This weekend’s Raindance Immersive Awards celebrated the best of VR moviemaking and beyond in 2019.
The awards, hosted in the center of London, included ten categories. They recognized everything from animation and interaction to documentary making and even gaming. The night’s big winner was Gloomy Eyes, the Atlas V and 3dar-produced animated love story narrated by Colin Farrell. The adorable short, in which a zombie called Gloomy falls for a human girl, picked up the Artistic Achievement and Audio Achievement awards.
Afterlife was another double winner. The searing 360 narrative, which deals with a family’s loss of a child, was awarded Best Cinematic Experience and Best Debut Experience.
Meanwhile, Immersive Game (which, for full disclosure, I was a judge on) featured hot competition between Maze Theory’s Doctor Who: The Edge Of Time, Fast Travel Games’ The Curious Tale Of The Stolen Pets, Italic Pig’s Infinite Hotel and Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky. It was The Curious Tale that took home the award.
The Spirit of Raindance award, meanwhile, went to Cosmos Within Us. The piece follows the story of an elderly man trying to recall childhood memories. It utilizes the audiences’ sense of smell and touch in a theatrical twist.
Other winners at the awards included A Box In The Desert, a theatrical VR performance in which audience members have their sense of obligation and trust test. Animated Experience went to Battlescar. The full list of winners (with trailers) follows below:
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Mixed reality has the potential to transform our lives, but there’s a lot that we don’t know about the technology and its impact on people and society, particularly when it comes to privacy and safety issues.
These technologies rely on constant, real-time analysis of users and the space around them. Unlike a phone or computer, you can’t just tape over the camera and still use them — without spatial data, AR/VR experiences could cause cybersickness or accidentally make users walk into walls. The sensors that are essential in making VR/AR apps work can pose a significant threat to user privacy.
Editor’s Note: This guest post by Diane Hosfelt originally appeared on VentureBeat.
That’s why privacy is an existential question for spatial computing — can we use mixed reality while maintaining privacy and agency? We need to figure this out before these devices and apps become a part of our daily lives.
What do we mean when we talk about virtual and augmented reality? In virtual reality, you’re entirely immersed in a digital world. In augmented reality, digital objects appear as if they’re in the physical world. Both AR and VR use similar underlying concepts like spatial computing and 3D elements, so we bundle them under the umbrella term “mixed reality” (XR, or sometimes MR).
Mixed reality experiences require a bunch of sensors (including cameras) to be on for extended periods of time in order to function. Mixed reality headsets are covered in sensors — not only cameras, but also infrared detectors, gaze trackers, accelerometers, and microphones.
XR is already being used for education and emergency first-responder training, and it’s going to continue to grow. Before this technology becomes as common as the smartphone, we need to think about how it can be built for safety and privacy.
There is a reason why flight attendants review safety procedures and schools have fire drills. When you’re prepared for an emergency, you can handle things better. But, drills can only prepare us for a fraction of the real experience. With XR, we can immerse emergency responders in situations that closely resemble real life. Being in a more lifelike experience can prepare responders for a real emergency, and it can also highlight any holes that need to be filled.
We know that VR can affect brain processing and psychology. Some VR applications are already being used to help treat PTSD via exposure therapy. Is it also possible to induce negative effects? This is something we need to study.
Social VR experiences allow us to connect more directly with friends and family, even if they live across the world. Not only does social VR provide space for stronger connections, but it also allows you to take on a new virtual persona. You can quite literally become someone else, even a cat.
Taking on a different identity in the virtual world is appealing for many reasons, one of them being potential online harassment. Social VR combines the worst of both in-person and virtual harassment — abusers are protected by the anonymity of the Internet, while their targets suffer more due to virtual embodiment. Getting trolled on Twitter is already unpleasant, and unfortunately, or victims of online harassment, this means they may feel the effects more viscerally.
The way we interact in a virtual space is unique to each of us. While this could be used as an authentication mechanism, it also poses a fingerprinting risk — anything that can be used for authentication must be uniquely identifying. Imagine if you use a VR headset in your job, then go home and enter a social VR space to fundraise as a volunteer for a political campaign. What if your employer can link your work persona to your personal avatar, simply based on your unique motion and interactions with virtual space, and that employer disapproves of that campaign?
