When I was at the GDC VR Mixer, Jim Preston struck up a conversation about his concerns about privacy in VR. He works at FOVE which is making a VR headset with eye-tracking, but wanted to speak to me on his own behalf about some of the deeper philosophical questions and conceptual frameworks around the types of intimate data that will become available to VR headsets. As more and more biometric data streams are integrated into VR there a lot of complicated and complex ethical questions that he thinks will take the entire VR community needs to figure out.
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Preston says that VR is challenging the long-standing enlightenment model of mind-body dualism, and that VR is able to do a sort of “redirected thinking” in being able completely control all aspects of someone’s else’s reality. This is a lot of power to put into the hands of performance-based marketing companies who have an extraordinary amount of data about our private lives; he has concerns that this data could start to be used to drive consumer behaviors in unconscious ways.
The technological roadmap for VR includes integrations with new biometric data streams including eye tracking, facial tracking, galvanic skin response, sensing of emotional states, our voices interactions, and perhaps even EEG brainwave data. This data has typically had tight privacy controls either within the context of medical applications or market research that requires explicit consent, but it’s being captured within the context of an attention-driven consumer market where there many other vectors of private data that have been collected and connected to your personal identity.
Here are some of open questions around the future of privacy in VR:
Do we need to evolve the business models in order to sustain VR content creation in the long-term?
If not then what are the tradeoffs of privacy in using the existing ad-based revenue streams that are based upon a system of privatized surveillance that we’ve consented to over time?
Should biometric data be classified as medical information and protected under HIPPA protections?
What is a conceptual framework for what data should be private and what should be public?
What type of transparency and controls should users expect from companies?
Should companies be getting explicit consent for the type of biometric data that they to capture, store, and tie back to our personal identities?
If companies are able to diagnose medical conditions from these new biometric indicators, then what is their ethical responsibility of reporting this to users?
Preston has a nuanced view of what VR is going to enable in that he thinks that it’s not going to be either a total dystopian or utopian future, but that our future is going to be complicated and complex. Much like chess teams of humans & AI are able to beat any other AI program, this type of cooperation between humans and machines are going to enable all sorts of new amazing capabilities while also introducing new challenging problems.
The future integration of biometric data into immersive technologies will being an array of complicated and complex questions that go beyond what any single company or individual can figure out, but Preston says that this is something that the VR community as a collective should talk about and attempt to answer some of these open questions.
I’d like to keep this conversation going too; I’ll soon be featuring some more information from biometric experts from the Experiential Technology Conference on the Voices of VR Podcast as well as an interview with Oculus’ Nate Mitchell.
Six Flags New England’s iconic roller coaster Mind Eraser is celebrating its 20th year of operation with an augmented reality (AR)/mixed reality (MR) revamp courtesy of Six Flags partner Samsung.
Mind Eraser is being transformed into Galactic Attack Virtual Reality Coaster by the addition of Samsung Gear VR headsets as well as getting an upgrade with a brand new restraint system for a more comfortable ride.
Riders of the coaster will don a headset, in this case a Gear VR that uses pass-through technology so riders can see the world around them, as well as the MR virtual content. Riders will be able to see a heads-up display showing various stats such as ‘weapon status’ and a countdown clock which will tick down as the ride mounts the first lift hill. Then, as the ride car swoops down the high-speed drop, the experience changes into an immersive space battle, with the riders in the cockpit of a spaceship.
After zooming through the battle, the ride is brought into one of four bays, which equates to four different endings.
Six Flags have teamed up with Samsung before, previously using the Gear VR technology for The New Revolution VR coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Los Angeles, California. Similarly, in the UK, Merlin Entertainments-owned parks Alton Towers and Thorpe Park have utilised VR technology for their rides, Derren Brown’s Ghost Train at Thorpe Park, and Galactica at Alton Towers. Galatica is in fact also a re-branded coaster previously known as Air.
Use of MR/AR/VR is increasingly popular in all segments of the entertainment industry, from sports to movies and even toys.
VRFocus will keep you updated on new developments in these areas.
Disney announced today that a virtual reality (VR) tie-in to the recently released Beauty and the Beast live-action movie is being launched on the Oculus Rift with support for Oculus Touch.
The interactive VR experience is out now for the Oculus via the Disney Movies VR app. The experience, titled Beauty and the Beast: Lumiere’s Dress Rehearsal, allows the user to see the inside of Beast’s castle dining room as Lumiere and the other castle furniture prepares a special feast in Belle’s honour, complete with spinning plates and dancing cutlery.
