Daily Archives: April 17, 2017

It looks like a weird experiment. In the foyer of Home in Manchester, four people sit at booths, virtual reality headsets covering their faces. Their heads gently sway for no apparent reason and strange, unannounced movements make for oddly compelling viewing for those in the box-office queue. And then, four minutes later, they unpeel the goggles from their eyes, smiling.

Theyve just experienced My Name Is Peter Stillman, a virtual-reality companion piece to 59 Productions adaptation of Paul Austers City of Glass, currently playing in the main theatre space. Its a fascinating little work taking place in one room that participants can explore as the character moves in strange ways in front of your very eyes.

When we started developing City of Glass, it became obvious that it was a perfect vehicle for VR, because its all about multiple realities and identity, says My Name Is Peter Stillmans director Lysander Ashton, also video director for the main show. Thats what VR does it places you in the shoes of someone else. It felt like a really good thing to explore.

Its 3D animator Edd Stockton has a slightly more straightforward explanation: sitting in the foyer of Home, the four user stations also act as a way to get people intrigued by the stage show. Its a very small snapshot of what City of Glass is trying to do, he says. But its in one room as opposed to the 10 or 15 Ive worked on.

Jenny Melvilles original set design for City of Glass, like much of her work, was modelled in 3D. It was a natural progression that the apartment wed started to design could then be adapted for VR.

So Stockton wasnt starting from scratch a lot of the animation and assets from Melvilles design worked for both productions. He textured the room up to make it look real, got the body and face right, and set the framework for Joseph Pierces hand-animated facial monologue. Its that bit which is really beautiful, says Stockton. Ive never really seen anyone do that before.

The animated face is without doubt the crux of My Name Is Peter Stillman. Ashton laughs that some people dont realise until the very end that their head movements mirror the protagonist they see in front of them and have sat still throughout the entire four minutes without exploring the room.

I was sceptical, says the director of City of Glass, Leo Warner, who also has a design-concept credit for Stillman. With VR, for all its immersive qualities, you still feel youre in a headset. So you have to be very specific about what you want to achieve. And the moment My Name Is Peter Stillman really got me was when we worked on the responsive mirroring of the head. It was at that point when I felt it had a human connection, when you were put into the position of the character and could empathise with him.

Its notable that Warner is honest about the pitfalls as well as the potential of VR for theatre. Ashton says that even this four-minute show has been a lot more work than they thought, taking six months of tinkering in different areas before script, design, tech and set were combined at the end in a post-production process more akin to a film.

Its a very different creative process, and its been a big learning curve. The tools to make a VR show are very good, but theyre not as honed or developed as a lot of editing software. Its still clunky making a small change can require a huge amount of development. Its unexplored territory.

You cant just go out and buy props, for example. Each individual thing has to be hand-modelled in 3D, and on all sides, because you can look around it in VR. It has to be optimised to run in real time, too, which takes ages. So the artwork is a big job. And we only had one location.

This is where Stockton comes in. He agrees that a lot of work has gone in for something so short, not least because VR creates huge challenges as far as lighting is concerned. Stockton rendered the props in separate 3D software, then exported them into this experience.

If you enjoy 3D animation, then you love spending lots of time making 30 seconds look amazing, because most of your career is spent doing it, he says. But the beauty of 3D is that if you have enough time and money, you can create any world, any environment. You can light it and animate it in any way you want, on your own.

Time and money: whether VR will genuinely become another medium to tell theatrical stories lays within these two crucial factors. My Name Is Peter Stillman was produced thanks to funding from the Space, which was keen to make sure digital innovation was used in a way that enhances or extends the experience. But it would take a team with Pixar-like backing and patience to consider a full-length show. The credits list for My Name Is Peter Stillman is eye-wateringly long for its four minutes and then there are the Oculus Rift VR headsets and PCs required to run it.

Quite expensive, nods Ashton. Once youve got the headsets, a lot of people will use them, so the cost per head is pretty good.

My Name Is Peter Stillman is free for the public to experience, as he reflects: Nobody really knows what the market would be for a paid VR theatrical experience. Were trying to figure out how long it would have to be before you felt comfortable about charging people for it and then how many people you could get through in a day.

Warner is more realistic. With the best will in the world, you couldnt do a two-hour show, he says. Not least because I dont think anyone has come up with a comfortable enough physical or optical user experience that you would be prepared to sit through for any length of time.

