Social VR – Page 51 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

January 25, 2017

Social App VRChat Launches Next Week With Multiplayer Games And Unity SDK

The social VR race heats up next week as a new challenger looks to take on the likes of High Fidelity, AltSpaceVR and vTime.

VRChat will be releasing on Steam in Early Access on February 1st 2017. The platform will support the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and OSVR and is free-to-play. Founders Graham Gaylor & Jesse Joudrey plan to keep it that way for the “foreseeable future”. Like other social VR experiences before it, the app will allow friends to meet up online in virtual environments with personalized avatars and talk, share videos and more.

At this point, if you want to stand out in the social VR space, you have to offer a bit more than the basics. The VRChat team, which raised $1.2 million late last year with help from the likes of HTC, certainly seems to be doing that. On top of casual hangouts, users will be able to play community-built games. As you can see in the trailer above, these range from Western-style first-person shooters to even a Tron-like game dubbed Battle Discs, which looks similar to CCP Games’ upcoming Project Arena.

Simple meetups, meanwhile, are enhanced with tools that allow you to draw, sculpt and more. Environments invite sandbox-style madness; at one point in the trailer a bowling game is abandoned as two groups of friends instead start to hurl balls at each other.

VRChat also aims to offer deeper user customization with integration with Unity. You can create your own avatars from scratch, meaning users won’t conform to a particular style like they do in other social platforms. You could create a realistic version of yourself, stylize your avatar in any way you see fit, or make something entirely different. Users appear as full body avatars with lip synced speech. The company’s Unity SDK will also let you build your own worlds for others to explore, and it claims there are already “hundreds” available.

A scroll through the company’s Medium blog reveals yet more ambitions, like bringing sculptures from Oculus Medium into the experience.

The developers haven’t set a final release date for the full version of VRChat yet, as it’s intended to be a constantly evolving platform, but they do note the Early Access release has many of the “core features” of the platform.

Social VR is set to be a powerful use for the technology as it improves, so we welcome the addition of new, more ambitious platforms to the genre. It remains to be seen, however, how apps like VRChat will compete with upcoming offerings from bigger companies, like Project Sansar from the creators of Second Life, or Facebook’s own VR experience demonstrated at Oculus Connect 3 last year.

Tagged with: social vr, VRChat

January 23, 2017

Breathe Fire and Grab Monkeys with Your Friends in ‘Life of Us’

“This is not a game, this is not a movie.”

The text floating in front of me before jumping into Life of Us made it abundantly clear that it knows what it is not from the get-go, but what is it? Part social experience, part evolution simulation, part wackadoo psychedelic freak-out joyride, Life of Us is charming, thought-provoking and just plain silly.

I had a chance to check out Life of Us at the Sundance Film Festival, and caught up with Within co-founder Aaron Koblin after my run through.

“We thought a lot about how to make a social experience that wasn’t a game, wasn’t a movie, you weren’t shooting anything, you were just sharing a social experience with someone else,” Koblin explains.

Life of Us takes you on a shared experience with up to three others through a comical evolutionary journey. Starting out as single-celled organisms and progressing through fish, lizard, pterodactyl, ape and finally human stages. Well, not really “finally” as there is a surprise at the end, but I won’t ruin it for you – let’s just say I hope you like grooving with lasers!

Since this is a social experience, you’ll be going through all these stages in tandem, talking and interacting with others along the way. There are vocal effects during each stage, so your voice is more watery and modulated during the fish scene, deep and powerful during the ape stage. Each stage also has a unique interactive element, so you can blow bubbles as a fish, flare your neck flaps as a lizard, breathe fire as a pterodactyl and so on. The pitch and timing of your voice affects how the effects are displayed, so high-pitched, quick noises produce lots of tiny bubbles, while deep, extended sounds create gigantic bubbles.

I particularly enjoyed my time in the ape stage when smaller monkeys would jump on me and ride along as I ran through the jungle. One of my little friends was riding on my forearm and I would reach over every now and again to ask if he was enjoying the ride and to feed him an imaginary snack. I called him Chester. As I was doing this, someone gently lifted the headphones off of my ears and whispered, “You can grab the monkeys.” Game changer! Using my other hand, I seized the little freeloader and tossed him into the wind! Sorry, Chester! He’s spry though, so I’m sure he’s fine.

Although a guided experience, you can interact with others not only through vocals, but also physically through actions such as popping the bubbles they blow or throwing biological goo at them.

As Koblin explains it, “We went into VR thinking real faces — real people — were the way to make the best connection – and we still think that’s powerful – but once we thought about connection with voice and movement, we said, ‘Forget about all that, we can make this crazy world as a social, connected system.’”

In order to make it accessible to everyone, Within kept the controls basic and minimal, focusing solely on the triggers and hand and head placement. The result is a very intuitive experience, and one that compels your motions, gait and movement as you switch from one creature to another. For example, I instantly started flapping my wings to stay aloft as I ran off a cliff and switched from the lizard to the pterodactyl, and when I switched into an ape, I took more of a squat, powerful stance. VR has an inherent transformative power, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Life of Us where you move between a half-dozen forms in the span of a few minutes.

Koblin admitted they still have some tweaking to do and they’re building out a few more features, but he also told us Life of Us will be available “soonish,” so you shouldn’t have to wait too long to grab those monkeys with your friends!

Tagged with: aaron koblin, Chris Milk, life of us, sundance film festival, Within

January 22, 2017

Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Pushes Forward In 2017

The Sundance Film Festival is this weekend and next in Utah, giving new mixed reality projects a moment in the spotlight.

