Author: Charles Singletary

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SXSW 2017: Swapbots Brings Toy Collector Culture To Augmented Reality

SXSW 2017: Swapbots Brings Toy Collector Culture To Augmented Reality

Augmented reality caught a flash of exposure with Pokemon Go and continues to get mentioned regularly alongside it, but the technology still has a way to go before it becomes a household constant. Children have access to mobile phones and tablets nearly as much as adults these days and encounter gaming ecosystems geared toward their interests and that’s what the Draw and Code team out of Liverpool is hoping to tap into. Swapbots is their augmented effort that couples AR with toys that have exchangeable parts to bring the imagination of children to life on mobile devices.

The foundation of the Swapbots experience is the bots themselves, toys that are built with three parts: Head, torso, and lower body. Each character you get comes in those three parts and you can interchange them with other characters to create different combinations of abilities. The Swapbots app then brings those creatures to life via the camera lens on your device so that you can battle with AI or other player-created bots. At launch, there’s also going to be a story mode that will force players to exchange parts in order to move forward like using the wings of the griffin to fly over an obstacle.

The toys will supply the full experience for the Swapbots application and there will be no microtransactions or advertisements to supplement the experience. Any currency used in-game is earned in game and there’s no way to purchase additional amounts, which is something that will likely result in a sigh of relief for parents. Adopting a toy-focused gaming experience is something that AR could really benefit from if you look at the success of things like Disney Infinity, Skylanders, and Nintendo’s Amiibos. The Kickstarter has about three weeks left at the time this article was written and is really close to being funded, so it clearly is something people find interesting.

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SXSW 2017: You’re A Pig Before The Slaughter In This VR Experience

SXSW 2017: You’re A Pig Before The Slaughter In This VR Experience

The immersion of virtual reality experiences can be harnessed to educate, terrify, inspire, or entertain. Some experiences eschew the entertainment aspect, instead shooting for something impactful that may even change your real life routine once you step out of the virtual space. iAnimal is one such experience that gives an immersive look into farms and factories with the goal of eliminating cruel conditions for animals.

At their SXSW booth, passersby are given the choice of chicken or pig for their virtual experience. I chose the pig and was transported into a claustrophobic pen with a fellow pig the next pen over trying to interact. After that, you’re taken through a handful of scenes that make it tougher and tougher to sit through the roughly 5-minute video as you witness mother pigs rendered motionless to be fed on, a grown pig shaking itself loose after having its neck cut open, and a couple pigs being euthanized via electrocution. The hosts were there to inform and comfort those that watched iAnimal, hoping that they’d leave an impression on at least some of those that stopped at their booth.

It doesn’t take a lot of thought to figure out what path an animal takes before it gets to your plate, but iAnimal was still an eye opener. Pictures of such conditions are heartbreaking but don’t show the situation in the same way this immersive experience set out to do. You’re isolated beneath the VR headset and headphones, basically watching from the perspective of an animal as the typical day-to-day horrors transpire in these environments. When you look around the 360-degree video you’ll often catch other gruesome activities taking place. The team behind the project has already reached over 22,000 people with the iAnimal experience ,and it joins a long list of VR experiences attempting to leave such a deep impression that people seek change afterward.

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SXSW 2017: Birdly Is VR Locomotion At Its Most Ridiculous

SXSW 2017: Birdly Is VR Locomotion At Its Most Ridiculous

What your mind expects and what your eyes see is a crucial element to the locomotion in VR experiences. As much as many developers would like to have everyone moving freely at high speeds, VR motion sickness is a real concern so things like teleporting must be implemented. There are a few gaming experiences that are experimenting with ways to combat motion sickness, but some are taking the immersion of VR to the extreme. Birdly, an immersive flight platform distributed by D3D Cinema, is one of those extremes.

On the expo floor at SXSW, a quickly growing crowd caught my attention and I moved to see what people were huddled around. What I saw was a headset-wearing gentleman sprawled across a platform that was rising, falling, and turning as he adjusted and flapped his arms. In this demo, he was flying around downtown New York City in a proprietary program and it looked like an exhilarating experience.

