Author: Kent Bye

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For Google, the Future of VR Is on the Open Web with WebVR & WebAR

brandon-jones-2017Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, and so they’ve been long-time advocates for the open web. At Google I/O last week, the company announced that they’ll soon be shipping Google Chrome for Android with WebVR, and that they’re going to start experimental builds for WebAR. During the WebVR talk at I/O, Google showed how to write a progressive web application with three.js that could be viewed on a desktop computer, mobile phone or tablet, or Google Cardboard or Daydream virtual reality headset. Google is pushing the hardest for platform-agnostic WebVR applications on the web as mental presence is their core strength.

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I had a chance to catch up with primary WebVR spec author, Brandon Jones, at Google I/O to talk about why they’re holding off on shipping WebVR 1.1 and waiting until the latest WebVR “2.0” version is ready. It’ll ship as WebVR 1.0, but there has been such major refactoring to account for augmented reality that internally it’s referred to as the 2.0 spec. Mozilla will be shipping the 1.1 WebVR spec in their browser in August, but Jones says that the Chrome team doesn’t want to have to maintain and support the 1.1 version, which is sure to quickly be deprecated.

Jones and I talk about the differences between WebVR & WebAR, and the long process of developing the WebVR API over the last three years, VR’s relation to other exponential technologies, and the philosophy of being a immersive technology platform developer for billions of devices.

SEE ALSO
Google Shows HTC Vive Running at 90 FPS in Chrome with WebVR

Check out my previous interviews with Brandon in 2016 and in 2015.

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‘Walkaway’ Author Cory Doctorow on Gift Economies & Privacy

cory-doctorowCory Doctorow’s new sci-fi book “Walkaway” is a optimistic disaster novel that imagines what society might look like if people walked away from competitive market-driven laws, norms, and technological infrastructure and into an open-source inspired, collaborative gift economy. He’s a co-founder of Boing Boing, and he uses the daily transom of tech culture and innovation as inspiration for world building fodder for his potential utopian futures. Privacy is also a recurring theme as the cyberpunks of the future have a number of different tactics for going dark and protecting their private data from being exploited.

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I had a chance to catch up with Doctorow on his book tour stop in Portland, and we talked about gift economy economic paradigms, theoretical self-provisioning Spime objects that instantiate when you need them and disintegrate into elemental form when complete, the extent to which market forces continue to infiltrate all dimensions of our lives, and how we’re reaching a “peak of indifference about surveillance.”

At his core, Doctorow identifies as a pulp writer who puts zeppelin rail guns battling mech warriors at the forefront of his incredibly well-specified sci-fi worlds. He’s crafted an engaging drama that’s creatively exploring new cooperative economic paradigms. He isn’t trying to present a viable hybrid synthesis of the old and the new worlds, but rather creatively explore building a greenfield world from scratch that’s based upon a post-scarcity mindset and fueled by open-source principles. It’s a world where it’s inhabitants exhibit an enlightened Buddhist level of detachment to physical objects to the point where concepts of personal property have vanished.

Virtual Reality may prove to be an experimental sandbox environment to prototype greenfield environments that could foster this type of post-scarcity gift economies. I’m already starting to see this type of gift economy exchange in virtual worlds that would be much more difficult given the constraints of the real world: you can find examples of cooperative asset sharing in Anyland, Tilt Brush worlds can be remixed, and you can mash-up A-Frame WebVR code with one-liners.

If the technical infrastructure moves to a model of distributed file storage, then this will invert the inverse relationship between supply and demand in that “the more popular something is, then the more available it becomes.” In other words, it’ll be kind of like a Bitorrent peer-to-peer network in that popular files have more seeds and are generally more available and faster to download. In other words, the more valuable an asset is, the easier it is to get ahold of it within these digital peer-to-peer sharing networks.

This is the opposite for how physical reality usually works, and so online virtual worlds will likely be the proving grounds to explore new cooperative models of yin currencies. It will also enable self-provisioning “spime” resources to arrive at the moment of need and then gracefully bow out back into the material stream of “feedstock.” Doctorow calls this the “Zip Car version of fully-automated, luxury communism.”

In this day and age, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to come up with a variety of potential dystopian futures that could be episodes of Black Mirror. What’s harder is to come up with a number of potential utopian White Mirror futures that extrapolate current technological metaphors into the future. Doctorow is one of the most sophisticated and nuanced sci-fi world builders out there today, and he’s constructed an inspiring vision of a potential gift culture paradigm. It may be a while before the full realization is possible to achieve in real reality, but this type of world and cultural norms can start to be prototyped and built in VR today.

