From The Void reportedly attracting a $20 Million investment from James Murdoch’s fund, and Sandbox VR partnering with NBC to put together an epic-looking Holodeck experience, to platforms such as Secret Location expanding globally, it seems that consumer appetite for Location-Based VR (LBVR) is, in many ways, outpacing the take-up of consumer HMDs.

Location-Based Virtual Reality (LBVR) is showing great promise as a consumer gateway to VR
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Although most VR hardware and experiences currently cost too much for the average consumer, Location-Based Virtual Reality (LBVR) is showing great promise as a consumer gateway to VR. It is becoming increasingly common, in fact, for people to be first introduced to an immersive experience through some sort of arcade or installation setup, and also for users to return to these locations for more.

It is becoming increasingly common for people to be first introduced to an immersive experience through some sort of arcade or installation setup, and also for users to return to these locations for more
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Taking advantage of the consumer technology gap, LBVR is somewhat akin to cyber cafes, providing users with a VR headset, a VR backpack PC and custom-designed space to freely experience in VR. Demonstrating the immersive potential of VR in this way is viewed as a potent means of increasing VR awareness (and therefore uptake) amongst consumers. However, applications of LBVR are also diversifying beyond entertainment, with training, education and marketing professionals amongst the many wondering what next steps to take in order the maximize the potential of this nascent and hugely promising technology.

Applications of LBVR are also diversifying beyond entertainment
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To take an in-depth look at the current state, and future, of location-based VR, VR Intelligence are hosting an exclusive webinar, The Explosion of Location-Based Virtual Reality: Now & Future. XR Consultant, Columnist and Author, Charlie Fink, will moderate the discussion alongside Joanna Popper (Global Head of Virtual Reality for Location Based Entertainment, HP), Charles Westerberg (Vice President of Business Development, Black Box VR) and Chanel Summers (Vice President of Creative Development, VRstudios, Inc.). Taking place Wednesday, August 7^th (9:00am PT/12:00pm ET/5:00pm BST), the webinar will explore what is really happening in the world of location-based VR, who is making the biggest gains and why, and what the future may hold for this industry still in its infancy.

VR Intelligence are hosting an exclusive webinar, The Explosion of Location-Based Virtual Reality: Now & Future with @VRChuckWagon @JoannaPopper @CharlieFink @VRStudiosUSA @blackbox_vr Wednesday, August 7th
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Register for this webinar to explore the following:

• Which VR games, experiences and formats are proving most popular in location-based entertainment? And why?
• LBE is undoubtedly a growing segment for VR… but what challenges are centers and content creators still facing?
• Are purpose built free-roam VR experiences or multi-game VR arcades seeing the biggest growth? And are location-based AR experiences now coming to market and making gains too?
• What does it take to make an experience stand out from the crowd and get returning customers who spread the word?
• How is location-based VR diversifying beyond entertainment into training, education, marketing and more – and what does this mean for the rise of the technology more broadly?

Register for this exclusive webinar today

Those who cannot join live will be sent the recordings once the webinar has run.

This webinar is being run in association with VR Intelligence’s upcoming VRX Conference & Expo, taking place December 12-13, 2019, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport Hotel. Expecting more than 600 senior attendees from across gaming, entertainment, healthcare, retail, automotive industries and more, VRX is the world’s premier B2B immersive tech event for those wishing to use XR to boost ROI, propel their business forward and engage consumers through immersive, innovative experiences. More information can be found on the VR Intelligence website.

Tech Trends is an official media partner of VRX 2019

Tech Trends offers a broad range of Digital Consultancy services to guide companies, individuals and brands in effectively leveraging existing and emerging technologies in their business strategy.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Exploring Location-Based VR appeared first on Tech Trends.

As Location-Based and cinematic VR continues to expand in a number of directions, with new cutting-edge arcades popping up all over the place, we’re also seeing some of the more established players in the immersive entertainment space collaborating as they figure out how best to scale and monetize this sector.

Such is the case with the just-announced news that mk2 (a leading VR experience provider in Europe) is teaming up with Secret Location.

