Blog V Reality

Wednesday, 30 May 2018

Oculus Venues Arrives for Oculus Go and Gear VR

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Your ticket to live social events in VR is here.

You can now watch live concerts, sports, and comedy shows with friends in VR. A month after the launch of Oculus’ $200 standalone VR headset, Oculus Go, the long teased Oculus Venues app is finally available for download.

Available on both Oculus Go and Gear VR, Oculus Venues attempts to bring the stadium fan experience to VR. You can pick your seat, chat with friends, and connect with thousands of other fans, all to watch concerts, sporting events, stand-up comedy, movies, and more in real time.

I was able to pop into an Oculus Venues press preview event last week, joining a handful of other journalists to experience a NBA Playoff game from the stands. Captured by NextVR, the footage was a pre-recorded demonstration, placing me right on the sideline and below the hoop.

While sitting court-side was nothing new from other NBA games i’ve experienced in VR, chatting with others in the stands was compelling. Having full on conversations with others around me mirrored an actual fan experience and made it feel that much more familiar and welcoming.

Rowdy fan in the row behind you? You can mute individuals or just move to another seat, something I wish I had the ability to do every day in real-life. Oculus also designed Venues with safety in mind from the start, building other tools like being able to block someone and even report activities that violate Oculus’ Code of Conduct. Its as simple as clicking “report” and recording a short clip of the violating actions. Oculus states that community moderators are on-hand in Venues to take action quickly.

For those of you who aren’t intersted in chatting it up with others, there’s also a solo viewing mode in Venues. It’s your choice whether to enjoy the experience on your own or join the crowd.

Oculus Venues is expected to sport a diverse line-up of events, so hopefully there’s something for everyone to enjoy. To kick things off, on May 30th at 7:30pm PT from Red Rocks Amphitheater, you can watch Vance Joy perform live in concert in partnership with AEG Presents.

The action continues tomorrow at 7:00 pm PT as NextVR presents Gotham Comedy Live from NYC.

Here’s a taste of what other Oculus Venues events you can expect in the coming months. You can subscribe to each event in the app to dive straight into the live action.

May 30 // Vance Joy // 7:30 pm PT
May 31 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
June 4 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
June 6 // MLB: Arizona Diamondbacks @ San Francisco Giants // 12:45 pm PT
June 7 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
June 9 // Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats and The Head And The Heart // 3:55 pm PT
June 11 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
June 13 // MLB: Los Angeles Angels @ Seattle Mariners // 1:10 pm PT
June 14 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
June 15 // Chromeo // 6:50 pm PT
June 18 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
June 20 // MLB: Atlanta Braves @ Toronto Blue Jays // 9:37 am PT
June 21 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
June 22 // Everclear // 10:00 pm PT
June 25 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
June 27 // MLB: Kansas City Royals @ Milwaukee Brewers // 11:10 am PT
June 28 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
July 2 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
July 5 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
July 9 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
July 12 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
July 16 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
July 19 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
July 23 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
July 25 // International Champions Cup: Manchester United v AC Milan // 8:00 pm PT
July 26 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
July 28 // International Champions Cup: FC Barcelona v Tottenham Hotspur // 8:00 pm PT
July 30 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
August 2 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
August 3 // Lionsgate Presents: Reservoir Dogs // 7:00 pm PT
August 5 // Lionsgate Presents: Sinister // 7:00 pm PT
August 6 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
August 9 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
August 13 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
August 19 // Lionsgate Presents: Apocalypse Now // 7:00 pm PT
August 20 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
August 26 // Lionsgate Presents: National Lampoon’s Van Wilder // 7:00 pm PT
August 27 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT

Oculus states that we can expect content from SHOWTIME coming later this summer, plus more film screenings of Lionsgate titles, new concerts from AEG Presents, live NBA League Pass games and additional shows produced by NextVR, MLB games, and more.

Download Oculus Venues on Oculus Go or Gear VR to view the full schedule of live events available in your area.

The post Oculus Venues Arrives for Oculus Go and Gear VR appeared first on VRScout.

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‘Oculus Venues’ Live Event App Now Available on Go and Gear VR, Event Schedule Here

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Oculus Venues, the social app that allows ‘thousands of users’ to watch live events en masse in VR, is now available on Oculus Go and Gear VR starting today. The company has also published a full list of upcoming live events (below).

Announced last year at Oculus Connect 4, Venues lets you connect with friends and thousands of other VR users to watch live events like concerts, sporting events, stand-up comedy, movies, and more.

Many of the live events are captured specifically for VR headsets by NextVR, including stand-up comedy from the Gotham Comedy Club, live concerts from bands via School Night, content from the NBA and MLB, and the International Champions Cup pre-season friendly soccer matches.

Concerts by Vance Joy, Chromeo, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats, and Everclear are hitting Venues all throughout the summer. Other events hitting Venues later this summer include films screenings from Lionsgate Films, featuring Reservoir Dogs (1992), Sinister (2012), Apocalypse Now (1979), and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002).

