Active virtual reality (VR) has a lot of potential to engage users in exercise in innovative ways. While some are crafting virtual gyms and bike rides, some other experiences are somewhat unintentionally providing workouts through use of Room-Scale VR. Among these is Raw Data, the upcoming co-op first-person shooter (FPS) from the team at Survios. In fact the developer even notes that people play the demo for this frantic action fest and feel like they’ve just been for a ‘short workout’.
The team said as much in a recent interview with Epic Games: “Active VR gameplay that takes full advantage of room-scale VR is a huge focus for us,” it noted. “We aim to deliver on the promise of VR where users are not just visually immersed in our games but are also physically part of the world. In Raw Data, players utilize room-scale VR in order to rapidly aim and reload powerful guns, swing melee weapons, and hurl projectiles as enemies come at them from all angles in a full 360° game space. Gameplay is enhanced so much when you have to actually reach around your body to grab a weapon and then duck, spin and dodge to avoid enemy fire. People come out of our 15-minute demos feeling like they just did a short workout, but they can’t wait to play again.”
Developed using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4, Raw Data has players fighting off waves of robots using position-tracked controls to wield guns and swords. Survios currently plans to release the title in Early Access this summer for the HTC Vive. That said, it also looks to bring the experience to other VR platforms in the future.
Check back with VRFocus for the latest on Raw Data.
When Perception Neuron popped up on Kickstarter promising a $1,500 motion capture suit, many people jumped at the opportunity, resulting in a crowdfunding campaign that raised over $500,000. Noitom, the company behind Perception Neuron, was able to raise a $5 million A-round of investment on top of that, and has worked furiously to perfect and manufacture the device since then. Now all Kickstarter orders and pre-orders have been filled, and the company raised another $20 million last November. But how good is the suit? I’ve been using Perception Neuron the last three months for my own VR game development, and here’s what I found.
The Kit
Perception Neuron uses up to 32 Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) to track the motion of your body. These IMUs have a gyroscope, accelerometer, and magnetometer, the measurements of which combine for an accurate picture of how your body moves. For $1,500 you get 32 IMU sensors (dubbed “Neurons”), two magnet protection cases, a wearable black suit in which to network those sensors (with an extra pair of gloves), and a sleek black case.
To put things in perspective, their closest competitor Xsens offers an IMU-based motion capture suit for about $10,000, and a motion capture camera setup is $15,000 minimum when you include software (with high-end setups running in the $40,000+ range). The advantage of IMUs is they are more portable and less expensive than a camera setup, but at the cost of positional accuracy (meaning multi-character interactions are harder to capture and the data will need more cleanup).
The Setup
Setup is fairly simple. Once you’ve downloaded and installed Noitom’s Axis Neuron software (a free and pro version of which are available on their site), you’re ready to construct the suit. This involves laying out and connecting the individual suit pieces (upper body, 2 arms, 2 legs), then taking the sensors out of their protective case and snapping them into the suite one by one. Due to the nature of the sensors, they can become demagnetized, and so must be kept away from any kind of magnetic field. This unfortunately includes computers, which I had to connect the device to, leading to the awkward situation of avoiding my computer while using the keyboard. To ensure the sensors’ protection, you need to store them in the special cases provided while not in use, meaning you must perform the tedious task of popping in and out the 32 Neurons every time you use the suit.
Because of this, I’ve found setup takes an average of 20-30 minutes, which isn’t too bad, but combined with 10-15 minutes for storage is enough that I’ll pre-plan my mocap sessions rather than throwing the suit on in a spur of the moment. If you’re using the suit wirelessly, you’ll need to buy a battery separately. The battery is also advised for a 32 Neuron setup, so I recommend you get one even if you plan to use the wired option (a battery that Noitom uses for tradeshows can be found here, but any battery capable of outputting 2.1 amps through USB will work).
Finally, with the suit on and the Neurons in their proper places (instruction for which can be found here), you’re ready to launch the Axis Neuron software and connect the device by either USB or Wifi. After 4 initialization poses you’re ready to capture.
