We have all watched the scene in countless films before: our protagonist pulls on “VR goggles” and is transported to a complete world with perfect representation of the character’s body, delivering full immersion. When I saw this as a kid in various movies or tv shows, I immediately knew I wanted that experience. I wanted to enter a world where I can enjoy the exhilaration of flight or engage in a Wild West adventure.

We can see these moments now and know how much Hollywood companies have exaggerated virtual reality gaming or augmented reality capabilities. But for all those that got it wrong, there are those that got it right. So let’s take a look at the most notable of examples both–and I will try to keep to only minor spoilers.

Hollywood VR: What They Got Right

There are older films with VR, but Lawnmower Man may have been the one that people point to as the “VR movie.” Released in 1992, we have a scientist played by Pierce Prosnan using VR and questionable pharmaceuticals to make Jeff Fahey smarter–and eventually into a psychotic, technological god.

Though the early CGI feels dated, it still works through the lens of a game’s specific graphic style. There are early scenes of characters playing games with just headsets, and later VR use in a lab with full haptic suits in rigs that suspend them in air for three-dimensional movement. Yes, there is some exaggeration, but this feels like a glimpse of what VR actually can be like these days and in the near future.

Read the full article at UploadVR.

It is the rarest of thrills for game enthusiasts, the giddiness of unboxing a new console. It brings the promise of previously unseen wonders and the excitement of being part of the “next big thing.”

Both Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X are arriving within days, for those lucky enough to procure a rare preorder. For the rest of us, is it worth the continuous effort to track them down? To put it one another way, what is really new about these new consoles? Today, I will take a look at what PlayStation 5 brings to the living room.

1. Graphical Horsepower

The obvious draw to new game hardware is the most easily seen when you power up the system. It is the raw power that the machine has, the graphics it can push to your television. Mathematically there is a clear progression in GPUs (graphical processing unit), looking at TFLOPs, or trillions of floating point operations per second — a measurement of how much information the processor can handle. The original PS4 was 1.8 TFLOPS, and the PS4 Pro was 4.2 TFLOPS. The PS5 is 10.3 TFLOPS. There have also been upgrades in other technical specifications along the way too, such as CPU, RAM, etc.

What does this all mean in practice? Most obvious is that a game can have a larger, fuller world with more characters, objects, and detail. On a technical level, while PS4 could only do games at typical HD resolutions, PS4 Pro could do them at Ultra HD resolutions, aka 4K. What PS5 brings to the table, besides the 4K, is an increased framerate. Whereas most games run at 30 frames per second, with the extra power, PS5 is more reliable in bringing the smoother 60fps graphics. Everything moves silkier, and gameworlds just seem more present.

Read the full article at Medium.

When details of the Oculus Quest 2 were leaked, VR enthusiasts were ecstatic about one item in particular: the new headset would be more powerful. As the Qualcomm GPU behind the standalone went from the Snapdragon 835 to the Snapdragon XR2.

We now know from benchmarks that the Quest 2 GPU is more than twice as powerful than its predecessor. But what does that really mean for users? Developers have gone that extra mile to tap into that GPU power to improve the graphics of their games.

One of the first breakout titles for the original Quest was Superhot VR, a reimagining of the PC shooter for virtual reality. Many who played this version of the game found it to be more engrossing than the flat-screen version, with the motion controls in three-dimensional space enhancing the time-bending and bullet-dodging gameplay.

But the port from Oculus Rift to Quest was made with some tradeoffs. With the additional power of the Quest 2, developers Superhot Team were able to restore much of what was lost.

Read the full article at UploadVR.

Dubbed the Varjo VR-1, this enterprise headset has launched today to 34 countries, including the U.S. It costs $5,995 for the unit, though a $995 per year license for software and warranty is mandatory in the first year. That also comes with 24-hour support. Clearly, the VR-1 is targeted for commercial use.

But does the VR-1 provide an image quality that has been missing in consumer VR headsets? It actually does.

The main screen of the unit, what Varjo calls the “Context screen,” is the same resolution as the Vive Pro and the upcoming Oculus Quest, 1440×1600 per eye. Overlaid the very center of the main screen is a micro display that is 20X the resolution, 3,000 Pixels Per Inch or 60 Pixels Per Degree. The view in that window, the “Focus Screen,” is astounding. The company calls this combination of screens the Bionic Display.

“If you can see a thing the same way as it would appear in real life, you can trust what you see,” said Urho Konttori, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Varjo. “You can keep your design process virtual. It must reach that pivotal resolution, where you can start doing things differently.”

Read the full article at UploadVR.

