Since it was first available, the HTC Vive room-scale VR system has been priced at $800. For comparison, the Oculus Rift and its Touch controllers will hit that same price when they start shipping in December. You might even need to add $80 to get a third camera that is said to offer full room-scale tracking support with Rift.
But starting at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on November 24 and ending at 11:59 p.m. on November 28 “wherever Vive is sold, purchasers can receive $100 off their Vive purchase (while supplies last).” That means at Microsoft Stores, Amazon.com, Gamestop, Newegg.com, Micro-center, and Vive.com the system should ring in at around $700 plus tax. For the first time, the Vive will also be available at 34 Fry’s locations, as well as online.
This puts the price of a Vive far under the Rift with comparable functionality, though it is possible retailers could also have Oculus deals planned as well. Individual HTC Vive retailers might also have additional discounts, deals or bundles beyond this one too.
HTC will also be holding a sale for software purchased through Viveport, its VR software store. According to HTC, here’s how that promotion will work:
Customers who spend $30 USD equivalent or more between Black Friday and Cyber Monday get $10 USD equivalent back in their wallets. You can also build your library with a $5 bundle deal on three of the most popular VR apps: Soundstage, Arcade Artist, and Lumen.
A number of individual titles will be discounted on Viveport as well.
This is likely just the first of many VR deals announced heading into the busiest shopping season of the year. Check back with UploadVR.com this week for more information about sales and discounts.
At the Smash Party this Saturday night party-goers in Hollywood stepped into a cage clad in safety gear and completely crushed to bits anything and everything.
The party hosted by Chris Prynoski’s Titmouse animation studio was also the launch event for Smash Party, a VR experience combining Prynoski’s art with the destruct-o-thon spirit of the actual Smash Party.
I’ve seen cats chase Mario across the screen. I know chimps are very close to humans. Still, nothing prepared me for actually seeing a chimp wearing a consumer VR product, the HTC Vive, and then reaching out to try to touch virtual reality just like I do.
The video was originally posted to an account associated with a wildlife encounter group in South Carolina. The Myrtle Beach Safari promises a guided walk through of a preserve with photos and close up encounters with tigers, wolves, leopards, orangutans and chimpanzees. I reached out to a Twitter account associated with the group and asked some questions to learn more.
The chimp’s name is Sugriva. He’s 5-years-old and he was born at the preserve. According to an email from Bhagavan Antle, director of the group, he’s tried the HTC Vive “15 min, 10 times, over a few days” and, though they “have been working on it”, Sugriva hasn’t grasped the concept of the Vive controllers yet. The worlds he’s visited are The Solus Project, SurrealVR, Waltz of the Wizards, MSI Electric City and, apparently his preferred world, Disney Movies VR.
“He liked the castle and looking around at the lands in that one and the Jungle Book’s scenes,” Antle wrote. “He loved being on the red carpet for movie events waving at people and trying to get the attention or grabbing them when they would walk by.”
I asked why they tried it and Antle wrote “to give him enrichment and entertainment.” I also asked whether they were concerned at all about whether VR might hurt the animal, and Antle wrote “I can see no way a working animal ambassador chimp like him” could be harmed by it.
I’ve put a number of people in VR for the first time and this reaction looks identical to a humans. It’s an unexpected reminder of just how similar they are to us.
The former co-host of popular tech site Tested launched a Kickstarter project today, seeking $20 from backers in exchange for the promise of a Steam or Oculus code granting access to the first season of his VR talk show.
The Foo Show is an interactive show created by Will Smith set inside virtual environments created by its guests. In other words, Smith will have software creators come on the show to talk about their work while immersed inside the world they made, whether it be from a videogame or VR app. The whole exchange is recorded and you can revisit their interview later as if it is happening live in front of you. According to the Kickstarter page, here’s the plan for that first season:
For the first season of the show, we’re producing five episodes. We’ll release the first episode on Oculus Home and Steam in December, a few weeks after this Kickstarter closes. And if you haven’t bought a VR headset yet, Kickstarter backers will be able to watch the first season using our experimental non-VR client. After that, you’ll get two episodes of The FOO Show every month, until we complete this first season.
