Ian Hamilton – Page 133 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

March 8, 2017

Duck Hunt Meets Five Nights At Freddy’s In Stress Level Zero’s Next VR Game

Duck Season is easily my favorite premise for a VR game. For anyone in the age range of about 30-45, the upcoming release from Stress Level Zero will be a giant nostalgia trip with a freaky twist.

The 1980s are in full swing and my virtual living room looks like it fits perfectly into that time period. My mom brings home a copy of the popular game Duck Season as a one day game rental, and I’m going to spend all day playing it on a giant box television. The toy gun for the game is sitting on the floor among a heap of game cartridges and VHS tapes. Most of these are playable, so I can grab a tape or one of the cartridges and check it out.

There is a copy of the game Sinatra, for example. I stick that in the game system and I quickly recognize the startup screen for Contra with “Sinatra” spelled out instead. The little mini-game is reminiscent of a cross between Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker and Streets of Rage. A crying Sinatra pops up whenever I die.

When I get to the Duck Season cartridge I actually go inside the television. If I turn around I can see the little boy that is me staring back through the television screen. It is a bit trippy. I pick up my shotgun and start loading shells to take out the ducks flying back and forth. Between rounds a creepy dog pops up from the brush and starts dancing. So I shoot him, just like I did that laughing mutt from the original Duck Hunt.

This might have been a mistake.

Later, when it is near midnight and I leave the game world, the lighting in that living room has darkened. Now it looks like something straight out of a childhood nightmare. If I stare at objects around the room, like the clock, the sound I hear slowly changes into a more haunting version of itself. Imagine listening to the slight ticking of a clock until it is the only thing drumming inside your skull.

“The various endings are determined by the players actions,” wrote Stress Level Zero’s Brandon Laatsch in an email. “Some elements of the sound design are driven subjectively. Focusing on them causes you to hear them how your mind might imagine them rather than how they actually sound.”

My skin starts to crawl and shivers run down my spine. I pick up the toy gun off the ground — will that help me here in the “real” world? I peek out the window nervously, turn around for fear there’s something hiding behind the couch and finally focus my attention on the door open a crack just to my left.

The dog is coming for me and I’m so scared.

The designers behind this world are Stress Level Zero, creators of the multiplayer shooting game Hover Junkers [Review: 7/10], and I found myself experiencing a range of emotions from laughter to straight-up fear inside a short tour of the experience at the Game Developers Conference last week. The game will feature different endings depending on what you do, including one for those that don’t shoot the dog. Laatsch says everyone shoots the dog though.

Stress Level Zero is planning to release Duck Season in the coming weeks.

Tagged with: duck hunt, Duck Season, Stress Level Zero

March 6, 2017

Valve, SMI and Tobii Preview VR’s Eye Tracking Future In HTC Vive

Over the last week we learned that by spending essentially $300 to purchase three Vive Trackers, you will be able to bring your legs, feet and torso into VR — so you can kick a dinosaur in the face without even looking at it. Dinosaur kicking for $300 is certainly funny, but it’s also a great example of a broad effort by developers and hardware manufacturers to make virtual worlds more responsive to human behavior. Another is more robust hand and finger tracking, so the incredible variety of quick and precise movements in your hands are accurately represented in a virtual world. Still another example is eye tracking, and we’ve seen demonstrations from both Tobii and SMI in the HTC Vive offering a glimpse of how much better future VR systems will be at understanding our behavior.

A look inside a headset with eye tracking from Tobii.

New Tools For Game Designers

After a few minutes using the tech from SMI and Tobii, I noticed I was starting to unlearn a behavior I’d grown accustomed to in first-generation VR. Namely, I’ve gotten in the habit of pointing my head directly at objects to interact with them. That’s because current VR systems only understand where your head is pointed. Some games, particularly those on mobile VR, use this “gaze detection” as the primary method of interacting with the world. Tobii, in contrast, offered a very interesting test where I tried to throw a rock at a bottle in the distance. My aim was so-so on the first few throws, but that was without eye-tracking. When eye-tracking was turned on, they asked me to pick up a glowing orb and throw that instead. This time, almost every throw collided with a bottle.

Initially, I couldn’t understand why I’d want the computer to help me so much. As long as I kept my eye on the bottle and made a decently strong throw I’d hit my target every time. The glowing orb could be recalled by pressing a button on the controller too, so I could throw the ball and the instant it collided with a bottle I could recall it back to my hand like Thor’s hammer. It was just a simple tech demo but once my brain started getting accustomed to this new capability, I made a game out of seeing how quickly I could eliminate all the bottles by throwing the orb, recalling it the moment it collided, locking eyes on the next target and then immediately throwing it again.

