Tag: vr

Discovery Channel Plays With Sharks In Virtual Reality Shorts

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Discovery Channel is dipping its toes into the uncharted water of virtual reality and 360-degree spherical video as it announced the launch of its virtual-reality platform, Discovery VR on Friday. The cable channel will kick things off with a series of short-form VR videos that invite viewers to swim with sharks as part of its hit show Mythbusters. Other nature-focused VR shorts are also reportedly in development.

What Brands Should Do
Virtual reality holds great potential as an immersive media platform for brands to fully engage their audience with innovative, branded experiences. The lack of quality content has been hindering VR from mainstream consumer adoption. In recent months, however, a slew of media owners and brands have started creating original VR content, including Facebook, BBC, Birchbox, and major Hollywood studios.Therefore, it is important for brands seeking to immersively engage with its audience to create branded VR content sooner than later.

Source: AdWeek

Facebook Debuts New VR Short For Oculus Rift

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Facebook unveiled the first original VR experience produced for Oculus Rift, its first consumer-facing virtual reality headset. Henry, a 10-minute-long animation short created by a former Pixar alum, is among several original narratives that will be made available on Oculus Rift when it launches in early 2016. Similarly, Samsung announced earlier this month that it has teamed up with Skybound Entertainment, to produce a VR horror series exclusively for its Gear VR headsets.

What Brands Should Do
As more and more media owners and brands start producing original content for the VR platform, it is important for brands seeking to immersively engage with its audience to start creating branded VR content now to stay ahead of the curve. For instance, subscription-based beauty e-retailer Birchbox is adding Google Cardboard in their monthly offers to treat its customers to some branded VR experiences. Besides, brands can also team up with media owners and content creators to help produce their own VR content.

 

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Samsung Gear VR Headsets Soon To Get Original Series

Posted on by Lab Team

Samsung has teamed up with Skybound Entertainment, the studio behind hit TV series The Walking Dead, to produce a new virtual reality series titled “Gone,” exclusively for Samsung Gear VR headsets. Virtual reality, along with other immersive media platforms such as augmented reality and spherical videos, has enjoyed a lot of buzz in recent years but suffers from a chicken-and-egg problem with content and users buying the hardware. By teaming up with a Hollywood studio, Samsung is clearly hoping to follow the footsteps of Facebook’s Oculus VR and leverage the Hollywood’s production expertise into creating appealing content in order to attract users which will in turn attract more content creators.

Source:VentureBeat

Microsoft Is Bringing Cutting-Edge Tech Into Gaming

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Engadget

Gaming is growing increasingly immersive as integrations with cutting-edge technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) deepens. In fact, at the E3 event currently underway, Microsoft just announced a new version of Minecraft built specifically for its HoloLens headset that was demonstrated at E3 yesterday. The company has also teamed up with Oculus for Xbox One game streaming and Valve for VR on Windows 10.

These two announcements may have Sony on high alert, as the competitive company does not offer the compatibility that Microsoft now does. ESPN magazine is at the forefront of the rise of competitive gaming, releasing the first ever issue on e-sports, calling the meteoric rise of professional gaming in recent years “the birth of a new sport”. As eSports continues to grow and gain legitimacy, we expect more emerging technologies to be integrated.

 

 

Turning Point For VR Gaming: Xbox Games Coming To Oculus Rift

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: TechCrunch

At a special press event this Thursday, Facebook-owned VR headset maker Oculus announced a new partnership with Microsoft, which will soon allow players to stream Xbox One games to the Rift and play them using a special Xbox One controller. Oculus is expected to ship its first consumer-facing model early next year, which the VR-compatible controller will ship with.

As VR and AR technologies continue to mature, increasingly ready for the mainstream consumer market, this partnership between Microsoft and Facebook makes perfect sense. By adding support for Oculus, Xbox gains a strong new selling point, while Facebook find a great launch partner for Oculus, easing VR headsets into mainstream market through video gaming.

Google “Jumps” Deeper Into Virtual Reality

Posted on by Lab Team

Google has announced a new version of its smartphone-powered virtual reality viewer Cardboard, adding support for iOS devices as well as phones with bigger screens. The latest Cardboard design will fit larger phones, up to 6 inches, and it’s gotten rid of the magnet controller, replacing it with a cardboard input button that will work with every phone. It is also much easier to assemble. In addition, an accompanying Cardboard virtual reality app for iOS will also be made available soon to broaden Cardboard’s accessibility.

Moreover, Google is also determined to push VR technology into the mainstream with a new open-sourced “Jump” VR platform that aims to facilitate and assist users in creating VR content. It also teamed up with action camera maker GoPro to develop a crazy-looking 16-camera rig for easier 360-video shooting.’

With other more polished VR headsets, such as Facebook’s Oculus and Samsung Gear, readying for consumer market, Google seems to be more focused on VR content rather than the hardware, which is a smart strategy for Google to ensure its place in the nascent VR market. Altogether, these new offerings will make producing live action VR content much cheaper and the confirmation that YouTube will stream spherical video will make its jump to the mass market happen sooner than later.

