Friday FOV: Magic Leap Falls Short, VR Sex Survey, Oculus Touch, and Vive Studios Launches
VR news for the week ending December 9, 2016
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This week in There Is Only R:
ROM: Extraction, the futuristic shooter game for Vive and Oculus by First Contact Entertainment, launched on Wednesday to strong reviews. We got an inside look (including HD video) from First Contact’s Hess Barber and Matt Candler, who talked about their upcoming DLC plans, their journey from traditional game-making to fulltime VR, and where they see the VR industry headed. This first installment, they say, is intended to introduce the characters and story. “Our next game, we’re going to announce early next year, will definitely have movement around a larger environment,” said president and co-founder Barber. “And it’s going to have theme-based multiplayer experience.”
Westworld reached its season finale on Sunday, and our final Season One recap by Steve Bryant looks at the show’s “golden ratio” of thirds, as well as some of the plot and character development that finds Maeve and Dolores positioned to swap roles in Season Two (which we won’t see until 2018). But, cautions Bryant, “now that the characters have backstories and personal motivations, don’t be surprised if neither Maeve nor Dolores are purely ‘good’ or purely ‘evil’… I wouldn’t be surprised to see more Buddhist conceptions of morality come into play.”
If you’re just starting to watch Westworld, follow along with all our recaps: Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6, Episode 7, Episode 8, and Episode 9. And check out Bryant’s Unified Color Theory of Westworld.
Alice Bonasio reports on Experience Builder, a new free app from YouVisit that lets users create virtual experiences for social media from their photos and videos.
Here’s some of the rest of the week’s VR news:
Story of the Week: Look Before You (Magic) Leap
Are you ready for the Magic Leap backlash? The mysterious and lavishly-funded ($1.4 billion from the likes of Google, Alibaba and Andreessen Horowitz) Florida mixed reality startup, and its founder Rony Abovitz, have had major profiles in Wired and Forbes this year. But now, The Information reports that one or more demos the company uses to show off its technology are really just special effects from their partners Weta Workshop. The Verge writes that Magic Leap’s “allegedly revolutionary augmented reality technology may in fact be years away from completion and, as it stands now, is noticeably inferior to Microsoft’s HoloLens headset”:
The crux of the problem appears to be Magic Leap’s gamble on a so-called fiber scanning display, which shines a laser through a fiber optic cable that moves rapidly back and forth to draw images out of light. The company thought the fiber scanning display could be Magic Leap’s breakthrough tech, allowing it to shrink down the extremely expensive hardware used on a previous prototype — a refrigerator-sized device known internally as the “Beast.”
The company has been unable to get the technology to work, and has back-burnered the fiber-scanning display, which has so far produced “images that are in some cases blurrier and more jittery” than HoloLens.
Tech
- Leap Motion introduced its new tracking platform for untethered, battery-powered VR and AR devices. The mobile platform boasts a boost to a 180 field of view, which the company calls the “biggest request from the VR community.”
- MediaPost reports that Oculus’s newly-released Oculus Touch peripheral’s controllers “allow VR users to get a sense of actually reaching out and interacting with their virtual environment.” Its sensors track positional movement: “as users rotate their hands, their ‘virtual’ hands rotate as well.” A “grip” trigger mimics the feeling of clasping an object between the index finger and thumb. Writer Josh Lovison praises Oculus for its “informal parity” with the Vive’s hand controllers: “With the two main ‘cutting edge’ VR vendors in the market finally having a similar controller for VR interactions, it strongly suggests we’ll be seeing a de facto content design for user interaction within VR over the next two years or so.”
- Occipital today announced Bridge, its mobile HMD with inside-out tracking and MR, designed specifically for use with Apple’s iPhone 7, 6, and 6s. The device features its own structure sensor mounted on top of a traditional-looking phone-based headset. Differing from other VR headsets that allow access to the phone camera through an open slot, Bridge has an adjustable lens that augments the iPhone camera’s field of view up to 120 degrees. Bridge enhances mobile VR with positional tracking — a goal of every device-maker from HTC and Google to Oculus — while also providing mixed reality experiences, allowing users access to the real world and positioning virtual objects in that environment.
- Social VR, the much-awaited development expected to transform and boost VR, just got closer. Upload’s David Jagneaux reports that Pluto is a “VR app that adds a social layer of interaction across SteamVR, regardless of what you’re doing.” He particularly recommends using it concurrently with apps like Google Earth VR — he describes the experience as “unlike anything I’ve tried in VR yet.”
Business
- Microsoft is ramping up its VR and AR plans for next year, Engadget reports, making its Windows Holographic platform available to other device makers and releasing specifications for its Windows 10 VR headsets. HoloLens creator Alex Kipman calls the $300 headsets “‘mid-range’ devices that’ll detect six degrees of motion, a similar experience to what you get with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. As for truly high-end VR experiences, Microsoft also announced a partnership with the Chinese headset maker 3Glasses, which will offer Windows Holographic on its S1 device in the first half of next year.”
- VR Scout reports that Google, Sony, Oculus, Samsung, Acer and HTC have joined to create the Global Virtual Reality Association — joining forces to establish industry standards (see Oculus Touch item above) boost the growth and development of VR hardware and software.
- HTC is now a content maker, with the launch of Vive Studios and its first release, Arcade Saga, reports CNET. The studio “plans to launch titles in categories ranging from education to design, sports and things cinematic.”
AI Watch
- Don’t worry about AI, says Wired founder Kevin Kelly. (This summer, we interviewed Kelly on topics including AI and his book The Inevitable: Understanding 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.)
- Elon Musk introduces OpenAI Universe, a “platform for measuring and training AI agents.”
Content
- HBOGO NOW and HBOGO are now available for viewing on Google Daydream, VR Scout reports. Though only available in 2-D, watching an episode of Westworld or Game Of Thrones on a HD virtual reality display screen should offer a very immersive experience.
- And finally, British women want VR sex, according to a new survey from fertility app Natural Cycles reported by Daily Mail. At least some of them, anyway: 16% of the 2,618 women surveyed would like to have sex in VR, while 40% said technology could make sex more enjoyable.
Be sure to catch up with last week’s “Friday FOV: Dementia And The Civil War Through VR, Stock Photo Fails & VR Treadmills.”
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