Innholdsfortegnelse for Virtual Reality - The Complete Guide 2016 i Virtual Reality - The Complete Guide

I don’t know about you but my youthful days were filled first with Lego, then an Acorn Electron before progressing to the Commodore Amiga and, ultimately, the pub. Californian Palmer Luckey, on the other hand, still only 23, grew up watching sci-fi films, reading sci-fi novels and tinkering with computers in his parents’ garage. What did we have in common? We both grew up wanting to escape. But while myself and many others sought a getaway in our imaginations or the bottom of a pint glass, Luckey wanted to immerse himself and others in a virtual world. The result of his tinkering cost Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg $2-billion in 2014. Now the Oculus Rift is ready to hit the mass market, signalling the new dawn of virtual reality. We check…

£0.79 INCELL WWW.INCELL.NIVALVR.COM This multi-coloured action-cumracing game takes place in a unique micro-world, which recreates the anatomy of a human cell in impressive detail, giving it an educational angle, too. Players ride along capillaries and connections as they take in inner space. The depth and scaling of the scenes really makes the experience worthwhile, and it has a rousing soundtrack to boot. iOS, Android, Cardboard, Oculus £1.49 DINOTREK WWW.GEOMEDIA.COM/VIRTUAL-AUGMENTED-REALITY If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to walk with dinosaurs then here’s your chance to find out. DinoTrek VR lets you get right up close to the prehistoric action, in which dinosaurs roam, fight it out amongst each other and, every now and then, just kick back and relax in the sun. Kids should love this app, which…

Headcase is an American virtual-reality production company who are currently developing projects for a number of high-profile clients including Nike, Chevvy, FX and Ticketmaster. They also have an ongoing relationship with the Pac-12 Conference, who provided the foundations for Headcase’s project ‘A Behind The Scenes Look’. Headcase utilised virtual reality to take viewers inside an American football stadium, sending them into the middle of a collegiate team huddled together while the players elicited a collective war chant. The team also captured much of the action, applying multiple cuts at the editing process to create the impressive piece of sporting ‘cinematography’. Key to recording the footage was the specially engineered 360° camera system, engineered and built for specially directed sporting shots. As you can see from above, the video camera rig…

Name Chris Merkle Regiment First Marine Division Active Service 2003-2010, three tours in Iraq, four tours in Afghanistan “The first couple of times using Bravemind were hard. I was disorientated and nauseous, partly because you have the headset on but also because you’re bringing up difficult memories. It was 10 years since the invasion of Iraq to the time I started speaking about it and a lot of emotions were buried deep down. I’d tried traditional psychotherapy and wasn’t getting results. I had a good therapist but I couldn’t talk about the deep, dark things. I think she realised that there wasn’t one big trauma incident, so we couldn’t get down to the root of the problem. She’s the one that suggested trying the Bravemind project. “I had to pick…

£412.00 LAFORGE SHIMA WWW.LAFORGEOPTICAL.COM 1 Laforge’s AR glasses have avoided the bulk of many competitors, and have instead developed a system that streams data from your smartphone directly to your designer-look frames. You can even order them with prescription lenses. £519.00 EPSON MOVERIO BT-200 WWW.EPSON.CO.UK 2 Epson’s ‘affordable’ AR glasses are powered by Android, meaning there are many apps available to run on the device. It has a battery life of up to six hours and it can even play 3D movies. £543.00 ORA-1 WWW.OPTINVENT.COM 3 The ORA-1 glasses claim to have unparalleled see-through lenses, so your real-world vision is not overly obscured. Switching between full AR mode and glance mode will also allow you to control how invasively you want data displayed. £2,099.00 MICROSOFT HOLOLENS WWW.MICROSOFT.COM 4 Microsoft’s HoloLens…

1 Field of View In order for VR to feel immersive, a field of view (FoV) of around 60° has to be maintained. The human eye can perceive a FoV of 200° so the greater the FoV in VR, the more immersive and ‘real’ the experience feels. The StarVR headset has the highest FoV on the market at 210°. 2 Comfort and immersion Decreasing the size and weight of virtual-reality headsets is also of great importance long term. The Samsung Gear VR, for example, weighs in at over half a kilo, whereas the Oculus Rift consumer release will be less than 380g. Long-lasting comfort will only really be achieved when units weigh under 150g. 3 Movement Many gamers want to play first-person shooters in VR, but everything has to slow…