Lumiere is being voiced by noted actor Ewan McGregor. Long-time Disney fans will be pleased to find out that McGregor does a performance of classic Disney song ‘Be Our Guest’ as part of the experience.
While Beauty and the Beast: Lumiere’s Dress Rehearsal currently only supports Oculus Rift, Gear VR users can watch a 360-degree trailer through the same app. Disney say that the full VR experience should be coming out for the Gear VR next month. If you don’t have either of those, head to Facebook to check it out.
The live-action version of the animated Disney classic Beauty and the Beast is out now in cinemas across the UK and the USA.
The Disney Movie VR app launched on Gear VR earlier this month, and today for Oculus Rift. With it, Disney fans will be able to immerse themselves in worlds themed on the company and its many franchises, including Marvel and Lucasfilm. Fans will also be able to dive into scenes from Disney movies and interact with some of their favourite characters.
VRFocus will keep you updated on Disney VR experience as they come in.
In a global society, it’s important that people learn about other countries and cultures from a young age. But what if you don’t have the resources required to travel long distances? The designers of WorldMapPortal think they might have the solution.
WorldMapPortal is an interactive augmented reality (AR) map that works with a smartphone app and a simple cardboard headset/viewer in order to present a way to travel all over the world by simply selecting a country.
An AR overlay goes over the map, allowing the user to change the viewpoint by simply moving where the smartphone camera is pointing. Looking at the map through the viewer allows users to see animated 3D characters and objects that are designed to model the real-life locations and people of that country. In addition to the AR overlay, the app comes with a selection of detailed VR videos of various significant locations around the world, complete with narration that offers details and history of each landmark.
The Kickstarter reward tiers range from the Early Bird Pack for $40 CAD, which will get backers a WorldMapPortal bundle of the Map itself, a VR viewer and the smartphone app. The top tier is the Mega Pack reward tier, costing $3,600 CAD which will get the backer 100 copies of the WorldMapPortal bundle, to be distributed to schools etc.
The designers are seeking $40,000 CAD to meet their goal. The campaign will end on 16th April, 2017. If the campaign succeeds, the team expect that distribution of the product will begin in July 2017.
Ever since HTC became involved in the virtual reality (VR) industry its been investing more whilst the smartphone business continues to languish. That trend appears to be continuing as recent reports confirm the company will be selling one of its Chinese manufacturing facilities to put the funds into VR.
Android Authority has reported that HTC will be selling a 114,000-square-meter (28-acre) factory in Shanghai, China, netting the company 630 million yuan (about $91 million USD).
While Focus Taiwan confirmed what HTC planned to use the money for, saying: ‘it plans to sell its phone manufacturing facility in Shanghai so that it can put more resources into its virtual reality (VR) business.’
This announcement follows another factory sale in December 2015 located in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, for $183 million. The smartphone manufacturer still has three production facilities in Taoyuan.
HTC has been one of the most vocal proponents of VR, instigating numerous investment channels, initiatives, promotions and more. There’s been Viveport and the new subscription service, Viveport M and the Viveport Developer Awards. The Vive X Accelerator Programme, and Viveport Arcade, a content management and distribution platform giving VR developers an end-to-end solution for monetizing their content at physical locations.
You’ve also got Vive Studios, the company’s own in-house software development team, and to finish it all off, the Global Virtual Reality Association (GVRA) – an international group of headset manufacturers aiming to promote the growth of the global VR industry.
There’s still a long way to go until HTC is likely to start recording decent profit from its VR investments, hopefully its on the right path.
For the latest HTC news from around the world, keep reading VRFocus.
HTC might not have a big western developers conference like Oculus does with Connect, but it’s planning a big show for China in just over a weeks’ time.
The Vive Ecosystem Conference 2017 is set to take place from March 27th – 28th in Shenzhen, China. HTC has told UploadVR that it’s planning some new announcements for the show, though we don’t have any specifics just yet. A keynote speech is set to take place on the first date of the show at 9:00 AM GMT+8 where, according to a rough translation of an invitation, the company will “announce new strategic cooperation and the latest initiatives to build the global VR ecosystem.”
Exactly what that means is up for speculation, but HTC is no stranger to strategic alliances in China and the rest of the world; it setup the VR Venture Capital Alliance (VRVCA) to bring together investors to fund VR startups and is working closely with others to establish VR within China. On the ecosystem side, it’s quite possible that we get an update on the new Vive Tracker add-on, which is rolling out to selected developers now and will be on sale soon. Don’t expect big new Vive games and experience to be revealed, then, but there could be some interesting announcements.
