Oculus, which makes virtual reality headsets Rift and Gear VR, will allocate $50 million to directly fund creators of non-gaming VR content, Jason Rubin, the company’s vice president of content, said in a blog post.

Rubin added that Oculus is “still absolutely committed to growing the VR film and creative content ecosystem.”

Facebook paid $3 billion to acquire Oculus and retain its employees in 2014. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said he believed the medium that offers a 360-degree panoramic view using headsets “will become a part of daily life for billions of people.”

Oculus tapped talent from both Oscar-winning animation company Pixar and the video gaming world to head up Story Studio, which it launched in January 2015 at the Sundance Film Festival.

Facebook’s VR ambitions have been threatened somewhat by a lawsuit from video game publisher ZeniMax Media Inc accusing Facebook and Oculus of infringing ZeniMax’s copyrighted software code.

A jury found in ZeniMax’s favor in February, awarding it $500 million. Oculus has asked for a new trial.

Vive, a unit of HTC Corp, and Sony Corp are also racing to bring virtual reality products to a mass audience.

Oculus debuted its first short film called “Lost” at Sundance two years ago, a story of an animated mechanical creature in a forest.

Last year, Story Studio won an Emmy for original interactive program for its short VR film “Henry,” and at Sundance this year, it premiered “Dear Angelica,” an illustrated film of a mother and daughter.

But internally, Oculus has undergone some changes in its management in the past year.

Brendan Iribe stepped down as CEO in December, saying he was going to head up the PC division of the VR company. In March, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who created the prototype Oculus headset, parted ways with Facebook.—Reuters

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He stands in the railway car that delivered him and his family to the camp. He walks to the gas chamber and the showers. Some rooms he can’t bear to go in. He shares his recollections and tries to remember what he can of his family. All he can really visualize of his sister is the fleeting image of her golden braid of her hair.

Walking with Gutter in Majdanek is an undeniably powerful way to make the Holocaust tangible, and to see it through a survivor’s eyes. Now, being Gutter’s companion as he revisits his painful past is an experience anyone can have just by putting on a headset.

The virtual reality piece “The Last Goodbye,” made from 3-D video and thousands of photographs at Majdanek, is being billed as the first Holocaust survivor testimony in room-scale VR. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, where the medium’s growing ambitions have been on display over the past week.

What “The Last Goodbye” and other works show is that virtual reality, while still very much in its early days, has a potent ability to foster empathy. In transporting you to an intimate space with someone, it gives that old expression, “walk in my shoes,” a new, high-tech, physical dimension.

That’s literally the concept behind Katheryn Bigelow and Imraan Ismail’s “The Protectors: Walk in the Ranger’s Shoes,” an 8-minute, 360-degree visit with the Garamba National Park rangers. They defend the Democratic Republic of the Congo park from waves of poachers.

Ismail, whose earlier, award-winning VR experience, “The Displaced,” followed three child refugees, says of virtual reality: “It enables empathy because it enables a kind of presence in someone else’s space. And breaking through apathy.”

“For me, it’s exactly that. It’s empathy,” says Bigelow. “Here are these individuals who put their lives on the line in order to thwart the problem. Sometimes they pay the ultimate price. In order to be able to help, you have to be very well informed.”

Big names filmmakers and actors are increasingly experimenting in VR, a fast-growing new media landscape that the investment bank Citi last fall forecast will be a trillion-dollar industry by the year 2035. Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”) and Justin Lin (“Fast & Furious”) have tried their hand in it, and in May, “Birdman” director Alejandro Inarritu will premiere a virtual reality project at the Cannes Film Festival. He has called it an effort to “allow the visitor to go through a direct experience walking in the immigrants’ feet, under their skin, and into their hearts.”

Jennifer Brea turned to VR for an accompanying experience to her Sundance entry film, “Unrest,” about her battle with chronic fatigue syndrome. In the VR experience, the viewer feels what it’s like to be bedridden in her room. Brea calls virtual reality “an engine of empathy.”

