According to an expert on artificial intelligence, would-be parents will soon be able to opt for cheap and cuddle-able digital offspring
Name: Tamagotchi kids.
Age: Yet to be born, though it won’t be long, says Catriona Campbell.
Continue reading...Editorial: Three Generations In The Metaverse
I convinced my Mom and Dad to buy a Meta Quest 2 for Christmas 2020 with hopes that the “Metaverse” could bridge the physical gap between us. I’m still waiting for that to happen.
When I packed up my wife and kids and moved to Seattle in 2015, I knew that I was leaving behind my close knit Cincinnati family. Grandparents, cousins, and long time friends were now thousands of miles away instead of right across the street. Not wanting to be excluded after we moved, we attended big family gatherings via FaceTime and got passed around with just enough time to say a garbled, “Hey! Nice to see you,” then shuffled to the next aunt or uncle.
As an early adopter of technology, I find myself constantly waiting around for others to catch up and see the value of things. Over the course of my first few years in this industry, virtual reality helped me find good friends in places like Ireland, Australia, and France. Places that are much farther away from me than Cincinnati. We meet up at virtual bars, play laser tag, and enjoy movies together. Full and satisfying interaction. As cliché as it sounds, it feels like we’re really together.
It made sense for me to encourage members of my family to jump into VR as well to give us a newer, better way to interact. The tech works. It’s a decent substitute for the real thing and much better than awkwardly staring at each other on flat screens. Do you miss our New Year’s Day ritual of bowling as a family? Put on your headset and we can do that right now. Hey Dad, how about we go on a fishing trip and pull in some smallmouth bass while we discuss the latest Sportsball game?
But that didn’t happen… yet.
When I convinced my parents to buy a Quest 2, I knew it would take some time for them to get acclimated. I still have nightmares of when they first got smartphones and joined the world of social media. I also knew that my nieces would probably get the most use of it when visiting my parents. It didn’t take long for my kids to connect with their cousins to jump into Rec Room and enjoy themselves until their batteries died. But when it came time for my Mom or Dad to suit up, there was immediate resistance.
It could be my fault. Throwing my parents into very early untracked headsets with super low quality screens may have set an unfortunate precedent. I can remember my Dad playing hours of Wolfenstein 3D back in the early 90s, but when Doom came onto the scene, he couldn’t play it. It was too much for him and he got sick. Same with early VR. Now that I’m trying to get him into the newer, smoother, higher resolution VR, I wish I could persuade him to get past his previous notions and try it.
Even if it’s taking time for some members of my family to give VR a second chance now that it’s so much more compelling, I also understand there are still fundamental roadblocks making VR headsets intimidating. It takes time for habits to change and syncing up playtime with family in other time zones can still be pretty challenging, requiring passwords or room codes that can be pretty foreign to some people. But unlike previous headsets and platforms, the barriers truly are lower than ever. The destinations in VR are more beautiful, the things you can do with others are more fun, and for those reasons alone a lot more headsets are going to be charged up and ready to play a lot more often.
Maybe I’m being impatient. Once others from my parents’ generation start buying headsets they might feel the pressure to join their peers and not be left behind. That’s how Facebook evolved. What started as a “College Kids Only” club slowly became a haven for parents sharing photos with grandparents and 50th grade school reunion pages. How long before there are “Seniors Only” nights in the Metaverse? Would mainstream mass adoption be enough for my parents to meet me in VRChat? When the neighbors brag about seeing their grandkids in VR every Friday, will that push my parents to jack in?
I hope that’s all it takes. I guess I can wait a bit longer for my multigenerational virtual experience. The best part of having a big family is that multiple generations can share wisdom and enjoy experiences together. In today’s world of emerging technology and whatever the Metaverse becomes, physical distance shouldn’t be a hindrance.
I still believe 2022 will be the year I see three generations of my family play together in VR, it’s just taking a little bit longer than I expected for everyone to get ready.
