VidCon is a celebration of online videos from the viewers to the creators and 8i took to the annual conference to share that it is making the technology available to consumers by way of a new app called Holo, which allows them to take pictures and record video in what they term as 3D holograms.
To simultaneously promote the new technology and an upcoming film, 8i partnered with Sony Pictures to give users a hologram of Spider-Man from the Homecoming film to add to their pictures and videos. Holo adds the holograms to your image or video while you’re in camera view and they’re not just static, augmented overlays. Spider-Man, for example, can flip, facepalm, and pose for a selfie.
“People are creating, augmenting and sharing content like never before directly through the cameras on their phones,” says Steve Raymond, CEO of 8i, in the press release for the new development. “With Holo, we’re introducing a new way to create and express yourself using holograms of real people combined with the AR capabilities of smartphones. Until now, it’s never been possible to direct your own videos using recognizable characters and celebrities and we’re seeing lots of creative storytelling from Holo users.”
The partnership with Sony is just the beginning of their desire to have exclusive content available for the app. Holo currently includes content from Cosmopolitan (Magic Mike dancers) and holograms of various go90 stars and, if the app permeates throughout social networks, more big ticket partnerships are sure to sprout up in the future. Holo is available for free on the iOS Store for iPhone and on Google Play Store for Android devices.
VR has no shortage of social networks to meet up with friends in, including Facebook itself. Hypatia, however, wants to take services like that and mash it up with something like Minecraft.
Developed by Timefire VR, Hypatia is releasing on HTC Vive later this month on June 15th for $29.99. The 30 man team has been working on the app for the past three years. Over that time we’ve seen apps like AltSpace and vTime make a play for social VR dominance, but Hypatia wants to differentiate itself from those applications by making a playground for the mind. You can see a little of what that might mean in the video below.
To start off with, Hypatia will only feature content created by the developers themselves, but the team wants the app to grow through the ideas of others. Right now citizens will be able to meet up in a picturesque urban environment and paint the city using tools similar to Google’s Tilt Brush. There’s also a virtual museum, an interactive theater, and puzzle solving minigames.
Hypatia seems to have visions of being VR’s Second Life — though Linden Lab has those dreams too — or Sony’s PlayStation Home platform. Some of its more creative features also appear in Facebook Spaces which launched in beta back in April.
Still, Timefire’s mission sounds no less ambitious. Today the developer is launching a competition for Vive owners to win one of 500 keys to get entry into the game. Sign up over at an official website to be in with a chance of qualifying. If you’re interested in checking this one out when we suggest you sign up.
There are multiple initiatives across the VR industry attempting to provide the most immersive and involving social experience the platform can provide. Creators like Avi Shapiro of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies are even working on ways to bring realistic avatars into VR content to enhance the immersion that much more. Shapiro’s project is technology that rapidly produces good avatars with accessible technology, but it has some work ahead when it comes to facial scans. Face and Communication Entertainment, or FACE, is a project from a Colopl company called 360ch that is building a social VR demo collaborating with BinaryVR, Facerig, and FOVE.
FACE is tackling avatars on three levels through technology from three companies to provide an expressive final product:
Facerig’s 3D model rendering technology provides the foundation for expressive avatars
Binary VR‘s face tracking camera records your own expressions so that they can be transplanted onto the 3D avatars
Social interaction is crucial for the future of VR and efforts that improve the potential of the platform are pivotal. Headsets and touch controllers already add a degree of fluid movement that improves the immersion of virtual spaces, but a tool such as FACE is another step toward us interacting naturally with people that are thousands of miles away from us.
Even beyond social VR, FACE could be used to produce realistic performances for characters that will be added to other forms of VR entertainment. It can also be used to analyze expressions and give developers valuable data as players work their way through their creations.
Valve’s new SteamVR Home Beta just launched and it represents a vast improvement on what has gone before with fully 3D, customisable environments, a glut of new social features and a fully featured Steam interface. Will you ever want to leave VR?
Valve launched its SteamVR Home in beta form on Friday and it represents their vision of both how to bridge the gap between the desktop steam interface we all know while integrating meaningful and functional social interaction with your friends whilst in VR. It’s the most comprehensive and wide reaching update that SteamVR’s UI has seen and it’s extremely promising.