A sense of growth was palpable at Tribeca, which increased the size of its VR arcade this year. Loren Hammonds, a film and experiential programmer at Tribeca, sees a rapidly progressing medium where artists are continually reexamining their notions of how to orient the viewer.

“The rules are being broken,” says Hammonds. “There are constantly these sets of rules that keep being presented to creators: you can’t move the camera or you can’t cut. And the minute someone breaks it and it works, well, no more rule.”

Creators, many eyeing the neighboring booths in the Tribeca arcade, acknowledge there’s a competitive atmosphere in VR that can feel like a land rush. Technology is one race, and all agree virtual reality is going to get exponentially smoother and crisper. “The Last Goodbye” has been “future-proofed,” meaning that more detailed photography and video has been set aside for when the tech catches up, says Patrick Milling Smith, chief executive of VR production company Here Be Dragons.

But storytelling is a race of its own in VR, a medium many call a combination of cinema and gaming. Should the viewer have agency to move and shape their experience? If so, to what degree? How do you guide them?

For inspiration, Baobab Studios co-founder Eric Darnell, an animation veteran who co-directed the “Madagascar” films, has studied how magicians manipulate the eyes of their audiences. Baobab’s first VR work, “Invasion!” supplied the viewer a partner — a little white bunny — for an alien arrival.

“Now everyone is doing that,” says Maureen Fan, chief executive of Baobab. “But a lot of people debated us on that. We felt that as a user, why are you there if you’re a fly (on the wall) verses if you’re a bunny? If you have a role to play, how much more do you feel for that character and feel immersed in that world?”

At Tribeca, Baobab premiered the first chapter of an ambitious multi-part series, “Rainbow Crow,” in which John Legend voices a mythical, sonorous bird forever changed by a cosmic adventure. “It’s about love. It’s about inclusion. It’s about community,” says Legend.

The creators of the choose-your-own-adventure, live-action “Broken Night” wanted to take go further. In it, Emily Mortimer plays a woman with a hazy memory recounting a violent encounter with an intruder in her home. At various points in the story, viewers are given a choice to follow different paths in the story, which they select by looking to one side of the action or the other.

“The problem with live-action VR today is it’s not interactive,” says co-director Tal Zubalsky. “Kind of the whole promise of VR is to get you to a different place. But if you get there only as an observer and not as a participant, then you’re not really there.”—AP

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Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson says riders of Drop of Doom VR will plunge 41 stories at speeds of up to 90 mph (145 kph) while battling mutant spiders.

They’ll have a 360-degree virtual reality view as baby spiders virtually crawl over their bodies.

The ride is scheduled to debut on May 5.—AP

Image: Alamy

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The promise of augmented and virtual reality was a big focus of Facebook’s annual conference for developers on Tuesday. CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the gathering of programmers and other tech folks by talking about augmented reality tools he envisions on Facebook.

Augmented reality involves the overlay of computer-generated images into real-world surroundings. Zuckerberg said new phone-based applications might let you create a three-dimensional scene from a single two-dimensional photo or splatter the walls of your house with colorful digital art. (You’d see the digital additions by looking “through” your phone at the augmented physical world.)

MAKING CHORES MORE INTERESTING

Facebook executives stressed that the technology is still in its early stages, and that the “journey to the future of augmented reality is just 1 percent finished,” as Deb Liu, vice president of platform and marketplaces, put it.

Zuckerberg envisions the marriage of augmented reality and Facebook’s camera feature enabling people to make even mundane chores, like doing the dishes, look entertaining with digital effects. Of course, it could also result in people staring into their smartphones even more intently as they marvel at an alternate reality instead of their actual surroundings.

“Over time, I think this is going to be a really important technology that changes how we use our phones,” Zuckerberg predicted.

Facebook also launched a virtual world, called Facebook Spaces, designed to let users of its Oculus Rift VR headset hang out with avatar versions of their friends in a virtual world. It’s the first time the company has connected the Rift to its social network in a meaningful way, though it’s a development Zuckerberg hinted at when the company bought Oculus back in 2014 for $2 billion.