Animation Recording
If you don’t like how the initialization poses matched up, it’s easy to redo them, and although unnecessary, I found myself resetting the pose initialization every other animation capture. To see what capture in their software looks like, take a look at this video:
Essentially you hit a record button, perform whatever movements you want captured, then save the file in their format. Once an animation is recorded, it can be exported in an FBX or BVH format.
Production
The results of your motion capture for actual production use will depend on several factors. In an ideal setup, you would have a character model with the exact same rig as the Perception Neuron default (you can change the capture rig, but that’s more expert than I’m capable of). It’s also possible to retarget the animation data to a different skeleton, but with varying results. In the video above I download a random rigged character model from the Unity Asset Store and retarget it to Unity’s default humanoid skeleton. As you can see, the character model’s prior skeleton had odd finger rigging and I messed up the finger calibration, leading to some awkwardness with the hands. Cleanup from an animator would help immensely, but overall the motion capture looks decent (especially considering the poor skeleton match and lack of a battery pack).
The Perception Neuron workflow is typically: Capture->Export as FBX->Import to Engine->Retarget->Apply to Character
Real-time Capture (edge case)
It’s also possible to use Perception Neuron directly in a game as a full-body input method. Noitom’s Axis software makes this easy to do with a Unity plugin (video below), also supporting Unreal and Motionbuilder. Although I’ve only tested the Unity plugin, I imagine the others are just as effective. Unfortunately the cost and setup time of the Perception Neuron makes its use as an input device extremely edge case, at least for now. It’s fun (I made a quick app where I could give myself a hug in VR), but cost, drift over time, and ease of setup are all areas that need improvement for Perception Neuron to be used real-time outside of research labs and specialized attractions.
Prototype Hardware
Using my pre-order kit (order #927), I’ve been unable to get wireless capture to work via wireless setup (they recommend using a cable to attach directly to the router during setup, which I havn’t tested since it’s impossible with my router location). This may be due to interference (which is why they recommend a cable) or may be due to faulty hardware, but regardless requiring a cable to your router for setup can make things a bit tricky depending on your situation. Additionally, the suit’s buttons for recording and zeroing position were faulty from the get go. These problems caused some inconveniences, but did not prevent me from getting the mocap animations I needed for my game development. Noitom made it clear before I purchased that I’d be getting prototype hardware, so these issues were not overly surprising. Additionally, Noitom covers the Perception Neuron under warranty for 12 months in which they will replace any defective hardware. At the time of receiving my kit I was in head-down development mode and needed to use the product immediately, but now that I’m less stressed I’ll probably get it repaired/replaced.
Final Verdict
At the end of the day, Perception Neuron is the best low-cost motion capture system ever made. For $1,500 you are getting a motion capture suit capable of putting your body movement onto a 3D character, making animation much more affordable for indie 3D developers. It may not be the data quality of a $40,000 setup, but working with an animator to do basic animation cleanup and proper rigging will allow you to achieve smooth, lifelike animation in your content for a fraction of the cost. The Perception Neuron is the perfect item for indie developers, animators, hobbyists, and machinimators.
Se révélant en tous points fascinante pour les férus de high-tech, étant sa cible marketing, la réalité virtuelle est un secteur hyper-concurrentiel et en …
The time has come when we can finally say that high-end consumer virtual reality (VR) is here. Both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have begun shipping to consumer audiences across the globe, bringing with them brand new worlds of possibility. Augmented reality (AR) however, is a different story. There’s still a lot of ground left to cover before AR can become a viable household technology, but where once both technologies were born they both shall converge in due course.
Though the roots of AR and VR can be traced far back beyond the birth of modern computing technology, it’s Ivan Sutherland who is often credited with the development of a design which is now most familiar: the head-mounted display (HMD). Back in 1968, while working as the Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University, Sutherland created The Sword of Damocles. A display suspended above the user, the system was capable of displaying simple wireframe drawings with the illusion of stereoscopic 3D.
