ILM – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

September 16, 2020

New Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge Gameplay Trailer, Launching This Holiday

Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge got a brand new trailer today during Facebook Connect showing lots of blaster action and familiar faces.

Now that we’ve seen the game in action, it actually looks quite impressive. While not directly related from a story perspective, Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge looks extremely similar to Vader Immortal, which is also developed by ILMxLab.

Previously we only really got to see concept art and mock up images, but now in the new trailer embedded above, you can see lots of actual gameplay as well. This looks like it’ll be extremely action-packed and way more than just a tour of Batu.

You can find some more details on what we found out already about Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge right here in this article from a few months ago. And keep an eye on the PC VR and PSVR spaces next month for when Star Wars: Squadrons launches with VR and full HOTAS support!

Be sure to watch our Oculus Quest 2 VR Download special show diving into the latest announcements and find a list of other Facebook Connect announcements below the video.

Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge is releasing on Oculus Quest this holiday season. Stay tuned to UploadVR for more details as they come out! Let us know what you think down in the comments below!

July 18, 2019

TIME Immersive VR/AR Mobile App Launches by Landing on the Moon

One of the most famous print magazines in the world, TIME, has launched a new way to consume is journalism, augmented reality (AR). Today, TIME Immersive has been launched for iOS devices, and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing the app brings that iconic moment into your living room.

Time Immersive

Landing on the Moon is the first piece of content to feature on the app, produced in partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum and sponsored by Jimmy Dean. The 3D assets are thanks to 20 years of research and artistry by John Knoll, Chief Creative Officer of Industrial Light & Magic, with the spatial sound design by Erik Lohr, RYOT’s head of audio, and a voice-over by TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger.

“With Landing on the Moon, TIME is building on its decades of trusted and authoritative space reporting to tell this story in a brand new way, just as we have done in previous projects such as our Emmy Award-winning documentary A Year in Space,” said Edward Felsenthal TIME Editor in Chief and CEO in a statement.

Currently only available for iOS devices, TIME Immersive will be coming to Android soon. If you don’t own an Apple AR compatible device and want to check out Landing on the Moon the mobile web AR experience, both of which are the work of Trigger.

Time Immersive

“TIME has always been at the forefront of visual storytelling. With the launch of this app and our first web AR experience, we are putting a stake in the ground with AR and establishing the level of immersive journalism that TIME will continue to bring to our readers,” adds Mia Tramz, Emmy-winning VR producer and editorial director of Enterprise and Immersive Experiences at TIME.

TIME has previously announced two major immersive projects it preparing to release, The March and Space Explorers: The ISS Experience. The former will allow viewers to experience the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, while Space Explorers: The ISS Experience is an immersive documentary series filmed in and around the International Space Station, created in conjunction with Felix & Paul Studios.

As TIME releases further immersive content, VRFocus will let you know.

September 26, 2018

New VR ‘Star Wars’ Series Slated to Launch on Oculus Quest Next Year, Trailer Here

ILMxLAB, the immersive media wing of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), today revealed at Oculus Connect 5 that they’re producing a series of Star Wars VR experiences for Oculus Quest, the company’s upcoming high-end standalone VR headset. The first in the series, dubbed Vader Immortal: Episode I, is said to come exclusively as a Quest launch title, and follow the exploits of Darth Vader.

ILMxLAB says it will be part one of a three-part series following Vader. The story, the company says, follows The Secrets of the Empire VR experience which launched at The VOID earlier this year.

The story is said to take place between Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977).

It’s unclear exactly where the series will fit in the game-experience continuum, although the company says you’ll “enter Darth Vader’s castle and get an up-close look into the mind of one of the most infamous villains, and take on an active role.”

Oculus Quest, the high-end VR headset based on Oculus Santa Cruz prototype, is said to launch sometime in Spring 2019, and start at $400 for the 64GB version. As a standalone headset with positional tracking (6DOF) for both the headset and controllers, Oculus Quest fits somewhere between Oculus Rift and Oculus Go, the company’s standalone VR headset with rotational-only tracking (3DOF).