COMING YOUR WAY … EVENTUALLY

While the new tools and features are impressive, analyst Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research cautioned that that “most of them won’t be in users’ hands anytime soon.”

That’s especially true for the Spaces app, since relatively few of Facebook’s 1.9 billion members are using Oculus’s VR headset, which sells for about $500 and requires an expensive computer to make it work.

But Facebook could still have the edge on rivals such as Snapchat, which also launched some augmented reality features on Tuesday, likely to coincide with Facebook’s news. “Facebook has the resources to move fast in this area and the audience to spread those features much more widely than Snapchat,” Dawson wrote in a brief research note.

Snap representatives did not immediately respond to an email for comment on Tuesday afternoon.

Facebook’s focus on smartphones over high-tech glasses or headsets makes sense given how familiar they are, said Gartner analyst Brian Blau. “People already have cameras and are used to having fun and being creative with them,” he said. “This will give people a chance to experience augmented reality in a way that isn’t so scary or off-putting.”

Until the past year or so, it seemed like it would be at least another decade before augmented reality would have a chance to become a widely used technology, said Ficus Kirkpatrick, Facebook’s director of engineering. But advances in image and object recognition, along with the ubiquity of smartphone cameras, “has put us on the course to bring augmented reality,” Kirkpatrick said in an interview.

CHATTING WITH COMPANIES

Facebook also announced a bevy of updates to Messenger, its increasingly independent messaging app.

Messenger head David Marcus claims the app has become the de facto “white pages” of messaging, since people can find and chat with friends without knowing their phone number. Now, Messenger wants to do the same for businesses, creating a “yellow pages” of sorts that let companies communicate with their customers.

Messenger will also let people chat with outside businesses as a group. That would, for instance, allow groups of friends to share Spotify playlists or to make a restaurant reservation through OpenTable that keeps everyone on the same page. The idea is simplify what might otherwise require a flurry of texts and sharing of links.

CLEVELAND MURDER

Zuckerberg also briefly addressed a tragedy that took place Monday, when a man posted video of a murder on Facebook. That raised questions about Facebook’s ability to monitor gruesome material on its site.

The Facebook founder said his company has “a lot of work” to do on this front.—AP

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While mainstream Western mobile wallets primarily focus on payments, pioneer mobile wallets in China have taken aggressive steps and become powerful customer engagement tools with innovative features such as WeChat’s social gifting and Alipay’s augmented reality (AR) coupons and red packets.

“Emerging mobile wallets will develop features like Alipay and WeChat. We expect mobile wallet innovations to happen more quickly in emerging markets with less legacy and competition. Paytm in India is a good example,” senior analyst Xiaofeng Wang said in a blog post.

The successful marketing use cases developed on Alipay and WeChat Wallet will inspire third-party players like Apple and PayPal to morph their mobile wallets into more powerful customer engagement platforms, Wang added.

The marketers need to smartly leverage the mobile ecosystem to borrow mobile moments from the popular apps that their customers already use every day, the analyst suggested.

IANS

Picture source: Alamy Image

Picture used for illustrative purposes alone

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The app also provides customer reviews of the available companies, eateries to help you make informed choices from product quality to timeliness of service.

The app has pay by card, net-banking or cash on delivery services.

IANS

Picture source: AFP

Picture used for illustrative purposes alone

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Only a section remains of the vast landscaped palace which once stood in the middle of the ancient city, its walls decorated with gold-leaf, ivory and gemstones, among gardens boasting vineyards, pastures, woods and an artificial lake.

Treasures looted in Eastern cities were displayed in the complex of porticoes and rooms built by Nero after the great fire of Rome in 64 A.D. had razed the aristocratic dwellings in the area.