This type of fingerprinting allows even more severe privacy violations than current device fingerprinting methods, which use specific information about the hardware and software you’re using. Without privacy, we lack agency and the ability to fully express ourselves.
Education is another emerging application. Students can ride a virtual version of the Magic School Bus, exploring space without ever leaving the classroom. These lessons can lead to increased engagement, especially for special needs children. However, we don’t know the psychological effects of immersing kids in XR.
Unlike adults, children are still learning how to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and their nervous systems are still developing. Because of this, kids are especially sensitive to potential risks in immersive experiences.
And it’s not just young children that we need to be concerned about. In the outdoor augmented reality game, Alien Contact, older students (aged 11-16 years) asked researchers if aliens had actually crashed at their school and if the researchers were FBI agents (Dunleavy et al., 2009). -Dr. Erica Southgate
How does participating in immersive experiences affect developing brains? Are there differences between the effects on children and adults? Is it possible that an immersive experience can have physical side effects after exiting? These are all questions that we don’t have answers to yet.
With these studies in mind, we need to consider both the effects on children and the privacy implications. Most societies recognize the need to treat children and adults differently when it comes to data processing and collection. XR experiences need to process data in order to work and headsets generate large amounts of data, regardless of the user’s age. How can we enable educational opportunities, while making wise choices about data collection and protecting children’s data?
We must work together to make mixed reality a safe technology. As with any new science, there’s a huge potential for good, but there are risks that go beyond the physical and mental impacts of XR immersion.
Mitigating risks is a part of the process, but unfortunately, it’s a step that’s sometimes overlooked. Having conversations about the potential risks of mixed reality is already a step towards safety. Developers can consider different scenarios, such as what happens when those who don’t have good intentions use this technology, and then design the technology with additional privacy and safety measures.
This is perhaps why many prominent technologists and even companies are raising their voices in favor of more mindful technological development. The Center for Humane Technology is an independent non-profit that seeks to drive more humane development centered around the impact on mental health, the breakdown of truth in society, and digital addiction, among others. The founders hail from Google, Mozilla, the CIA, Apple, and Microsoft. These are people who fight for innovation but who all recognize the need for research and responsibility.
Tony Fadell, the founder of Nest Labs and inventor of the iPod, has said, “Did we bring a nuclear bomb with information that can — as we see with fake news — reprogram people? Or did we bring light to people who never had information, who can now be empowered?” Fadell was referring to the smartphone specifically, but more generally to the unknown impact of new technology that has the power to distort users reality — impact mixed reality may have even stronger than the smartphone, with even more potentially negative results
Instead of writing about our regrets again in another five years, we need to start addressing these issues right now. As far as concrete steps, developers can use APIs that provide already abstracted data (like the geometry of the room), instead of using raw camera access to analyze the area around a user. In short, they can build for privacy first. As mixed reality evolves there will be other solutions, but in order to find them engineers first need to start asking questions of themselves, their users and of the true purpose of their technology.
Diane Hosfelt is the privacy and security lead for Mozilla Mixed Reality. This guest post originally appeared on VentureBeat.
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It may be warm still but Autumn is definitely upon us and that means doing away with the light clothing and grabbing something warm and snuggly. As the seasons change its as good a time as any for a change in circumstances and job, with some quality vacancies available this week.
| Location | Company | Role | Link |
| Toronto, Canada | Lucky VR | Unity 3D Developer | Click Here to Apply |
| Toronto, Canada | Lucky VR | VR Quality Assurance | Click Here to Apply |
| Toronto, Canada | Lucky VR | 3D Artist | Click Here to Apply |
| Guildford, UK | Fireproof Games | QA Tester | Click Here to Apply |
| Guildford, UK | Fireproof Games | 3D Artist | Click Here to Apply |
| Los Angeles, US | Respawn Entertainment | Development Tester | Click Here to Apply |
| Vancouver, Canada | Cloudhead Games | Intermediate to Senior Programmer | Click Here to Apply |
| Vancouver, Canada | Cloudhead Games | Game Designer | Click Here to Apply |
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hub to check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Every industry is noticing the effects of changing generational preferences and technological progress. The ways we shop, socialize, and amuse ourselves have all shifted into the digital age, limiting our opportunities to make real, in-person connections. The tasks that once got us out and about among our communities are now handled through screens, slipping us into a space of digital isolation.
