VR Video – Page 11 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

November 10, 2016

New YouTube VR App is Completely Re-designed for Daydream

YouTube has launched a new app to coincide with today’s Daydream launch, one that’s built for virtual reality headsets and designed from the ground up to work with Google’s ‘next gen’ mobile VR platform.

Immersive video and VR film has played a significant role in mobile virtual reality content, a trend that began with Google’s blindingly successful low-cost VR initiative Cardboard, later being taken up by the Oculus engineered Samsung Gear VR. But although you can view content via the standard apps and web channels in VR headsets right now, the functionality has always felt less than integral and mostly ‘tacked on’ and half-baked.

With the importance of VR video content in mind and the release today of Google’s flagship Daydream headset ‘View’, YouTube have launched their latest app, “built from the ground up and optimized for VR”. Appearing on Daydream first, the new application works with Google’s first flagship, Daydream certified Pixel phones and the new Daydream controller and will also bring forward voice search features, particularly handy when immersed.

YouTube’s press release however was heavily focused on the creative and content possibilities for videos to be viewed on Daydream. The company seems to be broadening its experimentation with different content types, some of which build on formats largely popularized by its service. You can spend time touring beauty vlogger Meredith Foster’s apartment should you so wish, join Tastemade for VR cooking videos and watch breaking news in VR with HuffPost RYOT. You’ll also be able to watch standard videos on a virtually projected ‘cinema’ screen too.

All of the above incidentally are producing videos in full stereoscopic 3D at 4k resolution or above, so while video quality is still not at the level I personally would like to see immersive video aspiring too (see my thoughts on this here) it does feel as if there’s an effort on Google’s part to set a benchmark for immersion with video on Daydream. This is a good thing and having an official app which delivers a VR focused experience from that good quality content is a big deal for VR in general, not just Daydream.

For initial impressions on how Google’s Daydream platform, the new View headset and YouTube VR stack up in our review here.

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November 6, 2016

Watch: Adobe Shows Off In-VR Premiere Video Editor ‘Project Clover’

Adobe have down off their solution for editing immersive 360 VR videos within VR itself as they took to the stage at their annual ‘MAX’ event last week to demonstrate their prototype in-VR editor for Premiere, ‘CloverVR’.

Adobe Premiere is almost ubiquitous in video editing circles, from hobbyist user all the way through to industry professional. Who better than Adobe then to try and tackle the not insubstantial issues and challenges facing video editors as they’re increasingly asked to tackled immersive video, shot to be viewed in VR?

The challenges are multitudinous of course and with such an early and developing format of film making (already split into various sub formats), but the primary problem is the same a developers working on VR games and applications – you need to be ‘in’ the experience to understand and from there build or edit it.

Adobe is clearly acutely aware of these issues and are keen to tackle them, so they demonstrated a short sneak peek session at the annual Adobe MAX conference in Las Vegas last week. Adobe’s Steven DiVerdi took to the stage armed with an Oculus Rift and two Oculus Touch controllers to who off ‘Project CloverVR’, a prototype in-VR video editor for Adobe Premiere which allows the assembly of 360 video from within virtual reality.

DiVerdi aptly demonstrates first the issues with snipping 360 video in the traditional 2D toolset. If you’ve ever looked at a 360 YouTube video outside of a VR headset you’ll know the problem too, that they don’t make a lot of sense to the human eye. Providing context and direction in 360 videos then becomes challenging as the editor has to continually preview the video within VR to ensure things are making sense. Functionally, CloverVR does indeed look early, but DiVerdi showed off a feature to help tackle that issue of context but flipping between two adjoining scenes to from a preview interface overlaid onto the active video view.

No word was given as to the timeline for CloverVR appearing in products we can actually use and it certainly looked like the interface has some way to go to match the overwhelming plethora of options in the standard Premiere interface. But, should Adobe manage to pull off a motion controlled, intuitive UI they may reduce headaches for the growing number of VR videe editors out there.

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October 19, 2016

Samsung’s Gear 360 Finally Comes To More Retailers This Week

With Facebook’s compelling social VR experience incoming, you might want to be looking into a 360 camera in the near future. Fortunately, Samsung’s offering has just become more widely available.

