MWM Immersive is finally combining virtual reality and location-based immersive theater

https://ift.tt/goU3rj

Using the timeworn and trusty narrative of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as its platform, MWM Immersive, a division of Madison Wells Media, is finally taking location-based virtual reality to its logical conclusion and merging it with an immersive theater experience.

Called Chained: A Victorian Nightmare, the new production combines live actors and an immersive setting with virtual reality to recreate Victorian-era London.

The new production is premiering at experiential studio GreatCo on Friday and will run through January 6, 2019. It include a full Victorian-era set in which one audience member at a time is fitted with a virtual reality headset by a professional actor. The individual audience experience is designed for the viewer to interact the entire time with live actors and objects.

Co-produced by MWM and the virtual reality studio Here Be Dragons, the Chained experience was created and directed by Justin Denton, who was also responsible for the immersive Legion experience that debuted at San Diego Comic Con in 2017. The executive producer for the project was MWM Immersive’s Ethan Stearns, who was the shepherd behind Carne y Arena the Academy Award-winning virtual reality project from the famed Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu.

[gallery ids="1752184,1752185,1752186,1752188"]

“By combining the best of VR and immersive theater, Chained surpasses the limitations of each medium and lets the audience see, converse with, and even touch the impossible,” said Justin Denton, in a statement. “I grew up with Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol but in my mind’s eye I always imagined the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future as much darker and more intense than most adaptations. Audiences will walk away from Chained as though they have just awoken from a dark and beautiful fever dream full of self discovery, fascination, fear, and wonder.”

Tickets, which cost $40, are available for purchase at Eventbrite.com and the company is planning to bring the experience to more cities after its initial run through January.

Combining immersive theater with virtual reality has long felt (at least to me) like the best use case for the technology. Unlike a cinematic experience, immersive theater benefits from movement in an established environment and interaction with a cast in real time. A production like “Sleep No More” would obviously lend itself to an enhanced experience in virtual reality and if this is successful, the MWM Interactive experiment could become a road map for increasing and encouraging the technology’s adoption among a broader base of users.

It’s a great gateway to the best use cases for virtual reality and something that more companies will likely pursue.

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2RnBk3Z
via IFTTT

Chained: A Victorian Nightmare Is VR’s Take On A Christmas Carol

https://ift.tt/2ShH2o1

VR’s about to get festive, but not in the way you might expect.

MWM Immersive today announced Chained: A Victorian Nightmare, a new location-based VR experience based on Charles Dickens’ classic Christmas story, A Christmas Carol. The piece is set to run at the GreatCo studio in LA from tomorrow until January 6th.

Chained won’t just be a standard VR experience though; it’ll also include elements of live theater. A single guest at a time is fitted with a VR headset in which they’ll go on a journey spanning their past, present and future. Actors using motion capture suits will appear inside VR, allowing the audience to interact with them in real-time. Outside of VR, though, there’s a fully Victorian-era set to explore.

The piece is directed by Justin Denton, best known for his work on the Legion VR experience shown at last year’s San Diego Comic Con. “I grew up with Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol but in my mind’s eye I always imagined the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Future as much darker and more intense than most adaptations,” Denton said in a prepared statement. “Audiences will walk away from Chained as though they have just awoken from a dark and beautiful fever dream full of self discovery, fascination, fear, and wonder.”

Experiential VR studio Here Be Dragons also worked on the piece and Bruce Straley, Game Director on Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, consulted on the story.

You can grab tickets to Chained from this Eventbrite page. They start at around $44.

Tagged with: Chained: A Victorian Nightmare

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Reddit
• More

The post Chained: A Victorian Nightmare Is VR’s Take On A Christmas Carol appeared first on UploadVR.

from UploadVR https://ift.tt/2AxxBtq
via IFTTT

High-Flying VR Shooter Skyfront Gets Full Release Date

https://ift.tt/2RlYc3W

It’s nearly time to swing into action with the full release of Levity Play’s Skyfront.

