Gorillaz’s Saturnz Barz 360 music video review

Some days ago I read an article on RoadToVR about Gorillaz’s latest video: Saturnz Barz (Spirit House). But why one of the most important sources of information about virtual reality has talked about a song? Well, because it is the 360 videos making the most views at his debut on Youtube.

Stats about Saturnz Barz views, compared with other 360-videos on Youtube. As you can see, they outperformed all the others (Image by Youtube, taken on Road To VR)

I got curious about this, so I decided to give a look to this video using DeoVR. And well, my impressions are pretty mixed.

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

PPT-VR review

I’ve been contacted by Hardik, an Indian guy that is working on a software to do presentations in VR, that asked me to review his project. He added that we’re buddy AR/VR-preneurs, so he convinced me to write this article :). At Immotionar, getting little visibility for our Hit Motion game was very hard, so I know the pain he’s living…

Hardik works in a company called SMIS and they’re making a product called PPT-VR. The name makes immediately clear what they want to do: presentations in VR. With “presentation” I don’t mean a presentation in a Powerpoint sense, but more in a 360-VR sense. In these last months lots of startups are popping out, promising the ability to create easily VR virtual tours where the user navigates from one 360-photos to the other, with the ability to see some info about some points of interests.

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!)