Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
Star Wars Battlefront II managed to top YouTube's list of the most popular games of E3 2017, beating out FIFA and Call of Duty. Electronic Arts had three other games crack the top 10, including Anthem.
The post ‘Star Wars Battlefront II’ was YouTube’s most-viewed game of E3 appeared first on Digital Trends.
360-degree videos are wonderful – they give you a full panoramic experience, despite not even having to be there. Though, it’s not always that easy to figure out where to look. Should be watch a band perform on stage, or should you look at that one guy just behind the camera who keeps looking at it. Well, YouTube are providing new insights to their creators, who will now be able to see where people are looking while watching their 360-degree videos.
Creators will be able to view a heat-map of where people are looking for all 360-degree videos over 1,000 views. Using this information, content creators should be able to figure out what people are attracted to looking at in 360 videos, and even curate the experience to ensure their focus gaze is set in the right area.
Currently YouTube’s 360-degree videos can be watched with a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD), by using YouTube’s Google Play or App Store app, or even using your mouse in your browser.
YouTube aren’t just giving creators indirect information – they’re also giving advice directly. A few helpful tips on optimising 360-degree videos for their platform, with advice such as viewers spend 75% of the time facing in the “front 90-degrees of a video,” so they advise to focus on the front view. Also, YouTube suggests creators use markers of indicators so users will know where to look to see the most interesting imagery.
This can only be a good thing for 360-degree video content. The extra insight should help creators customise their editing for the medium, hopefully bringing up the overall quality of videos for VR fans to watch. For more on 360-degree video and all the latest VR news, make sure to stay on VRFocus.
Oh, what to do while waiting for a microwave to cook your peanut-butter-topped onion. Thankfully, bonkers British inventor and YouTube star Colin Furze has come up with a solution.
The post Bonkers inventor Colin Furze turns a microwave into a video game console appeared first on Digital Trends.
Celebrate Thursday and the approaching weekend with the latest edition of the VRTV roundup covering all the hottest news from the past seven days. This week sees some news from Microsoft, Google and Oculus.
The last week has seen details of the upcoming updates and enhancements to Google’s Daydream platform which is incorporating social features like YouTube co-watching, plus Microsoft researchers producing a prototype of AR glasses that don’t look silly. Oculus is also working on an update for Gear VR that will bring in a new dashboard and also an upgrade for Oculus room-scale support.
Check out the full video recap below.
During the second day of the Google I/O conference Director of Product Management at Google Mike Jazayeri spoke about Google Daydream while Erin Teague, Product Manager for the YouTube virtual reality (VR) team came on to discuss the video developments.
Teague spoke of trying to make YouTube feel natural in a VR environment, and also about how valuable the YouTube community is. She said that users wanted to share experiences with community, as such there was a need to bring that community to VR. So, a new feature rolling out soon for the Daydream YouTube app will be the ability to co-watch YouTube videos. Users will be able to have their avatars inhabiting the same virtual space as other users, able to comment on what they are seeing with other users in the same space and customise the avatar appearance.With a click it will be possible join in to watch a video alongside other fans. The presentation used the example of the Gorillaz video, where fans can join in a ‘virtual front row seat’.
Jazayeri said that Google’s goal with the Daydream was towards bringing high performance smartphone VR to consumers. Since the launch of the Daydream eight Daydream-ready devices have come on to the market, with more due out from LG, Motorla and Asus, along with the support that will shortly be introduced to the Samsung Galaxy S8.
Yesterday Google’s big VR announcement centred around its standalone headset reveal, with two new devices set to arrive later this year from HTC and Lenovo that wouldn’t require smartphones or PC’s. These would feature the new Daydream 2.0 platform that includes support of Google Cast.
It’s not currently known exactly when the new Daydream YouTube app will launch, but VRFocus will keep you updated on news regarding it and other updates from Google I/O.
With Google Assistant coming to the iPhone, the company hopes to kill off Siri and wants to ‘see’ inside your home as it reiterates its AI-first approach
There were whoops and cheers from developers as Google announced the incremental ways it is strengthening its grip on many aspects of people’s lives at its annual developer conference, Google I/O.