The airborne multiplayer shooter, which releases in Early Access late last year, will be launching its full version on December 20th, the developer confirmed today. The news was accompanied by the reveal of a launch trailer for the game which you can see below.

Skyfront arms players with jetpacks and sets them loose in levitating arenas to do battle in solo and team-based gameplay modes. A hook shot equipped to the player’s arm allows them to quickly navigate the terrain and get the jump on unsuspecting foes.

The full version of the game will feature four maps with three modes as well as a character progression system. You’ll be able to wield a range of weapons and abilities.

Look for Skyfront on Steam, Oculus Home and Viveport at the end of the month, with support for Rift and Vive.

Tagged with: Skyfront VR

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Reddit
• More

The post High-Flying VR Shooter Skyfront Gets Full Release Date appeared first on UploadVR.

from UploadVR https://ift.tt/2PZrmsQ
via IFTTT

Lucas Di Grassi says human drivers are the real competitors for Roborace

https://ift.tt/2AzOPq3

As Roborace accelerates its plans to build an autonomous racing league, the company is finding that its toughest competition are still human drivers.

In this version of the John Henry story, the humans clearly are still winning, but the robots are catching up.

“We’re going to call it a singularity event when an autonomous racing car is faster than any racing driver,” says Lucas Di Grassi, Roborace’s chief executive and one of the world’s best Formula One racecar drivers. “We started the year 20% slower and we are now 6% slower.”

For the company’s long-term vision, the cars need to be better than any human, because part of the company’s pitch is to be the proving ground for autonomous technologies and a platform to put automakers’ best innovations through their paces in extreme conditions.

“We think when the car reaches a level that is better than any human this will create a layer of trust on the roads,” says Di Grassi. 

It’s a vision that has attracted the attention of some of the world’s biggest companies. Earlier this week, Amazon announced its own initiative for autonomous racing cars. And if Amazon is interested, you can be sure other large technology companies are also angling for a pole position in this proving ground for technology’s latest moonshot.

Amazon debuts a scale model autonomous car to teach developers machine learning

Amazon’s version of autonomous race cars are smaller than Roborace’s full-sized vehicles — and at $399 are far cheaper than the $1 million vehicles that Roborace is planning on putting on tracks.

Beyond the potential corporate competitors, the company’s human competition is more than just a technical obstacle for Roborace. It’s also a critical unknown when it comes to predicting whether anyone actually will want to watch the races.

When asked whether he thinks Roborace can find an audience for races that are divorced of any element of human risk or drama, Di Grassi says “We don’t know.”

To integrate the two worlds of robot racing and human Formula One (or the increasingly popular Formula E series), Roborace has tweaked its competitive model. Earlier this year, the company unveiled a new model of its car that has room for a human driver behind the wheel.

Roborace car at Disrupt Berlin 2018

That human driver is critical to Di Grassi’s new vision for how Roborace competition will now work. In the latest iteration of the company’s races, which will see their first flag waved in April or May of 2019, human drivers will play a larger role in the race.

“We are trying to combine humans and computers in a sport,” says Di Grassi. “The races next year will be a combination of drivers racing for the first part of the race and in a pit stop the driver jumps out and the autonomous vehicle will take over. We want to create this reality that the human and the machine are working together for a better outcome.”

Di Grassi hopes that this integration of the human element and autonomy will be enough to attract viewers, but there are other ways that the company plans to bring an audience to the wild world of autonomous robot racing.

“People want to interact,” says Di Grassi. And with the company’s planned robot races, there will be ways for audiences in the stands to shape the course of the race, potentially by throwing augmented reality obstacles onto the track for the autonomous cars to avoid — creating new challenges for technology to be put through its paces.

“We’re going to try and engage and we’re going to try and get different forms of engagement,” Di Grassi says. Including developing an open source platform that would enable viewers to interact with simulated races in virtual reality — encouraging audience participation and competition in virtual racing leagues that could mirror the action among actual racing teams. 