This is what it took for me to realize just how empowering eye tracking will be for VR software designers. The additional information it provides will allow creators to make games that are fundamentally different from the current generation. With the example of throwing that orb, it was like I had been suddenly handed a superpower and I naturally started using it as such — because it was fun. It is up to designers to figure out how much skill will be involved in achieving a particular task when the game knows exactly what you’re interested in at any given moment.

This is a screen grab from Tobii’s demo showing my eye movements over ten seconds. The purple lines represent what caught my eye in that virtual world over that length of time. This type of data is already used to optimize video game design.

Higher Resolution Headsets May Need Eye Tracking

Eye tracking will be useful for other purposes too, including foveated rendering and social VR. Foveated rendering focuses the most detail in the center of your vision where your eyes are actually pointed. Your eyes see less detail in the periphery, so if the computer knows exactly where your eyes are pointed it dials up the amount of detail in the right spot while saving resources in places you’ll never notice. As manufacturers look at putting higher resolution displays in VR headsets, eye tracking that enables foveated rendering may become fundamental to that effort because it could help keep computers at affordable prices despite pushing more pixels.

Make Eye Contact

Eye tracking also dramatically increases the expressiveness in communication. In Valve’s booth at GDC, both SMI and Tobii demonstrated a 3-person social VR experience in which I hung out with other folks in VR and had a conversation. Tobii showed its technology integrated with the popular multiplayer world Rec Room while SMI allowed me to chat with someone in Seattle as if he was standing right next to me. Social interaction in VR with current consumer technology is fairly awkward. You can get some sense of a person’s interest via their hand and head movements, but to really connect with someone you need eye contact and both Tobii and SMI enabled that natural connection regardless of physical distance.

I wouldn’t say any of these technologies are consumer ready just yet, but they do show a sophistication, ease of use and affordability that we haven’t seen before. In fact, all the technologies mentioned in this post are being distributed to select developers as kits so they can start to build software around these upcoming advancements. FOVE is distributing a eye-tracking headset too. Meanwhile, both Google and Facebook have acquired eye tracking technologies within the last year — underscoring the expectation that the technology will power future headsets. It indicates that we are getting much closer to the realization of next-generation systems that will enable far more compelling and responsive virtual worlds compared with the ones we have today.

“I like to think of this as an extension of the development of the human-computer interface,” said Valve Developer Yasser Malaika, in an interview with UploadVR. “You started with command lines where you needed a lot of memorization, then moved to GUIs…now with VR we’re bringing more of the human body into it…your whole body the computer can now respond to. And adding eyes is another layer where it’s more responsive to you. It is the computer adapting to you rather than it asking you to adapt to it.”

Tagged with: htc, SMI, tobii, valve

March 4, 2017

3D and 180-Degree Videos Get PSVR Support From Littlstar

Littlstar appears to be the first app for PlayStation 4 to allow access to USB drives with support for a wide range of VR videos including 3D and 180-degree content.

The feature should arrive in the next update to the Littlstar app on PS4, version 1.07. According to Littlstar, the update has been submitted to Sony and should start hitting systems in the coming hours as a beta feature. The feature isn’t endorsed or suggested by Littlstar as being used for this purpose, but this functionality should mean easier access to a wider range of content on PS4, including adult content.

“Littlstar had to request special permissions to have access to the USB port for sideloading content,” wrote Littlstar CEO Tony Mugavero in an email. “The player will support 2D and 3D 360 and 180 content, something the PlayStation player does not currently support (they only have basic 2d 360). We are the only company to have this available, so it’s an exclusive feature to Littlstar on the PSVR. The community was asking us for this because Sony doesn’t have a proper player to support it, so this was really an effort for the community. There were people offering to pay us for it, but we’re offering it for free and just asking for registration. This will enable content creators to preview and showcase content on the PlayStation without needing to go through a potentially lengthy process of upload/transcode/delivery via Littlstar. We’re excited to get this feature out there, and look forward to iterating with the community on future projects.”

The update should enable a much-desired feature for some PS4 owners — the ability to watch a wide range of VR porn downloaded from one of the many websites offering that type of content. For example, as of this writing one of the leading providers of adult VR content, Virtual Real Porn, notes on its website (NSFW) that its videos only play in 2D on PlayStation 4.