We previewed an earlier prototype of Birdly a couple years ago, but what we experienced at SXSW is what will be shipped out when ordered. From the outside, the flying rig looked pretty uncomfortable but I got into it and started flying like a bird naturally. Your arms control the wings and your hands have a grip that serves as the primary feathers for turning and diving. The platform responds immediately as you do such actions, and will rise or fall as you get further or closer to the ground. When you’re diving quickly but then turn your feathers upward and start flapping, it really feels like you’re fighting against the wind. It does help that the rig has a medium sized fan attached at the head that takes the immersion to another level. As far as comfort, it’s not as bad as it looks but you’ll start to get quite a back workout the longer you play. I also had no motion sickness feelings at all and I’m fairly susceptible to them.

Birdly is certainly not a product for consumers but is something that could draw a crowd as a pay-to-play attraction in arcades. The device is available to be shipped currently and includes everything you need including the computer and VR headset and the full experience is surprisingly compact.

You can find out more information on the official website and see all of our SXSW 2017 coverage right here.

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SXSW 2017: Birdly Is VR Locomotion At Its Most Ridiculous

SXSW 2017: Birdly Is VR Locomotion At Its Most Ridiculous

What your mind expects and what your eyes see is a crucial element to the locomotion in VR experiences. As much as many developers would like to have everyone moving freely at high speeds, VR motion sickness is a real concern so things like teleporting must be implemented. There are a few gaming experiences that are experimenting with ways to combat motion sickness, but some are taking the immersion of VR to the extreme. Birdly, an immersive flight platform distributed by D3D Cinema, is one of those extremes.

On the expo floor at SXSW, a quickly growing crowd caught my attention and I moved to see what people were huddled around. What I saw was a headset-wearing gentleman sprawled across a platform that was rising, falling, and turning as he adjusted and flapped his arms. In this demo, he was flying around downtown New York City in a proprietary program and it looked like an exhilarating experience.

We previewed an earlier prototype of Birdly a couple years ago, but what we experienced at SXSW is what will be shipped out when ordered. From the outside, the flying rig looked pretty uncomfortable but I got into it and started flying like a bird naturally. Your arms control the wings and your hands have a grip that serves as the primary feathers for turning and diving. The platform responds immediately as you do such actions, and will rise or fall as you get further or closer to the ground. When you’re diving quickly but then turn your feathers upward and start flapping, it really feels like you’re fighting against the wind. It does help that the rig has a medium sized fan attached at the head that takes the immersion to another level. As far as comfort, it’s not as bad as it looks but you’ll start to get quite a back workout the longer you play. I also had no motion sickness feelings at all and I’m fairly susceptible to them.

Birdly is certainly not a product for consumers but is something that could draw a crowd as a pay-to-play attraction in arcades. The device is available to be shipped currently and includes everything you need including the computer and VR headset and the full experience is surprisingly compact.

You can find out more information on the official website and see all of our SXSW 2017 coverage right here.

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SXSW 2017: Snatch Is Like Pokemon Go With Prizes You Must Steal

SXSW 2017: Snatch Is Like Pokemon Go With Prizes You Must Steal

Many mobile augmented reality experiences will continue to be compared to Pokemon Go for the foreseeable future. It was one of the first times that an AR-based game drew such a massive following and, even though it was mainly due to the strength and nostalgia of the Pokemon brand, the game did present ideas that take advantage of today’s constant use of smartphones.

The major key for Pokemon Go’s popularity was fostering a social experience by getting groups of people out in droves and Snatch is an AR app that hopes to do the same — but with a bit of a twist.

When it comes to groups hitting the pavement to collect items and capture creatures in Pokemon Go, it was always exciting to see other people clearly doing the same as you hit up parks, stores, and other places. With Snatch, you may be a lot less excited to see other players. In this AR app, your goal is to grab parcels on an augmented map but you must also protect them from being snatched by other players. You can steal from those people as well, but your focus is staying on defense considering the game has some pretty great prizes for you to earn. You’ll regularly find in-game currency that will allow you to steal and defend with unique tools, but the parcels can even contain extremely impressive gifts from cash to concert tickets and even full vacation packages.

The frequency of prizes is going to be a big concern for those trying this out (we’ll update everyone with some hands-on impressions of the app soon) but one key detail is that the parcel count is dependent on the amount of people playing the game in one area. So, though you’ll be wary of people playing near you, it’ll serve you better to invite as many people as you can to open up more chances for prizes. Stay tuned to UploadVR for more updates from SXSW.

