VRcade looks like the next logical step for immersive video gaming: With full body & weapon tracking, haptic feedback, a large motion capture arena and realistic graphics, the system offers everything needed to get closer to the virtual reality most of us know only from movies. Road to VR takes a look at VRcade and the exciting future of virtual reality gaming.

The VR gaming buzz is pretty loud these days, mostly thanks to the Oculus Rift VR headset. Half-Life 2 is VR-ready, you can reach for the skies, hunt some Zombies on the Holodeck, and much more with a dev kit. But the founders of VRcade are already thinking about the next step. To be precise, they’re already taking it.

Their working VRcade prototype uses Unity to drive an Oculus Rift headset, combined with full body and gun tracking as well as haptic feedback via gun recoil. The whole system is designed to be played untethered on a massive, divisible motion capture arena – the player only wears a small backpack to power the headset, while body movement and gun position are being tracked remotely with multiple cameras. All this with supposedly very low latency and highly accurate tracking.

VRcade has very ambitious plans for the type of experiences they would like to offer for their paying customers. One of them is an exploration game “aimed at male and female gamers of all ages” called Pyramid Adventure: using a torch prop, players enter an ancient Egyptian pyramid and explore its secrets. The only light-source is the virtual torch, which only burns for a certain time and can be used to interact with the surroundings. You burn away spider webs, set mummies ablaze or trigger traps with your torch and try to get as far into the tombs as possible. Different levels offer different challenges: combat situations, stealth passages or running episodes could offer variable gameplay and even a fitness workout for the player.

VRcade: RPGs Taken to the Next Level

Another, even more ambitious game pitch by VRcade is VRPG, a full-scale roleplaying game that is supposed to offer a very special twist: the game is played on two different platforms. In their browser or mobile app, players can collect items and level up their character. Coming to the brick and mortar VRcade location, they can use that gear to fight opponents with equal equipment in a virtual space.

Each player gets his or her own space of up to 50 by 90 Foot and never has physical contact with their opponent, since they only hit their virtual alter ego. Fighting in the arena rewards the players with items, gold, and tokens that can be exchanged for even better equipment.

Also planned are different levels that make use of the player’s loadouts, which they choose before each match. One example that VRcade mentions is a hedge maze level, where players can burn or cut down the bushy boundaries to create an advantage over their enemy.

Right now, these are only highly ambitious plans, but VRcade also has shown two proof of concept demos for their VR gaming system. One of them is the shooter demo from the above video, another interesting demo was shown to our colleagues at gamespot.com: VRcade recently visited their US corporate office with a portable version of their technology and showed off both the shooting demo as well as a zombie demo that seems to be pretty disturbing, according to everyone’s reactions in the second half of the video:

Besides their own ambitious game visions, VRcade also wants to get external developers on board; they plan to offer a software development kit to create new or export existing experiences to VRcade. According to Dave Ruddell, Software and Systems Architect for VRcade, simple projects and demos take only a few minutes to be exported for the VRcade tracking software. Right now, only a Camera Kit for Unity that works with the DIY Rifts is offered, but convenient support for UDK and Unity is planned for the future. And they are setting their own bar even higher.

VRcade also wants to offer a fun experience for spectators of the virtual adventures. Besides watching the actual scene at the physical location, VRcade’s “SpecNet” could allow people from all around the globe to watch fights, chat among each other or cheer for their favorite fighters as a virtual crowd. “The world’s first Athletic E-Sport” is the simple, yet lofty goal for VRcade. To reach it, the developers plan to set up a crowdfunding campaign soon – we’ll definitely keep our eyes on VRcade and keep you updated.

See Also: VIRTSIM, the Virtual Reality Platform That Gamers Crave but Can’t Have

The post VRcade: A Look into the Future of the Virtual Reality Arcade appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

This week is Google IO 2013, the company’s annual developer conference. While we expected to hear about Google Glass, it turns out Google may be bringing Oculus Rift support to their new version of Google Maps.

Update: First Photos of Google Maps with Oculus Rift and Leap Motion

Today at Google IO 2013′s day 1 keynote, the company made a big deal about their forthcoming version of Google Maps. The revamped online map software sports new ways to get directions, a new look, in-browser Earth functionality, and more.

On stage, Bernhard Seefeld, product management director on Google Maps, walked the audience through some of the new features.

Two of the new features are 3D photo tours, that are automatically generated from user-submitted photos, and the integration ‘Photo Spheres’ that users can take with the Android camera app; both similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth technology. Seefeld described Photo Spheres as being like “user-generated Street View.”

At around 2 hours and 49 minutes in the day 1 keynote, Seefeld says about the Google Maps booth, “if you go there tomorrow morning we’ll have Oculus Rift [sic], and you’ll get the experience you just saw, with the Leap Motion.”

Seefeld’s phrasing was a bit confusing if you listened to the actual presentation. As much as we’d like, this is far from any sort of official confirmation of Google Maps Oculus Rift support.

It isn’t clear what parts of Google Maps (if any) that Google has adapted to the Oculus Rift. It could be the 3D photo tours, or Photo Spheres, or both. Maybe they’ve even added support for the Google Earth portion?

It’s also unclear if this is anything the public will ever see. More than likely, this is just a quickly hacked together tech demo to ‘wow’ attendees at Google IO 2013. As much as we’d like to think that Google would make such functionality available, given the present niche audience of Oculus Rift users, it’s unlikely that they committed to a full rollout. Still, it’s encouraging to know that at least someone inside Google is playing with the Rift.

We’ll keep our eyes peeled tomorrow to find out just what Google has done with the Oculus Rift and see if we can’t get someone on the show floor to give us a hands-on report!

If you’d like to see more about the new Google Maps, take a look at the video below:

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Earlier today we noted that Google had mentioned some sort of Google Maps integration with the Oculus Rift and Leap Motion. A source on the ground at Google IO 2013 gives us the first photos and early details.

Juan Pablo Risso, a web developer attending Google IO 2013, was kind enough to check out the Google Maps booth for Road to VR. Though Google had said at their day 1 keynote that things wouldn’t be set up until tomorrow morning, Risso found the Oculus Rift and Leap Motion Google Maps demo already on display.

He shares with us some early details:

“For this demo they integrated Google Maps API for chrome and they are using the API from Rift and Leap to send the motion information to Chrome as well. They put it together overnight but base on the interest that it has generated they will release it publicly. Also the new version of Google Earth comes with leap motion support and they are planing to add Oculus Rift support,” Risso told me.

From the photos we can see the Oculus Rift and Leap Motion being used in what appears to be the new ‘Earth’ portion of Google Maps, a browser based version of Google Earth. No word yet on if it will support other parts of Google Maps.

We’ll keep you updated as we learn more.