You can check out a preview of The Foo Show on Rift or Vive for free via Steam or Oculus Home. The plan is to ultimately sell the episodes on Steam and Oculus Home. The crowdfunding effort was around 1/5 of the way toward its $50,000 goal at the time of this writing, with three weeks of fundraising left. In case you are still scratching your head, Will Smith is not the actor. He’s the bearded guy whose open-mouthed look of awe inside a VR headset development kit is so associated with VR’s wow factor. I reached out to him on Twitter to get some more information about his long term plan.
“Our episodes don’t cost a ton of money to produce, so we only need a few thousand people paying for them to make them self-sustaining. We’re using Kickstarter to bypass the slow growth part of any new show,” he said. “If the pilot succeeds on Kickstarter, it will have a built in community when it launches next month that will put it on the path to sustainability. In short, if we make something compelling, people will keep buying it, and we’ll keep making episodes. If they don’t, we’ll kill it and move on to the next thing.”
The Kickstarter page linked above is chock full of information, so I suggest checking it out. At the very bottom of the page is a bit that made me laugh regarding risks and challenges:
We are a small team of three people, so illness or injury of one of the core team members could delay production. While we’re each extremely careful, we do spend lots of time in VR. If one of us is killed while in virtual reality, that team member’s subsequent death in the real world would significantly impact our schedule.
An Adobe Research project was revealed via YouTube video, above, showing what looks like an answer to Google’s Tilt Brush and Facebook’s Quill virtual reality art programs.
A blog post by Erik Natzke, principal artist-in-resident at Adobe Research, explained some of the thinking behind the project, which is described as being in its “early stages.” From the post:
Project Dali is an immersive drawing experience in the virtual world. Artists use custom brushes to create, and move around their creations, in three dimensions—they can literally walk through their own paintings. The experience is so surreal that we couldn’t resist calling it Project Dali.
In November 2015, UploadVR.com marked its first birthday at the dawn of the consumer VR age. That was just before the launch of the consumer Gear VR, and for Upload, it was still prior to the company’s first significant funding. In fact, it was prior to most of the editorial team joining.
What. A. Year.
This week, Upload is marking the start of its third year and this post is exactly article number 3,000 published for the site. Over the last year, Upload as a whole has grown in a lot of different ways. In April, we opened the doors to the first Upload Collective in San Francisco, a hub for VR and AR startups, development, co-working, education, meetups and even live broadcasting. With over 40 member companies in San Francisco, The Upload Collective has quickly grown both in size and in scope. Additionally, founding the Upload Academy, a VR/AR developer training program, which graduated its first class in August with a number of success stories including Found – a gorgeous Miyazaki-esque narrative experience created by four of our students which was recently recognized on stage during the Oculus Connect Keynote.
UploadVR.com also expanded its editorial coverage throughout the year to deliver the very latest news, reviews, features and editorials covering VR and AR. We captured the transition from a couple companies shipping development tools to hobbyists into a fast-moving industry driven by some of the world’s largest tech companies, each of which is selling increasingly sophisticated systems directly to consumers. The transition for both the VR industry, and for UploadVR internally, has been enormous. As UploadVR starts its third year, consumers are bringing millions of VR systems into their homes.
We’ll have more soon about Upload’s next steps, including our expansion into LA and beyond, but we thought this would be a good opportunity to recap the year that saw VR transition to the consumer market.
November 2015
The New York Times distributes more than 1 million Google Cardboard phone VR viewers to subscribers with the launch of The Displaced, a 360-degree video project focusing on children driven from their homes by war.
The $100 consumer Gear VR also debuts during this same period, arriving alongside a virtual arcade from Oculus to let people play some classic games. Oculus had just launched the very first version of its social features for Gear VR, but a year later, we are still spending most of our time in VR alone.