However, Philco, a US firm based in Philadelphia, contests that it was actually they who created the first HMD. In 1961 a system was developed in which a camera was placed in one room, while the user sat in another with the display. Magnets were used to adjust the position of the camera in accordance with the user’s head movement: the first example of the potential for telepresence.
The HMD is a construct used for almost all modern AR and VR. Aside from entertainment properties such as the PlayStation’s Wonderbook and Eye Pet franchises or mobile applications including the likes of Nokia’s HERE City Lens, the HMD forms the backbone of AR in the same way that VR is more commonly associated with an enclosed device opposed to Caves.
AR has already been successfully implemented in many forms, however it’s the adaptation of the technology to improve or assist daily life that is considered the proving ground for the technology. Louis Rosenberg’s Virtual Fixtures, developed in 1991 at the U.S. Air Force Armstrong Labs, was designed to allow for the manipulation of virtually guided machinery from a remote location. Rosenberg’s subsequent research into AR, included virtual overlays atop of the user’s real-world view: the most commonly discussed implementation of VR in the current era.
Successfully adapting this technology for real-time broadcast was first achieved in 1998, when Sportvision developed the 1st & Ten system, which generated the now widely used yellow ‘first down’ line that a television viewer sees during live football broadcasts. This technology was actually based upon an earlier design for Ice Hockey, in which a blue halo was used to demonstrate where the hockey puck was located at all times, however this implementation was not well received by the sport’s general viewing audience.
Just one year later, ARToolKit saw its first release. An open-source tracking library that allowed for the creation of overlay information, first developed by Hirokazu Kato of Nara Institute of Science and Technology. ARToolKit is arguably the first instance of consumer-grade AR, with a mobile SDK having been developed and incorporated into early smartphone handsets such as Symbian in 2005. The SDK allowed developers access to video tracking capabilities that can calculate position and orientation of a camera relative to physical markers or natural feature markers in real-time. The technology was seen as a revolution in AR, and is still used in Android and iOS devices under the guise of ARToolWorks.
The next part of the story will be familiar to anyone who has been following the development of modern VR. A young part-time engineer from the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), while studying at the University of Southern California, began work on his own HMD. Disappointed with the low-grade technology of VR in the 1990s and the resulting disappearance of the medium from the public consciousness, Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR, had developed several prototypes before going public with the Rift. Attracting a great deal of attention from the videogames development community, including John Carmack of id Software and former CEO of Scaleform, Brendan Iribe, the Oculus Rift was about to become the leading light in consumer perception of the medium.
With the aid of a number of videogame luminaries, a Kickstarter campaign was launched in 2012. Raising $2,437,429 USD – 974% of its original target – the Rift was transformed from its original goal of a DIY HMD package into a consumer product. In March 2014, it was announced that Facebook had purchased Oculus VR, LLC, for a total value of $2billion. This in turn gave Oculus VR the resources required to establish a team of high profile developers, internal hardware and software development studios that would create a much higher grade of VR experience than was imagined possible at the time of the Kickstarter launch.
While Oculus VR was gaining traction with the Rift, Google was pushing in a different direction. April 2013 saw the launch of the first prototype of Google Glass, an AR HMD that was able to overlay small amounts of smartphone-style information as well as communicate directly with local devices. Google Glass was far from becoming the groundbreaking AR device technophiles had been begging for, but it did reignite interest in the potential of the medium.
The next few years would see numerous other HMDs clawing for their own space in the upcoming market for both AR and VR, including impressive entries from Google, Sony Interactive Entertainment (formerly Sony Computer Entertainment) and the HTC/Valve collaborative effort: the HTC Vive. In 2015 however, Microsoft announced their foray into HMD technology with the HoloLens.
