The Molecule, says CEO Chris Healer, is very good at solving unique challenges. So when 30 Ninjas came calling with a scripted VR series to be directed by its principal, Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow) and shot by Jaunt VR, Chris and his team were all in. In his words, “It made so much sense.”

Based on a screenplay by Julina Tatlock and Oscar-winning screenwriter Melisa Wallack, the mystery series centers on an heiress’ quest to guard her recently deceased grandfather’s estate and the family’s supernatural secrets. The story, told over five, roughly six-minute episodes, marks the first attempt at using virtual reality as an episodic-friendly, storytelling format while challenging many of VR’s current known truths.

VR Dreaming: hopes and predictions for where virtual reality is headed in 2017

Journey to VR

You got this: An animator-turned-VR creator’s 5 takeaways on giving virtual reality a go

CG and VFX artists: 3 reasons why the skills, tools you already have put VR content creation within reach.  You’re better at VR than you think—even if you’ve not yet tried it.

AUTODESK  UNIVERSITY

VR, AR, and the cloud were definitively top-of-mind for design visualizations artists and architects at this year’s event. Want to watch a missed class?

MEL Chemistry VR

The Now and Future of Virtual Reality for Design Visualization

VFX Workflows for Architectural Visualization

Procedural PBR Material Creation Using Substance Designer for Visualization

Positioning and Marketing a Skyscraper – 432 Park Avenue

Render Like a Photographer

BLACKMAGIC

Blackmagic eGPU Optimises Performance for Resolve, Games and VR  Blackmagic Design’s new eGPU is a high performance graphics processor optimised for professional video and graphics, such as those used in DaVinci Resolve software, 3D gaming and VR packages. The eGPU was designed in collaboration with Apple to improve graphics performance and accelerate computational tasks. It has a built-in AMD Radeon Pro 580 graphics card, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, HDMI 2.0 and 4K output, 85W of charging power and four USB 3.1 connections.

THE  FOUNDRY

• Our new initiative to help you embrace VR
• Virtual worlds and adaptive light-fields: an interview with Disney Research
• Virtual reality as a social experience
• A deep dive into Virtual Production workflows
• Can you afford to miss the virtual train?
• What they don’t tell you about 360° VR production
• Galvanized Souls get the 360° treatment
• VR? AR? MR? Sorry, I’m confused.
• Human anatomy and limited technology: the barriers to truly immersive VR.  Virtual reality is on the verge of mainstream adoption, but we’re a long way off experiences realistic enough to be indistinguishable from real life. So how can we create genuinely convincing, immersive VR?
• How design visualisation and VR will transform the AEC industries
• Hyperreality: the new trend you need to be ready for
• Modo VR: fully immersive design content creation
• Augmenting reality in the AEC industries
• A hyperreal history: the evolution of hyperreality
• FAME: film-quality augmented and mixed reality experiences
• VR’s Eastern Promise: the growth of virtual reality in the Far East
• From Russia with agility: The studio pioneering a new way of working
• More real than real: creating a feeling of ‘presence’ in VR
• VR: It’s time for a reality check
• Exploring VR’s accessibility problem
• Architect 2.0: How technology is driving the industry
• Meet the creators: content creation in the virtual age
• Kanova: flexible VR sculpting
• The Big Interview: Ben Grossmann, co-founder and CEO of Magnopus
• Foundry Trends’ VR Jargon Buster
• Virtual reality: what drives multiple hype waves?
• Making the impossible possible with virtual production at Imaginarium Studios
• Reaching true VR immersion: one blink at a time
• Exploring infinite walking in virtual reality
• Is enterprise the key to unlocking VR’s potential?
• Mixed reality: the future of AR devices?
• Walking in the footsteps of war survivors with virtual reality
• Peeling back the layers of the virtual production onion
• Meet the company transforming real-time content creation
• The three crucial VR headset developments you don’t want to miss
• This is why eye-tracking in VR is about more than foveated rendering
• Explaining deep learning: what it is, and what it’s not
• Mixed reality: the gateway to the mirrorworld
• The unexpected way VR could end up in your home
• Why the founders of London’s first VR arcade have bet on VR going places
• Five of the biggest trends from FMX 2019
• Deep inside DNA VR – London’s first VR arcade
• How mixed reality is sending us across the solar system
• How the AR Cloud will transform immersive technology
• What the dawn of the 5G era means for immersive technologies
• Bridging the uncanny valley: what it really takes to make a deepfake
• Be transported into new virtual worlds with AR portals

Virtual reality plug-in toolset for NUKE

CARA VR™—the much-anticipated new plug-in toolset for the NUKE® family of compositing, editorial and finishing products—helps you to create incredible live-action virtual reality content.

With a specialised toolset that includes headset review, CARA VR dramatically speeds up the challenging and often tedious process of stitching and compositing 360° video footage, so you have more time to focus on creating high-quality immersive experiences.