CCP Games, the maker of EVE: Valkyrie, Gunjack and other upcoming VR games, raises $30 million while NextVR gets $30.5 million from Comcast and others, representing relatively early bets on VR content by investors. Eye-tracking startup Eyefluence, which raises $14 million this month, is acquired about a year later by Google.
December 2015
Samsung starts off the month debuting its VR Internet browser for Gear VR, becoming the first to offer a VR browser. Oculus and HTC had been holding details surrounding Rift and Vive launch windows close to the chest, probably because they had delays to announce and need to nail down new plans. In December, these plans become known.
First, HTC delays the Vive until April 2016, with plans to show an updated developer kit at CES in January. At the end of the month, Oculus officially delays the release of Touch controllers until the last half of 2016. This offers a window to HTC and Valve making the Vive the only room-scale hand-controlled VR platform on the market for most of 2016. Oculus, for its part, makes clear that exclusive games like Rock Band VR and bundling freebies like EVE: Valkyrie with orders is how the Facebook-owned company plans to entice buyers.
January 2016
The enormous Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas kicks off the year with major showings for both Oculus and HTC.
Oculus reveals the $600 price for the Rift and opens up pre-orders. The ordering website goes down in the process while shocking some enthusiasts expecting half that cost for the system. When the dust settles, some early adopters find their device won’t arrive until deep into summer, despite the device shipping starting at the end of March.
Meanwhile, HTC shows the Vive Pre-developer kit that would be shipping to developers ahead of the Vive’s arrival in April. Pre-orders for the consumer version are set for the end of February. Valve finishes off the month showcasing many of the games, like Space Pirate Trainer, that will be available via SteamVR in 2016.
Google transitions Clay Bavor into a position as head of VR.
February 2016
Magic Leap kicks off the month with the announcement of an enormous $794 million fundraising round, backed by Alibaba. The money is said to help in manufacturing and launching the secretive augmented reality company’s first product.
A series of announcements from Amazon, Crytek, Epic Games and Unity Technologies showcase an evolution among their respective game engines into VR world creation toolsets. For example, Lumberyard from Amazon is released for creating games and VR experiences, while both Unity and Epic reveal in-VR tools to speed up the development process.
Closing out the month, HTC reveals the $800 price tag of the Vive ahead of pre-orders, while Mark Zuckerberg strolls onto a mobile conference stage in Barcelona and said “millions” would use VR this year. Zuckerberg makes the declaration as Samsung announces the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones will ship for a limited time with the Gear VR for free, along with $50 worth of some of the best games available for the platform.
The month closes with Microsoft finally awakening, announcing it will ship the $3,000 self-contained HoloLens augmented reality developer kit to developers at the end of March.
March 2016
A huge month for VR occurs around the Game Developers Conference and newly created Virtual Reality Developers Conference. The event sees so many people packed into the VRDC sessions, on day two they move the VR sessions to larger rooms.
Among a slew of content reveals, Sony reveals PlayStation VR will ship in October starting at $399, with the first pre-orders available at the end of the month.
The month closes with the arrival of the Oculus Rift alongside more than 30 games. Unfortunately, not many people would be able to try Rift on its launch date.
April 2016
The HTC Vive starts shipping to buyers, bringing the first room-scale hand-controlled VR platform to market. It debuts with what is still today one of the best pieces of marketing available to explain VR, embedded above. In fact, developers using Unity and SteamVR start effectively standardizing this mixed reality capture method. HTC also announces a $100 million VR investment fund.
Meanwhile just after the Rift debuts, “an unexpected component shortage…has impacted the original shipping estimates for some early customers.” While the Rift delay is a bummer, Minecraftdebuts on the Gear VR, representing one of the highest-profile pieces of content to make it to the VR platform from Oculus.