How did you first experience virtual reality? In 1989 I went to Boston, where there was a SIGGRAPH [Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques] exhibition. I had a recommendation from MIT for an animation which I was working on at the time. While I was at SIGGRAPH I met Jaron Lanier, who was quite a colourful character. We were both waiting in line and he was very nice to me, letting me go first to buy my ticket. I attended his talk and realised that this was real, that [VR] was really happening and that you could use it. I decided to turn my 3D animation into a VR movie, which became Angels. Describe the equipment that you used. It had a similar helmet to what you’d use…

£300.00 RICOH THETA S WWW.THETA360.COM The Ricoh Theta stands out from the current crop of consumer 360° cameras for being the most affordable and easy-to-use personal VRcapture device. Available for £300, the Theta S can shoot immersive video in 1080p HD at 30 frames per second for up to 25 minutes at a time. Variable shutter speed lets you get creative during active shoots, while its dual 14-megapixel, 1/2.3 CMOS lenses also take spherical shots with the click of a button. Also thrown in is high-speed wi-fi support that enables you to broadcast your 360° movies via the Ricoh ‘livestream’ feature, or you can share your immersive media on social networks and supporting websites such as Google Maps. And if you’re not happy with how your movie came out, you…

EDUCATION Therapy begins with education about the upcoming treatment. The service(wo) man will also learn about common trauma reactions and PTSD. Education allows the individual to learn more about their symptoms and understand the goals of the treatment, laying the foundation for future sessions. BREATHING Breathing in a relaxed manner helps the individual to relax. When people become anxious or scared, their breathing changes. Learning how to control breathing can help in the short-term manages immediate distress. REAL-WORLD PRACTICE This is where VR fits in. You approach situations that are safe, but which you may have been avoiding because they’re related to the trauma. An example would be a veteran who avoids driving since he experienced a roadside bomb while deployed. This type of exposure practice helps trauma-related distress to…

In 1901, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz author, L Frank Baum, first envisioned augmented reality. In The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale, a young boy is given a special pair of spectacles by the Demon of Electricity, which overlay character trait information for everyone he meets. Little did Baum know that, just over a hundred years later, this technology would become reality. But it wasn’t until towards the end of the 20th century that the term ‘augmented reality (AR)’ was itself first coined, and engineers and developers began to take things seriously. STATE OF PLAY Unlike virtual reality, where an entire world is generated and displayed to the viewer, AR is where real-world places are seen by the eye or depicted on-screen and supplemented by computer-generated, real-time, audio-visual material.…

Your films combine different media – the real and virtual. Can you explain how that works and why you use that approach? We utilise gaming platforms to create content but, as a very minimum, I use audio from the real world. Then I want to put you in the scene, and I do that using computer-generated imagery. But it’s based very carefully on photographs, video and audio from the actual scene, so it’s grounded in the same practice that I would have used to make my documentary films. Is that something you’d always stick to or would you have used real footage of the Aleppo explosion seen in Project Syria, for instance, if you’d had it? Well, 360 video can be very powerful, and we do use it for certain…

Which parts of the brain see a decrease in activity when in VR? All our experimental measurements were undertaken in a brain region called the ‘hippocampus’, which is very important for things like learning, memory and spatial navigation. It’s also a region that’s associated with epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD, PTSD and depression. How does the hippocampus work in real space? That’s a long story. Essentially, when a subject, which can be rats or humans, walks around in an environment, different neurons in the hippocampus become more activated in different parts of the maze and provide a cognitive map of the environment. In addition, the hippocampus activity also becomes more rhythmic. We found that both of these things were significantly altered in VR. The spatial maps were sort of lost in…

1838 Charles Wheatstone shows that the brain can construct a 3D image from two 2D ones with his Stereoscope photo viewer. 1936 Pygmalion’s Spectacles published, a short story that predicts the form and function of VR helmets. 1960 Morton Heilig patents the Telesphere Mask, a head-mounted 3D display for showing films but without head-tracking. 1961 Philco Corporation’s Headsight uses a screen for each eye and a head-tracking system linked to cameras for remote viewing of dangerous military situations. 1969 Artist Myron Krueger develops Glowflow, a computer-controlled environment that responds to the people in it. 1983 The ‘Atari Shock’ wipes billions off the value of American videogame companies. VR research is one of its victims. 1991 Virtuality’s 1000 Series arcade machines are released. Powered by an Amiga 3000 computer, they o"er…