ADF technology is a way of representing a shape in 2D or 3D that can significantly improve and speed up the ability to manipulate that shape.  Giving you much more efficiency and power – you can zoom in and to levels of data or scale not previously possible, because the operations carried out on ADFs are computationally much more efficient. You’re sculpting using the algebra built over the ADF, rather than pushing millions of polygons around.  The power to zoom in and create intricate details, or zoom out and work at huge scales, means artists can go way beyond knocking together basic designs for experimentation or fun. They could feasibly complete very intricate or very large-scale work to a professional standard, fast.

REAL TIME  GRAPHICS

Could you introduce yourself? I’m Matt Swoboda, the founder and director of Notch, a visual creation tool that works entirely in real-time. Notch technology powers visuals for acts from U2 to Beyoncé and Ed Sheeran, Eurovision, The Brits and numerous music festivals worldwide. Notch is a solution for artists and producers working in live events, interactive installations, mixed reality production, virtual reality, and motion graphics. Real-time isn’t just about pumping out frames faster, it changes the creative process completely. If a creative can see the full and final result of a render in real-time it changes the way they think when creating content. The iteration cycle moves to zero.

Speaker: Mike Seymour, fxGuide

Mike Seymour talk about the presentation he gave @ SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles earlier this year.  MEETMIKE showcases the latest research in digital human technology, with leading industry figures interviewed live and in real-time by a photo-realistic avatar in a ‘virtual set in Sydney’, presented at the VR Village at SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles.

Speaker: Mike Seymour, fxGuide.  #MEETMIKE

Producing a digital human in CG has been the ‘Manhattan’ project of computer graphics, it is both extremely difficult and has wide ranging implications both commercially and ethically. Digital Actors, Agents and Avatars are all very hot topics, but what few in the industry anticipated is how rapidly this would move from the issue of rendering a high quality human, to being able to do so in real time. Come and see MEETMIKE at ACM Siggraph ANZgraph were Mike Seymour will explain the project first shown that SIGGRAPH 2017 in LA that aimed to not only produce a realistic human but to do so at 90 frames a second in stereo in VR. Beyond realtime at even 30 fps (30 milliseconds), this International team has to render each frame in just 9 Miliseconds. To produce such fast results, the team deployed Deep Learning AI for a markerless facial tracker and solver, and used a custom build of Epic Games UE4.

In this worldwide first, each day of the SIGGRAPH show digital Mike met digital versions of industry legends and leading researchers from around the world. People such as Dr Paul Debevec, Tim Sweeney, Oscar Winners Ben Grossman (Magnopus) and Wayne Stables (Weta) and leading researchers from places such as PIXAR’s Christophe Hery, Glenn Derry (Fox).

Together they met and conducted interviews in “Sydney” via virtual reality which was watched either in VR or on a giant screen.

This project is a key part of a new research project into virtual humans as Actors, Agents and Avatars. The ANZGraph session will provide valuable data and insights for taking digital humans research to the next level, and share lessons learnt from the collaboration of R&D teams from around the world. MEET MIKE researchers span four continents, three universities and six companies including Epic Games, 3Lateral, Cubic Motion, Loom.ai and the Wikihuman global research project. The project aimed to explore best of class scanning, rigging and real-time rendering. Please note that this project aims to give away nearly all the data for non-commercial use and is a non-profit research effort.

Digital humans are a new form of computer human interface, the computer has a face that reacts emotionally, exhibiting matching and using affective computing or artificial emotional intelligence.

People like faces, emotion that is face to face, facial contact, live, immediacy, interactivity.  We think of people, our identity as faces.  The face is giving us the emotional context of what is going on, we care about it a lot.

Give the computer spaces and emotions, start having a thing we can interact with and to do this we need some AI and Deep Learning.  Think about things that are interactive. Want to do a realistic person.

Mick also spoke about Matching and Mirroring – Remember that people tend to like people who are like themselves. You will tend to like people who are like you, I will tend to like people who are like me. The most important key to gaining instant rapport with another individual therefore is to make ourselves like them. One way that we can do this is to match and mirror their words (7%), tonality(38%) and physiology (55%).

 Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science.^[1] While the origins of the field may be traced as far back as to early philosophical inquiries into emotion,^[2] the more modern branch of computer science originated with Rosalind Picard‘s 1995 paper^[3] on affective computing.^[4][5] A motivation for the research is the ability to simulate empathy. The machine should interpret the emotional state of humans and adapt its behavior to them, giving an appropriate response to those emotions.

Uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object’s resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept of the uncanny valley suggests that humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers. Valley denotes a dip in the human observer’s affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica’s human likeness.  

Uncanny valley – if you do not get it right, you can tell it is fake and in a film that matters.

Deep learning  (also known as deep structured learning or hierarchical learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on learning data representations, as opposed to task-specific algorithms. Learning can be supervised, partially supervised or unsupervised.  Some representations are loosely based on interpretation of information processing and communication patterns in a biological nervous system, such as neural coding that attempts to define a relationship between various stimuli and associated neuronal responses in the brain. Research attempts to create efficient systems to learn these representations from large-scale, unlabeled data sets.  Deep learning architectures such as deep neural networks, deep belief networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied to fields including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, audio recognition, social network filtering, machine translation and bioinformaticswhere they produced results comparable to and in some cases superior to human experts.

