Friday FOV: Steam Crash, VR Hangovers, Virtual Tools For Government Surveillance

VR news for the week ending December 23, 2016

Treehugger: Wawona from Marshmallow Laser Feast

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This week in There Is Only R: Alice Bonasio wonders whether the “walled garden” approach of Magic Leap is the best thing for the fast-growing mixed reality industry, which she argues will only thrive through collaboration.

Here’s some of the rest of the week’s VR news:

Story of the Week: VR Hangover

VR sickness is motion sickness, right? A diminishing problem, thanks to recent advances in top-end systems. But now comes a more existential VR-linked malady, “post-VR sadness,” reports Rebecca Searles in The Atlantic. Game developer Lee Vermeulen experienced what is sometimes called “VR hangover” in 2014 after using Valve’s early system. “He was mid-conversation with a coworker when he started to feel off,” Searles wrote, “and the experience sounds almost metaphysical.” According to Vermeulen, “It gave me a very weird existential dread of my entire situation, and the only way I could get rid of that feeling was to walk around or touch things around me.” VR hangover can be serious, and may be related to clinical dissociative disorders such as derealization-depersonalization (DPDR).

Tech

• The Intercept takes a close look at the ways VR, with its “troves of data that consumer VR products can freely mine from our bodies, like head movements and facial expressions” prized by marketers, will give the government its most “detailed, intimate surveillance” tool yet. For example, Baton Rouge-based Yotta Technologies aims to “unlock human emotion” with tools that claims its platform “can detect a user’s emotional state using an array of sensors mounted to a VR headset, reading microexpressions by tracking eye and muscle movements in the face.” Other concerns include ways VR data could be used to manipulate users.
• AI technology is “merging with the human body,” TechCrunch’s Daniel Waterhouse claims, spurred by advances in mimicking aural and even olfactory sensation.

Business

• Steam’s winter sale was apparently so successful it crashed the platform. Discounts of up to 67% were thought responsible for the disruption, two days before Christmas, rather than hacking. DiRT Rally and The Nest top Upload’s guide to the sale’s VR highlights.
• Dinosaur game Robinson: The Journey will no longer be exclusive to Playstation VR and will soon be available to Oculus Rift owners. Beleaguered developer Crytek will likely make the game available on other platforms as well.

AI Watch

• The NY Times Magazine describes how Google’s move to “reorganize itself around A.I.” led to astounding advances in Google Translate. It’s part of what Gideon Lewis-Kraus calls an AI “arms race” between Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Baidu.
• A look at the role of an army of low-paid workers in advancing AI, performing digital tasks for pennies through the decade-old Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Content

Asteroids! from Baobab Studios

• Actors like The Hunger Games’s Elizabeth Banks, who voices a character in the VR short Asteroids! from Baobab Studios, are adjusting to the new opportunities VR offers actors, USA Today reports.
• And finally, Vice’s Creator’s Project reports that an installation called Treehugger: Wawona from Marshmallow Laser Feast allows you to explore the inside of a giant California sequoia.

Don’t forget to catch up with last week’s “Friday FOV: 2 Million HMDs in 2016, VR Cadavers, Samsung AI.”

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