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We were lucky enough to recently get our hands on the latest beta of the soon-to-be-released vorpX DirectX injection drivers, similar in aim to the community supported Vireio Perception offering, which adds Oculus Rift head-tracking, stereoscopic 3D, and pre-warping support to vanilla games not built with the Rift in mind. The commercial product is due for release very soon and the extensive play-testing we’ve done so far shows it to be an impressive package.

Note: Because YouTube doesn’t deal with 16:10 aspect ratios well, the video has been scaled to fit a 16:9, 720p frame. As a result there are slight borders in the video that are not present in the actual version. Just to be clear to those eagle-eyed video dissectors out there. :)

The Oculus Rift Game Band-aid

We’ll have a full in-depth preview of the vorpX drivers very soon, but we thought you’d enjoy a taste of what’s to come so we’re sharing some of Oculus Rift Crysis 3 gameplay footage running in enhanced VR mode. The video shows the driver’s DirectX 11 capabilities with Crysis 3 running with settings maxed at 1280×800 with a touch of anti-aliasing. Most of the in-game orientation is done via head tracking with mouse control used for precision aiming and swift character rotation. The combination of these next-generation level visuals coupled with the high FOV of the Rift and crosstalk-free stereoscopy is impressive to say the least.

Machine Specs used in the video:

- Intel Core i5 2500k

- nVidia 580 GTX

- 16GB RAM

- Windows 8 64 bit

For best results, view the video in full-screen mode, at 720p, with your Oculus Rift in place. Stay tuned for the full hands-on preview and enjoy the video.

The post Exclusive: VorpX Teaser — Crysis 3 on the Oculus Rift [video] appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Among the Sleep is a forthcoming horror game by Krillbite Studio which, thanks to passing its $225,000 stretch goal, will be developed with Oculus Rift support.

Among the Sleep Kickstarter

Among the Sleep puts the player in the body of a helpless baby. It’s a “horror adventure” game, according to the independent development studio based in Norway, which reminds me of the excellent and frightening Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010). The Kickstarter intro video summarizes the game:

Among the Sleep’s Kickstarter began on April 18th and ends in 24 hours, on May 18th.

Among the Sleep Oculus Rift Support

Not only has the Kickstarter hit its $200,000 goal, at 115% funding, they’ve also passed their $225,000 Oculus Rift stretch goal.

For those unfamiliar with Kickstarter: stretch goals are objectives the developers promise to reach if they raise money a certain level beyond their initial funding goal.

Now that they’ve passed the goal, Krillbite Studio promises proper Oculus Rift support for Among the Sleep from the get-go. They released the following video to preview their implementation:

Starting at $20, you can still support the developers of Among the Sleep and reserve yourself a copy of the game in the process. You’ve got 24 hours left, so don’t hesitate!

As someone who has been dreaming of Oculus Rift support for Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I’m extremely excited to hear that it will be coming to Among the Sleep; I can’t wait to step into a new and frightening perspective. We’ll be watching this project carefully.

The post Among the Sleep Horror Game Kickstarter Reaches Oculus Rift Stretch Goal appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Back at GDC 2013 I had a chance to speak with Unity’s Emil Johansen about the Oculus Rift.

Johansen is a developer and AI specialist for Unity, one of two major game development engines to support the Oculus Rift. He’s been working with Unity since 2009.

This interview was recorded at the end of March, just as the very first Oculus Rift developer kits were arriving to eager devs. While it isn’t as timely as I would have liked, I’m glad to finally be able to share it with you! Let’s blame the delay on the deluge of awesome VR news over the last few months — not a bad problem to have!

The post Oculus Rift Interview with Unity’s Emil Johansen (video) appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Outerra is an in-development ‘world rendering engine’ which is literally capable of rendering a geographically detailed world on a 1:1 scale. The developers have shared with us a video showing initial Oculus Rift Outerra support and are expected to soon release support to the public.

Here’s how the developers describe Outerra:

Outerra is a unique 3D rendering engine, a world rendering engine capable to seamlessly render whole planets from space down to the surface. It can use arbitrary/varying resolution of elevation data that it further dynamically refines using fractal algorithms. The fractals try to mimic natural processes, generating fine, believable terrain with high resolution. The world is also being dynamically textured and populated with vegetation using predefined land type material sets and the computed terrain attributes.

This video gives a good idea of the beauty and scale that Outerra is capable of:

Outerra Oculus Rift Support Coming Soon

Back in March I wrote about the possibilities of Outerra and the Oculus Rift. At the time, there were a few hints that the developers were considering support.

I’m happy to report today that the developers have since received their dev kits and are already well on their way to making the game compatible with virtual reality. Here’s the first look at Outerra Oculus Rift support:

“One thing that’s really nice with Oculus is the sense of scale. I haven’t shown it in the video, but for example the truck looks appropriately large, when you approach the large tires…” Outerra developer Brano Kemen told me.

Kemen says that while initial support is already implemented, there is still some tweaking to be done before a public release:

There are still some basic issues with the stereoscopic rendering that I need to fix before releasing a build with it (sky and sun are wrong, antialiasing).

…some artifacts there are more visible with Oculus than on a monitor display, particularly there are some light leaking pixel gaps in the rocky parts, missing terrain self-shadowing, and morphing between terrain LOD levels. Experiencing it with Oculus actually gives us extra motivation to fix these issues, to make the experience better. But overall, this thing has a great potential.

Kemen expects to first release Outerra Oculus Rift support to supporters who have purchased the alpha version of a game based on Outerra called Anteworld which you can buy for $15. Further down the road support may come to the free Outerra tech demo.

The post Outerra Developers Making Progress on Oculus Rift Support (video) appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

An example of a Mandlebox fractal – photo credit

Fractals are intricate, infinite, and beautiful repeating patterns that are created from an equation. A fractal rendering program called Boxplorer2 recently added support for the Oculus Rift, allowing you to create mesmerizing 3D fractals which you can fall forever into.

Developer Marius Schilder added Boxplorer2 Oculus Rift support and used it to create an eerie Rift-ready rendering of a fractal known as a Mandelbox. While this video shows a pre-rendered scene, Schilder says that a powerful enough video card should be able to view it in real-time. Head tracking is supported in real-time rendering.

When asked about the experience inside the Rift, Schilder says, “Fairly immersive. The lack of sense of scale makes your brain less willing to think it’s just weird goggles. The low rez is also very apparent, since w/ fractals you tend to hunt for detail in the scenery.”

Schilder told me that adding Rift support was fairly simple. He also says that he has a Razer Hydra and may be considering future support for it in Boxplorer2.

Boxplorer2 lacks a front-end user interface and won’t be usable if you aren’t familiar with the command line. For those of you with the know-how, you can find Boxplorer 2 here – don’t get lost down there!

If you’re interested in learning more Schilder points to fractalforums.com, a hub for all things fractal, including Boxplorer2.