Synthetic data is “any production data applicable to a given situation that are not obtained by direct measurement” according to the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms; where Craig S. Mullins, an expert in data management, defines production data as “information that is persistently stored and used by professionals to conduct business processes.”  The creation of synthetic data is an involved process of data anonymization; that is to say that synthetic data is a subset of anonymized data. Synthetic data is used in a variety of fields as a filter for information that would otherwise compromise the confidentiality of particular aspects of the data. Many times the particular aspects come about in the form of human information (i.e. name, home address, IP address, telephone number, social security number, credit card number, etc.).

https://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/alsurface-shader-wikihuman-project/

The Wikihuman project is a collaborative by the members of the Digital Human League to advance the study of digital humans. For more information on the Wikihuman project, please visit their blog at wikihuman.org

Chaos Group – We would like to officially announce the wikihuman.org site. This is the start of an ongoing project by the Digital Human League (DHL). Our mission for this project is to study, understand, and most importantly share our knowledge of digital humans.

alSurface Shader Wikihuman project By Mike Seymour  October 20, 2016  The “al” in alSurface refers to Anders Langlands (right), a VFX sequence supervisor currently at Weta Digital, who wrote a series of shaders for Arnold.

Surface roughness often shortened to roughness, is a component of surface texture. It is quantified by the deviations in the direction of the normal vector of a real surface from its ideal form. If these deviations are large, the surface is rough; if they are small, the surface is smooth. In surface metrology, roughness is typically considered to be the high-frequency, short-wavelength component of a measured surface. However, in practice it is often necessary to know both the amplitude and frequency to ensure that a surface is fit for a purpose.

Woody  between 1995 and 2017.

BabyX v3.0 Interactive Simulation Official

IBM Watson presents Soul Machines, LENDIT Conference 2017 (Professional Camera)

Some interesting information:

Emotions, immediacy, we care about faces, smiling and the effects on a digital person.

Creating an optical flow for the merge between the two expressions with no texture loss, blend shapes on his face and needing something to drive it.  Fluid simulation using training data, learnt from an example, we can make the data.  Using synthetic and training data for more powerful interactions creating a nighter affinity, it is more trustworthy.  Get the points between the smile and the frown and the computer can reconstruct the points between them.

Look at the pores of the skin, the Diffuse, Specular and Normal Map and line up the textures for a smile and not a smile. Higher resolution specular maps for the face to be real.  Change the pings off it to read the surface texture.

VR, no 30fps, 90fps stereo vertically because of our noses.  UV lighting. 75% of the geometry went on the hair.

IMERSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

The head is designed to place the nodal point of the lens directly over the pivot point the tripod to increase the effectiveness of the stitching software.

CYLINDRICAL PANORAMAS

One way to capture a wide-angle view of the world is to use a wide-angle lens. However, very wide-angle lenses are expensive, and no lens is wide enough to capture a full-surround (360-degree) view. But as most photographers know, you can instead capture a sequence of images, rotating the camera between views, then stitch them together using Photoshop or another tool.

MULTI-NODE PANORAMAS

Where viewers can jump from one viewpoint to another place in the scene.  Viewers can move from one scene to another.  Click on successive nodal points it is possible to view a range of angles and viewpoints.

QUICKTIME VR (QTVR) Authoring Studio

Apple® QuickTime® VR Authoring Studio software lets you create interactive virtual-reality scenes with point-and-click simplicity. It takes full advantage of the intuitive Mac® OS interface to help you easily turn photos and computer renderings into attention-getting 360-degree views. QuickTime VR Authoring Studio is a powerful one-stop solution for producing all kinds of QuickTime VR content.

MASTERY MULTIMEDIA

VR PRODUCTION

YES VR

At YesVR We Design Safe Learning Through Virtual Reality.  People working in hospitality have told us passing the written Responsible Service of Alcohol (RSA) exam is not enough to get you job ready.

YesVR has been formed by partnering award winning Learning and Technology experts to create interactive virtual reality (VR) modules. Being immersed in VR provides experiential learning in a safe, non-threatening and realistic way individuals are better prepared for workplace situations. They practice applying their RSA knowledge and are provided with immediate feedback to reflect upon their decisions.

Interacting in these scenarios provide opportunities to learn things that only real-life experience can teach them… until today.

Staples VR is a complete VR production studio providing both end to end solutions and consultation services for a variety of clients and industry leaders.  We operate with the newest and highest quality equipment for image capture and 360 degree VR capture such as the Jaunt, Nokia OZO, Red, Arri, Blackmagic, Z-Cam, Sony, Panasonic and custom built solutions such our world fire fire proof VR capture system, and our underwater and aerial solutions.  We specialise in dynamic camera movement, from aerial drone, cable cam and crane to dolly and underwater, enabling us to add that something special to your production. We pride ourselves on our ambisonic audio capture and offer full spatial post production mixing and sound design.