However, the need for social and emotional experiences hasn’t gone away, and this shift is fueling a growing desire for real-life experiences and face-to-face interaction. As recently stated in Forbes, “Consumers are [now] looking for places to be—not things to buy—when they leave the house.” In fact, 74 percent of Americans said they’d rather spend money on an experience than a physical product.
The search for new, more entertaining ways of using shared social spaces and bringing people together has begun. With nearly 100,000 stores hit by the “retail apocalypse”, there’s ample real estate in need of revitalization and millennials, who currently make up more than half of the United States’ workforce, know just what to do with it.
Having grown up witness to the internet’s revolution, millennials saw how quickly communities changed with technology, giving them a very different viewpoint than that of surrounding generations. But the value of relationships remained, and they learned just as much from friends and teachers as they did from Nintendo and AOL Instant Messaging.
This generation is now the one with influence, and their memories of the pre-internet good ole’ days, combined with their love of technology, is driving the future economy. Through their nostalgia for genuine, emotional experiences, millennials are creating a new wave of location-based entertainment (or LBE) and positioning it as a prominent solution to empty real estate and struggling retail.
Location-based entertainment (LBE) is about bringing people together, in real life, to share experiences. Arcades, water parks, and family entertainment centers — built by baby boomers and Gen X — gave millennials great childhood memories and a particular fondness for LBE. However during their youths, this focus was quietly overshadowed by the advent of the internet, and the scramble to secure smooth, online experiences caused innovation in LBE to stall.
Now, as the novelty of online experiences starts to wear down, millennials want to go back and recreate those childhood memories in grown-up, more immersive and tech-enhanced versions. Traditional occupants of brick-and-mortar retail continue to move into online distribution, opening up more and more real estate. At the same time, technology becomes even more accessible, creating perfect conditions for innovation in the LBE market.
Don’t get me wrong, putt-putt — laser tag, and movie theaters (the first generation of modern LBE) are still awesome things to do, but the potential for new experiences — to use modern technology and progress LBE into a new generation — is ready to be explored.
Having spent up to 9,000 hours of their childhood playing games, millennials are well qualified to call themselves the first generation of gamers. Now, they’re shifting into a new role — as game developers, forming the second generation of gaming. What was created by the first gen (Galaga, Pacman, etc.) has advanced beyond what we could’ve imagined, and now, the first kids to grow up playing these games are creating experiences of their own.
In this, millennials are charged with overcoming a whole new set of entertainment challenges. While LBE offers a variety of investment opportunities, a sustainable business model is still a tricky thing. In order for an LBE company to be successful, experiences have to appeal to broad audiences and have some level of repeatability — two aspects that one-dimensional places, like VR arcades, are struggling to remedy.
Yet, numerous businesses have already shown success by grouping a variety of experiences in one area, adding entertainment value and accommodating a much broader audience — which makes for a more compelling, inclusive business model and heightens the user experience.
Places like Area 15 combine retail, art, entertainment, and technology, falling “somewhere in the no man’s land between shopping mall and amusement park.” Our organization, Two Bit Circus, is attempting to redefine both the arcade and the amusement park, with a 38k square-foot Big Top housing a variety of evolving, high-tech entertainment, along with a bar, food, and more to ensure that there’s something for everyone to enjoy.
Another company LiggettVille adds a “WOW factor” to existing retail locations by transforming empty space into adventure rope courses, aiming to create memorable experiences for shoppers. The same trend can be seen with Toys “R” Us who, unable to compete with less expensive online retailers (and vulture capitalists), enlisted the help of a company called b8ta to update their stores and turn them into interactive playgrounds.
There is a chance here for LBE to create new and wonderful social spaces — for malls to evolve into immersive entertainment and community culture centers, filled with inclusive experiences where everyone can create genuine, happy memories. With all of these factors together — the availability of real estate, decreased need for physical retail stores, increased need for human interaction, and the desire for unique, memorable experiences — the potential for innovation is huge.
This post by Kim Schaefer originally appeared on VentureBeat. Shaefer is the president of Two Bit Circus, a Los Angeles-based experiential entertainment company.
