Ben Lang – Page 202 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

November 7, 2016

PlayStation VR on PS4 Pro vs. PS4 Comparison

Sony’s new, more powerful PS4 Pro is due out on October 10th. The system is fully compatible with PlayStation VR, but what impact will the extra power have on the PSVR experience?

While every PS4 (and PSVR) game will run on PS4 Pro, only games specially designed (or updated) to take advantage of the new console’s extra horsepower will see significant visual improvements. So far we’ve caught wind of 13 PSVR titles that are planned to specifically support PS4 Pro at launch.

One of those PlayStation VR titles, Battlezone, has already been updated (as of patch 1.02) with enhanced visuals for PS4 Pro. The developer says they’ve increased the super-sampling resolution and enhanced the cockpit lighting and reflections.

We gave the game a shot on both PS4 Pro and PS4 and found almost no discernible difference in the PSVR experience between the two. Here’s a look at recorded gameplay on both systems:

Battlezone PS4 Pro PlayStation VR (PSVR) Gameplay

Battlezone PS4 PlayStation VR Gameplay

Even with a side-by-side comparison it’s difficult to see any significant differences between the two. If you look very carefully at comparative screenshots, you might be able to discern an ever so slight increase in the sharpness of the reticle and other thin interface elements, but in the midst of gameplay it’s virtually unnoticeable.

We also took Batman Arkham VR, one of PSVR’s best looking titles (our review here), for a spin on the PS4 Pro. Although the game hasn’t been specifically updated for the PS4 Pro to our knowledge, it seems it may have been built with a somewhat adaptive foundation. Inside the headset the game looks ever so slightly sharper, and you may spot fewer texture pops as the game seems to be able to load high-res textures a touch faster thanks to the PS4 Pro. The most noticeable change is that Batman Arkham VR running on PS4 Pro seems to no longer use foveated rendering which, on PS4, adds significant blur to the peripheral areas of your view:

Batman Arkham VR PS4 Pro PlayStation VR (PSVR) Screenshot

Batman Arkham VR PS4 PlayStation VR Screenshot

We’ve got a video comparison of Batman Arkham VR on PS4 Pro and PS4 as well, but we doubt you’d be able to reliably tell them apart in a double-blind test:

Batman Arkham VR PS4 Pro PlayStation VR (PSVR) Gameplay

Batman Arkham VR PS4 PlayStation VR Gameplay

PSVR Tracking on PS4 Pro

For those hoping that PlayStation VR might see improved tracking on PS4 Pro, we can confirm that it’s no different than what you’ll find on the original PS4. Unfortunately that means we’re still stuck with the sub-par tracking performance that we noted in our PSVR review. Presumably there’s still a sliver of hope that Sony could make an update to the PS4 Pro or PSVR that could devote a little extra processing power to tracking, but we’d advise against holding your breath.

Conclusion

PlayStation VR works just as well on PS4 Pro as it does on PS4. For now, we’re seeing minute improvements in visuals at best, while tracking performance is unchanged.

Keep in mind that the titles above, and pretty much every PlayStation VR title launched to date, were made with the PS4 in mind. We expect in the future to see more significant visual improvements for PSVR titles running on PS4 Pro as developers have more time to optimize their titles (and begin building new ones from scratch) for the extra horsepower. While the 1080p display and poor mura correction are the biggest bottlenecks to the headset’s visuals, increased supersampling can do wonders if applied appropriately to a well optimized VR game.

The post PlayStation VR on PS4 Pro vs. PS4 Comparison appeared first on Road to VR.

November 7, 2016

Microsoft Says New Surface Studio is VR Ready(ish)

Announced just last week, Microsoft’s Surface Studio all-in-one computer has been met with excitement and touted as an example of the company’s new approach to innovation. With a mobile GPU on board, you shouldn’t expect to be able to run the most demanding VR titles, but Microsoft says Surface Studio will be able to manage some VR experiences.

