Spaces Dead, Tilt Five Funded And Win A Quest! VRecap

It’s been a week of trials and tribulations for the VR industry. Pretty much a standard week, then.

David’s back to give you the news this week. Myself and Zeena have lost our passports in France and we can’t get home. I’m being serious. I feel like an idiot. Send help.

Anyway, this time on the VRecap we’re covering the death of Facebook Spaces. The company’s social networking platform has been shut down in order to make room (or Space) for Horizons. But does Horizons really stand to succeed where Spaces failed? We’ll have to wait until next year’s beta to find out.

Elsewhere, Tilt Five is celebrating Kickstarter success. The AR platform just rounded out its crowdfunding campaign and it made a whole heap of cash. Can the CastAR follow-up succeed where its predecessor failed? We’ve got our fingers crossed that that’s the case.

Finally on the news front we have the unexpected announcement of Vader Immortal’s third and final episode. The Star Wars series is concluding much sooner than we’d anticipated. But will the series be able to bow out on a good note following episode II’s stumbles? We’ll find out later this month!

Over in releases we’ve got a few things to list off. Not much love for PSVR players but Quest and PC VR enjoy a strong week. Meanwhile in the comments we’re talking about your favorite VR horror games. Okay, it’s a little late for Halloween now, but these are some winners all the same.

Oh, and you won’t want to miss this week’s giveaway! We’ve teamed up with Synth Riders to offer an Oculus Quest headset! We’re doing two giveaways this week: (10) people will win copies of Synth Riders for Oculus Quest and (1) lucky winner will win a Quest and a copy of the game to go with it!

Head below for a chance to enter and win in both giveaways:

GIVEAWAY: Win An Oculus Quest VR Headset And Copy Of Synth Riders!

GIVEAWAY: Win A Free Copy Of Synth Riders For Oculus Quest!

Okay, that about wraps us up for another week!

The post Spaces Dead, Tilt Five Funded And Win A Quest! VRecap appeared first on UploadVR.

‘Facebook Spaces’ Has Been Shut Down But Its Lessons Shouldn’t Be Forgotten

As of October 25th, Facebook Spaces has been shut down to “make way” for the company’s next try at a social VR platform, Horizon. While Spaces didn’t catch on, it represented some of the company’s finest VR design work to date. Facebook would do well not to forget its lessons.

Spotted by UploadVR, this week marked the end for Facebook Spaces, the company’s attempt to bring the Facebook experience into social VR. A message on the official website makes clear that Horizon, which Facebook showed off last month, is the new social VR priority for the company.

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'Facebook Horizon' is a New Social VR App Coming to Quest & Rift Next Year, Trailer Here

While the platform didn’t achieve traction, it was one of the most thoughtfully designed VR projects to come from Facebook. Not to say that it did everything right; Facebook Spaces was in equal parts a great example of what to do and what not to do in social VR.

A Deeply Spatial Interface

While many VR applications are still struggling to get away from the dreaded laser-pointer interface, Facebook Spaces was built from the ground up for spatial interactions. Just about everything you do in the application happens with a combination of touching and grabbing things within arms reach. This is a great place to start for any social VR application because spatial interaction naturally lends itself to social interaction, in the form of exchanging and collaboratively interacting with meaningful objects.

Image courtesy Facebook

A spatial interface is that much richer when virtual objects are persistent and everyone can participate. Spaces encouraged this sort of interaction from the get-go by allowing anyone in the room to interact with the objects around them. Not only does this create a strong sense of social embodiment, but it’s also conducive to deeper emergent behaviors, like users drawing their own board games for everyone in the room to play.

A Meeting Place, Not a World

Photo courtesy Facebook

Many social VR applications try to do too much at once and lose focus on the value of simply communicating with someone you care about. Games like Rec Room are plenty of fun in their own right, but their complexity means they aren’t a great place to simply be face to face with another person—in the same way that a theme park is a much worse place for catching up with an old friend than a pub.

Facebook Spaces had the excellent idea of not building a world for people to explore, but instead focusing on discrete rooms with features built to facilitate genuine human communication. It did this by using the concept of a ‘table’; a table is a thing which people who know each other gather around, and atop which they share things that are meaningful to them.