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We are all waiting for the predictions of Mike Abrash to come true. The head of Facebook’s Reality Lab believes virtual reality has the same potential as the personal computer, and that it will become the most powerful creative and collaborative environment ever. As he does each year, he pointed to a bright future in a speech at Oculus Connect 6, Facebook’s annual VR conference in San Jose, California.
But we have to survive the good old days first.
“VR hasn’t changed the world yet, but it will,” Abrash said. “The interesting question is, ‘When?’ I have some good news and some bad news.”
Abrash admitted being a bit too optimistic, and that he doesn’t know when the full vision for VR will materialize. He still believes that it will happen, and that’s good thing. A lot of venture capital investors, software developers, and others have been burned on their investments, and they no longer believe. While those folks have given up, Abrash is still trying to invent the future.
For consumer virtual reality to survive the gap of disappointment, everybody has to believe in it. Consumers. Game developers. Other app makers. Investors. And platform owners. OC6 gave us some clues on what Oculus believes about the future of consumer VR. To me, the moves I saw show just how many tradeoffs there are.
The small victories that help feed belief have come. Beat Saber has sold more than a million copies across all VR platforms. And I was delighted to hear at OC6 that the Johnson & Johnson Institute wants to scale virtual surgery training to all doctors around the world.
But after the hype went out of the VR bubble, the collapse was tough. Google retreated from the Daydream VR business. Apple still hasn’t launched its rumored augmented reality product. Magic Leap’s AR device feels like it’s a long way from a consumer reality. And so that leaves Facebook, Valve, and HTC to carry the torch. HTC continues to feed products into the high end in the hopes that enterprise VR will take off. Oculus is going after that market, too. I’m not sure what Valve is really doing.
But consumers aren’t going to go for $800 devices, no matter how good they are. Oculus is putting its investment behind the Quest, a $400 wireless headset which is selling as fast as the company can make them, according to Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg. The company didn’t announce a new high-end Rift headset. Rather, it announced the Oculus Link, which uses a USB-C link to enable Rift titles to run on a Quest. Oculus also showed off hand-tracking technology so you can use your fingers in VR, without hand controllers. That is coming next year, only for the Quest.
Chief technology officer John Carmack sang the praises of the Quest in his keynote talk on Wednesday. He thinks 5G technology will help on the wireless front. And Zuckerberg said people are using the Quest repeatedly and the company is selling the Quest units as fast as it can make them.
In other words, the $400 Quest looks like the prettiest baby. The Oculus Go, at $200, appeared to have too few features to take off. And the wired Rift doesn’t have a real roadmap.
Of all of the major efforts that Facebook made — pouring as much as $500 million into game and app investments — a few of the biggest titles are coming home. What did Facebook get for that investment? Well, Zuckerberg proudly announced that the Oculus Store has generated $100 million in revenues. As you can guess, that math doesn’t add up. Luckily, Zuckerberg is still a believer, as his talk at OC6 suggested.
He was quite excited about hand-tracking, as it is an accessible way to interact in VR. It’s a sign that VR is making steady progress, as a platform that improves over time. It is slowly getting rid of the wires.
“The hardware is getting out of the way,” Zuckerberg said. “With each step, we are getting to a more immersive and natural experience.”
I tried it out, and it was a nice demo. But it had no haptic — the sensation of touch — feedback, and so my hand kept going through objects. I was trying to pick up a ball and my fingers went through it. I worry it will fragment the platform further. It is promising, but needs work.
But as you can see from a picture of my hands, Oculus Connect 6 did not happen in a vacuum this week. Disney and Lucasfilm held an event in the Presidio in San Francisco where they showed off their retail merchandise for Triple Force Friday — October 4 — where the company will start selling its products related to the next film, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (December 20); the video game Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order (November 15), and Star Wars: The Mandalorian (November 12).
Disney showed off its new D-O droid, Lego toys, clothing, smartwatches, and mobile phone cases. But there were no augmented reality or virtual reality products, as there were in years past. ILMxLab showed off Episode 2 of Vader Immortal, a VR experience that tells a new story about Darth Vader. But this is a short episode, and it’s not necessarily going to move the needle on consumer VR. Nor does it suggest that Disney believes in VR.
