Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today’s Community Download, we want to know if you think VR exercise could be the future of home fitness workouts?
Now that we live in an age of social isolation and stay-at-home orders from governments around the world, finding novel ways to stay active and fit is more important than ever. Gyms are often closed nowadays and working out at home like normal with videos or over web conferences doesn’t do it for lots of people.
That’s where VR can come into play. Not only is it great to stay connected with others, but there are some truly great VR exercise apps out there too. With the likes of Beat Saber serving as a major catalyst for thousands of VR users around the world, as well as apps such as BoxVR and Supernatural that focus specifically on helping you exercise and stay fit, there’s never been a better time to get fit at home.
But is this really what the future looks like for at-home fitness? Will VR exercise be ubiquitous enough that gyms, trainers, and users will start to use it as often as a Peloton, Bowflex, eliptical machine, treadmill, or other common exercise equipment? Could a VR headset replace at-home gyms in the future?
Let us know what you think of the prospect down in the comments below and recommend any tips you have for working out in VR!
One of the film industry’s staple festivals, Tribeca Film Festival, is moving online in response to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. That includes a selection of its VR-compatible content.
As part of the move, Tribeca is partnering with Facebook’s Oculus to bring its Cinema360 lineup to Oculus Quest and Go via the Oculus TV app. Cinema360 offers a curated list of 15 VR films, split into four playlists each lasting around 30 to 40 minutes. Films span various genres, ranging from entertainment to hard-hitting messaging, as you’d expect from a festival of this caliber.
Cinema360 will offer projects from all over the world, including World Premieres of films like Forgotten Kiss, a Finnish project that tells the story of a prince in search of a magical fairy. The Pantheon of Queer Mythology, meanwhile, is a Spanish piece about “a collective of Deities that present a way to question, empathize, celebrate, repent, resist, consume, abstract, identify, regenerate, and love in complex times.” Upstander, meanwhile, is an intriguing animated experience about bullying.
In addition, Oculus is also launching a film from the 2019 iteration of the festival, The Key. This animated, interactive project was developed under Oculus’ VR for Good program. It’s also coming to Quest and Go as well as Rift. Previously the project won the Tribeca Film Festival Storyscapes Award and the Grand Jury Prize for Best VR at Venice Film Festival.
Film festivals are important to the VR industry, offering a venue to showcase work beyond VR gaming. With the COVID-19 crisis heavily impacting the year’s events schedule, moving screenings into VR makes perfect sense.
The Cinema360 films will be available on the app from April 17 to 25. We’ll be looking forward to checking it all out.
As the coronavirus crisis develops across the world and more communities prepare for self-isolation, VR headsets seem ideally suited as a versatile companion for the weeks ahead.
It’s true that VR is treated as a gaming platform first and everything else second at this point in time. But the medium’s capabilities also stretch far beyond gaming, overlapping with other forms of entertainment, providing us with ways to connect without physically meeting up and letting us explore new places, both real and fictional, from the comfort of our homes.
With that in mind, we’re rounding up the ways in which a VR headset can help you during self-isolation, along with some app suggestions for each. We’ve tried to cover experiences for the vast range of devices out there, including experiences for high-end PCs right the way down to Oculus Quest.
Of course, we also have Top 25 lists for basically every major VR headset and platform out there (including, Quest, PSVR, Rift and SteamVR), if you’re looking for more suggestions.
Social Interaction Without Risking Infection
One of the biggest reasons people are talking about VR in the wake of the coronavirus crisis is its ability to defy self-isolation. Social VR applications still have a long way to go before evolving into our own personal metaverses, but even in its current form it’s undeniably compelling to meet up with a virtual avatar of your friend online and then hang out together.
You’ll find that different apps specialize in different areas, so it’s good to give them all a look. Rec Room, for example, has a lot of different activities from paintball to co-op questing. AltspaceVR, meanwhile, has a full roster of live events to check out. With Bigscreen, you can even share your PC screen with others to watch videos or share other content with each other. And VRChat holds a sprawling user-created world with something new to see around every corner. Best of all, these are all free experiences.
It’s true that current VR limitations prevent a lot of experiences from perfectly simulating the real world. But there are a handful of experiences out there that actually get pretty close to the real thing. The light touch and pinpoint physics of Eleven: Table Tennis make it a genuine alternative to getting a ping pong table, for example.
But VR can also be a useful tool for real-world travel. Even if it can’t fully replace the real thing, there are apps out there that offer a truly impressive facsimile, like a virtual visit to Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, or taking a globe trotting trip as a National Geographic reporter.