Most Gear VR-compatible smartphones work with Venues, excluding Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and Samsung Galaxy Note 5. Oculus’ Code of Conduct is also in full force, with community moderators on-hand in Venues.

You can download Oculus Venues here for Gear VR and and Oculus Go.

Oculus says they’ll be highlighting Venues events in Oculus Go and Gear VR’s ‘Explore’ section where you can subscribe to upcoming events and launch them from there.

Check out this summer’s Oculus Venue showtimes below:

May Showtimes

May 30 // Vance Joy // 7:30 pm PT
May 31 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT

June Showtimes

June 4 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
June 6 // MLB: Arizona Diamondbacks @ San Francisco Giants // 12:45 pm PT
June 7 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
June 9 // Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats and The Head And The Heart // 3:55 pm PT
June 11 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
June 13 // MLB: Los Angeles Angels @ Seattle Mariners // 1:10 pm PT
June 14 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
June 15 // Chromeo // 6:50 pm PT
June 18 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
June 20 // MLB: Atlanta Braves @ Toronto Blue Jays // 9:37 am PT
June 21 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
June 22 // Everclear // 10:00 pm PT
June 25 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
June 27 // MLB: Kansas City Royals @ Milwaukee Brewers // 11:10 am PT
June 28 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT

July Showtimes

July 2 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
July 5 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
July 9 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
July 12 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
July 16 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
July 19 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
July 23 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
July 25 // International Champions Cup: Manchester United v AC Milan // 8:00 pm PT
July 26 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
July 28 // International Champions Cup: FC Barcelona v Tottenham Hotspur // 8:00 pm PT
July 30 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT

August Showtimes

August 2 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
August 3 // Lionsgate Presents: Reservoir Dogs // 7:00 pm PT
August 5 // Lionsgate Presents: Sinister // 7:00 pm PT
August 6 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
August 9 // Gotham Comedy Live // 7:00 pm PT
August 13 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
August 19 // Lionsgate Presents: Apocalypse Now // 7:00 pm PT
August 20 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT
August 26 // Lionsgate Presents: National Lampoon’s Van Wilder // 7:00 pm PT
August 27 // School Night! Live from Hollywood // 8:00 pm PT

The post ‘Oculus Venues’ Live Event App Now Available on Go and Gear VR, Event Schedule Here appeared first on Road to VR.

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Live Event App Oculus Venues Launches Today On Go And Gear VR

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Oculus Venues is Facebook’s portal for live event entertainment, launching today on Oculus Go and Gear VR. The one-stop app is building up to feature a piece of live entertainment almost every single night for the next three months. The first event starts tonight at 7:30PM PT and will feature live music from Vance Joy. Following that event are an assortment of MLB games, comedy shows, and more.

Oculus Venues also has social features, much Oculus Rooms and other upcoming entertainment apps, letting you connect with friends and fans from around the world. It’s basically like a single ticket that gets you into all of the best lives shows.

Here is the full list of planned events from today through the end of August, which covers about three months of scheduled content, although it is reportedly “depending on your location” as well:

Coming “later this summer” Oculus also teased content from Showtime, Lionsgate films, new concerts, live NBA Leage Pass games, as well as additional NextVR events, and MLB games.

All of the content sounds promising, but it’s going to take more than a few one-off comedy shows, sports games, and old movies to really turn VR into a social hang out space that people voluntarily visit on a regularly basis. Nevertheless, this could be a step in that direction. First, let me watch the Super Bowl in VR from home, then we can talk.

Let us know what you think down in the comments below! Download Oculus Venues now for Go or Gear VR.

Tagged with: gear vr, Go, Oculus Venues

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Tobii Pro VR Analytics turns your eye movements into design and training data

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Tobii Pro VR Analytics enables companies to create virtual store layouts and packages, seeing which win the most attention from consumers.

Eye movement tracking might sound like a dystopian nightmare, but as the technology continues to improve and become mainstream, the tracking data is becoming more useful. Tobii, maker of frighteningly accurate eye-tracking technology solutions, today announced Tobii Pro VR Analytics, a tool that enables developers and researchers to visualize what…Read More

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Budget Cuts Delayed A Day Before Release

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Just a day before its long-anticipated release, Neat Corporation has delayed its VR stealth game, Budget Cuts, again.

Taking to Reddit, the team’s Freya Holmér explained that the studio needed extra time to fix several bugs that it had been aware of for some time. Right now the team estimates that it may take another one to two weeks to be ready to launch the full version, though also acknowledged it may take longer.

“It’s very hard to predict when the issues we’re facing have many unknown variables and moving parts, which is why we’re not ready with a specific release date,” Holmér wrote. “Maybe we’ll time it perfectly with E3, to make sure our game will be drowned out by all of the other announcements!”

UploadVR received review code for Budget Cuts last week but Neat Corporation explained that it was an earlier version of the game than the one planned for release, and was bound to have bugs. After playing the game for several hours, we encountered several major issues, including regular hard crashes, that prevented us from getting too far into the story. We decided not to issue a final verdict until we knew if the full consumer build would also feature these same issues. You can see our review-in-progress with initial impressions right here.

