Hands-On: ‘Cowbots and Aliens’ is a Multiplayer Wild West Shootout From The Future
Hands-On with VREAL’s VR Live Streaming System & Q&A With CEO Todd Hooper
Michael Glombicki goes hands-on with VREAL’s VR live streaming platform that puts viewers inside the game, right next to their favorite streamers.
I took a short break during my time at PAX West this year to checkout VREAL’s new streaming platform at their office in downtown Seattle. At the office, I strapped on a Vive and jumped into VREAL’s virtual lobby with a couple of others to try things out. After a quick tutorial on how teleportation and avatar controls worked, we moved our characters over to a small floating island depicting a scene from Cloudlands VR Minigolf and teleported in to launch the game.
As a spectator, I was able to teleport around the golf course and view the action from wherever I decided to point my headset. Cloudlands already supported multiplayer so that concept wasn’t particularly ground-breaking by itself, but the important part is that VREAL says this same experience can be viewed by an endless audience of viewers in VR.
After the golf demo we went back to the lobby and then hopped into a tower defense game. In this game I was able to see some of the neat perspective features that VREAL offers developers. Depending on where in the map I teleported, the scale of the entire scene would change to fit the action. Teleporting near the lanes brought me down to a frontline perspective while teleporting away towards the edges brought me back up to a more strategic overview perspective.
During the demo, I was also introduced to VREAL’s new virtual camera feature. By placing virtual cameras in the world, VREAL streamers can broadcast their gameplay from a fixed point of view. So while I was viewing from within a Vive, people in the lobby were watching on a 2D screen, but without the shaky perspective view that most streamers are currently stuck with.
After the demo, I sat down with VREAL CEO, Todd Hooper, to ask some quick developer-oriented questions about their platform.
Road to VR: What is the performance impact to the streamer?
Todd Hooper: Most of the VREAL tech actually runs on the CPU, not the GPU. We have not seen a massive performance hit on games. It seems to be in the region of a couple percent. Basically we are capturing the game state and sending up to the cloud so that’s not something that touches the GPU at all. Most games are GPU-bound not CPU-bound so so far that hasn’t been a challenge.
Road to VR: How does a developer make a game work with VREAL?
Todd Hooper: We have an SDK for Unity and Unreal 4. When we identify a developer that we want on the platform we give them the SDK. Our goal is to be able to have VREAL up and running for them in a day. We are not there yet, but for the beta at the end of the year, we should be able to get a new developer up and running on the SDK pretty quickly. It’s one of the design considerations for the system because there’s lots of ways you might be able to build something like this but would require the developer to do a lot of work. If you can’t get developers on board a system like this fairly quickly, it’s going to be challenging to get a lot of traction.
Road to VR: How would an interested developer get started?
Todd Hooper: We are happy to talk to all VR developers so visit our website, there is an address for the developer relations team there or hit us up on twitter, we’ve got a full time team that is talking to developers. We’ve had a lot of interested developers. I think they’ve seen that a way to stream VR games now doesn’t really exist, you just stream the headset. Once developers have that streaming experience they get really passionate about it.
Road to VR: How many developers are on the platform so far?
Todd Hooper: We haven’t announced any of the titles yet. We are going to be announcing titles at the end of the year.
Road to VR: What platforms will VREAL support?
Todd Hooper: The Vive and the Rift are the launch platforms. We are Sony partner and will be talking more about Sony later. We also have a way to do 360 video capture so you can render that and consume it on a mobile VR device as well.
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How Ubisoft Set Out For The Final Frontier of VR With ‘Star Trek: Bridge Crew’
‘VReal’ Plans to Be Much More Than Just Twitch for VR Games
Emteq Aims to Humanize VR by Capturing Your Facial Expressions
As researchers and VR start-ups make great strides in increasing the sense of presence such as larger field of view, lower latency and more natural input, a Brighton based start-up has just announced a new technology that can track a user’s facial expressions without markers.
Emteq, with was founded with $1.5 million of seed funding, hopes their technology will enhance social engagement in the growing social VR space, which combines miniature sensors and artificial intelligence to enable digital avatars to mirror the user’s expressions and mood.