The omnidirectional treadmill ties into the idea of ‘immersion’ – the perception of being physically present in a non-physical world. As you move your feet, the virtual world moves around you, as displayed through your head-mounted display. The treadmill is designed to keep you in its centre, either through a mechanical solution that moves the surface beneath you no matter which way you’re facing or an array of spheres your feet can slide across. Users are often tethered in place or surrounded by a safety barrier so they don’t launch themselves onto the floor. A Kickstarter campaign by Virtuix was successful, raising money for the development of the Omni, a device to help you move naturally and freely in virtual worlds, but the concept of the omnidirectional treadmill goes back…

Virtual reality is no longer the preserve of developers and the super rich. Now anyone can give VR a go, just by downloading a free app onto your smartphone and getting your hands on a cheap (or even free) VR unit. These entry-level headsets broadly consist of a case that houses your phone and a couple of lenses, which bend the light emanating from the phone screen, giving the illusion of a wrap-around virtual world. Most modern smartphones also contain their own accelerometers and motiontracking sensors, which allow basic VR apps to roughly track the position of your head relative to the virtual landscape, so make sure yours is up to the task before investing in a headset. At this price point, you can also expect a comfortable, adjustable headset…

FREE VRSE WWW.VRSE.COM Vrse is a production company specialising in telling stories through liveaction VR filmmaking, and this app is the best way to experience their selection of high-quality 360 videos on your smartphone. Collaborations with the likes of The New York Times, the UN, Vice and Saturday Night Live ensure a well-rounded exploration of the medium’s potential. VRSE also worked with U2 on their ‘Song for Someone’, so viewers could sit with Bono in their living room. iOS, Cardboard FREE JAUNT VR WWW.JAUNTVR.COM Jaunt is another production company that aims to send viewers into story-driven worlds, simply through use of their mobile device. A virtual Nepalese mountain adventure, a front row seat at a Paul McCartney concert and a trip inside North Korea as the country holds military celebrations…

VR’s growth in popularity stems from transporting individuals to simulated environments that present no real, physical danger to the person immersed in them. Being simulated also means those environments can be precisely calibrated to deliver a tailored scenario appropriate to that person. These two characteristics make VR a valuable tool for conducting ‘exposure therapy’, in which patients with anxiety-related conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), repeatedly confront the cues that trigger their stress reactions. Prototype VR exposure therapy applications began appearing in the 1990s but were held back by capabilities of the technology available at the time. But as the technology improved, so too has VR therapy’s potential. Now it’s reached a point where all branches of the US military are funding a VR PTSD treatment developed specifically for…

Augmented reality has the potential to revolutionise the way we teach our children, and bring lessons to life like never before. US teacher and AR advocate Drew Minock believes that ‘AR is already changing the way we learn’. And he’s already applying it in the classroom… ENGLISH “Each year our students would do a writing project using a visible thinking routine called ‘Step Inside’. The students would slip into the shoes of a character and write from their perspective. They would then create a drawing to go with their writing. The students were never very ‘excited’ about this project until we introduced augmented reality. We had the students dress up as the character and record a video of them reading their writing. We would then attach that video to their…

PRIMESENSE The Israeli company behind the 3D sensor technology that fuelled Microsoft’s original Xbox Kinect, allowing the console to read the layouts of 3D spaces such as living rooms. It was originally assumed PrimeSense would work on the Apple TV, but the tech could also benefit an AR device. METAIO Beginning life as a side-project at Volkswagen, Metaio is an augmented-reality company with many impressive apps under their belt, such as Time Traveler, which enables users in central Berlin to hold their iPad in front of them to see what the world around them looked like in the time of the Berlin Wall. FACESHIFT The Swiss studio behind the motion-capture technology in Star Wars: The Force Awakens has created software that transfers a person’s facial expressions onto an animated avatar…

1 Going public with cafes Once upon a time, when the internet became more than a backroom experiment for software engineers, the internet cafe was all the rage. It provided the perfect platform to delve into the exciting world of the web. Cost effective and approachable, it brought together people of all walks of life to surf and send emails at the dawn of a new commercial age of technology. Virtual reality, with its sciencefiction roots and reborn form, feels a similarly alien prospect, so it’s intriguing and a little comforting to know that the technology ‘cafe’ is set to experience something of a renaissance. HTC, the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer behind VR headset Vive, believes that virtual reality offers a new avenue for social interaction – so much so that…