Microsoft says Surface Studio is made for designers and creators. The computer’s crowning feature is a huge 4500 x 3000 display that gracefully tilts down to make the touchscreen and stylus-enabled display ready for hands-on interaction. And while it may have a relatively small footprint, the company is trying to play up the device’s performance.

Microsoft was at VRDC 2016 in San Francisco last week showing the Surface Studio powering an attached HTC Vive. Given that the computer includes a mobile GPU (which neither Oculus, HTC/Valve, or NVIDIA have explicitly approved of as ‘VR Ready’), the company isn’t going so far as to say that Surface Studio is properly VR Ready, but they do say that it’s capable of handling lighter VR experiences.

At the event, Microsoft had a demo list featuring 14 VR titles running on Surface Studio:

Tilt Brush
SculptVR
SoundStage
theBlu
The Night Cafe
Gnomes and Goblins
The Lab
Hoops VR
Space Pirate Trainer
Paddle Up!
Duo
Cloudlands Minigolf
Audioshield
Budget Cuts

I was told that this wasn’t an inclusive list of VR games the system could handle, just that these made for good first-time VR demos. I hopped into Space Pirate Trainer and blasted my way through a few waves of deadly robots and it all worked as expected: smooth 90 FPS gameplay on the Vive.

It’s nice that the Surface Studio can handle some VR, but the fact that it doesn’t quite qualify as a VR Ready machine means that none of the above titles will necessarily work in perpetuity as they are being built with a different recommended specification in mind. Oculus’ new “minimum” (not “recommended”) specification could give the Surface Studio a bit more breathing room for handling VR experiences.

The ability to play “light” VR experiences on Surface Studio is going to weigh heavily on your wallet. At the event, I was shown the top-end configuration of the computer which includes a Core i7 processor, 32GB of RAM, and the GTX 980M GPU, for a cool $4,200. Lesser models only have the GTX 965M, which is less likely to be able to push frames as fast as VR demands.

Why didn’t Microsoft just go with one of NVIDIA’s new VR Ready 10-series mobile GPUs? An engineer from the Surface team told me that the Surface Studio spec was locked down some time before that line was introduced; it seems likely that future iterations of Surface Studio will pick up a 10-series card at a minimum, and be properly VR Ready across all configurations.

The post Microsoft Says New Surface Studio is VR Ready(ish) appeared first on Road to VR.

November 6, 2016

Google Launching WebVR Support for Android Chrome in January, Desktop to Follow

WebVR is gaining significant momentum; last month the biggest players in the browse space came together to discuss the future of VR on the web at the W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality. There, Google said that the company soon plans to ship a public version of Chrome on Android with support for WebVR 1.1.

WebVR is an evolving foundation for delivering virtual reality directly from the web. It’s slowly being pulled into a coherent set of guidelines, features, and best practices to allow compatibility of virtual reality web content across a daunting array of web browser and VR systems, each with varying capabilities.

Just a few weeks ago, major forces collaborating on the WebVR Spec gathered in San Jose, CA for the W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality, a two-day conference where the likes of Mozilla, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Oculus, The Khronos Group, and many more hashed out the latest developments and directions for the WebVR ecosystem.

It was there that Megan Lindsay, WebVR Product Manager at Google, announced that the company is working toward a public release of Chrome on Android that supports the latest WebVR 1.1 Spec.

Lindsay said that the company plans to launch a beta in December with a stable release planned for January. WebVR in the “stable” release means that it’ll make its way into the same Chrome browser app that everyone on Android sees in the Google Play store. Lindsay says that the company is targeting this release initially for Daydream, so it isn’t clear yet if the update will immediately add WebVR capability to all compatible phones, or if it will be restricted to Google’s Pixel phone (the first to be ‘Daydream ready’) and Daydream View headset. Once it does become available for all, it will mean WebVR capability for a huge swath of people (Chrome on Android has been downloaded between 1 and 5 billion times…).