New VR productions at the festival show an enormous leap in quality from its first real appearance there in 2012. That’s when Sundance became the pioneering event to host Nonny de la Peña from USC showing her VR project Hunger In Los Angeles. She was accompanied at the event by none other than Palmer Luckey, who worked at USC before formally founding Oculus.

Now VR projects are spread across multiple venues at Sundance on different consumer headsets, with a wide range of content competing for eyeballs, and ultimately dollars, with varying artistic and technical approaches attempting to push the new medium forward.

I spoke by phone with Shari Frilot, Director and Curator of the New Frontier portion of the festival about what’s different compared to previous years. Among the experiences she explained the festival this year might enable, is the ability for people at two different venues to meet one another for the first time in a shared virtual experience — then to follow up and meet in real life.

“This is technology that affects storytelling in a really profound way,” Frilot said. “It is one thing to meet people in real life…it is also something to meet someone in text, but is is a…another thing to meet someone in VR.”

Life of Us from Chris Milk is a shared VR journey that “tells the complete story of the evolution of life on Earth.” It is one of several premieres from groundbreaking VR creators at the event. Another is Miyubi, a 40-minute endearing comedy project from Felix & Paul, the talented studio behind a variety of VR work including those showcasing Cirque Du Soleil performances. Miyubi lets you look into the life of a family from the 1980s from the perspective of a Japanese toy robot. There have been some previous attempts at lengthier VR projects before, Frilot said, but “they’ve all failed miserably.”

“Except for this one,” she said. “They’ve managed to create something that has….breadth and emotional gravity that maintains your interest for 40 minutes…it’s an important effort.”

The New Frontier portion of the festival includes 20 VR experiences and 11 installations across three venues. Tear-jerking project Dear Angelica from Oculus Story Studio had its premiere there, and ASTEROIDS! from Baobab is being shown too, which continues the story of the aliens we saw in the startup’s initial project INVASION!. Meta is showing Journey to the Center of the Natural Machine on its Meta 2 mixed reality glasses and the Synesthesia Suit which lets you feel the game is there too. Acting and motion capture app Mindshow is there at the event as well showcasing its intuitive method of creating animated projects in VR. That’s just a sampling of some of the VR projects available at Sundance this year. Much of the content being shown and talked about there is likely to make it to headsets in the next few years, though some projects might fail to resonate and disappear from the public eye.

“The one thing I can say is nobody knows” what will catch on, Frilot said. “You just have to sit and watch it unfold.”

Tagged with: Asteroids!, baobab, felix & paul, invasion, Meta, sundance film festival

January 18, 2017

Facebook Says Introverts Feel More Comfortable with VR Social Interaction

A recent study by Facebook IQ, in which people completed one-on-one conversations in VR, concluded that most people respond positively, and introverts in particular feel more comfortable. Facebook IQ is a team established to assist marketers in understanding the way people communicate online and offline.

Facebook has been exploring the potential of social VR since their famous acquisition of Oculus VR in 2014. More recently, they detailed the results of their social VR avatar experiments and are planning to launch a ‘social VR app’ very soon. A different social experiment was recently completed by Facebook IQ, an internal team who help businesses understand communication trends and advertising effectiveness – asking 60 people to have a one-on-one conversation, half of them being in person, and half being in a VR environment wearing the Oculus Rift.

Interestingly, they didn’t use the VR avatars seen in Facebook’s own demonstrations, nor did they use the Oculus avatars found in the Rift’s menus – instead they used vTime, a popular ‘sociable network’ app available for Rift, Gear VR, Cardboard and Daydream. vTime uses its own full-body avatar system, complete with automatically-animating hands – surprising that these would be used in such an experiment. However, it seems like the main reason for choosing the software was to use its comfortable ‘train cabin’ environment – a familiar and natural place to converse with a stranger – and the focus of the experiment was about vocal communication.

Applied neuroscience company Neurons Inc was commissioned to assist with the study of cognitive and emotional responses; all participants wore high resolution electroencephalography (EEG) scanners, used to record electrical activity in the brain, and eye trackers. With half the group conducting a normal one-to-one conversation in person, and the other half engaged in vTime, Neurons Inc was able to compare the level of comfort and engagement of a VR conversation compared to a conventional one. The eye trackers helped to determine the user’s level of attention, and the EEG scanners were used to assess motivation and cognitive load, based on the level of brain activity. If the load is too low, it means the person is bored; too high and they’re stressed.

According to the report published on Facebook Insights, the participants, who had mostly never tried VR before, were within the ‘optimal range of cognitive effort’, being neither bored nor overstimulated. The cognitive load decreased over time, meaning that people naturally became more comfortable as the conversation progressed. In the interviews that followed, 93% said that they liked their virtual conversation partner, and those who were identified as more introverted responded ‘particularly positively’, being more engaged by meeting in VR than by meeting in person.

This increased confidence and reduced self-consciousness in introverts raises an interesting question about the current effectiveness of VR – did this occur because VR is already powerful, or not powerful enough? It seems that the main reason why introverts are less intimidated in VR is because it doesn’t feel as real as meeting someone face to face, and yet the entire industry is working towards making the experience as real as possible. What will happen when social VR reaches a level of fidelity that is much closer to meeting in person – are introverts only more engaged because of VR’s current limitations, or is there something unique to VR that introverts will remain attracted to, no matter how realistic it becomes?

The post Facebook Says Introverts Feel More Comfortable with VR Social Interaction appeared first on Road to VR.