Emteq’s technology called “Faceteq” uses a range of biometric sensor techniques including electromyography (EMG), electrooculography (EOG), heart rate and more in the faceplate of VR headsets, such as Oculus Rift, which track the electrical current generated in the movement of facial muscles.
Unlike camera-based facial tracking systems, it also registers movements in eye, forehead and cheek muscles that are underneath a VR headset. Although this technology has clear applications for gaming and social VR apps such as vTime and the upcoming Facebook VR platform, the founders also plan to use the recorded data to analyse how audiences react to regular films and TV advertising.
Graeme Cox, the Chief Executive, co-founder of Emteq and serial tech entrepreneur, said: “Our machine learning combined with facial sensor technologies represents a significant leap forward in functionality and form for developers looking to introduce human expression and mood into a digital environment.
“Imagine playing an immersive role playing game where you need to emotionally engage with a character to progress. With our technology, that is possible – it literally enables your computer to know when you are having a bad day or when you are tired.”
Emteq joins a small but growing range of companies that hope to bring the user’s facial expressions into VR applications. FOVE VR is able to track a user’s eye movements allowing for people to take actions through eye gaze and blinking. It also goes towards a more natural way of viewing scenes in VR such as shifting focus with our eyes which we do in reality.
In July we reported news that Kickstarter project Veeso was aiming to be the first to market with a mobile VR headset that tracks your face’s movement; a system that uses head-mounted infrared cameras to track both your eyes and mouth for a greater sense of presence in virtual reality. Unfortunately that project was cancelled due to lack of funding, but what is exciting about Emteq is that their technology won’t be restricted to one headset.
What is important is that companies such as Emteq are able to garner enough support from developers and produce the required plugins for game engines such as Unity and Unreal to unlock its true potential.
Road to VR will be visiting Emteq within the next few weeks for a closer look and to try the technology first hand.
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vTime Adds Detailed New Social VR Avatar Customization to Celebrate Diversity
‘vTime’ Releases New Avatar Customization Tool
vTime, the social VR platform from Starship Group, today released an update to their avatar creation tool that now gives users access to thousands of avatar customization options, promising to “let you reflect more of yourself inside vTime.” The new feature is available across all of the app’s supported headsets including Google Cardboard, Oculus Rift and Gear VR.
With the so called ‘New vYou’ tool, users can control a wide range of characteristics such as body type, skin tone, hair, eyebrows, eye shape, eye color, nose, lips, ears, cheeks, jaw, face length, facial hair, and even age—providing users with a much more detailed way of recreating themselves in virtual reality. Something the devs intentionally didn’t include however was a clear gender distinction, meaning you can mix and match whatever clothes or body style you like to get the desired effect.
vTime Managing Director Clemens Wangerin says the new gender-neutral avatar system “sees vTime become truly diverse and inclusive, allowing us to see the faces and uniqueness of each of our users – something that has been missing from the wider social VR community, until now.”
To test the system, I tried to rebuild my face without looking into a mirror or picture of myself. The results, although not perfect, are pretty good for only about 5 minutes of playing around with the tool’s sliders and color swatches.
But as anyone who spends an exaggerated amount of time in character builders knows, a nondescript white guy is probably the easiest avatar to make, so I set off to max out the sliders and create something with a little more flair. In all earnestness, I was hoping for a result that the McElroy brothers over at Polygon’s YouTube show Monster Factory would be proud of, but the result was decidedly much more human than monster.
Disheartened somewhat by the fact that in my quest to build a monster, I actually ended up making a funky web developer, I then drifted on to the second favorite pass time of avatar creators: Celebrities.
With the basic swath of pre-set avatars at my disposal, I was able to create Samuel L. Jackson’s character from Django Unchained (2012) and a hipster version of Mahatma Gandhi, both of which were made in about 10 minutes.
Overall, vTime’s new avatar system proves to be pretty robust, offering a wide enough variety of clothing options, skin tones, and facial feature sliders to create any basic human form, be it young or old.
vTime says that the social VR app, along with the new character builder, is coming soon to iOS, Google Daydream devices, PlayStation VR and HTC Vive. The studio maintains that new features, events, tools and further customization options will coming out next year.
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