We’re seeing established players in the immersive entertainment space collaborating as they figure out how to scale and monetize the sector
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Secret Location was founded in Toronto in 2009 as a services company, but has since pivoted into content production. In 2015 its Sleepy Hollow production was one of the first VR experiences to win an Emmy, which it did for “User Experience and Visual Design”. In 2016 the company was acquired by Entertainment One (eOne) which has a movie library valued at over $1.7 billion, and under that umbrella continued to explore the intersection between tech and traditional storytelling.

mk2 has a strong background in managing traditional cinema venues, operating over 26 theaters in Europe
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The partnership is specifically targeted at location-based venues and will integrate Secret Location’s Vusr technology with mk2’s recently launched VR Pods. Vusr is their internally developed cloud-based content management system that streamlines the various challenging logistics involved in delivering immersive experiences.

mk2's VR Pods - plug-and-play solution for professionals – were first unveiled at this year at South by Southwest, and around 100 have been sold across the world since March
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mk2 has a strong background in managing traditional cinema venues, producing over 100 award-winning movies and operating over 26 theaters in Europe. Their VR Pods – plug-and-play solution for professionals – were first unveiled at this year at South by Southwest, and around 100 have been sold across the world since March. Partners so far include public institutions including the National Public Library of France and the Film Fund in Luxembourg, leaders in the movie theater industry such as Nordisk in Scandinavia as well in Brazil (Arvore) and Asia.

In the New Year, mk2 plans to invest on increasing its footprint in the location-based VR market
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Vusr Venue lets Location Based Entertainment VR providers manage their content and experiences through a centralized dashboard. The advantage of that is that by streamlining the process and being able to quickly respond to changing consumer needs during a play session, the provider can improve the overall quality of the experience. Operators are able to manage live sessions, view station-operating statuses, download and install new software, troubleshoot hardware, components and software.

Elisha Karmitz, mk2’s CEO, believes Vusr Venue will give their operators simpler and much more efficient methods for managing the complex back-end components of VR LBEs and will help make mk2’s VR Pods easier to use at scale. “mk2 has long been searching for an easy-to-use content management tool to power our VR Pods. Secret Location’s Vusr Venue is providing exactly what our global customers need, and more,” he added.

The VR Pods come loaded with over 50 curated VR experiences provided by mk2, and with the integration with Secret Location’s Vusr Venue, it now hopes to develop a worldwide VR distribution network, collaborating with prominent studios such as Atlas V, Chris Milk’s WITHIN, SuperHot Team and Felix & Paul to showcase their latest content on their continuously refreshed catalogue.

In the New Year, mk2 plans to invest on increasing its footprint in the location-based VR market, not only by opening new LBE VR venues, but also by investing heavily in content production and distribution, as well as opening a communication agency dedicated to VR.

This article was originally published on VRScout

Mk2 Partners With Secret Location For Worldwide VR Distribution Network via @alicebonasio https://t.co/njIxqpTPNc pic.twitter.com/fL4yhBcvFg

— VRScout (@VRScout) December 20, 2018

For companies looking to get into Immersive technologies our VR Consultancy service offers comprehensive support in strategic deployment of Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Betting on Location-Based VR appeared first on Tech Trends.

There are many tantalizing possibilities around immersive technologies, but where they usually hit a snag is the fact that most cool experiences require complicated equipment. Stuff that you have to wear, setup, and ultimately think about.

So the holy grail for achieving a truly immersive experience is, of course, for it to just happen all around you – just like real life. There are many companies working on various visions of that Holodeck-like future, including Light Field Lab which we covered recently, but mostly they’re at an early conceptual stage.

Yet advances in existing projection technology have made it possible for new kinds of immersive movie theaters to be built, such as Space 360 in South Korea, opened last year.

There are many tantalizing possibilities around immersive technologies, but where they usually hit a snag is the fact that most cool experiences require complicated equipment.
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We wanted to make a true VR theater that would give visitors a breathtaking 360 immersive experience
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The setup inside this sphere, which is 12 meters in diameter, consists of a transparent glass observation bridge which spans the interior space, with high-resolution projection enveloping users above, below, and all around in 360 degrees, bypassing the need to wear VR headsets altogether.