One of VR’s most welcome and unexpected side-effects is just how healthy it is. Gaming has a long history of underwhelming takes on the fitness market but, with VR, you can play a few hours on a highly addictive experience like Beat Saber just for the fun of it and find yourself burning calories almost by accident.
Some games like BoxVR also specifically dedicate themselves to fitness and offer multiplayer modes to challenge your friends with too. Or you could tackle a VR campaign like the one in Creed: Rise to Glory and shed weight while you play a core gaming experience.
Going Beyond Your Living Room With Massive Virtual Worlds
While it’s true that games like Superhot VR and Beat Saber offer some of the best experiences in headsets, they’re also quite small in scale and don’t always capture a sense of travel. An unprecedented time such as this calls for massive virtual destinations you can lose tens of hours exploring. Exploring the world of Skyrim in VR was a dream come true for many, for example, and now’s the perfect time to return there.
It’s true that VR has relatively little in the way of these right now, but some ports of traditional games, high-end native games and some online offerings give you a fair bit of choice.
Streaming services like Netflix are no doubt going to see a heavy increase in use as self-isolation ramps up around the world. But you don’t just have to watch your favorite worlds onscreen; you can also visit many of them in VR. The platform has incredible potential for wish fulfillment, and we’re already seeing some experiences capitalize on that. If you want to use this time to truly escape from reality, VR is a great bet.
This can, of course, be an anxious time for a lot of people and it might be hard to turn that switch off. But VR offers a lot of options for retreat, whether you’re looking for light entertainment or games to help distract you or you’re in search of dedicated meditation alternatives. A light trek through the gorgeous worlds of Fujii can prove to be a soothing remedy, for example, or Guided Tai Chi offers a more practical approach.
Either that or maybe you simply want to watch Netflix in a different environment to your living room. It might sound silly, but it can go a long way to helping you lose yourself.
The Oculus Quest is one of the hottest VR headsets on the market right now. While there’s a great selection of games for the Quest, there’s also a bunch of media apps that are perfect for when you want to kick back and watch something in VR.
Here are the best VR media apps available on the Oculus Store for the Quest.
YouTube VR
YouTube VR serves two purposes — you can watch normal YouTube content in a VR environment and you can also watch a plethora of 360 video content available on YouTube as well. While 360 degree video content is technically watchable on a standard YouTube browser or mobile app, VR is definitely the best option, so get on it.
Netflix VR
Netflix is probably the biggest player in the streaming game and they have a nice accompanying VR app for your Oculus Quest. Netflix VR will place you in a small cozy cabin where you can enjoy your regular selection of Netflix content on a virtual TV screen that’s probably bigger than the one you own in real life.
Bigscreen
Bigscreen is all about cinemas and social VR. Upon launching Bigscreen, you’ll be able to join a bunch of different rooms and cinemas types providing both free and paid content. Bigscreen Cinema – a service that offers paid tickets to screenings of popular movies — is one of the newer additions to the app. The movies are often shown in 3D and the selection changes weekly, with occasional special screenings such as the Valentine’s Day Titanic screening.
In addition to the official rooms, you can join rooms hosted by other Bigscreen users, which will be displaying content chosen by the host. Plus, you’re able to host your own rooms for you and your friends to join. Using a Bigscreen desktop app, you can even stream your computer display into those rooms while you hang out – it’s a versatile app, to say the least.
Skybox VR
Skybox VR is like Bigscreen but without the social element. It offers a bunch of different cinemas and environments for you to watch content in. You can load files that are stored locally on your Quest or stream content from your a DLNA server on your own network.
Oculus Venues
Oculus Venues is a Facebook app where you can watch a bunch of different events, from music concerts to sports to stand up comedy and more, as they happen live. The catch is that you have to tune in live — you won’t be able to rewatch any Venues content later. Like Bigscreen, you can watch with people around you in a social VR setting or you can opt to watch solo. We’ve had fun with venues in the past, watching some pretty high profile artists like Billie Eilish perform live. If you download the Venues app, you’ll be able see a schedule of the upcoming streamed events and their broadcast times.
Next VR
Similar to Oculus Venues, NextVR has a bunch of live content that you can watch in VR, as if you’re really there. However, Next VR doesn’t incorporate any social elements and you’ll just be watching solo. That being said, some content is also presented in stereoscopic 3D, which really deepens the level of immersion. One of the biggest pulls of NextVR is their NBA content, with some matches allowing you to sit courtside and watch the action live in 3D!
Quill Theater
Late last year, Quill Theater released on the Oculus Quest, which allows you to view Quill content created on the Rift platform. The Quill creation tool is only available on Rift, not Quest, but allows users to make mini scenes, animations and movies. The creation tool allows creators to use some complex 6DoF animations and transitions between scenes, so there’s some great content to watch on the Quest. Quill Theater will present you with a rotating selection of creations to dive into and is definitely worth checking out if you want to see some awesome community media content that made in VR.
