Google has pushed an update to its VR paint program Tilt Brush (2016) that finally lets you intuitively drag your 3D creations in from Blocks (2017), the company’s latest 3D modeling app for VR.
Before the new Tilt Brush update, importing a model you built-in Blocks required you to manually move the file over between folders, and then select the item as a media object so you could gussy it up with all the wonderful lights and effects Tilt Brush is known for.
Now with Google’s latest update, you simply need to select any of your Block-created objects directly from within Tilt Brush’s hand-heldmenu. If you have already played around with Blocks, creations you published to vr.google.com/objects will automatically show up alongside the list of locally stored models.
The update also makes it easier to import others’ Blocks models from vr.google.com/objects, which already hosts a big selection of user-created models. To import someone else’s object, you simply need to browse the site and “like” it.
It’s amazing what you can do with the low poly objects created in Blocks now that you can rotate, resize and plonk them down any where you want in Tilt Brush. Take a look at how artist Andreas Grontved built his own pirate ship using both programs.
You can download Blocks now for free for Vive or Rift on their respective stores (Steam, Oculus Store). Tilt Brush is however no longer free with purchase of HTC Vive, and sells for $20 on both Steam and the Oculus Store.
Pimax, the China-based VR headset manufacturer, just launched their Kickstarter for the hotly anticipated 8K and 5K VR headsets.
Update (09/19/17): The rumors were true; Pimax has launched their Kickstarter today. The company is aiming to reach $200,000 in funding, with prices starting at $349 for the 5K, and $449 for the 8K headset. Unlike the Kickstarter preview page that was published earlier this month, the live page quotes a January 2018 delivery for Early Bird headsets instead of the previous December 2017 shipping date.
Original article (09/11/17): To be frank, the Pimax headsets aren’t actually 8K or 5K resolution, instead integrating dual 3840×2160 LCD panels and dual 2560×1440 OLED panels respectively. Both are still higher resolution than consumer VR headsets today though, and have a much higher field of view (FOV) at 200 degrees horizontal, almost the entire 220 degree natural range of human eyes.
There’s no tier pricing on the Kickstarter preview page yet, but the first 8K/5K headsets are said to roll out to backers starting December 2017, with normal tiers delivering in February 2018.
We had a chance to play with a prototype of Pimax 8K at this year’s CES before the company integrated Valve’s Lighthouse tracking solution—one of the first to do so outside of HTC. Road to VR’s Frank He, who tried the headset, said its 200 degree FOV was “impressive,” and that resolution-wise, he couldn’t discern sub-pixels “no matter how hard [he] looked.” To He, the screen door effect (SDE) was also diminished to the amount of “looking at a slightly textured surface or film.” The prototype did however suffer from a dim display and some geometric warping that made the experience less than perfect.
Since CES, the makers have added support for SteamVR, giving it access to a full catalog of games originally developed for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
image courtesy Pimax
You may be asking yourself how a VR-ready gaming computer could possibly drive these sorts of graphically demanding resolutions. Pimax’s answer is a software technique they call ‘Brainwarp’, which renders a 4K image only on a single display at time, doing it 150/180 times per second. Pimax says users “perceive a complete 8K at 150/180 Hz with high frame rate,” and that it “boosts refresh rate, reduces latency and decreases GPU pressure for Pimax 8K.”
What’s noticeably missing from Kickstarter page is any substantial info about the ‘next generation’ modular add-ons we reported on recently, with the page simply saying that the headset is just a starting point for DIY enthusiasts.
image courtesy Pimax
“With modular design in mind, we made Pimax 8K an extendable device that not only works with your current accessories, but also new technologies. e.g. hand motion, inside-out tracking, wireless, eye tracking, etc,” the company says. At the time of this writing, no funding tiers appear to include any of the teased add-ons.
We’ll check back in when the campaign goes live, so stay tuned.
ProjectM: Daydream is a VR dating experience from Korean studio EVR Studio. While it’s fairly short and only offers subtitles in a number of major languages to go along with the Korean audio, the experience of sitting across from a very life-like person as she laughs and smiles, talking about her vacation as you jump into immersive interludes, makes me wonder what the future of VR dating sims will look like. From what I can gather from Daydream, they’re going to be a whole new ballgame.