Here’s another fractal treat to indulge in, for those as mesmerized by these beautiful works of math as I:

The post Zoom Into Infinity in the Oculus Rift with Boxplorer2 Fractal Explorer (video) appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Theme Park Studio lets you design your own amusement park and ride the roller coaster of your dreams; with a set of convenient editor tools for quick content creation and both Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra support, the program looks to be made for future Rift engineers. The Kickstarter goal has been reached, now Pantera Entertainment has extended funding for the ambitious project.

A roller coaster demo was one of the first released experiences once the Oculus Rift dev kits were out in the wild. MTBS3D user boone188 posted his RiftCoaster, now famous for eliciting lots of interesting and often funny reaction videos – some of them having half a million views already. And roller coaster fans probably won’t have to wait very long for more stomach-turning fun: the team at Pantera Entertainment is already planning the next step, with their amusement park simulator Theme Park Studio.

A few hours ago the Kickstarter campaign for the full-fledged editor, that allows you to design your own park and ride your own roller coasters, ended at the sum of $101,433 – but Pantera has extended funding for the project, so you can still get on the train.

Theme Park Studio: Oculus Rift and Razer Hydra Support

Pantera has pledged support for both the Oculus Rift and the Razer Hydra. The Rift support would obviously give the roller coasters and flat rides in Theme Park Studio a new dimension, but the planned Razer Hydra support could be an interesting fit as well. Place objects in a 3D space with your hands, switch through menus with simple gestures and draw pathways through your park: All this could work well, depending on Pantera’s implementation. It might end up somewhat like MakeVR.

Extended Funding: Hope for RollerCoaster Tycoon fans?

In its current state, Theme Park Studio doesn’t offer any management gameplay, which is a bit unfortunate given that the genre has pretty much dried up since the release of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (2004).

Fortunately, management gameplay isn’t completely off the list — it was one of the original stretch goals of the crowd funding campaign at $180,000. With an extended funding period of 30 more days, this goal could still be reached — just like Mac support ($130,000) and a PlayStation 3 version ($250,000) of Theme Park Studio.

The projected release date for Theme Park Studios is September 2013, so there should be more than enough time for hobby engineers to build stunning roller coasters until the Oculus Rift consumer version is released, currently expected for the third quarter of 2014. If you can’t wait that long, you can pimp your RiftCoaster ride with some easy tweaks or take a look at Parrotcoaster – another rollercoaster demo that is “coming soon to Oculus Rift”.

Fund Theme Park Studio

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(Photo based on image by iFixit)

For those who haven’t tried one on for themselves, the question remains — what does it look like in in the Oculus Rift?  This article is intended to help answer that question.

VR enthusiast Yossi Preminger put together a series of images which approximate what the combination of combination of the Oculus Rift’s resolution and the screen door effect. Be sure to view in full size to see the detail:

Of course, there’s only so much that still images through your computer monitor can tell you. For the rest of the details, and an explaination of why the inside of the Oculus Rift looks like it does, read below.

See Also: Head Mounted Display Comparison Chart

What Does it Look Like in the Oculus Rift?

A number of factors contribute to what it looks like inside the Oculus Rift.

Field of View and Head Tracking

The Oculus Rift has a horizontal field of view (HFoV) of approximately 90 degrees in each lens. Each human eye has a horizontal field of view of appropriately 95 degrees, giving both eyes a range of ~190 degrees horizontally. Thanks to the Rift’s HFoV nearly matching that of each individual eye, the view inside the Rift appears to almost completely surround the user.

If you turn your eyes away from the center of the screen, it is possible to see the edges. However, when you are focusing on the center of the display, the mind quite effectively ignores blank peripheral spaces and maintains the feeling of being surrounded by the virtual world.

Vertical field of view in the Oculus Rift is even greater, close to 110 degrees. This means it’s difficult to see the top and bottom edge of the screen even when explicitly trying.

The Oculus Rift head tracker

Head tracking lets the user look around the virtual world just like they would in the real world. The Oculus Rift head tracker constantly anlyzes the player’s head movement and uses it to control the view, instead of relying on a mouse or analogue stick to turn your view in the game. This makes for a completely natural way to observe the world, which is a major factor in immersion.

The high field of view and head tracking lead to the feeling of actually being present in the virtual space, rather than just looking through a small window into a virtual world like most are used to with a monitor or TV.

It can be so immersive that many users of the Rift, myself included, have reported the experience of being ‘transported’ back to reality when removing the Oculus Rift.

Fovea and Variable Acuity Resolution

The diagram shows the relative detail achieved by left human eye (horizontal section) in degrees from the fovea. Image by: Vanessa Ezekowitz

The Oculus Rift lenses are designed to provide a high field of view and to mimic the way that the human eye naturally functions.

Humans may have a field of view close to 190 degrees, but we can only see fine detail in a tiny portion of it. The rest is low-detail peripheral vision which largely relies on the brain to fill in the blanks and give context to vague colors and shapes (which you can see for yourself by trying any number of simple blind spot experiments).

The part of the eye responsible for this is called the fovea; a small pit in the back of your eye that is densely packed with photosensitive cells, much more so than the surrounding retina. Light that lands in the fovea can be seen in high detail. You can see by the graph on the right how quickly detail drops as light gets further away from the fovea. This less detailed area is your peripheral vision.

It’s easy to see the affect of the fovea for yourself: focus your gaze on the edge of your screen and try to read any of the text in this article from your peripheral vision. Just a few degrees away from the fovea and it’s nearly impossible to read text.

It is because of the fovea that it makes sense to use variable acuity resolution (VAR) on the Oculus Rift.

VAR means that the resolution is not consistent across the display. Technically, the Rift’s display has consistent resolution, but the lenses warp the image, causing a compression of pixels toward the center. This doesn’t noticeably warp the imagine in the Rift because the corresponding virtual scene is warped equally in the opposite direction so that it is projected correctly.

The result is a higher pixel density in the center of the screen and a lower pixel density as you approach the edges of the screen. VAR helps prevent ‘wasted’ detail in your peripheral vision by bunching pixels closer in the area seen by your fovea.

It is for this reason that heads up display elements (like health, ammo, radar, etc.) can be difficult to see at the edges of the display, and why the Oculus Rift is challenging developers to come up with new ways to present that kind of info to the user.

Resolution, Screen Door Effect, and Ghosting

The 7-inch display that the Oculus Rift uses is 1280×800. However, it is split down the middle to dedicate one half to each eye. This means that the effective resolution is only 640×800, pretty low by today’s HD standards.

The low resolution is almost always the first thing people comment on when trying the Rift for the first time. Fortunately, thanks to the burgeoning mobile device market, small displays are increasing in resolution independent of the Oculus Rift. Even if the Rift didn’t exist, the development of high resolution mobile displays would continue. It’s for this reason that the Oculus Rift 2.0 (consumer version), is almost certain to ship with a higher resolution display. Many are expecting at least 1920×1080 which would lend itself to an effective resolution of 960×1080 — better, but still less than ideal.

