What your mind expects and what your eyes see is a crucial element to the locomotion in VR experiences. As much as many developers would like to have everyone moving freely at high speeds, VR motion sickness is a real concern so things like teleporting must be implemented. There are a few gaming experiences that are experimenting with ways to combat motion sickness, but some are taking the immersion of VR to the extreme. Birdly, an immersive flight platform distributed by D3D Cinema, is one of those extremes.
On the expo floor at SXSW, a quickly growing crowd caught my attention and I moved to see what people were huddled around. What I saw was a headset-wearing gentleman sprawled across a platform that was rising, falling, and turning as he adjusted and flapped his arms. In this demo, he was flying around downtown New York City in a proprietary program and it looked like an exhilarating experience.
We previewed an earlier prototype of Birdly a couple years ago, but what we experienced at SXSW is what will be shipped out when ordered. From the outside, the flying rig looked pretty uncomfortable but I got into it and started flying like a bird naturally. Your arms control the wings and your hands have a grip that serves as the primary feathers for turning and diving. The platform responds immediately as you do such actions, and will rise or fall as you get further or closer to the ground. When you’re diving quickly but then turn your feathers upward and start flapping, it really feels like you’re fighting against the wind. It does help that the rig has a medium sized fan attached at the head that takes the immersion to another level. As far as comfort, it’s not as bad as it looks but you’ll start to get quite a back workout the longer you play. I also had no motion sickness feelings at all and I’m fairly susceptible to them.
Birdly is certainly not a product for consumers but is something that could draw a crowd as a pay-to-play attraction in arcades. The device is available to be shipped currently and includes everything you need including the computer and VR headset and the full experience is surprisingly compact.
Many mobile augmented reality experiences will continue to be compared to Pokemon Go for the foreseeable future. It was one of the first times that an AR-based game drew such a massive following and, even though it was mainly due to the strength and nostalgia of the Pokemon brand, the game did present ideas that take advantage of today’s constant use of smartphones.
The major key for Pokemon Go’s popularity was fostering a social experience by getting groups of people out in droves and Snatch is an AR app that hopes to do the same — but with a bit of a twist.
When it comes to groups hitting the pavement to collect items and capture creatures in Pokemon Go, it was always exciting to see other people clearly doing the same as you hit up parks, stores, and other places. With Snatch, you may be a lot less excited to see other players. In this AR app, your goal is to grab parcels on an augmented map but you must also protect them from being snatched by other players. You can steal from those people as well, but your focus is staying on defense considering the game has some pretty great prizes for you to earn. You’ll regularly find in-game currency that will allow you to steal and defend with unique tools, but the parcels can even contain extremely impressive gifts from cash to concert tickets and even full vacation packages.
The frequency of prizes is going to be a big concern for those trying this out (we’ll update everyone with some hands-on impressions of the app soon) but one key detail is that the parcel count is dependent on the amount of people playing the game in one area. So, though you’ll be wary of people playing near you, it’ll serve you better to invite as many people as you can to open up more chances for prizes. Stay tuned to UploadVR for more updates from SXSW.
Reality capture company 8i debuted its narrative experience Buzz Aldrin: Cycling Pathways To Mars and also hosted a panel where Aldrin chatted with a large group about his life and his goals with this collaboration. We weren’t able to attend the panel, but we were given an opportunity to speak with Aldrin in a more intimate setting with a few other journalists. The result was an intriguing journey through the mind of a man that certainly can’t be easily impressed, considering he’s viewed Earth from the face of the Moon.
To no one’s surprise, Aldrin pays a significant amount of attention to detail. As mentioned in our report on the hands-on with the Pathways experience, much of what Aldrin theorizes could easily go over your head, but I could grasp what he spoke of during the interview largely because I’d experienced Pathways. Much of the detail in the experience itself was placed at Aldrin’s instruction, something the 8i team said led to a pretty cool moment when Aldrin watched the narrative unfold himself. In life and in VR, people don’t usually look straight up without being instructed to. The action simply isn’t a natural thing, but Buzz immediately did so when he reached the part of Pathways that recreated his Moon landing. Why? Because that’s where he remembered seeing Earth. Details like that and even the amount of pods on the Cycler ship were painstakingly recreated by the 8i team to truly bring Aldrin’s vision to life.