There were no jaw-dropping major product launches nor executives proclaiming their utopian vision of the future (ahem, Mark Zuckerberg). Instead there was a showcase of features, powered by artificial intelligence, designed to make people more connected – and more reliant on Google.
Continue reading...
At Sundance this year, I had a chance to catch up with a couple of representatives from Google to talk about what’s happening on the YouTube VR platform with 360 videos. I talked with Jamie Byrne, YouTube’s Director of Global Creator & Enterprise Partnerships as well as Julia Hamilton Trost, Google VR’s Business Development & Content Partnerships.
We talked about the YouTube VR application, what they’re doing to do to empower content creators, how they see 360 video as a gateway into higher-end VR, and some of the potential future to add more volumetric and interactive elements to the YouTube platform in the future.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Here are a number of 360 videos that were mentioned in this interview:
The Unboxing Time Machine – NES 1985
Rhomaleosaurus: Back to Life in Virtual Reality #PreviouslyOnEarth
The Dropper – A Minecraft 360° Video
Meredith Foster giving a 360 tour of her apartment
New York Times is doing a Daily 360 video
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
The post YouTube VR Wants to Find the Next Billion Dollar Genre That Hasn’t Been Created Yet appeared first on Road to VR.
Es ist eine der wichtigsten Plattformen für 360-Grad-Videos mit einer großen Menge an Inhalten, die man über seine jeweilige VR-Brille betrachten. Das Problem ist oft noch die Qualität. Und die will Google jetzt verbessern.
Das 2005 gegründete Videoportal YouTube gehört seit 2006 zu Google. Und das Suchmaschinen-Unternehmen aus Mountain View in Kalifornien hat diese Woche angekündigt, dass die zuständigen Abteilungen für YouTube und Google Daydream zukünftig eng zusammenarbeiten werden. Deren Ziel ist es, die Qualität der VR-Videos zu verbessern. Das ergibt durchaus Sinn. Denn Youtube ist eine der wichtigsten, wenn nicht sogar die wichtigste Plattform für VR-Videoinhalte. Und Google möchte seine Plattform Daydream-Plattform weiter ausbauen. Zumal der Start für die Daydream nicht optimal verlief.
40 Minuten verbringt laut Google ein Daydream-Nutzer pro Woche in der virtuellen Realität – hauptsächlich um dabei 360-Grad-Videos anzusehen. Diese Zeit wolle man deutlich steigern, aber das geht nur mit qualitativ hochwertigem Content. Konkret soll es dabei um die Projection gehen, die auf die atmosphärische Abbildung bezieht, die im rectangular layout dargestellt wird. Oder anderes ausgedrückt: Die Darstellung im YouTube-Fenster, was man direkt im VR-Headset betrachten kann.
Seit dem Start der VR-Videos in YouTube arbeitet die Firma mit equirectangular projection. Dabei werden die Pixel ober- und unterhalb des Bildausschnittes am qualitativ hochwertigsten gerendert, während in der Mitte des Bildes eine niedrigere Pixel-Qualität dargestellt wird. Der Grund ist einfach, denn diesen Bildabschnitt betrachtet der Nutzer durchschnittlich am wenigsten. Jetzt hat Google ein System entwickelt, das sich equi-angular cubemaps nennt und ein konstanteres und damit besseres Bild verspricht.
Nähere Details über diesen Prozess hat Google auf seinem Blog veröffentlicht. Auch wenn das Ergebnis bei Weitem noch nicht perfekt ist, so ist es sicherlich ein Schritt in die richtige Richtung, der viele YouTube-Nutzer erfreuen wird. YouTube-Videos können mit sehr vielen VR-Brillen betrachtet werden. Dazu gehört unter anderem auch das Playstation-VR-Headset. Wobei die Qualität schwanken kann.
(Quelle: uploadvr.com)
Der Beitrag YouTube verbessert VR-Videos zuerst gesehen auf VR∙Nerds. VR·Nerds am Werk!