Then there’s the ‘screen door effect’ which looks like a fine black grid spread out over the image. This happens because of the empty space between pixels — a characteristic of a display known as ‘pixel fill factor’. Most displays that use real pixels (as opposed to projection) have some amount of space between pixels. The particular amount of space determined by the display technology and the subpixel structure.

On an LCD display, each pixel is made up of three subpixels — red, green, and blue — which are combined together to create whatever color is needed for that pixel. The ‘pixel pitch’ or ‘dot pitch’ of a display indicates the distance between subpixels. Higher pixel pitch generally correlates with higher pixel fill factor.

The Oculus Rift’s display has a fairly typical pixel fill factor. However, because it is worn so close to the user’s eyes, the screen door effect becomes quite apparent — you can see this demonstrated effectively in the photos toward the top of the page. This is another area where Oculus hopes to improve for the Oculus Rift consumer version.

Ghosting is caused by slow pixel switching times (how long it takes for the pixels to change colors). Ghosting causes the appearance of faint trails behind moving objects in the virtual scene. When turning your head in the virtual space, the entire scene moves — ghosting causes the scene to blur until you stop moving again.

Ghosting in the Oculus Rift is quite apparent because the display being used has slow pixel switching. Ghosting, like resolution and the screen door effect, is expected to be greatly improved in the Oculus Rift consumer version’s display.

In my experience with the Oculus Rift, the visual issues (low resolution, screen door, and ghosting), seem to melt away once you become immersed in the virtual world around you. Part of this likely has to do with our brain’s ability to ignore information we don’t need and estimate missing information that we can’t actually see. Another part may be that we remember the feeling of an experience much more than we recall the specific visuals.

The post What Does It Look Like In the Oculus Rift? appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

We take an exclusive early look at VorpX, a new commercial 3D Driver from developer Ralf Ostertag which promises to graft Oculus Rift support onto existing games that were developed and released long before the Rift was even a twinkle in Palmer Luckey’s eye. How well can it work? Let’s find out.

Inject VR Into Your Old Games

The Oculus Rift Developer Kit is finally in people’s hands (including ours!)! in fact, according to Palmer Luckey, all Kickstarter Dev Kits will have shipped to their lucky recipients by the end of May. And despite both the original Kickstarter pitch and Oculus VR’s constant assertions since it’s spectacular $2.5M successful funding run that this is resolutely NOT ready for the regular gamer, not many listened. To be honest, there wasn’t much chance that the most exciting development in gaming for years wasn’t going to be snapped up by gamers looking to bring their 90s dreams of Virtual Reality to life.

So it’s day zero for VR then, which of course means that very few actual games exist with support for the Rift. So, what do Rift owners give their new gadget to feed in the mean time?

Bioshock using Geometry Mode

Take me straight to the games!

What is VorpX?

For a Virtual Reality HMD (Head Monuted Display) to deliver a compelling experience, you need to address a few issues that unsupported games suffer from:

1. There’s no Head Tracking support. Moving your head has no effect on your view of the game’s world.

2. There’s no image pre-warping. The Oculus Rift uses Aspheric lenses which distorts light passing through them to achieve it’s high Field of View. So, in order for games to ‘look’ right to the user, the image must be  warped (or undistoreted [sic] if you like) to correct this distortion and any aberrations.

3. Stereo 3D support is currently provided as either GPU specific implementations (i.e. nVidia 3D Vision) or 3rd party drivers (i.e. Tri-Def).

From the official website:

VorpX is a 3d-driver for DirectX9-11 games that is specifically geared towards VR-devices like the Oculus Rift. Additionally to ‘making games 3d’ it offers various features to tackle many of the issues that arise when playing games on the Rift that are not designed for it.

To explain further, VorpX hijacks the rendering and input IO pipeline when a game initiates 3D acceleration and maps head-tracking input data from the HMD to mouse commands within the game.  Along the way, VorpX also forces the rendering of two in-game ‘cameras’ so that distinct, shifted views (one for each eye) can be presented to the HMD’s screen. Finally, the views are ‘warped’ to accompany the Oculus Rift’s Aspheric lenses and presented to the HMD’s display ready for viewing.

The practical upshot of all this is that you can (in theory at least) play many games in your library using the Rift, with high-FOV, Stereo 3D and head tracking as if the game had been built with support from the beginning. In theory it’s a little more complicated than that (which we’ll come to later) but this is the core premise behind the product.

For all these reasons, you can understand why VorpX is one of the most hotly anticipated bits of software in the VR community. With that in mind, I spent a couple of weeks with a beta preview version recording my thoughts, observations, configuration tips and gameplay to give you the fullest possible picture on whether VorpX is for you.

Know Your Buffers: 3D Reconstruction Explained

As mentioned, VorpX forces the rendering of Stereoscopic 3D as part of it’s injection process – essentially shoehorning depth where none previously existed – hence ‘Reconstruction’.

VorpX supports 2 main methods of 3D Reconstruction, Geometry and Z-Buffer (or 2D + Depth) based rendering. It’s important to understand the differences between them as it helps illustrate the flexibility and power of VorpX whist highlighting some of the compromises that are needed to make it work effectively.

Z-Buffer Mode (aka 2D + Depth)

The default mode in VorpX (referred to as ‘normal’  in the menu), Z-Buffer reconstruction renders depth based on objects position on the Z-axis in a 3D rendered scene. I defer to this excellent article on 3D rendering at Gamasutra:

2D + depth rendering creates the 3D effect in games by sampling the geometry in the scene to obtain the depth-map, and then using it to generate a second point of view from the regular 2D color image. This technique renders the scene for the left eye, and then creates the image for the right eye using a per-pixel displacement based on the depth map — making the results geometrically accurate.

The key advantage to the 2D + depth technique is the low impact that its integration has on production. It requires that the game only render frames once, which has a low performance impact on the game.

Features: 

• Extremely fast.
• Effective at adding depth and scale to first person views.
• Requires few if any tweaks to game configurations to work.
• 3D / Parallax effect limited when compared to Geometry mode.

Geometry Mode

The traditional method of rendering 2 distinct views of the same scene, mimicking the way our eyes view the real world. Again from Gamasutra:

In comparison, dual rendering creates the strongest 3D effect, and is used for movies as well as in video games. For movies, to create stereoscopic 3D images using the effect of parallax, film makers need to capture two images shot from slightly different angles. This means 3D-compatible cameras are needed in order to record the two images simultaneously. This allows one image for each eye to be projected onto the same screen to create a 3D effect.

In the case of video games, to construct a three-dimensional virtual world, game makers need to position characters, buildings and other objects in a manner that simulates a miniature version of the real world. In doing this, they can position two cameras to capture slightly dissimilar images of the same scene, just as the right and left eyes would do.