On his death, Nero’s successors did not take long to scrap the palace, building the Colosseum for gladiator battles on his ornamental lake in 70 AD, filling the Golden House with earth, and erecting the Baths of Trajan on top in 109 AD.

The complex was lost for centuries, before being rediscovered in the Renaissance by accident and becoming a must-see for artists from Raphael to Michelangelo, who were lowered into one of the rooms by a window in the ceiling to study the frescoes by candlelight.

Strapping on virtual reality headsets, visitors can now see that room as it was when it was filled near to the roof with earth and as it would have looked in Nero’s time, its marble walls gleaming in the sunlight.

“It’s called the Domus Aurea (Golden House) not only for the gold leaf in the frescoes but because it was designed so that the rays of the sun would bounce off the marble and waterfalls to glimmer like jewels,” architect Gabriella Strano said Wednesday.

The viewer steps, virtually, past the columns and into the garden, crossing lavender beds and the lawn to look out across Rome.

Visitors, who must book in advance to join groups of up to 25 people, can also look behind and above them with the 360 degree technology viewers.

“There were no kitchens here, or bathrooms or heating. The rooms were all open onto the gardens or the view of the lake. It was probably a place to take walks and relax,” said architect Elisabetta Segala.

The complex officially opened to tourists in 1999, but was forced to close again when water damage lead to partial roof collapses.

The fault lay with the public gardens on top of the buried palace, and in 2010 it was decided the area would have to be redesigned.

Not only is the garden soil four-metres thick in parts and porous — weighing 30 percent more in heavy rains — but oaks and pines have stretched roots down over 25 metres to feed on the mineral salts in the mortar between the ancient bricks below, weakening the structure.

“We need to treat the frescoes to stop them going green, but as even the smallest intervention removes a layer of the original work we are first resolving the problem with the gardens before doing a final restoration,” Strano said.

Part of the new tour shows visitors how architects and archaeologists plan to save the complex — if funds can be found. The government has so far stumped up 13 million euros ($14 million) of the 31 million needed to shore up the walls and transform the land above.

Fifty trees will be uprooted, with smaller potted fruit and olive trees put in their place. The flower beds, which will echo the layout of the palace and baths below, will feature plants grown in Roman times, from rosemary to irises.

The beds will be shallow and placed over a system of thermal insulation and drainage which will protect the frescoed rooms below by maintaining the climate underground at exactly 16 degrees Centigrade and the 90 percent humidity to which it has long been acclimatised.

Italy has appealed for private sponsors to help with the restoration work.—AFP

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Some phobias, for instance, can be effectively treated by gradually exposing a patient to his or her worst fear, be it spiders, plane travel or small, enclosed spaces.

TeleSoftas, a Lithuanian firm that develops mobile apps, believes this exposure therapy can easily be achieved from the safety of a health professional’s consulting room using the headsets.

“With virtual reality you can create audiovisual therapies in a safe environment for phobics,” its CEO Algirdas Stonys told AFP at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the phone industry’s largest annual trade fair.

So for instance, someone who is scared of speaking in public would find himself in front of a room full of people, virtually.

TeleSoftas has just received EU funding to finance the development of mental health apps for virtual reality headsets, in collaboration with academics.

Psious, a Spanish start-up, is also in a similar field.

Exposure therapies are designed to encourage the individual to enter feared situations, either in the real world or through imagined exercises.

“But we thought that in this digital age, there had to be something more,” said CEO Xavier Palomer Ripoll.

Created three years ago because one of its founders was scared of flying, the firm develops apps for psychotherapists who can download them and use them on virtual reality headsets.

The doctor then choses an adequate environment.

For instance, once kitted out with the headset, a person with vertigo will find him- or herself in a lift going up or down a skyscraper.

Using a computer, the psychotherapist can propel the lift higher and higher, or make the floor transparent to increase the difficulty of the exercise.

They can also gauge how well the patient is doing by seeing for example if they are able to look down.

Psious raised close to a million euros ($1.1 million) in 2015, and provides the technology to some 600 doctors, mostly in Spain.