Anyone who has used the HTC Vive on a regular basis will be familiar with Steam VR’s base interface, the ‘construct’ from where you can browse, buy and launch games immersively. This interface has received countless updates since its release, but the core experience hasn’t really advanced. You could plop in low resolution spherical images as your backdrop to customise your space and you could skin your motion controllers if you so chose, but in general it wasn’t a virtual space you wanted to spend much time in. With SteamVR Home however, Valve want you to re-consider that position, adding in a raft of new features to keep you and your friends stay in VR for longer.
The first major update adds support for fully 3D, navigable environments. Gone is the flat, unconvincing spherical photo, now you have the ability to select from Valve or community supplied 3D scenes. These new environments are powered by the same underlying technology that drove Valve’s impressive photogrammetry experience ‘Destinations’, which formed part of Valve’s The Lab thatlaunched alongside the HTC Vive last year. As with Destinations, you can navigate to fixed points within the space, with the world made up from a mix of photographic and geometrically rendered assets. It’s a huge improvement, but more than just a visual overhaul, this new technology provides a great canvas for SteamVR Home’s array of other features. Assets to create these new environments will be added to SteamVR Workshop with tools there enabling content creators to build and submit new environments.
Once you have your base environment looking the way you want, you can import 3D props to place in the scene and, should you feel creative, scribble into that 3D space using Home’s integrated ‘Tilt-Brush-like’ 3D painting function. Once you’re happy, you can then invite any friends who also own SteamVR compatible headsets into your virtual home and spend time customising your avatar with a fairly comprehensive set of options, all via the now familiar floating ‘holographic’ style Steam interface.
From a functional standpoint, the new beta also adds UI options to reduce the time you spend traversing Steam itself. The ‘Quick Links’ feature holds your most used games, applications and your friends list in a triptych of at-a-glance tiles. These can then be embedded into your Home scene at your discretion.
How to opt into SteamVR Beta:
1) Open Steam on your desktop 2) Find ‘SteamVR’ in your Library under ‘Tools’ 3) Right click and go to Properties 4) Select the Betas tab and pick SteamVR Beta from the dropdown
It’s an important move from Valve and shifts SteamVR from a functional yet somewhat uninviting venue for the base VR experience to something much more inviting, collaborative and ultimately much more enjoyable. There are clear parallels of course to the work being done elsewhere in the VR space, not least Valve’s direct rivals in the VR ecosystem Oculus and Facebook. But unlike other options for social VR, SteamVR Home is integrated into a tool mant of us use daily and in a way that’s seamless and non-disruptive. Doubtless we’ll see Oculus Home evolve along similar lines, with applications like Spaces better woven into the fabric of the experience, but right now Valve has a march on its rivals and is leading the way.
Viele VR-Erfahrungen werden aufgrund der Isolation und antisozialen Erfahrung kritisiert. Dies liegt daran, dass man mit einem VR-Headset auf dem Kopf nicht in der Lage ist, etwas in seiner Umgebung wahrzunehmen. Man taucht in eine immersive Welt ein, entsprechend befindet man sich in einer virtuellen Blase, welche die Interaktion mit anderen Personen äußerst erschwert. Dafür hat die Universität in Ulm nun eine Lösung entwickelt mit einem ungewöhnlichen Prototyp eines FaceDisplay Headsets.
Social Virtual Reality dank FaceDisplays
Der Prototyp der Universität Ulm ist eine modifizierte Version der Oculus Rift. Am VR-Headset sind drei Touchscreen Displays angebracht – die FaceDisplays – welche umstehenden Personen erlauben, auf den Displays die VR-Erfahrung des Headsetträgers mitzuerleben. Die Touchscreens sind an der Außenseite des Headsets befestigt. Dadurch können weitere Personen nicht nur betrachten, was in der Virtual Reality passiert, sondern sind sogar in der Lage mit dieser zusätzlich zu interagieren. Die Touchscreens fungieren also ebenfalls als Interfaces für alle Anwender, wodurch Außenstehende die virtuelle Welt beeinflussen können, indem sie beispielsweise per Touch neue Gegner spawnen.