Clearly demonstrating the distance between VR and AR as consumer technologies, the HoloLens began shipping to developers in the same month the Oculus Rift began arriving with end users. Microsoft’s HMD arguably acts as the first point at which the two technologies could converge. What once started as a display to deliver experiences that the human eye could not conceive on its own became segregated by the gap between the ability to deliver on consumer expectations; within the HoloLens, there is the opportunity to bring AR much closer to the quality of what is now consumer VR. It’s still years away from a retail launch, but if AR has now reached the point of Luckey’s Kickstarter campaign four years ago the progress soon to be made will be rapid and very public. Facebook has already expressed interest in a HMD capable of doing both AR and VR within a single device, and with the HoloLens providing a jumping-off point it’s not hard to believe that the next decade will look very different for modern computing both in industry and within the home.
Marty O’Donnell, a composer most famous for his beloved work on Bungie’s Halo Series, talks to Ben Lang about his new developer start-up Highwire Games – whose first title Golem is coming this year for PlayStation VR.
“My approach to music is almost always the same, I believe music is the direct line to your emotions,” O’Donnell told Road to VR’s Ben Lang whilst at GDC last month. “If there’s a story and an emotional journey that we want players to go on, there’s no better way to enhance that emotional journey than music.”
O’Donnell is those rarest of artists, a composer who’s most famous works are for video games that you may know by name. He’s perhaps most known for his work on the epoch defining first person shooter series Halo, and as part of Bungie he went on to score 4 entries in the series with his final work with the studio culminating with Destiny. That long relationship with Bungie came to an acrimonious end unfortunately, amidst a row over the use of his music (or lack in this case) in a key unveiling of the game. Later, being fired from Bungie, O’Donnell was to go on to win damages against his employer of 13 years, with company stock he claimed were owed to him as a founder being returned also.
Now, O’Donnell is moving on – and how. He’s once again part of a start-up Highwire Games, formed from video gaming veterans from developers such as 343 Industries (Halo 4), Sucker Punch (inFamous), and of course Bungie. Their motivation to form? To create “new experiences and reaching new audiences”. So how are they going about that?
The answer is a new virtual reality title called Golem, a beautiful adventure title which has you stepping into the mind of a young girl, capable of controlling giants. “I’m always looking for who are the characters, what is the world, what are the feelings we want to evoke,” O’Donnell says, “I don’t think it’s any different for VR than for any other story based game.”
The first real question of course is: Why is a veteran of traditional video games part of a new company throwing themselves at the as yet unproven platform that is VR? “We don’t do things for good business reasons,” O’Donnell replies, “I had a company that did film and television scores for years, and there was this little company that was doing these cool little games called Bungie, and eventually that turned into Halo and then turned into Xbox launch title, and I enjoyed taking the risk on that – because I like new technology I like doing new things and I sort of like doing risky things.”
That risky venture has now been in development for about a year with a team of around 10 people, a size that the company founders are more than happy with at this stage. “Frankly, we’ve all been in big, big studios before and kinda like the idea of not growing even close to that big.”
VR audio of course is a developing art, and something that many (including us) believe is crucial to a truly immersive VR experience. “The sound design side of things is really interesting because with VR, we have the technology to know where the player’s ears are,” O’Donell says, “Which means we can put sounds in very specific location for your ears and it really brings the world to life.” When asked whether he’s having to learn new tricks for sound design in VR, O’Donnell responds with an interesting tidbit. “We had HRTF [Head Related Transfer Function] on the Xbox 1″ , he says, “but it didn’t really necessarily have a place because for one not everyone would be using headphones, you also had Dolby Surround sound, that came out of the speakers which I love.” O’Donnell continues “HRTF technology has really come of age, has a real reason for being.”
As well as the video game itself, Marty is working on an audio-only prequel to Golem called Echoes of the First Dreamer, “It’s a standalone, listening experience – an album made of music that’s going to tell you the story, the back story and the magic and the mystery and the world of Golem. You’ll be able to get the album and you’ll be able to listen to the music and you’ll be ready to play our game.” Echoes of the First Dreamer was part funded by a Kickstarter campaign that just concluded successfully, with the project raising over $55k.
Golem is coming in 2016 for PlayStation VR, no specific release date is known. PlayStation VR is due for release in October this year.