May 2016
The 2016 VR game gets its final player, with Google revealing its Daydream platform with a plan to partner with Samsung, HTC, Huawei, LG, ZTE, Asus, Alcatel, and Xiaomi to evolve the Android ecosystem and support high-quality VR experiences. Unlike the Gear VR, Daydream features a simple motion controller that can be stored inside the headset itself for travel.
NVIDIA also starts shipping its new generation of VR ready graphics cards led by the GTX 1080. The new generation of cards dramatically lower the cost to get a machine that’s ready to drive VR.
Tension also rises in the VR community as a hack allowing Oculus-purchased games to run on the Vive reveals a dividing line between Valve and Oculus.
June 2016
The E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles is overtaken by VR, with Oculus promising more than 30 games for the Oculus Touch controllers this year and Microsoft making clear it will support VR with its next Xbox console, code-named Scorpio, in 2017.
Valve’s Steam, meanwhile, bakes in support for Oculus Touch, introducing an interesting twist to the platform battle underway. The addition makes it easy for developers to support the Rift and Touch without the difficulty of offering their app through a separate store.
July 2016
The Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance (VRVCA) reveals $10 billion in “deployable capital” from investors including HTC, Immersion Ventures, The VR Fund, and the Colopl VR Fund. Oculus finally catches up on pre-orders for the Rift this month. Unity raises a massive $181 million round to grow its ambitions.
The SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference shows new professional VR tools, as well as research into new areas such as haptics and foveated rendering. A new file format for 3D scenes, glTF, is also gaining momentum with the support of industry leaders like Oculus chief technology officer John Carmack.
August 2016
Samsung unveils the Note 7 smartphone alongside the latest Gear VR. Though the new Gear VR is super comfortable to wear, the Note 7 comes with the unfortunate tendency to catch fire. The problem becomes increasingly clear over several weeks.
Valve begins evolving the VR hardware ecosystem by offering its SteamVR tracking technology royalty-free. The move could open up a world of accessories for SteamVR-compatible headsets while also giving partners with different HMD designs access to a precision tracking technology.
Intel introduces “Project Alloy’, which will deliver technology to partner manufacturers in late 2017 allowing them to deliver wireless headsets that can know their precise location in any room. The headsets are likely not going to be available to consumers until 2018.
September 2016
Samsung issues a worldwide recall for the Note 7 to try and stop the Note 7 fire problem. It doesn’t stop the problem.
In a critical data point for the VR industry, the developers of HTC Vive titles The Gallery and Raw Datareveal their apps each cleared $1 million in sales since release, suggesting small teams with the right idea and execution might be able, right now, to make enough money to support themselves from the sale of a VR title.
Palmer Luckey
Amid a bitter U.S. Presidential election season, a bombshell article connects Oculus co-founder, Palmer Luckey, to a crude political meme group. Luckey issues an apology, and Facebook says he’s still with the company, but the originator of the Rift concept has been completely silent publicly in the months since the revelation.
October 2016
A pivotal period in the emergence of the VR industry takes place over the course of the month.
The Note 7 officially dies, with flights in the U.S. banned from even carrying the fire-prone device as cargo. It dies just in time for Google to debut its Gear VR competitor – the eye-popping Pixel phone and Daydream View headset. The device represents the first member of the Daydream family of VR systems, which should grow to become an interchangeable system of headsets and phones.
The Oculus Connect 3 developer conference gives Zuckerberg the chance to personally reveal the most exciting VR initiatives from the company. This includes new social features, with a VR-to-real-world group video calls, as well as an entirely self-contained headset prototype codenamed “Santa Cruz.” The standalone prototype from Oculus seeks to combine the best of the Rift with the mobility of the Gear VR in a self-contained inside-out tracking headset. Oculus Chief Scientist, Michael Abrash, takes the keynote stage to lay out the improvements we can expect to see in high end VR headsets over the next five years. He predicts field of view potentially widening to 140 degrees as pixel density doubles.
