Category: Sky

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Sky Series Britannia Gets Free VR Tie-In With Impressive Volumetric Capture

Sky’s bloody historical drama, Britannia, is returning for a second season today. And, oh look, there’s a new VR experience to tie-in with it.

Britannia VR: Out Of Your Mind was developed by Sky VR and Hammerhead VR, the team that runs the Dimension volumetric capture studio in London. Sure enough, the experience displays impressive use of the format. Volumetric capture is a process in which an array of cameras capture an actor’s performance from all angles. The results are then stitched together to make a realistic 3D model of that performance.

Here it’s used to bring you closer to some of the characters from the world of Britannia. The series itself centers on the Roman conquest of Britain. The VR app lets you experience that conflict from two different sides. First, you can join the Druids and take part in a psychedelic rave. You can also visit the Roman empire to worship gods and more.

The volumetric capture brings real-life actors including MacKenzie Crook, Liana Cornell, Ben Bailey Smith and Steve Pemberton to virtual life. It’s one of the more impressive displays of this technique I’ve seen, with highly detailed character models and less of the fuzziness you can find in other volumetric experiences. In fact, the entire experience is richly detailed, with crisp environments captured with photogrammetry. There’s even some fun interactive elements. I personally know very little about the show, but I found this to be just as engaging as a historical VR experience.

Take note that there’s some hefty requirements to run the experience, though. It requires 13GB of space (which is almost as big as Stormland). The app’s currently available on SteamVR for free with support for most PC VR headsets and will be coming to the Oculus Store soon.

The post Sky Series Britannia Gets Free VR Tie-In With Impressive Volumetric Capture appeared first on UploadVR.

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David Attenborough’s VR Experience ‘Hold the World’ Lands on Rift

Hold the World (2018) is an educational VR experience from Sky that lets you come face-to-face with Sir David Attenborough, the English broadcaster and world’s foremost naturalist, as he teaches you about a number of species going as far back as the Trilobite and as recent as the flea.

The interactive experience takes you to London’s Natural History Museum, and puts you in reach of a few rare specimens from its world-famous collection, letting you handle and resize the objects while Attenborough teaches you important facts about how the animals must have lived, ate, breathed, and more.

Attenborough is presented to the user by way of high-quality volumetric video capture, and he takes you behind the scenes to a few areas out-of-bounds to the general public. Like the items themselves, the environments have been captured using photogrammetry, allowing you to truly feel like you’re in iconic museum’s geology library, fossil lab, and herbarium.

 

Skeletons and fossilized specimens come to life as well, showing you a true 1:1 scale of how a Pterosaur must have flown, or how a dragon-fly independently controls each of its four wings as it makes its long migratory trips across the world.

At $4, the experience is undoubtedly one the best price to value ratios out there; everything is lovingly reconstructed to maximize for realism, truly making you feel like you’re sitting across the table with the affable and always knowledgeable Sir David Attenborough. It took me about an hour to complete, going through every animal presented in the experience and taking the few quick quizzes to go along with it. It’s truly something that could be made into a larger series, as I found sitting across from Attenborough and learning with the object in hand to be a really effective way of absorbing the information.

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Hold the World features no artificial locomotion (it’s a 100% seated experience) and comes with intuitive hands-on Touch controls which really makes the experience perfect for VR first-timers and experienced users alike.

If you’re a Sky customer and enrolled in the free Sky VIP loyalty program, you can access Hold the World for free via the Sky VR app in UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Italy. If not, you can purchase the experience on the Oculus Store.

The post David Attenborough’s VR Experience ‘Hold the World’ Lands on Rift appeared first on Road to VR.

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Sky, Ericsson and Tiledmedia Showcase VR For Live Sports

At this years’ IBC Conference and Exhibition, three members of the Virtual Reality Industry Forum, Sky, Ericsson and Tiledmedia will be demonstrating how virtual reality (VR) can be paired with live sports for a more engaging viewer experience.

Using 360 video displaying on untethered VR head mounted displays (HMDs), users will be able to experience what it is like to be a Formula 3 driver making a crucial overtake, or in the dugout when their favourite team scores a goal.

The demonstration will use streaming technology provided by Ericsson’s HEVC software encoding along with Tiledmedia’s ClearVR streaming technology for better video quality. Content will be provided by Sky, such as footage from Premier League Football and additional Formula 3 footage provided by Ericsson.

The demonstration will use custom untethered VR headsets along with tablets that will be synced to a TV screen for real-time viewing.

The demonstration will be available at the Ericsson booth in Hall 1, D61. The IBC show will take place on 14th-19th September, 2017 at the RAI in Amsterdam. Featured speakers include Saul Berman of IBM, Stephen Beres of HBO, Orly Amsalem, a Data Scientist at Cisco, Chris Buchanan of Samsung and Caroline Chan of Intel.

Further information and tickets can be found at the official IBC website.

VRFocus will bring you further news on Vr-related events as it becomes available.