A total of 25 new web-based VR projects have been lined up for next week’s New View Awards in Tokyo, Japan.
The New View Awards highlight VR experiences focused around fashion, culture and art, showcasing projects created on web-based development and publishing platform, Styly, developed by Psychic VR Lab.
You can check out some of the finalists now just through your browser, and there are some really interesting picks from developers all over the globe. We particularly like this unique take on Japanese manga, which has you navigating a virtual world in which panels of a story overlay certain locations. Intersubjectivity, meanwhile, boasts impressively lush visuals for a web-based VR project, though it gets a bit trippy to say the least.
Elsewhere, Piece of String showcases an impressive degree of photogrammetry and Tsukumo offers an authentic exploration of Japanese culture and history. If you want to see them all in VR, you can also download the free Steam app right here. The company also recently published an AR app on iOS and Android.
A Gold Award totaling $20,000 will be given to one winner. Three runners-up will also receive $5,000. Styly will also be hosting a VR exhibition at the new Shibuya PARCO building from December 14 – 22, where you can see these sorts of experiences for yourself.
The awards take place on December 15. We’ll bring you coverage of the winners, and look out for some of these projects to pop up in our next episode of the VR Culture Show!
Disclosure: UploadVR is a media partner for the New View Awards and will be attending the ceremony with accommodation paid for by the awards.
The BBC VR Hub will soon cease to commission and produce new VR experiences.
In a blog post published earlier this week, Commissioning Editor for VR Zillah Watson confirmed that the “Hub will be wrapping up its commissioning and production work.” The VR Hub launched in November 2017 following a handful of earlier VR releases from the BBC. According to an announcement blog, its aim was to create a “small number” of VR experiences with “broad, mainstream appeal” in order to offset VR’s various barriers to entry.
Those experiences included Nothing to be Written, developed by Unit 59, which won our Best Mobile VR Experience award in 2018. It also produced the excellent Doctor Who animated VR short, The Runaway earlier this year. All of these experiences will still be available to download, but don’t expect to see any new content coming out from the Hubs banner.
A BBC spokesperson provided us with the following statement: “The VR Hub had funding for two years, so is now wrapping up its production and commissioning. It’s been an important part of our charter commitment to promote technological innovation and maintain a leading role in research and development which benefits the whole industry. We’re really proud to have produced some award-winning projects in that time, and we’ve learned valuable lessons about producing unforgettable virtual reality experiences. We’re produced a guide sharing what we’ve learnt with the wider industry, and we’ve built up experience across the BBC so different areas will be able to develop their own ideas.”
While The Hub acted as a centralized location for much of the BBC’s VR work it wasn’t solely responsible for all of its output. BBC Studios is responsible for the wider organization’s portfolio including TV programs and continues to work on immersive projects with commercial viability. It will also soon launch Doctor Who: The Edge of Time, a new VR game developed by Maze Theory and the recently-announced Micro Kingdoms: Senses on the Magic Leap AR headset.
Elsewhere, the BBC’s R&D department, which helped produce many of the organization’s earliest pieces like Easter Rising: Voice Of A Rebel, may yet work on more immersive projects under its experimental banner. Other divisions of the BBC such as News and Sport also worked on VR experiences like Trafficked and World Cup VR. They too could possibly produce their own VR experiences in the future.
It’s a situation somewhat similar to when Facebook closed Oculus Story Studio in mid-2017. The group produced short-form VR narratives for the Oculus Rift and Gear VR/Oculus Go. Facebook still invests in and distributes similar experiences under other publishing initiatives.
The VR Hub’s final project, meanwhile, will be a six-part series called Missing Pictures. In it, film directors will discuss projects they were never able to realize while viewers are immersed in conceptual visuals. The group will also be taking its content on tour to UK libraries over the next year.
Visiting the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris can be a dreary, crowded experience. The museum, however, will soon offer an alternative way to experience the portrait through VR with the support of HTC VIVE Arts.
The VR experience, titled Mona Lisa: Beyond the Glass, will last around 7 minutes and be offered as part of a larger upcoming exhibition at the Louvre focusing entirely on Leonardo da Vinci. The exhibition, along with the VR experience, coincides with the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death and will run from October 24 to Feb 24, 2020. It also requires a reservation ahead of time.
The experience offers a way for more people to experience the work despite ever-present crowds when visiting the portrait in person. If you’ve ever been to the Louvre, you’ll understand that due to the sheer number of people and small size of the portrait, it can often feel underwhelming and, to some, not worth the effort to see the Mona Lisa in person.
