Interesting articles about VR – week #12

Why VR vs. AR is an obsolete argument

Over the past year, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology have become hot topics, particularly when it comes to how they stack up against each other. Enthusiastic publications are treating these two as fiercely competitive technologies, while in fact, it’s much more likely there will be a place for both in our future.

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The best free games for Oculus Rift (with Vive ‘Hack’)

What now? You can’t just hang out in the Oculus Home all day. Well maybe you can, it is rather beautiful in there. But there’s no sense in missing all the awesome experiences. While the Oculus store has an excellent catalog nowadays you will also want to download and set up Steam VR. Steam has a bigger list of apps and games, but as usual there’s a lot of junk. There are even some titles on Steam that claim to support Oculus and/or Touch but are so buggy they hardly work at all. Make sure you check out reviews before buying anything. In case you missed it , our Setup the Oculus Rift Guide has instructions on setting up Steam VR.

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Law, virtual reality, and augmented reality

Stanford law professor Mark A. Lemley and I have just finished a draft of a new article, “Law, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality.” It’s still early days in the development of commercial VR and AR, and even more so in the law of each. But we think that the shape of the technology is clear enough to speculate about the legal issues that are likely to arise. Plus, selfishly, we’d like to get in on the ground floor of something that’s going to be big — and we’re sure that VR and AR will indeed be big.

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Surgeon Simulator Experience Reality: I just don’t have the heart for it..

Have you ever wanted to be knee deep in Eyeballs? Spit out somebody else their teeth? No? Well you are missing out buddy. Bossa Studios released the Virtual Reality version of there game Surgeon Simulator. “But wait, They did that Last year!” why yes they did! But back then the game was not really fun to play, not for me anyway. The controls were not really optimized and in the end it could get a little frustrating that you were not able to cut someones eye out with a bone saw that effectively. I was a bit busy this and last month so I was not able to test out the new patch they brought out.

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That’s Powerful: GE Is Using Virtual Reality To Train Nuclear Engineers

Few places in the world are more secure than a nuclear power plant in France. Anyone who doesn’t work there full time, including maintenance engineers and field technicians, needs to get a security clearance and to complete rigorous safety training before they can step inside.

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Virtual reality needs to solve problems, NOT be the problem

Virtual reality will sell beyond gaming and technology markets if it solves problems. It will not sell if it creates them. After a few spectacular failures in a professional distribution of VR, film and tech enthusiasts from Denmark and Poland got the point and now jointly launch a unique pop-up VR cinema at CPH:DOX film festival in Copenhagen.

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Privacy in VR Is Complicated and It’ll Take the Entire VR Community to Figure It Out

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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The struggle to adapt storytelling for virtual reality

Storytelling in virtual reality has yet to take shape. While the simulated world of gaming has proved the visual capabilities of the medium, few have taken a crack at the art of building a compelling narrative.

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Are You Talking to Me? – My Problem With AR Headsets

I work on the third floor of an office with three other developers. It is a fun group of guys, and it is not uncommon for us to kick out some great tunes, or spark up awesome conversations about whatever tech news is hot that day. We aren’t a rowdy bunch, but occasionally the folks on the first and second floors have to come up and tell us to keep it down.

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How YouTube Is Making Virtual Reality Look Better

YouTube has developed what it hopes can become a new industry standard that makes 360-degree videos look better and perform more efficiently. The technological update, which YouTube and Google’s internal Daydream virtual reality team have already implemented for displaying 360-degree videos on Android devices, was created to address a problem that would be familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to lay out a spherical object on a rectangle. Think: showing the Earth on a rectangular map, which vastly distorts the size of various continents.

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