Friday FOV: VR Gloves, T Brand Buys Fake Love, And 360-bama
The latest in virtual reality for the week ending August 26, 2016
This week in There is Only R :
A filmmaker discusses the lessons for VR content creators from Robert Altman’s unique technique for directing the viewer’s focus.
Christopher North, executive producer of Calvin Harris’s VMA-nominated 360 music video “This is What You Came For” featuring Rihanna, gave us a peek behind the scenes.
Here are some other stories that caught our eye this week:
Story of the Week: Handy Haptics
We got a bunch of news about a variety of devices that are meant to let us interact with the virtual world. Dexta are gloves that push back your fingers to convey the size, shape, and firmness of objects. Powerclaw has a slightly more dire take on what defines reality — the handset will freeze, burn, or shock your fingers until you believe. Gear VR seems content to leave your hands alone, allowing Leap Motion to do hand tracking without any gloves. Meanwhile, poor Oculus is just proud that its touch controllers “technically” work in roomscale.
Business:
- The New York Times purchased the VR-centric ad agency Fake Love to strengthen the VR offerings of its branded content arm, T Brand. Here’s an interview about it with their executive video producer, Sydney Levin.
- Google seems to be preparing for the launch of Daydream, its mobile VR platform, by queuing up a range of films and programs from sources renowned for the strength of their original content, from individual YouTube Stars to major platforms such as Hulu.
- Meanwhile, the mysterious Magic Leap has mysteriously acquired a new 40-person team in Austin (in addition to its Fort Lauderdale headquarters). They claim the team is mostly software and imaging experts, but it probably ought to be dedicated to hype management.
- A poll of 500 VR professionals found that those in the industry preferred the HTC Vive over the Oculus Rift, both for their personal use and for developing content. But the truly astounding result from the survey is that 95.5% of people in the business of VR/AR believe that VR/AR is a sustainable longterm business. Read the full report here.
Hardware:
- Want to try VR, but your puny Mac can’t handle it? Good news: The Wolfe external GPU promises to give your machine the boost it needs. Bad news: It’s still in its crowdfunding phase, costs $300, and won’t arrive until March 2017 at best. Worse news: You’ll need to run Boot Camp.
Content:
- For those who worry about Obama’s vacation time, fear not: he and his family had their trip to Yosemite converted into a 360 video experience to honor the National Park Service’s centennial. It’s only available for Gear and Oculus, but you can watch the trailer here:
- Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland dipped his toes into VR with Virtual Rickality. But in announcing the creation of his own VR Studio, Squanchtendo, he’s diving in headfirst — probably to pee in the water.
- Watch out, curators: the museum got disrupted this week by the release of the creatively named VR Museum of Fine Art (the name obviously should have been ‘VaRt Museum’). It lets you get up-close and personal with 15 iconic paintings and sculptures.
- There were plenty of criticisms to go around for the buggy, boring “No Man’s Sky.” But that won’t stop people from trying to explore the procedurally generated universe in VR: this YouTuber cobbled one together, and the game’s code indicates that the studio is working on putting it on VR.
- Finally, this week’s dystopian short film about VR is Uncanny Valley. Enjoy:
Don’t forget to catch up with last week’s “Friday FOV: Virtual Rio-lity, New HMDs & 360 Analytics, Ozo Price Chop.”
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