The electronics giant has this week announced that its Gear 360 panoramic camera is now on sale at retailers around the US including AT&T, Best Buy, Sprint, U.S. Cellular, and Verizon Wireless. Previously the company had only sold the device at select events and through its own online store but kept it away from third-party retailers despite putting a big spotlight on it at its developer conference earlier in the year. The device costs $349, making it one of the more affordable 360 degree cameras on the market right now. Those in the UK can also currently pick it up from Samsung directly.

Gear 360 consists of two 15 megapixel fisheye lenses that stitch together to create spherical, immersive videos and images. They capture video at a resolution of 3840 x 1920 at 30fps. Any content captured with the device can be viewed with Samsung’s Gear VR headset and on its more recent smartphones (not including the now deceased Galaxy Note 7). But this type of content could soon have an important function for Oculus Rift owners too.

Earlier this month at the Oculus Connect 3 developer conference Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showcased new VR features for the social networking site that allow users to put on a Rift, pick up a pair of Oculus Touch controllers and then meet with friends as virtual avatars surrounded by 360 degree images and videos. Friends could easily swap between locations they were visiting, jumping to an image of Mars, the Facebook offices, and even a video of Zuckerberg’s home.

We don’t know when these features will be available to Rift users, but having your own 360 camera so that you can decide where to visit might not be such a bad idea.

October 15, 2016

Steam to Get High Quality Adaptive 360 Video Streaming Service

360 video is coming to Steam and it looks as if Valve are aiming high in terms of the quality they’re aiming to deliver to consumer VR headsets.

There’s an op-ed piece I’ve been meaning to write for some time around the current technical state of play with regards to 360 video. Leaving aside the contentious (and ultimately pointless) debate over whether immersive video content counts as ‘real’ virtual reality – despite all of the format’s technical limitations, I think it has significant potential.

However, after years of writing about so-called groundbreaking 360 camera rigs and the rise of numerous so-called groundbreaking VR video startups, there is still not a single way to consume 360 video on your VR headset at the level of quality which I think would allow that potential to blossom. Not to put too fine a point on it, 360 video quality sucks right now and it’s time for the companies who have planted their flag on this particular patch of VR frontier land to step up and deliver on the promise.

Enter Valve, stage left.

At last week’s Steam Dev Days event, Valve revealed that it was to bring its own solution for the delivery of immersive video content to its content portal Steam. It’s partnering with video streaming specialists Pixvana and Akamai to deliver an adaptive 360 video streaming system that’s capable of delivering what it claims to be 8k-10k resolution video quality via the same bandwidth as a 1080p stream.

“But that’s impossible!” you may be exclaiming, and you’d be right. Pixvana’s technology uses adaptive bitrates for video delivery, depending on the user’s direction of gaze. In other words, it drops the quality of the video stream for the angles you’re not currently looking at. Turn your head to look at a segment and the bitrate is upped to deliver a much higher quality image. This is how the technology achieves the “10k over 1080p bandwidth” claim – and it’s an interesting approach, one which Facebook and others are exploring too.

The system is called FOVAS, short for Field of View Adaptive Streaming, and was developed by Pixvana and is encapsulated in its Open Projection Format, a way to facilitate the above adaptive streaming techniques using existing video compression standards (i.e. AVC / H.264).

You can already get a taste for what Valve’s 360 video service will look like too as Pixvana released a technology preview app onto Steam a couple of weeks ago. I took a look myself to see how the quality claims held up. I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. Indeed, the looping video clips demonstrated very good detail and a refreshing lack of compression artefacts. Once you turn your head to look at another angle, the compressed video outside of your previous viewport was then clearly pixelated and poor in quality before the system upped the bitrate and resolution again with the image becoming pleasingly detailed again. The transition is sudden however and a little jarring, but once it had transitioned there was no doubting it’s one of the best quality streaming VR video I’ve yet seen.

