Ashes To Ashes (VR short movie) review

Today I’ve seen a short VR movie: Ashes To Ashes. It is a movie made for VR by Dutch studio Submarine Channel, which has already won a gold prize at Dutch VR Awards. The video is accessible for free inside Jaunt App on lots of VR platforms (Oculus, Vive, etc..) .

The creators define it “a surreal tragicomedy in virtual reality about a dysfunctional family burdened with the bizarre final wish of their deceased grandfather”. Said shortly: a complete WTF in virtual reality 😀

The experience begins with the user immersed into water, like at the bottom of the sea (you’ll understand the sense of it at the end of the movie), with a girl looking at him from above the surface. I liked a lot this first scene because it grabs immediately the attention. It is super-original and makes you curious about the plot of the movie.

The movie begins this way, with a little girl looking at you from above the surface… and the water waves distorting the visual of her face

Google creates an amazing technology to see the face in mixed reality

If you’re a VR enthusiast like me, surely in these two days your Twitter feed has been flooded by GIFs like this one:

Ok, you got my attention (Image by Google)

If your question has been “what the heck is happening?”… well, I’m here to help you a bit.

It all started with Google sharing this article on its blog, followed by this super-interesting research paper (I suggest you to give it a read!) and some youtube videos like this one.

When reading all those articles, the first thing we did was looking at the calendar… and no, it was not April the 1st, so this news had to be real. So that faces behind the headset were real!

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.