Developer: EVR Studio Available On:HTC Vive, Oculus Rift (Touch not required) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift Release Date: September 5, 2017
Note to reader (09/11/17): This is a paid, non-Early Access experience. From a consumer’s perspective, it is a finished, purchasable product. The developers told us initially that ProjectM: Daydream is merely “a preview of one of the digital characters that will appear in [their] main VR adventure game that’s slated for a launch next year.” We don’t review unfinished projects, but considering none of the quoted information is provided to consumers, we are obligated to treat this experience like any other paid, finished product.
Taking over the role of Dong-Woo, a school-age Korean guy just back from summer vacation, you head over to Seung-Ah’s house, your friend and apparent love interest. Inviting you into her home, she prepares a small snack and proceeds to tell you about the details of her summer vacation to Europe. Her most memorable bits: a skydiving trip to Switzerland and a day at the beach in Spain. Excluding a brief bikini scene, this is a ‘safe for work’ experience.
Let’s put this out on the table before I go any further:
I’m a happily married guy, and don’t have interest in VR dating sims outside of their technical abilities to provide some form of artificial emotional connection, however imperfect and sometimes misogynistic they can be.
I don’t speak Korean, so my impressions are skewed by the obvious cultural barrier.
Barring that, ProjectM: Daydream features some pretty impressive character animations that really make you feel like the girl in front of you is only a few degrees away from real. Her posture, facial expressions, body language, voice acting, her gaze that follows you—all of it feels convincing enough to click on the part of my brain that says “please don’t fart, for Pete’s sake.”
image courtesy EVR Studio
As she continues to tell you about her experiences in Europe, you quickly drift off into an imaginary trip along with Seung-Ah, taking you for a stint of skydiving over Interlaken, Switzerland and looking out over an ideal sunset on the beach in Nerja, Spain. Of course, these never happened within the context of the game, so you’re returned back to her house, supposedly with stars in your eyes for the beautiful time you could have had together as a proper couple on vacation.
Technically, the experience delivers competently rendered interiors which feel like genuine places. The home is a comfortable, inviting space that feels real enough to keep you on company manners. I can’t say so much for outdoor scenes though, as textures appear too basic and uncared for, clearly not sharing the same polish as Seung-Ah’s Korean suburban home.
image courtesy EVR Studio
Dialogue suffers from two big pain points. The game’s dialogue tree is a wooden and wholly uninspiring way to interact with another person in VR, but seems like a necessary evil in lieu of some future version of AI-driven voice recognition that ought to be next to perfect to maintain the illusion. As for the dialogue itself, I often felt my gaze wandering (not what you think) to rest of the room because of how painfully boring the conversation went. We broached subjects like “Where did you go on vacation?” and “Why […]” and “With whom […]”—all riveting stuff that didn’t personally keep my attention. Of course, if you say the “wrong thing,” she loses interest in you and is less receptive to your jokes and other advances—to what end, we don’t know. The experience ended with her thanking you for a dress you bought her.
Clocking in at 25 minutes, ProjectM: Daydream is decidedly too short to be considered a buy for anyone earnestly looking for a VR dating sim (it only promises to be a preview, for reasons we explain above). Looking past the gameplay length though, Daydream provides a serious peek into the future of the VR dating sim genre and what it might become. The ability to go anywhere and do anything could be valuable in creating “bonding moments,” which users may appreciate as they delve deeper into keeping their virtual companions happy.
image courtesy EVR Studio
Comfort-wise, the experience makes a few missteps with the way it handles artificial locomotion. Skydiving was stomach-turning due to the forced yaw-turn, which spins you to seem more cinematic. It tries to do this slow enough, but it was still off-putting.
If you look past the game’s traditional canned responses, what remains is another person looking at you, and talking to you sweetly and affectionately; sitting on your lap and whispering in your ear. I personally found that last bit pretty off-putting, but again, I’m obviously not the target demographic here. The developers say their most important goal is “to ultimately provide a sense of comfort to the user at the end of the day.” Whether that’s right or wrong for whatever reason isn’t within the scope of this review, so we’ll just leave it at that.
If you want to get a basic look at the studio’s character modeling ability, check out the ProjectM: Dream demo on Steam.
The second night of the 69th Emmy Awards saw a number of nominations for virtual reality content, including rendered experiences and 360 video spanning a diverse swath of genres. Only one VR project took home an Emmy this year though, The People’s House: Inside the White House with Barack and Michelle Obama, a 360 video created by Felix & Paul Studios and Oculus Studios that gives you a guided tour of one the most important buildings in the world, led by former US President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama.