It’s early days for the application of course, but if Valve’s implementation of the technology can smooth out and quicken those transitions, we may finally see the viable delivery mechanism for high quality VR videos I’ve been searching for. As to when Valve’s 360 streaming will come online, it’s not yet clear. As no press was allowed at the Steam Dev Days event we were unable to glean any more details. We’ll of course update you of we learn anything further.

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October 9, 2016

Blade Runner Sequel to Release October 2017 in VR via Oculus

The long rumoured sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult sci-fi classic Blade Runner is coming soon and it’s coming to virtual reality via Oculus.

There’s a good chance if you’re reading this, you’re pretty familiar with Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford. The movie, received somewhat coldly by critics and audiences on its release in 1982, has since become a revered classic of the genre and fans of the film have longed for a sequel ever since.

Now, not only has the follow up been officially confirmed as ‘happening’, the new film, entitled Blade Runner 2049, will show up in October next year and it’s being produced for virtual reality too!

There’s not much detailed information out there right now, but according to Ars Technica, Harrison Ford will reprise his role as gruff ‘Blade Runner’ (special detectives, dedicated to hunting down and eliminating rogue androids known as ‘replicants’) Deckard, with new blood being injected in the shape of Ryan Reynolds. Disappointingly, Ridley Scott will not be at the helm of the new film, with Director Denis Villeneuve – who brought us the incredible thriller Sicario last year – is stepping in to bring the film to life. Further good news is that the original writer (although, Blade Runner geeks will know there’s some contention on that front) Hampton Fancher returns to pen the sequel.

As for the virtual reality aspect, it’s unclear exactly how that will play out. All we know right now is that the film will debut both in theatres and via Oculus’ VR platforms, which may mean both Rift and Samsung Gear VR, and that Oculus will release more details later on.

It’s an interesting move on the part of the filmmakers, and perhaps a risky one too. However, if they were intentionally picking a movie that would appeal to VR enthusiasts around the globe, this is probably one of the better picks.

Feature image courtesy Alcon Entertainment and Warner Bros via Ars Technica

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October 3, 2016

Watch HypeVR’s Impressive Volumetric 360 3D Video In Action

HypeVR may be poised to alter the 360 video landscape with their depth-mapped, volumetric video system that lets VR users move in, out and around the captured scene. Watch Fox’s Futurist Ted Schilowitz as he gives one of the first real time demonstrations of the technology.

We’ve followed HypeVR for some time now, first reporting on their incredible looking LiDAR powered, depth mapping camera rig back in early 2015 and once again just recently, after the company released the first ever look at footage captured with its technology.

HypeVR’s proprietary system uses 14 Red Dragon, 6k Video Cameras rig-mounted to capture a 360 degree field of view. Recording at 60Hz currently (with 90Hz planned) the definition of the resulting footage, once stitched would probably be impressive enough in and of itself, but there’s more. HypeVR’s rig is extended to use a Velodyne LiDAR scanner, capable of capturing up to 700,000 points of 3D depth information every second at a range of up to 100M.

The practical upshot of all this is that, the resulting data captured allows any recorded scene to be reassembled and ‘played’ with the scene able to respond in real time to a viewer’s movements – this means parallax within a video and even the ability to move in and out of the scene.

The HypeVR team have just released a video featuring 20th Century Fox’s Futurist Ted Schilowitz, who as it happens co-founded RED, the company which builds the cameras featured on HypeVR’s rig. Schilowitz holds a small tablet, with a scene apparently captured using HypeVR technology playing on it. As he begins moving around, the video (a looping coastal scene) can be seen to respond to his shifts in position, with both parallax and advancement / retreat in and out of the scene displayed.

It’s impressive stuff and the applications for virtual reality video are blindingly obvious. However, with every apparent breakthrough, especially one still largely unseen by the media or public, questions remain. How is HypeVR’s likely vast quantities of data reassembled in such a way as to be transferable and rendered on consumer devices? Is the scene ultimately distilled to a series of simplified geometric surfaces, extrapolated from the LiDAR depth-sensing information and will therefore look poor quality under close inspection?

We’ll have to wait to find out, but it does seem as if HypeVR – up until now perhaps a victim of their own choice of company names – is nearly ready to show the world what they can really do.

