culture – Page 14 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

August 22, 2018

‘Bigger than MTV’: how video games are helping the music industry thrive

The success of a booming video game industry, expected to generate $137.9bn in revenue this year, is music to the ears for bands, musicians, record labels and composers

“Video games have not only helped the music industry survive, but thrive on entirely new levels,” Steve Schnur tells me. As the worldwide executive and president of music at game publisher EA, his team – many of whom have been professional musicians and singer/songwriters – work with some of the biggest music acts in the world, licensing music for video game series like Fifa, Madden NFL, Need for Speed and NHL.

Since the 90s, when licensed music became prevalent in games, series such as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Grand Theft Auto and Wipeout have become just as well-known for their soundtracks as they are for their gameplay. For millions of people, video games have been a way to discover new favourite bands or dive into other musical genres. And because people discover this music while playing a game they love, they develop a strong emotional attachment to it.

August 22, 2018

‘Bigger than MTV’: how video games are helping the music industry thrive

The success of a booming video game industry, expected to generate $137.9bn in revenue this year, is music to the ears for bands, musicians, record labels and composers

August 20, 2018

Harsh headlines, failed festivals and, finally, friends: Pokémon Go, two years on

John Hanke, the boss of developer Niantic, is as passionate as ever about getting players outside. And his strategy is working, as seen in the success of this year’s Pokémon Go Fest in Chicago

Going to the gym meant something quite different in Chicago’s Lincoln Park one weekend in July. The Pokémon Go Fest, returning to the city after a disastrous event in 2017 that ended with developer Niantic refunding tickets, handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of in-game currency and settling a $1.5m (£1.18m) lawsuit, once again packed the US city with virtual collectible creatures and real Pokémon trainers. The 20,000 players who took part were on a five-stage quest to catch a mythical Pokémon, Celebi, and the soggy 30C weather didn’t put them off.

Yes, people are still playing Pokémon Go. The mobile gaming phenomenon has quietly reached its highest player figures since it launched in 2016. In a moral panic not dissimilar to the one currently surrounding Fortnite, the summer of that year saw Pokémon Go blamed for car crashes, trespassing incidents and even death. Two years on, though, the headlines have faded into memory and the augmented-reality monster-catching game has peacefully built a thriving community of passionate Pokémon trainers.

August 6, 2018

‘I am drawing from different sources’: Hidetaka Miyazaki on life after Dark Souls

The game designer discusses swapping horror for a strange VR adventure game about fairies, inspired by manga and Celtic folklore

The downside to making something critically revered and loved by millions is that it isn’t easy to get out from under its shadow. For Hidetaka Miyazaki and the game development studio he now leads, FromSoftware, Dark Souls was a golden ticket. In 2004, Miyazaki was a designer on the Armored Core series of mech games. By 2015, he was the company’s president and the games he has directed – Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls and Bloodborne – have been lauded as some of the greatest of the modern era.

Now, finally freed from the Dark Souls series, which came to an end (for the time being, at least) in 2016, FromSoftware has previewed two brand new games this year. One of them, the samurai-themed action game Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, shares a lot of the DNA of Dark Souls: intense, violent combat, a ravaged setting full of fallen creatures, and cleverly designed locations that interlock and wrap around themselves. The other, Déraciné, is a VR adventure game about fairies. Both are under Miyazaki’s creative direction, and represent a way forward for the developer. But the inspiration for Déraciné came from looking back.

July 23, 2018

Virtual necessity: can VR revitalise Japan’s ailing arcades?

VR may have lost the sofa war to home consoles – but the format once heralded as the future of gaming could yet revive the glory days of the past

One day, on my way past the outskirts of Kabukichō – Tokyo’s red-light district, infamously depicted in the Yakuza games – I spot a curious advertisement. At first glance, it looks like nothing out of the ordinary: a woman cheerfully donning a VR headset, with kanji lettering welcoming passersby to come in and try the technology for themselves. As my eyes wander to the logo in the corner, I realise that the poster is promoting Soft On Demand – one of Japan’s biggest porn, or “AV” (adult video), companies. I’m staring at a billboard for a virtual brothel.

A stone’s throw away is Bandai Namco’s massive VR Zone complex, an indoor, 38,000 sq ft all-VR theme park that opened just over a year ago. And further south, on the artificial island of Odaiba, Sega recently cleared out a massive room in its Joypolis amusement park to make space for Zero Latency VR, a “warehouse scale, free-roam, multiplayer virtual reality entertainment” where a team of zombie hunters are equipped with “military-grade” motion-tracking backpacks and let loose on the undead with an arsenal of plastic firearms.

June 24, 2018

AΦE: Whist review – an awesome virtual-reality dance experience

Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, London
AΦE’s first major work explores psychoanalytical themes through cutting-edge technology

AΦE is a dance company founded by Aoi Nakamura and Esteban Fourmi, and based in Ashford, Kent. Whist, its first major work, unites dance and virtual reality in a work that offers an intriguing new framework for performance. Wearing headsets, spectators proceed through a series of VR scenarios peopled by five performers. We are transported to a dilapidated suite of rooms where various Freudian psychodramas are being played out, often graphically. A masked man writhes and bellows as he wrestles with his sexual desire for his mother; we see him quivering, knife in hand, before a reproduction of Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde (which depicts a woman’s genitals). We pass through disturbing dreamscapes, and succeeding tableaux of jealousy, rivalry and desire.