The People’s House: Inside the White House took the 2017 Emmy for ‘Outstanding Original Interactive Program’. Six total nominations for VR content were spread between that and the category for ‘Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media Within a Scripted Program’. The latter was won by Westworld’s interactive website DiscoverWestworld.com, a web portal to the sci-fi program’s fictitious resort that lets you book stays and peruse Westworld’s various amenities.
Felix & Paul Studios is known for creating highly polished VR videos covering everything from made-for-VR performances for Cirque du Soleil to a 40 minute-long 360 video that explores the life of a funny, but depressingly broken family through the eyes of a robot toy. The common thread among all of their VR projects is the attention to detail and production quality, making the company’s offerings a clear a cut above your standard 360 videos.
This isn’t the first VR experience to win an Emmy though. Sleepy Hollow’s VR experience picked up an Emmy in 2015 for best ‘User Experience And Visual Design’. One year later, Oculus’ Henry, the company’s Pixar-esque VR cartoon that follows the woes of a lonely hedgehog, won the Emmy in ‘Outstanding Original Interactive Program’ category—making Felix & Paul’s video the third to do so.
Whilethe company’s production studio Oculus Story Studios—which saw the release of Lost, Henry, and Dear Angelica—is now shuttered, Oculus is still active in seeding creatives with development funds, earmarking $50 million of the $250 million they recently committed to invest in VR content exclusively for external investments in “non-gaming, experiential VR content.” The similarly named Oculus Studios, the company’s publishing house, is still active however.
You can download Felix & Paul’s Emmy award-winning video on both Oculus Rift or Samsung Gear VR. It can also be streamed to Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, and traditional monitors via YouTube.
The second night of the 69th Emmy Awards saw a number of nominations for virtual reality content, including rendered experiences and 360 video spanning a diverse swath of genres. Only one VR project took home an Emmy this year though, The People’s House: Inside the White House with Barack and Michelle Obama, a 360 video created by Felix & Paul Studios and Oculus Studios that gives you a guided tour of one the most important buildings in the world, led by former US President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama.
The People’s House: Inside the White House took the 2017 Emmy for ‘Outstanding Original Interactive Program’. Six total nominations for VR content were spread between that and the category for ‘Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media Within a Scripted Program’. The latter was won by Westworld’s interactive website DiscoverWestworld.com, a web portal to the sci-fi program’s fictitious resort that lets you book stays and peruse Westworld’s various amenities.
Felix & Paul Studios is known for creating highly polished VR videos covering everything from made-for-VR performances for Cirque du Soleil to a 40 minute-long 360 video that explores the life of a funny, but depressingly broken family through the eyes of a robot toy. The common thread among all of their VR projects is the attention to detail and production quality, making the company’s offerings a clear a cut above your standard 360 videos.
This isn’t the first VR experience to win an Emmy though. Sleepy Hollow’s VR experience picked up an Emmy in 2015 for best ‘User Experience And Visual Design’. One year later, Oculus’ Henry, the company’s Pixar-esque VR cartoon that follows the woes of a lonely hedgehog, won the Emmy in ‘Outstanding Original Interactive Program’ category—making Felix & Paul’s video the third to do so.
Whilethe company’s production studio Oculus Story Studios—which saw the release of Lost, Henry, and Dear Angelica—is now shuttered, Oculus is still active in seeding creatives with development funds, earmarking $50 million of the $250 million they recently committed to invest in VR content exclusively for external investments in “non-gaming, experiential VR content.” The similarly named Oculus Studios, the company’s publishing house, is still active however.
You can download Felix & Paul’s Emmy award-winning video on both Oculus Rift or Samsung Gear VR. It can also be streamed to Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, and traditional monitors via YouTube.
Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America’s President and COO, took the stage Thursday at Variety’sEntertainment and Tech Summit to discuss the company’s immediate future, including the likely (and entirely predictable) shortage of Nintendo Switch this holiday season. According to Fils-Aime, who spoke briefly about the company’s plans for VR, there still isn’t any reason for Nintendo to go head-first into the medium.
Reggie Fils-Aime, image courtesy GDC
“It’s technology that we have been looking at literally tens of years,” Fils-Aime told the crowd. “There’s not a lot of experiences yet that are truly fun.”