Oculus finally announces the $200 price and Dec. 6th release date for the Oculus Touch controllers. The price puts a complete Rift and Touch system essentially on par with the cost of the HTC Vive, and the Rift is potentially more expensive if you opt for three camera sensors to match Vive’s room-scale capabilities.
Oculus also announces a new optimization it calls “asynchronous spacewarp” that will allow VR experiences to run at lower frame rate. The company is using ASW to support a new minimum specification for the Rift, allowing VR to run on a PC as inexpensive as $500.
Not to be outdone with the Oculus announcements, Valve reveals a new controller prototype that can simulate the sensations of grasping and releasing objects.
PlayStation VR also starts arriving at homes, bringing one of the most comfortable headsets into living rooms worldwide.
After such a busy year, Microsoft upends the industry with the revelation of VR headsets starting at $300, powered by Windows with inside-out tracking.
November 2016
Daydream View starts arriving to buyers with its motion controller and impressive Google apps like YouTube, Street View and Photos included. The single strap design is a hit with some early reviews, but it fits uncomfortably for some. Nevertheless, the new simple motion controller is innovative and the Daydream ecosystem should allow different phones to work with different headsets. That means there should be a variety of designs on the way from Google’s partners all compatible with the same apps.
Unity plans to release its Editor VR environment for content creation inside VR next month. Extensions for Editor VR should allow other developers to add their own functionality to the Unity asset store. This would offer an additional revenue stream for developers creating VR software tools rather than games while also being a first step in allowing developers to do more of their work while inside VR.
Most recently, the unexpected announcement of an HTC-backed startup reveals a $220 accessory for the HTC Vive that can turn the headset wireless when it ships in 2017. It is said to add less than 2 milliseconds of latency to the overall system.
Like many of the announcements in 2016, including Microsoft’s VR headsets, Unity’s Editor VR and even Oculus Touch, we are anxious to get our hands on these systems for extended periods of time so we can get a better idea of just how 2017 is going to shape up. In the meantime, we can recognize 2016 as the year when giants Google, Microsoft and Intel joined Sony, Facebook, HTC and Valve in declaring VR and AR as critical to the future of their platforms.
In 2017, we should start to see the emergence of an early market leader as prices come down, capabilities improve and more content is made available for these systems. Of course, one of the biggest unknowns for 2017 remains the same unknown we had in 2016: What exactly is Apple doing?
The white light of the real world was visible out the bottom of Daydream View both for myself and a couple family members who tried the new $80 mobile VR headset from Google. After some tweaking to the head strap I found a relatively comfy fit, but others felt front-heavy pressure from the weight of the phone. In dark lighting and the seclusion of headphones, it blocks off most of the outside world.
Even though the fit is odd — you can see around the side of the headset too — the Daydream View is a convenient package. It is the first mobile VR headset I’d want to take with me on trips carried loose in a bag.
Gear VR vs. Daydream
Side view showing spacing between face and headset in the Daydream View.
I praised the last Gear VR as being one of the most comfortable VR headsets yet, but it can be a pain to get a phone fitted perfectly into the connector. Daydream doesn’t plug into the headset — it just straps in. And though Daydream View is lightweight, small and feels nice to hold, on your head its rigid body and single strap doesn’t match Gear VR. Google says the fit was designed to “work for a majority of faces.” It may not bother some people while others might find it very uncomfortable.
I only accessed three games with Daydream prior to launch, and while they showcased an impressive range of input methods for the touch-sensitive pad and motion controls, Oculus had nearly two years to build up a library of content for mobile VR. While some of those experiences are being adapted to Daydream, like VR Karts Sprint and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, it is unclear just how many will end up making the jump.
The Daydream controller and headset needed to be re-centered from time to time. Resetting is a simple process of just holding a button on the controller, but it is an annoying step to repeat.