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An In-depth Look at Microsoft’s HoloLens & Mixed Reality Ecosystem

Brandon-BrayThe HoloLens is the most impressive augmented reality headset on the market today, and their developer kit is already being deployed into industries ranging from architecture, engineering, design, sales, medicine, and education. Microsoft is taking a holistic approach with Windows Mixed Reality being baked into Windows 10, meaning that developers can create a single application that can run on the HoloLens, on one of their partner VR headsets, on a Surface tablet, or as a desktop app. At Microsoft’s Build conference today, the company is announcing a new OEM VR partner with HP as well as inside-out, six degree-of-freedom input controllers for VR headsets made by Microsoft partners like Acer.

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Greg-SullivanI had a chance to sit down for an hour with two representatives from Microsoft to talk about the latest HoloLens updates, the VR headsets coming from their partners, as well their overall Mixed Reality strategy. Brandon Bray leads the Mixed Reality developer ecosystem, and Greg Sullivan is on the marketing team for the Windows & Devices Group. We cover a lot of the high-level mixed reality strategies as well as the low-level details for developers, as well as a wide range of topics from AI integrations with Microsoft Cognitive Services to the technical details of their new motion-tracked controllers.

Microsoft has leapfrogged the augmented reality competition with the combination of having the best AR headset with the HoloLens, a healthy ecosystem of enterprise developers, a suite of AI-driven cognitive service APIs, and a forward-looking Mixed Reality strategy (which the company uses to describe both VR and AR headsets). They have impeccable timing with taking a leap of faith to solve a lot of really hard problems in order to have created the HoloLens in the first place.

Bray admits that there’s still a lot of remaining problems to be solved with the limited field of view, but that there was a tradeoff for being able to even create a battery-driven, tetherless, holographic computing platform that you can wear on your head that can do inside-out positional tracking.

SEE ALSO
HoloLens Inside-out Tracking Is Game Changing for AR & VR, and No One Is Talking about It

The HoloLens developer kits are priced at $3,000, and so they’re targeting enterprise use-cases for now. But their VR strategy seems to be aiming for the bottom to low-end portion of the market with their $400 price point for an Acer VR headset bundled with motion-tracked controllers. I had a chance to have some hands-on time with the Acer VR headset, and I was not impressed with the motion-to-photon latency of the LCD screen, poor quality optics, build quality, or user experience of putting the headset on.

These tradeoffs in comfort were made in order to bring the price down, but the overall experience feels like it’s a small step up from a Daydream, but perhaps on par with the GearVR or possibly even worse. The high resolution of the Acer VR headset makes it one of the best VR HMDs to read text in and the inside-out tracking works pretty well with occasional judder. But the LCD screen is not a blur-free low persistence screen that seasoned VR veterans have grown used to, and so the resulting Rift DK1-era blurring when turning your head makes it feel worse than a Gear VR. But as long as you’re not quickly moving your head around, then you’ll minimize the motion sickness triggers.

The 6 DOF motion controllers are tracked inside-out and Bray said that they rely upon a sensor fusion combination of having a direct line of sight with the front-facing cameras on the VR headset, IMU sensors, and inverse kinematic probabilities. There were not any prototypes available for testing, and so I don’t have any direct experience with how they actually work. But I do have some concerns with their approach based upon my experiences with other line-of-sight controllers such as the Leap Motion. With the Leap Motion, you have to hold your hands up so that they can be seen by the cameras on the HMD, which will likely require developers to specifically design applications that optimize for this constraint.

This limitation of the input controllers may mean that it could limit existing room-scale Vive and Rift VR experiences from being easily ported. If existing Vive or Rift applications aren’t a good experience on these lower-end VR HMDs, then there’s going to be a huge gap of content to drive consumer adoption. If this lower price point is going to attract more consumer-grade users, then they’re going to need content. If custom entertainment content is need, then I doubt that the Microsoft enterprise developers are going to generate a lot of compelling and entertaining content.

But it could be that Microsoft isn’t concerned about having a library of entertainment for regular consumers of these VR headsets, and maybe they’re more interested in creating data visualization and enterprise applications. But if that was the case, then why not create something on par with the Vive and charge enterprise prices? Most of the mobile VR content designed for a 3 DOF controller hasn’t been nearly as compelling as the full room-scale and 6 DOF experience provided by the Rift and Vive. These Microsoft VR headsets look to be in yet another category of quality & performance that’s slightly better than mobile, but a lot worse than the best high-end systems.

If Windows Mixed Reality VR headsets are going to go anywhere, then there’s going to need to be content that’s compelling and drives adoption. Will these VR systems meet the needs of whatever Microsoft has decided is their target market? If it does, then all of this discussion is moot. But if not, then we’ll have another platform that could creature the developer ecosystem and is left without a critical mass of compelling content.

SEE ALSO
Microsoft Shows Windows in VR, Gives Acer VR Headset to Vision Summit Audience

Overall, I’m really impressed with Microsoft’s holistic approach to mixed reality. The HoloLens is the market leader for head-mounted AR that’s actually being deployed into enterprise. They are positioned to really own the enterprise and professional AR market as they create more integrations between Windows Mixed Reality, their cloud hosting, and AI-driven cognitive services.