While Nintendo may still not be ready delve into the world of VR, the company seems more hopeful about augmented reality though, pointing to games like Pokémon Go as an example (despite the glaring fact that it really isn’t AR). “We have a lot of experience with AR. The potential for AR is here and now,” he said.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard some wariness about VR coming from Nintendo. A year before the release of Switch, reports speculated whether the convertible home-to-portable device would also be used to drive VR experiences. Shortly before its release, a translated statement by Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima held that the company might “add VR to Switch once they figure out how users can play for hours without problems.” Despite Nintendo’s patent for a Cardboard-style headset fitting the Switch, there’s still no official VR support in sight. Combined with Fils-Aime’s statement, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see it.
image courtesy US Patent and Trademark Office
Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, the mind behind some of the company’s most iconic franchises, told USA Today he agrees “that adapting Mario to new platforms is a key to keeping him relevant, but we want families to play together, and virtual reality (which requires players to be closed off from the real world) doesn’t really fit well there. We also like people playing for a long time, and it’s hard to do that in VR.”
In a strange twist of fate, Bandai Namco’s VR Zone arcade in Shinjuku, Japan currently plays host to a VR version of Mario Kart, which lets Vive-wearing arcade-goers race in a multiplayer kart sprint through Thwomps and Piranha Plants, while battling against an AI-controlled Bowser and Wario. As a move by Bandai Namco, the creators of the Mario Kart franchise, and not Nintendo itself, it’s unclear when we’ll see a VR version of the game available for general purchase.
Nintendo historically tends to keep its most iconic IP strictly exclusive to Nintendo hardware, so these sorts of edge cases may continue as the company feels out when the time is right to finally dive into VR.
Pimax, the Chinese VR headset manufacturer, released a teaser video showing a number of high-tech accessories that clip onto the company’s upcoming 8K VR headset—a headset that boasts a staggering 200 degree field of view (FOV) at 3840×2160 per eye resolution via its dual LCD displays.
In the video, we see some pretty ‘next generation’ clip-on (and screw-on) modules; eye-tracking, inside-out hand-tracking, scent enabling module, wireless transmitter, prescription glasses frame, cooling fan, and both a halo-style headband with integrated audio and traditional headstrap—everything you might consider ‘the future’ of VR.
image courtesy Pimax
The video doesn’t go exactly how some of the less obvious, and decidedly more exotic accessories work, the most curious being the scent module, which if like others on the market, acts essentially as an oil diffuser with built-in fan. If it works like the similarly-sized scent unit from Japanese startup Vaqso, it contains a small number of ‘scent cartridges’ that activate during specific points during the VR experience, including an integrated battery and Bluetooth radio. This is uncertain however.
What’s also striking is how thin the wireless transmitter appears. It remains to be seen whether the company’s transmitter features an integrated battery like industry stalwart DisplayLink, or requires an external powerbank like TPCast.
image courtesy Pimax
Pimax is staying mum on any of the specifics, and only currently offers an info signup sheet. We can only speculate at this point how good both the eye and hand-tracking are (so we won’t).
Road to VR’s Frank He went hands-on with a prototype of the 8K headset at this year’s CES, saying the headset’s 200 degree FOV was “impressive,” and that resolution-wise, he couldn’t discern sub-pixels “no matter how hard [he] looked.”
In the following months since CES, Pimax has also integrated Valve’s Lighthouse positional tracking to go along with its own optically-tracked system, making it one of the first headsets outside of HTC to do so. A pair of Lighthouse-enabled controllers come in the package, which look like a mashup of the Vive’s own motion controllers and Oculus’ Touch contollers.
image courtesy Pimax
There’s no launch date in sight for the company’s 8K VR headset Kickstarter, but we’re hoping the headset delivers on everything its promised so far in the video.
Marvel Powers United VR, the upcoming co-op superhero adventure game for Rift, revealed that two of its twelve payable heroes are coming from the Inhuman franchise: Black Bolt and Crystal.
The upcoming Inhumans TV series just debuted its first two episodes back-to-back September 1st at IMAX screens across the world, and while it wasn’t particularly well-received—it’s rated 0% on Rotten Tomatoes—the VR teaser trailer seems to look promising, with Black Bolt’s booming voice and Crystal’s elemental powers offering the player an interesting departure from the beat-em-up abilities of the already announced cast of heroes.