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September 26, 2018

New VR ‘Star Wars’ Series Slated to Launch on Oculus Quest Next Year, Trailer Here

ILMxLAB says it will be part one of a three-part series following Vader. The story, the company says, follows The Secrets of the Empire VR experience which launched at The VOID earlier this year.

The story is said to take place between Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977).

The post New VR ‘Star Wars’ Series Slated to Launch on Oculus Quest Next Year, Trailer Here appeared first on Road to VR.

November 2, 2017November 29, 2017

‘Star Wars: Droid Repair’ VR Experience Comes to Consumer Headsets Next Week – New Trailer

Hold onto your extendable plastic lightsabers, kiddies, because ILMxLAB and Lucasfilm recently announced a new Star Wars–themed VR experience, Star Wars: Droid Repair Bay — Astro-Mechanic for the Resistance. While the experience was originally only announced to debut… for some reason… in Nissan car dealerships, the experience is now set to launch next week on SteamVR, Viveport, and Gear VR.

Update (11/29/17): Announced earlier this month, Star Wars: Droid Repair Bay became available first in select Nissan car dealerships, but today ILMxLab announced the experience will launch come December 6th on SteamVR, Viveport, and Gear VR. A new trailer accompanied the news:

Though the announcement makes no mention of the Rift, it’s expected the SteamVR version will work fine given the platform’s inherent Rift support, and that the prior Trials on Tatooine (2016) experience works with the Rift. No price is mentioned in the announcement, though it isn’t clear whether or not the experience will launch for free.

Original Article (11/2/17): As chief astromech technician aboard General Leia’s ship, users are tasked with repairing BB-8 and a number of (less-marketable) droids that are needed for the war effort, according to the Lucasfilm’s Star Wars blog. Developed for HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR, the experience is coming soon to select Nissan dealerships in the US, Mexico, and Canada.

From the description, it sounds like a neat diversion, similar to Valve’s Portal: Aperture Robot Repair released as an early demo for HTC Vive. Hocking it in Nissan dealerships feels odd, though it’s likely that Nissan paid to have the experience produced to draw people into their dealerships as part of their broader Star Wars themed marketing campaign.

As Lucasfilm’s experimental immersive media wing, ILMxLab has been producing its distinctly Star Wars–flavored pieces for VR like Star Wars Trials on Tatooine since it was founded in 2015, which ideally immerse you in the galaxy far far away as a bid to keep you living and breathing Star Wars until they can get you into theaters for the next big franchise movie. And as the next Sisyphean Star Wars hype cycle moves into full swing, I can’t help but think this was whipped out, or re-purposed to fulfill a contractual obligation to provide Nissan with something, anything for its ‘Master The Drive’ sales event.

Given it’s an official VR experience promoting Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it’s also hard to imagine anything more banal than experiencing the Earth-shattering debut of “brand new astromechs with their own unique personalities and original designs” while waiting for the salesman to finalize your Altima lease, but at least it’s sure to be realized in the same high-quality we’ve come to expect from ILMxLab.

ILMxLab’s John Gaeta Joins Magic Leap as Senior VP of Creative Strategy

John Gaeta, known for his work as visual effects supervisor on The Matrix trilogy and for launching Lucasfilm’s immersive media branch ILMxLab, is joining the mysterious augmented reality start-up Magic Leap.

As reported by The Verge, Gaeta says he’s joined Magic Leap as Senior Vice President of Creative Strategy. “It will be a new chapter in a long story for me of pursuing frontiers that I think will one day create compelling experiences for people,” he told The Verge.

As the senior VFX supervisor on The Matrix trilogy, Gaeta pioneered the series’ iconic camera technique ‘bullet time’, the results of which nabbed him an Academy Award for Visual Effects and a BAFTA for Best Achievement in Special Effects in 2000, both for The Matrix (1999).

Going on to become executive creative director and co-founder at ILMxLab in 2015, Gaeta set out to expand the ‘galaxy far far away’ to immersive platforms including AR and VR. To wit, ILMxLab and Magic Leap announced a “collaboration lab” last year at the WIRED Business Conference, a strategic partnership that would see the companies work together on immersive experiences using Magic Leap’s technology.