Gear VR, Oculus VR and Samsung’s mobile-based virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD), is getting some very unique experiences this month. While the usual assortment of videogames are still coming in by the week, the Apps and Concepts areas are also getting some interesting additions. Among them is a new ‘immersive art’ experience from Shape Space VR artist Kevin Mack named ShapeSpace VR – Zen Parade, which is planned as the first of a number of releases from the studio.
This allows users to explore computer generated, ‘living’ sculptures in 3D and 360 degrees. “Shape Space VR is inspired by nature, technology, and transcendent visions,” the developer notes on an official website. “The health benefits of meditation and experiencing beauty through art and nature have been well established. Shape Space VR uses spatial presence and the science of perception to engage the imagination, inspire wonder, and enhance wellbeing. It is informed by research in a wide range of fields from neuroscience to artificial life.”
The experience can currently be downloaded for free as a 30 second demo and then the full title can be purchased from within the app itself for $4.99 USD. The full piece lasts for five minutes though a looping options is also available.
For the latest Gear VR releases, check back with VRFocus.
There are a handful of must-attend conference events we participate with each year. CES, Game Developers Conference, SVVR, Immersed (of course!), and…FMX. FMX is easily the premier event for networking and learning from market leaders and pioneers working in digital media and technology. This year, The Immersive Technology Alliance has been honored to work with their content development team to help build their program pertaining to virtual reality and immersive tech, though honestly – thanks to their team’s hard work, everybody already kind of knows to make their way down to FMX each year. It’s just the place to be!
Insomniac Games today revealed Feral Rights, a single-player VR adventure-brawler set on a mystical island that promises to let you explore your wild side.
Coming exclusive to the Oculus Store in fall 2016, Feral Rights gives you control of an orphan on a mission: to return to your home village and avenge the brutal murder of your father, the tribe’s once beloved chieftain. Exploring your way through ruined temples deep in the jungle, you learn to transform into a feral beast, your special ability that you use to fight enemies and wreak general havoc.
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Feral Rights uses the Xbox gamepad, and features a combo-based combat system, plenty of gear, and customizable characters (male or female). While Insomniac doesn’t explicity mention it, the game appears to be third-person.
Adding to Insomniac’s soon-to-release Edge of Nowhere, a Lovcraftian horror due to hit the Oculus Store June 6th, comes the magical 1v1 online multiplayer The Unspoken, an Oculus Touch exclusive announced today that puts magical fireballs and shields in your hands (Holiday 2016). As with all of Insomniac’s games so far, Oculus Studios is listed as publisher.
It’s often said that modern virtual reality (VR) has to be experienced to be fully understood. It now seems that Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) feel the same way, as the head-mounted display (HMD) manufacturer intends on offering 500,000 demo stations to retail partners across North America.
SIE Vice President of Marketing, John Koller, presented at a Gamestop investors meeting last week, stating that “Trial drives the conversion to purchase… We’ll have a fantastic technology, but you need to get your hands on it.”
GameStop will be a “key launch partner” for SIE. According to Fortune, the retailer will have a “significant” amount of stores with “dedicated PlayStation VR demo stations” beginning June 2016.
Opportunities to experience VR at retail outlets are growing, with Best Buy and Verizon having partnered with Samsung for the Gear VR and the HTC Vive already appearing at Microsoft Stores and Gamestop throughout the US, and at Harrods in London, UK. Oculus VR has not yet announced any similar plans for the Oculus Rift.
The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are available to consumers now, but suffer from a long tail in as-yet-unfulfilled orders. The PlayStation VR is set to launch in October 2016, and VRFocus will keep you updated with all the latest details on all three HMDs.
Vendre un casque de réalité virtuelle à 400€ en plus d’une console à un prix équivalent, les équipes marketing de Sony se creusent la tête. Selon le vice-président en charge du marketing chez Sony Interactive Entertainement, John Koller, le PlayStation VR dispose d’une technologie qui doit « être vécue pour être crue ». Voilà pourquoi dès le mois
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