Like traditional Formula One racing, Roborace is serving two audiences. One is the company’s actual customers — the automakers and vendors that are building the software and hardware for electric and autonomous vehicles — and the audience that ideally will be around to see the fruit of all that labor.

Right now, no automakers have signed up as partners, in part, Di Grassi says, because they’re not confident with their technology. “The automakers are afraid because the software is not ready,” says Di Grassi. But the company’s chief executive is undeterred, because of the profusion of technologies required to make autonomous vehicles work. “Autonomous cars are a combination of a lot of different technology segments — sensors, electric motors, batteries. Our customers are sensor processing companies [and] companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm, Intel,” DiGrassi says.

However, at some point Roborace needs that audience so vendors can prove that their technology works, and people can become more comfortable with the safety and capabilities of autonomous vehicles.

“Nobody’s using high precision vehicle model like drifting and sliding and these situations will be very real. There is a whole different segment that we can develop faster in a controlled environment,” says DiGrassi. “The pitch is to compete against each other to develop technology faster and you develop trust among consumers… this will give trust to people to jump into autonomous taxi in the future.”

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Rmqnjj
via IFTTT

Borderlands 2 VR Could Come To Rift and Vive In 2019

https://ift.tt/2AxHtU6

The small text of Sony’s latest trailer for Borderlands 2 VR for PSVR reveals an interesting fact- the game’s exclusivity to the platform is timed, not permanent. Specifically, it is a timed exclusive for 5 months from launch.

At the bottom of the screen from the very start it states: “Borderlands 2 VR is exclusive to PSVR for a minimum of 5 months from launch.”

This means that after that 5 month period, Gearbox could port it to PC VR platforms like Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows VR if they wanted to. That would mean May 15th, 2019 is the earliest you’d see Borderlands 2 VR on a PC headset, but since that’s a Wednesday, I’d wager May 16th or 17th at the earliest instead.

We’d be shocked if Borderlands 2 VR isn’t ported to PC. The non-VR game has enjoyed a long life thanks to the PC gaming community and there is nothing inherently tying Borderlands to PSVR other than whatever deal they’ve arranged. In the case of Resident Evil 7 VR I’m less shocked it hasn’t come to PC yet (almost two years later) just because of the history with that franchise on Sony platforms. Borderlands 2 VR feels more like Batman Arkham VR or Skyrim VR, both of which eventually released on PC VR devices.

Regardless, you can play Borderlands 2 VR later this year on December 14th when it releases on PSVR as a timed-exclusive. The game will support both DualShock 4 and dual PS Move controllers, both of which will have teleportation or smooth locomotion options.

Tagged with: Borderlands 2, Borderlands 2 VR

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Reddit
• More

The post Borderlands 2 VR Could Come To Rift and Vive In 2019 appeared first on UploadVR.

from UploadVR https://ift.tt/2AwSDZl
via IFTTT

Report: Acer Could Sell or Disband StarVR Soon

New VR App Celebrates The Work Of Claude Monet

https://ift.tt/2rcs1Z9

A brand new VR experience now showing in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris celebrates the work of beloved painter Claude Monet.

The app, named Claude Monet – The Waterlily Obsession, was directed by Nicolas Thépot and created with the help of ARTE France, Lucid Realities, Camera lucida productions under HTC’s Vive Arts program. As you can see in the trailer below, it allows visitors to step inside Monet’s work and explore it like never before.

Things kick off in Monet’s garden, where the artist carried out much of his beloved work. You’ll then visit his workshop and even end up in the Orangerie Museum itself.

Arte is also releasing a 360 video on its various platforms that will give fans at home a chance to appreciate Monet’s work. The VR installation, meanwhile, will run until March 11th next year though you can also jump into it via Viveport for $2.95 (or via the Viveport Subscription).

Tagged with: Claude Monet

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Reddit
• More

The post New VR App Celebrates The Work Of Claude Monet appeared first on UploadVR.

from UploadVR https://ift.tt/2RrX27b
via IFTTT