Charles Singletary – Page 10 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

June 1, 2017

The Mage’s Tale Officially Launches June 20 With A Pre-Order Discount

As noted in our initial coverage of The Mage’s Tale, the game’s developer inXile Entertainment has a track record for keeping old-school RPGs alive. The Mage’s Tale, which takes place in the same world as The Bard’s Tale, is a first-person dungeon crawler reminiscent of Elder Scrolls and Might and Magic. The marriage of VR’s immersion and interaction with a potential vintage RPG experience garners a lot of anticipation and we now have a release date for The Mage’s Tale.

We’ll find out if inXile executes in a big way again on June 20 when it launches for Oculus Rift.

The Mage’s Tale takes place between The Bard’s Tale III and IV and provides players with a 10+ hour return to the world. Players can craft spells, solve puzzles, and fight creatures while exploring the 11 dungeons below Skara Brae that range from tombs to sewers.

“Our goal was to use the old school tried and true methods of game design and integrate that with everything that Virtual Reality offers. We wanted to get away from the VR ‘experience’ and create the kind of meaty and full-scale game that gamers appreciate,” says Brian Fargo, dungeon crawler expert and CEO of inXile Entertainment, in a prepared statement. The inXile team has some award winning pedigree behind their old-school RPGs (Wasteland 2 won Game of the Year in 2014 and Torment: Tides of Numenara will likely be a part of the conversation) so the potential for The Mage’s Tale is high.

If all of this sounds interesting, The Mage’s Tale can be pre-ordered on the Oculus Home store for a 10% discount off the launch price. The regular pricing is $39.99 and the game has Oculus Touch functionality.

Tagged with: the mage's tale

May 30, 2017

Aryzon Pitched As The ‘Cardboard of Augmented Reality’

While Google Cardboard, Daydream, and the Samsung Gear VR lead the charge for accessible virtual reality headsets and experiences, augmented reality hasn’t had its full day in the sunshine. There’s already some ease-of-use for the platform via smartphones and their cameras, but the devices could benefit from the immersion of a dedicated headset. Enter Aryzon. Calling it the “Cardboard of AR”, the 5-person team behind this cardboard AR viewer is opening the door for consumers to finally see what it’s like to have their worlds augmented.

The Aryzon project is full steam ahead, already exceeding the funding goal of $27k with 33 days to go at the time this article was written. Due to the nature of AR, the Aryzon’s cardboard structure is a bit more complex than Google Cardboard. It uses a combination of mirror and stereoscopic lens in conjunction with your smartphone’s display to show you projected objects from any angle through a combiner glass panel.

Augmented reality is a wonderful tool that can be impactful for education, construction, the medical field, and more. AR for entertainment is becoming more notable but offering an affordable device that shows off other elements to casual consumers will be beneficial to the industry as a whole.

If you want to reserve yourself an Aryzon AR viewer, you can pledge at least $27. It is estimated to ship in September. It comes with a standard AR target image and access to the free application that serves as an introduction to augmented experiences. The app is available for both iOS and Android and, as they continue to exceed their funding goals, the Aryzon team wants to develop a software development kit in the near future to help inspire new AR creations. If you’re a dev, they’re also looking for additional help with app development. More information can be found on their Kickstarter page.

Tagged with: Aryzon

May 24, 2017

Silicon Valley’s Not HotDog AR App Is Actually Available For Download

HBO’s Silicon Valley is a consistently hilarious and enlightening look into the California high-tech hub. The show is told through the eyes of six men founding their own startup and their trials as they navigate the tech realm. The 4th season debuted in April this year and, on their 2nd episode, the show finally addresses virtual reality. A statement from character Erlich Bachman, played by TJ Miller, about his desire to get involved with a VR app in the 2nd episode of this season served as a comical and fairly accurate summation of today’s VR status: “That’s the frothiest space in the valley right now. Nobody understands it, but everybody wants in. Any idiot could walk into a f*cking room, utter the letters ‘V’ and ‘R’ and VCs will hurl bricks of cash at them. By the time they find out it’s vaporware it’s too late. I have got to get in on this.”