Marvel Powers United VR doesn’t have a launch date yet, but a number of playable characters have already been announced including Hulk, Rocket Raccoon, Captain Marvel, Ronan the Accuser, and Deadpool. With Black Bolt and Crystal in the mix, six spots remain.
image courtesy Marvel
While we’re hoping for more ‘main franchise’ characters, future hero reveals could sync up with heroes featured in Marvel’s upcoming films; Thor: Ragnorok (2017),Black Panther (2018), and Captain America: Civil War (2018).
Song Exploder, the popular music podcast that lets musicians explain every part of their songs, has gotten some help from Google to create a new app that throws you in the middle of song so you can experience it like never before. Called Inside Music, the WebVR app lets you turn individual pieces of a song on and off, giving you a little more insight into just how it’s made.
The project, which Song Exploder reiterates is “an experiment, not a Google product,” lets you select a song from the menu, presenting you with little orbs that represent parts of the song, or ‘stems’. Viewable in both VR and flatscreen mode on desktop and mobile, Inside Music lets you toggle the orbs on and off, something that helps you pinpoint exactly where any given sound is coming from within the song.
The design of the app is fairly simple, featuring the pulsating orbs that give you a visual que. The real star of the show is the app’s positional audio though, which helps you dissect the song by letting you can tell where each stem is physically located, and whether it’s plugged in or not. With all of the stems coming at you from different directions, you can really hear when one is missing a much easier.
The brilliant part: the creators have thrown everything on GitHub so you can integrate your own songs, or others’ into the app. The application supports between 1-7 stems.
Considered a WebVR Experiment, Inside Music was built using WebVR, an open standard that’s gained notoriety as a quick and easy way for users to launch VR apps, which are accessible through a number of supported web browsers. VR headsets with access to WebVR browsers include Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows ‘Mixed Reality’ headsets, Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, and Samsung Gear VR.
Check out the app here—just make sure to grab a pair of headphones first if your VR headset doesn’t have integrated audio.
ManoMotion, a computer-vision and machine learning company, today announced they’re integrated their company’s smartphone-based gesture control with Apple’s augmented reality developer tool ARKit, making it possible to bring basic hand-tracking into AR with only the use of the smartphone’s onboard processors and camera.
With Google and Apple gearing up for the augmented reality revolution with their respective software developer kits, ARCore and ARKit, developers are fervently looking to see just how far smartphone-based AR can really go. We’ve seen plenty of new usecases for both, including inside-out positional tracking for mobile VR headsets and some pretty mind-blowing experiments too, but this is the first we’ve seen hand-tracking integrated into either AR platform.
image courtesy ManoMotion
Venture Beat got an early look at the company’s gesture input capabilities before they integrated support for ARKit, with ManoMotion CEO Daniel Carlman telling them it tracked “many of the 27 degrees of freedom (DOF) of motion in a hand.” Just like their previous build, the new ARKit-integrated SDK can track depth and recognize familiar gestures like swipes, clicking, tapping, grab, and release—all with what ManoMotion calls “an extremely small footprint on CPUs, memory, and battery consumption.”
In ManoMotion’s video, we can see the ARKit-driven app recognize the user’s hand and respond to a flicking motion, which sends a ping-pong ball into a cup, replete with all of the spatial mapping abilities of ARKit.
A simple game like beerpong may seem like a fairly banal usecase, but being able to interact with the digital realm with your own two hands (or in this case, one hand) has a much larger implication outside of games. AR devices like HoloLens and The Meta 2 rely upon gesture control to make UI fully interactive, which opens up a world of possibilities including productivity-related stuff like placing and resizing windows, or simply turning on Internet-connected lights in your house with the snap of the finger. While neither Google nor Apple have released word on future AR headsets, it’s these early experimental steps on the mobile platforms of today—which necessarily don’t have access to expensive custom parts—that will define the capabilities of AR headsets in the near future.
“Up until now, there has been a very painful limitation to the current state of AR technology – the inability to interact intuitively in-depth with augmented objects in 3D space,” said Carlman. “Introducing gesture control to the ARKit, and being the first in the market to show proof of this, for that matter, is a tremendous milestone for us. We’re eager to see how developers create and potentially redefine interaction in Augmented Reality!”
ManoMotion says ARKit integration will be made available in the upcoming SDK build, which will be available for download “in the coming weeks” on the company’s website. The integration will initially be made available for Unity iOS, followed by Native iOS in subsequent updates.