When discussing the “big picture” VR creators seek to show in virtual spaces, Aldrin pointed out creators maybe focus too many assets on details that weren’t quite needed. With Pathways, he and 8i seem to have struck a solid balance. Visualization of data and concepts is something software developers constantly try to make more efficient and informative, from interactive graphs to living visual charts. We must “understand the conditions under which we’re going to use something and then design something to see how it works,” as Aldrin put it. Virtual platforms will hopefully continue to provide the space to do so.
When asked if he’d go to Mars himself, he responded: “I’m more valuable here than I ever think I could be there”. At 88 years old, virtual reality could be a means to not only solidify his legacy further (his hologram could greet people through mixed reality applications for hundreds of years), but it also allowed him to see his ideas for the future come to life.
Update: The full Buzz Aldrin: Cycling Pathways to Mars experience is now available in Time Inc’s LIFE VR app on combat mission isolation for astronauts, and this new experience is essentially an extension of that. Aldrin has had a complex theory for how the colonization of Mars would begin, but it was not something easily explained to those that don’t share Aldrin’s level of expertise. The immersion of VR coupled with Aldrin’s knowledge made for a narrative experience where his words are brought to life and viewers, such as myself, come away with a much better understanding.
Cycling Pathways To Mars places you on a platform with a projection system on the floor that displays the virtual Buzz Aldrin as he theorizes the different steps needed to move toward Mars colonization. As he walks us through his ideas, the space around us unfolds to match what he describes. We’re shown his original moon landing, the moon of the future, the proposed journey to Mars on massive ships called “Cyclers” and, finally, the Mars colony. The experience is running on an HTC Vive in roomscale, so you’re able to walk around the platform and get a look at things from a different perspective.
Planets fly through you as you’re surrounded by the solar system and you’ll even fly through the Cycler and get a close look at its components. There was an interesting interaction I was making that I didn’t realize until my host told me after the hands-on. Ben Stein, 8i’s General Manager, pointed out I gave Buzz Aldrin’s hologram a wide berth and those before me had done the same. I moved through the other digital assets with no problem, but I really felt like Aldrin was sharing the space with me. 8i has shared images of their volumetric projections before, but seeing one close up really reveals how impactful they can be.
If you’re at SXSW, you owe it to yourself to check out Cycling Pathways To Mars. It is being hosted at the Marriott in downtown Austin until Thursday March 16. On Friday, it will be available through TIME Inc so others can experience it as well.
“We just want to make weird cartoon shit,” Chris Prynoski says to me in the VR office of Titmouse’s LA Studio. “We want to stay as far away from reality as possible.”
Having demoed his latest creation, I don’t doubt him for a second. Titmouse started out as an online T-shirt company in the early 2000s. Years later, it’s become a prolific animation studio, one that founder Prynoski thinks is perfect to lead animation’s entry into virtual reality. He proved the point to me by making me sit next to a pink demon lady in a VR music video.
Bringing Music to Life
Prynoski has been crafting a collaboration between Titmouse and the band Night Club to create an HTC Vive experience for their song Show it 2 Me. Given Prynoski’s experience working on Metalocalypse, Daria and Beavis and Butthead, and Titmouse’s name behind Nerdland and The Venture Bros., the result is an unsurprisingly obscene 80s wasteland.
Filling the start menu is Night Club’s album cover, the stiletto knife serving as the start button. I reach out my hot pink monster hands, grab hold, and then drop into an endless black void. Soon, it’s raining dozens of daggers. They fall into my face as I’m propelled through tunnels of neon pink and blue palm trees.
“This one was bananas,” Prynoski later tells me of development. At one point, he motions to the walls around us, covered in sticky-note timelines the team uses to map out every piece of the creation. Somewhere among the yellow squares is a queue that morphs the aforementioned demon lady’s head into a skull, then a wolf head, and then the head of some other chimeric creature I won’t attempt to name. Co-director Dylan Carter’s descriptions were “weird doll head” and “a rat thing.”
