The city of Darwin in Australia has a museum that is using HTC Vive and VR to allow visitors to experience impact of the war and the bombs of the Japanese airplanes in 1942 on the city.
http://elsewhere.nine.com.au/2016/08/17/09/12/darwin-bombing-virtual-reality-experience
I came across this blog by Takala where he writes about thoughts about VR. I agree with a lot of the points in his posts about the current state of development, it’s challenges and way of thinking. In his latest post in August, he makes the comment that The added value from the use of VR must outweigh its costs for your application which I think is a point which is often overlooked. VR is not the solution to everything and there will still be many scenarios out there where VR is not suitable. However, the exciting part is finding out and seeing what things it can do well.
The following is a link to a talk he made about staying ahead of the curve in VR:
Check out this professional underwater 360 degree camera. It requires 6 GoPro cameras and costs $5985, but lets you shoot up to 8K resolution (8000 x 4000) video at up to 1000m in depth.
http://shop.360rize.com/360Abyss-v4-360-video-p/360abysskit.htm
Talaria is a wearable technology which allows for natural, unrestricted, and comfortable motion in virtual reality.
WebVR is an Javascript API that provides access to Virtual Reality devices, such as HTC Vive, Oculus, or Google Cardboard in a web browser.
You can try it for yourself if you get yourself a experimental version of Chrome browser here. From there you can go visit some websites with some demo applications:
The video below shows an early test with hand motion tracking using webVR on the Vive.
This is a really cool demo of a project which lets you play the role of an actor and director in your own movie. You take on the persona of a character and you can physically act out your part taking turns to represent each character and then combine them together in multiple takes to form a complete scene.
I was interested in looking at what the possibilities are for being able to do LIVE video with 3D capture. This is different than a 360 video which is a 2D capture of a scene all around you. What I’m interested in is scene/video capture of 3D depth and 360 degree at the same time.
Facebook
Live Planet
Project Tango
I think that Project Tango has a lot of strong potential moving forward because of a number of factors:
1. It allows for indoor and realtime mapping of the users environment which bridges the link between the virtual and physical world
2. It is wireless.
The things that I think would hamper this : a better method for interfacing hands is a key thing for immersion, frame rate and resoluion on the mobile units driving the display
HTC Vive X’s Accelerator is a program to help seed and support companies that are developing new VR applications. They released a list of the 33 initial companies being funded and you can see the breadth and types of applications that are being thought out and developed. It’s an exciting time. Link
This is a video of an early prototype of a program that let’s you be a director and creator of movie scenes. This makes my mind swim with possibilities on the incredible things we can achieve with more time. Link
This is a video of a early prototype of using a VR interface for 3D modelling. I can see how this can make modelling much easier to use than a traditional 2D interface. Link
This is a thread from reddit describing how TiltBrush can be used to help draw hair more efficiently for CG characters which is traditionally a very time consuming task. Link
There are a lot of amazing games coming out on the Vive making use of the motion tracked controllers. There was a round table discussion with VR devs on Toms Hardware where a comment was made that dealing with two handed objects was a challenge because there isn’t that physical link between the real and virtual world. If a game designer provided a set of 3d printer files along with the game that allowed people to create a game specific harness such as a gun mount, sword hilt, etc. then it could potentially provide a way for people to have a standardized mechanic for building gameplay on. The link between VR and 3D printer industries could have a symbiotic relationship.
Here’s a fun video of a vision of a possible future of AR/VR world. Link
Using a GoPro to experience what it’s like to be on a motorbike. Link
nVidia releases VR funhouse application to show off their new GTX 1080 GPU which has VR optimizations based on their new Pascal architecture. Link
VRomit's World 