Watch Launch Of The NASA Mars Perseverance Rover In Oculus Venues

The NASA Mars Perseverance Rover is set to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on July 30, and you’ll be able to watch the liftoff in Oculus Venues.

Facebook announced that the countdown and liftoff stream for the NASA Perseverance Rover will be broadcast in Oculus Venues, which is available for Oculus Quest and Oculus Go. The broadcast will begin at 4:00am PST on July 30, and is scheduled to end approximately 2 hours later at 6:00am. The launch time has been tentatively set right in the middle at 4:50am PT, but being a live event, that’s subject to change.

According to NASA, the Perseverance rover mission “takes the next step by not only seeking signs of habitable conditions on Mars in the ancient past, but also searching for signs of past microbial life itself.” It will take almost 7 months to reach the red planet, touching down on February 18 next year.

Oculus Venues is an app that allows you to watch an event broadcast in VR while sitting in stadium-like seating, surrounded by other Venues users who are watching in sync with you. You can talk and interact with people around you, each of which is represented by their Oculus Avatar. While there is an option to use Venues by yourself, the main purpose of the app is to provide a social setting to watch an event in VR — it’s essentially simulating being in a live audience.

Venues has mostly hosted music concerts in the past, but has reached been branching out into other areas, such as this NASA liftoff stream or our UploadVR Summer Showcase last month.

You can subscribe to the Oculus Venue Perseverance event online or in the Oculus Venues app on your headset.

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Unity Launches Its MARS Augmented Reality Tools June 1

Unity is launching its new augmented reality creation tools collectively known as MARS on June 1.

The tools have been under construction for a few years now and are meant to make cross-platform development of robust augmented reality projects easier with Unity.

According to Unity, the tools include:

WYSIWYG authoring experience

Author complex, data-oriented apps visually with a customized window for AR creators that includes tools and UI that give you the power to see, prototype, test, and visualize robust AR apps as they will run in the real world.

Intelligent real-world recognition

The query system gives apps contextually relevant behavior based on the user’s surroundings. Pull in any kind of data – semantic object recognition, location data, map data, product data and more – from any source to include in your AR experience.

Responsive visual authoring

The procedural authoring system uses proxies to represent real-world objects, conditions, and actions as a framework.

Test in the Unity Editor

Test your AR experiences against a variety of examples of indoor and outdoor spaces without needing real-world data on hand or physically testing the experience in every real-world environment you want your app to work in.

Fuzzy authoring

Use gizmos for “fuzzy authoring” to define minimum and maximum measurements for real-world objects rather than coding precise measurements.

Multiplatform AR dev framework

Build your experience once and deploy across all AR platforms, including ARKit, ARCore, Magic Leap and Hololens devices, with AR Foundation. AR Foundation is the preferred method for bringing real-world understanding into MARS.

AR apps face different design challenges as compared to other games — like play spaces that can vary considerably — so the new Unity tools are meant to make it easier to design with those types of considerations  in mind. Altogether, these new features may lead to a new generation of AR apps that are more useful or fun. We’re looking forward to seeing what developers make with MARS. you can learn more about MARS here.

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Titans Of Space Plus VR Review: Stellar Space Education On Oculus Quest

After more than six years of development driven by a single developer working in his free time, the launch of Titans of Space Plus on Oculus Quest is a match made in the heavens.

Titans of Space Plus brings to the most accessible VR hardware ever made the most compelling and complete educational software available for the medium. This project belongs on every headset and comes with the highest recommendation I’ve ever given VR software. I believe it should be experienced at least once by every person you’d ever want to understand both the scale of the universe and the educational power of VR technology. And this version on Quest is the best yet.

Awe-inspiring

In classrooms around the world, a video is often played depicting the scale of things in the universe moving from the tiniest atoms to the vast distances between galaxies. Titans of Space begins somewhere in the middle of that journey and focuses not on distances, but on the relative scale of the giants of our cosmos.

Titans of Space Tour Guide
A ‘flying professor alien’ talks about the planets in one of the many ways Titans of Space builds on its predecessors. It is one of several ways curious visitors in Titans of Space can access information about the planets and stars.

For hundreds of years, telescopes were used to offer brief glimpses of some of these celestial bodies. Only about 50 years ago we landed a handful of humans on our moon and, in the decades that followed, sent ever more advanced robots and cameras to other (relatively) nearby objects in the night sky. Every few years, with greater study and ever-sharpening resolution, our sense of what these objects are all about improves, and we get to understand a bit better what sits beyond our pale blue dot.

Titans of Space Plus takes that accumulated understanding we’ve honed from observation and study, and translates it to three dimensions in a way not possible with any earlier medium. The closest analogue is a physical planetarium exhibit that allows the visitor to touch and move around scaled down spheres representative of the planets or stars. It is through that frame of reference and comparison to an eye-opening field trip  — without the need to spend money on gasoline or time on the road — that forms the basis of my recommendation of this project for every VR headset, and especially Oculus Quest.