Those are our picks for best media apps available on the Oculus Quest? Are there any other apps you feel we should add to the list? Let us know in the comments.
Speaking to Tested in an in-depth Making Of video, series director Ben Snow revealed that the series was originally more of a passive piece in which players didn’t embody a character at all.
“It was originally going to be a fly on the wall narrative where you essentially observe the goings on,” Snow explained. “And so the first prototype that I became involved in, we were essentially trying to grey box/proof out/pre-viz the first script that he [David S. Goyer] had written.”
Longtime VR fans will remember that ILMxLAB originally teased the experience that would become Vader Immortal all the way back in 2016. We didn’t see it again until late 2018, by which time we’d begun to wonder if it was still in the works. As it turns out, it was the introduction of The Void’s location-based Star Wars VR experience, Secrets of the Empire, that ended up changing the direction of Vader Immortal.
“So we kind of put Vader Immortal, or what became Vader Immortal on hold and then focused on this interactive experience, ” Snow continued. “And it was great because it gave us a chance to step back and say “You know what? People are going to enjoy this more if they are not the fly on the wall. They’re in VR, it’s really disappointing to stand in VR and watch two other people have a conversation around you. We want you to be part of it.””
And so, after a new pitch, ILMxLAB created a new prototype that ended up being very similar to the scene in the cells in Episode 1.
“We finished that, showed it and everyone was like “Yeah, this is the way to go with it,”” Snow added.
And the rest is history from a long time ago. Snow also revealed that this was around the same time Oculus became involved with the project.
Though we definitely would be interested to see this other version of Vader Immortal, we’re glad it turned into an interactive experience in the end. The storytelling is hugely compelling and the cinematic battles are a thrill to take part in.
All three episodes of Star Wars: Vader Immortal are available now on Oculus Rift and Quest.
Horror week is kicking off in Bigscreen starting today at 5:00 PM PT featuring The Ring and other terrifying movies like Cloverfield and World War Z. The lobby has a new look too, shown in the image above.
From February 7th (today) until next Friday, February 14th Bigscreen will be showing World War Z (3D), The Ring, Cloverfield, and 10 Cloverfield Lane as the featured films in Bigscreen Cinema. This means you can purchase movie tickets starting at $3.99 to meet up at a virtual movie theater that goes to great lengths to simulate the movie-going experience from the comfort of your VR headset at home.
According to Darshan Shankar from Bigscreen, they’re working on a bunch of new features that are coming soon:
Friend system to make it easier to invite people into your rooms,
Renting, buying, and watching 3D movies in your own private room rather than just pre-scheduled group cinema screenings so you can watch anytime with friends like a real home theater,
Licensing more (newer) movies, sports, anime, and other content,
Networking improvements to enhance audio, video, streaming, and performance,
Drive-In Movie Theater environment, but that likely won’t be out until near the end of 2020.
For more on Bigscreen and/or Bigscreen Cinema check out the official website and don’t forget you can watch our live in-VR news talk show podcast, The VR Download, from inside Bigscreen every week as well.
Two of Facebook’s first in-house experiments in VR movie-making, Henry and Dear Angelica, have been uncovered on Oculus Quest. But, in our opinion, you shouldn’t watch them there.
The short films are available to download for free (you may need to search in the Oculus Store on browser to find them but Henry is here but Dear Angelica is here). Reddit users uncovered both apps, though it’s not clear if they’ll get featured release slots on the store.
Note that these are not Oculus Go apps that you can download from the Go store as you can others; they’re full, native Quest downloads. Despite this, both apps are the same 3D 360 video version seen on Go as opposed to Rift; there’s no positional tracking in either experience. We can’t find Story Studio’s very first film, Lost, on Quest at this point in time.
Henry was one of the first releases under the Oculus Story Studios banner, launching on Rift in 2016. The short film, narrated by Elijah Wood, stars a lonely hedgehog looking for companionship on his birthday. It’s a sweet, experimental piece that resembles a Pixar short.
Dear Angelica, meanwhile, was Story Studio’s last release before Facebook shuttered the team in mid-2017. Built inside Oculus Quill, the experience tells the story of a daughter reminiscing over her mother’s Hollywood career. It was a powerful experience that’s still worth watching today.
