Mirror GearVR with ScreenBeam Mini 2

One of my Christmas Gift has been a ScreenBeam Mini 2. What is that? Well, it is a little device that lets you stream movies from laptops or smartphones to and HDMI screen through Wi-fi. If you’re thinking “Woah, it is like a Chromecast!” well, yes, it definitely is. And if you’re thinking “Woah, so I can use it to mirror GearVR content to an external monitor!“… well, yes, you’re right!

This is another piece of hardware that you can use to stream GearVR / Cardboard content to an external monitor so that people can see what the user is seeing in virtual reality. If you missed my article about other possible methods… what are you waiting for? Follow this link and read it!

ScreenBeam Mini2 is a little device by ActionTec that lets you stream content from any device to an external HDMI screen. Main advantage over Chromecast is that it is not an Android-dedicated piece of hardware. It works also with Windows ecosystem (even Windows Phone!).

VRideo shuts down

While I was preparing my next article, a great sad news arrived to me: VRideo shuts down. With a long, sad and warm message on their blog, they closed their platform yesterday. They were one of the most famous VR video apps (they had 700.000+ installations), they were compatible with lots of headsets (I remember VRideo being one of the first non-gaming app for GearVR), they raised a huge investment (2 million dollars!), they were super-cool… nonetheless, they’re closing.

How to mirror Gear VR or Cardboard to PC

Tomorrow we will be at the WTT to make a talk about the differences between AR/VR/MR and on how to use our ImmotionRoom system. We’ll take with us a laptop and a GearVR and so we’ll need a technique to stream Gear VR content to my laptop or to an external screen (or a projector) to make people see what my buddy Gianni will see inside the virtual world (otherwise, from the audience standpoint, he would just look like an idiot waving hands and feet like a zombie). But… how to make it? How to let people see what you’re seeing in your mobile virtual reality headset?

How to stream virtual reality to Youtube

As you already know, we of Immotionar re organizing a small event here in Turin about VR & AR, called Disruptive Technologies Conference. Since we’re sold out, we’re planning to create a live stream of the event, to show our fantastic talks to people that can’t attend it. This means that we’ve also to stream our virtual reality demo game, with its audio and video on the same PC where we stream the seminar slides and the speaker talking… but, how to stream all this correctly?

Our new futuristic demo game for ImmotionRoom system… look at that explosive Tron candies!

DeoVR review

Some days ago I found on reddit a post about a new video player for virtual reality: DeoVR. I got curious about this new product, since I couldn’t understand the need of having a new video player for VR where products like Whirligig already exist. So I decided to try it.

DeoVR has a nice website but it’s a product so new that it’s still hard to find it using Google (ah, thanks reddit for providing me the link). The name should be something that reminds of Matrix Neo, but to me reminds only of deodorants… so, mission failed 😀 😀 :D. It will be cross-device, but at the moment the only supported headset is Oculus Rift (and Vive in some days). If you want to download it, the website will provide you a dirty zip file with an executable (really? C’mon guys, provide us an installer at least… you can use Wix and make it feel really cool and professional, even if the only thing that it does is copying some files ;)…. we all do like this!)

What is VRidge and how to use it

Today I tried VRidge. VRidge is a cool software that lets you use your Cardboard to play virtual reality PC games for Oculus and Vive. The premises were just too awesome that I had to try it, so I spent some time trying to figure out how it works. VRidge just installs DLLs, drivers and stuff, so that when you launch your PC virtual reality game, it thinks that the required headset is attached. Instead, the service just streams all sensors data (gyroscopes and stuff) from the phone to the PC game and all visuals data (the images to show to the user) from the PC game to the phone screen.

Twitch: first impressions

Some days ago Max and me had the crazy idea to publish our full-body virtual reality game experiments on Twitch. The idea turned out to be great, since now we’re on first, second and third position if you search for “Oculus” on twitch! (wow, a whole podium!) If you lost our last broadcast, well, you can still found it here or in the highlights here.

I know since a lot about Twitch, but I never streamed to it and never had even a look to it. So, today I wanted to try this famous website, to have my own opinion and be able to write it to you.