There will be 15 headset stations present at the exhibition in the Louvre, but the experience should also be available for VR users at home through VIVEPORT and “other platforms“, which have yet to be detailed. The home version of the experience is longer and features a different opening.
At least, he doesn’t appear as such when I find him battling jet lag atop an offensively pink pillow just a stroll along from central London’s Southbank Centre. His long hair is neatly tied back in a bun and he rests his crossed arms on his knees as if ready to dive into impromptu meditation at a moment’s notice. Between stifled yawns from an early morning flight from Barcelona, he seems generally amiss on his first day at the Raindance Film Festival.
At first sight, it’s not what I expected from the co-director of Battlescar (seen below in our VR Culture Show). It’s a searing, explosive VR feature that thrusts you into the disgruntled spirit of the late 1970’s New York punk scene. Blink and you’ll miss it, and you’ll get no apologies from its creators.
“Actually, the first episode [of Battlescar] the producers were like “this is too fast, people need more time to see the scenarios,”” he says. “And Nico and I were like “Actually all the VR is very boring because it’s very slow.””
Well, that’s a bit more like it.
In Allais’ defense, Battlescar, which he created alongside longtime friend Nico Casavecchia, does give a lot of other VR experiences the appearance of having training wheels. Despite its lengthy 30 minute run time, it’s relentlessly paced, barely letting a minute pass before radically switching up storytelling styles. The plot follows Lupe, a young Puerto Rican-American voiced by Rosario Dawson who happens upon the ferocious Debbie while flirting with a New York jail cell. Taken under her wing, Lupe bonds with Debbie over disillusionment and outrage as they plot to bring their plight to the stage with the repetitive thud of punk rock musiv. An assortment of misadventures befalls them along the way.
“We started seeing VR films out there and VR experiences and we’re like trying what we didn’t like of them and how we can do the film we want to see in VR,” Allais explains. “It was a very personal process because there’s nothing written really in VR language, so you can do everything at the same time.”
It’s that kitchen sink delivery that makes Battlescar sing louder than its screechy-voiced soundtrack. No two instances are the same, be it a fleeting ride on the back of a motorcycle in which you long for the wind to bite into your face, or the dizzying clashing of drums and ideas from all angles as Lupe’s frustrated words flow from mind to page. “I just wanted to come with ideas like what we think should be the experience of getting in a headset,” Allais explains. “So that’s Battlescar for us, a big playground of exploration and ideas. Narrative, framing, and I think pretty much everything that we came up with ended in the film.”
Despite Allais’ earlier dismissal, there are traces of VR’s past, like the hints of Dear Angelica in its readiness to tinker with scale. But it’s otherwise blisteringly fresh; a collection of revelatory discoveries just waiting to be made. One minute Debbie has an enormous gun held to her head with terrifying proximity, the next her and Lupe are leap-frogging their way home like a level in Super Mario Bros.. In fact, Allais tells me he and Casavecchia eventually stopped watching other VR experiences to maintain their own ideas. One guiding star was particularly crucial; no interactivity.
“When we started playing with VR, we wanted to create a piece that wasn’t interactive, but at the same time used the space in an interactive and playful way,” he says
Simply put, there isn’t time for interactivity in Battlescar. There are no moments to linger; to lean in and wonder if you can pick up the drum stick resting on the desk or strum the guitar sitting next to you. This isn’t a world, it’s a slideshow, kicked and bashed together to demand the viewer’s attention at all times. Without this urgency, Allais suspects it wouldn’t be half as engaging.
“Because you don’t have a director’s point of view that shows you how to go from one place to the other,” he says. “So what we wanted to do is just the opposite. If people want to see more they need to see it again.”
I won’t go on much longer, suffice to say I truly loved Battlescar. It was an experience that reenergized my love of narrative-driven VR and brought me back to the infantile excitement of seeing this technology with fresh eyes. I can’t wait to see what the pair does next.
“Now we’re more into coming back to some of those techniques and developing them more,” Allais teases. @[Battlescar] is like this mash-up of different techniques and ways of storytelling and they need to be developed. And that’s what we want to do hopefully in the following story.”
Sign me up.
Battlescar is planned for release on home headsets in the near future.
Two Australian digital artists will board the RSV Aurora Australis next year to document the journey from Australia to the Antarctic, with the aim of creating a virtual reality experience upon their return.
The artists, Dr Adam Nash and Dr John McCormick (collectively known as Wild System), have experience in creating mixed reality artworks and installations. Their artistic Antarctic expedition next year will be made possible thanks to support from the Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowship and two Australian universities.