Unique to VR

Titans of Space Plus DashboardTitans of Space Plus begins with some options so the tour can be tuned for length, comfort, and interaction preferences. Options include seated or standing, motion-sensitive or not, and a short or long tour. More than other cool space-based VR software like Apollo 11, Elite Dangerous, Universe Sandbox 2, or No Man’s Sky VR, these options mean Titans of Space is welcoming to a very wide range of people.

Once those decisions are made, Drash lets the magic of head-tracked VR take over. Written words can never fully express the instantaneous human understanding conveyed in the first moment of Titans of Space. Neither can any traditional video kids see in their classrooms. The words “wow!” and “cool!” — even  “where was this when I was a kid?” — tumble out from the mouths of anyone who can process the depth cues provided by current VR headsets. This software comes as close as any I’ve found to eliciting the “overview effect” described by astronauts who actually traveled to space.

Titans of Space Side By Side Comparison

The tour begins with the Earth floating in front of you, as the moon orbits, with both scaled to one millionth their actual size. Represented at the same scale, but not at an accurately scaled distance, the moon casts a shadow across the rotating planet as it blocks light you realize is coming from an unimaginably large yellow body to your right. That is our sun, and in this one moment you come to understand, in an instantly intuitive way unique to VR, just how vastly larger that ball of fire truly is compared with everything we see every day.

Titans of Space Plus Alternate Maps

Everything about Titans of Space Plus reflects the years of love and refinement poured into the project by Drash. Previously, Titans of Space struggled to stand out on storefronts either made to promote VR games first, as on Oculus, or on Google Play and Steam, where all VR content in general struggles to stand out from the traditional “flat” screen content.  Where does an educational VR experience that lasts roughly 30 minutes to an hour or so, and costs roughly $10, sit relative to games priced at $20 or more and tailored towards hours of entertainment?

Titans of Space Plus Review Verdict:

Titans of Space Plus is the purest example of everything VR can achieve. In my excitement over VR’s potential over the years, I’ve put person after person into a range of VR headsets with Titans of Space as my go-to demo. Each time the demo elicited awe, but it was always followed by a conversation about comfort and hardware cost. A discussion about the screen door effect in one generation became a talk about wires and freedom of movement in another. In a pair of Oculus Quests this week, however, Titans of Space Plus seemed to help VR cross a threshold for me. I put on the headset and my oldest child put on hers, and we took a roughly 30-minute tour of space together. We exchanged “wows” and anecdotes as we each found impressive facts about our solar system. There’s no actual multiplayer here, so we simply coordinated our locations by calling out to one another where we were, what we were seeing, and agreeing to press the “ready” button together to visit the next stop on a count of three. This time was better spent than any trip to a planetarium, and the experience was a highlight of my year. Drash delivered the best version of Titans of Space he’s ever made for an accessible and comfortable piece of VR hardware that finally feels complete with its addition.


Final Score: :star: :star: :star: :star: :star: 5/5 Stars | Fantastic

You can read more about our five-star scoring policy here.

Titans of Space releases December 19 for Oculus Quest with cross-buy available for the Rift version from the Oculus Store. The project also exits Early Access on Steam at the same time.

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Unity Extends ‘MARS’ Creation To Magic Leap And HoloLens

Unity hosted a keynote presentation in Copenhagen and announced a series of updates to its AR and mixed reality creation tools.

Unity’s MARS tool — which stands for Mixed and Augmented Reality Studio — is going to have companion apps for dedicated AR gadgets. The first version of the tool is coming for mobile phones through ARKit and ARCore. “You can sync project folders in the Unity Cloud, then lay out assets as easily as placing a 3D sticker,” according to the company. “You can create conditions, record video and world data, and export it all back straight into the editor.”

The next version of the tool will be made for AR devices like Magic Leap and HoloLens. Unity also offers a tool it calls “AR Foundation” meant to allow developers to build one AR application and have it work across the major platforms. That, too, is coming to wearable AR headsets like HoloLens and Magic Leap.

For those unfamiliar, Unity is the most popular development tool for game designers and its been pursued for acquisition by Facebook in the past as well as added enormous rounds of investment. The toolset’s broad cross-platform support helps developers bring their software to multiple gadgets. The company claims more than two thirds of creators working on VR and AR software use Unity. Unity is also including as a preview in its 2019.3 release “Unity as a Library” which will “let creators of native apps benefit from Unity’s best features and tools, including AR tools like MARS, AR Foundation, and the XR Interactions Toolkit.”