There’s a lot of long-term promise in tetherless VR with inside-out tracking, but the early Acer VR prototypes are disappointing and risk fracturing the VR ecosystem in potentially needing specially designed experiences in order to really use the strengths of the platform.

Here’s a number of Twitter threads with more thoughts and impressions from Microsoft Build so far:

Live tweets of first day keynote of Microsoft Build Conference

Thread with highlights from the HoloLens YouTube channel

Twitter Thread of Hands-On Impressions from Acer headset

 

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Microsoft Technical Evangelist on Presence in VR Game Design

The Microsoft Build conference starts this week, and I expect that we’ll be learning more about the HoloLens as well as Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality operating system. Microsoft has been evangelizing about virtual reality the past couple of years now, and I had a chance to catch up with Microsoft Technical Evangelist Kat Harris at PAX West last Fall. She’s been teaching VR 101 development courses at different conferences, and we talk about what she’s been telling game designers about maintaining presence, building immersive experiences, and how to deal with some of the biggest breakers of presence including VR locomotion and the uncanny valley. We also discuss the limits of virtual reality when it comes to haptics, uncanny narrative, the future of artificial intelligence in enabling collaborative role-playing, and the power of world building & storytelling in games like Minecraft.

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PAX West is great place to play social games like Johann Sebastian Joust, where the biggest aspect of this gameplay is being able to control your sense of embodied presence. A game like this would translate well in mixed reality with other co-located people, but it would be nearly impossible to translate this gameplay into a distributed virtual reality game.

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High Fidelity is Architecting for VR Privacy with Self-sovereign Identity

philip-rosedalePhilip Rosedale has been thinking deeply about how to architect large-scale, distributed virtual worlds after experiencing many bottlenecks as the founder of Second Life. His new metaverse venture, High Fidelity, is taking a much more distributed approach with how it’s being developed openly in open source using Worklist.net contractors, how it plans on distributing hosting and compute resources to user’s computers, as well as using a decentralized identity based upon blockchain technology. Rather than having a centralized authority for tracking and data mining an individual’s identity, they’re planning on using what’s called “Self-sovereign Identity”, which Christopher Allen explains in great detail in his comprehensive essay titled A Path to Self-Sovereign Identity.

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I had a chance to catch up with Rosedale at the 4th annual Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference where we talked about distributed identity, privacy in VR, High Fidelity’s business model based upon sales tax, whether existing cryptocurrencies will work for them, yang and yin currencies, and their open source development process. High Fidelity is architecting a lot of the open standards for the future of the metaverse, and Rosedale is one of the most deep and profound thinkers in the social virtual reality space. He’s ahead of his time in architecting virtual worlds that will be able to democratize space and disrupt travel.

May 5th, 2017 also marks the three-year anniversary of the Voices of VR Podcast, and this is a fitting podcast as I started the bulk of my interviews at the very first Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference in 2014 and I’ve been able to talk to Rosedale at each of the last four SVVR gatherings. You can check out my previous interviews with Rosedale in episodes #25, #173, and #376.

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The Extremes of Mental Presence: Cognitive Enhancement, Biohacking, Psychedelics, & Transhumanism

eric-matznerEric Metzner identifies as a Techno-Optimistic Futurist who sometimes works an entire second workday within VR exploring different ways to expand his mind. He’s pushing the limits of mental presence by using nootropic supplements for cognitive enhancement from his company Nootroo, experimenting with psychedelics and VR with the psychonauts from /r/RiftIntoTheMind, exploring sensory addition & biohacking with the Northpaw device, using EEG sensors and VR to have an embodied experience of neurofeedback, teaching himself how to type with one hand with a chorded Twiddler3 Keyboard, and Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to read up to 1000 words a minute using Virtual Desktop.

I had a chance to catch up with Metzner at an UploadVR party during GDC where he shared his explorations into the extremes of mental presence. For me, I’m interested in the balance between mental & social presence with embodied presence, emotional presence, and active presence. But Metzner wants to push the limits of what types of experiences are possible as well as use VR to help him focus on his learning practices.

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Part of the extremes of the air element is the risk of disassociation from his body and the real world, and Metzner is openly wondering whether or not reality is going to be able to keep up with how compelling VR is to him. He’s a part of an emerging group of Transhumanist Merry Pranksters of Silicon Valley experimenting with immersive technologies and daily habits to optimize productivity and happiness.