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SXSW 2017: The Sphere Combines A Motion Simulator With An 8K Screen

SXSW 2017: The Sphere Combines A Motion Simulator With An 8K Screen

At SXSW, the Sphere 5.2 from Wonder Vision made its debut and it looks like it could bring immersive excitement to a theater setting, theme parks, and more.

If you’re walking the SXSW exhibition hall, it is pretty hard to miss the Sphere. It’s a massive, curved screen that resembles an extremely condensed version of the IMAX dome theater, except Sphere is for an audience of two to four people. Labeled as “VR without HMDs”, the setup I experienced was for the VR ride “Victory” where two passengers are strapped into a pair of chairs that rise, fall, and shake as you’re flown around various streets and districts in Tokyo, Japan.

Being 6’1, my trip on the Sphere was hindered a bit. After it starts, you’re lifted off of the ground but I had to continue to be mindful of my feet hitting the Sphere’s parts as we got lower. The passenger I shared the ride with was about 5’10” and was having the same issue as me. The experience was monoscopic — no glasses involved. It was also shown in a setting that takes away from its 8K screen as the expo hall’s lights beamed down, and didn’t really allow us to take in the crisp details of Tokyo. In a darker, enclosed area the screen would likely have a lot more pop.

This potential for this motion system is evident though. The promotional material for Sphere 5.2 showed off a collection of different seating modifications including a full car, static seating for more people, and even a small gaming-like racing seat. The Wonder Vision team believes there’s potential beyond theme parks, even finding space with car manufacturers as they test out their prototype cars.

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SXSW 2017: Framestore’s Advice For Producers Considering VR Projects

SXSW 2017: Framestore’s Advice For Producers Considering VR Projects

The Film and Interactive disciplines at SXSW are home to many VR experiences and they often intersect. As a matter of fact, the interactive nature of cinematic VR experiences is a quality that’s underestimated by those employing the efforts of production teams. We discussed this and other VR topics with Christine Cattano, Framestore’s Global Head of VR, during SXSW.

The Framestore crew is, collectively, some of the best minds in visual effects and VR having not only created virtual spaces inspired by works such as Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, but also creating immersive experiences like the actual magic school bus we reported on back in August last year. At SXSW, Cattano will be speaking at the “Wrapped Up In The Big Screen” session about the evolution of cinematic entertainment marketing. Cattano points out that, during the last couple years, marketers have been tapping VR platforms during the promotional run for a film or a TV show.

“I think now we’re starting to see a bit of an evolution of that,” she says. Now teams beyond marketing are thinking of ways to use the immersive platform not only during the promo window but the in-home release and maybe even in-between sequels if a film has multiple installments. “We’ve really seen this extension in the thinking and timeline for how people are looking at [VR experiences], which is great because it opens up new resources to content creators and production companies.”

VR and AR also brings a unique set of challenges for creators, one that producers may not truly take into account when green-lighting them, according to Cattano.

“What’s a challenge [for production teams] is the marketing timelines that they work within,” Cattano says. “We’ve had to do several of our projects within an 8-week time frame. That’s not really optimal for creating a piece of interactive software ultimately. You want to give yourself time for user testing, feedback, and prototyping to make sure that the experience that you’re designing is powerful and it’s doing things what you want it to do.”

The message seems to be that those in charge of doling out cash to build VR experiences for a particular movie or TV show need to understand that creators are still working with legacy platforms in the building process and it is simply not realistic to stick them with the same windows of time to finish a project that non-VR teams work with. This is especially true if those VR experiences are also interactive. These professional teams, especially an experienced company like Framestore, have a solid grasp of what does and does not work in these experiences as well as how long it realistically takes to bring it to fruition.

Cattano also suggests “putting a little bit more control in the hands of the content creators to really steer how you approach things.”

Despite these barriers, the Framestore crew continues to be one of the leading collaborators with filmmakers for high-quality interactive VR. Though they couldn’t share exactly what’s in the works, they suggest staying tuned for a big announcement.

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SXSW 2017: Astronaut Buzz Aldrin Discusses Space and VR

SXSW 2017: Astronaut Buzz Aldrin Discusses Space and VR

Reality capture company 8i debuted its narrative experience Buzz Aldrin: Cycling Pathways To Mars and also hosted a panel where Aldrin chatted with a large group about his life and his goals with this collaboration. We weren’t able to attend the panel, but we were given an opportunity to speak with Aldrin in a more intimate setting with a few other journalists. The result was an intriguing journey through the mind of a man that certainly can’t be easily impressed, considering he’s viewed Earth from the face of the Moon.