Samsung Gear VR Jumps Into Consumer Market

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: TechCrunch

Right on the heels of Oculus VR’s big announcement for a consumer-facing release last Wednesday, Samsung made its Gear VR Innovator Edition for Galaxy S6 available for sale for just $200. It is worth noting that this Innovation Edition is not a standalone consumer-ready headset, as it requires a Galaxy S6 or S6 Edge in order to work. Samsung has yet to announce the specific launch date for its official Gear VR; nevertheless, this move shows the Korean company’s determination to acquire the early adaptors in the VR market.

We here at the Lab are always looking out for new developments in the VR space, and currently we have two VR headsets—an Oculus Rift and a Samsung Gear VR—ready for demo in the Lab. Virtual reality is something that has to be experienced to be understood. So come by the Lab and get a VR demo to see just how engaging it can be, and understand why consumers would be excited by this technology.

Get Ready For Consumer VR: Oculus Headset To Ship In Early 2016

Posted on by Lab Team

After months of speculations, Facebook-owned VR company Oculus finally confirmed the release date of the first commercial model of its virtual reality headset. “Extremely excited to announce that the Oculus Rift will be shipping Q1 2016! We can’t wait to get it in your hands,” tweeted Nate Mitchell, vice president of product at Oculus VR, earlier today.

Although no further details on pricing or content partners have been made available as of yet, the announcement mentions that the first commercial models will be focused on gaming and entertainment with more use cases to come later, heralding a boost in consumer-facing VR technologies soon beyond just at-event experience and activations. We expect VR to be a niche market in 2016 in the same way that smartphones were a niche market in 2007, therefore it’d be wise for brands to prepare a VR strategy to stay ahead of the curve.

We here at the Lab are always looking out for new developments in the VR space, and currently we have two VR headsets—an Oculus Rift and a Samsung Gear—ready for demo in the Lab. Our staff got to demo the new Crescent Bay prototype at CES this year and can help explain the differences between what developers have their hands on now and what will be released in less than a year.

Virtual reality is something that has to be experienced to be understood. So come by the Lab and get a VR demo to see just how engaging it can be, and understand why consumers would be excited by this technology.

 

The Next Cool Bar Game May Be Powered By Virtual Reality

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: AdWeek

Several alcohol brands such as Jim Beam, Dos Equis, and Fire Eater are all trying out virtual reality gears to win over millennial bar-goers at the crucial moments of drink purchasing. By offering at-the-bar VR gaming experiences powered by the likes of Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear, these brands look to capture the attention of patrons in a noisy, distracting environment and turn that engagement into brand awareness, or better yet, sales on the spot.

Top Five Takeaways From Facebook’s F8 Conference 2015

Posted on by Lab Team

With more than 30 million apps and sites currently on Facebook’s platform, Facebook is much more than just a social network. At their big F8 Developer Conference today, Facebook made some major announcements that uncovered their detailed plan for building out its platforms, as well as helping developers and publishers alike connect with users and monetize their content.

Messenger App To Become A Platform And Disrupt Ecommerce

As we reported earlier this week, Facebook is expanding its Messenger app into a full-fledged media platform by allowing integration with third-party apps and content. More importantly, it is also looking to disrupt ecommerce with a new mobile shopping experience. Equipped with real-time shipping notifications and enhanced receipts, the new Messenger Platform promises to connect shoppers to businesses by integrating all disconnected emails generated through online shopping into one cohesive chat thread for easier access and tracking.

New Parse SDK To Connect The Internet of Things 

Parse, a mobile development platform that Facebook acquired 2 years ago, is coming out with a new SDK that will make it easier for developers to create apps to connect a variety of connected devices. One demo featured a garage door opener build on Parse’s new platform. This puts Facebook directly in competition with Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Nest Platform, as well as a handful of other IoT platforms.

Mining Insights From App-Generated Data

Mobile apps generate tons of untapped data all day, and Facebook is looking to make better use of them with a new Facebook Analytics for Apps. Essentially a “Google Analytics” for mobile apps, it will help developers and content owners alike gain valuable insights into engagement or conversion rates of Facebook-powered apps.

Bringing New Video Experiences Into Social

Besides a new video plug-in tool that allows easy embedding of Facebook videos on other sites, Facebook is also looking to integrate its new Spherical Videos, which let viewers move around in a 360-degree view, right into the News Feed, laying the groundwork for virtual reality video in your social stream.

New Ways Of Monetization Glue The Platform Together 

To help publishers better monetize their content, Facebook unveiled an upgrade of its video ad platform Live Rail that will add support for mobile display ads—especially native ads, Facebook’s Audience Network—while also improving content targeting using Facebook’s anonymized data. Moreover, the previously mentioned deep integration of content and apps on Facebook Platform will undoubtedly bring in ample opportunities for monetization.