In parallel, it is currently going through nine clinical trials with universities to get long-term efficacy data.

TeleSoftas, meanwhile, hopes to eventually be able to offer virtual environments to treat obsessive-compulsive disorders, post-traumatic syndromes, alcoholism or smoking.

Several American start-ups are working on these kinds of applications as well.—AFP

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Rift headsets bundled with Touch controllers for letting people reach into faux worlds began selling for $598 as Oculus lopped $200 off the price of buying the VR hardware that hit the market last year.

The price of the Rift alone was dropped to $499 and Touch controllers to $99.

Oculus broke the news at an annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco where scores of titles were being shown off for play using Rift, or competing hardware such as HTC Vive or Sony PlayStation VR headsets.

“Our mission at Oculus is to drive VR into as many people’s homes as we can,” Oculus vice president Jason Rubin told AFP.

“We believe this is a massive step; and the people coming in at the lower price have a ton of software they can use.”

The prices of computers needed to power Rift VR experiences has also come down hundreds of dollars in the past year in an overall cost reduction that he hoped would entice a new wave of customers to follow the “early adopters.”

Rubin referred to the new Rift and Touch prices as “aggressive,” but declined to discuss how much money Oculus was making on each sale other than to say that the price is “sustainable.”

The more VR gear that sells, the more developers of games or other experiences will be motivated to create software for the technology in what Rubin called a budding “virtuous cycle” where sales of hardware are fueled in return.

“We look at is as an opportunity; it’s a new frontier,” Gunfire Games development director Ben Gabbard told AFP during a demonstration of its latest VR title, science fiction shooter game “From Other Suns.”

“Being at the forefront of a special and interesting medium to tell stories and make games has been very awesome for us, even though it hasn’t taken off to the stratosphere.”

While games standout when it comes to using VR, Oculus believes “ultimately the killer app is social” with people interacting at virtual venues.

Virtual reality sought its stride at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early this year, where despite being a hot topic there was little sign that the technology was racing into mainstream culture.

Show floor space devoted to virtual reality abounded with companies diving into the market with headsets, content, or tools for better creating or delivering immersive experiences.

Vive, PlayStation VR and Rift have been wooing software developers and refining hardware to better entice users.—AFP

Image: www.oculus.com/rift/

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“Dear Angelica “ is a 12-minute illustrated story about memory, movies and grief that premiered at the Festival last Friday. In the film, a girl, voiced by Mae Whitman, lies in bed writing a letter to Angelica (Geena Davis), a famous movie star who we also discover was her mother. We swirl around in her memories of Angelica, shifting between real life and images from movies she’s been in and back again. The viewer spins around taking in all the environs with Angelica, whether she’s in a shootout car chase or drifting into space. More than a few viewers shed some tears into the headset by the end.

It’s the first animated experience created entirely in VR.

Writer and director Saschka Unseld, also the Oculus Story Studio Creative Director, wanted to tell a story about how both family and films help shape you as a person.

Unseld, who’d wanted to do illustrative VR for a long time, had always struggled with the coldness of computer animation.

“It’s really hard to keep the human touch and texture in it,” he said. “If something is directly illustrated, you feel more human touch, you feel more hand, you feel more character.”

It’s why he settled on illustrator Wesley Allsbrook to create the hand painted images. They had a coder develop a custom system so that she could draw directly into the program.

“In VR it’s important to counter that tech coldness with artistry and the human touch,” Unseld said.

“Dear Angelica” is already available for free for those who have Oculus headsets. For everyone else, it’ll be a little more difficult to see, but not impossible.

“It’s important to us to always be in places like Sundance or Tribeca or other place where we can show these things to people who haven’t had interesting VR experiences yet,” Unseld said. “It’s still early times and there’s a lot of preconceptions about what VR is and isn’t.”

“Dear Angelica” proves that VR is not just a cool immersive experience — it’s also art form that’s capable of pulling at your heartstrings.—AP

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