10 fun ways to entertain kids over half-term
Escape that Groundhog day feeling by trying out our creative tips on cooking, crafting, ‘camping’, and chucking stuff at Dad
Christmas, Easter, Bonfire Night and Halloween – the events that usually punctuate our year – haven’t felt sufficient in the pandemic, so in my family we’ve gone all out for occasions that would usually pass us by. Cultural appropriation maybe, but it has livened up Groundhog Day dinner times. We had a Diwali party in November, taking advice from an Indian friend on how to do it right, and cooked pakoras, wore new(ish) clothes, played games and covered the kitchen with fairy lights. For Burns Night my four-year-old helped make frozen cranachan, we ate haggis, played a bagpipe Spotify playlist and recited poems, including a welcome address penned by my seven-year-old, whose lines included: “I don’t know why but my dad is wearing a skirt …” (In lieu of a kilt, a peach silk number had to suffice.)
Continue reading...10 fun ways to entertain kids over half-term
Escape that Groundhog day feeling by trying out our creative tips on cooking, crafting, ‘camping’, and chucking stuff at Dad
Christmas, Easter, Bonfire Night and Halloween – the events that usually punctuate our year – haven’t felt sufficient in the pandemic, so in my family we’ve gone all out for occasions that would usually pass us by. Cultural appropriation maybe, but it has livened up Groundhog Day dinner times. We had a Diwali party in November, taking advice from an Indian friend on how to do it right, and cooked pakoras, wore new(ish) clothes, played games and covered the kitchen with fairy lights. For Burns Night my four-year-old helped make frozen cranachan, we ate haggis, played a bagpipe Spotify playlist and recited poems, including a welcome address penned by my seven-year-old, whose lines included: “I don’t know why but my dad is wearing a skirt …” (In lieu of a kilt, a peach silk number had to suffice.)
Continue reading...Helen Costa: ‘We don’t prepare people for the huge challenge of adoption’
Shocked at how ill-equipped she felt as an adoptive parent, the social entrepreneur started to make VR films from the child’s perspective
Like many people, Helen Costa found the process of adopting a child challenging, but once she’d got through it, she thought the hard part was over.
She soon realised she was wrong. “I was completely ill-equipped, and as a result of that really didn’t manage things very well,” she says. “With a child who’s come into the world hardwired for bad things to happen, their response to you and their ability to trust you is incredibly limited, and the behaviours that go with that are completely the opposite to what you expect as a new mum.”
Related: 'Hard truths told in a gentle way': how life story books help adopted children
Related: Local authorities told to focus on adoption for children in care
Continue reading...Virtual reality headsets to distract women from the pain of labour? Dream on | Nell Frizzell
The experience of giving birth is overwhelming in every way – no coral reefs or dancing penguins can distract from that
There was a point during labour when I would quite happily have ripped off every scrap of clothing, hunkered down into a squat and moaned like a pilot whale in the middle of a busy Frankie & Benny’s to deliver that baby. You could have thrown 10-inch four-cheese pizzas at my face and served cajun cheese fries off my head and I would hardly have noticed. Forty hours in, I was so beyond my body, so utterly absorbed by the swollen, fuzzy, monumental pressure beneath my skin, so transported by a feeling that wasn’t pain but felt like the tearing open of rock, that I would hardly have noticed if a family of four from Smethwick had turned up and started eating chicken wings in the corner of the birthing room. I have never been more aware of and more occupied by the present moment in my life.
Which is why, when I first read that University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff is offering labouring women virtual reality headsets during labour, I wondered, why bother? During the last 12 hours of my labour I was so completely transported by my physical experience, as I hung off door handles, appeared to slide up the wall and felt my breath leave my body like a coil of golden thread, that visions of a herd of buffalo or a quick virtual swim through a coral reef would hardly have registered. The idea of walking around my room in that wonderful east London birth centre, utterly naked but for a Daft Punk-style helmet over my pale and sweaty face, colostrum falling across my pulsating orb of a stomach, shuddering with each contraction like a freight train, seemed faintly ridiculous.
Related: What does childbirth feel like? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Nell Frizzell
Continue reading...First Impressions: a virtual experience of the first year of life – video trailer
Using the latest research in neural development and colour vision in infants, First Impressions allows you to experience and interact with the world from the point of view of a baby. It’s a period that none of us remember, but is the most crucial stage of our development
This Marble Maze Brought Into VR Is Family Friendly Fun
VR experiences welcome users into virtual worlds for education and entertainment purposes, immersing them into settings of the developer’s own design. Games like the recently announced Dungeon Chess take a simple table-top experience and project it into a VR space with special effects, ultimately providing an intimate gaming experience that brings players together that may actually be thousands of miles apart. Programs like Tilt Brush give the user creative tools to shape a virtual space or create works of art within, but there are other experiences that are blending all of these ideas together, even through the use of something as simple as a maze.
