Monthly Archives: March 2017

Visitors to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles (NHMLA) can now immerse themselves in spectacular ocean environments alongside a bevy of sea creatures with a new virtual-reality exhibit.

"TheBlu: An Underwater VR Experience" invites users to enter a special viewing gallery, where they don HTC Vive virtual-reality (VR) headsets to explore a series of marine ecosystems. Using handheld controllers, visitors can interact with migrating fish and turtles, vibrant anemones, glowing deep-sea anglerfish, and even an 80-foot-long (24 meters) blue whale.

Curators and administrators at the NHMLA worked closely with designers from the VR firm Wevr to craft a three-episode encounter the museum's first VR experience within specially designed spaces. The collaboration not only mimics the feeling of being underwater as closely as possible, but also presents a series of narratives about the ocean's different environments and wildlife. [TheBlu: An Underwater VR Experience | Video]

Before embarking on the virtual tour, participants enter an area in the museum with real marine specimens on display, which provides a visual introduction to the underwater experience. A "dive master" assigned to each user helps to prepare those who are unfamiliar with VR technology, Lori Bettison-Varga, director of the NHMLA, told Live Science in an email.

In the first part of "TheBlu," users alight on the deck of a sunken ship, a relic that helps them visually adjust to the scale of the underwater world and prepare themselves for the first big encounter a blue whale swimming by.

In the VR experience "TheBlu," users enjoy a close encounter with an 80-foot blue whale.

The next portion of the journey transports users to a peaceful coral reef amid a migration of thousands of jellyfish.

Finally, in the third episode, participants descend to the darker depths of the ocean along with the remains of a dead whale, finding a dark abyss inhabited by strange creatures that glow when illuminated with a virtual flashlight. The beam of light also beckons the creatures closer to the participants.

"The concept of something that large falling to the bottom of the ocean floor and then becoming an ecosystem for the surrounding ocean life sounded like a unique space to explore," Jake Rowell, director of "TheBlu," told Live Science in an email.

Producing captivating VR content requires the artful combination of many elements, including visuals, audio, and interactivity on both large and small scales, enveloping the people holding the controllers and allowing them to feel "a sense of presence" within the world they inhabit in virtual space, Rowell explained.

Encountering a life-size blue whale is especially awe-inspiring in VR, he added.

"Coming face-to-face with an 80-foot blue whale is pretty special and unique," Rowell said. "You can only get the scale of a marine creature that large by either being next to it in the ocean or being in virtual reality."

A sea turtle seems close enough to touch, in the VR underwater experience "TheBlu" at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

The wonder inspired by glimpsing a realistic ocean habitat, including its marine life, in such close proximity in VR builds appreciation for the real-world animals and their lives in the sea, Bettison-Varga told Live Science.

"We are hoping this leads to questions about environmental stresses on the oceans that will generate a greater sense of responsibility for marine habitats," she said.

Future NHMLA forays into VR could incorporate research conducted at the museum, and could introduce visitors to more of the 10 million specimens in the marine collection, of which only a fraction are currently on display, Bettison-Varga said.

"TheBlu: An Underwater VR Experience" is on display at the NHMLA until April 28.

Original article on Live Science.

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Dive with a Blue Whale in New Virtual-Reality Experience - Live Science

Philip Marcelo, Associated Press

Turning James Joyce's 'Ulysses' into a virtual reality game

BOSTON (AP) Students are developing a virtual reality game based on James Joyce's "Ulysses" as part of a class at Boston College.

The goal of "Joycestick" is to expose new audiences to the works of one of Ireland's most celebrated authors, as well as to give a glimpse of how virtual reality can be used to enhance literature, said Joseph Nugent, the Boston College English professor who is coordinating the project.

"This is a new way to experience the power of a novel," he said. "We're really at the edge of VR. There's no guidance for this. What we have produced has been purely out of our imagination."

Nugent and his students hope to release a version of the game on June 16 in Dublin during Bloomsday, the city's annual celebration of the author and novel. They've already showcased their progress at an academic conference in Rome last month.

"Joycestick," in many ways, fills in the blanks of the novel, as many of the places key to the story have been lost to time as Dublin has evolved, said Enda Duffy, chairman of the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has tried a prototype of the game.

"The VR version in this way completes the book," she said. "It makes it real. 'Ulysses' is an ideal book to be turned into a VR experience, since Dublin is, you might say, the book's major character."

There have been a number of efforts to bring works of literature into the gaming world over the years, including a computer game of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" that became a viral hit in 2011 as it mimicked the look and feel of a classic, 1980s-era Nintendo game.

But the Boston College project is unique for trying to incorporate virtual reality technology, says D. Fox Harrell, a digital media professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He is impressed that the students are taking on such a complex text.

"It requires multiple entry points and modes of interpretation, so it will be fascinating to see how their VR system addresses these aspects of the work," said Harrell, who hasn't tried the game out yet.