That means that the browser will be compatible with WebVR content that’s built to the WebVR 1.1 Spec, allowing users to pop their phone into a Cardboard or Daydream headset to experience and jump between VR web content straight through Chrome, without the need to download individual apps.

Looking further out, Lindsay says that work is underway for WebVR in Chrome for Windows (supporting the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive), and will see a limited public release in early 2017, with a full rollout presumably later down the line.

She also noted that the company is continuing work on the Chrome ‘VR Shell’ that will allow 2D websites not built for WebVR to be browsed in VR. That’s planned for the first half of 2017 on Chrome for Android, and later in 2017 for the desktop browser.

WebVR support of varying levels has been in development versions of Mozilla and Chrome for some time now, but those have yet to make their way to a public release as the WebVR Spec continues to be honed. Most recently, Microsoft announced their support for WebVR in the Edge browser; Opera and Apple’s Safari are notable holdouts, having not yet said if they plan to support the spec (though employees from both were registered to attend last month’s meeting).

The post Google Launching WebVR Support for Android Chrome in January, Desktop to Follow appeared first on Road to VR.

November 4, 2016

Idealens’ All-in-one VR Headset Looks Crazy, But You’ll Wear it Anyway

There’s been a lot of talk lately (including from yours truly), about the impressive comfort of Sony’s PlayStation VR headset, but Idealens K2, a mobile all-in-one VR headset out of China, features a promising new ergonomic approach that might be the most comfortable I’ve ever worn.

The Idealens K2 is an all-in-one VR headset. It’s got roughly the same internals you’ll find from a Galaxy S6 powered Gear VR headset, except everything is self-contained within the headset, rather than relying on a snap-in smartphone to power the experience.

The performance of the K2’s proprietary Android-based VR OS is impressive, and it uses a touchpad on the side of the headset along with a few buttons for interaction; it feels as responsive and performant as you’d expect from Gear VR (which is widely regarded as the current bar-setting device for mobile VR); that alone is something many other mobile VR headsets have struggled with, but perhaps the most impressive part of the Idealens K2 is its phenomenally comfortable design.

idealens-k2-headset-1

Yes, it looks a little crazy, but it doesn’t matter once you feel it on your head. At a mere 295 grams, the headset feels featherlight compared to its bulky looks. (For comparison, the latest Gear VR weighs in at 312 grams before snapping in another 138 grams or more of phone.) The springy band that arches high over the top of your head keeps the right amount of pressure on your forehead and the back of your head without the restrictive feeling of a left/right/top strap tightened around your cranium. The desire for a counterbalance on the back of the head makes a natural opportunity for the placement of a large battery, which we see on the K2, powering the headset for several hours of continuous use.

The height of the top band has the secondary benefit of not getting in the way of overhead headphones, and allows you to put your headphones on before the headset (avoiding that surprisingly annoying task of blindly finding them and determining their left/right orientation before putting them over your headset). The headset slides on with ease, and within seconds you’re inside of functional VR environment with resolution, headtracking performance, and field of view similar to Gear VR.

You might be concerned, as I was, that the lack of side straps would make the Idealens K2 prone to falling off one side of your face or the other. In normal use however, the centralized center of gravity leads to very little acceleration of the headset away from your head, keeping it easily in place. For more intense games, there are optional straps which attach to mounting points on the side and back of the headset to keep it more firmly in place, but in my time with the headset I didn’t feel any need for them. Once positional tracking is introduced, that could change.

The company is working on a laser-based positional tracking solution, but the 3D printed prototype they brought to the show was not in use due to unexpected interference, possibly due to SteamVR Tracking basestations in the booth directly next to Idealens, suspected Brent Jentzsch, the company’s Developer Relations Manager.

In general, I’m skeptical of new VR tracking technologies, especially from small Chinese-based startups, but according to Jentzsch, Idealens’ parent company, Idealsee Group, employs some 230 engineers across the company’s three major interests (Image Recognition/VR, VR Headsets, and VR cameras), about one third of which are working on the VR front.