It turns out the app he was interested in wasn’t VR related but, after a series of events, it became the “Shazam of Food.” Via Engadget, the real-life counterpart to the show’s app has gone live and it can tell you with great confidence if the object you’re pointing your phone’s camera at is a hot dog or not.

Not HotDog is the hilarious app that gets sold for a large sum of money by the character Jian-Yang after Erlich Bachman backs away from the deal. It’s not VR, but it still presents the immersive industry on the show by being a very basic form of augmented reality. You simply point your phone’s camera at an object and it tells you whether it’s a hotdog or not a hotdog — crucial information for our daily lives.

This is a neat promotional tool that parallels the humor of the show in a silly way and most likely will not be the last time Silicon Valley tackles the VR and AR industries. Not HotDog is available for free on iOS.

Tagged with: silicon valley

May 22, 2017

Watch Dancing With The Stars Two Part Finale In 360 Degrees

Major television series and networks regularly utilize 360-degree and VR to promote franchises, but we haven’t quite reached a time where they’re comfortable with providing alternate viewing methods on a consistent basis. Companies have opened their arms to Netflix and Hulu to a point, but we may be on the verge of a new simultaneous broadcast format.

In its 24th season, ABC’s Dancing With The Stars is coming to a close this week with back-to-back episodes that serve as a two part finale and ABC is taking advantage of immersive media by airing a 360-degree feed alongside the live television broadcast.

Considering the popularity of the show, it can be argued that the immersive tech industry would have benefited a great deal even if ABC decided just to use the 360-degree broadcast with one of the regular episodes during the season. Coupling this exclusively with the season finale episodes, which we can assume will be their most watched for the season, is an even more potent boon. This plays into the idea of VR and 360-degree media being premium formats but also welcomes a large audience that’s likely filled with people not very aware of the content they can see in those formats.

The broadcast will be powered by Nokia’s OZO+ cameras, which are also being utilized by Disney for behind the scenes footage for major franchises, and can be viewed on both Facebook and YouTube. Part 1 of the finale airs today at 8 pm – 9 pm EST and part 2 airs tomorrow, March 23, and will be an extended episode lasting from 8:30 pm to 11 pm EST. The familiarity and widespread popularity of broadcasting like ABC’s Dancing With The Stars is another solid avenue for the VR industry to take into households and hopefully, there will be an uptick in interest after.

May 19, 2017

Grab Tickets For The Art of VR, A Festival Celebrating Immersive Tech

Expos, festivals, and conventions centered on immersive technology continue to grow in number and importance. The majority of them focus on breaking new advancements in VR/AR tech or showing the new experiences on the horizon, but a few exist just to appreciate the artistic aspect of the industry. The VR Society is putting on such an event with The Art of VR, a celebration of art and technology taking place in New York on June 22-23.

“New York City has always been at the forefront of the creative sector so we are delighted The VR Society has chosen to host The Art of VR in our city,” said Julie Menin, Commissioner of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, in a prepared statement. “As this event will showcase, virtual and augmented reality now intersect with so many industries that are based here – from fine art to real estate and from media to entertainment. Events like The Art of VR enable New Yorkers to experience these applications first-hand – something they’ll be able to do even more frequently when we open the nation’s first publicly funded VR/AR lab later this year.”

The Art of VR is open to the public if you purchase a ticket and will serve as a great opportunity to get a better understanding of virtual and augmented reality and how they both impact a collection of industries.

“The public is hungry to explore all the ways we can experience and work in virtual reality. The Art of VR is our chance to share the potential of this exciting new medium,” says VR Society President Jim Chabin. The event will be home to a sneak peak of a VR film from two-time Oscar and Grammy winner A.R. Rahman, the premier of family-friendly animated feature Raising A Rukus produced by Hollywood visual effects expert Robert Stromberg, and much more.