Features:

• Strongest and most effective 3D / Parallax effect
• High rendering overhead. Up to 50% slower
• Lowest compatibility for existing games (shader / lighting and post processing effects can cause glitches)

These two methods with their drastically different approaches to 3D rendering clearly both have their strengths and weaknesses. So it’s refreshing to note that VorpX not only includes both options, but that you can swap them on-the-fly whilst the game is running, giving you the ability to decide which method suits which game suits which method best. There is one caveat here however, Geometry mode will only work with games which can run in DirectX 9 mode.

Anyway, with the science is out of the way, onto the important stuff .. Games!

The post VorpX Driver Preview: Skyrim, Fallout 3, BioShock, and More with the Oculus Rift — Unlock the VR in Your Games Library (videos) appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

On Tuesday this week, Inition, a UK-based company specializing in the development of real-time 3D graphics applications, held an event to showcase the latest in 3D AR and VR technology. Present at the showcase was Kevin Williams, who agreed to give us the inside scoop.

Kevin Williams is the founding chairman of the Digital Out-of-Home Entertainment Network Association (DNA); he is also founder of the digital out-of-home entertainment (DOE) consultancy KWP Limited, and is publisher of the well-respected industry news service, The Stinger Report. He has been involved in immersive entertainment simulation since the 1980’s – first with virtual reality (VR) technology since 1991, working in military simulation’s entrance into entertainment, as well as working for one of the first UK VR corporations; going on to be a Walt Disney Imagineer, developing one of the longest running VR attractions. A prolific writer on the DOE sector and its technology, he also presents at numerous conferences in the sector – consulting with many of the leaders across the industry. He has recently co-authored a book on the immersive out-of-home entertainment sector that will be published soon.

Introduction

It has been some years since my colleagues and I, from the then-leading VR company (Division), appeared in the pages of EDGE Magazine sporting the latest in virtual reality head mounted rigs. Now it’s 2013 and VR is hot again — and once again appears on the cover of EDGE.

I have had the honor to be one of a select few that have been linked to the development of an affordable mass-market VR platform. Since 1968, when Ivan Sutherland and his team implemented the first virtual reality system — using wire-frame graphics and the first head-mounted display — the technology industry has been drawn to develop to a system for detailed representation of virtual worlds. But it would not be until VPL Research was founded in 1984 by Jaron Lanier, and he would coin the phrase Virtual Reality (VR), that the true drive for VR would begin.

I have charted the latest emergence of interest in VR, first with a number of consultancy projects to evaluate the opportunity to drop VR back into the public space – and then with the momentum of the successful Kickstarter and initial release of the Oculus Rift.

This momentum reached a high-point this month for me, with a personal invitation to attend Inition’s ‘AV versus VR’, a special presentation for press and VIP’s of VR technology.

The Demonstrations

The two-day event was held in London, during the Digital Shoreditch festival organized to promote the innovation of the ‘silicon roundabout’ (as the local area has been dubbed in response to California’s Silicon Valley). The event organized by Inition – a self-styled multidisciplinary creative studio creating exhibitions, live events, interactive experiences, promotions and retail installations for a wide and varied clients base (the company is based in the heart of Shoreditch).

Held in Inition’s dedicated Demo Studio – ‘AR versus VR’ gathered a number of Oculus Rift dev kits in one place, and offered a chance for invited guests to appraise the system, as well as a number of other immersive platforms. Inition had managed to present innovative technology demonstrations running across the slew of systems.

A brief overview of these attending: Wizdish showed their omni-direction treadmill with Kinect tracking, Animazoo showed their new three gyro IGS Glove system with an impressively disturbing VR hand amputation experience. A flying demonstration was also presented using the Kinect to track the user’s body movement to fly round the virtual environment.

Pride of place given to a Inition’s demonstration of Vertigo – with a VR experience, using the Oculus Rift, that had users balance along a virtual ledge with wind effects. Next to this was Norwegian Making View (an early Oculus supporter), showing the Rift HMD running a selection of their impressive real world videos captured on their ViewCam system offering interactive 360 presentation in real-time, perceived by this author as turning the Rift into a modern day View-Master, and compelling representation on the early system.

Along with these VR experiences, there were a number of immersive display technologies including the impressive Dimenco 3D display – a 50’’ 4K LCD display, running a glasses free 3D presentation; along with the ImmersaVu – 160 degree display system with a 1920 x 1080 native resolution.

Inition also showed demonstrations of their recent work — a driving simulator representing the symptoms of hypoglycemia;  also including the Nissan JUKE “Built to Thrill Wingsuit Experience” repurposed to use a Kinect to control the simulated wingsuit glider through a game scenario (based on their original motion base VR experience). There was also a Macallan Whiskey ‘Holographic’ Point of Sale (POS) display, and a suite of 3D printers displaying their capabilities.

To round this off Inition showed a number of Augmented Reality (AR) demonstrations using tablets to view virtual items, and a virtual mirror system representing AR connectivity on a large display.

All these demonstrations were impressive in their own right — and we could go into much more detail about each one – but space is limited and the focus of my report for Road to VR is to give impressions of the Oculus Rift, (if you would like to read a detailed report on the event, please check out our news service, The Stinger Report).

(continue reading on page 2…)

The post Inition ‘AR vs. VR’ Showcases the Latest in AR/VR Tech — Kevin Williams Reports appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Take a flight in a wing suit, ride in a formula one car, or go on a daring course in a stunt prop plane — all from the comfort of your home. Making View has adapted their 360 degree video experiences for the Oculus Rift.

Making View, based in Norway, is a company which specializes in all types of interactive imagery. Their ‘Making Viewer’ tool lets people view 360 degree video. And now they’re created a Making View VR edition for the Oculus Rift.

There are three demos you can try right now. A wingsuit flight, formula one race, and a ride in a stunt prop plane.

Making Viewer VR Edition for Oculus Rift Download

The official page is down at the time of writing, so I’ll post the download links here for those of you with an Oculus Rift (note – if you are finding this article a while after publishing, be sure to check the official page for the latest versions):

Wingsuit:

• Windows
• Mac

Formula One:

• Windows
• Mac

Stunt Plane:

• Windows
• Mac

[If you don't have the Rift, you can see the same experiences in the browser: Wingsuit, Formula One, Stunt Plane]

Control of the camera is done with headtracking with the Rift. The concept is pretty cool and works well, though it’d be great to see the footage in higher quality. One thing is notably absent — 3D; though it doesn’t take much to image why it would be difficult to achieve.

However, according to our friends at 3D Focus, Making View is working on stereoscopic 3D 360 degree video for the Oculus Rift.