“There’s a lot of people that are digging into the virtual reality part, the emphasis on reality, where they’re creating photoreal experiences,” Prynoski says tepidly. He notes flight simulators and medical training programs as obvious successes in the field, but at Titmouse, it’s about the fun.
The entirety of the song is a first-person journey through this dark void, four minutes of passing animations that pulse to the beat. I can draw temporary neon squiggles in the air with my hands, or grab knives out of the occasional dagger storm, but for the most part I am standing there, soaking in countless glowing oddities. As the chorus drops, I’m placed into the passenger seat of a fluorescent sports car. Night Club’s track sets out a laidback skeleton of techno thumps, as nonchalant as the she-devil at the wheel. She nods her head to the rhythm and is just so casual she seems barely capable of keeping hold of the cigarette hanging from her right hand.
I try poking her a few times, as well as fiddling with the gear of the car, but there’s very little interaction programmed into the piece. It’s more of a visual cacophony, notable sights including giant demon bodies floating below me, giant demon bodies passing overhead, and giant, curled demon hands replacing the palm trees of my trippy tunnel drive.
The Future of Animation?
The dozens of assets were all drawn using Google’s Tilt Brush, a VR creation tool with more recently released audio reactive brushes. The team has no need to program in beat queues; these brush strokes will coordinate pulsing, flashing, and head-morphing to the tune of whatever song is run through the program.
It’s this technology that inspired Titmouse into a music video project after years of close work with Tilt Brush, a partnership that began even before Google’s acquisition. But when I ask if this program is the future of animation, the answer is probably not. The application is mainly limited to the absurd.
Co-director Carter likens the kit to the old Mac drawing software Kid Pix: “You get all these weird, little drawing tools, and so you get to make cool stuff all the time. But if you ever wanted to draw something realistic, you couldn’t use that tool. The medium just isn’t made for that kind of work.”
“It’s actually kind of a good restraint,” Prynoski says of the Kid Pix of VR. “I knew what the limitations of Tilt Brush were, and we kind of used them to figure out what the style of this was. One thing that Tilt Brush does really well is the neon-looking and glowy-looking stuff. It helped to pick this 80s feeling song and make it feel like that kind of era.”
Titmouse has multiple virtual reality projects in the pipeline. One is a game similar to their first VR outing, Smash Party, a free title where you step into a cage and smash things to bits. The game is a long ways off, though, so we talk about the team’s pseudo-narrative endeavors instead.
Prynoski then pulls out his phone and shows me doodles of what seems to be–by his excited hunch–Titmouse’s more immediate passion. The simple lines sketch out a player sitting on a couch beside two characters, both voiced by comedians. In this “Harry Potter-esque” world, we would watch the antics of a magic box, these characters cracking jokes in my ear. A turn of my head and a gaze at either would trigger certain lines, much like the mechanics of last year’s Gary the Gull.
The future of music video VR, and Titmouse’s greater ambitions, looks to be small, passive experiences like this. Prynoski is skeptical of the cost and length of narrative creations in the hardware, but animation, he says, solves a lot of these problems. It eliminates the need for expensive 360° productions that suddenly need to mask the wiring, stages, and other unsightly tools of film making. Animators can get wildly ambitious right out the gate, and for a fraction of the cost.
“Easy,” Prynoski happily muses on his projects. He then notices the walls covered in paper. “I mean, not easy,” he chuckles, “but… easy.”
The main worry of these projects, however, is that they grind counter to the most popular experiences of virtual reality, times spent interacting with worlds rather than just watching them. The medium can struggle with maintaining attention without user input, but a day after my time in Show it 2 Me, I listened to Night Club’s tune again and each line brought me back to the sights I’d seen in VR. This music video is primarily a delivery method for the band–the definitive experience of their song was waiting for me back on the Vive.
Just as the music video once introduced a new music outlet, Prynoski notes, VR has the opportunity to start a cutting-edge media wave, one that can lend exposure to bands with thinner pockets, and fresh experiences for users. It’s an exciting prospect, but ultimately, what excites most is Titmouse’s irreverence to reality. Show it 2 Me proves they have a readiness to bring the absurd and obscene to VR, with all the expertise of a company that’s spent its lifetime entertaining through artificial visuals.