Im sure that will all develop. Were not far off someone doing a short. But the key question is: why? Where are you putting people in relation to the story that makes VR an interesting tool? For me, thats not fully been answered.

Still, Ashton points to the possibility of a new medium that combines theatre, video games and film. He can picture immersive experiences taking place away from traditional theatre spaces that transport people directly into intriguing worlds. Locations and environments is what VR does really well, he says. No ones really cracked the really important part of storytelling yet, though character.

Grappling with VRs potential has been as tricky for 59 Productions as the technology itself. Its left to Stockton to point towards a useful VR application for theatre right now.

In the actual act of producing shows it will be so useful, he says. Working in parallel with City of Glass, its been so interesting to create virtual sets, walk around them, and tweak the bits that didnt work. One VR headset in a production office will allow everyone to look at a show from directors, to actors, to investors. Its a fantastic tool in that way, already.

My Name Is Peter Stillman is at the Lyric Hammersmith in London from April 20 to May 13. Details: lyric.co.uk

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Is virtual reality the future of theatre? - The Stage

PALO ALTO, Calif. Stanford University offers doctors a room with a unique view the inside of an infants beating heart, valves opening and closing, blood cells rushing past.

The virtual reality project tackles what has always been a major challenge for medical trainees: how to visualize a heart in action in three dimensions. Through VR goggles, they can now travel inside the heart and explore congenital heart defects as if they have been shrunken to the size of a peanut.

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I can literally see where the bloods coming from and where its going in a way that I never had, Dr. Christopher Knoll, a Stanford pediatric cardiology fellow, said after trying out the prototype system for the first time this month.

When Dr. David Axelrod, who helped develop the virtual heart teaching tool, asked Knoll if he was ready to return to the real world, Knoll resisted. No, I like it! he said with a laugh.

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The VR system is part of a growing push to use immersive 3-D visualization technology to improve medical and patient education. Microsofts HoloLens is being tested at Case Western Reserve University for teaching medical students anatomy and physiology, and a University of Michigan project takes doctors inside the brain to gain insights for treating migraine headaches.

The CT scan, echocardiogram, and MRI will remain crucial tools for diagnosis and treatment, but some experts think VR visualization could soon become an essential supplement for heart doctors and surgeons, and a way to reduce reliance on cadaver dissection for teaching.

The Stanford project and similar efforts are where the future is, said Dr. Luca A. Vricella, chief of pediatric heart transplantation at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, noting that getting a 3-D image in ones mind is crucial for medical trainees to understand heart surgery. It gives you a much better understanding of what you will be looking at in the operating room.

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Put the Stanford VR goggles on, and you find yourself in a well-lit doctors waiting room, standing on a central dais. On the left you see wall-mounted flat images of hearts, and on the right, a multicolored plastic heart model homages to old-school visualizations of heart defects and blood flow.

Straight ahead, a shelf holds a dozen 3-D hearts, labeled by congenital defect. Hit the trigger of a hand-held controller, and you drag a living, beating heart from the shelf so it hovers in front of you. The heart can be spun on its axis or exploded into sections that continue their synchronized beating showing both internal and external features. You can grab a section with another command and turn it over or around to see it from any angle as it continues to pulsate, almost like its a small living creature.

One model shows a ventricular septal defect a hole between the two ventricles, or main heart chambers. This birth defect causes some oxygen-rich blood to be pumped back into the lungs rather than to the rest of the body an inefficient step that can cause the heart to overwork.

With the push of another button, you teleport inside the heart and see blood cells streaming through the hole between the chambers. With another button you can surgically fix the defect, making the heart normal.

Users dont get dizzy or develop motion sickness, because they are stationary inside the heart, with structures moving around them, in contrast to being on an amusement park ride.

So far, Stanford has prototypes that show the ventricular septal defect and one other type, with a goal of rolling out the 25 to 30 most common heart defects soon. The long-term goal, Axelrod said, is to add models for adult heart diseases, and eventually those of the lung and brain.

Even advanced imaging methods can leave gaps in how clinicians understand a surgically corrected hearts structures, said Axelrod, a pediatric cardiologist at Stanfords Lucile Packard Childrens Hospital.

If you cant understand what the geometry is, what the anatomy and physiology are of the heart, you can make a mistake in later treatment, he said.

The Stanford system was built with the San Francisco-based software company Lighthaus, which Axelrod owns shares in and advises. It was funded by Stanfords Division of Pediatric Cardiology and Facebooks Oculus VR subsidiary.

