Social VR – Page 46 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

July 28, 2017

Social VR App AltspaceVR Is Shutting Down

When you establish companies and create things inside of a big new industry like the virtual reality marketplace you’re inviting a bit of risk into your professional life. Most VR companies right now are surviving on venture capital funding, limited software and hardware sales, or sheer force of will and passion in spite of dwindling bank accounts. For AltspaceVR, the landmark social VR application that quickly became synonymous with “hanging out” while in virtual reality, the runway has finally ran out.

Today the company announced that on August 3rd, 2017 at 7PM PT AltspaceVR will officially be shutting down. In a blog post entitled “A Very Sad Goodbye,” mentions of financial trouble outline the reasons for the closure. Similar fates befell the likes of Vrideo and Envelop as well.

“The company has run into unforeseen financial difficulty and we can’t afford to keep the virtual lights on anymore,” the company states in its blog post. “This is surprising, disappointing, and frustrating for every one of us who have put our passion and our hopes into AltspaceVR. We know it will probably feel similarly for you.”

For many people, myself included, AltspaceVR was one of the very first and very best ways to hang out with other people in a virtual space while wearing a VR HMD. Whether you were on a Rift, Vive, or Gear VR it was easy to hop on, hang out, play games, and feel like you were actually near one another.

However, AltspaceVR was free to download and use without much in the way of a monetization plan. “We’re a venture-backed startup,” the company states in the blog post. “We had a supportive group of investors that last gave us money in 2015. It looked like we had a deal for our next round of funding, and it fell through. Some combination of this deal falling through and the general slowness of VR market growth made most of our investors reluctant to fund us further. We’ve been out fundraising but have run out of time and money.”

Additionally, the VR landscape has changed a lot in the years since AltspaceVR first released. Bigscreen has a lot of similar features and does certain areas of social engagement better, while Facebook Spaces could very likely take the place of AltspaceVR as the default way of “hanging out” with friends while wearing a headset.

We have reached out to members of AltspaceVR for comment on the nature of the closure and what’s next and will keep you updated on what we find out.

In the meantime enjoy the last days of AltspaceVR before it comes to an end. And don’t forget to let us know some of your favorite moments from the past couple of years in AltspaceVR down in the comments below!

Tagged with: altspacevr

July 27, 2017

Facebook Has ‘No Plans’ For Spaces To Overtake Oculus Rooms

Oculus Rift owners are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Rooms social hub and with good cause. Already available on Gear VR, Rooms includes critical features such as parties that allow you to launch into multiplayer games together. Some fear that parent company Facebook’s own social app for Rift, Spaces, might be replacing Rooms. Facebook assures us that isn’t the case.

In an interview with UploadVR Head of Facebook Spaces Rachel Franklin stated that there are “no plans” for one service to “overtake” the other. “Rooms is really fundamental to the Oculus platform. And it’s one of those things that makes it fundamental is you can do the app launching and go into multiplayer,” Franklin explained. “We are learning from each other but, at this point, there’s no plans to kind of have one overtake the other.

“There’s similarities but they’re also serving two different worlds.”

Spaces is directly connected to a user’s Facebook account, providing access to their pictures and friends lists. You can meet up with other friends, share pictures and even video call other Facebook friends with smartphones. Recently, the app also added a live streaming ability.

“I think there’s lots of cool stuff we would like to do,” Franklin replied when asked if Spaces might get Rooms-like features like app launching. “I think the intention of both products at least right now is pretty different. So we’re starting from a place of, you have Rift technology, you’re with your friends, how do we bridge out from that?”

Over on the Oculus side, Head of Rift Nate Mitchell has in the past said that the Rooms team would continue to improve the experience on Gear before moving to Rift, but we’re still yet to get a definitive statement on if and when it will arrive on the platform. Until then you’ll have to keep loading up multiplayer games within apps.

July 27, 2017

‘Rec Room’ Update Adds Hundreds of New Items, Increases Level Cap, Squashes Bugs

The impressively popular social VR game Rec Room recently received a ‘Fancy Pants’ update, adding more than 100 new items for players to customize their avatars. As detailed on the game’s Steam news page, the update fixes a number of bugs, increases the level cap along with retuned XP rewards and level curves, and adds new community event features.

The new items should please anyone looking for a virtual makeover, with over 100 “dresses, shirts, hats, accessories, hairstyles, and gloves”. The level cap has increased from 20 to 30, with “the coolest stuff is available at the higher levels,” naturally.