Wie das aussieht, kann man in folgendem Video betrachten:
Das Ziel hinter dem Prototyp ist klar: Die Virtual Reality soll zu einer sozialen Erfahrung gemacht werden. Aktuell gibt es jedoch noch einige Probleme mit der Implementation des Multi-User-Interfaces. Die Verwendung des Touchscreens ist für den Headsetträger höchst frustrierend, da man noch nicht sieht, was darauf abgebildet wird. Ebenfalls schwierig ist die Interaktion mit dem Headset für Außenstehende, wenn der Headsetträger schnelle Bewegungen in verschiedene Richtungen ausführt. Zusätzlich bleibt das Problem, dass der Träger des Headsets nicht weiß, wo die umstehenden Personen sind. Dies kann natürlich auch zu Kollisionen führen bzw. ein unsicheres Gefühl hinterlassen.
Die Idee hinter dem Projekt ist gut dafür geeignet, um Virtual Reality um eine weitere Social VR-Erfahrung zu bereichern. Jedoch wird es noch einige Zeit dauern, bis das Projekt weit genug entwickelt ist. Wir dürfen uns also auf neue Verbesserungen freuen.
NVIDIA CEO Jensnen Huang took the stage at GTC 2017 today to share what the GPU manufacturer is up to concerning deep learning, ray tracing, and virtual reality.
To this latter point, Huan announced Project Holodeck — an upcoming social VR Experience that will allow multiple users to occupy a single digital space.
To demonstrate Project Holodeck, Huan showed a feed of four NVIDIA representatives inside of the experience. Together, they examined and discussed a high-resolution model of a sports car. The four then began to interact with the model directly by opening the doors and entering the car. Huang then requested a closer look at the sports cars internal parts. On command, the car exploded into hundreds of pieces and parts that could be studied individually.
Shared experiences and car visualizers are nothing new for VR. However, Huang explained that what will set Project Holodeck apart is its focus on photo-realistic graphics and consistent, believable physics.
Most readily available social VR experiences now prioritize connectivity over image fidelity. As a result, things like Altspace VR and Facebook Spaces utilize low-poly avatars and assets in order to ensure a quick connection over the internet. NVIDIA’s social VR experiment, however, will be committed to making the visuals as photo realistic as possible, according to Huang.
In addition to realistic visuals, Huang added that Project Holodeck’s sense of realism will be protected through a suite or believable physics that are consistently applied. For example, in Project Holodeck when you want to touch the steering wheel of a car with your hand, your avatar’s hand will be stopped by the wheel rather than passing through it. Objects will have a rigidity inside Project Holodeck that NVIDIA hopes will make spending time inside of it more enjoyable and believable.
NVIDIA has already shown off this type of physics-based VR in its VRWorks collection of demos.
Project Holodeck will be available for early access in September, 2017.
Philip Rosedale has been thinking deeply about how to architect large-scale, distributed virtual worlds after experiencing many bottlenecks as the founder of Second Life. His new metaverse venture, High Fidelity, is taking a much more distributed approach with how it’s being developed openly in open source using Worklist.net contractors, how it plans on distributing hosting and compute resources to user’s computers, as well as using a decentralized identity based upon blockchain technology. Rather than having a centralized authority for tracking and data mining an individual’s identity, they’re planning on using what’s called “Self-sovereign Identity”, which Christopher Allen explains in great detail in his comprehensive essay titled A Path to Self-Sovereign Identity.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I had a chance to catch up with Rosedale at the 4th annual Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference where we talked about distributed identity, privacy in VR, High Fidelity’s business model based upon sales tax, whether existing cryptocurrencies will work for them, yang and yin currencies, and their open source development process. High Fidelity is architecting a lot of the open standards for the future of the metaverse, and Rosedale is one of the most deep and profound thinkers in the social virtual reality space. He’s ahead of his time in architecting virtual worlds that will be able to democratize space and disrupt travel.