Jentzsch told me he was proud of the performance of the company’s positional tracking system (currently called the T1000), which relies on small tracking spheres that clip onto the Idealens K2 and hand controllers. I’ll be interested to see how it performs once I can try the system in a stable testing environment.

Because the headset has everything built inside, the price is naturally higher than a snap-in smartphone headset like Gear VR (unless you factor in the cost of the phone). The Idealens K2 is currently available on the Chinese market for around $500 USD, with the available content (which the company says includes 100+ VR games and 1,000+ VR videos) understandably composed of Chinese-oriented games and apps. Meanwhile, the company is still deciding on its strategy for offering the headset in the US.

The post Idealens’ All-in-one VR Headset Looks Crazy, But You’ll Wear it Anyway appeared first on Road to VR.

November 3, 2016

The White House Highlights 6 Funding Opportunities for VR Education Projects

Got an idea for how virtual reality could revolutionize education? The White House suggests six ways you could get funding to make it a reality.

Education is one of the most obvious use-cases for VR; its ability to immerse and engage gives it massive potential to revolutionize the way we teach future generations of students. But getting from the grand concept of ‘VR will be huge for education’ down to the nitty gritty of actually making it work practically for millions of students is a massive challenge. The White House sees the opportunity of VR in education and is encouraging innovators to turn opportunity into reality.

At VRDC 2016 this week, Erik Martin, Policy Advisor at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, took to the stage to explain the challenges of melding real education with VR, and also recommended six funding opportunities for those that want to take a crack at it:

Institute of Education Sciences – Small Business Innovation Research

Purpose: provides: up to $1,050,000 in funding to small business firms and partners for the research and development of commercially viable education technology products.

Point of Contact: Edward Metz, Ph.D.
SBIR Program Manager
Institute of Education Services
U.S. Department of Education
(202)-904-8972

Institute of Education Sciences – Grants

Purpose: to support research that contributes to school readiness and improved academic achievement for all students and particularly for those whose education prospects are hindered by inadequate education services and conditions associated with poverty, race/ethnicity, limited English proficiency, disability, and family circumstance.

Point of Contact: Edward Metz, Ph.D.
SBIR Program Manager
Institute of Education Services
U.S. Department of Education
(202)-904-8972

National Institutes of Health – Serious STEM Games for Pre-college and Informal Science Education Audiences

Purpose: to develop serious Scient, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) games with a focus on biology that addresses health and medicine questions for: 1) pre-kindergarten to grade 12 students and pre and in-service teachers or 2) Informal Science Education audiences

Point of Contact: Tony Beck
OSE/SEPA/NIH
(301)-435-0805
beckl@mail.nig.gov

National Science Foundation – Discovery Research PreK-12

Purpose: to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by PreK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of STEM education innovations and approaches.

Point of Contact: DRLDRK12@nsf.gov
(703)-292-8620

National Endowment for the Arts – Media Arts

Purpose: to support the development, production, and distribution of innovative projects that demonstrate media as art and media about the arts. Media arts, as defined by the National Endowment for the Arts includes screen-based projects presented via film, television, radio, audio, transmedia storytelling, as well as media-related printed books, catalogues, and journals.

Point of Contact: Lakita Edwards
National Endowment for the Arts
edwardsl@arts.gov

US Department of Education – EdSim Challenge

Purpose: The U.S. Department of Education calls for concepts for immersive simulations that transfer academic, technical, and employability skills. Successful simulations will pair the engagement of commercial games with rigorous educational content to prepare students for the 21st century workforce. Entrants compete for a $480,000 grand prize.

In his presentation, Martin explained that all games are great teaching tools, but the vast majority of the time the thing being taught is simply how to play the game.

“Every game is an education game, it’s just what they’re educating you about. They put you in this optimal engagement and challenge space where you’re constantly moving toward discovering something new,” he said, which keeps players deeply engaged.