Whist was created by Nakamura and Fourmi following conversations with psychoanalysts working at the Freud Museum and the result is the Oedipus complex writ large. The VR experience is awesome. It’s as if you’re suspended in space, watching events unfold around you in three dimensions. It reminds me of childhood dreams of invisibility, which always had a weird, voyeuristic edge. Our journeys through the narrative depend on the visual choices we make while immersed in individual scenarios. As we weave through the performance space, moving from location to location, the organisers watch our progress with smiling, Olympian detachment. Whist is an engaging and intelligent application of VR and the early-days feel of the technology is very appealing. Watch this multidimensional space.

June 15, 2018

Virtual truth: face to face with immersive documentaries

Experience life as a blind person, play a customs officer or swim with sea otters. A new breed of VR film-making is making viewers engage in a deeper way with the issues they confront

Sitting on a stool opposite me is Ayesha, a young American I’ve been asked to interrogate about her recent trip to Pakistan. “Did you visit any areas controlled by the Taliban?” I ask. “No, I did not,” she responds.

Ayesha is a hologram, and I’m “playing” a US customs officer in an augmented reality experience called Terminal 3. I spend 15 minutes in my fictional airport, asking her questions based on choices that appear in writing in my field of vision. My voice triggers her responses – which start off clipped and defensive but become increasingly intimate – to the point where I feel like I’d really like to hang out with her.

May 21, 2018

Nuzzle a panda, kiss a lioness: Jane Goodall takes us on her wildest adventure yet

The wildlife legend wants to take the whole world on safari. As her stunning new VR film series launches, she talks about firing up David Attenborough – and explains why Andy Serkis was ‘fantastic’ as an ape

‘Amazing!” gasps Jane Goodall, as she tilts her head in all directions, oblivious to the outside world. Goodall is the primatologist who changed our understanding of nature by recording chimpanzees using tools, a skill previously thought to separate humans from animals. But today Goodall is the one mastering a new tool: the 84-year-old is sitting spellbound on a sofa, wearing a VR headset and a wry smile.

She’s watching a film from The Wild Immersion, a project intended to raise awareness of – and perhaps even save – the natural world, via 360-degree virtual reality wildlife documentaries. Introduced by Goodall, they really are immersive: you’re practically nuzzling into the pandas’ fur, flying with the flamingos over an African lake. Then a lioness comes up and sniffs your face, before a giraffe walks right over you, its vast legs splayed above you like pillars. So that’s what a giraffe’s underneath looks like. Turn your head and the savannah stretches to the horizon in every direction.

May 3, 2018

Jordan Wolfson: ‘This is real abuse – not a simulation’

Creepy and vengeful, Wolfson’s puppet boy is violently smashed to the floor at Tate Modern – then threatens to fight back. But is the controversial US artist just yanking our chain?

In a room at Tate Modern, a boy is getting beaten up. He has a chain fixed to the top of his head, another attached to an arm, a third to a leg. As I watch, computer operatives sitting next to me press buttons, activating cranes that pull the chains taut. He spins into the air, limbs fly out, the torso swivels upside down. The chains loosen, he smacks into the ground. Then music kicks in over loudspeakers. Percy Sledge is ardently, if grotesquely inappropriately, singing When a Man Loves a Woman.

The boy is an animatronic puppet, slightly larger than life, with glossy red hair and loose limbs like the 1950s American TV cowboy puppet Howdy Doody. His gap teeth and leering eyes reference Mad magazine’s Alfred E Neuman, his ragged trousers Huckleberry Finn.

The animatronic boy takes such a thrashing he has to have new body parts transplanted regularly

I'm no moralist trying to shock people into behaving better … Really, I don't care about your interpretation

March 30, 2018

All mixed up: Ready Player One’s pop-culture crossovers are just empty nostalgia

Steven Spielberg’s film mashes together Jessica Rabbit, Sonic the Hedgehog and the Iron Giant, without much thought to how they would all get along

On paper, it sounds like a utopia. Steven Spielberg’s new film Ready Player One presents itself as a party to which everyone is invited, its fictional VR dimension playing host to familiar faces from every blessed corner of the pop-culture universe. In the virtual plane known as the Oasis, players can captain the Millennium Falcon or the fluffy beast Falcor. They can try to sweet-talk Jessica Rabbit or befriend Sonic the Hedgehog. Brave warriors may fight alongside Freddy Krueger or Solid Snake, Mecha-Godzilla or the Iron Giant.

Except that the Iron Giant is a lover, not a fighter. Tricking out the character with death-lasers goes against everything that he’s about, directly contradicting his native film’s guiding theme of pacifism in the face of violence. The way Ready Player One deploys the character undermines everything we understand about him. But the film doesn’t get hung up on this, quickly cutting to the next big-ticket cameo. Was that Samus Aran from Metroid just now?