JAUNT ONE VR CAMERA

Meet Jaunt One https://www.jauntvr.com/jaunt-one/ and https://www.staplesvr.com/rentals-sales.

Jaunt ONE is a professional-grade camera system specifically designed for capturing high-quality stereoscopic 360º cinematic virtual reality experiences. Built from the ground up with visionary VR creators in mind, Jaunt ONE has proven itself in the hands of the world’s top filmmakers, studios, and networks.

Jaunt ONE offers industry-leading stereoscopic capture quality and a suite of tools for camera control and data management. It features 24 camera modules with frame-sync, global shutter, 10-stops of dynamic range, and custom 130º FOV lenses with a fixed f/2.9 aperture. Additional features include support for 120 frames per second capture and a live viewfinder. Jaunt ONE and its complementary workflow present content creators with an end-to-end solution for filming high quality cinematic virtual reality content.

Gear — Jaunt ONE VR Camera  David Alexander Willis

First Look: Jaunt’s ‘ONE’ VR Light-Field Camera with Newly Revealed Specs

Introducing Jaunt ONE – Cinematic VR Camera – Jaunt One Demo Sydney by Staples VR

The Jaunt One is a professional grade, stereographic cinematic VR build from the ground up and designed with visionary VR creators in mind. Staples VR will put the camera through its paces and explain the good the bad and the amazing when it comes to the system.  Client support to visualise, post production, time line cost, testing, consulting, access to equipment. and do well in collaboration.

Staples VR lead the way when it comes to live action 360 video and your content creation. What can you do with the technology?  They have worked with clients to make high end quality VR including live action capture, gameified interactivity, photogrammetry, lidar scaning, installations, training, equipment resource, live streaming VR that can be mix in with prerecorded material and swapping between different camera systems.  They have build a huge range of skills and techniques to get the most of your capture systems and post workflow for the entertainment, medical, architectural, OH & S, forensic training, military training, building installations, airlines, factories, education and telecommunication industries to name a few and are on the fore front of this rapidly expanding industry.

EXPERIENCE A REAL HOUSE FIRE THROUGH 360º VIDEO & VIRTUAL REALITY

New Zealand Fire Service today launched a world-first initiative – a 360 degree and virtual reality (VR) experience – Escape My House available online now. For the first time ever, the public can experience a real house fire first-hand and, along the way, learn why they need an escape plan.

LYTRO CIMEMA Imagine working on footage in visual effects and having the ability to change the depth of field or focal point of a scene on the fly. Change the frame rate and have physically accurate shutter angle that would have been appropriate for the rate. Reposition the camera in the scene. Drop 3D objects in your scene and have them properly occluded by the live action content. Pull mattes by setting a near depth and a far depth and extracting an object. Effectively, think of having many of the benefits of deep compositing for live action scenes.

Proof of Concept (PoC) is a realization of a certain method or idea in order to demonstrate its feasibility or a demonstration in principle with the aim of verifying that some concept or theory has practical potential. A proof of concept is usually small and may or may not be complete.

Photogrammetry is the science of making measurements from photographs.  The input to photogrammetry is photographs, and the output is typically a map, a drawing, a measurement, or a 3D model of some real-world object or scene. Many of the maps we use today are created with photogrammetry and photographs taken from aircraft.

There are different camera systems with camera modules are getting smaller, some examples along the way are:

• optic cluster based systems where VR started, the GoPro rigs, mini bundle.
• cluster based, panoptic camera systems – multicamera face tracking system suitable for large wired camera networks
• mirror rigs with parabolic mirrors, larger cameras improving quality, expensive and difficult to use
• light field systems such as Lytro recording refractions and reflections of the entire area of space.  Light field camera, also known as plenoptic camera, captures information about the light field emanating from a scene; that is, the intensity of light in a scene, and also the direction that the light rays are traveling in space. This contrasts with a conventional camera, which records only light intensity.  Lytro is building the world’s most powerful Light Field imaging platform enabling artists, scientists and innovators to pursue their goals with an unprecedented level of freedom and control. This revolutionary technology will unlock new opportunities for photography, cinematography, mixed reality, scientific and industrial applications.

• volumetric capturing an area, volumetric video with large storage and at the moment no suitable way of playing it back.

Volumetric capture is the swift kick in the butt VR so desperately needs

Why Volumetric VR Is The Real Future Of Virtual Reality

JauntONE camera has 24 independent camera systems, resolution 8K, minimum 4K in a stereoscopic field of view.  It uses every second camera module to give a slightly parallax view for the left and right eye giving a sense of depth and only playable back through head sets. Can shoot different frame rates up to 120 for slow motion which can only do 4K output.  Can preview the camera system, change the ISO values, 12 volts, workflow with changing batteries and cameras. The parallax information becomes your depth map in the full 360 arc to incorporate in vfx elements.