Community event hosts are now marked with a crown icon, have the ability to kick players without a vote, and the host is “guaranteed a spot in their own event.”

The bug fixes are listed below, including a few more added in a subsequent ‘Fancy Pants’ patch:

Fixed a bug where Share Camera would be tiny when you dropped it!

Fixed bug where @names were displaying incorrectly

Fixed a bug where friend import could fail during new user tutorial

Fixed a system issue that could cause a bunch of “weirdness” with activities (e.g., Paintball, Quest, etc.). So, hopefully there will be less weirdness!

Fixed “ice skating” bug – you can no longer abuse rotate to move through the world! Fun while it lasted…

Quest – fixed boss encounter in The Rise of JumboTron

Quest – can now get past lava room in Golden Trophy!

Quest – fixed a bunch of bugs with enemy spawning

Since developers Against Gravity received a major funding boost in February, updates have arrived thick and fast, adding new features, quests, maps, and fixes. A major update a few months back brought the game’s second quest, Rise of the Jumbotron, a four person cooperative mini-campaign where players battle through challenging enemies to reach the end.

As for this recent character customisation update, it could present a money-making opportunity if players were given the choice to purchase rewards, but Rec Room admirably remains totally free to play.

The post ‘Rec Room’ Update Adds Hundreds of New Items, Increases Level Cap, Squashes Bugs appeared first on Road to VR.

July 25, 2017

Bigscreen’s Huge Cinema Update Supports High-Fidelity Multiplayer Streaming

When we first wrote about Bigscreen over a year ago it represented something we hadn’t seen before. Users were able to invite friends into private virtual rooms where they could stream content together in real-time. Not only that, but it allowed users to stream content from their desktop directly, not just from things available online. That meant you could play a game installed on your hard drive, watch videos saved on your computer, view images, work together on projects, and anything else.

Today, Bigscreen is launching what it’s billing as its “biggest update yet” with the Cinema Update. The biggest feature here is the inclusion of high-fidelity, 1080p quality, seamless, real-time streaming in a multiplayer environment. You really have to experience it to udnerstand what that means for VR streaming, but here is a quick video:

Yesterday, Darshan Shankar walked me through the update in Bigscreen. We loaded into the experience’s new Cinema environment (shown above) which simulated sitting in a huge movie theater wit 40 A.I. bots that help make sure you don’t feel creepy and alone. There were dozens of spots for us to pick from for seating and the huge 100-foot screen really was a sight to behold.

When the screen didn’t have any colors or images, the movie theater was completely and utterly pitch black. Then, as images popped onto the screen the light would bounce and dance around the walls and chairs. An explosion would send orange and yellow and red lights out to paint the setting.

My favorite new feature of this update, personally, is that now there is finally full support for seamless desktop audio streaming. Previously users had to install third-party plugins and play with the settings to get audio streaming to work well. Now, you just select an option from a menu and you’re good to go. We watched the new Ready Player One trailer in HD without any framerate loss.

While coding this update, Shankar joked with me that they had “accidentally created the world’s best streaming program” and I have trouble finding reasons to disagree. In fact, you can totally play PC games in split screen using Bigscreen too. Multiple streams, at 1080p, 30fps, all in VR, and no issues that I could see.

July 12, 2017

Facebook Spaces Now Lets You Broadcast Live from VR to Any Facebook-capable Device

Facebook today announced their Oculus Rift app Spaces is getting an extra feature, bringing it closer in functionality to the rest of Facebook’s near ubiquitous platform—of course with a few extra ‘VR perks’. Starting today, Facebook is letting Rift owners ‘go Live’ and broadcast in-app video of their session, sharing it with the rest of the Facebook-using world.

Facebook Spaces, released in April on Rift, lets you view 360 photos and videos, doodle with a virtual set of Tilt Brush-style markers, visit VR buddies in the virtual flesh, and manage your timeline, albeit in a limited way considering there’s no virtual keyboard solution yet. Despite the split from normal Facebook functionality, there are a few VR specific tools at your disposal.

The tool set already has a selfie camera that lets you snap impromptu pictures and share them to your Timeline, and a ‘Messenger’ call function that lets you place direct VR-to-realty video calls with anyone on your Facebook friends list. With the recent update pushing out today, you’ll now have a virtual camera too that you can position anywhere in the space to capture your session.

