3D-Film Pioneer James Cameron Talks VR Filmmaking and Oculus Rift

As the director of the highest-grossing movie of all time — the 3D technology-driven Avatar — when James Cameron talks new film technology, Hollywood and Silicon Valley listen.

That's why when Cameron responded to a question on Saturday about making films using a virtual-reality device such as the Oculus Rift, many ears in the tech and filmmaking community will likely perk up.

"I personally would be very interested to find a way to incorporate VR and a narrative-filmmaking experience," Cameron said during a Reddit Ask Me Anything session. "So a narrative directed experience that has individuated pathways where you have choices that you make in real-time, I think that would be a lot of fun. I think it would be very technically daunting and expensive, to do it as the same quality level as a typical feature, but it would be fun to experiment with."

But don't get too excited about the prospect of a virtual-reality Avatar coming anytime soon.

"It sounds like a lot of fun," the director said. "I don't think it would take over the feature film market though. I'm very familiar with VR, but I haven't seen the specific Oculus Rift device."

Nevertheless, Cameron will get his hands on the Oculus Rift soon — an experience that generally seems to get users even more excited about the technology.

"I'm interested in it," Cameron said. "I'm meant to see it some time in the next month or so, but I've been familiar with VR since its inception. In fact, virtual reality is a way of describing the way we work on Avatar, we work in a virtual workspace all day long. We use a 'virtual camera' which is how I create all the shots that are CG in the film, a window into a virtual reality that completely surrounds me."

If the director's history with technology is any indication, if and when he does decide to delve into virtual reality, it will likely be on his own terms, using specialized equipment developed by his own team.

One question posed by an AMA participant, which focused on Cameron's extensive experience with deep-sea diving, may be of interest to those following the search for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean.

Asked how he might approach the search for the black box, reportedly sending signals from the bottom of the sea, Cameron explained:

"There are a suite of tools that can operate at the kind of depth we're talking about, I believe between 4000-5000 meters. My ultra-deep submersible would not be required at those levels, that's half of the level it's designed for. The next step would be to use an AUV, an autonomous underwater vehicle, and have it run at 400 or 500 feet above the bottom and do a sonar profile of the bottom," he said. "But it all hinges on whether or not those pings [our link] are actually from the black box, and not from something else, like a scientific instrument that's drifted off course."

Read full Article…

Facebook Acquires Oculus VR for $2 Billion

Facebook announced Tuesday that it acquired Oculus VR, the company behind the Oculus Rift gaming headset in a cash and stock deal valued at $2 billion.

The terms of the deal include $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock.

The Oculus Rift project gained prominence on Kickstarter, raising over $2 million in the summer of 2012. The company went on to raise more than $91 million in venture funding in 2013. With this exit, the Oculus Rift is easily the most successful Kickstarter project of all time.

"Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Although the Oculus team was never committed to bringing a consumer version of its VR headset to the market, more than 75,000 developers had already ordered developer kits for the technology — and the early prototypes we've seen look amazing.

Facebook says that Oculus will remain headquartered in Irvine and will continue developing the Oculus Rift platform.

This is Facebook's second major acquisition in less than two months. Last month, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for a staggering $16 billion.

On an investor conference Tuesday evening, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed why he was so interested in the Oculus team and the Oculus Rift.

For Zuckerberg, it's all about the future. If mobile is the current computing platform, vision and virtual reality could be platforms of the future. Zuckerberg described buying Oculus as "a longterm bet on the future of computing."

This is a sentiment echoed by Chris Dixon, an investor at Andresseen Horowitz, the company that led Oculus VR's $75 million Series B funding round. On his blog, Dixon described his research into virtual reality and Oculus as a company. He writes, "the more we learned, the more we became convinced that virtual reality would become central to the next great wave of computing."

The idea that Oculus represents the future of computing isn't relegated to just investors. Shane Hudson, a London-based web developer, says he thinks that Oculus has the ability to offer up a " fully immersed experience." Hudson thinks that experience could extend from tasks such as "playing a game, watching a film, reading a book or even chatting your friends 'face-to-face' despite being on the other side of the world."

Hudson works with data visualizations and he sees the Oculus Rift as giving an entire new way of working with that kind of data. "It's a very interesting technology that could go in any number of directions, much as the web did," Hudson says.