While aboard the ship, they will document the journey using “cutting-edge technologies, such as drones, portable motion capture system, ambisonic recordings, LiDAR scanning and still, 360 and video cameras.” This will allow them to map the journey and then convert the recordings into an immersive experience available after their return.
The ship they’ll be travelling on, the RSV Aurora Australis, is over half a mile long, accommodates 166 passengers and currently serves as a “multi-purpose research and supply ship.”
Given the scale of both the ship and the journey, there’s potential for the artists to create a really unique VR experience from the trip. Speaking about the project, Dr McCormick said, “It is a lifelong dream to travel to Antarctica. We want to create a work that honours the spirit of those who have explored the world’s last great wilderness area.”
The resulting immersive experience will be available in “galleries and festivals, and via mobile, gaming and virtual reality technology.” It’s unclear whether the experience will be publicly available on VR headsets, or limited to VR headsets at the aforementioned galleries and festivals. Let’s hope it’s the former – it would be quite cool to take a trip to the Antarctic from the comfort of one’s own home!
The artists will begin their journey in January of next year.
Voxel-based art and multiplayer playground software SculptrVR is available now on Oculus Quest.
The creativity software first launched on Steam in 2016 and its primary developer, Nathan Rowe, repeatedly refined and rebuilt the application over the last three years. Now available for $9.99 on Quest it includes a collection of tools for singleplayer or multiplayer shaping of voxel worlds, along with cross-play support with players in other Oculus-based headsets. One of the application’s key features allows the player to resize themselves for an incredible playground experience which toys with your sense of scale. For creatives, the feature also allows for some detail work in the sculpting app.
There’s climbing, hang gliding and even rockets you can fire to drill little — or large — holes in the surrounding landscape. While there are other art apps available on Quest like Tilt Brush and Gravity Sketch — SculptrVR is a different sort of experience. Facebook’s own VR art apps, Quill and Medium, aren’t available on the headset either. SculptrVR is no means a replacement for the lack of No Man’s Sky and Minecraft on Quest, but its exploratory and creative gameplay could certainly fill the gap for some.
I talked with Rowe this week in Quest and asked him some questions about the path his software took to the standalone VR headset from Facebook. The 12-minute tour was recorded entirely on Quest in SculptrVR.
SculptrVR is listed as having cross-buy with Rift, so if you own the application already from Oculus for Rift it should already be playable inside Quest.
Get yourself out of Gamescom, find a quiet spot with decent WiFi and dig in; VRecap #5 is here!
Even without throwing in our recent trip to Germany, it’s been heck of a busy week. First up, Sony acquired one of the biggest VR developers out there, Insomniac Games. They did games like The Unspoken and the upcoming Stormland, exclusively for the Oculus Rift. What does that mean for the developer’s existing relationship with Oculus? Could we see Insomniac on PSVR? Oh the possibilities!
Elsewhere, we’ve got an update from The Void that confirms the company is working with both Marvel and Sony Pictures on new location-based VR projects. Perhaps they’ll create a reality where Spider-Man is still in the MCU?
Too soon? Sorry.
Oh and, yes, we’ve been to Gamescom! We’ve got a quick preview of our adventures in Cologne this episode before we round up the week’s releases. We saw a heck of a lot of VR games out there, so keep an eye out for a bunch of previews heading your way over the next week or so. In fact we’ve already got a few ready for you, like Iron Man VR and Espire 1!
As for the competition, this week we’re offering up free copies of The Tower 2. This VR obstacle course makes full use of room scale tracking and gives you quite a workout. If you want to be in with a chance of winning, just follow this link.
Okay, time to get out of here and enjoy the weekend. What are you going to be diving into this weekend?
Wolves in the Walls from Fable and Age of Sail from Google won Emmy awards this year, according to the Television Academy.
Wolves in the Walls tells the story of Lucy, a character its creators see as a fully realized virtual being who addresses you directly and interacts with you as a visitor in her world. The VR project based on the work of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean won in the category of Outstanding Innovation In Interactive Media.
“Sometimes when you are exploring in the dark it’s comforting to know that others are not too far away, hands outstretched, searching alongside you,” said Wolves co-creator Pete Billington, in a prepared statement. “We are humbled and grateful for the encouragement and recognition.”
The award names Billington, Jessica Yaffa Shamash (Creative Producer and Creator) and Edward Saatchi (Executive Producer) alongside Fable Studio and Facebook. It is available for free on Rift through Facebook’s Oculus store.