May 5th, 2017 also marks the three-year anniversary of the Voices of VR Podcast, and this is a fitting podcast as I started the bulk of my interviews at the very first Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference in 2014 and I’ve been able to talk to Rosedale at each of the last four SVVR gatherings. You can check out my previous interviews with Rosedale in episodes #25, #173, and #376.
Facebook launched their first social VR app Spaces last month to much acclaim. It’s a polished experience that does a few things very well, and has the major benefit of tapping into Facebook’s existing dominance of the social graph. But to become truly compelling it needs to do much more than it does today. Facebook knows this, and is looking to third-party developers to expand and enhance Spaces.
Spaces, available today as a beta on the Oculus Rift (and playable on Vive with a hack), demonstrates a few key concepts of socializing in VR:
Social VR doesn’t necessarily require virtual exploration of a virtual environment. Many other social VR apps place users in a world space and ask them to move about. Spaces puts users around the central fixture of a table, and doesn’t allow them to move around, putting the emphasis on what they are doing together, not where they are doing it within the virtual space.
Social VR isn’t only about doing, it’s also about sharing. Many of today’s social VR apps try to give users something to do inside the social space. This is useful to connect strangers who can use the activity as their common ground when there otherwise isn’t any. When it comes to socializing in VR with real life friends, you want to be able to share important moments in your life, not just participate in a shared activity. Facebook has a huge leg up here because their platform already serves as a host for much of the content people want to share with friends, in the form of photos and videos (and more recently, photospheres and videospheres). Few other social VR apps today make it easy to media from your real life with friends in VR.
Social VR isn’t only about VR. That sounds weird, I know… but for VR to be social, it needs to be inclusive; if it’s limited to only people with VR headsets, then today that cuts out the vast majority of the world. Spaces allows users to make Messenger video calls from inside VR to the outside world. This not only lets users connect with friends who don’t have VR equipment, but it also lets those non-VR people literally see into the virtual world through their smartphone, opening the door to a massively larger group of people who can participate in social VR.
And while Spaces aptly demonstrates these concepts, once you’ve made a few video calls to friends, drawn a few objects with the virtual pencil, and shot a few virtual selfies, you may find yourself with a lack of things to do beyond talking and sharing pictures. But Spaces isn’t meant to be a finished product at this stage—hence the beta tag—and like many Facebook products, the company wants to open the door to let third-party developers expand spaces to let users do new and interesting things.
Much like Messenger, the company’s chat app, Spaces is meant as a foundation that does a couple of core things right, and then lets developers build on top. Today Messenger offers a text communication channel at its core, but from there you can find many third-party applets the integrate directly into the chat stream, specifically those which allow sharing of additional content types like music, gifs, locations, and even mini-games.
Photo courtesy Facebook
At F8, the same conference where Facebook announced Spaces, they also announced that they’re opening the camera in their apps to do the same—allow developers to start building augmented reality extensions on top.
Spaces will follow a similar path. Facebook knows that it alone won’t be able to sufficiently build out every feature or activity that people will want, nor will get be able to integrate all the services that provide sharing of different content types that people will want to bring into VR. Instead, it makes a lot more sense to open the door to let developers build on Spaces and make these integrations when and where users will find value from them.
It’s too early for Facebook to just throw an API out there and let developers have at it. VR is so new that it’s still not clear exactly how such extensibility should even be structured (though there’s probably lessons to be learned from apps like Second Life). But the company says it wants to being working with developers to start to answer that question and more.
Speaking at F8, Facebook Social VR Product Manager Mike Booth explored the making of Facebook Spaces, and toward the tail end of his presentation he spoke about the direction the company plans to take the app in the future (you can watch this section in the video heading this article).
Facebook says pool is one example of an activity that could be created by a third-party developer | Photo courtesy Facebook
“We’re putting [Spaces] out because there’s some interesting things to do, but we have lots of things we want to do in the future. One of the things that we’re thinking about is what Mark [Zuckerberg] talked about at [Oculus’ most recent developer conference] which is this people-centric computing platform,” Booth said. “So in this case say I want to hang out with Rachel. So we meet up in VR and we’re there in the space. And then we decide ‘hey let’s play pool’, so instead of launching into a separate app, we have a way to bring a pool table into the space with us. […] So we’re playing pool… now we want to listen to music. Let’s bring in a boom-box that can stream my favorite music service. So this is the kind of thing we want to do where these things come into the space, and they combine together. So we’re very interested in working with developers and talking to developers about the future of this sort of thing.”