“Our current cameras used in production do not shoot stereoscopic 360 degree content, but after creating the VR viewer we saw the use for this, and have therefore begun experimenting with a new camera rig to explore and try to solve the challenges this presents,” Making View Chief Software Engineer Daniel Ervik told 3D Focus.

Continue reading the full interview with Daniel Ervik over at 3D Focus to learn more about Making View’s exciting plans for the Oculus Rift (including live stereoscopic 3D 360 degree video!)

The post 360 Degree Oculus Rift Ready Videos Give you a Front Row Seat to Extreme Sports appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Outerra is the stunning, in-development, world rendering engine that we’ve had our eyes on lately. After teasing Oculus Rift Outerra support with a few videos, the developers have released the first build to enable Rift functionality.

First, a bit of background. Outerra is a game engine. It can render a beautiful 1:1 scale Earth on which you can explore. Anteworld is a game based on the Outerra engine — it’s still in alpha, but you can get it now and support the developers for $15.

Now that we have that cleared up, it’ll make sense when I tell you that Oculus Rift Outerra support is now available in Anteworld. You’ll need to purchase the Anteworld alpha and then enable the Rift through the game’s video settings. You can get Anteworld by downloading the Outerra Tech Demo and then purchase through the demo (learn more here). The developer tells me that Oculus Rift support could come to the demo version of Outerra sometime down the road.

Be warned though Anteworld is still very much in alpha — it isn’t a full game experience just yet. Oculus Rift support is there and working, but there’s still tweaking and testing to be done. The developer warns: “There are many things that don’t work correctly in stereo mode yet. Editing tools haven’t been tested at all.”

As it stands though, Oculus Rift Outerra support is pretty cool. I dropped into a plane and had a great time flying around a huge swath of space — inside the cockpit you can see your avatar controlling the flight yolk and throttle. Rolling the plane upside down and into a dive feels disorienting and amazing at the same time. It looked a bit like this:

I’m looking forward to testing out the truck during my next visit.

I did have some issues — to be expected with alpha software — sometimes the menu didn’t work quite right with the Rift, and head tracking didn’t seem to initialize several times, though I’m not sure if that was a problem with the Rift or Outerra. Thanks to ongoing development, it’s likely that we’ll see a smoother experience soon.

The way that Outerra is handling the interface for the Oculus Rift is actually quite clever. Instead of forcing you to use the default interface in a standard window (which would be hard to read), the developer is using a virtual screen which floats up quite close to your face. You can easily look around it with head tracking, making it much easier to read.

The post First Outerra Build with Oculus Rift Support Now Available appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Today at E3, the massive annual gaming convention, a new Oculus Rift 1080p prototype is being shown running with Unreal Engine 4. Here’s all the info we gathered so far.

See Also: What Does it Look Like in the Oculus Rift?

Oculus Rift 1080p Prototype

Photo credit – Engadget

Everyone was expecting a higher resolution Rift at some point, but we weren’t expecting to see it so soon. The new Oculus Rift prototype is using a 1080p display. Based on a picture from IGN (above), it looks like they’re gone down from a 7-inch screen to a 5-inch screen, a size that they had originally intended to use.

Assuming a 5-inch display, the new 1080p panel would have a pixel density of approximately 440 PPI, more than twice the density of the current Oculus Rift developer kit (215 PPI). As currently, the display is divided in half for each eye. This makes the effective resolution 960×1080, compared to 640×800 of the current model. While this still doesn’t take the Oculus into the realm of true 1080p HD gaming, it is a big improvement in visual fidelity, about 2x the current development kit.

The latest official update from Oculus says that new display “greatly reduc[es] the screen-door effect seen in the development kit. The brightness, contrast, and color are also improved. All of these changes come together to ratchet the sense of immersion to an entirely new level.”

Comparison between current developer kit (left) and 1080p prototype (right)

The Verge’s David Pierce took a look into the new Oculus Rift 1080p prototype. Oculus is showing off integration with Unreal Engine 4. They’re showing some environments from the ‘Elemental’ demo, seen below:

Oculus is also showing off the VR Cinema 3D demo with a trailer of Man of Steel.

Oculus Rift 1080p Dev Kit 2 in 2013?

Earlier this year at GTC 2013 we saw a hint that Oculus was planning a second development kit for “Q2-Q3 2013″.

Photo credit – PC Perspective

Seeing as we’re almost into Q3, I think it’s a safe bet that it’ll be at least until Q4, if not into 2014, for a 1080p version, and that’s if Oculus even plans to release a second dev kit.

While Oculus is showing off the new 1080p Rift prototype to the press at E3, they currently have “no solid plans” to release it, according to IGN. The fact that we see two cables coming out of the new unit (one for display output, the other for tracker data) tells us that this decidedly still in protoype status — the current Rift development kit has one custom cable for both data streams.

“The 1080p prototype isn’t a product — this isn’t necessarily the display (or even the resolution) that we’ll use for the consumer version — it’s simply a taste of what’s coming,” wrote Oculus in their latest update.

Will the New Screen Adapt to the Current Development Kit?

Photo credit – Engadget

Those who know the Oculus Rift dev kit well will note that the new prototype appears to be using the same front portion as the current dev kit, with only the screen portion swapped out. While we’d love to see an upgrade available for existing dev kit owners, we doubt it’ll happen.

Oculus chose to directly connect the display on the current dev kit to the control box. An upgrade would essentially mean replacing nearly all of the hardware, making it not much of an upgrade to begin with. We would have preferred to see a connector attachment from the display to the control box for this reason, and also to extend the cable length when necessary.

The post Everything We Know About the Oculus Rift 1080p Prototype appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Earlier this week, the Oculus Rift 1080p prototype was shown at E3. Oculus says that they can’t reveal the name of the panel manufacturer, but we think we may have tracked it down to a 5.5-inch LG display.

Hat tip to our pal Kevin Williams of the DNA Association who tracked down what could very well be the Oculus Rift 1080p prototype display.

We’re looking at a 5.5-inch 1080p display from LG. From photos of the unit, we can clearly see that the Oculus Rift 1080p prototype uses a smaller display than the current developer kit (Dk1), which uses a 7-inch screen. Here are the specs of the display in question (data from Panelook.com):

• Brand: LG Display

  The current Oculus Rift developer kit (DK1) 7-inch display. Photo credit – David Hodson | iFixit (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA)

• Model: LG550WF1-SD01
• Type: LTPS TFT-LCD
• Size: 5.5 inch
• Resolution: 1920×1080
• Weight: 20.23g
• Display Mode: IPS, Normally Black, Transmissive
• Brightness: 450 cd/m²
• Contrast Ratio: 1000:1
• Display Colors: 16.7M (8-bit)
• Response Time: 17/18ms (Tr/Td)
• Viewing Angle: 80/80/80/80 (L/R/U/D)
• Frequency: 60Hz
• Lamp Type: WLED
• Signal Interface: MIPI (4 data lanes)
• Input Voltage: 5.0V
• Surface: Antireflection

So what makes me think that this is the one? Aside from the resolution and size, the 60Hz frequency gives us a clue.