Nuke plug in for VR

AUDIO FOR VR

George the dummy head microphone, two microphones and does not do top, bottom, front and back very well and does not change the perspective.  Humans have two ears, notes the difference in levels between the ears, the difference in time that it takes for the sound to travel to the ears and position the sound based on those things. Giving the recording that sounds real, suitable for atmos, two track stereo. The head has been used in radio for many years and during an Opera on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, George was used for the orchestra inside in the concert hall.

Alexa Hohenberg listening to the audio being recorded for VR https://www.stillstoked.com/

The dummy head recording  is a method of recording used to generate binaural recordings. The tracks are then listened to through headphones allowing for the listener to hear from the dummy’s perspective. The dummy head is designed to record multiple sounds at the same time enabling it to be exceptional at recording music as well as in other industries where multiple sound sources are involved.

The dummy head is designed to replicate average sized human head and depending on the manufacturer may have a nose and mouth too. Each dummy head is equipped with pinnae and ear canals in which small microphones are placed, one in each ear. The leading manufacturers in Dummy Head design are: Neumann, Brüel & Kjær, Head Acoustics GmBH, and Knowles Electronics.

Binaural recording is a method of recording sound that uses two microphones, arranged with the intent to create a 3-D stereo sound sensation for the listener of actually being in the room with the performers or instruments. This effect is often created using a technique known as “dummy head recording”, wherein a mannequin head is outfitted with a microphone in each ear. Binaural recording is intended for replay using headphones and will not translate properly over stereo speakers. This idea of a three dimensional or “internal” form of sound has also translated into useful advancement of technology in many things such as stethoscopes creating “in-head” acoustics and IMAX movies being able to create a three dimensional acoustic experience.

The term “binaural” has frequently been confused as a synonym for the word “stereo”, and this is partially due to a large amount of misuse in the mid-1950s by the recording industry, as a marketing buzzword. Conventional stereo recordings do not factor in natural ear spacing or “head shadow” of the head and ears, since these things happen naturally as a person listens, generating their own ITDs (interaural time differences) and ILDs (interaural level differences). Because loudspeaker-crosstalk of conventional stereo interferes with binaural reproduction, either headphones are required, or crosstalk cancellation of signals intended for loudspeakers such as Ambiophonics is required. For listening using conventional speaker-stereo, or mp3 players, a pinna-less dummy head may be preferable for quasi-binaural recording, such as the sphere microphone or Ambiophone. As a general rule, for true binaural results, an audio recording and reproduction system chain, from microphone to listener’s brain, should contain one and only one set of pinnae (preferably the listener’s own) and one head-shadow.

SENNHEISER  The elegantly designed AMBEO® VR Mic has been developed in cooperation with VR content producers and fine-tuned through an extensive creators’ program with participants from across the audio and VR communities. The mic caters exactly to the needs of VR content creators, letting you capture the experience and spirit of any location enabling the listener to be immersed as if they were there.

Four mono channels, matrix into one mono in the middle, up down stereo and a left right stereo and front stereo.  When you move around the sound stays with the visual experience, losing the illusion.

AMBEO A-B format converter plugin.  The capsules of the Sennheiser AMBEO VR Mic deliver A-format, a raw 4-channel output that has to be converted into a new set of 4 channels, the Ambisonics B-format. This is done by the specifically designed Sennheiser AMBEO A-B format converter plugin, which is available as free download for VST, AU and AAX format for your preferred Digital Audio Workstation for both PC and Mac. B-format is a W, X, Y, Z representation of the sound field around the microphone. W being the sum of all 4 capsules, whereas X, Y and Z are three virtual bi-directional microphone patterns representing front/back, left/right and up/down. Thus, any direction from the microphone can be auditioned by the listener during playback of Ambisonics B.

AUGMENTED  REALITY

Augmented reality (AR) is a direct or indirect live view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are “augmented” by computer-generated perceptual information, ideally across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory, and olfactory. The overlaid sensory information can be constructive (i.e. additive to the natural environment) or destructive (i.e. masking of the natural environment) and is spatially registered with the physical world such that it is perceived as an immersive aspect of the real environment. In this way, Augmented reality alters one’s current perception of a real world environment, whereas virtual reality replaces the real world environment with a simulated one.

The primary value of augmented reality is that it brings components of the digital world into a person’s perception of the real world, and does so not as a simple display of data, but through the integration of immersive sensations that are perceived as natural parts of an environment.

Overlaying a digital canvas onto a person’s view of the real world, to enhance the design visualisation process, has vast potential.

AR Experiments is a site that features work by coders who are experimenting with augmented reality in exciting ways. These experiments use various tools like ARCore, an SDK that lets Android developers create awesome AR experiences. We’re featuring some of our favorite projects here to help inspire more coders to imagine what could be made with AR.

Army uses modified Microsoft HoloLens 2 for ‘real-life game of Call of Duty’

The U.S. Army showed off its Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, which is a modified version of the Microsoft HoloLens 2 augmented reality headset.  Microsoft received a $480 million contract last November to equip soldiers with its HoloLens technology, which the Army said would “increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect, decide, and engage before the enemy.” It was also suggested that the Army would likely use the HoloLens 2 as a training tool.