Along with those visual features, there’s going to be a Space VR exhibit from Sotheby and a collection of panels on VR and its use in museums curated by artist-in-residence Gabe Barcia-Columbo. There’s going to be plenty of things to see with different flavors for different individuals. More information can be found on their website. Tickets start at $50 and there are different options for the multiple sessions taking place during the two-day festival.

Tagged with: Art of VR, vr society

May 18, 2017

Japan’s Superhuman Sports Society Has Created Two AR Contests

From my perspective of being an American, Japan is consistently willing to push the envelope when it comes to entertainment. Popular shows like American Ninja Warrior and Iron Chef America are modeled after Japanese shows and clips from Japanese entertainment go viral regularly for outlandish activities and inspire spoofs galore.

With such adventurous creative minds contributing to their visual media, it is no surprise that Japan natives are finding fun and unique ways to utilize modern technology. The Superhuman Sports Society is a company using drones, hoverboards, and more for accessible athletic contests. They’ve created 12 new sports and a couple of them even use augmented reality.

Launched in 2015, the Superhuman Sports Society’s goals exemplify the values from Japan’s Sport Basic Plan by focusing on three principles:

All participants can enjoy sports,
Along with the technology, sports continue to evolve,
All spectators can enjoy sports.

The Society took these parameters to heart when crafting their 12 sports, including a wheelchair ball shooting contest, and came up with activities that put competitors on as even a playing field as possible. Hado is a sport that works with an arm sensor and augmented reality via a head-mounted display. Players engage in what’s essentially superhero dodge-ball, shooting projectiles that resemble Hadokens from Ryu in Street Fighter at each other and even erecting virtual walls to defend themselves. Hado Kart takes the concept to the streets, dropping players into motorized carts/scooters and having them lock onto each other’s vehicle to shoot as they maneuver around each other.

In 2011, Japan passed the Basic Act on Sport. The plan laid out a 10-year strategy starting in fiscal year 2012, including the Sport Basic Plan created by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) that improved the transparency of sports and steadily improved the development of sports for those with disabilities. Hopefully, similar initiatives will permeate across VR and AR, welcoming more and more into the fold.

Tagged with: Superhuman Sports Society

May 17, 2017

I/O 2017: Google Unveils VPS – Indoor Navigation Through AR

Clay Bavor, VP of VR for Google, took the stage to share intriguing new information for immersive technology. He made a blockbuster announcement for the new standalone VR headset Google is working on with HTC and also shared that the S8 will finally be getting Daydream support.

Not to be left out, AR also got some shine from Bavor and there are some cool things down the pipeline.

First up, the 2nd gen AR phone will go on sale this summer. The new Asus ZenFone AR is a far cry from the first Tango-equipped device, adopting the small form factor prevalent across the mobile phone industry currently. Bavor didn’t spend very time on hardware before he shifted right into new technology that could send shockwaves across the mobile industry.

“AR is most powerful when it’s tightly coupled to the real world,” says Bavor. “The more precisely, the better.” Google has been working with the Google Maps team to get precise location data for indoors. The result is Visual Positioning Service, or VPS, which uses your phone to find distinct visual features in your surroundings to triangulate and get you to your desired space.

The example on stage showed a VPS equipped phone take a user directly to the specific screwdriver he or she needed in a Lowe’s store. The visual representation of how this works showed the phone’s camera marking “feature points” with different color dots. It recognizes where items are in the space down to within a few centimeters. Then the user interface shows navigation-like elements as the user is guided down aisles.

Bavor followed the demo up with an anecdote on how an audio-based version of VPS could help those with impaired vision and “transform how they make their way through the world”.

He also revealed that VPS will also be one of the core capabilities of Google Lens, which we recently covered as well. A lightweight pair of AR equipped glasses with Lens tech and VPS would be incredible to experience and, hopefully, we’ll see that initiative come to fruition in the near future.