You’d think if a division of Sony was making a VR experience they’d be using the company’s own headset, PlayStation VR (PSVR). It’s surprising to learn, then, Sony Music Entertainment is working with a rival headset, the HTC Vive.
The Japanese division of Sony Music is at the 2017 South By South West (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas right now showing off an experience named Gold Rush VR that uses not one but four Vives attached to backpack PCs, allowing four people to roam around a room scale area without tripping on each other’s wires. You can see it in the video below:
Basically, players step onto a wooden makeshift tram in the real world, which comes to life in the virtual one, transporting them to different zones to explore from within the confines of the vehicle.
This piece is being showcased as party of Sony’s Wow Factory, a set of projects from the company’s innovation labs that, according to an official listing, are “developed with a spirit of open-minded and unbridled experimentation.” That probably explains why the company is using Vive instead of PSVR; the latter headset can’t pull off the same level of position-tracking seen in the SteamVR platform that Vive uses.
But the Vive display isn’t the only VR installation from Sony at the show. There’s also an intriguing mobile VR experience called Parallel Eyes in which players can see each other’s perspectives and use that to their advantage to play a game of tag in real life. It doesn’t exactly sound like the safest use of VR, but we’d be lying if we said we didn’t want to give it a go.
Finally, PSVR itself is also on display at the show with popular launch game Rez Infinite and the incredible synesthesia suit that it’s been shown with multiple times over the past year.
Developer Telltale Games will offer an exclusive glimpse at its upcoming Marvel-licensed adventure game at PAX East this weekend, followed by an interactive gameplay session at South by Southwest.
Tom Cruise might be the biggest action star on the planet, known for huge stunts that probably cost millions of dollars to pull off. His latest trick has been filmed in VR, too.
Cruise will feature in a new zero gravity VR experience, presented by IMAX in partnership with Universal, in promotion for the upcoming reboot of The Mummy franchise. In the film’s debut teaser trailer (seen below), he and co-star Annabelle Wallis are caught up in a huge plane crash that sees them tumbling through the sky. The VR experience is set inside that sequence as the pair try to escape certain death.
To simulate zero gravity, the experience will be on display at the 2017 South by Southwest festival this week with the Voyager full-motion chair from Positron. First seen at Sundance earlier this year, the chair features motorized rotation and pitch to move you through cinematic VR experiences, and haptic feedback to help you feel them. Twenty units will be on display at the festival from March 10th – 14th, and you can sign up to see it through an official website. You can also just turn up on the day, though expect a queue.
This isn’t actually the first VR experience to involve Cruise; back when Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation released in 2015 a VR experience accompanied the movie. Funnily enough this time you were hanging onto the outside of a plane (it had a rather elaborate setup), where gravity was very much working against you. Earlier today a full Mission: Impossible VR game was announced, though it’s not yet clear if Cruise will feature in it.
IMAX is closely aligning itself with VR experiences like this right now, and is even creating its own cameras to shoot this type of content as well as funding it. The company sees location-based VR experiences forming a big part of the industry, which is why it’s opened up its own cinematic VR arcade of sorts in Los Angeles.
We had so much fun at the YCombinator Upverter Hackathon. I was honored to be part of “the beatles” team  (Sam Cuttriss, Josh Cardenas, Jason Appelbaum, Lauren Elliott, Tish Shute, Otto Leichliter III & IV) that produced the prize winning IoToaster. Rick Merritt did an awesome write up in EE Times, Slideshow: Y Combinator hackathon’s prize-winning designs. If you want to hear more about hardware startups shaping play with connected stuff, I hope you will stop by, Parsing Reality: Shaping Play with Connected Stuff, Tuesday March 12th, 12.30pm -1.30pm, Raddison Town Lake Ballroom, Austin, SXSW 2013. I’m delighted to join, Adam Wilson Founder, Chief Software Architect Orbotix, Dave Bisceglia Co-Founder & CEO The Tap Lab, Phu Nguyen Founder Romotive Inc to talk about shaping play with connected stuff – more details here.