Sony also had a big event this week with the revelation of the story, theme, trailer, and some gameplay for The Last of Us Part II, which is arriving on February 21. That reminded me that some of the biggest efforts underway in video games are still in traditional titles for consoles such as the Sony PlayStation 4.
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is not meant to compete with The Last of Us Part II. It just can’t.
Sony is going to keep on investing in games like this as it gears up to launch the PlayStation 4. With more than 100 million units sold, it can guarantee that it will invest in big titles for new products like its upcoming PlayStation 5. I have no disbelief about Sony’s platform.
Oculus showed off some outstanding games at OC6, including Insomniac’s Stormland (coming November 14), Sanzaru’s Asgard’s Wrath (October 10), and Respawn’s Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond (2020). These are real, meaty games that promise dozens of hours of gameplay. These titles have to knock it out of the park, but I’m not sure there is a lot more coming.
Consider how massive the Medal of Honor game is. Peter Hirschmann, director at Respawn, said in an interview that the game has been in the works for 2-and-half years, and it has 180 people working on it. If you’re making a game like Beat Saber, which has sold more than a million units, then you can afford to have a larger staff. (Beat Saber was made with just three people). Respawn’s effort is a huge expression of belief in VR. But it’s a one-of-a-kind title, and it’s not coming for a while.
But Hironao Kunimitsu, a VR believer and CEO of Japan’s Gumi, said in an interview at OC6 that it’s more realistic to make a game with about 30 people. That’s how many are working on Swords of Gargantua, which Kunimitsu hopes will sell hundreds of thousands of copies … or even a million. He continues to invest in the game in the hopes of turning it into an ongoing massively multiplayer online role-playing game. But he was surprised to learn that Respawn is investing so much money into Medal of Honor.
There is a scary truth about what VR has to accomplish. When a new piece of hardware or a new game arrives, it doesn’t have to just capture the attention of VR aficionados, of which there are too few. It should dominate all of entertainment for the time that it comes out. That’s what The Last of Us Part II will do.
Zuckerberg is hoping that the answer will be Facebook Horizon. There are hundreds of people working on this virtual world for VR. It’s a kind of PlayStation Home, or maybe the correct analogy is more like Second Life or Minecraft. Zuckerberg believes that making VR more social is the path to making it the next big computing platform.
I tried out Facebook Horizon. It’s easy for individual creators to build little worlds within Horizon. These user-generated places will enabe a lot more people to express themselves in VR. I played a cute game called Wing Strikers, which was a kind of Quidditch multiplayer game that you play in toy airplanes. If Facebook isn’t funding a ton of new hardcore VR games, perhaps it will create more believers and strike gold with Horizon.
Peter Moore, who spearheaded the launch of the Sega Dreamcast 20 years ago, once told me that they keep “moving the goal posts back” in terms of all of the things the platform had to do in order to be a success. That’s happening with VR, too. As much as it has achieved, it still has such a long way to go.
I think the next big steps are clear. Moore’s Law and other technologies have to advance, enabling engineers to accomplish feats like getting rid of the wire and the PC on the Rift. VR is still too solitary, so we should be able to stream the experience that we see inside the Quest to a TV, so spectators can see it. And the price of something like the Rift or the Quest has to come down to $200 or $300. And those games like Stormland, Asgard’s Wrath, and Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond have to make not just a nice revenue impact. They have to make a cultural impact on the world. Maybe that’s the job of Facebook Horizon.
And Facebook can’t just advance this all on its own. The consumers have to come along. They have to offer their feedback on what Facebook and Oculus are doing to help guide it to the next goal.
I am as anxious to see some of the cool things that Abrash is making in his lab come to the market. Like the full-body avatars that mimic your movements and facial expressions in real-time. Between now and then, there is so much engineering to do. There is so much belief that has to be created in consumers who find something magical about VR. Abrash said he doesn’t have any regrets about diving in early, either into PC games or VR. I don’t have any regrets about all the time I have put into VR, like playing Beat Saber or trying out Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond.
“VR technologies will need to be woven together into a complete, tightly integrated platform in order to make that quantum leap,” he said. “It’s the sum of those parts that will lead to that breakthrough experience, not technologies in isolation.”
This post by Dean Takahashi originally appeared on VentureBeat.
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