YouTube offers thousands of hours of content for your VR headset with its 360 degree videos, but the massive amount of data these clips require means they often show up blurry. Google is working to fix that.
The search engine giant this week announced that its YouTube and Daydream divisions are working together as part of a new series looking at how to improve the quality of VR video. It makes sense; YouTube is one of if not the biggest providers of VR video content in the world and Google’s Daydream mobile VR ecosystem features a dedicated app for watching those videos.
This week, the company is talking about projection, which refers to mapping spherical content into the rectangular layout that you’ll see either in a YouTube window or through the limits of your own field of view inside a VR headset.
Since launch in 2015, YouTube has been using equirectangular projection, which renders pixels best at the top and bottom of an image, where a user normally isn’t looking, and has lower quality pixels closer towards the center of the screen, where they usually are looking. After comparing saturation of pixels with cubemaps, Google has come up with what it calls equi-angular cubemaps, which gives a more consistent image.
A detailed run through is available on the Google blog, but the image above shows you some improvement, however marginal. Still, the company says this project method offers “better results” and “more efficient use of resources”.
Though the results are far from perfect, it’s great to see that companies are working to resolve VR video’s blur problem. YouTube is available across a range of VR headsets, including Sony’s PlayStation VR (PSVR), but the quality of the videos can often deter people from spending much time watching them. News that YouTube is doing something about that will come as a big relief to fans of the platform.
The world is used to watching videos on YouTube and depending on bandwidth, altering the resolution to get a steady stream, regardless of quality. For immersive 360-degree content however that’s not as easy. While poor internet speeds can ruin virtual reality (VR) viewing, low resolutions can also destroy immersion and make content an unwatchable mess. So in a joint effort between the YouTube and Daydream teams, they’ve been working on new techniques to solve the issue, one of which is Equi-Angular Cubemaps (EAC).
In a new series of blog postings, Google VR will be taking an in-depth look at improving VR experiences, and with immersive video gaining popularity as it becomes more widely available the company has chosen to start there.
So what are Equi-Angular Cubemaps and how do they help improve 360-degree content? 360-degree videos require a significant amount of pixels to create a decent experience, ideally being 60 pixels per degree of immersive content to match human visual acuity. But due to current device capabilities and internet speeds this isn’t generally possible, instead clever projection methods are needed.
There’s Equirectangular Projection, where latitudes and longitudes are used to form a square grid, but as Chip Brown, Staff Software Engineer, Daydream, explains: ‘when used for video transmission, it has serious problems. First, the poles get a lot of pixels, and the equator gets relatively few.’ Then you’ve got Cube Maps, this deforms a sphere into a cube which can then be unfolded. “This is an improvement over equirectangular projections, but it still causes substantial variation in pixel density,” explains Brown. “The problem is that the centers of the cube faces are close to the sphere, while the corners are further away.”
This is where Equi-Angular Cubemaps come in. “The traditional cubemap has samples of varying length depending on the sample’s location on the cube face. EAC is specifically constructed to keep these lengths equal, creating uniformly allocated pixels,” said Brown. “The EAC formula is mathematically precise in 2D, but only an approximation of an equal angle pixel distribution in 3D, albeit a pretty good approximation with manageable distortion.”
As you can see from the image above, what this means is a higher quality video for consumers creating a far more engaging experience.
YouTube engineers haven’t stopped there, they’ve also developed a Projection Independent Mesh, which they hope will eventually become a widely agreed upon industry standard.
“A Projection Independent Mesh describes the projection by including a 3D mesh along with its texture mapping in the video container. The video rendering software simply renders this mesh as per the texture mapping specified and does not need to understand the details of the projection used,” said software engineer Anjali Wheeler. “Some 360-degree cameras do not capture the entire field of view. For example, they may not have a lens to capture the top and bottom or may only capture a 180-degree scene. Our proposal supports these cameras and allows replacing the uncaptured portions of the field of view by a static geometry and image.”
Android already benefits from EAC projection streamed using a projection independent mesh and the techniques will be coming soon to iOS and desktop.
To keep up to date on Google’s latest advancements in VR, keep reading VRFocus.