The second day of the event looks to be a more educational experience with seminars about the best practices for VR. There will be an experience area too where we’d expect attendees will get hands-on with the latest Vive demos.
We’ve reached out to HTC for more info about the event. We’re not sure if there will be a livestream though, if there is, it’s likely to all be in Chinese. Still, those that like to keep a close eye on the Vive ecosystem will want to pay attention to any news coming out of the event here.
OpenSim grids reported a net fall in both regions and active users this month, but the regions drop was due to one grid with server issues, and the active users drop was due to a couple of grids that had problems with their stats.
Overall, OpenSim lost 975 active users this month, with DreamNation, which had 559 actives last month, not reporting its active user numbers and Sinful moving to a new hosting provider. The Public World also suffered some server issues, resulting in a drop of more than 400 actives on that grid alone.
And the number of regions went down by 839 standard region equivalents, as Virtual Worlds Grid turned off the less-used servers to allow for a greater than usual load on its welcome regions. That led to a net drop of 2,380 regions on that grid alone.
Without these issues, both land area and active user numbers would have shown an increase this month.
Meanwhile, registered user numbers went up by 13,228, the highest gain in the last two years.
There are now 272 active grids, which represents a six percent increase or an additional 16 grids this month.
Party Destination Grid gained the highest number of registered users — 3661, but that’s only because they just made their grid public and we added their data to our list this month. They still had the registered users or most of them before becoming public. Kitely gained 2028 and InWorldz gained 1551 new registered users. All the rest had less than 500 new registered users with OSgrid closest at 452 and Island Oasis 328.
The number of hypergrid enabled regions, which reached a record high in January, fell by 700 regions this month.
Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)
OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region — compared to $300 a region for the same land in Second Life.
When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is: the busier, the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience… you get the idea.
The Party Destination Grid is on the most popular list for the first time. The grid, which had previously run in private mode, opened up to the public this month and we began tracking its stats.
As mentioned before, Sinful Grid and The Public World both saw a drop in active user numbers. The other biggest change on this list was that InWorldz lost 210 active users, though it retained its spot as the most popular grid.
InWorldz’ share of all active OpenSim users has fallen from a high of 40 percent in the summer of 2012 to its current low of just 15 percent. But the next-most-popular grid, OSgrid, still has a long ways to go before it catches up.
InWorldz also has the highest number of registered users of any grid, at 164,806, with OSgrid in second place at 115,300. InWorldz is also a grid that brings in a lot of new users. This month, it reported 1,551 new registrations, second only to Kitely with its 2,018 new users.
InWorldz is a closed commercial grid, meaning that users cannot teleport to other grids, go shopping on other grids, attend events there, join hypergrid groups, or send messages to friends on other grids. OSgrid and Kitely both allow their users to teleport to other grids.
In fact, many closed grids have either been moving to the hypergrid, losing users, or shutting down over the past few years. Today, non-InWorldz closed grids total just 1,526 active users, or about 4 percent of OpenSim’s active user base.
(Hypergrid Business Data.)
The hypergrid also offers more renting options for users, with average prices lower than on InWorldz, and some grids allow users to connect their own home-based regions for free. In fact, several grids offer free parcels or even entire regions to users. As a result, hypergrid-enabled grids currently account for more than 95 percent of all OpenSim land area.
The full list of all hypergrid-enabled grids, ranked by traffic numbers, can be found here.
Kitely Market now reaches 185 grids
Kitely’s online shopping platform, the Kitely Market, now exports to a total of 185 OpenSim grids. There are 9,104 products are listed on the market, groups into 17,429 variations. Out of these, 12,502 are exportable.
Growth in exportable and non-exportable content on the Kitely Market. (Kitely data.)
Ever since Kitely turned on the hypergrid export functionality, exportable content has been growing at a much faster rate than non-exportables, as merchants increasingly become comfortable to selling to the hypergrid.
VirTec Network sales down slightly
The total revenue for the 72 merchants using the VirTec vending network for the month was $475, a drop of 17 percent from last month.
InWorldz still had the highest number of merchants with 14 merchants, followed by DigiWorldz with 10 merchants, although Genesis Metaverse had the highest number of transactions with 195 transactions. InWorldz had 179 transactions while DigiWorldz had 90 transactions.
February spending, in US dollars, on individual grids. (VirTec data.)
Twelve more grids adopt Gloebits multi-grid currency
The number of grids that use the Gloebits currency on one or more regions has grown from three to 15 over the past month, Gloebits CEO Christopher Colosi told Hypergrid Business, and the list now includes OSgrid and DigiWorldz.