A Messenger video call in ‘Spaces’ | Photo courtesy Facebook
That’s the plan, though Booth readily admits that the company is still figuring out exactly how this should work.
“We have no way to do this right now, but we are very interested in figuring out a way for third-party developers to be able to create interesting experiences and objects that we can bring into spaces to use together.”
With Spaces, Facebook is following their philosophy of “move fast and break stuff,” and hopes to learn from its users where they should focus their attention on continued development.
“I know you’ve probably heard this a million times today—but this is very literally true with Facebook Spaces right now, that’s why we’re labeling it as a beta—’this journey is 1% finished’. We have some really fun interactions, we have a million more things that we have planned… we wanted to put this out so people could use it and we could see what they do with it and we could get feedback from people on where to go next.”
Virtual-Reality-Erfahrungen sind in der Regel besonders intensiv und nicht umsonst spricht man gerne von Erlebnissen. Diese müssen allerdings nicht immer positiv sein. Vor allem die sexuellen Übergriffe können in virtuellen sozialen Netzen noch problematischer werden, als sie es in klassischen Netzwerken wie Facebook und Co. schon sind.
Neue Geste stoppt Belästigungen
Die Entwickler der virtuellen sozialen App Rec Room haben das Problem erkannt und bieten in der aktuellen Version eine einfache Lösung an, um eine Belästigung abzuwehren. Sie basiert auf der englischen Phrase und der Geste „Talk to the hand“, bei der man dem Gegenüber zu verstehen gibt, dass lediglich die Hand zuhört. Eine etwas höflichere Form des „Shut up“.
In Rec Room lässt sich diese Geste verwenden, um unerwünschte Teilnehmer im virtuellen Raum für einen selbst verschwinden zu lassen. Das sieht ganz putzig aus und sollte seinen Zweck erfüllen und die Sperre lässt sich bei Bedarf auch wieder rückgängig machen. Sicherlich werden andere soziale Netze in der virtuellen Realität ebenfalls solche Mechanismen einführen (müssen), denn der User soll sich in seiner virtuellen Umgebung auch gut aufgehoben fühlen. Vielleicht hat der Entwickler Against Gravity mit der Talk-to-the-Hand-Geste einen neuen Standard geschaffen? Zwar gab es auch bereits ähnliche Projekte von anderen Entwicklern, doch Rec Room könnte durch seine exzellente Stellung in der Szene hier wegweisend sein.
Rec Room hatte uns bereits in einer frühen Version viel Spaß gemacht und kurzerhand den Titel Social-VR-König erobert. Im Spiel für die HTC Vive und Oculus Rift kann mit anderen Spielern nicht nur kommunzieren, sondern sich bei einigen Spielen wie Tischtennis oder Dart miteinander messen. Zudem wurde das Konzept in den letzten Monaten um zahlreiche Inhalte erweitert. Ende letzten Jahres führte Rec Room beispielsweiseeine private Lounge ein, falls man keine Lust auf fremde Mitspieler hat und unter Freunden bleiben will.
The developers behind popular social VR experience Rec Room posted a video showing users how players can easily block someone who is antagonizing them with a simple gesture.
Harassment in VR is a tough subject as developers grapple with how to stop it. The sense of presence you gain in a virtual world means that when other people get close to you, or in your face saying something offensive, they really feel like they are invading your personal space.
With Rec Room emerging as a fun social hub for a variety of activities from paintball to disc golf, the lobby of the virtual space has become a place for for folks with varying levels of maturity to interact. While Rec Room can be a cool way to meet someone and find something fun to do together, it can also be occasionally annoying. Rec Room developer Against Gravity, though, has included a “Talk To The Hand” gesture to block someone.
Here they show how the feature works to quickly get rid of someone:
We hope other developers take note of the approach and use it or something similar as a building block for more enjoyable social VR interactions.