To no one’s surprise, Aldrin pays a significant amount of attention to detail. As mentioned in our report on the hands-on with the Pathways experience, much of what Aldrin theorizes could easily go over your head, but I could grasp what he spoke of during the interview largely because I’d experienced Pathways. Much of the detail in the experience itself was placed at Aldrin’s instruction, something the 8i team said led to a pretty cool moment when Aldrin watched the narrative unfold himself. In life and in VR, people don’t usually look straight up without being instructed to. The action simply isn’t a natural thing, but Buzz immediately did so when he reached the part of Pathways that recreated his Moon landing. Why? Because that’s where he remembered seeing Earth. Details like that and even the amount of pods on the Cycler ship were painstakingly recreated by the 8i team to truly bring Aldrin’s vision to life.

When discussing the “big picture” VR creators seek to show in virtual spaces, Aldrin pointed out creators maybe focus too many assets on details that weren’t quite needed. With Pathways, he and 8i seem to have struck a solid balance. Visualization of data and concepts is something software developers constantly try to make more efficient and informative, from interactive graphs to living visual charts. We must “understand the conditions under which we’re going to use something and then design something to see how it works,” as Aldrin put it. Virtual platforms will hopefully continue to provide the space to do so.

When asked if he’d go to Mars himself, he responded: “I’m more valuable here than I ever think I could be there”. At 88 years old, virtual reality could be a means to not only solidify his legacy further (his hologram could greet people through mixed reality applications for hundreds of years), but it also allowed him to see his ideas for the future come to life.

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SXSW 2017: Buzz Aldrin Shows Us The Pathway To Mars Colonization

SXSW 2017: Buzz Aldrin Shows Us The Pathway To Mars Colonization

Update: The full Buzz Aldrin: Cycling Pathways to Mars experience is now available in Time Inc’s LIFE VR app on combat mission isolation for astronauts, and this new experience is essentially an extension of that. Aldrin has had a complex theory for how the colonization of Mars would begin, but it was not something easily explained to those that don’t share Aldrin’s level of expertise. The immersion of VR coupled with Aldrin’s knowledge made for a narrative experience where his words are brought to life and viewers, such as myself, come away with a much better understanding.

Cycling Pathways To Mars places you on a platform with a projection system on the floor that displays the virtual Buzz Aldrin as he theorizes the different steps needed to move toward Mars colonization. As he walks us through his ideas, the space around us unfolds to match what he describes. We’re shown his original moon landing, the moon of the future, the proposed journey to Mars on massive ships called “Cyclers” and, finally, the Mars colony. The experience is running on an HTC Vive in roomscale, so you’re able to walk around the platform and get a look at things from a different perspective.

Planets fly through you as you’re surrounded by the solar system and you’ll even fly through the Cycler and get a close look at its components. There was an interesting interaction I was making that I didn’t realize until my host told me after the hands-on. Ben Stein, 8i’s General Manager, pointed out I gave Buzz Aldrin’s hologram a wide berth and those before me had done the same. I moved through the other digital assets with no problem, but I really felt like Aldrin was sharing the space with me. 8i has shared images of their volumetric projections before, but seeing one close up really reveals how impactful they can be.

If you’re at SXSW, you owe it to yourself to check out Cycling Pathways To Mars. It is being hosted at the Marriott in downtown Austin until Thursday March 16. On Friday, it will be available through TIME Inc so others can experience it as well.

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Here Are The VR/AR Sessions and Speakers for GTC 2017

Here Are The VR/AR Sessions and Speakers for GTC 2017

In early May, the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) will be opening up a window into new advancements in the computing industry. Various sessions from deep learning and AI to big data analytics will be held with various companies speaking on their developments. Mixed reality will have a huge spotlight on it as well, with a handful of VR and AR sessions and speakers taking the stage at the event May 8 – 11 (specific dates and times TBD):

Computational Focus-Tunable Near-Eye Displays

Description: We’ll explore unprecedented display modes afforded by computational focus-tunable near-eye displays with the goal of increasing visual comfort and providing more realistic and effective visual experiences in virtual and augmented reality. Applications of VR/AR systems range from communication, entertainment, education, collaborative work, simulation, and training to telesurgery, phobia treatment, and basic vision research. In every immersive experience, the primary interface between the user and the digital world is the near-eye display. Many characteristics of near-eye displays that define the quality of an experience, such as resolution, refresh rate, contrast, and field of view, have been significantly improved over the last years. However, a pervasive source of visual discomfort prevails: the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). Further, natural focus cues are not supported by any existing near-eye display.