Age of Sail is a gorgeous VR short from YouTube, Google Spotlight Stories, and Boathouse Studios. It won Outstanding Individual Achievement In Animation with Céline Desrumaux (Production Designer), Bruno Mangyoku (Character Designer) and Jasmin Lai (Color) named in the award.
Fable Studio is co-founded by members of the groundbreaking Oculus Story Studio team and they are developing a Part 2 for Wolves In The Walls we should be able to preview later this year. Fable seems to be a studio at the forefront of interaction development in VR and we are looking forward to seeing what they do to further develop ways of interacting with simulated characters like Lucy.
The annual Raindance Film Festival approaches London once more. This year’s show will feature nearly 30 VR experiences.
As per usual, Raindance 2019’s immersive offerings include a mix of gaming, world premiere VR experiences and a chance to see some of the pieces first shown at festivals like Tribecca and Sundance. The selection includes both full VR pieces and 360 videos.
In terms of premieres, we’re looking forward to seeing Heart of Darkness, the latest animated experience from Sutu. There’s also Rise of Animals, a new experience with Sir David Attenborough. The experience will give us a virtual look at three prehistoric animals.
Elsewhere, we’ll get a first look at Anonymous, the VR film debut from Virtual Umbrella’s Samantha Kingston.
As for returning experiences, Gloomy Eyes, an animated VR story starring Colin Farrell, will be on display. Tupac Martir’s Cosmos Within Us will be at the show too.
Meanwhile, in the gaming section, Raindance will showcase the likes of No Man’s Sky Beyond and Maze Theory’s soon-too-release Doctor Who: The Edge of Time. Fast Travel Games’ The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets will also be on display. We’ll also see the international premiere of The Infinite Hotel, a promising new game from Italic Pig.
The best experiences are also being gathered for the Raindance Awards.
Raindance 2019 runs from September 25 to October 6. If you’re looking for tickets you can find them here.
Disclaimer: UploadVR’s Jamie Feltham will be a judge on the ‘Best Immersive Game’ category at this year’s Raindance Awards.
In 1903 the Wright brothers did the impossible; they flew. Not only that, but they did it with some wood wrapped in fabric and a 12 horsepower gasoline engine. I’m fondly reminded of their crude efforts as I step into the booth for Fly, a new VR experience showing at London’s Saatchi Gallery this month.
Inside the strange giant egg that houses Fly, which is created and directed by Charlotte Mikkelborg, you’ll find a curious makeshift VR rig. To the front is a sort of harness you lean into during the attraction’s first half, and behind it a chair to sit in in the second. Strap in, put on an HTC Vive and you’ll find yourself in the fields of Tuscanny, next to a daydreaming Leonardo DaVinci.
It’s here that you get your first taste of what Fly is all about. You suddenly find yourself cast as a bird, soaring through the sky high above the fields DaVinci ponders in. It’s quite similar to Ubisoft’s Eagle Flight, only the installation uses some clever tricks to make Fly a more convincing and (quite literally) uplifting experience.
Twisting my head tilted the platform I was on to give me the sensation of turning, diving and ascending while flapping my arms sent me flying higher. Meanwhile, a fan whipped my face with the Tuscan air as I was bathed in golden sunlight, the summer scents of the fields starting to flood my senses. Combined together under one roof (or, in this case, shell), you can’t help but feel, just for a moment, that you’re really there, winding through trees and marveling at mountains in the distance. It’s quite a treat.
It’s over just as it begins, but Fly has more stops on its whirlwind tour. One particular highlight is commandeering the Wright brother’s plane in a minute-long flight that perfectly captures the sense of invention and elation the pair must have felt. Again, when it asks you to land, you don’t really want to.
Later trips to more modern inventions aren’t quite as magical with your face finally protected from the wind, though a playful look at the future of flight does inspire a little excitement. Fly works best when it’s rooted in history.
It might not always be the most graphically proficient piece, but the potent assault on the senses leaves you walking on air long after you’ve removed the headset. It’s powered by the raw enthusiasm of creation, something that Mikkelborg emphasizes in curious fashion outside of the experience. Place your hands on the egg that surrounds the VR rig and it will eventually change color before you hear the sound of it cracking.
It’s intended to symbolize the beginning of the long journey to make man fly. Coming from a VR angle, though, it’s equally fitting as a starting point to mastering virtual flight. One day we’ll look back on Fly and laugh at where we were in the mission. As it stands right now, though, it’s a pretty amazing experience. Humanity is learning to fly all over again.
Fly is on display at London’s Saatchi Gallery throughout August. Tickets cost £20. You can book to see it right here.