From Cardboard Apps To Daydream
Daydream as a platform debuts with a limited set of apps, but the five initial ones from Google (YouTube, Photos, Play Movies, Street View, Arts & Culture) put some of the best of the company in VR, and provided wow moments for myself and family members. A ton of Cardboard apps might also find a second life upgraded for Daydream in the coming weeks.
“For Cardboard apps to operate with Daydream, apps will need to use an upcoming version of the Google VR SDK which will be available in the coming weeks,” Google spokesperson Liz Markman wrote in an email. “This release contains a new API that allows the Daydream controller to act as a Cardboard button.”
I tried Wonderglade (free with in-app purchases), which is a mini-game title that uses the controller to spray, spin or tilt through different levels. Mekorama ($4) is a diorama puzzle game while Hunter’s Gate ($6) is a shooter that makes clever use of the controller and promises multiplayer. In addition, Star Chart VR ($5) offered a simulation of the solar system and a free app from The Wall Street Journal offers a real-time market data visualization and 360-degree videos. While additional apps are available today, the above apps combined with Google’s own were the only ones we looked at prior to launch.
Pixel XL Camera
Enhancing Daydream’s case versus the fire-prone Note 7 and its Samsung kin is the Pixel’s camera, which forces its way into your pocket after you’ve captured a couple photos with the eye-catching shallow depth of field effect. The Note 4, Galaxy S6 and Note 7 (Rest In Peace) all took good pictures in their respective generations, but the Pixel is on a different level. It features an automatically stabilized video camera that can make footage of my children running around look almost cinematic. That’s not something I’ve had in my pocket before and I don’t want to be without going forward.
More than any other phone before it, the Pixel’s camera combined with Google’s services like unlimited photo backups — with the added bonus of inexpensive VR — makes for a combination that’s ready to supplant the iPhone in many pockets. Unlike Gear VR, Daydream View blocks the phone’s camera, with no passthrough option to see into the real world when in use.
Google Photos VR
Google Photos got big wows from my family in VR. The app loaded panoramic photos automatically from my account, with pictures of rainbows and snow flurries taken months apart ready to view. A turn of my head let me examine features as if I was standing on my porch checking out the weather.
There’s also an impressive 360-degree photosphere mode on the Pixel’s camera that stitches together your surroundings from a series of stills. There were still stitching errors — problems where the different photos met — but I was impressed by the quality of the finished sphere. The photosphere software existed before, but Google told UploadVR it is enhanced by the Pixel hardware. You could also try the Cardboard Camera app for stereoscopic captures.
YouTube VR, Google Play Movies And More Personal Theater Apps
A private theater is the most likely use case for Daydream View at its launch, either on a flight with a downloaded Google Play movie or streaming on YouTube with the screen seemingly stretching across the ceiling of your bedroom. Moving and resizing the virtual screen into the perfect position with the simple motion controller is simple and delightful in YouTube, but I couldn’t find the same feature in Google Play Movies. You can also voice search in YouTube, which is a very nice touch.
YouTube plays 360-degree videos too, of course, though you’ll likely need a high speed connection to stream high quality. Apps like Hulu, HBO Go and Netflix are on the way to join the Google apps.
Street View and Google Arts & Culture
Street View elicited some of the biggest wows from both myself and other family members, with destinations visited ranging from our street corner to the Taj Mahal. Street View displays teleportation points that show you where you can go next with the controller, and the movement method was found intuitively by people who had experienced transporting from place to place in Valve’s The Lab.
Google Arts & Culture is much like the Woofbert art musuem app, allowing you to skip the crowds at a museum but still get up close to the art.
I’m standing along a rail and there is a red trolley in the distance. It is broken and Daniel Hurd, Design Lead at Playful Corp., isn’t sure why. He pressed the button to call the trolley but it wouldn’t come. It isn’t too far away though, so I decide to leave Hurd and the others behind and just head over there.