Both Henry and Dear Angelica’s Go releases used a 5K 3D 60FPS video player code made by John Carmack. We can’t say for sure but it looks like these Quest releases use it too. That said, given that both of these experiences only offer 3DOF movement, we’d recommend instead seeking them out on PC with an Oculus Link cable if possible. Doing this will allow you to move your head around in VR just like you can in other Quest games. That’s really how these films were first intended to be seen.
Members of Story Studio went on to create Fable Studio, best known for its 2019 series, Wolves in the Walls. Facebook, meanwhile, continues to lend support to other VR movies and experiences in production, though to the best of our knowledge doesn’t produce such apps in-house.
Did you know Colin Farrell was the star of a VR app? Well now you did, and this new video for affectionate VR series, Gloomy Eyes, proves it.
Gloomy Eyes — which won big at last year’s Raindance Awards — is one of the latest creations from Atlas V and 3dar. It tells the story of a young zombie boy who falls for a human girl in a world that, for self-explanatory reasons, doesn’t want them to be together. Assuming the role of a gravedigger, Farrell narrates the experience, which plays out in diorama-sized scenes you can lean into using your VR headset.
In this video, released as part of HTC Vive’s Viveport Developer Stories series, Farrell can be seen in the VO both, playing his part. Not only that but he shares his take on working on the experience.
“Because [it’s] a VR experience,” Farrell says, “they’ve been able to just keep it about the purity of the story in a way that sometimes in feature film gets compromised because of the scale, sometimes, of things or the amount of people involved.”
There’s also an intriguing look into the piece’s music and other elements. Overall it’s a pretty eye-opening peek behind the scenes at what does into current VR movie-making.
Gloomy Eyes is now available as a three-part series, exclusively on Viveport. Viveport Infinity subscribers can get it as part of the service. Note that this doesn’t mean you have to watch it with Vive; Viveport also supports Rift, Index, Oculus Link and Windows VR headsets too.
For our third episode, due on today, we’re in Japan. Yup, the land of stunning scenery, bustling metropolises and robotic toilets. How could we venture over to the East and not bring a camera in search of every cool VR gadget and game we could find?
And, believe us, we found plenty. In this episode, we visit three different VR arcades to see some of the amazing, unique experiences they offer. First up we’re in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district to visit Bandai Namco’s amazing Mazaria VR park. Located in the Sunshine City shopping mall, the dream-like center offers all kinds of amazing VR goodies, including games based on Dragon Quest and Pac-Man.
We also journey over the road to the Capcom Plaza, where two exclusive Resident Evil VR games are on offer. This is a rare look inside two location-based spin-offs that you can’t play in the West so, if you’re a fan of the series, you really won’t want to miss this.
Finally on the arcade front, we also head up to another Bandai Namco VR Zone, this time in the chilly northern city of Sapporo. There we find yet more legendary franchises have been virtualized, including Gundam and Evangelion.
Outside of arcades, we also got to hang out with Psychic VR Lab, an intriguing Tokyo-based company making a web-based VR/AR creation platform called Styly. The team took us on a whirlwind tour of some of its work across the Shibuya district, where it has plenty of cool AR experiences littering the streets and some strange VR apps too. We also attended the company’s New View Awards, which hosted a bunch more indie-made VR ideas.
So, when will this burst of exotic VR excitement land on your plate? Very soon; be back here at 10am PT on Monday, January 20 to be the first to watch our best episode yet.
Liked this episode of The VR Culture Show? Let us know! We’ll be back soon with another installment, so keep your eyes peeled.
Jon Favreau’s live action remake of The Lion King was one of the most technically astonishing films of 2019. It also marked a milestone for VR, as Favreau and his crew used VR to visualize scenes before committing them to film. According to one of the film’s senior VFX supervisors, this technique is here to stay.
That is according to Rob Legato, who spoke to Cinema Blend about the process.
“It’s really great to share an idea before you actually cement it,” Legato said. “Even in artificial terms, it’s like, ‘You know what? Let me show you something else. I’ll move the trees over here; what do you think of this?’ And it doesn’t really cost you anything, and you get to experiment and continue to iterate and make better.”
Over the course of production, Favreau and the crew would all meet inside VR to tour virtual versions of their sets to help plan filming. In an interview last year the director described it basically as a “multiplayer VR filmmaking game”. It seems to have had a profound impact on an industry veteran like Legato, whose other credits include Avatar and Titanic.
“Really, I think it’s here to stay. It’s definitely here to stay, and every filmmaker I show, they’re like, ‘Holy shit, this is great. This is a powerful tool.'”
It seems likely, then, that Favreau will use this approach in future films. Fittingly, Steven Spielberg also used VR when filming his adaptation of Ready Player One last year.
Could we see more high-profile names start to use headsets to film their blockbuster pictures?