Engadget’s hands-on with the Oculus Rift 1080p prototype notes that, “After looking around a snowy mountain stronghold inhabited by a fire lord in low res, we switched to the exact same demo running at 60 fps on the HD prototype device…” (my emphasis).

To me, it doesn’t sound like the author of that piece just instinctively knew that the demo was running at 60 FPS. Rather, it was probably a talking point from Oculus during the demo. This coincides nicely with the panel having a 60Hz frequency.

We also know that the colors have been improved, which may be from the new display using IPS — which is indeed a feature of the LG panel.

Furthermore, Oculus’ VP of Product, Nate Mitchell, confirms that the panel is LCD in an interview with Tested.com, another match for the LG panel (the potential alternative being an OLED display).

And while I’d love to say that you could pop this display into your DK1, Mitchell confirms in the same interview that Oculus is using a custom display driver; even if you could get your hands on the display, you wouldn’t be able to use it!

The post Is This the Oculus Rift 1080p Prototype Panel? appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Looking for a summary of all Oculus Rift E3 news so far? Road to VR has got you covered!

Oculus Rift E3 news: 1080p HD prototype

Comparing the Oculus Rift Dev Kit (left) and the 1080p prototype (right). See fullscreen image and note the greatly reduced screen-door effect. Source: Tested.com

Undoubtedly, the biggest piece of news was the Oculus Rift HD prototype that was unveiled by Oculus VR on the show floor last Tuesday. Upgraded with a 1080p, 5 inch display, the HD prototype “makes the world feel more immersive, more immediate”, according to The Verge. IGN reports that the screen-door effect is “significantly reduced”, Engadget‘s Michael Gorman agrees:

“Surface textures could be seen in much higher fidelity (…) and the general detail of the entire environment was greatly improved”

Paired with a more vibrant, possibly IPS, panel, the HD version of the Oculus Rift even seems to be good enough for pleasant movie viewing experience. Oculus VR showed confidence into the display’s fidelity by demoing VR Cinema 3D by Joo-Hyung Ahn, a demo that takes you to your own personal 3D cinema. According to most testers, the new 1080p prototype offers a pleasant movie experience – which gives hope for mainstream Oculus Rift use outside of the realm of gaming.

EVR now called EVE-VR, stuns E3 visitors

After unveiling EVR at the EVE Online Fanfest a few weeks ago and covering the history of CCP’s small side-project in an insightful community blog post, the icelandic game studio showed EVE-VR at E3 as well.

Unfortunately, the game still ran on the Oculus Rift Dev Kits, but nevertheless fascinated players: Reddit users (including Chris Dycus, Hardware Developer at Oculus VR) are reporting EVE-VR as “one of the best Rift experiences” and pocket-lint.com even goes one step further in its praise for EVE-VR:

“There is no easier way to describe it other than by saying this is what it must be like to fly a spaceship. Really.”

Unfortunately, CCP hasn’t announced any plans at E3 to release the game to the public. If you want to show your support, visit the still ongoing petition to release EVE-VR to the public.

Sony confirms interest in the Oculus Rift, Shuhei Yoshida “loves” it

Sony has shown interest in the Oculus Rift while denying Rift support for Playstation 4. Above: Console rival Microsoft is rumored to work on their own Augmented reality glasses – under the codename “Project Fortaleza”.

Another very interesting Oculus Rift E3 news bit comes from an Engadget interview with Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios – A confirmation that the Japanese electronics giant has interest in the Oculus Rift: “We’ve got a couple of the development kits, and I tried it out and I love it,” he told Engadget at E3 2013.

After being asked whether Playstation 4 supports Oculus Rift, Yoshida denies:  “No, it doesn’t”. Further inquiries were greeted with a “No comment”, but Yoshida seems to be a fan – During CES in January, he already tweeted about the Oculus Rift: “I say Oculus, you say _ _ _ _?” alluding to a VergeCast that was recorded during the exhibition.

Of course this is in no way a confirmation for Oculus Rift support in the Playstation 4, but the fact that Sony has multiple Dev Kits is a very strong indicator that the console makers are watching Oculus VR closely. On the same note, Microsoft is rumored to plan their own gaming glasses with Project Fortaleza for the Xbox One and could very well take inspiration from the Rift’s current success.

We will be watching the LA exhibition center for any more Oculus Rift E3 news, so stay tuned to Road to VR in the coming days.

The post Oculus Rift E3 News Roundup: 1080p Prototype, EVE-VR, and Sony’s Love for the Oculus Rift appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Virtual Reality promises to pull us into digital worlds and convince our brain we’re elsewhere, even if those places are dangerous. We look at Inition’s ingenious interactive VR experiment designed expressly to terrify you.

Mind Games

Recently Kevin Williams visited and reported on the AR Vs. VR event, part of the Digital Shoreditch festival. The event includes a number of novel VR and AR experiences.

The star of the show however, was a unique experiment exploring the basest of human fears – that of plummeting to your death. Designed and built by Inition, it comprised a mix of physical props (in this case a thin plank of wood) married with a virtual space (that plank bridging the gap between two derelict skyscrapers) with  the obvious aim to completely fool the subject’s brain  into thinking they were in imminent danger of becoming pavement pizza.

The experiment was effective by all accounts. And as illustrated in the video below, once the final, cruel trick was played out that reaction climbed to extreme!

The Making of ..

Inition’s own case study on how the experience was built is below. The fundamental components were an Oculus Rift HMD, Kinect (for  movement tracking) with the environment created in the Unity game engine using MiddleVR .. oh, and a crosswind generator (aka ‘a big fan’).

Our 3D artists created a bespoke environment which could be explored in the Oculus Rift head mounted display which offers a 110 degree field of view.

The user would start their experience in a room complete with Digital Shoreditch Festival graffiti, comfy arm chair and log fire.  After being moved towards the exit door, it would suddenly open up, revealing a sheer drop hundreds of feet tall.

A thin plank of wood separated them and the roof of the building on the other side and they were encouraged to walk across, remaining on the plank.  For their return journey, an operator would manually send them falling to the ground.

Inition used a Microsoft Kinect for positional tracking and fans generated wind to enhance the sense of height. The whole experience was created within just one week.

The post Don’t look down! Inition explores VR Vertigo. appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Reported by various news outlets and later confirmed in the latest Oculus Kickstarter update, it seems Oculus have received a substantial financial shot in the arm from two Venture Capitalist firms.

$16M R&D Dollars

Brendan Iribe, CEO Oculus VR

In what must come as little surprise to those that have followed Oculus VR’s meteoric rise over the last 12 months, Oculus just got all corporate on us. CEO of Oculus VR Brendan Iribe has announced that they’ve finalised their first round of funding and chosen 2 VC firms to join with them to help build the future of Virtual Reality gaming.