Considered the epitome of the 1920s-era modernist literature, "Ulysses" traces a day in the life of an ordinary Dubliner named Leopold Bloom. The title reflects how the novel draws parallels between Bloom's day and "The Odyssey," the ancient Greek epic.

"Joycestick" isn't meant to be a straight re-telling of "Ulysses," which in some versions runs nearly 650 pages long, acknowledged Evan Otero, a Boston College junior majoring in computer science who is helping to develop the game.

Instead, the game lets users explore a handful of key environments described in the book, from a military tower where the novel opens to a cafe in Paris that is significant to the protagonist's past.

It's also not a typical video game in the sense of having tasks to complete, enemies to defeat or points to rack up, said Jan van Merkensteijn, a junior studying philosophy and medical humanities who is also involved in the project. For now, users can simply explore the virtual environments at their leisure. Touching certain objects triggers readings from the novel.

The project represents an extension of what academics call the "digital humanities," a field that merges traditional liberal arts classes with emerging technology. Nugent has had previous classes develop a smartphone application that provides walking tours of Dublin, highlighting important landmarks in Ulysses and Joyce's life.

But the native of Mullingar, Ireland, is quick to shift credit for the current project's ambition to his group of 22 students, who are studying a range of disciplines, from English to computer science, philosophy, business and biology, and have also been recruited from nearby Northeastern University and the Berklee College of Music.

"These are ambitious kids," Nugent said. "They want to prove they've done something on the cutting edge. They have the skills. They're doing the work. All I'm trying to do is direct these things."

___

Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/journalist/philip-marcelo

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Turning James Joyce's 'Ulysses' into a virtual reality game - SFGate

Weighted replica rifle are used to heighten the reality of the virtual experience. USC Institute for Creative Technologies

It is fast becoming one of the most affordable treatments available.

But while PTSD treatment evolves, Castellanos believes that, within the military, the understanding of its effects is still in the dark ages. "In the military PTSD is almost synonymous with weakness," he says. "Nobody talks about it. Nobody gets evaluated." The statistics, meanwhile, show PTSD is close to an epidemic. According to official figures, between 11 percent and 20 percent of soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2001 and 2010 experience PTSD in any given year.

According to the RAND Corporation, almost half of the vets diagnosed with PTSD

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This is the irony of its stigma, particularly in relation to the military. If properly treated, soldiers with PTSD are able to get back to work much more quickly. "I'm probably the team member who has fared the best," Castellanos says. "Many of the others can't maintain jobs, can't maintain relationships. They are still angry, thirteen years later."

By maintaining the taboo, the system is weakened. "The end goal," DiFede says, "is that soldiers

For Castellanos, while VR offers a technological way to salve the effects of PTSD, it doesn't factor out the role of the human approach in the equation.

"I always post about my treatment online," he says. "I talk to veterans. One of the interesting things is that veterans often won't talk about this stuff unless it's to another vet. I've learned ways to tease out the story. As long as I let them know it happened to me, they completely open up. It quickly turns into a conversation about their symptoms, and their fears about getting help. I hope they do. If they hear it from another Marine, about how it can change lives, I hope they do."

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How Virtual Reality Is Helping Heal Soldiers With PTSD - NBCNews.com

Ive killed a lot of people in virtual reality. Last night alone I wracked up well over 100 kills in just one experience called Pavlov VR.For each of my victims, I pulled out a gun, aimed for their heads, pulled the trigger and watched with satisfaction as their bodies jerked into lifelessness complete with low-poly blood spurts. Sometimes, if they managed to get too close, I even had to pull out aknife and slashthem repeatedly. Thats a lot of violence.

With each kill my teams score went up and each opponent I felled was instantly respawned for a chance to exact their own murderous revenge.Pavlov VR, Onward, and other games like them are quickly becoming the most popular VR games on the market.With VR shooters rising in popularity and prevalence a question must be asked:is it time to start considering the moral and psychological ramifications of shooting, attacking, and ultimately killing other humans inside a hyper-immersive VRheadset?

Dante Buckley is the creator of the aforementioned Onward arguably the most popular VR shooter available today. Buckley isa 20-year-old, self-taught game designer who built the entire game by himself. He is currently occupying a space in one of the worlds video game Meccas: the Valve offices in Redmond, Washington. UploadVR had the chance to speak with Buckley recently for a general interview and during our talk he expressed his growing concern with depictions of realistic violence in VR.

Something that Ive been thinking about lately is the ethics and the consciousness of violence in VR shooters, Buckley said. VR right now just doesnt have enough power to create visuals that makeyou feel like what youre doing in the game is real. Its like youre playing paint ball or like an advanced version of tag. Butwhen things do start get more real for a game like Onward,or another first person shooter, theres going to have to be a responsibility for people to consider.

In Buckleysmind, one way to address theissue as the fidelity of VR shooters improves would be to make the games more casual with a diminished focus on realism. This is somewhat surprising coming from the creator of a game like Onward.Right now, Onwardsmain selling point is its realism. In this gamewhen you die youre dead for the rest of the match. There are no respawns, radars, or mini-maps. Its just you, your team, and your gun. Despite the success that realism has brought to his game, Buckley says that he is prepared to take a different approach if there is no other way for the violence problem to be solved.