Just like going live in non-VR broadcasts, friends on Facebook can comment or ask you questions in the moment. You can even see their emoji reactions while you’re in VR, and pick out the best comment by hand to highlight it for the rest of the viewers.

In the promo video, Facebook is suggesting the new Live feature would be valuable for when the video’s contents could be useful to many people, like during office hours for a college-level course. Teachers could hypothetically institute the new ‘VR office hours’ today supposing enough of their students had Oculus Rifts. Letting a conversation unfold naturally between a teacher and student can yield some valuable answers that some less outspoken students wouldn’t naturally be inclined to ask.

Facebook’s latest update to Spaces comes hot on the heels of a dramatic price drop for the Oculus Rift, now cut to $400 for the next six weeks for both the Rift headset and Touch motion controller.

This price drop comparatively puts the Oculus Rift + Touch in the same range as the latest gen consoles such as the PS4 Pro ($399) and the more expensive Xbox One X ($499).

Facebook ‘Spaces’ on Rift

The post Facebook Spaces Now Lets You Broadcast Live from VR to Any Facebook-capable Device appeared first on Road to VR.

July 11, 2017

Bill Nye in VR & ‘TheWaveVR’ Concert, Two Virtual Events Worth Attending This Wednesday

This Wednesday, you can fill up your brain with knowledge in a unique opportunity to meet Bill Nye ‘the Science Guy’ in the digital flesh, and then melt your brain immediately afterwards at a VR concert, where crowds can interact with mind-expanding 3D objects while experiencing music from digital musician GRIMECRAFT like never before.

Bill Nye in AltspaceVR

Where: AltspaceVR

When: July 12 @ 2:30pm PT (your timezone)

How: Login or create an AltspaceVR account, then RSVP here. AltspaceVR supports cross-play between Google Daydream, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Gear VR and traditional monitors.

What: This is your chance to meet Bill Nye ‘the Science Guy’, TV personality and engineer, in AltspaceVR. Get a chance to win a signed copy of Bill Nye’s book, Everything All at Once by RSVP’ing and attending the show.

GrimeCraft in TheWaveVR

Where: TheWaveVR

When: July 12 @ 7:00pm PT (your timezone)

How: Download TheWaveVR on Steam (US-residents only)

What: With his gaming-inspired tunes, digital musician GRIMECRAFT will present new songs at a crowd-interactive, audio-visual show that’s aiming to push the boundaries of the concert format using the medium of VR. The platform’s creators have built “powerful tools to create this content and represent artists’ music and aesthetic in new ways through these shows,” CEO Adam Arrigo told us.

This will be TheWaveVR’s second show after putting on NFOLD, an audio-visual spectacle only possible in VR which featured LA-based digital artist Strangeloop in association with the label BRAINFEEDER. (check out the video below)

“In the coming weeks, you’ll see us releasing content that is incredibly varied and specific to that artist. We want each show to feel like a portal into that artist’s world- to have unique visuals and interactions that couldn’t be possible outside VR,” Arrigo told us.

The post Bill Nye in VR & ‘TheWaveVR’ Concert, Two Virtual Events Worth Attending This Wednesday appeared first on Road to VR.

July 7, 2017July 25, 2017

‘Bigscreen’ Overhaul Brings High-Quality Multiplayer Video Streaming, More Users Per-room to Follow

Bigscreen is a social VR app which lets VR users bring their PC desktops into virtual reality, as if sitting at their computer next to friends or co-workers. Users inside of Bigscreen can see each other’s desktops which means you can watch movies or play games together. With Bigscreen still in beta, the streaming functionality has been hit or miss, but a new update promises to bring “flawless” 1080p streaming at 30 FPS to everyone.

Update (7/25/17): We got a chance to try out Bigscreen’s promised 1080p 30 FPS video streaming. While we can’t profess to have run any type of reliable metric to see empirically if it was working as advertised, visually there was little discernible difference between locally played 1080p 30FPS content (i.e. the verifiable target fidelity) and content streamed between two people. Whether it was watching two other people stream video contemporaneously in split-screen mode on the 100-foot cinema screen, or sharing smaller personal screens while sitting next to each other—it seemed to conform to the level of visual fidelity we expected. That said, minor hiccups did occur once or twice during initial video buffering where locally displayed video was superior to streamed video including a few dropped frames that we estimate dipped into 15-20 FPS territory, but over the course of testing several videos we saw these issues as few and far between. We were also told that there are still outstanding issues regarding global desktop audio, but we didn’t encounter anything during our demo—both with and without the Bigscreen staff—that would suggest anything showstopping. Tests were conducted with users chatting between California and Europe. The patch will be available today for Rift through the Oculus Store and HTC Vive and Rift through Steam.