“An Internet Toaster, two pair of faux Google glasses and two novel electronic gloves emerged from a hackathon organized by Upverter and hosted by Y Combinator. SAN JOSE, Calif. – Imagine sending an Instagram to your Internet toaster and printing it—on whole wheat or white bread. Imagine creating your own vision for a variant of Google’s Project Glass.
Those were among the 32 projects from more than 130 designers at a recent all-day event organized by Upverter.com and hosted by Y Combinator, a startup incubator in Mountain View, Calif.
Winners took home iPads, Pebble watches, Arduino kits and Raspberry Pi boards after dedicating about 10 hours of their Saturday to hacking on their best ideas. Some took with them hopes of products that could make it to the market or new-formed teams that could be the heart of a new startup. Others just had a good time.
Here’s a look at some of the winners.
Two teams worked on variants of Google’s $1,500 glasses-mounted computer. One team (above) used laser-cut medium-density fibreboard and embedded LEDs that could indicate when the wearer faced north. Another team (below) created Prism, a more thorough knock-off of Google’s concept complete with an embedded display and gesture recognition.
Photos courtesy of Kuy Mainwaring and Sam Wurzel of Octopart.
Printing on whole wheat or white
The IO Toaster (above) is sort of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of social electronics. It’s an Internet-connected combo toaster/printer that creators say can “bring the cloud to your breakfast.â€
The team adapted code from an LED matrix to control heat transmission down to the pixel level. They hope to present the device at the Augmented World Expo at SXSW as well as at other hackathons and hardware meetups.
The team included Sam Cuttriss, Josh Cardenas, Tish Shute, Lauren Elliott, Jason Appelbaum and both Otto Leichliter III and IV.
Peripherals and apps for the IO Toaster
The potential for the IO Toaster is great, said team members who brainstormed spin off products including:
FaceToast: Your friends’ Facebook status messages pop up automatically at breakfast.
Instagram Toast: Patented sepia tone filters add artistic textures to photos (above). Too grainy?
Toasted, Augmented Reality: Toast revitalizes boring QR codes (below).
Pop Tweets: Twitter toaster pastries. Follow your favorite fruit flavor.
FlipToast: Create an edible FlipBook with a carb-hinge technology in development.
Angry Toast: A hyper sling and gimble add on hurls slices at kids trying to leave for school without breakfast.
Touch screen toaster displays
Designers of the IO Toaster created this animation to show the romantic possibilities of their product.
Grand prize was a real grabber
The Tactilus is a haptic feedback glove for interacting with 3-D environments. A series of cables applies pressure to the wearer’s fingers to resist their motion in response to pushing against a virtual object.
Meet the Tactilus team
Jack Minardy had the idea to create a haptic glove. Five strangers who stopped by his table and liked the idea became a virtual team for the day, bringing Tactilus to life. They are (from left) Matt Bigarani, Nick Bergseng, Jack Minardy, Neal Mueller and Tom Sherlock. Not pictured: Oren Bennett.
Fitness glove has something up its sleeve
The Body API is a comprehensive metric-gathering device that gives the sports enthusiast a big data boost.
Baby gets a robo rocker
One team prototyped its invention for an automatic baby rocker using an electric can opener. Parents can control it visa a mobile app.
And other winners were…
At the end of the day, 30 groups took two minutes each to pitch their hack (below), some of which judges pitches in the circular file. A handful of others got various levels of recognition.
The winner in the most marketable category was the DIYNot, a plug that fits between your recharging device and the socket to turn off the two amp energy flow anytime you want. The Window Blind Controller, a clip on device that keeps streetlight out in the night and lets sunlight in during the day, got a nod from judges.
Judges also liked the Walkmen, an ultrasound virtual walking stick with haptic feedback for guiding disabled people. A team from Electric Imp got the Corporate Shill Award for a networked dispenser that spits out M&Ms in response to tweets. Another group added Wi-Fi links to home switches opening a circuit for new kinds of remote controls—and pranks.
From here to China and back
Zack Hormuth of Upverter.com (left), organizer for the event, helps hacker Matt Sarnoff. Upverter led a hackathon at Facebook’s Open Compute Summit. It also has hackathons in the works for New York City and Shenzhen.”