Gaeta says he’ll continue to work with the ILMxLab team on its Magic Leap projects in his new role.

We sat down with Gaeta at GDC last year to figure out where AR and VR fits in the existing cinema landscape of storytelling. Gaeta told us his team was “very interested in changing the way films are made,” saying that immersive media could be used to “step inside films before they’re made”—somewhat foretelling a time when the relationship between traditional media and its virtual counterpart becomes more intertwined.

Referring to his new position at Magic Leap, he says “[i]t’s something that I think I can grow as a creator and innovator, and I feel, always, I have a role to help enable others to grow in some of these new platforms, [a]nd Magic Leap is a company that really wants to foster enabling people to be creative in new spaces.”

Magic Leap has yet to show its AR tech to anyone outside the confines of a non-disclosure agreement, but the company recently revamped their website, saying they want to “[take] you with us on this journey to launch.” Shortly afterwards, the company announced a Series D investment round of $502 million, bringing its total investment to $2 billion. A recent report contends the Magic Leap headset could between $1,500 and $2,000, and is set to ship its first device “to a small group of users within six months.”

Update (10/27/17, 9:50AM PT): An earlier version of this article referred to Gaeta’s new position as SVP of Creative Strategies and has been correctly adjusted to SVP of Creative Strategy.

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June 5, 2017

ILM, HTC Vive, Epic Games Showcase VR on Apple iMac with Star Wars

Well the Apple conference is now over and while it didn’t quite have the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) announcements of rivals Google and Microsoft, it certainly wasn’t absent. The majority of the conference focused on new OS High Sierra for the Mac’s and iOS 11 for mobile devices, with VR and AR both appearing, with a surprise collaboration alongside HTC Vive. To high the power of the new top-of-the-range iMac’s Apple enlisted the help of Epic Games, its Unreal Engine and ILM with a VR Star Wars experience.

Plugging into the new iMac Retina 5K 27-inch, Epic ran the HTC Vive on its Unreal Engine using content provided by ILM, with Epic Games’ Lauren Ridge demonstrating real-time placement of an Imperial Shuttle and even making Darth Vader appear.

This showcase followed announcements for Metal, Apple’s API for high performance graphics, and the biggest reveal that made it all possible, support for Steam VR. On the AR side there was also ARKit for iOS 11, for developers to create AR applications.

Checkout the demonstration below, and for any further Apple updates keep reading VRFocus.

June 5, 2017

Apple Announces First VR-Ready Computers

Apple has finally made a commitment to VR, announcing on stage today at Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2017 that not only will they offer an external GPU developer kit for MacBooks capable of meeting the graphical demands of VR, but that both the new 27-inch iMac and the iMac Pro will be VR-ready out of the box.

Senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi announced today to the WWDC crowd that Metal 2, the company’s updated hardware-accelerated graphics API, will be launching with support for external graphics as well as a set of VR-specific features to the newly revealed High Sierra macOS.

Dubbed ‘Metal for VR’, the update will include developer features such as a VR-optimized display pipeline, viewport arrays, system trace stereo timelines, GPU queue priorities and frame debugger stereoscopic visualization. The company says Metal 2 will also support Unity, Unreal Engine and the Steam VR SDK, making Apple’s new operating system a true VR-native.

The new external GPU dev kit, available today, is coming with a VR-capable AMD Radeon RX 580, which is somewhere between an NVIDIA GTX 1060 and 1070 in function. While it may not be specifically marketed for VR consumers, instead targeted towards developers, the external GPU enclosure would technically allow you to use a high-quality VR headset like a HTC Vive or Oculus Rift with a MacBook using the Steam VR beta.

Apple VP of hardware engineering John Ternus later presented the new iMac lineup, concluding with the 27-inch iMac that’s finally packing a VR-ready GPU and making it the first out the door to have native VR support. Calling it a “great platform for VR content creation,” Ternus revealed that Lucas Film’s ILMx Lab has been using the 27-inch iMac and Unreal Engine to develop a new Star Wars themed real-time creation with the help of Epic’s Unreal VR Editor.