The push from the White House to expand STEM education sees games, and increasingly VR games, as potentially highly effective teaching tools for that reason, but wants to nudge creators to start making games that teach skills beyond the mechanics of the games themselves.

Martin also highlighted the free Ed Tech Developer’s Guide created by the Department of Education’s Office of Education Technology, which details guidelines for developing technologies that achieve real education objects. He also stressed the need to create educational solutions that work today rather than waiting years for the educational system to slowly transform on its own.

The post The White House Highlights 6 Funding Opportunities for VR Education Projects appeared first on Road to VR.

November 3, 2016

Lyrobotix Merges Ultrasonic and Lighthouse-like Tech for Portable Positional VR Tracking

Lyrobotix is developing a portable outside-in positional tracking system for mobile VR headsets that uses a combination of ultrasonic and Lighthouse-like tracking.

While big names in the VR space hope to create a robust inside-out positional tracking solution for mobile VR headsets, one company wants to simply reduce the cost and friction of what we already know works well: outside-in tracking.

Lyrobotix, a Beijing-based startup, is building an outside-in tracking system for mobile VR headsets that’s worth keeping an eye on. The system, which works (for now) by attaching a tracking sphere to your VR headset of choice, relies on a single, battery powered emitter which shoots out sweeping lasers as well as ultrasonic pulses to achieve positional tracking. The sweeping laser approach is clearly inspired by Valve’s Lighthouse technology (right down to the design of the emitter), but by my understanding is of Lyrobotix own design rather than a licensing of Valve’s tech.

The lasers and ultrasonic waves are picked up by the small tracking sphere which is covered in receivers. In the prototype demo I saw this week at VRS 2016, the sphere was plugged directly into a Gear VR headset for both power and data relay.

With the emitter placed on a shelf in front of me (which has a supposed 5 hours of battery life), I put on Gear VR and walked the system through its paces. I was presented with a 3D Tetris game where the Tetris pieces were scattered to my left and right, and I had to use the motion controller (built around the same tracking sphere) to put pieces in the right position to win the game. Two controllers are supported, though I only used one during my demo of the prototype.

As I moved my head and body around the tracking space, it responded appropriately to my movements and I didn’t spot any ‘bending’ (where the system thinks I’m moving slightly toward it as I move my head perpendicular to the emitter). With only a single emitter in the front, the tracking space was not room-scale, but felt roughly on par with a front-facing Rift setup (giving me a step or two in any direction).

While the latency of this prototype leaves much to be desired, the accuracy of the system impressed (despite feeling like positional movements were constrained to a grid of small quantized points), and so did its usability. Despite the latency, the tracking was certainly functional, and turning to one side or the other to reach out to grab and manipulate the virtual Tetris pieces really did work. This made me curious about how much potential the system has to improve as it continues to be refined toward a consumer product.

Lisa Zhao, COO of Lyrobotix, told me that the prototype system was not yet fusing IMU data, so the positional tracking I was seeing in the demo was relying entirely on raw data from the emitter and tracking sphere, which only updates at 60Hz. For big headsets out there like the Vive and Rift, the onboard IMU is sampled at very high rates (in the hundreds of Hz) and used to determine the movement of the headset (with the addition of prediction), and then that data is fused with a slower outside-in tracking system to make absolute positioning corrections to prevent drift (much like using GPS coordinates to repeatedly correct small segments of dead reckoning). If Lyrobotix is able to achieve the same sensor fusion with Gear VR’s IMU (and they say they will be able to), it could mean a big improvement over the unfused performance I saw on the prototype (and may also be an answer to the quantized positional behavior I noticed).

I’m still skeptical about the value of combining ultrasonic tracking with Lighthouse-like tracking—after all, it seems like one of the two should be sufficient—and I’ve reached out to the company for clarity on this.