In her post, Holmér cited several issues that Neat Corporation was already aware of, including “progression-blocking bugs” that had been “on our radar for a while” but were yet to be fixed. Other issues include framerate drops with the Oculus Native build of the game, which we also encountered, and problems with audio performance and occlusion culling.

“We’ve worked hard on this game for such a long time now, we’re so very excited to finally get it into your hands!” Holmér explained. “However, we’d hate to have all it diminished by a laggy experience, especially the ones we could fix with just a little bit more time. I hope this is all understandable. We’re just as disappointed about delays and framerate issues as you are.”

Tagged with: Budget Cuts

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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR1 Aims to Make Standalone Headsets Mainstream

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There is no doubt that standalone headsets, be they for AR or VR, are starting to pick up some steam. This momentum is especially noticeable with headsets like the ODG R9, HTC Vive Focus, Lenovo Mirage Solo and the Oculus Go. Smartphone designs like Gear VR and Daydream are fundamentally incompatible with long-term VR usage. Now that we have standalone VR headsets and the market is starting to heat up it only seems logical that we would finally start to see XR-specific components. One of the most expensive components in an XR headset is also one of the most important parts of the headset, the SoC (system on chip) which does nearly all the device’s processing.

Qualcomm’s smartphone chips that are powering nearly all the standalone XR headsets today are repurposed for XR uses. Because Qualcomm’s chips are designed to be very low-power and high-performance, especially on graphics, they are uniquely suited to power standalone XR headsets. However, there are certain aspects of the smartphone design cycle and SoC design that aren’t optimized for XR. As a result, the cost of using a Snapdragon smartphone chip is higher than it needs to be since not all the components of the smartphone SoC are being used. By building an optimized chip for use in XR headsets, Qualcomm is enabling their many partners in the XR ecosystem to be able to build higher quality devices with more features at lower cost.

That gets us to the Snapdragon XR1, Qualcomm’s first and the industry’s first built-for-XR SoC to power a standalone headset. The XR1 is the first in what I expect to be a series of XR-specific SoCs targeted at satisfying the needs of headset manufacturers and the developers that build applications for them. However, the XR1 is not the pinnacle of VR or even mobile VR for that matter; the XR1 is designed to hit the segment of the market that delivers a high-quality VR experience at an affordable price. This isn’t quite the same as the premium quality devices that feature the company’s fastest and most expensive SoCs (Snapdragon 835 and 845). While there is no defined price point that the XR1 is trying to hit because of the flexibility of being an XR-capable chip, I expect that the XR1 will deliver a good experience regardless of the device…but with limitations.

These more mainstream XR1-based devices would fit more into the Oculus Go category of devices. They could have 3-DoF tracking and relatively simply point and click controllers like the Oculus Go or 6-DoF tracking and 6-DoF controllers, at a cost. In fact, one could almost see the XR1 as the chip that will enable VR manufacturers to be competitive with Facebook and Oculus on the Oculus Go while still being within reach regarding price. Before today’s announcement, the Snapdragon 845 was the only SoC that Qualcomm offered for XR that could offer 6-DoF head tracking and 6-DoF controllers. With the introduction of the XR1, we could see the democratization of 6-DoF head tracking and controllers at an even lower price point, driving up the need to support such features for developers and giving a unified user interaction environment for developers.

Companies like Meta, Pico, HTC Vive and Vuzix have already committed to using the XR1, which means we could see some very interesting mobile VR and AR headsets from these companies very soon. This already shows a significant commitment from some of the biggest players in the space to adopt this platform and give it credibility as a solution for the industry. Looking forward, I believe that the XR1 will help to mark a point where the industry stopped repurposing smartphone components for use in XR headsets and finally started to use purpose-built components that elevate the user experience. I believe these improvements will still come at a premium, but with chips like the XR1 democratizing 6-DoF tracking and headsets, I believe that we will start to have a certain set of features that are considered standard across the industry. We’re starting to get there slowly, but I think XR1 and 6-DoF head and controller tracking will start to pave the way for 6-DoF eventually being the standard for everyone that wants to consider their solution competitive.

We can still very likely expect a Snapdragon 855 or something later this year from Qualcomm that will probably still find its way into high-end XR headsets. However, I believe as volumes increase we could see an XR2 or XR3 that are, like the XR1, specifically catered to enabling the best XR experience at the best price. Until then, we’ll have our continuum of Qualcomm Snapdragon chips ranging from the Snapdragon XR1 to the Snapdragon 845 and all the chips in between. There are no specifics on when we can see devices based on the XR1 from the OEMs above, but if history is any indicator, they will all launch at different times and probably at very different prices.

Disclosure: My firm, Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided research, analysis, advising, and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry including Qualcomm and others. I do not hold any equity positions with any companies cited.

Tagged with: Qulalcomm, XR1

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Oculus - Rift + Touch Virtual Reality Headset Bundle

Oculus - Rift + Touch Virtual Reality Headset Bundle
ID: 173341737968

Auction price: $175.00
Bid count: 1
Time left: 6d 16h

Buy it now:

May 30, 2018 at 02:47PM
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