“We believe that by chasing for the human-eye resolution as fast as possible, it jump starts everyone so they can work toward the end game of VR and AR,” said Urho Konttori, CEO of Varjo.

Varjo is a startup of 19 employees that is only 10 months old based in Helsinki, Finland. The talent comes from the likes of Microsoft and Nokia. This work they have done comes from their original $2M funding, with a second round of funding being pursued currently.

My experience in that Unity-based living room and other demos, using what Varjo is calling the “20/20” prototype, shows that they are working in the right direction.

They retrofitted an Oculus Rift with an extra layer of lenses inside the unit. An OLED microdisplay projects an image onto a glass plate over the Oculus lenses. That center piece is said to have 70 times the resolution of the Rift’s image.

Read the full article at Upload VR.

The most noteworthy of these was Draw Me Close, which I have already extensively covered. This meditation on childhood featured not only Vive Trackers on the back of your hands, but objects you manipulate such as a door and a window.

As Jordan Tannahill, the playwright behind Draw, told Upload VR, “It was important to me to craft an experience that was tactile, that invited full awareness of one’s own body and the body of another. I wanted to invoke the idea that this childhood memory has come to life so vividly it can be touched and interacted with.”

Trees

One project at Tribeca was simply called Tree, created by Milica Zec and Winslow Porter. You extend your arms out, holding Oculus Touch controllers. You experience the entire lifetime of a tree’s growth, from a tiny seed sprouting out of the ground, to a towering behemoth looking over the land. A vest vibrated at different stages of your growth, and scents of soil, plants, and later smoke, accompanied the piece. There was even fans blowing air when you grew tall.

But another project really brought trees to life. It used Vive Trackers on the back of your hands and was called Treehugger: Wamona, from Marshmallow Laser Feast, a studio based in London. This project had a unique installation, a large foam tree with sections cut out of it where you can insert your hands. Around this tree were four stations, so more than one person can experience the project at a time.

“We love mixed reality. As artists, we have a mission to create experiences that change the way we see habitats and their inhabitants. Sense of touch & the tactile elements in our work are crucial to establishing and maintaining immersion. Discovering when you reach out and feel — or smell — something helps blur the line between the virtual and the real,” said Nell Whitley, the executive producer of Treehugger.

Read the full article at Upload VR.

Draw Me Close is a project from Canadian playwright Jordan Tannahill. Tannahill worked with illustrator Teva Harrison and developer All Seeing Eye, through a partnership with Canada’s National Film Board and the UK’s National Theatre. It is about Jordan’s relationship with his mother, who was diagnosed with stage-four cancer two years ago. It debuted last week at the Tribeca Film Festival. This singular virtual reality experience may be one of the most immersive so far.

“I knew nothing about the form. As I became more familiar with it, several exciting affordances emerged: Its immersive and interactive capabilities. The ability to ‘enter’ an animation and move about within it. The way VR seems to exist within a liminal space between dreaming and waking,” Tannahill told Upload.

Stepping Back Into Childhood

Draw Me Close begins by taking off your shoes. You are stand on a path of outdoor tiles, like for a garden walkway, with plants beside you. You feel the stone beneath your socks. You are standing in a five-foot square room, surrounded by beige curtains. The attendant helps you put on your Vive and a pair of fingerless gloves that place Vive Trackers on the back of your hands. Then you are in an empty space of white, except for a simple outline of your tracked hands.

Black lines begins to draw the outlines of objects, creating a black and white world like a drawing made with a black Sharpie marker. The outside of a surburban home begins to take shape, you standing on the path to the front door. This art is the work of artist Teva Harrison, who has written and drawn about her own experiences with cancer in the book, In-Between Days.

“VR has a lot of possibility, in terms of different ways of communicating straight to the heart of the viewer, in a way that is difficult to without an immersive experience,” said Harrison. “The house is Jordan’s childhood home. He sent me streetview pictures to make sure I lined it up with the specificity of his memories. And that’s where the commonality of human condition is found, the really specific memory.”

Read the full article at Upload VR.

Tracking

At a demo for a prototype Microsoft VR headset at the Game Developers Conference in late February, we reported that the headset’s biggest innovation, the inside-out tracking, worked well — albeit we tested it with a very short cord.

This time we got a little more room to move around and the tracking for the new Acer dev kit remains as robust as it was in our previous demo. With the new demo I had roughly four feet in either direction to walk around. Despite jumping around, laying down on the floor, and quickly stepping sideways, the headset didn’t completely lose tracking. It stuttered a bit when coming up from the floor, just a few inches off the ground, but otherwise performed well. My demo station was only about two feet from a wall and the initial calibration of the room took a few tries, but once that succeeded tracking was solid.