Provided there’s room to reduce the latency, Lyrobotix’s positional tracking solution could be an interesting option. The ease of setup is so simple—place emitter in front of you, turn on switch, put on headset—that it could be a good stopgap until mobile inside-out positional tracking is affordable and widespread, and could even thereafter remain a practical solution for positional tracking on low-end mobile systems.

Zhao says that the company is rapidly moving toward the launch of a development kit of the system. At the beginning of December, Lyrobotix plans to solicit interest in the dev kit and will give a small batch away for free, with following dev kits priced at $100.

The post Lyrobotix Merges Ultrasonic and Lighthouse-like Tech for Portable Positional VR Tracking appeared first on Road to VR.

November 1, 2016

Facebook Details Social VR Avatar Experiments and Lessons Learned

Facebook says they want to launch an official social VR experience “as soon as possible;” to get there the company has been experimenting with various approaches to find out which avatars work best for social VR interaction.

During the opening keynote at Oculus Connect last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg excitedly showed the latest version of the company’s forthcoming social VR experience. As he put on the headset for a live demonstration, one of the first things he said to his virtual friends was “your avatars look a lot better than the last time that you showed me…” He was referring to an older Facebook social VR demo showed off earlier this year which featured more ‘holographic’ style avatars which had elements like glasses and hair hand-drawn onto them.

Michael Booth, Facebook Social VR Product Manager and one of the two virtual friends virtually on stage with Zuckerberg, was among the team that evolved Facebook’s social VR avatar design to what we see in the latest demo. Speaking later that day in a presentation at the conference, Booth walked through a number of experiments the company has done in an attempt to find the most believable way to represent users in a social VR space.

In the video heading this article, Booth showed that the company clearly aimed to stay away from ‘realistic’ avatars, citing the uncomfortable feeling of the Uncanny Valley as something to be avoided until it can be effectively crossed. That means dropping back to a stylized avatars, but Booth says that even stylized representations of humans can be unsettling and uncomfortable to engage with while in VR.

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While avatars in VR could be literally anything (a dinosaur, spider, a building, etc), Booth says that Facebook’s policy of “authentic identity” (using your real name and photos of yourself) constrained the avatar design to something necessarily human, and something that could be identified as ‘you’ by people around you.

So while the cute ‘Rabbitar’ that the team developed was surprisingly effective as a believable avatar, it didn’t quite fit the prompt. However, lessons from the Rabbitar, specifically its simple eyes and mouth, carried over to other experiments, and ultimately found their way into the latest avatars that Zuckerberg showed off on stage. Booth summarized what the company has learned so far and what they think makes for a believable avatar in VR:

Speech – with positional audio)

1:1 Tracking – don’t break it with animations

The importance of hands – for gesturing while you speak and interactions with the environment

Eye contact/blinking – procedural blinking works fine, as long as blinking is happening

Gaze following – creates the connection of someone looking at you and allow lets you natually follow their gaze to others

Lipsync – an important visual queue to show who is talking

Emoting – helps add emotion and emphasis while we wait for more advanced facetracking technology

Arms and body – avatars seen in a third-person view should have arms and rather than just a floating head and hands (the first person view should not show arms and body because the tracking is not precise enough)

That’s not to say that Facebook’s social VR team has dusted their hands and called their work on avatars complete… Booth says even about the latest avatars, “this is still a work in progress, we still are experimenting and we plan to continue to evolve these avatars over time.”

Curiously, despite being owned by Facebook, Oculus is taking its own approach to avatars, and in fact debuted an entirely new avatar paradigm at the same conference, which the company says can be persistent between apps and cross platform between Rift and Gear VR. Their approach is even more stylistic and doesn’t aim for “authentic identity” as the Facebook avatar system does.

Though we’re learning more about what types of avatars feel comfortable to interact with in VR, the problem is far from solved for those looking for one consistent representation of their virtual selves across all social virtual spaces.

The post Facebook Details Social VR Avatar Experiments and Lessons Learned appeared first on Road to VR.

