Interesting articles about VR – week #28

Painting with the Full Palette of VR Tools

We commonly hear that Virtual Reality is a mixture of gaming, animation, video, and installation art. These mediums all offer different strengths to the palette of VR tools, from interactivity to photorealism.

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Watch Oculus Detail Its Varifocal Half-Dome VR Prototype Here

Last month, we reported on a talk by Douglas Lanman of Oculus Research (now Facebook’s Reality Labs) from the 2018 SID Display Week event. The fascinating 40-minute session showcased some of the team’s latest work in VR hardware. Now you can watch that talk for yourself.

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In the footsteps of refugees crossing the border

To understand some of the many perspectives of the immigration debate, Academy Award-winning director Alejandro G. Inarritu has created a VR-based art installation that draws on true accounts from refugees who have made the journey to cross the border.

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Oceanic Whitetip Sharks in VR: Google Expeditions off Cat Island

The oceanic whitetip shark was once widely distributed throughout our world’s oceans; however, human impacts (such as overfishing) have since diminished the status of this shark to the point of being critically endangered in the Northwest Atlantic. Starting in 2017, a team of scientists from the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life joined the research efforts of a long-standing, multi-institutional expedition to study the severely threatened oceanic whitetip shark off Cat Island, the Bahamas. Check out this previous blog post for more information on our research.

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Advanced Reality. Values & Benefits of VR/AR for Schools of the Future

“Over the next few decades demand in the top layer of the labour market may well centre on individuals with high abstract reasoning, creative, and interpersonal skills that are beyond most workers, including graduates“

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Mettle FLUX | Getting Started in After Effects

Charles Yeager (yeagerfilm.com) gives us a walk through of the FLUX for After Effects, so you can get up and running quickly. Download a free demo to follow along. You can also watch “FLUX: Getting Started in Premiere Pro”.

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Meet the AR startup that wants to give live theater an augmented makeover

Theater artist Sasha Kreindlin spent about 15 years of his career doing video projections for stage productions, but he always felt like he didn’t get involved in that particular medium early enough. “I was about 10 years too late to the video revolution,” he tells me in a phone interview from Tel Aviv.

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HoloSuit promises full-body VR tracking and haptics by November 2018

If you’ve ever felt that your body would be a better controller in virtual reality than a joypad or wand, you’ll understand why Kaaya Tech’s HoloSuit just reached its funding goal on Kickstarter. Offered in multiple versions, the wearable haptic controller uses a considerable array of sensors to control VR apps, and promises to start shipping this November.

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Skyrim VR Sells ~ 1 Million Copies On Steam & PSVR — But Actual Skyrim VR Usage Still Seems Low

This week feels like a good time to check and correct assumptions — for instance, that the augmented reality mobile game Pokémon GO, contrary to common wisdom, is still extremely huge. Now here’s another amendment: Sales of Skyrim VR, which initially seemed super slow, are now actually pretty decent. VR Redditor Porgator points out that the Playstation PSVR version has sold about 770,000 copies since hitting the market last November/December, and that the PC/Steam version has sold between 100,000-200,000. So very close to 1 million copies total.

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VR AND AI: RESHAPING THE EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

The biggest bet you put on VR is that immersion makes your experience inside VR very real. When AI becomes an integral part of the VR experience, it takes the learning process forward by several leaps. With a plethora of AI options, VR can become much more intuitive, immersive and interactive.

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