“When is virtual reality going to take off — or fail?” Whether I’m talking to founders or other investors, most conversations I have regarding virtual or augmented reality eventually turn to this line of questioning.Rather than making something up about where VR is on the hype cycle — which is descriptive, not prescriptive, so don’t assume you can use it as a guide for timing the market — I think it’s helpful to look at the specific hardware products that have been publicly announced and how well they might do — and where their relative successes will push the ecosystem…
After more than two years of heavy public hyping since Facebook’s 2014 acquisition of Oculus for $2 billion, virtual reality is reaching an important turning point. VR has been promoted up and down the street and consumers seem to have grown oversaturated with all the media coverage of expensive tech that’s inaccessible to them, but the platform is preparing for a mini-renaissance.The next couple weeks will be the biggest moments for VR in its consumer history. A lot of crazy hardware will be coming out, new platforms will be further defined and everyone will hopefully get a better picture of where this runaway futurism train is heading…
Source: Virtual reality looks to its adolescence | TechCrunch
“I don’t think the future of VR looks like video games; I don’t think it looks like cinematic VR; I think it looks like stories from our real lives.
It’s the most amazing afternoon you’ve ever had. For one person, it might be what we call a rom-com, for another it might be an action movie. For another, it might be something we don’t have a movie genre preexisting for. It might be just exploring.”
VR Pioneer Chris Milk: Virtual Reality Will Mirror Life Like Nothing Else BeforeChris Milk, founder and CEO of virtual reality company Within (formerly Vrse), has a vision for the future of stories. He was kind enough to take some time at Singularity University Global Summit to sit down and walk me through a wide-ranging conversation touching upon the future of storytelling as a medium, virtual reality as a platform for innovation and the wildly exciting interactions between virtual reality and other exponential technologies…
Source: VR Pioneer Chris Milk: Virtual Reality Will Mirror Life Like Nothing Else Before
Among the hottest trends in technology these days are virtual reality, or VR, and its cousin, augmented reality, or AR. VR devices like the Oculus Rift give wearers the illusion of being in an entirely digital universe, whereas AR gadgets like Microsoft’s HoloLens overlay computer graphics on the wearer’s physical environment.
The latest development in this exciting space is the acceleration of “virtual personal computing,” in which the entire PC experience is based around VR or AR. Instead of interacting with a computer or smartphone via a mouse, keyboard or touch inputs, virtual personal computing calls for doing so with your voice, hand gestures or a digital keyboard you might only see while wearing special goggles…
Source: How Virtual Reality Could Change Computers As You Know Them | TIME
By nearly any measure, Facebook has had a remarkable year. More than 1.65 billion people use the service every month, making it the world’s largest social network by a considerable margin. Its advertising business has grown significantly faster than analyst expectations, powered by sophisticated targeting capabilities that rivals struggle to match. And in April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out an ambitious 10-year vision that places the company at the frontier of computer science, making aggressive moves in bringing artificial intelligence and virtual reality to the mainstream.
Source: Facebook 2026
The office building on Facebook Way is in the unfinished style that honors materials like plywood, concrete, and steel. The I-beams supporting its soaring walls still have the builders’ chalk placement instructions on them. It takes a business making billions of high-margin dollars to make plywood and concrete seem so appealing. The merely ordinary have to put up drywall.
Facebook’s spokeswoman calls its headquarters the largest single room in the world. Maybe. It feels like it, anyway. The space isn’t square, so it doesn’t seem pointedly vast; it’s long and narrow. Heading to meet Mark Zuckerberg, the wizard of this open-plan office, you wind through it like an Ikea, following a painted path…
The future of immersive virtual reality is often depicted as a dystopian view of millions of people spending hours alone each day, with huge gadgets stuck to their face, enraptured by fantastical worlds.
But it’s going to be millions of people spending time together — with friends, family, colleagues, and new acquaintances — experiencing moments together no matter the physical distance between them…
Source: Why Virtual Reality Will Be the Most Social Computing Platform Yet — Medium
IN LATE 2013, Clay Bavor began experimenting with teleportation. He paired an Oculus Rift headset to a robotic arm, upon which he mounted a couple of GoPro cameras. When he moved his head, the thinking went, the cameras would mimic the movement, acting as a second pair of eyes. If it worked, he’d be able to “teleport” himself (or his eyes, at least) a few feet away. He still has a video of the first time he ever got it running: There’s Bavor, tall and thin in a t-shirt and jeans, standing among the contraptions with the Rift on his face. He reaches out his arm, waving his hand in front of the cameras at his side while simultaneously seeing it in front of his face. “Whoaaa,” he says to himself. “This is crazy. This is like the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced.”…
Source: Clay Bavor, Google’s VP of VR, on His Plan to Make Virtual Reality Amazing for Everyone | WIRED
As VR storytellers, we are charged with molding experience itself into story, and none of our storytelling tools have prepared us fully for that. As we stumble our way into this new, mysterious medium, we ask ourselves, “How do we tell a story for the audience when the audience is present within it?”
Being bodily present in the story seeds the need to be active, to “do.” But how does the audience know what to do? And how do we take their needs and perspective into consideration? To even scratch the surface of these questions, we need to better understand the audience’s experience in VR — not just their experience of the technology, but the way that they understand story and their role within it…
Source: The Storyteller’s Guide to the Virtual Reality Audience — Stanford d.school — Medium
ANDRÉ CRAMER 
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