What’s the Difference Between HoloLens, Meta 2 & Magic Leap?  Augmented reality is beginning to leak out into the mainstream world. This is thanks, in part, to ARKit and ARCore making their debuts this year. These releases turned the current smartphones owned by millions of Apple and Android users into AR-capable machines. Within a few short weeks, some of the most talked about apps in Apple’s App Store were AR apps.

Augmented Reality Sandbox

Let your phone do the Tango

Scanning and Detecting 3D Objects

Record spatial features of real-world objects, then use the results to find those objects in the user’s environment and trigger AR content.

ARCore is a platform for building augmented reality apps on Android. Cloud Anchors gives you the ability to create AR apps that share a common frame-of-reference, enabling multiple users to place virtual content in the same real world location that can be seen on different devices in the same position and orientation relative to the environment.

This codelab guides you through modifying a pre-existing ARCore app to use the Cloud Anchors APIs, and demonstrates how you can create a shared AR experience.

Augmented Reality: Marketing’s Trillion-Dollar Opportunity  Within this decade, augmented reality is going to change the way the always-connected consumer works, shops and plays.

A Systematic Review of 10 Years of Augmented Reality Usability Studies: 2005 to 2014

Augmented Reality (AR) interfaces have been studied extensively over the last few decades, with a growing number of user-based experiments. In this paper, we systematically review 10 years of the most influential AR user studies, from 2005 to 2014. A total of 291 papers with 369 individual user studies have been reviewed and classified based on their application areas. The primary contribution of the review is to present the broad landscape of user-based AR research, and to provide a high-level view of how that landscape has changed. We summarize the high-level contributions from each category of papers, and present examples of the most influential user studies. We also identify areas where there have been few user studies, and opportunities for future research. Among other things, we find that there is a growing trend toward handheld AR user studies, and that most studies are conducted in laboratory settings and do not involve pilot testing. This research will be useful for AR researchers who want to follow best practices in designing their own AR user studies.

Augmented reality project adds a little road system to your living room floor. Invisible Highway is an experiment in controlling physical things in the real world by drawing in Augmented Reality. Simply make a pathway along the floor on your phone and the robot car will follow that path on the actual floor in your room. A custom highway with scenery is generated along the path to make the robots a little more scenic on your phone screen.

IKEA AR The Swedish home goods giant IKEA has been a trailblazer when it comes to applying new technology to improve its products and overall retail experience. Today, it’s taking the latest step into the future of shopping with the launch of IKEA Place, one of the first wave of augmented reality apps getting released today to work with Apple’s new ARKit technology and iOS 11.

CHOICE AR APP  A nationwide hunt for real free range eggs is underway ahead of the Easter holiday, as CHOICE releases major updates to its augmented-reality app, CluckAR.

Interested in AR’s boundless potential?  Check out the Meta Blog to get more in-depth insights on this fascinating frontier.

Huyen Nguyen, ‘Immersive Analytics of Honey Bee Data’

Bees are dying – in recent years an unprecedented decline in honey bee colonies has been seen around the globe. The causes are still largely unknown. At CSIRO, the Global Initiative for Honey bee Health (GIHH) is an international collaboration of researchers, beekeepers, farmers, and industry set up to research the threats to bee health in order to better understand colony collapse and find solutions that will allow for sustainable crop pollination and food security. Integral to the research effort is RFID tags that are manually fitted to bees. The abundance of data being collected by the thousands of bee-attached sensors as well as additional environmental sensors poses a number of challenges with regard to the interpretation and comprehension of the data, both computationally as well as from a user perspective. In this talk, Huyen will discuss visual analytics techniques that have been investigated at CSIRO DATA61 to facilitate an effective path from data to insight, with a particular focus on interactive and immersive user interfaces that allow for a range of end users to effectively explore the complex sensor data.

Tiny sensors, called backpacks are collecting real-time data to build a three dimensional model and visualise about how the bees move.

An augmented reality system for visual analytics of honey bee behaviour in the field, Data Visualisation

MelissAR: Towards Augmented Visual Analytics of Honey Bee Behaviour

Honey bees are essential for the pollination of about one third of the food we eat – including fruit, vegetables, oils, seeds and nuts – yet their health and ability to pollinate our crops is under serious threat.

Global Initiative for Honey bee Health: How do the bees’ backpacks work?

Häagen-Dazs ice cream and HTC Vive are giving you a chance to fly like a bee in VR.

In 2015, the United Nations established a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including ambitious aims to end poverty, create affordable energy systems, and improve global quality of education. In response, Taiwanese VR company HTC Vive provided $10 million to kick start a VR for Impact initiative that funds VR projects and solutions to help the UN reach its goals by the 2030 deadline.

360º

Watching 360 videos

360 video: next stop is the living room

Vertical video transformed from a syndrome to an accepted form of viewing the world. Agencies, film festivals, online groups, promote the portrait format. But there is a new kid on the block: 360 video.