The demo was set inside a building called the “cliffhouse.” As I walked around the building trying out apps the tracking never failed. Inside-out tracking continues to be a promising solution to make VR more convenient.

Read the full article at Upload VR.

Hallelujah is the latest video from Within, an acapella rendition of Leonard Cohen’s famed tune. It is a sacredly soft version, only performed by one man, Bobby Halvorson. But in contrast, it is boldly presented, as the video is a partnership with Lytro, and uses their lightfield camera for VR to capture the singer and the church he later stands in.

“To get to really great VR, you need a whole new set of tools and technology to make the content,” said Jason Rosenthal, the CEO of Lytro. “Hallelujah is the first example of what things might be able to look like when you’re doing true volumetric capture.”

The promise of Lytro’s camera is to not flatly capture the image of a place, but all of the spatial qualities a place. What does that mean? Well, unlike most of the live-action VR videos at Tribeca this year, it isn’t just 360-degree video. Nor is it simple 3D. It is a volume with a full six-degrees of freedom, more like the animated VR shorts, but not generated by artists at a computer. It is our live-action world recorded as data and then all that data processed into a volume.

Read the full article at Upload VR.

Arden’s Wake is the latest animated VR piece rom San Francisco-based Penrose Studios, the same team behind the early piece Rose and I, and then last year’s wonderful and ubiquitous Allumette. At the Tribeca Film Festival’s VR wing, Penrose is debuting Arden’s Wake: Prologue. And while Allumette had the notoriety of being the longest VR piece made, at 16 minutes, this first act of Arden’s Wake shows that Penrose is ready to go longer and further with VR storytelling.

“Our mission is to define the next generation of human storytelling. We have this vision that we can create the media technology company that transforms the way we view entertainment,” said Eugene Chung, director of Arden’s Wake and the founder of Penrose.

Though it is only the first part of a larger work, this Prologue has a three-act structure and the viewer goes through a rollercoaster of emotions. The visuals of Wake are also well made. It comes together to feel like a solid piece of immersive storytelling. And, like any great show, when it ends, it leaves you wanting more. Penrose has succeeded in creating another vibrant world to experience.

Read the full article at Upload VR.

Link, the elfin hero of the Legend of Zelda series, has been rescuing the princess for over 30 years and 17 games. With the latest installment, Breath of the Wild, he ventures to a new place: Nintendo’s next-generation console, the portable Nintendo Switch.

After the tepid sales of Nintendo’s Wii U, released for the holiday 2012 season, the Japanese game giant announced in March 2015 that it was working on new hardware that featured a new concept, codenamed NX. In October, via a teaser trailer, it revealed the Switch.

And last week, at an event in Tokyo, the company showcased the features of the device, games coming this year, and the all-important launch details. The Switch will be released March 3 for $300 and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the flagship game available on day one.

From the very first glimpses of the hardware via that teaser video, it was evident that Nintendo was once more embracing the blue-ocean strategy that has taken the company to uncharted waters far away from its competition in the gaming industry.

“Our competitors are going down their own strategy, Sony and Microsoft, arguably, very similar strategies,” says Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime. “They need to figure out how they are going to compete with each other, and they need to figure out how they are going to compete with us.”

“From a Nintendo perspective, we believe in creating products and experiences that are unique and really can’t be copied by our competition. That’s our mentality. I don’t really care what our competitors do. We need to do what plays best to our strengths, and what we believe is going to motivate the consumer to engage with our products.”

Read the full article at Fast Company.

“In America, the Developed World, we take for granted being able to go to bed at night safely, without the fear of a deadly disease attacking us while we sleep. Making this film really opened my eyes,” Justin Perkinson, writer and director of Under the Net, told Upload VR in an interview.

In a 10th anniversary event, the Nothing But Nets campaign from the UN Foundation showcased the VR documentary Under the Net. The campaign is focused on providing protective nets to the people of Africa, where mosquitoes pass Malaria to people at night. The disease can be lethal to children.

The origin of the charity is not what you would expect. Sports journalist Rick Reilly, who has a long history of writing stories for Sports Illustrated and ESPN, found out about the threat of Malaria to the children of Africa and realized he could make a difference.

“There was a documentary on Malaria. It said that every 30 seconds a child was dying of Malaria. And it said there was such a simple fix: hang a net over them. The mosquitoes only comes out from midnight to four. And if you can get a kid to six or seven years old, they are probably not going to die of Malaria. I was like, ‘That’s all we need? A net? Nothing has to be cured?’ This is a no-brainer charitable act,” said Reilly.

Read the full article at Upload VR.