There are a number of methods on both PC and mobile headsets for people to load up whatever videos they want stored locally or over of the Internet. Streaming content in VR can dramatically limit the quality of the video, though, and pornographic content typically runs against the rules imposed by sites like YouTube. So for those looking for a high-quality adult video, the best option typically is to download the video and then use an app that “sideloads” the content.

Sony’s own Media Player app appears to only support 360-degree videos and doesn’t support 3D content, though we haven’t tested ourselves. A large number of adult videos, however, are shot in a 180-degree format while some others are shot in 3D. Adding support for this content might essentially establish Littlstar as the go-to app for folks looking to watch a wider range of content on PlayStation 4.

Tagged with: littlstar, porn

March 1, 2017

GDC 2017: Hands-on With LG’s SteamVR Headset

LG’s upcoming VR headset powered by Valve’s SteamVR Tracking represents an important milestone in the development of the industry, and we just got the first hands-on.

The prototype revealed at the Game Developers Conference uses the same tracking technology from Valve that’s used in the HTC Vive which shipped last year. It also runs at 90 frames per second and flips up away from the face like the Microsoft headset we tried earlier this week. This should make VR developers very happy.

Here are the specs:

Two panels (one for each eye) with a resolution of 1440 by 1280 each
OLED display from LG
3.64 inches diagonal
90 Hz refresh rate
110 degree FOV

These dev kits are going out to “select partners” by the end of this week. Representatives from the company were reluctant to commit to a time frame for a consumer release, but said an announcement should come some time this year after they get feedback from partners and developers.

The tracking base stations used for the headset appeared to be no different than those used with the HTC Vive. I got to spend about six minutes inside the headset, two minutes each in three experiences including Longbow from Valve and Firebird. While the fit on my head could probably have been tightened a bit and LG made sure to be clear this is an early version of the device, to my eyes the visuals inside the headset already felt roughly comparable to the Vive. From my six minutes in there I don’t feel like I can say whether FOV or resolution felt higher or lower than the Vive. I can say, however, that it felt at least on par and that’s pretty significant. In other words, there’s another player in the SteamVR ecosystem and the quality of it feels a lot like what we’ve come to expect from room-scale VR powered by Valve’s tracking technology.

“It’ll be similar prices” compared with the current generation of VR hardware, said Richard Taylor, an assistant research engineer at LG. “It completely depends what feedback we get, but…I can probably say the display will improve, the weight will probably get lighter.”

March 1, 2017

GDC 2017: Hands-On With Microsoft’s First Windows Holographic VR Headset

I tried a Microsoft prototype VR headset at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and got the first public look at the company’s vision for mixed reality beyond Hololens.

I’ll get straight to the point. Inside the headset, I saw considerable motion blur while moving my head. I was among a handful of journalists invited to see the internal Microsoft prototype, though I was told photos or videos for my demo would not be allowed. Developer kits are slated to ship in the coming weeks. While those units are expected to be an improvement, the prototype internal hardware I tried was running at 60 frames per second. To my eyes, this blurring effect was more than I’m accustomed to seeing in even mobile headsets like Gear VR or Daydream. When dev kits ship, I’m told those units can run at 90 frames per second.

This is Acer’s kit, the first Holographic VR headset to roll out to developers.

The unit also had a very short cord to the PC, so I was severely limited in how much I could test the robustness of Microsoft’s inside out tracking. I could manage jumping in place, turning and lots of leaning. As far as tracking is concerned, it worked without hitches with the exception of one or two very brief moments where some stairs seemed to pop out of place a few inches then quickly return. It was brief, and unclear if related to tracking specifically. I didn’t note any discomfort when it happened.

I used an Xbox controller to select apps and teleport from place to place inside a virtual house. When I encountered a bug in the system and couldn’t jump to a particular world, they had to do one full restart of the system while I was inside the headset. It’s to be expected with in-development software and hardware, but am I the first person outside Microsoft or its partners to see the Windows startup logo appear in VR?

I also found features in Microsoft’s gear I instantly wished were included in my Rift and Vive back at home. First, the flip up screen feature made me giggle with joy.

One second I’m playing Forza on a big screen in VR streaming from an Xbox. Flip. Now I’m back in the real world chatting with the people there. Flip. Now I’m driving again. Flip. Back in the real world. It was effortless and nearly instant to switch between realities by simply flipping the screen up away from my face. This was far more convenient than removing the entire headset or even using the passthrough camera on Vive.

“We’re the most affordable, we’re the easiest to setup, and we’re the most comfortable,” said Alex Kipman, Microsoft Technical Fellow, in an interview with UploadVR.