The table concept wasn’t just a good social metaphor, it was also a useful design principle. Rather than popping into a big virtual world with miles to roam, Facebook Spaces puts you directly in a seat at the table. This achieves a few things, notably: automatically spacing users at a comfortable ‘social proximity’ while preventing them from accidentally getting uncomfortably close.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in other social VR applications and been engaged in a meaningful conversation only to have it interrupted by one of the participants accidentally teleporting 20 feet away (or worse, into my body). If the goal isn’t to explore a virtual world, but simply to facilitate meaningful communication between people, open-ended locomotion is nothing but a distraction and an invitation for immersion-breaking accidents which kill social momentum.

A Direct Line to the Outside World

Image courtesy Facebook

One of the absolute coolest parts of Facebook Spaces, and one which still has no equal, was the ability to initiate a Messenger video call to friends in the real world. You’d start a video call in VR and your friend would get a ring on their phone in. When they answered, they’d see your avatar and everything in your Facebook Spaces room, while you’d see them in RL through their camera. You could even pull the video window up to the virtual table and your friend could see everything and participate in the conversation.

It was an incredibly novel and interesting way to share VR and avoid a feeling of isolation; after all, if Facebook Spaces only allowed you to communicate with friends who owned a VR headset, it wouldn’t be very inclusive….

If It Isn’t Inclusive, It Isn’t Social

Photo courtesy Facebook

While the ability to video call friends in real life was a great way to make social VR feel open to everyone, this was betrayed by other choices which hampered the adoption of Spaces. One of the key lessons that Facebook needs to learn if it wants to build a genuine social VR platform, is that it needs to be inclusive of the entire VR sphere.

Facebook.com (the website/app) wouldn’t be any good if it was only available on Android phones or only available on Mac. No matter what phone, operating system, or browser you use, you can be part of Facebook.com; as more of your friends join a given social network, the more valuable it becomes to you (this is the ‘network effect’, and it’s a major reason why Facebook.com dominates the social network world.

If any company in the tech space should understand this, you’d think it would be Facebook. Yet Facebook Spaces was only available on Rift and Vive. That meant the platform excluded PlayStation VR and all of Facebook’s other headsets: Oculus Go, Quest, and Gear VR. This is part of a broader issue of social VR fragmentation which has plagued the company.

What’s more, the need to be ‘Facebook friends’ before interacting with anyone in Facebook Spaces stymied use-cases beyond communicating with those you were already connected to. If you wanted to have a meeting with a business acquaintance or a tutoring session with a teacher, both parties would need to be ok with friending each other on Facebook, and then use some other communication channel to facilitate the friending of participants. It was a clunky hassle and an unnecessary barrier to getting people together inside of what was otherwise a very thoughtfully designed space for social interaction.

– – — – –

It’s my hope that whoever ultimately pulled the plug on Facebook Spaces didn’t just look at the lack of traction and say ‘this was a failure, let’s start from scratch’; there’s a ton of smart design here which would be an absolute shame to leave on the table. From what I’ve seen of Horizon—Facebook’s next attempt at a social VR platform—I don’t have much confidence that the learnings of Spaces will be put to much use, but I’ve certainly got my fingers crossed.

The post ‘Facebook Spaces’ Has Been Shut Down But Its Lessons Shouldn’t Be Forgotten appeared first on Road to VR.

Facebook Spaces Shuts Down To ‘Make Way’ For Facebook Horizon

Late last week, Facebook Spaces officially shut down ahead of the launch of Facebook’s new social experience, Facebook Horizon, in 2020.

A statement now occupies the Facebook Spaces site, which informs users the app is no longer available as of October 25, 2019.  The statement also notes that Facebook is “grateful to each and every one of you who joined us in the experience” and that they look forward to users joining them in Horizon next year.

Facebook Spaces was announced in 2017 and available on the Rift and the HTC Vive. However, it never made its way to the Oculus Quest, much like other Oculus services like Home and Rooms.

Horizon will be available on the Rift and the Quest, presumably with crossplay, in 2020, with a closed beta early in the year. Despite Horizon acting as Spaces’ replacement and successor, there is no word on HTC Vive support for Horizon and it seems unlikely that Horizon will support platforms outside of the Oculus ecosystem, at least for now.

We went hands-on with Horizon at OC6 last month, and spoke to some of the development team behind the new social experience. In many ways, Horizon is more like VRChat, Rec Room or AltSpaceVR, but with Facebook integration that ties your in-game avatar to your Facebook account. It remains to be seen if this will be enough to differentiate the platform from Spaces and ensure it doesn’t suffer a similar fate.

Are you sad to see Spaces go? Let us know what you used Spaces for in the comments below.

