The greatest problem of Social VR is friction, not adoption

Today I was reading an UploadVR article about social VR: the article showcased how social VR will be enormous (with Facebook and others investing lots of money into it) but it has a present problem called adoption. I agree with everything inside that article (I’ve in this blog various articles that say that social VR is cool, like this one): social VR will be enormous and super-important (let’s all think how it will be cool to meet in VR with our far away grandpa or how it will be cool cooperating with teamworkers that are on the opposite side of the planet); but currently it has a clear adoption problem, meaning that very few people have VR devices, so we can’t meet with our friends in VR: many of my friends do not own a VR headset (some of them do not even know what VR is), so having a social VR ecosystem is very difficult. It will need time, they say: when we’ll all have VR devices, social VR will be huge, will be fantastic.

An example of AltspaceVR environment and avatars (image from AltspaceVR Inc.)

And I agree. Or maybe not. After reading the article I had a “ehm, no” feeling. In my opinion, social VR will be great, but it will not be enormous. I mean, it will be like Skype (and Skype is a service we all use) but it will not be like Facebook. And the reason is friction.

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

A talk about advertisement in virtual reality with Get Virtual

Some times ago I got in touch with Get Virtual founder Michael Rapoport and we had the opportunity to talk a bit about virtual reality advertisement.

Get Virtual logo

Advertisement. Yes, that thing on which some of the most powerful IT companies make all their business: think about Google, or Facebook for instance. They all make bazillions of dollars thanks to smart advertisement. Internet has been one of the key revolutions in the computer science history, something that has revolutioned completely our life. The following revolution, lead by smartphones, has made possible the connectivity in every moment and in every place, making possible the social revolution. All these revolutions have been completely interconnected with sales and so with advertisement: now, wherever you are, you can see a targeted ad and buy something that you just discovered you love from a shop that is on the other side of the world. Virtual reality and augmented reality will lead the next computing revolution and we’re asking ourselves: how advertisement will be on those platform?

I’ve tried talking with it making some questions to Michael, which has founded Get Virtual, a company in Florida focused on virtual reality advertisement. Here you are the questions I’ve made him, with his answers and some comments by me in the end.

Just Relax (relaxation GearVR app) inter-review

I’ve been contacted by Paul, of Mostly Human Studios, to try his virtual reality relaxation tool: Just Relax. I was happy, because I’m super-stressed due to my startup life, so I just wanted to relax a bit. With DK2 I was a huge fan of Guided Meditation, so I was eager to try its app. But life is a b**ch and his app is not compatible with my phone (I’ve a Note 4 and the first GearVR… I feel so old) so I’ve not been able to try it.

So goodbye to my idea of a review and welcome to the idea of an interview. So I made Paul some questions about the Just Relax relaxation app and his experience in developing it. I found his answers very interesting… in a sense I’m more happy with this article than with a review 🙂

WebVR will be huge, but nowadays has some compatibility issues

Today I decided to try a website supporting WebVR with my PC and Oculus Rift. I was happy because I was to experiment the future: finally I could experience the ability to try some virtual reality content without passing through any hub (like Oculus Home), just going with my browser on a website. I was excited.

This is the feature that makes WebVR so awesome. WebVR means two things:

• No need to install any particular app on the device;
• No need to worry about the platform: the same WebVR app can run on PC (e.g. Oculus Rift) and on Android (e.g. Cardboard), without further modifications.

My personal opinion about VR in China

VR in China will be huge. Everyone is saying this. Once in a while all major VR blogs and magazines come out with an article saying that VR in China is huge, will be huge and that China will conquer the VR world. They talk about Chinese investments funds, startups, enormous VR centers, lots of VR arcades and with numbers they’ll prove you that US is just a little country compared to China. An example link for such Chinese-friendly articles is this one.

These articles are very interesting because they remember us that we are very Western-world-centered: we all look at US and the Silicon Valley as the tech paradise and we usually forgot the big red giant. China is huge and it’ll grow even more in the next times: it is predicted that in some years it will become the first economical power of the world. So, surely VR will be huge there. But I don’t share the same exact opinion of these articles… I’m not a business expert, but I know something about Chinese people and I know something about VR, so I can have some sensible thoughts on this topic.

Virtual reality locomotion choice in games is not an option

Locomotion is one of the biggest issues in virtual reality: lots of alternatives with pros and cons for each choice have been provided, like:

• no locomotion (like in GearVR): just stay in a fixed place and don’t move, like when you look 360° videos;
• standard locomotion: you use keyboard or gamepad to move forward… very easy to understand but leads to motion sickness;
• teleportation (introduced by Vive): you just move immediately from one place to another. There’s no sickness, but it’s absolutely not natural;
• walk-in-place (like the one used in our full body VR solution ImmotionRoom): you move forward looking at the direction you want to move to and then walking in place in the real world to walk in the virtual world. This is smart since reduces a lot motion sickness, while being natural;
• Freedom locomotion system: like walk-in-place, but you define where to go using your thumb on the VR controller.
• Lots of others: really there are a bazillion locomotion options out there! Every day some new mechanics get invented

Moving with teleportation with Vive inside The Lab

Happy 8th of March, #WomenInVR

It’s the 8th of March and all over the world this is the International Women’s day. Here we’re used to gift some yellow flowers called mimosa and remember our beloved women why they’re important for us.

There’s lot of debate about women and technology and women and virtual reality. As always we men are much more, but in the field that I know best, VR, I know some really valuable women, like Eva Hoerth or Helen Situ, that are very important influencers. They usually use the tag #WomenInVR to help the spread of this wonderful technology among women, in a tech world populated by men.

GDC and MWC 2017 main VR news

This article is just a small recap about the latest VR news and announcement, so if you’ve lost them, you can read it here only in one place! Most of them has been made at GDC or MWC.

First of all, Vive has revealed the price of the Tracker and the Audio Strap: they’ll cost $99 dollars each. Finally we know how much money we will spend to start developing innovative VR applications with pseudo-objects-tracking. As I’ve already said, I hoped price would have been lower for the Tracker, to help adoptions among makers, but the price shows a more business-oriented approach.