Watching 360 videos

You can enjoy all 360 video on Vimeo on your desktop, mobile device, and with or without a headset. How do you know it’s 360? Next to every 360 video’s title on vimeo.com, a 360 badge will appear.

360 Cinema on Vimeo

vimeo.com/channels/360

Vimeo:  The fundamentals of 360

• All the terms you need to know to create 360 video
• Beyond the frame: tips for nailing 360 video shots
• The key things to consider when shooting 360 video
• Breaking down the 360 video editing process
• 3 film genres perfectly suited for 360 video
• Your home for high-quality video (now including 360)
• Diary of a 360 video: recording Grandaddy’s live concert
• 360 videos you should be watching
• Vimeo 360: the new home for immersive storytelling
• 360 storytelling: tips from 5-time Staff Picked company RYOT

Does It Make A Sound | 360 Title Sequence for Semi-Permanent.  Was created by the Australian-based animation studio Poke The Bear. The title sequence for the prestigious Semi-Permanent conference in Sidney was made using Getty royalty-free 360 stock footage combined with CG character animations. All post-production was done with Adobe software and Mettle SkyBox Suite* of 360/VR plugins.

*Skybox 360/VR Plug-ins have been acquired by Adobe and will be integrated into After Effects and Premiere by the end of 2017. They are available now for free if you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud subscriber.

 360 Vision 2018:  Keynote speaker Lynette Wallworth

6K 3D 360° Drone Aerial of Epic Sunset Castaic Lake California | DJI M600 + Obsidian R

VIDEO  GAMES and Such Things

Learn how to design your own video game for free

“Learn to code.” It’s been the mantra of the past decade, and for many creatives, a daunting or even pointless prospect. Where do you even start? And who has the time? Well, sheltering in place, and a little help from Unity—the world’s most popular video game engine—may provide these answers!

ACTIVEWORLDS

Active Worlds is an online virtual world, developed by ActiveWorlds Inc., a company based in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and launched on June 28, 1995. Users assign themselves a name, log into the Active Worlds universe, and explore 3D virtual worlds and environments that others have built. ActiveWorlds allows users to own worlds and universes, and develop custom 3D content. The browser has web browsing capabilities, voice chat, and basic instant messaging.

In its simplest form, that’s what Activeworlds is, its a collaborative virtual sandbox, and it happens to be one of the oldest in the world, over 20 years old and containing the creations of hundreds of thousands of players spread throughout hundreds of different worlds covering an unimaginably large area.

Beginner’s Guide to becoming a Video Game Designer

This guide is for absolute beginners who are trying to find a career that compliments their passion for playing games, technology, design, coding and digital art. You are the type of person who knows that finance and medicine really isn’t your thing. You also know you never want to wear a suit to work either. However, you need some help getting started. It’s also a great guide to share with your parents and guardians who are trying to understand what the hell you are rambling on about, and why you are so excited.

DOOM   Hell’s armies have invaded Earth. Become the Slayer in an epic single-player campaign to conquer demons across dimensions and stop the final destruction of humanity.  The only thing they fear… is you.

INDIEDB

Indie DB the independent games site. News, downloads and media direct from the developers. Powered by ramen noodles.

CUBE 2

How not to start a mod

CELIA HODENT — GAME UX CONSULTANT

User experience is an under-appreciated but crucial aspect of modern technology and software — particularly in the field of video games, which have to introduce complex ideas without intimidating players. In this week’s podcast, Chris is joined by UX Director, Celia Hodent, who put her PhD in psychology, specialized in cognitive development, to good use in helping create Fortnite.

Creating a Chinese CyberNeon Game Environment In UE4

My name is Junliang Zhang. I come from Shanghai, China. I am a 3D Environment Artist currently working at 3BLACKDOT in Los Angeles, USA.  My passion for the game industry comes from my childhood. I still remembered how much I was setting in front of computer playing the most of classical PC games back to 90’s, such as, Starcraft, Commend & Conquer series, and Age of Empires II.  When I usually playing these games I always wondered how they were made arts and gameplay or how I could make something cool mods. Therefore, My true interest is game art.

REALTIMEUK REBUILDS “GAME OF THRONES” CHARACTERS FOR “WINTER IS COMING”

From artist to engine: revolutionizing the game art pipeline

How games are delivering increasingly innovative experiences.  As an ever-evolving industry driven by creative technologies, games are always aiming to the future to deliver increasingly innovative and visually captivating experiences. Today’s 3D game artists aren’t just tasked with pushing polygons beyond the boundaries of previous generations; they’re helping to shape a whole new world of immersion across the AAA and indie landscape.

The sheer volume and variety of games hitting the market in recent years is staggering, thanks in large part to accessible tools like Unity and Unreal Engine lowering the barrier to entry and allowing more developers to create impressive projects in a fraction of the time. With studios of all sizes now armed with even more ways to streamline and shorten the development process, game artists benefit from new technologies and techniques that help them keep pace without sacrificing the quality of their work.

How to Make a Graduation Video-Game Project

For our inspirations, we did not want to find ourselves too quickly copying the artistic direction of a particular game, we avoided as much as possible to make reference to already existing games.