That's what Zuckerberg thinks too. He sees Oculus's current focus around games and entertainment as just the beginning. "Oculus has the potential to be the most social platform ever," he said. "Imagine not just sharing moments with your friends online but entire experiences."

Zuckerberg also said that buying Oculus was a way of investing in the best and brightest players in computing. He said Oculus is "years ahead in terms of technology" but that "all the best and brightest in the space already work there."

Over the last two years, the Oculus team has amassed tons of talent, including many of the best minds in virtual reality and in gaming. John Carmack, the co-founder of id Software — and the lead programmer of Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake, joined Oculus in Aug. 2012 as its CTO.

Original Oculus Rift founder and designer Palmer Luckey was just 19 when he came up with the first prototype for the Oculus Rift. Luckey worked at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies in the Mixed Reality lab, contributing to research and development of virtual reality systems. A head-mounted display aficionado, Luckey's original Oculus Rift prototype caught the attention of Carmack, who was doing his own research in VR.

The other Oclulus VR co-founders, Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov, previously founded Scaleform, a vector 3D rendering engine acquired by Autodesk in 2011. Iribe, Oculus VR's CEO, almost passed on Oclus, before seeing the technology.

"I said, 'Virtual reality never works—I'm not interested," Iribe told Fast Company. After meeting with Luckey and seeing the demonstration, he had a change of heart. "It was probably one of the most powerful moments of my life. Right away, I knew it was gonna change the world, and I wanted to be a part of it."

After a successful Kickstarter run and a round of funding, the Oculus team quickly amassed talent from across disciplines. The Oculus team is brimming with experience in the game industry and in virtual reality, ranging from commercial applications to flight simulators for the Navy and NASA.

On the call, Iribe said that he and the Oculus team are thrilled to be "building the future with Facebook."

Moreover, Iribe says that he's excited about "bringing even greater resources to our work." Competition in the VR space is just beginning — with Sony's Morpheus headset already turning heads (pun intended) and other players expected to enter the space in the next year. With Facebook, Oculus now has a parent company with immense resources and a CEO dedicated to helping accelerate its visions for computing of the future.

Of course, not everyone sees a Facebook-owned Oculus VR as an appealing future. Markus Persson, creator of Minecraft and known online as Notch, is disappointed with the development. Persson shares his thoughts on his blog, revealing that the Facebook deal will put an end to plans for an official Minecraft port for the Oculus VR.

Similar sentiment is cropping up from other game developers. Of course, Facebook has faced this kind of backlash before. After Facebook announced it was going to purchase Instagram, users threatened to leave the service en masse. Not only did users not leave, two years later, Instagram is more popular and more successful than ever before.

Zuckerberg is clearly hoping the same situation will take place with Oculus VR. For him, a little backlash is nothing in exchange for, what he describes in his words, as a "longterm bet that immersive VR is the future."

IMAGE: ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Read full Article…

Oculus Rift Unveils New Virtual Reality Headset for Devs to Play With

Game developers interested in creating games in virtual reality will get an upgraded set of tools from the Oculus Rift team this summer, the company announced Wednesday morning.

The second-generation Oculus Rift development kit is available for preorder starting Wednesday for developers. The virtual reality headset, which began as a Kickstarter campaign in 2012, now has 50,000 units in the hands of developers interested in creating games for it.

Oculus VR Vice President of Product Nate Mitchell said doesn't resemble anything like consumers will eventually see, but is much farther along the company's vision for virtual reality than the previous Oculus Rift model. A consumer version is still not under discussion, he added.

"We've learned a lot of lessons from our original vision," Mitchell said.

The new Oculus Rift headset solves many users' latency issues; it eliminates the motion blur problems that were easy to spot if you moved your head too quickly. It features a brighter, higher-resolution OLED screen with a 960 x 1080p resolution over each eye, rather than a 640 x 800p resolution over each eye on the current kit.

The new headset also boasts improved positional tracking, part of the Crystal Cove prototype the company showed off during CES 2014. Mitchell said that such new features will allow developers to bring many more complex elements into games they produce for virtual reality, including text and UI layouts. Previously, both were previously very difficult to add.

The new headset will cost $350 for developers and will ship sometime in July of this year.

Virtual reality may be the belle of the ball at the Game Developers Conference this week. Sony also used the conference to announce its own virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 4, currently called Project Morpheus. Sony remained mum on setting a date for its headset to reach consumers.

