Interesting articles about VR – week #25

Just How Big Is The Virtual Reality Market And Where Is It Going Next?

2016 was a pivotal year for the Virtual Reality industry but just how pivotal? Almost 100 million VR units shipped, pivotal. The trouble is… most of those (96%) were Google Cardboard – the pretty much free and bottom-end of the VR spectrum. These units offer little that is anywhere near the experience of the higher-end units focusing on or around with 360-video rather than full VR. So is full VR’s goose cooked? Absolutely not. 2017 looks like it will be a good year too good thanks to the new Samsung S8 and second-generation (yes, already) headsets from industry giants Oculus and HTC but most VR coverage misses one important factor out. China.

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Virtual Reality: Transformation Tool for Learning and Equity in Middle Schools

To gauge the current state of Virtual Reality (VR) in middle schools in the Bay Area, I talked with Azine Davoudzadeh, Video Educator/Filmmaker, of the San Ramon Valley Unified School District. Azine is actively building curricula to get more young women involved in growing tech fields. She also teaches English/History classes to middle school students and explores how VR can impact differing subjects. Azine is developing Virtual Reality 101 weekend courses for teenagers. Currently, she is designing curriculum for a summer enrichment course she will teach July 24–27, titled “Intro to Virtual Reality” which will give students experience with 360 filming, Unity development and testing existing apps in VR.

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Garmin Virb 360: unboxing and first impressions

After a few delays, I finally got the Garmin Virb 360! I’ve been really excited about this camera because of its many features. In fact, I would say that it has the most features of any 360 camera I’ve encountered, bar none, not the least of which is its unique image stabilization that follows the user’s direction of movement instead of being locked in one direction.

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Google Earth VR is now shaping the future of travel

Fancy travelling the world from the comfort of your bedroom? Google Earth VR, Google’s latest foray into virtual reality technology and available on popular gaming platform Steam since 16 November 2016, is now poised to reshape the future of travel.

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GearVR New Release : June 15th 2017

This week, 14 new experiences were released for the GearVR. With many Free applications, take some time this weekend to try them out.

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What Does Virtual Reality Mean for Our Eye Health?

It’s an exciting time to be living on this planet. Technology is moving faster than ever and the world is communicating in new and innovative ways. Humans are mobile, wireless, and connected like never before.We’re even being transported into virtual reality. But, as we embrace all these new possibilities, there’s one question that keeps popping up: how is the human body processing all of this new hyper-connectivity?

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Performance Analysis and Optimization for PC-Based VR Applications: From the CPU’s Perspective

Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming more and more popular these days as technology advancement following Moore’s Law continues to make this brand new experience technically possible. While VR brings a fantastic immersive experience to users, it also puts significantly greater computing workloads on both the CPU and GPU compared to traditional applications due to dual-screen rendering, low latency, high resolution and high frame rate requirements. As a result, performance issues are especially critical in VR applications since a non-optimized VR experience with insufficient frame rate and high latency could cause nausea for users. In this article, we’ll introduce a general methodology to profile, analyze, and tackle bottlenecks and hotspots in a PC-based VR application regardless of the underlying engine or VR runtime used. We use a PC VR game from Tencent* called Pangu* as an example to showcase the analysis flow.

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A new startup from Nokia employees is trying to fix VR’s biggest technical problem

One of the biggest limitations of current virtual reality technology — whether you’re talking about Samsung’s mobile Gear VR or a full home system like the Oculus Rift — is resolution. And progress toward solving this problem is slow, because companies making VR headsets are at the mercy of advances in display technology.

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360-Virtual Reality: The Ultimate Storytelling Platform

The art of marketing is essentially the art of storytelling. The basic goal of marketing, its raison d’être, is to tell a story that will create an emotion in order to influence an action. I strongly believe – as many around the world do – that virtual reality as a storytelling platform is the ultimate emotion creator.

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The Vanishing of Milliseconds

As a game with very rich visuals, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (available for the Oculus Rift and Steam VR) has been a difficult case for hitting the VR performance targets. The fact that its graphics workload is somewhat uncommon for Unreal Engine 4 (and, specifically, largely dissimilar to existing UE4 VR demos) did not help. I have described the reasons for that at length in a previous post; the gist of it, however, is that The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’s game world is statically lit in some 95% of areas, with dynamic lights appearing only in small, contained, indoors.

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