Links and show notes:

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VR Veteran Tony Parisi is Leading Unity’s AR & VR Strategy Beyond Gaming

The keynote from Unity’s Vision VR/AR Summit yesterday showcased just how far Unity is reaching into non-gaming content when it comes to augmented and virtual reality. The person who is in charge of Unity’s xR strategy is Tony Parisi, who is a co-founder of VRML and a long-time open web advocate. Tony has long been interested in using VR for artistic expression and storytelling, and the keynote speakers highlighted the range of diversity of immersive technologies ranging from NASA JPL to car companies to the NFL to graphic novel comic books to immersive storytelling to construction to the big tech players including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

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I had a chance to catch up with Tony at Sundance earlier this year to talk about his approach to leading VR & AR strategy at Unity, and moving immersive technologies beyond just entertainment. Anyone who knows Tony can say that he wouldn’t have taken this job at Unity if there wasn’t some long-term open web strategy involved, but he wasn’t prepared to provide any specifics on it yet. But it’s safe to assume that it’s on the roadmap, especially with the recent news that the co-creator of WebGL & WebVR, Vlad Vukicevic recently joined Unity’s emergent technology group.

Here’s the full two and a half hour 2017 Unity Vision VR/AR Summit Keynote, hosted by Parisi and below a some of the news that has come from the event thus far:

SEE ALSO
Unity CEO: VR Will Get Huge, But Devs Need to Survive and Avoid Hype Until it Does

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Upload LA Opening Represents a Focus Shift From VR Tech to VR Content

freeman-masonUploadVR opened up their new 20,000 square foot Upload LA co-working space in April. I had a chance to catch up with co-founders Taylor Freeman and Will Mason as VRLA to get the inside scoop. Mason told me that opening up this huge co-working space in Los Angeles represents an energetic shift from the VR technology born out of Silicon Valley to focusing on content & storytelling in VR.

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UploadVR’s first co-working space, The Upload Collective, was opened in San Francisco during GDC in 2016, and Mason said that they quickly outgrew the space. The Upload LA space will allow them to have a lot bigger educational and training initiatives without having to completely rearrange their space for every event. Upload LA is a vertically-integrated co-working space that has access to hardware, mixed reality studio, audio mixing studio, and immersive entrepreneurs that hopes to incubate many smaller startups and content studios. It’s proven to be a winning combination for UploadVR considering that all of their dedicated office space was accounted for just a couple days after launching, and they’ll have floating desk space available until it runs out.

UploadVR plans on continuing to grow and expand their physical spaces to new markets, but the space in Los Angeles will be sure to hold many events, talks, and parties for the years to come. You can get a sense of the space from this launch video as well as some photos of their space after their grand opening.

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VR Storytelling Highlights from Tribeca Film Festival

loren-hammondsThe Tribeca Film Festival featured over 30 different VR experiences within their Storyscapes and Immersive Virtual Arcade, and I had a chance to catch up with curator Loren Hammonds about some of the highlights of the festival program with genres spanning from live-action narrative, animated narrative, documentary, interactive installations, guided tours, empathy pieces, and even a couple of immersive theater, mixed reality pieces. The overall focus and theme that connected all of the VR pieces is storytelling, both in terms of strong storytelling execution as well as in innovations around interactive storytelling.

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Some of my personal favorite pieces included an immersive theater, mixed reality piece called with a live actor Dram Me Close. The Last Goodbye was an incredibly powerful tour of a concentration camp by a Holocaust survivor that pushes innovations around best practices in volumetric storytelling using photogrammetry and stereoscopic video capture.

Other documentary standouts include Step to the Line as well as Testimony, which used an innovative non-linear structure to feature direct testimony about experiencing sexual assault.

One of the best narrative shorts was Alteration, which used AI-processing techniques on the 360 video to great effect. My favorite animated short was APEX, which is the latest music video by the creator of Surge.

I also had some great interviews with the creators of Blackout, Treehugger, Tree, The Island of the Colorblind, Auto, Bebylon Battle Royale, Becoming Homeless, The People’s House, Remember: Remember, Falling in Love, and Beefeater XO.

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Zoning AR Permissions with the Mixed Reality Service Spec

MarkPesce

Mark Pesce is a VR pioneer who has been thinking about networked virtual and augmented reality for over 20 years now. He developed the Ono-Sendai Sega VR helmet prototype, co-created VRML, and presented his Cyberspace Protocol spec at the first Web conference in 1994. This CP spec evolved into the Mixed Reality Services spec, which aims to be a distributed system that would grant geospatial permissions for mixed reality applications.

This system would be an open way of preventing AR games from being played at culturally sensitive locations, but also provide Universal Resource Identifiers to bring the open web to the real world. It could provide permissions for airspace & drones, surveillance permissions, AR game permissions, hazmat warnings, electrical and plumbing layouts, and hours of operations for buildings.

I had a chance to catch up with Pesce where he gave me a history of his work on the canceled SEGA VR helmet, VRML, and the evolution of the Mixed Reality Service. We also talk about his first ritual in VR and Technopagan explorations, as well as his thoughts on ethics in overall tech industry.

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Show Notes

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