We recently covered Audi’s Sandbox 2.0, an advertising experience that allows you to harness your childlike creativity in a play area, have it brought into VR, and drive around your creation in Audi’s new car. Seedling, a company focused on children’s creativity through hands-on games and crafts, is utilizing VR for a similar idea with their Maze game.
In Maze, players build a wooden marble maze by placing wall blocks and adhesive stickers onto the board. Once you get your paths, dead ends, and hole traps in place, you can use the Maze app to scan in your custom built maze and journey into it with a cardboard VR viewer.
We had a chance to ask questions about the game’s concept with Seedling’s Chief Product Officer Rachel Rutherford.
UploadVR: What inspired the decision to blend a classic game with virtual reality?
Rachel Rutherford: At Seedling, we’re always thinking about how to play with creative materials, whether they are tactile or virtual. When figuring out how technology will play a part in the experience, it’s most important that the technology isn’t an afterthought. For Maze in particular, we were looking at games or activities that can be reinvented and designed their own way – like a marble maze – while also brainstorming interesting ways to design your own VR adventure. Then the two came together!
UploadVR: Do you believe family oriented concepts like Maze are crucial to VR’s growth?
Rachel Rutherford: I think for families, it’s all about figuring out how to play together. With Maze, it’s a great coffee table or kitchen table game for everyone to participate in, and then because you can race with others in the app, it becomes a social VR experience. I think VR can naturally extend past single-player experiences and I think this is crucial in getting parents (and grandparents) excited to bring it into the home.
UploadVR: How crucial is the VR integration to the experience? Could it potentially grow in the future?
Rachel Rutherford: What’s exciting about the VR integration is it opens the possibilities of extending the play even further. With new releases of the app, we can create additional maze themes and more exciting game customizations, creating a compelling reason to revisit the game. We’ll continue to blend the effects of the physical and digital mazes and see how else we can allow for kids to personalize their experience, both in and out of VR. When we talk to kids who are playing with Maze, the VR experience is what makes them excited to come back and share it with others, so we definitely want to build on that momentum.
MAZE is available on the Seedling website for $59.99. The base game includes a wooden marble maze, 45 wooden wall blocks, 5 reusable paper grids, adhesive stickers, and 3 marbles. The MAZE application is available on iOS and Google Play.
Tagged with: board game, children, family, gaming, Marble Maze, Maze, Seedling
For Japan’s ‘stranded singles’, virtual love beats the real thing
Multimillion-pound industry caters for young people enamoured of fictional computer characters
Japan’s apparently waning interest in true love is creating not just a marriage crisis but a relationship crisis, leading young people to forgo finding a partner and resort to falling for fictional characters in online and video games.
New figures show that more than 70% of unmarried Japanese men and 75% of women have never had any sexual experience by the time they reach 20, though that drops to almost 50% for each gender by the time they reach 25.
Continue reading...Björk Releases Teaser Trailer for VR Film ‘Family’
It was back in June that VRFocus first reported on Icelandic singer Björk planning a virtual reality (VR) album exhibition tied to her world tour for HTC Vive. The Björk Digital exhibition toured Sydney, Tokyo and London earlier this year and recently the artist released a teaser trailer for her VR film Family.
Family has been directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, with in collaboration Björk and James Merry, commissioned by Phoebe Greenberg and Penny Mancuso, from Montreal’s Phi Centre, and Red Bull Music Academy.
Speaking to The Creators Project, Huang explained: “The story of the piece is about a woman who journeyed to see the Icelandic landscape to sew herself back together through, out of heartbreak, towards transcendence and empowerment. All the landscapes that you see in the piece are actual landscape scans of the sets that we shot in Black Lake. They‘re meaningful scans, they‘re not just any Icelandic environments…
“You‘ll be travelling inside an embroidered piece designed by James Merry that‘s kind of like your magic carpet taking you through the world,” he notes. “We got actual motion-capture of Björk, so her presence is there in the piece.”
The Björk Digital exhibition is currently running at the DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal until 12th November.
Keep reading VRFocus for all the latest VR news from around the world.