Spark Capital and Matrix Partners are the two willing investors, and a representative from each firm now form a new upper echelon of management at Oculus VR. As Iribe put it, whilst talking to The Verge “I have a boss now, I guess .”

Clearly concious that it’s hard-won indie credentials may be lost, Iribe is quick to point out that Oculus VR’s mission has not been altered, quite the reverse. Iribe insists this new money is quite simply “R&D Dollars” to enable the company to recruit and grow where required.

It does seem that Oculus VR have had a firm hand on the steering wheel throughout the process. In the latest Kickstarter update from Oculus, Palmer Luckey states:

We were fortunate enough to be able to pick investors who we thought would be a great fit. They really believe in our vision for the future of VR. These are people who have taken companies from startup to mass market many times, entrepreneurs who have a ton of meaningful experience building hardware and software consumer technology.

It’s great news for Oculus, it’s employees and, ultimately, it’s customers and fans. The technical problems yet to be solved that currently stand in the way of  the fabled Consumer Edition of the Oculus Rift are tough. With any luck, this new money will give Oculus the space it needs to solve these problems without compromising their vision for a first rate VR experience.

Iribe Speaks to Forbes

In an interview with Forbes magazine, Iribe details estimations on how the funding will manifest itself at Oculus:

We don’t have an exact number nailed down. We are around 30 now, and we have about 35 jobs on our careers page, so you can see we’ll be ramping up pretty quickly. They are almost entirely engineering – is almost entirely engineers and developers. That sprawls across multiple different skill set: there are software developers, hardware developers… We are going to start to scale up the developer relations side, and technical support. Now that we have over 10,000 developers with kits in their hands and at least another 10,000 more to ship, we want to make sure that people generate the best content they can.

..R&D dollars indeed.

Matrix Partners Blog about the Oculus VR Venture

Antonio Rodriguez from Matrix Partners, who clearly has his geek credentials firmly in place, posted a grounded and interesting take on the new venture. References to cult VR literature notwithstanding, Antonio clearly understands the challenges that await the Oculus team:

Finally, let’s not kid ourselves: though we are in the business of investing in the future, it is rare to see a team that seems to have jumped directly out of the pages of “Snowcrash” or “Ready Player One.” When Oculus’ CEO, Brendan Iribe, first brought the demo over to our office, it was one of those moments that inspire a mix of deja vu (because you’ve read about concepts like this so many times before) with a sense of wonder about just how much of science fiction is possible today. It might be rough around the edges right now, and the team has loads of work ahead of it before the Rift can go mass market, but to be so wholly transported to another place by such an immersive piece of technology, we immediately knew that this is a piece of the future we wanted to support. We are enormously excited about Oculus VR and can’t wait for everyone to experience what it’s like when virtual reality reaches its potential.

About: Spark Capital

Formed 8 years ago, Spark have been been a major player in the technology and online field. Big name investments in their portfolio include Twitter, FourSquare and Tumblr. From their CrunchBase profile:

Founded eight years ago, Spark Capital is a leading venture capital firm focused on early stage startups. Spark’s portfolio includes companies such as Twitter, Tumblr (acq Yahoo!), Foursquare, AdMeld (acq Google), Warby Parker, OMGPOP (acq Zynga), ThePlatform (acq Comcast), and 5Min (acq AOL).

With offices in Boston and New York, Spark invests across the globe and across stages, from a $250k active partner at a seed stage, to $25m to establish category leadership.

Spark’s tight-knit group of partners focuses on a number of areas including: advertising & monetization, commerce & services, cloud & infrastructure, social, mobile and content.

About: Matrix Partners

An elder statesman in comparison to Spark, the company was formed back in 1977 and now focusses on investing in technology, online and mobile communications startups from seed. heir CrunchBase profile reads:

Matrix Partners is a US based private equity investment firm focusing on venture capital investments. The firm invests in seed and early stage companies in the software, communications, semiconductors, data storage, Internet and wireless sectors.
Matrix Partners has offices in Waltham, MA, Palo Alto, CA, Mumbai, India and Beijing, China.
Read more: http://www.crunchbase.com/financial-organization/matrix-partners#ixzz2Wbgx30Tx
Follow us: @crunchbase on Twitter | crunchbase on Facebook

The post Oculus VR Receive $16M in Funding from Venture Capitalists appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.

Virtually There

Back the Virtua View Indiegogo Now!

Chris has set his funding goal at $50,000 with a duration of 30 days and has told us that this will enable to continue expanding the development team to push on and complete the first version of the product.

His pledge tiers and rewards range from $5 (Reward: A Huge Thanks!) to $15,000, which gets you the entire 1st floor of the Virtual Lounge.

Virtual Meetings

We’ve been privileged to try Virtua View a couple of times over the last few weeks and on both occasions it left quite an impression. The latest playtest (which you can see featured in the campaign’s video above)  involved a spin around the standard cinema, various fantastical meeting rooms (including a lovingly  AV Boardroom in space) all realised in glorious Oculus-Rift-o-Vision. In addition to the immersive visuals, Virtua View also incorporates full Razer Hydra support and is used to enhance communication in game. Want to wave ‘hi!’ to a friend in game, make the motion and it appears, illustrated via your avatar’s virtual hands.

“..the immediacy of the experience transcends anything you might have felt before.”

This seemingly simple feature has so much impact when in Virtua View because, when you’re in a virtual space via Virtual Reality, the immediacy of the experience transcends anything you might have felt before. Yes, we’ve all had Skype calls and we’ve all played an online First Person Shooters, but the connection you feel to your friends / colleagues whilst ‘plugged in’ cannot be overestimated. It has the potential to become the bridge between online and physical meetings.

The potential too for leveraging the power of VR for educational purposes via Virtua View is huge. Indeed, Chris includes a virtual meeting room designed to illustrate this. As seen in the campaign video, we’re transported to a huge planetarium, suspended in the vastness of space complete with 3D orbiting planets. Pupil engagement via this medium, perhaps enabling teachers to reach those finding it difficult to connect with the material, is of particular interest and one which Chris is keen to emphasise.

Dedicated

Chris has spent the last 6 months pouring his time and his own money into this project, one in which he passionately believes. But development is expensive. He’s now in need of investment to ensure his project and the myriad ideas tied up in it see the light of day.

We’d love to see this project funded and to have a chance to see that vision realised. If you have some spare cash and are interested in helping a genuine, first-of-its-kind software project ‘happen’ head to IndiGogo via the above link and pledge away.

We’ll have a more in-depth look at Virtua View in a forthcoming article, including some exclusive video playtests. Stay Tuned.

The post Virtua View for Oculus Rift — Crowdfunding Campaign Launched appeared first on Road To Virtual Reality.