My arms swing at my sides (in real life, and in the virtual world) as I move along the rail. I look over my shoulder and realize there is a cat girl following me. UploadVR Staff Writer Joe Durbin is the meat sack occupying the avatar, and it is gaining on me. Our pace quickens almost without thinking about it, and we instantly enter a foot race.
Outside VR two grown men are madly swinging their arms back and forth while standing in place and laughing. Inside VR, it is as if Forrest Gump’s leg braces are flying off. As of now, Joe may hold the world record for a virtual reality foot race.
The world we visited is called Wonderland and it is a container for a variety of experiments in virtual reality software design from Texas-based Playful Corp. that made this spontaneous moment between us possible. In particular, the software doesn’t use teleportation, or blinking, right now, which is currently the most popular method of allowing free roaming of virtual environments without discomfort. But that method destroys a new kind of immersion — that of social connection — when your friend can suddenly disappear rather than start to walk away.
“We don’t use teleport so you remember the journey,” said Hurd. “You wouldn’t have had that foot race.”
The supernatural VR series Invisible from Doug Liman, director of The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow, launched a week ago on Samsung VR, but now you can access the 5-part series across any device via Jaunt.
The series is a first-of-its-kind scripted 360-degree video project about a powerful family with an intriguing secret — an invisibility gene. The episodes are going to be far more immersive in a VR headset, so if you want to check out the series it might be better in VR via the Jaunt app on Cardboard, Steam or Oculus compared to seeing it via a 2D website. That said, you could stream the first episode right from UploadVR. I embedded it below and all the episodes are at the Jaunt link above or inside the app on different platforms linked above.
The episodic approach to the scripted 360-degree project is a notable one, breaking up the overall story into roughly 5-7 minute segments and employing a number of editing techniques to cut between different locations and shots. To underscore the cutting-edge nature of the effort, creators were unable to examine captured footage live on set in a headset, so putting it together was more like the pre-digital days of filmmaking when footage needed to be developed first. In this case, the multiple cameras on the 360-degree camera rig had to be stitched. With the script, they described the whole room in addition to the actions and lines of the characters, which is one of the reasons it turned into a 40-page document.
Left to right in foreground directors Jerome Sable, Doug Liman and Julina Tatlock shooting Invisible.
“We had to create our own script writing format,” said Liman, in an interview with UploadVR. “I think when people watch Invisible, they’ll see how far you can push scripted VR, and how many of the rules that existed before us don’t really apply anymore.”
The project is created by 30 Ninjas, a digital entertainment company co-founded by Liman and Julina Tatlock, who executive-produced Invisible. Visual effects were added by The Molecule and the project was supported by Jaunt, Samsung and Condé Nast, with a sponsorship for Lexus tagged at the end of each video.
“It’s going to be hugely important for us at 30 Ninjas that people find this entertaining,” Tatlock said. “We want to tell popular stories.”
The creators are looking to see what people have to say about the project and, with Jaunt’s heatmap analytics, they may soon see data that shows them whether the many cutting and editing techniques employed throughout the series kept audience attention as intended.
“We’re looking to additional seasons of Invisible,” Liman said about the future. “Our skill level at the end of season one is way beyond what it was at the beginning of season one.”
Have you checked out Invisible yet? What did you think?
Microsoft’s play for command of next generation personal computing can be seen today with the announcement of a series of Windows-powered VR headsets starting at $300.
The headsets planned from HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, and Acer will use what’s known as “inside-out” position tracking. The system is already used on the $3,000 HoloLens, an advanced augmented reality system, but with it employed on a low-cost VR headset Microsoft may have leapfrogged efforts by both Facebook and Google, powered by Windows.
“Most consumers will experience Windows Holographic for the first time through VR, not through HoloLens,” wrote Raven Zachary, founding partner of mixed reality startup Object Theory, in an email. “This means shifting from being a HoloLens-focused mixed reality company to a Windows Holographic focused mixed reality and virtual reality company. HoloLens will continue to be at the core of what we do, but Windows Holographic is the larger and more diverse ecosystem that HoloLens exists within.”