Read full Article…

Sony Ventures Into Oculus Rift Territory

Sony may move into the territory market dominated by the Oculus Rift and other virtual-reality headsets with an upgrade to its head-mounted display. With a prototype head tracker attached, the visor-like entertainment device becomes an immersive game environment.

The company's HMZ-T3W headgear has been around since September of last year, although it was designed to be primarily a video device. The idea is you slip on the display (which makes you look like Cyclops from the X-Men), sit back and press play. The headset will create a virtual 750-inch (!) screen in front of your eyes, complete with surround sound, giving you a cinematic experience wherever you are.

A head tracker, which Sony showed a prototype of at CES 2014, takes the experience to the next level. With the tracker, which is located right behind your head, the virtual environment it creates can respond to your head movement — perfect for games or even interactive videos.

We got a little eyes-on time with the upgraded headset. The display definitely immerses you, and although it's not quite the same as looking at a real screen, you get used to the "virtualness" of the screen quickly.

I watched some video captured from a race car, which was specifically created for the headset. As the road, spectators and landmarks whizzed by me, I could turn my head side to side or up and down to see more of the environment. The video wasn't a complete 360-degree view, going black if I turned too far, but there was next to no latency, and the headset's OLED screens did a great job of producing a bright, sharp picture.

Sony has no info on if or when its head-tracking version of the headset will become available, but you can buy the regular HMZ-T3W today for $998.

Image: SONY

Read full Article…

Oculus VR’s New “Crystal Cove” Prototype is 2014's Best of CES winner

Virtual reality has captured the imagination of developers, consumers and businesses for decades, but most VR headsets produced so far have been notable more for their limitations than their capabilities. With its latest prototype, code-named "Crystal Cove," Oculus VR has taken a massive leap forward, eliminating the stomach-churning motion blur that has plagued previous generations of VR headsets, and adding sensors and a camera to track the position of both your head and body and provide more accurate simulated movement. With the latest Rift, Oculus has created a device that may usher in an era of truly immersive gaming and entertainment, and even create new opportunities for businesses to use virtual reality in everything from manufacturing to medical environments. Of all the exciting, innovative products we've seen at CES this year, the Oculus Rift "Crystal Cove" prototype is unquestionably the best of the best.

In its short history, Oculus has already gone from being a promising startup to becoming a market-moving creator of innovative technology. The first time we saw a version of the Rift, in mid-2012, Oculus had already raised more than $2 million on Kickstarter and caught the attention of legendary game developer John Carmack, who was so impressed with the company that he joined up as its CTO. In our first hands-on -- playing a Rift-optimized version of the Carmack classic Doom 3 -- we found ourselves "raving about it." Since then, Oculus has raised more than $90 million, grown to almost a hundred employees and has sold 50,000 units to developers. And, of course, the company has continued to refine the Rift, with every update dramatically improving the device.

The Crystal Cove version's 1080p OLED display is amazingly sharp and bright. However, what really sets it apart is its positional-tracking capabilities, accomplished thanks to an array of sensors mounted around the edges of the unit, which are monitored by an external camera. It's no longer just your head that controls movement; lean forward or back, and the virtual environment moves in sync, providing an unparalleled, fully immersive experience. Use the new Rift for a few minutes, and you may never want to take it off; at the very least, it may change the way you think about gaming, and make that 55-inch TV hooked up to your console feel small and constricting. When I tried it out here at CES, in an all-too-brief demo session, I didn't want to take it off, and only reluctantly returned it to the Oculus execs helping with the demo.

The Rift has broad applications beyond gaming, and Oculus VP Nate Mitchell tells us that the company has sold developer kits to companies in virtually every industry, from auto manufacturers to the movie business (and, yes, Mitchell admits that there are military applications for the technology). NASA is already using the Rift to create virtual tours of Mars and the International Space Station, and Mitchell points out that the Rift is getting a lot of interest from the training and educational communities. Virtual reality, says Mitchell, is a "new disruptive medium that can revolutionize the way we do a lot more than just games." Forbes is already referring to the way businesses are looking to capitalize on VR as the "Oculus Rift effect."

The biggest challenge for Oculus is getting the Rift in the hands of consumers, and the company remains quiet about a release date, with Mitchell saying only that "2014 is going to be a big year for VR." It already is, now that Oculus has started the year as the winner of the official Best of CES Award for 2014.

Image: Oculus VR

Read full Article…