Interesting articles about VR – week #16

IS VIRTUAL REALITY THE LAST COMPUTING PLATFORM?

We see devices get smaller and smaller hardware-wise. Take a look at the first computer: We need a room with 2.4m × 0.9m × 30m in size, at least, to own the computer. But see what’s happening years, years later: Every office, every school, every laboratory own PCs, perfectly fit in a small cubicle. Even more, everybody has a laptop at their houses. Things get even crazier today, as we bring a computer everywhere in our pocket — yes, I’m referring to a smartphone.

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The Race to Make Virtual Reality an Actual (Business) Reality

In mid-April, virtual reality passed a milestone. Using an app created by a company called Medical Realities, viewers from around the globe, each presumably with an iron constitution, witnessed a surgeon at the Royal London NHS Hospital delve into the bowels of a 70-year-old cancer patient. If that sounds like a Nova special, it was so much more. Doctors, medical students, and the merely curious experienced the operation in real time, with 360-degree control over their vantage points, as though they were actually in the operating room.

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A Chip Revolution Will Bring Better VR Sooner Than You Think

DAVID KOSSLYN AND Ian Thompson are the founders of a virtual reality company called Angle Technologies. Two years into this stealth project, backed by $8 million in funding, they won’t say much about the virtual world they’re building—at least not publicly. But they will say that they’re building it in a way that alters the relationship between computer hardware and software. When a PC or a game console runs this virtual world, the GPU chips play an unexpectedly large role, taking so much of the burden off the main processor.

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I played the ridiculous and delightful new ‘Rick and Morty’ game — here’s what it was like

As a devout “Rick and Morty” superfan, I’m often an evangelist. “You haven’t seen ‘Rick and Morty’? How lucky you are to get to experience it for the first time, totally fresh!” I might say. It’s one of those shows — like “Arrested Development,” or “Community,” or “Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job!” — where it’s almost as famous for its cult following as it is for the show itself.

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The Medium is the Divine Message: Religion Meets Virtual Reality

Anyone looking to experience God in a brand new way will soon have his or her chance — virtually. Believe VR, is a new immersive faith-based virtual reality experience for people of color. The experience is part of a larger project created by L. Michelle Media called Mission VR. “The idea for Believe VR came from our passion to enhance current Christian programming options,” L. Michelle Salvant, the company’s founder, told NBCBLK. “When Mission VR began, we knew we wanted to create a signature virtual reality environment – a faith world of sorts – where dynamic, never before seen, Christian lifestyle stories and experiences could have a home.”

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VRScientist v1.0

There are very few standards in the VR industry at the moment. For now, there’s a ton of guesswork and eyeballing. For example, do you know what your target Field of View should be for a VR movie? Don’t worry about it! From our tests, no one else does, either. Every headset is a little different.

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Creating 360-Degree Content With The Ricoh Theta S, Part 2: Production And Editing

This is Part 2 of our three-part series looking at how to create content in 360 degrees, using the Ricoh Theta S as a specific example. Some of this will be germane to the Theta S, but you can extrapolate a great deal, including best practices for shooting, editing, and sharing. In Part 1, we discussed how to shoot with the camera. Below, we look at the editing and production process.

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How to hire VR developer: Skills and places to look for

With the release of major VR headsets Virtual Reality’s potential in entertainment and science has been finally uncovered. And the labor behind hundreds of constantly emerging projects falls on shoulders of VR developer. This is a new breed of programmers of high demand. How to hire VR developer is a teaser that hasn’t been fully solved yet. But let’s try.

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Real-world photo comparison: 2017 Samsung Gear 360 vs. Ricoh Theta S

The Ricoh Theta S is currently the most popular 360 camera on the market by a very wide margin (even if you only look at recent sales and not historic sales). The Ricoh Theta S was released in 2015 but remains one of my favorite 360 cameras for 360 photos. It has the best manual controls, the best stitching among 360 cameras, and it’s easy to hold and use. However, it has low resolution videos (1920 x 960).

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Animation In A VR World: How Is It Different and How Is It The Same?

Whether you believe the hype or not, virtual reality is here. Billions of dollars are being spent on vr headset development, vr content creation, and getting users to adopt the technology.

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