Lastly, Bavor tackled AR’s capacity as an educational tool. With over 2 million students served by the Expeditions VR experience, which gave teachers a way to travel with their students without leaving the classroom, Google is now adding an AR mode to give students an augmented way to learn about things seen in the classroom.

The video shown displayed a classroom where each student was equipped with phones on selfie sticks as they watched an augmented volcano erupt on their desk and a tornado take shape in the class. The AR mode got the students up, moving, and excited about the things popping up in their learning environment.

Implications are that Google is gearing up to take Tango and AR the extra mile as they add more and more functionality. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Tagged with: Google I/O

May 17, 2017

Google I/O: The New Google Lens Shows AR Potential

Google I/O’s 2017 keynote kicked off with some exciting statistics, showing off just how impactful and widespread the company’s applications are. There are 800 million Google Drive users and 500 million active Google Photos users. For hardware, they’ve even reached an incredible milestone with over 2 billion active Android devices. Later into the keynote, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai spoke of the advances Google is making with their computer vision technology.

From 2010 to now, the vision error rate for image recognition has fallen to a point where it is even below the rate of the human eye. An element of this allows for cleaning up noisy images taken with a Google device and even completely removing obstructions like a fence from a picture of a child playing baseball. Pichai followed this up with the announcement of Google Lens.

“All of Google was built because we started understanding text and web pages,” Pichai says. “The fact that computers can understand images and videos has profound implications for our core mission.”

May 15, 2017

Intel: Untethered VR Is “The Next Level Of eSports”

The VR ecosystem is far from settling into a rhythm, with developers still experimenting to learn what does and does not work. Nevertheless, players and companies are keeping their eyes open for competitive experiences that could leave a lasting impact on the industry and possibly gain ground in eSports. Companies are also embracing VR and 360-degree video as a spectator platform, such as with SLIVER.tv’s efforts to create a universal spectator platform.

After this year’s IEM (Intel Extreme Masters), which is an eSports collaboration between ESL and Intel, esports-pro.com caught up with Intel’s eSports Marketing Manager, George Woo. Intel championed VR in a big way at IEM and the publication reached out to him to discuss the current eSport climate, Intel’s position as a leader, and how untethered VR could be the next step for the industry.

Esports Pro noted that, coinciding with eSports’ immense growth, very notable brands like Nissan and Dominoes have become visibly involved with the industry.

Woo explains that this the audience growth plays a large part in this (256 million viewers in 2016 with a projected 345 million by 2019). “We’re learning how to address those audiences and create those amazing experiences, pushing the boundaries of innovation,” Woo says. “And this year is all about VR.

“Are we going to say we’re going to have eSports in VR next year? No. But what we want to do is get this top of mind, get people experienced with the head units, start with the experience showcases, and the next iteration is broadcast – in which we did League of Legends and CS:GO with Sliver.TV.”

When speaking of his 10-year projection, Woo not only believes there will be a significant VR presence that Intel leads the charge for, he also thinks we could have gamers competing in untethered VR headsets. “We want to change that model, and that’s why we are continuing to push on this because we know it’s an open canvas and we can change that scope,” he says. “We want it to be untethered, almost like a laser tag environment. People running around and being physical but in a virtual space. That could be it. You might talk to ESL and they’d have a different vision, but Intel wants to continue to look at that as the next thing, the next level of eSports.”

Woo and his team at Intel can see the potential in VR, taking significant steps even though they “know there’s no audience or community” and he hopes a preemptive strike will lead to the creation of a great AAA title in the eSport realm. 360-degree and VR live stream production companies are carving out their place in the VR industry right now, but that big VR hit game that draws in competitors hasn’t quite arrived.

For a deeper dive into how the ESL and Intel are bringing VR to eSports, check out our feature: The Future of Play.

Tagged with: eSports