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HP Mars Home Planet: Marskolonie für VR entwerfen

Wer wollte nicht schon mal entspannt auf dem Mars wandeln? Manche Menschen wünschen sich sogar, der guten alten Erde für immer den Rücken zu kehren und auf dem roten Planeten ihre neue Heimat zu finden. Was in der Realität noch in den Sternen steht, wird zumindest in VR bald Wirklichkeit, mit Mars Home Planet. Das Projekt leiten HP und NVIDIA, weitere Partner sind beispielsweise Vive, Unreal und Autodesk. Die Registrierung ist ab sofort möglich. Wer an Challenges teilnimmt, kann sogar Preise gewinnen.

HP Mars Home Planet: Das zukünftige Leben auf dem Mars mitgestalten

HP Mars Home Planet

Klingt nach einem beschaulichen Plätzchen: Der Mars besitzt lediglich den halben Durchmesser der Erde und ein Viertel der Erdoberfläche. Dafür kann der Planet die größten Vulkane des ganzen Sonnensystems vorweisen.Romantiker unter den zukünftigen Mars-Bewohnern freuen sich zudem über zwei Monde. Wenn alles nach dem Plan von Tesla– und SpaceX-Gründer Elon Musk läuft, könnte die Menschheit im Jahr 2025 mit der Besiedelung beginnen. Der Planet soll Platz für eine Million Menschen bieten, die Reise zum Mars dauert im günstigsten Fall ein halbes Jahr.

Um die doch noch sehr lange Wartezeit bis zur nicht-virtuellen Kolonialisierung zu überbrücken, kann man sich Gedanken darüber machen, wie es sich denn auf dem Mars so leben könnte. Bei Mars Home Planet geht es genau darum. Die ersten 10.000 Interessierte, die sich für das von HP und NVIDIA geleitete Projekt registrieren, erhalten die Software Mars 2030.

Mars 2030 ist eine frische VR-Erfahrung von Fusion für die Oculus Rift und HTC Vive. Eine Version für die PlayStation 4 (PSVR) ist noch in Planung. Um die virtuelle 40 Quadratkilometer große Umgebung möglichst realistisch zu gestalten, haben die Entwickler auf Daten der NASA zurückgegriffen. Der Titel ist im Steam-Shop für PC und PC-Headsets für 15 Euro erhältlich.

HP Mars Home Planet
Das Projekt Mars Home Planet unterteilt sich in drei Phasen: Zuerst steht das Konzept für die Mars-Kolonialisierung an, danach folgt das Erstellen von Modellen und am Schluss das Rendering. Bei der Registrierung sollen Teilnehmer mindestens drei Themen angeben, auf die sie sich fokussieren wollen. Anschließend kann man ein oder mehrere aus den vorgeschlagenen Projekten auswählen. Dazu gehört beispielsweise der Aufbau der Infrastruktur, damit eine Million Menschen den Mars besiedeln können. Außerdem gibt es noch Challenges, die mit Preisgeldern versehen sind.

(Quelle: HP)




Der Beitrag HP Mars Home Planet: Marskolonie für VR entwerfen zuerst gesehen auf VR∙Nerds. VR·Nerds am Werk!

Ridley Scott’s ‘The Martian’ Gets A Full VR Experience On Vive, PS VR This Week

Ridley Scott’s ‘The Martian’ Gets A Full VR Experience On Vive, PS VR This Week

Ridley Scott’s 2015 sci-fi blockbuster, The Martian, is considered a return to form for the legendary director. This week, you’ll be able to enter the world of the movie with a new VR experience.

You may have heard of The Martian VR Experience before. Developed at 20th Century Fox’s Fox Innovation Lab along with RSA Films and The Virtual Reality Company, the cinematic piece has been shown at a handful of events throughout the year but, tomorrow, you’ll get to experience it at home on both the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR.

This isn’t a simple 360 degree experience like other Fox VR projects such as Wild; it’s a full VR production that uses position-tracked controls. You take on the role of astronaut Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon in the movie, and experience key scenes like driving a rover across the surface of the red planet, and flying through space. While it’s not necessarily a VR movie, it might be closer to something like Batman: Arkham VR, as a shorter experiential piece in which you won’t have to worry about failure. It’s built in Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4.

This likely isn’t the first time HTC Vive owners will have visited Mars, and nor will it have been the last. Experiences like Mars Odyssey are already available and others like Mars 2030 are still on the way. We’ll also be seeing more of Ridley Scott’s worlds in VR; the upcoming Blade Runner sequel will have VR tie-in content, as announced back at Oculus Connect 3 last month.

It may be a promotional experience, but Fox certainly thinks it’s worth a price; The Martian VR Experience will cost $19.99. We’ll be interested to see the difference between the Vive and PS VR versions. We’ve also asked after the possibility of an Oculus Rift version, though it would likely arrive once Oculus Touch releases in early December.

Would you pay for an experience like this?

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