October 31, 2016

Cardboard Apps Can Tap into Enhanced VR Performance on Daydream Phones

A spokesperson for Google’s VR team has confirmed that Google Cardboard applications will be able to benefit from the enhanced VR performance that’s baked into Daydream ready phones.

Cardboard was Google’s first step into virtual reality. Wanting to introduce as many people to VR as possible, the company developed Cardboard with the lowest common denominator in mind; they wanted any modern smartphone to be able to inexpensively experience VR with a cheap VR headset literally made out of cardboard.

Daydream, on the other hand, is the company’s initiative for high-performance mobile VR on Android. Thanks to a combination of hardware optimizations in specialized ‘Daydream ready’ phones and software optimizations in the latest version of Android, Daydream apps perform much better than what we’ve seen from Cardboard—specifically when it comes to headtracking latency—similar to the performance we’ve seen from Samsung’s impressive Gear VR headset.

But there’s good news for Cardboard apps, which Google said last year had exceeded 15 million collective downloads: these apps can majorly benefit from the enhanced performance that’s afforded by Daydream ready phones.

According to a spokesperson for Google’s VR team, Cardboard apps updated and adapted to the recently launched Google VR SDK (which combines the Daydream and Cardboard SDKs) will enable the improved performance for those phones.

“Apps need to both compile with the 1.0 SDK and properly use the new APIs (like VR Mode and scanline racing) to see performance improvements on Daydream-ready phones,” the spokesperson told Road to VR.

With the first Daydream ready phone, Google Pixel, now launched, and the first Daydream headset, Google View, launching this coming month, we expect to see renewed attention on development of Cardboard and Daydream apps.

The post Cardboard Apps Can Tap into Enhanced VR Performance on Daydream Phones appeared first on Road to VR.

October 31, 2016

Daydream View Gets Its First TV Commercials

With Google’s Pixel phone out the door, the first Daydream-ready phone, the company is now ramping up to launch Daydream View, the first Daydream-ready VR headset. The device is making a cameo alongside the first cable TV ads for Pixel.

Daydream View launches on November 10th for $79. With it, Google promises a new level of virtual reality performance from Android, that which greatly surprases the company’s Cardboard initiative.

Pixel is Google’s first fully self-branded phone, and they’re going big with it, now serving commercials across a wide range of media, including adverts running on major TV networks. While the commercials focus largely on the Pixel, Daydream and VR do get their moment in the spotlight (even if it’s fleeting in a 30 or 60 second commercial).

In the first commercial (heading this article), we briefly see the Pixel inserted into the Daydream View while the narrator tells us that the phone is capable of a “stunning VR experience.” Maybe I’m reading a little too much into this, but the actress that dons the headset sounds genuinely surprised when she says “how is this possible!” compared to other lines delivered by the characters in the commercial. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to think it might have been the first time she saw VR and that was her real reaction.

The second commercial (above) is largely text-based, so we don’t see the headset itself, but among the qualities highlighted is that the Pixel is “built from scratch for VR.”

Interestingly, both spots refer to it as “VR” and not “virtual reality.” This suggests Google aims to appeal to those who already know what VR is rather than trying to introduce the concept anew; probably a good idea given the scarcity of airtime for TV commercials.

It’s a good thing for the broader virtual reality industry that Daydream is getting some airtime in a mass media ad campaign like this because it helps the mainstream slowly begin to familiarize themselves with this cutting edge technology.

The post Daydream View Gets Its First TV Commercials appeared first on Road to VR.

October 22, 2016

Oculus on Platform-exclusive VR Content: ‘it’s the only viable way to jumpstart the market’

Earlier this month we saw a slew of new Oculus Touch game announcements. Many of these new VR titles, which benefit from funding or publishing (or both) by Oculus, will launch exclusively for the Rift and Touch. And while the company has come under fire for that practice in the past, Oculus’ Head of Content defends the decision as the right approach to get the VR market moving.