The post Facebook Spaces Shuts Down To ‘Make Way’ For Facebook Horizon appeared first on UploadVR.

Social VR World Facebook Horizon Coming to Oculus Quest and Rift in 2020

With two big hardware launches, it was unclear quite what Oculus had in store for this week’s Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) event in San Jose. Needless to say, it really didn’t disappoint, with a new hand tracking feature coming next year for Oculus Quest as well as Oculus Link. On the software side, there were a few arrivals, with the most unexpected being social virtual reality (VR) world Facebook Horizon.

Facebook Horizon

Supporting both Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest platforms, Facebook Horizon is the future replacement of Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms, with both being closed down on 25th October 2019.

Facebook Horizon is much grander in scale, moving towards the likes of Sansar, Somnium Space and other big social worlds. Designed as an ever-expanding world where people can connect and play together, the centre of this new world will be a town square to meet and mingle. From here it seems there could be no limit, where you can explore; play games like Wing Strikers, a multiplayer aerial experience and eventually create your own experiences.

Just like with most social worlds, you’ll be able to create your own avatar with an array of clothing and body options to suit your own style. After sorting out your avatar it’s time to jump in one of the many telepods (a sort of portal) to whisk you around the world. But there’s not just one Horizon world. Using the World Builder you’ll be able to create your own, from scratch. From a tropical paradise to an interactive action arena, supposedly anything is possible with the easy-to-use creator tools.

Facebook Horizon

If this sounds exactly what you want to dive into using Oculus Rift or Quest then you’ll have to wait as Facebook Horizon isn’t due to launch until 2020. A beta is due to start in early 2020 – which you can sign up to here – so a full launch may happen at next year’s Oculus Connect.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Facebook Horizon as further updates are released, or take a look at the other news from OC6 like Respawn Entertainment’s first VR title Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond.

Facebook Launches ‘Quill 2.0’ with Enhanced Features Making It a “self-contained storytelling tool”

Facebook today announced and launched Quill 2.0, bringing overhauled VR animation, audio, and narrative tools to make the app an all-in-one pipeline for storyboarding, drawing, animating, and storytelling.

When Oculus first launched Quill back in 2016, it was a powerful ‘VR drawing’ app with features like a layer system, brush styles & opacities, exporting, and video capturing functionality. But an update which brought animation tools to the app turned it into much, much more. Over the years (and now officially under Facebook’s purview) the app has increasingly become focused on VR drawing, animation, and audio.

Today Quill 2.0 brings a host of improvements to further mature the app into a “self-contained storytelling tool,” says Quill‘s lead engineer, Sebastien Chervrel.

Oculus detailed Quill 2.0’s new and enhanced feature set today and said that it’s now available in Early Access on Rift. The company says that 2.0 was built so that VR animators and storytellers no longer need to juggle several tools to make immersive artwork and narratives built with Quill.

Storytellers are often forced to switch between tools at various steps in the narrative process. A typical project might include storyboarding, modeling, surfacing, rigging, lighting, and all kinds of rendering, each with their own specialized tool. With Quill’s new Animation Timeline feature, storytellers can sequence narratives, synchronize animations to sound, create transitions between shots, and much more. Storytellers now have everything they need to create long-form VR narratives, all in one tool.

Quill also saves time and resources by avoiding file transferring and the need to learn new software. Most importantly, it lets storytellers go from initial concept to finished project in the most efficient and accurate way possible. In traditional animation pipelines, things can often get lost in translation with each step of the production process. This happens as subsequent steps become increasingly abstracted over time. With Quill 2.0, the concept becomes the finished piece as storyboards seamlessly transform into final animation.

Oculus says that Quill’s animation features have been vastly upgraded with keyframe transform tools, making it easier to move complex objects with keyframes and automatic interpolation, rather than frame-by-frame animation.

Quill 2.0 also introduces ‘Stops’ into its animation tools, which gives storytellers a way to pause the scene at key moments so that viewers can indefinitely see the action up close until they choose to proceed, enabling ‘page-turning’ and ‘comic book’-like narrative creations.

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Oculus Artist's 'Quill' Shorts Show the Incredible Potential of Illustrating & Animating in VR

Additionally, 2.0 has enhanced spatial audio tools which allow creators to define the position, direction, and area of sounds inside their creation. The sound volumes can also be animated along with everything else, allowing animators to pair moving objects with moving sound.