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September 29, 2016

Pixvana Reveals 10K VR Video Player and Publishing Platform ‘SPIN’

Pixvana, a cloud-based VR video company, today announced their much awaited solution for publishing and streaming 360 video, a platform that promises to deliver up to 10K resolution streaming playback from the cloud to your VR devices. They’re calling it Pixvana SPIN.

In a mission to make 360 video less terrible, the Seattle-based company has developed a number of technologies since they came out of stealth last December. Their linchpin technology: a field-of-view adaptive streaming (FOVAS) technology that promises to both increase video quality and reduce bandwidth for 360 video, something that has stymied the medium and frustrated its viewers long before Facebook and YouTube started supporting the format. Even 4K video spread across a 360-degree sphere leaves much to imagination.

With Pixvana SPIN, the company claims they can deliver up to 100 megapixel quality within the user’s field-of-view while cutting data delivered by up to 70% overall. Company co-founder and CEO Forest Key says “FOVAS is like swapping your old standard definition set for a 4K TV.”

spin-resolution-comparison — image courtesy of Pixvana Inc.

Following this technique, which segments the video into multiple tiled views, the company is simultaneously pushing an Open Projection Format (OPF) that will index user-created video streams into the correct, multi-tiled format optimized via their SPIN publisher. The visualization below shows a 10K 360 SPIN video encoded with 30 individual tiles. When the viewer moves their head to a new part of the video, the stream is “seamlessly switched so that the highest possible quality image is presented, at a greatly reduced bandwidth.”

Pixvana maintains that a preview version of their SPIN Player will be available soon, with the publisher close to follow in early 2017. As ‘platform agnostic’ player, we’re sure to see apps available for headsets such as Samsung Gear VR, HTC Vive, Google Daydream, and Oculus Rift.

The SteamVR compatible app is slated to release on October 8th.

“Pixvana has shown the best-looking VR video we’ve seen to date,” said Valve’s Sean Jenkin. “An open standard for 360/FOVAS content which scales to high-quality VR headsets and lets creators of all sizes publish anywhere without requiring proprietary tools or formats is great for consumers and content creators and reflects Valve’s commitment to an open VR ecosystem. We look forward to making Pixvana’s technology and compatible content available on Steam.”

Pixvana came out of stealth with their announcement of a $6 million seed round back in December led by Madrona Venture group with participation from Vulcan Capital and other angel investors. Company founders come from senior product and engineering leadership roles at Apple, Adobe, Microsoft and Lucasfilm.

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September 1, 2016

Crazy Camera Rig Captures Volumetric VR Video with 14 Cameras and LiDAR

HypeVR is working to bring live-action volumetric 360 video to VR. The company’s crazy camera rig, built to capture the necessary data, is a mashup of high-end cameras and laser scanning tech.

HypeVR recently shot a brief demonstration of the output of their rig, which they say can capture ‘volumetric’ VR video that allows users to move around in a limited space within the video, similar to Lytro’s Light field capture which we saw the other day. Traditional 360 video capture solutions don’t allow any movement, effectively locking the user’s head to one point in 3D space, reducing comfort and immersion.

The HypeVR rig used to capture the footage appears almost impractically large; consisting of 14 high-end Red cameras and a Velodyne LiDAR scanner, HypeVR says the rig can “simultaneously capture all fourteen 6K [Red cameras] at up to 90fps and a 360 degree point cloud at 700,000 points per second.”

See Also: Inside ‘Realities’ Jaw-droppingly Detailed Photogrammetric VR Environments — **See Also:** Inside ‘Realities’ Jaw-droppingly Detailed Photogrammetric VR Environments

With similar capture approaches we’ve seen in the past, the video data is used to ‘texture’ the point cloud data, essentially creating a 3D model of the scene. With that 3D data piped into an engine and played back frame-by-frame, users can not only see live-action motion around them, but also move their head through 3D space within the scene, allowing for much more natural and comfortable viewing.

Fortunately, HypeVR says that this massive camera platform is not the only option for capturing volumetric VR video. The company’s purportedly patent pending capture method is camera agnostic, and can be applied to smaller and more affordable rigs, which HypeVR says are in development.

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