Update (7/15/17): Bigscreen has confirmed the new update will launch for everyone on July 25th and has teased the update with a new GIF:

For those interested in helping to test the update ahead of the launch, Bigscreen invites you to join the Bigscreen Community chat server on Discord and join the private alpha test. The original article continues below.

Original Article (7/7/17): Your computer can do a million things—browse the web, watch YouTube, edit movies, create documents, send email, play games, and on and on—what if you could just bring your PC into virtual reality and join up with friends? Then you’d be in a room with your friends and their PCs, which can also do a million things. That’s the surprisingly simple idea that makes Bigscreen magical.

But, making it happen relies on being able to stream desktops between each user with solid performance. For many users using Bigscreen’s multiplayer mode, streaming screens has been sub-par, making desirable social activities like watching Netflix or playing games with friends impossible due to choppy framerates which could often look more like slideshows than moving video.

That’s all about to change, says Bigscreen founder Darshan Shankar. He and his team have been working on a major overhaul of the app’s streaming tech and a new version will bring smooth, high quality desktop streaming to all users. Shankar explains:

We’ve spent the past year rewriting our media engine and networking stack from scratch. Our new technology takes advantage of Nvidia and AMD graphics cards for hardware accelerated encoding and decoding, enabling flawless 1080p30 streaming for all Bigscreen Multiplayer users. Previously, Bigscreen multiplayer would perform poorly for some users and consume 80-100% of CPU. Our new tech doesn’t use the CPU or GPU resources that games use, and instead uses the dedicated video acceleration chips on the graphics cards. It’s a massive increase in performance and functionality.

The performance enhancements brought by the new streaming tech will do more than just make your friend’s screen smooth, it will also open the door to raising the current limitation of four users per room. Shankar says that another update following the streaming overhaul (in the next one or two months) will enable rooms supporting somewhere between 6 to 10 users at a time, and maybe even more down the road.

Bigscreen users who use the app in single player as a VR desktop environment also have something to look forward to: optimizations from the overhaul can “reduce CPU usage by 50% and reduce GPU usage in some environments by 60%,” Shankar says.

The update will also come with expanded support for Windows 7 and laptops with Nvidia Optimus graphics, and will bring with it an IMAX-sized cinema environment with “real-time lighting and a new artificial intelligence NPC system.”

Volkswagen Group, One of the World’s Largest Companies, is Building VR Apps to Help Employees Collaborate Across the Globe

Volkswagen Group, the multi-brand automotive company, has developed VR apps to make long-distance collaboration in production and logistics an easier task. Using the HTC Vive, the company has created what it calls the Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub Group, a VR platform that will help the company’s employees collaborate across the Audi, SEAT, ŠKODA and Volkswagen brands.

The company has used its suite of VR apps to allow multiple users to simultaneously collaborate while physically located between Volkswagen logistics office in the Czech Republic and the company’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany. Apps in the platform already include VR logistics training, realistic workshop environments created using photogrammetry, and VR spaces for exchanging best practices—all of course with avatars so employees can talk face-to-face.

Developed with VR production studio Innoactive, the Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub made its public debut at the Digility conference and exhibition in Cologne this week.

Mathias Synowski, a VR user from Group Logistics, says the company’s VR app will “make our daily teamwork much easier and save a great deal of time.”

“Virtual reality creates the ideal conditions for cross-brand and cross-site collaboration,” Jasmin Müller from Audi Brand Logistics explains.

“[E]xchanging knowledge is just as important as bundling knowledge. That’s why we came up with the Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub central platform in collaboration with Innoactive. All employees have access to all existing VR elements as well as existing knowledge via the platform. That way, we enable individual units to implement new use cases quickly and jointly move in VR applications so they can plan new workflows interactively,” says Dennis Abmeier from Group IT.

The Volkswagen Digital Realities Team is currently developing more apps for production and logistics intended for the company’s fleet of HTC Vive Business Edition headsets.

The post Volkswagen Group, One of the World’s Largest Companies, is Building VR Apps to Help Employees Collaborate Across the Globe appeared first on Road to VR.

Bill Nye in AltspaceVR

GrimeCraft in TheWaveVR

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