The project was financed by Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. (the country’s national operator of power plants) which then proceeded to donate the entire thing to the National Science Museum as part of its corporate social responsibility program.

The holy grail for achieving a truly immersive experience is, of course, for it to just happen all around you
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The first show created exclusively for the sphere told the story of the Big Bang and the beginnings of human civilization, but it is capable of playing any fulldome or VR content.

Ukrainian creative studio Front Pictures was responsible for engineering and installing the projection system and software. They had extensive experience in engineering fulldome theaters and planetariums, having delivered over 150 such installations around the world. The concept of a fully immersive installation, however, was more challenging. For starters, placing the projectors in such a way that they would not shine directly in the viewer’s eyes was difficult.

“We wanted to make a true VR theater that would give visitors a breathtaking 360 immersive experience. But to meet our idea of the future, the system also needed to have the highest possible resolution and brightness of projection, high energy efficiency and cost effectiveness,” they recounted in a blog post on their website. “Unlike in a conventional digital planetarium, where projectors are located along the dome’s perimeter, the options for placing them in a full sphere are substantially limited. One of the challenges was to devise a layout that would avoid shadows being cast by the observation bridge, minimize openings for the projectors, while, at the same time, maximizing the resolution and brightness of the projection.”

In the end, they chose to use 12 projectors, located around two entrance doors, with their engineers exhaustively testing different layouts that would allow for rotation at extreme angles, as well as equipment configuration offered by various vendors (noise was also a big factor considering the number of projectors in an enclosed space.)

“The spherical screen creates significant geometrical distortions of the projected image. The distortions become even larger due to the fact that in a full projection sphere, it is impossible to place projectors along the perimeter, as a sphere has no edge. They need to be located around the entrance doors on the opposite sides of the sphere.”

A conventional fulldome experience is only half a sphere, so one can get away with deploying one fisheye lens. This is not enough to completely cover the spherical screen with a bridge in the center, however. In this situation, manual calibration – i.e. stitching the images together isn’t the best option, so they adopted an automated calibration system, based on powerful computer vision and image analysis algorithms combined with a 360 degree multiple camera rig. Front Pictures has been developing auto-calibration technology since 2012 which analyses patterns to seamlessly blend projectors together into a unified coordinated space.

Ukrainian creative studio Front Pictures was responsible for engineering and installing the projection system and software
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To overcome that, Front Pictures used four cameras with fisheye lenses mounted around the glass bridge, customizing their software to enable the multi-camera calibration. As they further explain:

“The previous generation of multi-projector systems were built around the “one computer per one projector” paradigm. But this approach has significant drawbacks such as a relatively big budget for computer hardware, more possible points of failure, difficulties with implementing proper failover solution, as well as higher electricity consumption. Another downside of the cluster systems is a discrepancy in video playback speed on different computers, which can result in rough, jerky video playback.”

They developed a technology called Screenberry to address that particular problem. This is a hybrid video processing engine which uses both the GPU and CPU in a much more efficient way and can smoothly playback 8x8K video on up to 72 output devices, all the while connected to just one computer.

The bar is set very high for immersive experiences that manage to capture our imagination and get punters actually paying to try them out
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It all highlights how incredibly difficult, laborious and time-consuming a process it is to get this stuff right. The bar is set very high for immersive experiences that manage to capture our imagination and get punters actually paying to try them out, and that sweet spot is mighty hard to hit. But the continued market growth shows that there is also an appetite for these experiences, it’s just a matter of finding the best way to deliver them. Whether or not that will involve any sort of wearable device in the future remains an open question.

This article was originally published on VRScout

Inside Space 360 – South Korea’s Amazing Fulldome Theater via @alicebonasio https://t.co/EOhLyUXnOS pic.twitter.com/0FkDf3kS2e

— VRScout (@VRScout) October 30, 2018

For companies looking to leverage Immersive technologies such as VR/AR/MR/XR Tech Trends offers a comprehensive range of Virtual Reality Consultancy Services.

Alice Bonasio is a VR and Digital Transformation Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Diving Into VR Without a Headset appeared first on Tech Trends.