Our universe was created around multiple references from the reality and artworks made by independent artists. These 2 points were very important for us, on the one hand, we wanted to give credibility in our creations with our real references, and tint these creations with references from other artists, this without ever losing the essential points of an architecture of medieval city or castle as well as armour creation.

DESIGNING WEAPONS AND PROPS FOR GAMES

Hi, my name is Mauricio Llano a 3D game artist looking to break into the industry. I’ve done two internships, one with Lee Lanier for animation and VFX and the second in the amazing outsource company CGBot. At the latter is where I found my love for doing art for games.  At first, I wanted to go for environment art. But then realized I needed to polish my skills on single assets first and what a better way to do it than doing Weapons and Props with Ethan Hiley. All of you that are thinking on taking any course, feel confident that it is well worth it. I had industry exposure and what you learn is the real deal and you learn amazing tricks from industry professionals.

Indie horror games for a good fright

Halloween hasn’t really taken off in Australia as much as it has in the northern hemisphere, but that won’t stop costumer-lovers and scare-enthusiasts alike from celebrating! Whether that means dressing up, baking some tasty treats or hosting a movie marathon that’s bound to be a scream; the spooky season is here!

ITCH.IO is a simple way to find and share indie games online for free.

LUDLUM  DORE

NEW GROUNDS

Video games historically are culturally colourless, Australians have a unique way and are now exploring history and storytelling that are uniquely Australian.

CG Society:  BEHIND THE XBOX ONE X RELEASE TRAILER, WITH MATTHEW ENCINA

Microsoft created waves at E3 this year with the announcement of their new gaming console, Xbox One X. Kicking off the release was a spectacular trailer created by the crew at Blind. The minute we saw it, we knew we had to find out more from the team about how it was made. Below, Creative Director Matthew Encina offers an exclusive look inside the inspiration, process and tools of the momentous trailer.

EPIC GAMES Unreal Engine

If You Love Something, Set It Free.  You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. It’s a simple arrangement in which we succeed only when you succeed.

5 IndieGoGo projects to keep an eye on

Who says the creativity well has run dry? We’re still seeing a number of innovative entrepreneurs making waves in 2017. You’ll find a lot of them pitching their ideas on crowd-funding websites such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, where anyone can pledge some money to support new products and business ideas.

Battlefield 1  Making a Game on The Great War

WORDS OF WISDOM FROM SUCCESSFUL INDIE DEVS Looking to see what it takes to become a successful indie developer? You’ve come to right place. We spoke to ten game devs and asked for their words of wisdom on making it in the indie world.

10 OF THE SCARIEST EXPRESSIONS IN GAME DEVELOPMENT

Some games: Bioshock Infinite, LA Noire, Borderlands The Pre-Sequel, Flight Control, Fruit Ninja, Crossy Road.

OUR  TOP  GAME  PICKS for 2017 iiNet

With a number of great games in the lineup, you might not know where to start when it comes to planning out your pre-orders or tactical secondhand purchases.

SPACEBAR  1962 Steve Russell

COMPUTER SPACE  1971 Nolan Bushnell,  PONG  1972 Atari

PAC-MAN, PuckMan Tori Iwatani ARGO version, PONG,

ASTEROIDS, AMPED, ACCLAIM

BLOOD WAKE, BUBBLE BUBBLE

CRAVE, CAPCOOM, CENTIPEDE

DOOM, DEAD or ALIVE 3, DEFENDER, DONKEY KING, DIG DUG

FROGGER

GALAZIBAN

HALO

INTERPLAY

JOUST

LUCAS ARTS

MYST, MISSILE COMMAND, MOON PATROL

NAMCO

ODD WORLD: MUNCH’S ODDYSEE

PROJECT GOTHAM. POOYAN, PENGO

Q*BERT, QIX

SEGA, SIERRA ENTERTAINMENT, SHREK, SUPER MARIO BROS 3, SPACE INVADERS, SCRABBLE

TAKE-TWO, TIME-PILOT, TEMPEST

UBI SOFT

ZAXXON

MAME ENTERTAINMENT:  originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator.  MAME’s purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important “vintage” software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?). Over time, MAME absorbed the sister-project MESS (Multi Emulator Super System), so MAME now documents a wide variety of (mostly vintage) computers, video game consoles and calculators, in addition to the arcade video games that were its initial focus.

MACMAME:  is part of the MAME project, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the history of arcade videogames via emulation. MacMAME achieves this by running the original program code found in the arcade games. As such, it is much more than a reproduction, it is essentially that same game running via an emulated layer inside your Macintosh.  On this site you’ll find the most current build of MacMAME, information about upcoming versions and instructions for using it. Please look around and enjoy reliving some of the games that made going to video arcades an enjoyable part of our pop culture. You can move to various parts of the site by clicking on the headings to the left.

Video Game Archive for ROM images to download and play with MAME

Original Xbox Retrospective: 2001 – 2002 (PART 1)