The added convenience of the flip out screen is amplified by the tracking technology Microsoft pioneered on Hololens. This “inside-out” tracking tech was developed over a number of years by Microsoft, and it is quite an achievement. Rather than cameras searching for lights or base stations beaming out lasers, the inside-out approach relies on cameras and sensors embedded in the headset itself to figure out your head’s precise location within a given space. In theory, with a Microsoft-powered VR headset, you can move your VR experiences from one room to another as easily as you could a laptop. It’s an important feature that makes getting in and out of VR a lot easier, and one Facebook and Google would love to match.

My time inside Windows Holographic also highlighted the value of multi-tasking with access to familiar apps. This is something we’ve lost in the Vive and Rift. Any simple task like checking Twitter or the weather requires dropping out of whatever you’re doing, but in the Windows vision of mixed reality these apps sit on tables or hang from walls. Fully immersive software takes over everything, but some legacy apps can be enjoyed simultaneously. The interface also showed how some content, like a highly detailed animated 3D capture of a space suit, can seem to float in this virtual living room alongside other content.

I watched 360 videos with the movies app, checked out a model of the solar system and played Forza streaming from an Xbox. I also checked out Twitter and the weather forecast simultaneously, with both traditional Windows apps sitting on my virtual walls. I immediately wanted to surround myself in dozens of windows. Access to all these apps in VR really highlights just how simplistic and limiting Steam and Oculus Home are when it comes to app selection. Within a few minutes of playing around in there, I really wanted something similar in the Rift or Vive.

We still have much to see from Microsoft. Kipman said that the company’s GDC showcase is “all about the headset”, adding that Windows is open to a variety of inputs, from gamepad, to keyboards, to 6 degrees of freedom (6DOF) controls. He suggested upcoming conferences, including Microsoft’s Build, would show next steps in mixed reality for the tech giant.

Tagged with: GDC, Micrsoft, Windows Holographic

February 28, 2017

GDC: 2017: New VR Strategy Game Blade & Soul Table Arena From Ncsoft

The most memorable part of Blade & Soul Table Arena wasn’t the game itself — which is a lot like Dragon Front if it leaned toward real-time strategy more than a trading card game.

Blade & Soul is a massively multiplayer online game that premiered in Korea from Ncsoft. This Table Arena game, though, is said to be using intellectual property from that world but is otherwise unconnected. The space where I picked out my creatures for battle is filled with a bunch of Amiibo-like figures. It is a rich and detailed area of the game that was an absolute feast for the eyes.

You can pull one of the figures off the shelf and place it in front of you to use as part of your team. Hold one creature in each hand and move them close together to watch them do battle. You can also power them up. It’s a very cool thing to see for anyone who likes small figures or remembers the holographic chess game from Star Wars. All of the figures on the shelves were eye-catching and uniquely designed, and I wanted to pull each one down and examine it.

The game itself was structured somewhat like Dragon Front in that you are dueling with another player and arming yourself with a set of creatures you can send into battle. I enjoyed winning a few matches as I powered up my creatures to much higher levels in the lab before each subsequent match.

Dragon Front is a cross-platform title available on both Gear VR and Rift, which can help with match-making as it widens the pool of possible players. It is unclear whether we would ever see a mobile version of Blade & Soul Table Arena — it was shown on Rift with Touch. For a game like this, launching with enough players so everyone can find challenging matches is important. Developers gave me no timeline for its possible release.

Tagged with: Blade & Soul Table Arena, GDC, Ncsoft, Oculus Studios

February 28, 2017

GDC 2017: Brass Tactics Combines Real-Time Strategy With Oculus Touch

The studio behind popular strategy games Age of Empires II and Defense Grid 2 VR (Review: 8/10) have found success in the genre before, but now Hidden Path Entertainment is developing a brand new title for VR headsets. We went hands-on with the new game, Brass Tactics, at GDC 2017 and found a fun new approach to a classic genre in VR.

The core vision behind real-time strategy game Brass Tactics comes from Age of Empires 2 lead designer Mark Terrano, who is founder and chief creative officer at Hidden Path. The VR version of the studio’s earlier Defense Grid 2 converts the intricate battlefields of the traditional tower defense game into a highly detailed tabletop diorama that can be explored up close. It is immensely satisfying to see these kinds of rich and bustling miniature worlds floating in front of you. Games like Landfall (Review: 8/10) from Force Field continue to push these kinds of miniature-scale games forward in VR. Both those titles, however, are built for gamepads. While we rated each as being great, you can only do so much with that interaction approach in VR. This is where Brass Tactics comes in, which uses Oculus Touch controllers to let you control its clockwork mechanical units.