– – — – –

Quill is available free to any Rift users who also activate Oculus Touch. Quill artwork can be shared and viewed immersively in the app itself and in Facebook Spaces. While the company has said they’re working to bring Quill artwork to Quest, they haven’t announced plans to bring the actual creation app to the headset (likely due to performance considerations).

The post Facebook Launches ‘Quill 2.0’ with Enhanced Features Making It a “self-contained storytelling tool” appeared first on Road to VR.

Facebook Has Four Separate Social VR Apps and None of Them Are on Quest

Facebook’s fragmented approach to social VR hasn’t gotten any better with the launch of Quest. The company now has four separate social VR apps, and none of them are currently available on its newest headset.

With Oculus, Facebook has aimed to build the premiere VR ecosystem, but when it comes to allowing users of the company’s different headsets—Go, Quest, and Rift—to actually interact with one another, it has completely dropped the ball.

Facebook has lofty ambitions for what the far future of social interaction could look like with VR, but between the parent company and the Oculus brand, there’s a confused smattering of different social VR offerings which do a poor job of connecting users across the platform. Let’s review:

  • Facebook Spaces (available on Rift & Vive)
    • Allows users chat and share Facebook content (like photos and videos), draw in 3D, and video chat with non-VR users via Messenger
  • Oculus Home (available on Rift)
    • Allows users build virtual homes and invite friends over to talk and visit
  • Oculus Rooms (available on Go & Gear VR)
    • Allows users to decorate a virtual home and invite friends over to talk and visit, play mini games, share Facebook content (like photos and videos), and launch into other VR apps together
  • Oculus Venues (available on Go & Gear VR)
    • Allows users to watch live VR video content together

As you can see, before Quest came along, there was already a complete division among Facebook’s social VR apps which kept PC users (Rift) and mobile users (Go & Gear VR) completely separate. If you happened to own a Rift and had a friend which jumped into VR with Go as their first VR headset, there’s unfortunately no easy first-party way for you to connect with your friend in VR.

With Quest now on the market, things have only become more fragmented. While it was at least possible for Rift users to connect with other Rift users, and Go & Gear VR users to connect amongst themselves, Quest doesn’t have access to any of Facebook’s social VR apps. We would have expected at a minimum that Quest would get Rooms and Venues to link up with the company’s other mobile headsets—and it might one day—but at launch, Quest is a social island unto itself.

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It’s an unfortunate situation because it fails to leverage the Oculus ecosystem that Facebook has spent so much time building. The company now has five headsets on the Oculus platform, and it’s baffling that there isn’t at least a basic first-party social VR service that works between them all. For a social media company that thrives on the network effect, Facebook has been surprisingly obtuse about social VR.

Individually, some of Facebook’s social VR apps are quite compelling. It’s too bad that your invite list is limited by which Oculus headset your friends own. | Oculus Rooms, image courtesy Facebook

The current state of things is as if there were a Windows version of Facebook that would only connect to other Windows users, and a Mac version of Facebook that would only connect to other Mac users—while Linux (Quest in this rough analogy) wasn’t allowed to access Facebook at all.

When we asked Facebook about the state of their social VR offerings at the launch of Quest the company told us that they want to “push for having social layers that sit above all the headsets and work together,” but they have no specific plans to share. So it seems like it’s going to be a while yet until the company manages to make the Oculus platform feel like one socially connected group.

Luckily, third party developers are bridging the gap. Some social VR apps like Bigscreen manage to interconnect users on all of Oculus’ headsets, and even headsets outside the Oculus ecosystem. So even if Facebook doesn’t have it figured out yet, there’s at least somewhere in VR where friends of almost any headset can come together to be social.

The post Facebook Has Four Separate Social VR Apps and None of Them Are on Quest appeared first on Road to VR.

Oculus Quest Social Strategy Unclear Three Weeks Before Launch

oculus quest

The Oculus Quest is less than three weeks away with its May 21 release date fast approaching. The $399 standalone VR headset allows users to freely move around their environments with complete 6DoF head tracking and positionally tracked controllers. At launch it will feature top-rated VR games such as Beat Saber and Superhot as well as new releases like Dance Central, Journey of the Gods, and more.

Facebook is marketing the Quest as a gaming-first platform, similar to the Oculus Rift, but fans of non-gaming media apps like Netflix, multi-user social hangout spaces like Oculus Rooms, or live event social apps like Oculus Venues, are left wondering about the status of those experiences.