Head tracking is an essential part of all mixed reality technology, both VR and AR, and the so-called inside-out variety in a VR headset makes set up dramatically easier. A computer needs to know your head’s location at all times with an enormous degree of accuracy to make you believe objects are floating in the room, or to make you think you are somewhere else entirely. Microsoft is essentially promising headsets powered by Windows that will always know where they are, but starting at much lower prices than existing headsets while also being much easier to set up.
“As we have built up expertise and credentials in Windows Holographic, we likely will not be working with other platforms in the foreseeable future,” Zachary wrote.
An example of the Windows Holographic user interface.
A Rift from Facebook-owned Oculus or a Vive from HTC can track your head throughout a room, but these “outside-in” systems require careful placement, or mounting, of sensors around the perimeter of the room for a full experience. If you want to take VR into another room, for example, you have to find places for the sensors again. This is not the case with the headsets on the way from Microsoft’s partners.
“It’s reasonable to assume Microsoft has licensed the ASIC [Application-specific integrated circuit] they developed for HoloLens to their partners to make inside-out VR cheap and plentiful,” Mark Pesce, a 3D Web and VR pioneer, told Upload VR. “The strategy has become clear. Low end VR on Xbox and these new headsets, all the way through high end mixed reality on HoloLens. Microsoft has positioned itself across the entire space, and will drive mixed reality into the enterprise in 2017.”
John Carmack, the chief technology officer at Oculus, told me at the company’s second developer conference in September last year that inside-out tracking in a mobile headset “is a problem that I want solved right now. I wish somebody had spent all of this last year on it.” Microsoft, it turns out, was only six months away from shipping such a solution in HoloLens.
The Santa Cruz inside-out tracking prototype from Oculus.
In stark contrast to the comments made by Carmack only a year before, at this year’s developer conference Facebook made clear its future for the Oculus platform is a standalone headset with this same kind of inside-out tracking. Microsoft, however, may be one step ahead.
Last month it was revealed Oculus hired USC’s pioneering mixed reality expert Mark Bolas. In that article I noted:
Microsoft already demonstrated a solid inside-out tracking system with its $3,000 HoloLens, but getting that kind of robust tracking system to work with other kinds of headsets, including wide field of view VR, is the place Bolas might be able to offer assistance.
With today’s announcement, we have clear confirmation this is Microsoft’s direction.
Going forward, the same manufacturers developing these headsets in partnership with Microsoft might also create smaller screen-less PCs, like backpacks or pocket computers, that make Windows-powered VR completely portable.
I wouldn’t count out Facebook or HTC’s partner Valve just yet, however, because Microsoft revealed nothing around input with its announcement today — leaving wide open the question of how experiences inside these headsets will be controlled. Rather, Microsoft seems to be describing these headsets as “accessories” for Windows rather than independent platforms. Voice input is something Microsoft can do, but hand-tracking is a separate and enormously difficult problem despite companies like Leap Motion working hard at it. In fact, outside-in tracking systems capable of seeing more advanced controllers, like the upcoming Oculus Touch and those we saw shown from Valve recently, might still be a route toward VR becoming its own independent platform.
Very early prototype controllers from Valve that simulated gripping and dropping objects.
Then again, Microsoft might still have more tricks up its sleeve. In the meantime, for Windows-focused developer Object Theory, a home-grown solution to input might be a possibility.
“We’ve experimented with input devices communicating over Wi-Fi to the HoloLens and sending real-time X,Y,Z coordinates in Unity,” Zachary wrote. “If we had a client that needed precision hand controllers, we’re pretty sure we could build a solution for them either through our own custom code running on smartphones or utilizing third party hardware. That said, I’d like to see Microsoft provide a solution here. They showed a 6DOF controller in their Intel Developer Forum concept video a month or two ago for the Windows Holographic Shell, and I will be curious to see if they productize this or just publish the specs for the third party hardware partners to release their own.”