Presented by: Nitish Padmanaban (CTO) at Stanford Computational Imaging Lab

Assembly Chain Training with Professional VR

Description: Optis has been involved in advanced optical simulation for the past 25 years and has recently invested in VR for virtual prototyping. Its latest HIM built for human ergonomics evaluation in combination with advanced, real-time, physics-based rendering enables precise environment reproduction for appropriate prototyping or training. We’ll present the latest integration for assembly line training with HTC Vive and feedback powered by NVIDIA® PhysX®. Companies such as Tesla Motors and Bentley are the proud early adopters of this solution. We’ll demonstrate our software and show customer use cases and their data to explain how to improve the VR experience with haptics and audio simulation in the future.

Presented by: Nicolas Dalmasso (Innovation Director) at Optis

How To Bring Engineering Datasets To Head-Mounted Displays

Description: Hear visualization experts explain why people in professional visualization, in particular virtual engineering, are great candidates to unleash the full potential of HMDs and how close today’s technology pushes application developers to the finish line of discovering massive datasets with HMDs. Learn about new hardware (NVIDIA Pascal™-powered NVIDIA Quadro® GPUs), extensions, APIs (NVIDIA VRWorks™: NVIDIA SLI® VR, Single Pass Stereo), techniques (GPU culling), and next steps that enable ESI to create amazing VR experiences even with high node and triangle count.

Presented by: Andreas Mank & Ingo Esser (Software Development Team Leaders ) at ESI Group and NVIDIA

Improving Patient Care Using EchoPixel’s Interactive Virtual Reality Technology

Description: Get the latest information on how virtual reality is being used to change healthcare outcomes. EchoPixel, a company focused on VR in healthcare, has developed the True 3D Viewer, a real-time, interactive VR platform. It offers physicians an unprecedented opportunity to view and interact with patient tissues and organs in an open 3D space as if they were real, physical objects. The resulting improvement in clinical efficacy and workflow has had a significant positive impact on patient care.

Presented by: Janet Goldenstein (Lead Engineer) at Echopixel

NVIDIA VRWorks Audio: Improving VR Immersion with Acoustic Fidelity

Description: The demand for realism increases dramatically the instant a player puts on a head-mounted display (HMD) – images, sounds, and interactions make or break the immersiveness of the experience. We’ll provide an overview and examples of the NVIDIA VRWorks Audio SDK, a geometric acoustics rendering toolkit that helps developers improve realism and immersion through realistic acoustic simulation and audio rendering.

Presented by: Tony Scudiero (Developer Technology Engineer) at NVIDIA

GPU Computing for the Construction Industry, AR/VR for Learning, Planning, and Safety

Description: We’ll dive head-first into some of the current challenges of the construction industry, how we’re addressing them, and how we’re planning to use virtual/augmented reality and real-time GPU computing to address them. To optimize the construction of a building, site logistics must be planned and all systems analyzed and coordinated to confirm constructability. Along with the use of building information modeling (BIM) and the advent of inexpensive GPU and AR/VR hardware, we’re building tools to redefine the planning and analysis process for construction management. Virtual and augmented reality systems aren’t just for entertainment anymore; they can help us plan faster, help confirm our client’s design goals, and facilitate stronger communication among our team members before and during the construction process.

Presented by: Kyle Szostek & Ken Grothman (Senior Virtual Construction Engineers) at Gilbane Building Company

If you’re a creator, you still have a little bit of time to submit to NVIDIA’s GTC contest as the deadline is on the 15th of this month. The details can be found here and you must be able to attend the event with at least two representatives for your team (the exhibition floor space must always have at least one person on hand).

This is sponsored content which has been produced by UploadVR and brought to you by NVIDIA. NVIDIA did not have any input into the creation of this content.

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