In the Star Wars-themed creation, Epic’s Lauren Ridge demonstrated by putting on a HTC Vive and building a basic scene by picking assets and resizing them, including an animated Darth Vader.

27-Inch iMac Specs

Intel 7th Gen Core processor (“Kaby Lake”)
Radeon Pro 570, 575 and 580 graphics options with up to 8GB VRAM
New Retina 5K display (up to 500 nits, or 43 percent brighter)
Up to 64GB memory
Fusion drive (up to 50 percent faster, up to 2TB capacity)
2 USB-C connectors with Thunderbolt
Starting at $1799

iMac Pro, Apple’s high-sec 27-incher with Retina 5K display, is going to be VR-ready too, coming with a Radeon Pro Vega GPU which delivers up to 11 Teraflops of compute power for real-time 3D rendering and high frame rate VR. The iMac Pro is scheduled to ship in December starting at $4,999 (US).

The post Apple Announces First VR-Ready Computers appeared first on Road to VR.

May 20, 2017

Preview: ILM Uses ‘Star Wars’ Assets to Show Potential of Google’s ‘Seurat’ VR Rendering Technology

Google’s newly announced Seurat rendering tech purportedly makes use of ‘surface light-fields’ to turn high-quality CGI film assets into detailed virtual environments that can run on mobile VR hardware. The company gave Seurat to ILMxLab, the immersive entertainment division of Industrial Light and Magic, to see what they could do with it using assets directly from Star Wars.

Google just announced Seurat this week, a new rendering technology which could be a graphical breakthrough for mobile VR. Here’s what we know about how it works so far:

Google says Seurat makes use of something called surface light-fields, a process which involves taking original ultra-high quality assets, defining a viewing area for the player, then taking a sample of possible perspectives within that area to determine everything that possibly could be viewed from within it. The high-quality assets are then reduced to a significantly smaller number of polygons—few enough that the scene can run on mobile VR hardware—while maintaining the look of high quality assets, including perspective-correct specular lightning.

As a proof of concept, Google teamed with ILMxLab to show what Seurat could do. In the video above, xLab says they took their cinema-quality CGI renders—those which would normally take a long time to render each individual frame of final movie output—and ran them through Seurat to make them able to playback in real-time on Google’s mobile VR hardware. You can see a teaser video heading this article.

“When xLab was approached by Google, they said that they could take our ILM renders and make them run in real-time on the VR phone… turns out it’s true,” said Lewey Geselowitz, Senior UX Engineer at ILM.

Star Wars Seurat Preview

I got to see the Star Wars Seurat-rendered experience teased in the video above for myself running on a prototype version of Google’s standalone Daydream headset.

When I put on the headset I was dropped into the same hangar scene as shown in the video. And while there’s no replacing the true high quality ray-traced output that comes from the cinematic rendering process (that can take hours for each frame), this was certainly some of the best graphics I’ve ever seen running on mobile VR hardware. In addition to sharp, highly detailed models, the floor had dynamic specular reflections, evoking the same sort of lightning you would expect from some of the best real-time visuals running on high-end PC headsets.

What’s particularly magic about Seurat is that—unlike a simple 360 video render—the scene you’re looking at is truly volumetric, and properly stereoscopic no matter where you look. That means that when you move your head back and forth, you’ll get proper positional tracking and see parallax, just like you’d expect from high-end desktop VR content. And because Google’s standalone headset has inside-out tracking, I was literally able to walk around the scene in a room-scale sized area with a properly viewable area that extended all the way from the floor to above my head.

I’ve seen a number of other light-field approaches running on VR hardware and typically the actual viewing area is much smaller, often just a small box around your head (and when you exit that area the scene is no longer rendered correctly). That’s mainly for two reasons: the first of is that it can take a long time to render large areas, and second is that large areas create huge file sizes that are difficult to manage and often impractical distribute.

Continued on Page 2: Combining Real-time Elements »

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