In an interview with UploadVR last month, Chris Pruett, the Direct of Content Ecosystem at Oculus, explained the current non-game offerings included on the device as a review unit:

UploadVR: What about non-game apps? Rooms, Netflix, Venues, etc?
Chris Pruett: “You will see a browser, you will see some media apps, you’ll see a few of them in Oculus TV in the device that you get today, but not the complete lineup. We are continuing to experiment with other first party applications, so for now no Rooms and no Venues, but that’s something that we will continue to figure out how we want to do on Quest.”

UploadVR: What about Facebook Spaces?
CP: “That falls into the same group, we have a large group of people that build things like Spaces and Venues and that group continues to be building things but we aren’t ready to talk about yet.”

UploadVR: Will there be word on those things before launch?
CP: “I don’t know the answer to that.”

Based on that language it certainly seems like apps such as Rooms, Venues, Netflix, and even Spaces are being considered for Quest eventually, and may be included in the near future, but none of them are listed on the day one launch lineup published by Oculus this week. Even John Carmack is reluctant to talk about media apps.

Currently the Quest lacks any sort of default social hub. There is no customizable space like Home on Rift or Rooms on Go and you have no way of using your avatar to hang out with friends in VR other than audio chat in a party or playing games like Racket Fury and Creed together. That feels like a major missed opportunity. Granted, we are still basing impressions off of pre-release hardware, but the embargo on official reviews has lifted so I’m hesitant to pull punches if they consider it complete enough to review.

Obviously by the time Quest comes out there will be more options, such as Rec Room, Bigscreen, and VRChat, but the lack of a native social experience feels like a notable omission, as is the reluctance to talk about it.

Let us know what you think down in the comments below!

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The post Oculus Quest Social Strategy Unclear Three Weeks Before Launch appeared first on UploadVR.

Facebook Artist Transforms Iconic Manga Into VR Sequence

Anime and Manga may have waned slightly in popularity since its 90s heyday, but it is till an incredibly popular medium. Many artists have been keen on praising the Mangaka who created some of the most famous and iconic Manga. The resident artist of the Facebook Social virtual reality (VR) Team, Goro Fujita, has created his own Manga tribute by turning a famous Dragonball Z moment into a short VR sequence.

Fujita has stated his opinion that ‘VR Comics will be a thing’ on Twitter, where he posted a link to a video showing the VR sequence, which can also be viewed using Facebook Spaces, the social VR app created by Facebook.

The artistic VR interpretation was taken from a famous moment in Dragonball Z where former villain Piccolo sacrifices himself to save the boy Gohan, eldest son of series protagonist Goku. Fujita used Oculus painting and drawing tool Quill to create the VR manga, using animation effects that made it appear to be a hybrid between Anime and Manga, something which Fujita calls ‘manime’.

Fujita said on Twitter that he considers the short Vr sequences to be ‘proof of concept’ and that there are no current plans to produce any full-length VR versions of branded manga such as Dragonball Z. Fujita further confirmed that he generally prefer to create his own original content. However, he also said that using VR to create the scene was faster than any other medium he has worked with.

“Something clicked when I drew Spiderman yesterday and I wanted to spend a bit more time into a daily painting. I took a Dragonball page and did my VR interpretation for it. That key moment that made me love Piccolo! How rewarding this experiment was! I would totally read comics like this! Quill comics will become a thing!”

For future coverage on new and upcoming VR projects, keep checking back with VRFocus.

Facebook Artist Makes a Case for VR Manga in Homage to Iconic ‘Dragon Ball’ Scene

As a current artist-in-residence on the Facebook Social VR team, Goro Fujita has been making some pretty impressive “quillistrations” as a part of his daily creative regime using Quill, Oculus’ first-party VR paint and drawing tool that he helped develop. In a few of his latest creations though, Fujita has been plumbing the possibilities of bringing comics to life in VR. As Fujita puts it, he’s now convinced “VR comics will be a thing.”

Taking inspiration from the Dragon Ball manga, Fujita recently recreated the iconic moment when Piccolo sacrifices himself for Gohan, the eldest son of series protagonist Goku. The animation effects lend the work a decidedly more manga-like feel than anime per se, something Fujita calls “manime.”

First, the original inspiration for Fujita’s quillistration:

Image courtesy of Akira Toriyama

Now for Fujita’s interpretation—you can check it out for yourself in Facebook Spaces, the company’s social VR app that lets you chat, share 360 photo and video, and now Quill projects too.