The technology can also help patients grasp how surgeons repaired the defects in their hearts.

I see patients every week that come in with a scar on their chest, and theyre 20 years old, and Ill say, What surgery did you have? and they have no idea, Axelrod said. Its our job to help them understand their heart problem, because we think you get much better care if you know whats going on.

Within five years, individualized VR programs informed by diagnostic scans could be ready, Axelrod said. I will be able to say, this is your virtual heart.

Dr. Jamil Aboulhosn, who directs a congenital heart disease center at the University of California, Los Angeles, cautioned that immersive 3-D technologies should be regarded as an adjunct, rather than a replacement, for more traditional ways of studying anatomy and physiology that have served medicine well for decades.

I have been a little bit concerned as we move toward everything becoming 3-D and virtual reality, that we are moving into an era of simplification Lets just make something look really cool, he said. But its not yet time for medical schools to dispense with teaching human anatomy through the painstaking dissection of cadavers.

Yes, virtual reality is ready for prime time. Yes, its exciting, Aboulhosn said. Will it make everything that came before obsolete? No.

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Virtual reality lets MDs in training step inside a heart - The Boston Globe

Last year Patently Apple reported that Regina Dugan, who led Google's Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, left the company to continue her work over at Facebook. Tomorrow Facebook will hold their annual F8 conference for software developers that will emphasize Augmented Reality. During Wednesday's session we may get to see some of the new toys that Regina Dugan has been working on for Facebook.

From the live-streamed event, expect advances in how virtual reality can become truly social, beyond playing games or taking selfies in 360-degree recreations of real places, and updates to Facebook Messenger.

On the second day of the conference, Facebook will tease futuristic gadgets, some of which are being cooked up in a secretive lab called Building 8 run by former Google executive and head of DARPA Regina Dugan. Building 8 has been stocking up on experts in consumer electronics, neuroscience, and robotics and computer vision. Cameras are said to be part of the experimental mix and so is brain scanning.

You could learn more about the F8 conference here. Sessions will focus on smartphone cameras, virtual reality, Messenger, and more.

Without a doubt Silicon Valley is pushing forward with Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality projects. Just yesterday Patently Apple posted a report covering a patent from Hollywood's Warner Bros. Entertainment preparing a movie distribution system to push AR/VR movies to theaters, home theaters and future headsets powered by Intel and ARM processors.

In March Patently Apple posted two reports on the subject (one and two) covering Apple's growing team dedicated to all things Augmented Reality and beyond. Rumors have suggested that Apple may introduce an Augmented Reality application for the iPhone 8.

In the end, Facebook's F8 conference will be full of super hype to show that Facebook is the leader is this field even though nothing of real value has yet to crack the consumer market. In February we posted a report about how thrilled Zuckerberg was wearing VR Gloves to type on a virtual keyboard within the Oculus VR headset.

Here's to hoping that in F8's session two on Wednesday we'll get to see cooler developments beyond VR gloves.

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Facebook to Kick Start their Virtual Reality F8 Conference Tomorrow Morning - Patently Apple

Rev. William H. Lamar IV, pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. preaching during the morning worship service on September 28, 2014. Walter Morris

"For Christians, being in fellowship with one another spiritually and physically is vitally important," he told NBCBLK. "Virtual reality worlds, which may take people from community and from the incarnational aspects of Christian life could be potentially dangerous."

Rev. Lamar wants to be clear - he is not against technology. He references the AME church's founder, Richard Allen, as a leader who utilized technology to advance the church and its mission.

"Allen used technology, technology of the printing press, to spread political dissent against white supremacy as well as other important denominational documents as needed," he said. "However, we always run a very serious risk that the medium overtakes the message. Technology should be used as the handmaiden of a liberating gospel. What we must do is guard against the use of technology through market logic where people become brands and all things spiritual become commoditized."

Mission VR

Collins, on the other hand, is convinced Believe VR will add on and help expand the reach of the Christian church by expanding the message and tenets of Christianity beyond traditional and conventional methods.

Salvant is excited to be leading the effort. They are working to have Believe VR available as a free mobile app at its launch. They are sure their early adopters will more than likely millennials and those most comfortable with technology.

"But the project will not be limited to them. My 68-year old Mom is waiting excitedly for Believe VR to come," she said. "I can say, we have truly done something that is groundbreaking and we hope opens the door for much more to come."

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The Medium is the Divine Message: Religion Meets Virtual Reality - NBCNews.com