Last month’s Connect 3 conference saw the reveal of ambitious (and exclusive) new VR content for Oculus Touch, like Robo Recall, Arktika.1, and Lone Echo. With $250 million already invested into VR content and another $250 million on the way, the company shows no signs of slowing its strategy of exclusivity deals.

Jason Rubin is the Head of Content at Oculus, and a veteran of the videogame industry. Known for his work on the Crash Bandicoot franchise and founding of studio Naughty Dog, Rubin has been around the block, and contrasts his experience in the early days of the videogame industry with what’s happening today in virtual reality.

Speaking with Road to VR at Gamescom 2016 earlier this year, Rubin laid out the company’s decision to aggressively invest in VR content, often in exchange for exclusivity agreements.

“A lot of the games you see here today are larger than would be practically financeable by developers and publishers at the launch of a hardware system. When you’re talking about VR, you’re talking about a new hardware that has no past analogue, there is nothing that can be ported well onto VR. There are games that work ok like Project Cars for controller. But when you talk about hand-tracking, there’s nowhere those sorts of games can come from,” Rubin said. “By definition you’re shipping into a zero-person install base when you ship this new hardware. For developers to make large leaps of faith—to do multi-million dollar projects—it simply doesn’t happen without the hardware manufacturers believing in their hardware and believing in the ecosystem and helping those developers out with large grants. There’s no other way that Wilson’s Heart, Chronos, or The Climb gets made.”

Rubin speaks to the chicken-and-egg conundrum of getting developers to make content for a platform with no customers, or getting customers to buy a platform with no content.

“Once those games are out there [customers] say, ‘Oh, there’s great stuff out there. I’m going to buy into VR. I get it now, I understand why I want to play.’ Then they buy the systems, and they’re now an addressable market,” he said. “Then the second or third generation of developer doesn’t need our money. They can see there’s an established userbase there built by first generation games, they can build a bigger title than they would have otherwise because there’s now enough consumers to buy their game. That’s the only way these systems work.”

Looking back at his experience in the early days of the videogame industry, Rubin suggests that not aggressively funding VR content through exclusive deals would mean painfully slow growth for the VR space.

“The other way to [create a sustainable customer/developer ecosystem], is to do it the way PC originally did it which started 30 years ago; I was making games when the PC came out. The way you do it is, you put it in a ziplock bag, you put it on the shelf, somebody buys your ziplock game, and the addressable market gets a little bigger. [Then] you make a better game that you put in a very cheap box and over time it gets to $100 million games. It took 30 years. We don’t want [VR] to take 30 years,” Rubin explained. “We want this generation to race forward. Because we don’t have the luxury that the PC market had, where it was the best-looking thing out there. Well, we’re going up against Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty. [Gamers] have the ability to play these triple-A games. So if we don’t compete visually [and] depth-wise, if we don’t jump out there and give them great games to play right off the bat, we may never have what the PC had. We may never have the stepping stone. What we are doing now is the only way to viably jumpstart the market.”

Rubin points to the Oculus store and its library of games as proof that the approach is working.

“There have been a lot of suppositions from various parties who haven’t wanted to fund [VR games] about how it could happen elsewhere, or their particular methodology for getting [VR] to spread, but the proof of any system is in its results. The proof is there in our system—funding developers—that’s creating next generation content that other systems have not.”

If the exclusive titles Oculus has helped fund weren’t any good, there probably wouldn’t be much backlash from the community. But it’s clear that some of VR’s most substantial titles are found on Oculus’ platform, even prompting the creation of ‘Revive’, a hack that allows some Oculus exclusive games to be played on the HTC Vive. When the hack was patched by Oculus, outrage from the VR community prompted the company to backpedal on their approach to DRM.

Meanwhile, Sony has taken a similar approach with exclusive funding of VR content for PlayStation VR but rarely sees the level of criticism directed at Oculus. That’s likely due to the fact that platform exclusive titles are a norm in the console space, whereas PC has long been seen as an ‘open’ platform.

Additional reporting by Scott Hayden

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