In a tweet, Fujita maintains the VR illustration is “more like a proof of concept,” and that he doesn’t currently have plans to produce any VR versions of branded manga like Dragon Ball at this time, as he prefers to make his own original content. He says however designing the scene in VR allowed him to create it more quickly than any medium he’s experimented with thus far.

“Something clicked when I drew Spiderman yesterday and I wanted to spend a bit more time into a daily painting. I took a Dragonball page and did my VR interpretation for it. That key moment that made me love Piccolo! How rewarding this experiment was! I would totally read comics like this! Quill comics will become a thing!”

As a former visual development artist at Dreamworks, Fujita is credited for his work on films such as Megamind (2010)Madagascar 3 (2012)Penguins of Madagascar (2014), and Boss Baby (2017). Fujita joined the now shuttered Oculus Story Studio as art director in 2014, and then moved onto his position as artist-in-residence when Quill’s development was picked up by Facebook’s Social VR team.

Fujita shares Quill content most days via his Twitter, and hosts a monthly livestream teaching session for backers of his Patreon.

While virtual stalwart Fujita isn’t the first to hit on the idea of creating manga exclusively for VR headsets—Square Enix recently released a long-term manga project called Tales of Wedding Rings VR (2018)and last month MyDearest’s VR manga game TOKYO CHRONOS reached its Kickstarter funding goal—he makes a strong case for the burgeoning genre. With the right understanding of the tools (in this case Quill), a single developer can quickly create a VR comic without the need of voice actors, and without having to master a game engine.

For aspiring VR comic creators, Fujita offers a quick look behind the scenes of how he created the Dragon Ball scene:

The post Facebook Artist Makes a Case for VR Manga in Homage to Iconic ‘Dragon Ball’ Scene appeared first on Road to VR.

Facebook F8: Oculus präsentiert fotorealistische Avatare

In der zweiten Keynote auf der F8 präsentierte Facebooks CTO Mike Schroepfer interessante Fortschritte in der Darstellung virtueller Avatare in der sozialen VR-Erfahrung Facebook Spaces. So arbeitet das Unternehmen derzeit an einer Möglichkeit, um ein fotorealistisches Ebenbild des eigenen Gesichts in die VR zu übertragen und diesem mit Mimik und Gestik Leben einzuhauchen.

Oculus – Neue VR-Technologien sollen zukünftig fotorealistische Ebenbilder in die VR übertragen

Oculus arbeitet stetig an der Weiterentwicklung der VR-Technologie, um das Medium eines Tages zu einem wichtigen Hauptkommunikationskanal zu befördern. Dadurch wäre es möglich, ohne große Kosten und Aufwand direkt mit anderen Personen in Kontakt zu treten. Sei es für privates Vergnügen oder zu Arbeitszwecken, die Möglichkeiten wären nahezu unbegrenzt.

Diesem Unterfangen könnte Oculus bereits einen großen Schritt näherkommen, denn in der zweiten Keynote auf der F8 präsentierte der technische Leiter Mike Schroepfer Einblicke in die derzeitige Arbeit des Unternehmens. In der Präsentation stellte er die Entwicklung der Avatare in Facebook Spaces vor, die sich im Laufe der Zeit von einem blauen menschenähnlichen Kopfgerüst zu comichaften Ebenbildern entwickelten.

Der nächste Evolutionsschritt liegt im fotorealistischen Übertrag des eigenen Gesichts sowie der dazugehörigen Mimik und den passenden Lippenbewegungen in die VR. In einem Video stellt er die Früchte der Arbeit vor, durch die eine neue Technologie entstand, welche es zwei Mitarbeitern von Oculus mit einer Oculus Rift erlaubt, durch fotorealistische digitalisierte Abbilder in Echtzeit miteinander zu sprechen. Sowohl die Mundbewegungen wie auch das Zwinkern mit den Augen wirken dabei sehr realistisch.

Wie Oculus diesen Übertrag bewerkstelligt, wann die neue VR-Technologie in Einsatz tritt sowie die nötigen Hardware-Voraussetzungen, ließ der Redner noch offen. Dennoch wirkt die Präsentation schon beeindruckend und wir können gespannt sein, welche weiteren Fortschritte uns in der Entwicklung der VR auch zukünftig erwarten.

Die komplette Keynote befindet sich hier.

(Quellen: Upload VR | Facebook Day 2 Keynote | Video: VR Focus Youtube)

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