culture – Page 17 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

June 10, 2017

Step inside Butterfly’s house in virtual reality opera night

Arts are embracing cutting-edge tech in Puccini production

Cutting-edge visual technology is pushing its way into the hallowed halls of culture this summer. New 3D replicas of missing artworks have been installed at the home of the 18th-century writer Horace Walpole, while Welsh National Opera is going a step further, creating a virtual reality performance.

Authenticity was once key to the value of a work of art, as well being a crucial notion in the world of entertainment. Yet soon it is likely that even experts will be unsure what they are looking at.

May 22, 2017

Carne y Arena review – dazzling virtual reality exhibit offers a fresh look at the refugee crisis

Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest project is an innovative and immersive account of the horrors faced at the Mexico-US border

So – the envelope is pushed a little further, the limits of cinema questioned a little harder, the rectangular perimeter fence of the movie screen challenged a little bit more confidently.

May 17, 2017

Virtual reality brings ninth century Viking invaders’ camp to life

Exhibition to feature scenes and artefacts from large-scale winter base where soldiers prepared to conquer Anglo-Saxons in 872

The Viking armies that invaded Britain in the ninth century were far larger than had previously been realised, according to academic research that forms the basis for a groundbreaking virtual reality project.

A major exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum, staged in partnership with the British Museum, draws on new research by the universities of York and Sheffield. According to Professor Dawn Hadley, one of the co-directors of the universities’ project at the site of a Viking winter camp, archeologists and historians had thought that the invading Viking armies numbered in the low hundreds. But archeological work at the camp on the river Trent at Torksey, Lincolnshire, suggested otherwise.

May 17, 2017

Farpoint review: an embryonic and limited virtual reality experience

Developer Impulse Gear has made an earnest attempt at a VR version of Halo, but the game, and its strange PlayStation Aim Controller, fall short of the target

When the GunCon, a plastic replica pistol for the PlayStation console, first launched in December 1995, it came in just one colour: jet black. Viewed from any distance, the only giveaway that this was a video game controller, rather than an authentic firearm, was the claret-coloured start button on the side of a barrel. Pull a GunCon from a rucksack on a crowded subway and you’d almost certainly cause a terror stampede. When the devices launched in the UK, the law demanded they were recoloured bright blue and red.

There’s no risk of any potentially deadly confusion when it comes the PlayStation Aim Controller, which launches this week alongside Farpoint, a futuristic shooting game built for virtual reality. It’s an impressionistic sketch of a firearm, built from the kind of white tubing you might find under a kitchen sink, with a glowing ping-pong ball fixed to the end of the barrel. If the purpose of peripherals like this aim to narrow the gulf of abstraction that separates activity in a video game from its real-world counterpart (the plastic driving wheel that makes it feel more like you’re driving a Ferrari in Forza, for example, or the wooden gear lever that approximates the Shinkansen’s dashboard in Densha de Go) then this effort seems laughably off-target.

April 20, 2017April 21, 2017

Sir David Attenborough to become 3D hologram for Sky VR documentary

Naturalist to help viewers ‘handle’ objects from Natural History Museum, as broadcaster also unveils new HBO deal

Sir David Attenborough is to be turned into a hologram for a virtual reality tour of the Natural History Museum in London that promises to allow users to “handle” rare fossils from the comfort of their own home.

Sky has commissioned the new experience, called Hold the World, which it says is a marriage of interactive video game technology and TV documentary. The public will be able to take the tour, which offers an up close and personal experience with fossils, bones and skulls, with insights from Attenborough, if they have a VR set, controller and phone app.

April 14, 2017

Mat Collishaw restages 1839 photography show in virtual reality

Artist says VR will change our outlook as he prepares Somerset House display based on Henry Fox Talbot’s seminal exhibition

Art galleries have long specialised in transporting visitors to another world, allowing them to dive into Hockney’s swimming pool, hear the clamour of war in Picasso’s Guernica or feel the spray of the sea from a Turner scene – all within the confines of four white walls.

But a new dimension is making its way into museums and galleries across the UK, one that extends the physical space into an experimental virtual world.

April 13, 2017

Heavy hitters and hot tickets: Cannes 2017 is as mouthwatering as ever | Peter Bradshaw

Michael Haneke’s Happy End leads the charge for this year’s Palme d’Or, but there are tasty spectacles on the Croisette wherever you look

The Cannes official selection list has been unveiled and it is a politicised lineup with a repeated thematic emphasis on the refugee crisis, designed to give the finger to the New Trump Order. The inclusion of Claude Lanzmann’s new film Napalm may be of interest to the White House press secretary Sean Spicer – horrified as he is about countries who use chemical weapons.

April 9, 2017

Games reviews roundup: Persona 5; Yooka-Laylee; Virry VR

Teen rebellion is even better fifth time around, while a crowd-funded platformer revives the 90s and Kenya’s wildlife gets up close and personal

PS4, PS3, Sony, cert: 12
★★★★★
Following the success and acclaim of Persona 4, this new entry in developer Atlus’s series of turn-based role-playing games has a lot to live up to. Thankfully, Persona 5 exceeds these high expectations, oozing style and personality. In both the dynamic, context-specific loading screens and the intuitive battle menus, every design decision reinforces the narrative theme of battling the corrupt systems that have robbed the protagonists’ futures, driving them to become the phantom thieves of hearts. Even dungeon descents are made to feel like heists, with the protagonists infiltrating the mindscapes of their abusers to steal their secrets and treasures.

April 8, 2017

Virtual reality: Is this really how we will all watch TV in years to come?

At the media industry’s annual bash in Cannes, virtual reality is the next mass medium that will take TV to a new level

Virtual reality (VR) technology secured its place in popular culture through films such as The Lawnmower Man and The Matrix, as well as books such as Ready Player One, which Steven Spielberg is adapting for a movie. They presented visions of technology whereby strapping on a VR headset (or, as in The Matrix, being imprisoned in pods and hooked up to a computer network by human-farming machines) enabled people to explore virtual, computer-generated worlds.

In 2017, these cultural touchstones are freshly in mind for the television industry, as it tries to understand whether real-life headsets can be used to deliver new forms of drama, documentary and storytelling.

April 4, 2017

Sodas, fries and killing zombies: games arcades are back

A beloved but long-struggling industry sees a fresh start in VR, and in Bangkok headsets and high-powered PCs have replaced the coin-op machines of old

It’s a scene straight from a 90s arcade.

A group of guys clutching greasy fries and icy sodas fixating wide-eyed on a screen where their friend is manically shooting the limbs off zombies. The gang have bought credit for an hour of gaming — surely more than enough time for bloodshot eyes and pounding headaches.