Video game purists have long turned up their nose at violent video games create violent people arguments, but it does seem that the debate should be given new light in the wake of such disruptive new hardware. VR games simply are not the same as 2D titles. The entire point of the technology is to make you feel immersed in your environment.Light needs to refract correctly, wind needs to blow with believable physics, and in order to protect immersion kills need to feel as realistic as possible.

As Buckley points out, right now no VR shooteris graphically powerful enough to truly make you believe thatby shooting a digital enemy youve actually shot a living, breathing person. But that may not be the case for long. Upcoming VR gamesare already looking and playing better just a year after the hardware launched. Titles like Arktika.1 are jaw-droppingly beautiful, including the human enemies youll be shooting. What affects, if any, will this have on the human mind and spirit?

Arshya Vahabzadeh M.D. is the Chief Medical Officer at a VR startup called Brain Power and serves on the faculty at Harvard Medical School as a lecturer in psychiatry. We reached out to him to ask if a platform as immersive as VR could possibly cause people to contract real life psychiatric afflictions such as post traumatic stress disorder.

According to Dr.Vahabzadeh:

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is commonly caused by a directly witnessed real life event that is life threatening or violent in nature. Current clinical diagnosis of PTSD excludes exposures that occur through electronic media, including movies and pictures.

However, given the immersive and interactive nature of VR, and the increasing ability to stimulate a range of senses beyond sight and sound, including tactile and olfactory sensations, one has to wonder if at some point these experiences may result in the rewiring the the brains fear centers in a similar way to that seen in PTSD.

One could postulate that if a person felt the VR experience was real, that they genuinely felt they were at risk of harm, and that they did not have a way of voluntarily ending the experience, they could experience rewiring of fear circuitry of their brain in a manner similar to PTSD. They would then perhaps have a range of PTSD like symptoms. Clearly this is an area that will need further research as immersive technologies become more realistic and widely used, and potentially abused.

For now there seems to be a growing consensus from both medical professionals and VR game designers: violence in VR is not a problemyet. But, as the industry matures so too should its understanding of the types of effects it can create and the scope of damage it might do.

What do you think? Does violence in VR concern you? Let us know in the comments below.

Tagged with: onward, pavlov vr, violence

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Is it Okay to Stab, Shoot, or Kill People in Virtual Reality? - UploadVR

CATHERINE HARRIS

Last updated18:15, March 17 2017

Watson Property principal Greg Watson takes some virtual reality goggles for a spin.

The days of open homes may be numberedin the Manawatu, thanks to a local real estate taking on virtual technology.

Watson Property in Palmerston North believes it is possibly the first agency in the country to use a certain type of virtual reality technology.

Principal Greg Watson said the firm had imported a Matterportcamera from the US so vendors could choose "VR"as part of their marketing campaign if they wished.

By using an Oculus viewer, if they hadone, or their smartphone and a set of cardboard goggles supplied by the company, people could feel like they were really insidethe property.

READ MORE: * Kiwi house hunters may soon swap open homes for virtual reality * Harnessing the power of Pokemon Go "It allows somebody viewing a rental property or a property for sale to put the phone into the goggles and experience actually standing inside the property," he said.

"The real advantage for people is they can get a really good feel forwhat it's like, rather than thesituationwhere theymight travel to a property."

Virtual reality had an edgeover videos and 360-deg photography on computers by giving people a cleareridea of the condition of the property, Watson said. They could look out the windows at the view, or get a sense of scale.

The user simply had to downloadan app, go to a link on their phoneand slideitinto the goggles, he said.

At $20 a pair, theywere cheap enough for vendors to send a limitednumber out to likelycustomers on the agency's database as well.

Watson said he expected other agencies to followtheir lead.

"As soon as you put those goggles on, it is an experience. It's not just looking at something on a screen."

-Stuff

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Palmerston North real estate agency becomes early adoptor of virtual reality - Stuff.co.nz

Forbes

Play With Drones And Virtual Reality At San Francisco's High-Tech Escape Room Forbes In the middle of a dark room, Mike Newton, a talent and account manager at Discord, sat cross-legged on the floor. He waved his arms in circles, head turning side to side as he reacted to the action taking place inside the HTC Vive Virtual Reality ...

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Play With Drones And Virtual Reality At San Francisco's High-Tech Escape Room - Forbes

Forbes

Troubled GoPro Deepens Layoffs, Eliminating Positions In Media And Virtual Reality Divisions Forbes The leaders at embattled camera maker GoPro may have been hoping for a fresh start at the beginning of the year. The company's 2017, however, has picked up right where its 2016 left off. On Wednesday, GoPro announced it would cut 270 more positions, ... and more »

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Troubled GoPro Deepens Layoffs, Eliminating Positions In Media And Virtual Reality Divisions - Forbes