Interesting articles about VR – week #33

The new discovery will allow to touch the video, not just watching it

The new discovery will allow to touch the video, not just watching it. Watching video is basically a fairly passive action. Information coming to your eyes, the brain processes them and you accept them. However, the researchers of the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the American University of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed a new technology that videos could do more interactive.

---

 

Not quite directly related with AR or VR, but these technologies are mentioned and it definitely worth reading;

Can technology revolutionize the way Americans worship?

Late on a school night this spring, 26-year-old University of California Santa Barbara student Yankoff got an idea. Yankoff, a graduate student studying software engineering, was trying to study and like many students stress was getting to him.

He wanted an outlet and he needed to talk to someone, but it was the wee hours of the morning — too late, he felt, even to reach out to friends on Facebook and risk waking them with a notification. That got Yankoff thinking.

---

 

The New York Times Used Thousands Of Old Photos To Recreate Olympic Stadiums In VR

The New York Times is one of the most well respected and venerable news outlets in the United States. It is also one of the few “old school” organizations that seems to be prioritizing and understanding the new immersive medium beginning to crop up. To that end, the Times launched the NYT VR application and began filling it with 360-degree content.

---

 

What’s the Difference Between HoloLens, Meta & Magic Leap?

Augmented and mixed reality started as a lofty promise that’s just now taking form, but with several companies taking somewhat different approaches, it’s hard to understand what’s what. Let’s take a look at the three big players and what they’re doing: HoloLens, Meta, and Magic Leap.

---

 

Why the year of VR glasses will morph into the decade of AR

Innovative new applications using virtual reality headsets are seemingly popping up everywhere these days, especially in the gaming, education, and entertainment arenas. While we will likely look back at 2016 as the year of VR, many industry observers believe augmented reality (AR) glasses may actually rule the day in a few short years.

---

 

Crisis and opportunity. How one VR startup is capturing the 360 degree reality of the World’s most vulnerable people.

Four boats approach the small harbor of Skala on the Greek island of Lesbos. The first vessel is occupied by agents of Frontex, the European Union border-control unit. The men are dressed in black, from helmets to combat boots. They tow the second boat, an inflatable dinghy with flimsy plywood baseboards that’s crammed from pontoon to pontoon with extremely cold people. Earlier this morning a smuggler in Izmir, Turkey, filled the raft with refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, handed the throttle to a young man who’d never driven a boat, and pointed toward Greece. Like so many of the thousands of vessels provided by human-smuggling mafias, this one didn’t have enough fuel and ran out of gas somewhere in the middle of the Aegean.

---

Facebook introduces guided tours and a heatmapping tool for 360 videos

Facebook has launched two new creator tools designed to give publishers additional insights into how people respond to their 360 videos. More than 250,000 videos with this capability have been uploaded to the social network since September, and as adoption continues to increase, there’s going to be a need to give creators information about what’s performing and how to make adjustments to have a better experience for people.

---

 

This man is cycling around the UK in virtual reality using Google Street View

So much so, that nausea can be a problem, especially when he’s navigating complex routes — like roundabouts — that have been squashed into only a few layers of depth. “The problem [is that I’m] telling the ‘bike’ in VR to face in the direction of the path it was moving along,” says Puzey. “Then I had a breakthrough and realized if I make it face about 5 meters ahead of where I was it made an enormous improvement.”

---

 

These global research centers are a proof that virtual reality is more than gaming

In a 2016 report, Goldman Sachs indicate that video games will make up the largest portion in the virtual reality economy. Multiple headsets are on sale for consumers, mostly targeting the gamers. However this doesn’t mean that VR is only about games.

---

 

How NASA uses virtual reality to train astronauts

The first time an astronaut takes a spacewalk, in a way, it’s not his or her first time.

Thanks to virtual reality, NASA can make sure the people they put into space have some amount of experience under their belts before they have to perform complicated tasks in zero gravity.