Some of the grids accepting Gloebits are listed on the Gloebits app discovery page.
“I expect to see a couple more pop up on the discovery page by the end of the week,” Colosi said.
For example, one grid which has recently deployed the currency is 3rd Life Grid, which now has two Gloebits shopping regions. Both local and hypergrid merchants can sell products on these regions. Creators from other grids can contact DJTommy Seetan to set them up with the shop, grid spokesman Gary Justus told Hypergrid Business.
The hypergrid address is 3rdlifegrid.com:8002:3rdlife Stores 3.
Sinful Grid has also added a shopping region named Sinful Grid Gloebit Mall just for Gloebit purchases. The grid is offering free stores, each with up to 400 prims.
The hypergrid address for the Gloebits Mall is login.sinfulgrid.com:8002:Sinful Grid Gloebit Mall.
Grids can opt to have the entire grid use the Gloebits currency, or enable individual regions. Other regions can have no currency at all, or a grid’s own currency. More info about Gloebits and how they work is here.
Total transactions, in US Dollars, and total users on the Gloebits platform. (Gloebit data.)
Gloebits processed about 100,000 Gloebits, the equivalent of about US $400, between January 28 and February 28, and this month is on track to process about 180,000 Gloebits, or $720, said Colosi.
In addition to more grids signing up, more users did as well. Gloebits had 200 people using the currency as of the end of 2016, and has more than doubled since then to 471.
ZanGrid Hypershopping I and II regions are also Gloebit-enabled. (Image courtesy ZanGrid.)
AviWorlds is back online, and back in the garage
After a short-lived experiment with getting hosting from a solid, reputable provider, AviWorlds is back in its garage after the owner failed to pay for their servers on time.
The grid has also changed its loginURI, to login.aviworlds.com:8002. A few regions are back online and the grid is open to visitors. There’s no website yet, but the Facebook page is back up.
The rest of the functionality will be built by this summer, grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business.
“Its not full power yet,” he said. “It has a few regions online until June, when I will go full power with ads, bill boards on the beach in Brazil and also building structure for the grid.”
And he still plans to give away 1,000 free regions.
“Only the ones that can build an entire region, knows how to build or can pay someone to build it for them will qualify for the free region,” he said. “The ones that cant build yet will get a plot 4,096 square meters with 937 prims already built for them with a home and all.”
The grid shut down earlier this month with no warning to residents. At first, because the social media accounts were also closed and Pomposelli could not be reached by anyone, we counted the grid as closed. But since it was up relatively quickly, and there was no official announcement of closing, we’re going to count it as a temporary outage instead of a full shutdown. That means that AviWorlds has closed up shot nine times, and is now in its tenth incarnation.
Public Grid is back online, has a new server
Public Grid, which had some server issues for a few days, is now back online and running, and most of the regions are back as well, according to a Saturday post. Owners of affected avatars may need to re-register. The loginURI has not changed and is still thepublicworld.de:8002 but users may need to double-check that their viewer settings are correct.
The grid has put in place a second server to avoid future problems but is testing everything on it before bringing it online, said the announcement.
Public Grid is now back online. (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)
Party Destination, PMGrid offering free land
Party Destination Grid, a closed grid that has been in testing for two years and opened to the public this year, is offering its first 100 regions for free to content creators, of which 50 regions are still left. Communities or schools can also claim free land for learning and teaching purposes.
Those who claim the free land are required to create content for the free region within four months. But users can also opt for a plot measuring 7400 sqm or a store if a region is too big for you to create and fill content, grid owner Aleš Moškon told Hypergrid Business.
Aleš Moškon
“We allow users to upload OAR or IAR files but first we all check with our own mechanism if everything is legal,” he said.
Once testing is done, the team will charge US $27 for a full region.
The grid is not hypergrid-enabled, but is currently working on setting up Kitely Market deliveries.
The lack of hypergrid access is due to security concerns, he said.
“As we all know hypergrid is not so great if it’s in the wrong hands,” he said. However, they have users from all over the world, he said.
Another grid which has recently announced a new free land offer is PM Grid, one of the oldest grids in OpenSim. The grid celebrated its ninth anniversary last month and is hypergrid-enabled.
The grid is offering free regions to builders and the land is given according to what the user wants to use it for, grid owner Bob Wellman told Hypergrid Business.
“I talk to them to see what they want build and try to, as far as I can, allocate enough land for that,” he said. “That could be a parcel a standard region or a large var region. The only proviso is use it or lose it.”