UploadVR Games Editor David Jagneaux and I initially commanded our armies from opposite ends of a very large battlefield spread across the surface of a table. The height of the table can be adjusted by pressing grip buttons on both controllers and raising or lowering them.

To move, all you need to do is press the grip button on one hand and pull. It took a minute to get acquainted with this approach of getting around but I found it very responsive and comfortable. In just one play session I was getting good at skimming across the surface of the map to move from spot to spot with a single tug.

And it may have been my speed that ultimately crushed David’s attempts to mount any sort of serious defense against me. You grab structures to place them on the battlefield so you can summon more troops and try to press onward.

At one point David and I encountered each other in the middle of the map and I felt a surge of adrenaline at the sudden realization he was micromanaging the same portion of the battle. I immediately rushed off to gather more troops and send them back to David’s location.

The game also offers a catapult feature in the corner of the map you can try to dial in and manually bombard a location. I found it more useful to manage my armies and direct them to key locations that David either wasn’t paying attention to or didn’t understand how to defend.

Brass Tactics from Hidden Path Entertainment is slated for release this fall with single player, player vs. player, and cooperative modes.

Tagged with: Age of Empires 2, brass tactics, defense grid 2, Hidden Path Entertainment, real-time strategy

February 27, 2017

GDC 2017: LG Headset Prototype Will Be Shown At Valve Booth

We just had a juicy bit of information dropped on us by Valve — LG is showing a headset prototype at the company’s booth.

Very little is known about the device right now, though Valve did confirm to UploadVR that this is a SteamVR tracking headset, making it the second such device to be revealed, two years after HTC first introduced its Vive headset and nearly a year after it was released.

According to a statement from Valve, the device will offer a “high fidelity, next generation VR experience.” Though not confirmed, we assume that makes it another PC-based device rather than another mobile-based headset, with LG has dabbled with in the past. The company intends to meet with developers during the event to showcase its prototype and collect feedback. Final pricing and launch dates are not being revealed at this time.

Don’t expect this to be the last SteamVR device; last week Valve dropped requirements to attend a $3,000 class for its platform and 500 companies having signed up to work with its Lighthouse tracking technology, be they new headsets, controllers or otherwise.

SteamVR isn’t alone in licensing VR technology, however. Microsoft is also working with companies like Dell and Asus to produce its own VR headsets using inside-out tracking and running on its Windows Holographic OS.

There are still a lot of questions about this headset to be answered, then, and we’ll be sure to hunt answers down during GDC week.

Here’s the statement from Valve:

LG Electronics will unveil its first VR HMD prototype at this year’s GDC in San Francisco, CA. Being shown in Valve’s GDC booth, the LG HMD prototype is designed to deliver a high fidelity, next generation VR experience.

During the show, LG will be meeting with developers to collect feedback and impressions as part of its effort to define the first commercial units. Pricing, launch dates, and territories will be announced at a later date.

Tagged with: GDC, lg, valve

February 26, 2017

Sony Sells Nearly 1 Million PSVR Headsets

Sony revealed official sales figures for the PlayStation 4-powered VR headset, PSVR.

Through Feb. 19 the company sold 915,000 headsets, Sony revealed in an interview with the New York Times. The figure joins the previously revealed number of 5 million Samsung Gear VR headsets sold so far as the only solid data we have about the size of the VR market.

With Gear VR priced around $100 and PSVR around $400, both figures are significant measures that provide our first real window into the emerging market for VR headsets.

Updates to come.

Tagged with: PSVR

February 24, 2017

Bigscreen Raises $3 Million To Succeed Where Envelop Failed

Startup Envelop VR raised around $5.5 million for its platform which promised to use VR to surround you in limitless windows. The company’s VR tech basically extended the Windows operating system so you could theoretically work with a number of apps spread around you in VR. Ultimately, the idea was that legacy apps could eventually use Envelop tools to extend into VR and use 3D space more effectively to display information.

We reported on the startup finally closing the funding round in January 2016. By January 2017, the startup had shut down.

The reason this bears repeating is that one of our favorite VR apps, Bigscreen, announced seed funding today to the tune of $3 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Bigscreen has a lot in common with that earlier startup in that it basically does the same thing as Envelop, Virtual Desktop and several other Windows extension apps — with one big caveat.

In Bigscreen, you’re not alone.