of fear present in the sweat of someone very afraid or scared, are complex mixtures and no-one knows the composition and they will not be synthetically recreated in a hurry, says Tim Jacob, a smell expert at Cardiff University. Smell is not like vision where from a primary color palette you can mix all colors.

So there are a list of daunting technological challenges to solve before we can incorporate smell fully into VR. But the psychological hurdles may be even higher, because of the idiosyncratic way we all experience smell.

This is well illustrated by another experiment, published last October, where participants were told to hunt for a murderers knife in a VR house. Those who were exposed to the unpleasant smell of urine as they entered the virtual kitchen rated the experience as more presence-inducing providing further evidence that smell helps us feel VR is more believable.

But participants often misidentified the urine smell as something else entirely. Some thought it was fish, others garbage, the bad breath of the killer, or the body of the victim, explains Oliver Baus, a researcher at the University of Quebec. Some even thought it was a pleasant smell because it evoked happy memories.

We had one participant who said when they were young, they drove to school past a farm, and thats what it smelled like, he says.

In other words, our reaction to a particular smell is highly dependent on the context, or our previous experiences. Although some cultural consistency in response to certain odors can be assumed to some degree, because the associations we each have acquired to odors is idiosyncratic, it cannot be assumed on the individual level and therefore cannot be used in a predictive fashion, says Rachel Herz, adjunct professor at Brown University and author of The Scent of Desire, which explores smell.

If VR developers want to ever include smell in a game, says Baus, they are therefore going to have to give a lot of visual cues to tell players exactly what they are smelling. The visual is dominant, he says.

For now, smell in VR is seen as something of a bizarre joke, like the moldy timber and blood scented candle you can light while playing Resident Evil 7. But without using this overlooked sense, VR may never be able to pack the emotional, visceral punch of our real lives. For that reason, incorporating smell may become one of the biggest tasks facing the industry over the coming decades.

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Why Smells Are So Difficult To Simulate For Virtual Reality - UploadVR

Adam Tischler and Adam Wartel took turns taking in a virtual reality experience at Westerville South High School Thursday afternoon.

"It's a headset and it has a screen inside of it and you put it on and you look around and you can see things," Tischler said.

The students are playing with the school's Virtual Reality system.

"Right before thanksgiving [a teacher] did a demo for our academic boosters," said Debbie King, library specialist for Westerville South. "They were so impressed that they wrote a check right then, sent him to my center and he bought this for us."

The students are able to visit any place throughout the world thanks to Google Earth. The device also offered various programs in biology and art.

"Because it's 3D you are actually able to see it like you do in person," said King. "So, perhaps we are not able to go to the cadaver lab at OSU to actually see a real autopsy. But now, the kids can kind of get their hands on a body."

Virtual reality allows students to work on projects they may be exposed to on the college level.

"I'm actually going to be majoring in computer science," said Tischler. "I get the opportunity to see it first hand. I get to work with it. I get to use it."

Wartel said the program has broadened his perspective about education.

"There's definitely more! And there's always going to be more," he said.

Westerville City School officials said they hope more schools in the district are exposed to similar technology.

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Virtual reality sends Westerville students across the world - 10TV

March Madness finally has arrived, and two of college basketballs major conferences are allowing fans to watch tournament games in amazing ways.

As part of a partnership with EON Sports VR, the Atlantic Coast Conferenceis broadcasting its tournament games in virtual reality, according to CNET. And starting Thursday the Big East will broadcast its tournament games in VR for the second straight season.

Fans can watch ACC games in VR by downloading the ACC VR app, whereas Big East games once again are available through the FOX Sports VR app. Both services allow the games to be viewed without a VR headset, though true virtual reality is achieved through using either a Samsung Gear VR headset or Google Cardboard.

While using a VR headset, users can choose from a variety of angles.

If you ask us, theres nothing quite like watching a great college basketball game in person, but virtual reality is a pretty amazingalternative.

Thumbnail photo via Pexels

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Virtual Reality Lets Fans Experience March Madness Like They're Really There - NESN.com