Sinful Grid has moved to DigiWorldz, a change that has come with some upgrades and new functionalities such as search and offline IM to email. Users need to update the viewer URL to loginsinfulgrid.com:8002 and migrate their account to the new service to change to the new control panel, Sinful Grid CEO Tony Moore told Hypergrid Business.
The grid has also posted new land prices, with a 15,000-prim region available for $14 per month.
Users who rented regions under the previous price schedule can keep their existing prices, Moore added.
Grids that have been suspended for more than two months will be marked as closed. If your grid isn’t on the active grids list, and not on the suspended list, it may have been marked closed when it shouldn’t be. Please let us know.
And if there’s a public grid we’re not tracking, please email us at editor@hypergridbusiness.com. There’s no centralized way to find OpenSim grids, so if you don’t tell us about it, and Google doesn’t alert us, we won’t know about it.
By “public,” we mean grids that allow hypergrid visitors, or have a website where people can register for or request accounts.
In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be undercounted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.
March Region Counts on the Top 40 Grids
The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,216 different publicly-accessible grids, 272 of which were active this month, and 194 of which published their statistics.
All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.
Many school, company or personal grids do not publish their numbers.
Robo Recall is a very important game. We labelled the robot-fighting title “very good” in our review, and with its modification system and pedigree coming from one of the industry’s most influential companies (Epic Games), the game is likely to influence others as they think about VR game design.
That makes the amount it cost to make a game like this a key point of interest. Late last year we interviewed Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and talked to him about the budget for the game. He compared the amount Oculus paid to be produced exclusively for the Oculus platform to the size of the budget for the original Gears of War.
Here’s that original quote, which Sweeney confirmed today we reported accurately:
“In 2006, a world class Triple A game cost 10-20 million to produce now they’ll cost up to 100 million. It’s become so expensive and so risky that only massive publishers can really afford to put these kinds of games out…Oculus has been willing to fund third party software that’s exclusive to their hardware. That’s a perfectly acceptable way to jump start an industry…For example, Oculus is funding Robo Recall which has a budget that’s close to the budget of the entire first Gears of War game.”
We looked it up, and found the budget for Gears of War was previously reported by Wired as between $9 or $10 million.
An article from RoadToVR today attempts to zero in on the actual costs of development in that budget, quoting a team size of 15 for the project and doing some math to estimate the rough costs involved in actually producing the project with that team. Sweeney confirmed to us the team size data reported in that article is correct as well.
“UploadVR’s original article quoted me accurately,” Sweeney wrote in an email. “The Road to VR [article] accurately conveys the team size data.”
The problem, though, is that each of these are limited data points that don’t exactly paint a full picture of the deal between Oculus and Epic Games. The game, for instance, is offered for free on the Oculus store. This means Epic wouldn’t see a traditional revenue split from individual sales of the game with Oculus — something a Reddit commenter pointed out on our original article would’ve likely figured into the deal.
“There are lots of numbers involved in budgets for the various parties involved, they span many areas of which direct game development cost is one, and we can’t break them down further for reasons of Epic and partner confidentiality,” Sweeney told UploadVR. “I apologize for sharing partial details this way. In retrospect we should’ve shared team size data only, which would have avoided speculation and conflicting interpretations of the various data points.”
Realize Mobile Communications Corp. announced the development of a dental treatment simulations system today, combining augmented reality (AR) with virtual reality (VR) to create a mixed reality (MR) training simulation for dentists.
As VRFocus has reported previously, dentistry has utilised AR and VR in training before, but this new system allows training to take place on physical practice models in real environments while guidance is provided from CGI overlays in the virtual space.
The new simulation system features sensors that track the locations of the patient, dentist and all the dental instruments in real-time. This enables CG images to be imposed onto video data, including information that cannot be seen with the naked eye, while simultaneously able to visually inspect the areas undergoing treatment. The practitioner can also refer to CG images to check the treatment plan against the current condition of the patient.
We'll need to wait until it airs to find out what the Candy Crush TV show is all about, but we now know that's not that far away. On July 9, CBS will air its very first episode of the new game show.
When I was at the GDC VR Mixer, Jim Preston struck up a conversation about his concerns about privacy in VR. He works at FOVE which is making a VR headset with eye-tracking, but wanted to speak to me on his own behalf about some of the deeper philosophical questions and conceptual frameworks around the types of intimate data that will become available to VR headsets. As more and more biometric data streams are integrated into VR there a lot of complicated and complex ethical questions that he thinks will take the entire VR community needs to figure out.
