This Month in Virtual Reality — Edition #2

Recent Funding, Sundance Premieres, and Exclusive Q&A

Welcome to Virtual Reality Pop monthly newsletter!

This month we cover top news from CES, Sundance, funding announcements, trending articles, and exclusive Virtual Reality Pop Q&A with the President of Viveport and Senior Vice President of Virtual Reality at HTC, the founder of High Fidelity and Second Life, Principal Designer at Unity, Managing Director of Comcast Ventures, and the Vice President of Virtual Reality at SuperData Research.

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— Helen Situ, Editor of Virtual Reality Pop

P.S. I got a VIVE this month and it is incredibly awesome! I have been playing Audioshield non-stop (doing everything I can to become as good as Kent Bye).

💥 The Big News:

• Facebook/Oculus hired Hugo Barra as the new Vice President of Virtual Reality. Read more: Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement post

💸 Funding News:

• Entrypoint raised $2 million in seed investment, led by Samsung NEXT and Two Sigma Ventures. Other investors include Indicator Ventures, KBS Ventures, Galvanize Ventures, Social Starts, Female Founders Fund and Virtual Reality Investments. Read more: Entrypoint
• Two Bit Circus raised $15 million in Series B, led by Jazz Venture Partners. The round includes participation from existing investors, including Foundry Group, Techstars Ventures, and Intel Capital. Read more: Two Bit Circus
• DigiLens raised $22 million in Series B. Investors include Sony, Foxconn, Continental, Panasonic, Alsop Louie Partners, Bold Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners, and Dolby Family Ventures. Read more: DigiLens

⚙ Platform News:

• Samsung announced at CES that it has shipped more than 5 million Gear VR headsets to consumers globally. Read more here.
• HTC Vive announced the Vive Tracker at CES, enabling a wireless connection between your attached tools and the Vive system. Developer applications open through February 7. Read more: Vive
• HTC Vive announced a $10 million program, VR for Impact, at the World Economic Forum. Read more: Vive
• Daydream by Google opens up its VR platform to all developers. Claude Zellweger, HTC Vive’s Vice President of Design has left to join the Daydream team. Read more: Daydream
• Facebook/Oculus hired Hugo Barra as the new Vice President of Virtual Reality. Read more: Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement post

💎 Content News:

• Episodic virtual reality experiences are arriving: Within announced “The Possible” series and Jaunt announced “Lawnmower Man” series.
• Dear Angelica, from Oculus Story Studio, premiered at Sundance. The moving experience was entirely created from within VR using the studio’s new tool, Quill. The experience is available for download on Oculus Rift now. Read more: Oculus Story Studio
• Asteroids!, from Baobab Studios, premiered at Sundance. This is the second animated project from the studio with interactive elements. The experience runs as a 10 minute short and will be released on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive later this year. Read more: Baobab Studios
• Miyubi, from Felix & Paul, premiered at Sundance. This is the studio’s first scripted projects and is one of the longest VR narratives made, at 40 minutes. The experience will be released for Gear VR later this year. Read more: Felix & Paul
• Life of Us, from Chris Milk and Within, premiered at Sundance. This installation was an entirely different virtual reality experience; one that is narrative-driven, interactive, and social. The experience will be released later this year. Read more: Within
• Pearl, from Google Spotlight Stories, received an Oscar nomination in the animated short category. Available on every virtual reality platform and YouTube 360. Read more: Google Spotlight Stories

📃 Other News:

• IMAX has opened its first IMAX VR Experience Centre in Los Angeles (across from the Grove shopping center on Fairfax boulevard). It is showing games and other virtual reality experiences on the HTC Vive and StarVR headsets. Read more: IMAX VR
• Summary of ZeniMax v. Facebook/Oculus $4 Billion Lawsuit here.
• Update: Oculus ordered to pay $500 million in ZeniMax lawsuit. Read more here.

🔖 Trending Reads On VirtualRealityPop.com:

• Draw Sketches For Virtual Reality Like A Pro by Volodymyr Kurbatov
• VR Startups Are About To Die. Investors Should Relax. by Marcello E. Miranda
• Practical VR: A Design Cheat Sheet by Ryan Betts
• Google Accidentally cc’d The Entire Daydream Platform Developer List And What Happened Next Was Awesome. by Robbie Whiting
• Apple Strategy 2017. Very Important Change To iPhone Coming. by Robert Scoble

🔑 Exclusive Virtual Reality Pop Q&A:

We took some time to talk with a few key players in the virtual reality space. Here are the questions we asked them:

1. What type of virtual reality tool or experience do you wish existed today?
2. In what ways will artificial intelligence affect virtual reality?
3. What do you predict Apple will do to enter the immersive media industry?

Rikard Steiber

President of Viveport and Senior Vice President of Virtual Reality at HTC

Q: What type of virtual reality tool or experience do you wish existed today

Answer: The most exciting thing with Virtual Reality is that it is here today, it is not about the future. However, it is still early days and there are many experiences missing. I would love to see more educational experiences highlighting the big challenges we have on planet Earth, experiences that would inspire us to take action. To help make this happen I started “VR For Impact” which is a call to VR developers to create Virtual Reality experiences that will drive positive impact in support of United Nations sustainable development goals. Check out www.vrforimpact.com

Q: In what ways will artificial intelligence affect virtual reality?

Answer: There are two sides to this VR/AI coin. On the VR side — experiences have the potential to be greatly improved by using AI in everything from intelligent interaction with artificial beings and avatars to predicting our needs and behaviors to create a great user experience. On the AI side of the coin — AI could be greatly improved by simulating experiences more effectively in Virtual Reality rather than doing experiments in the real word. For example, we could train a self-driving car AI by adding a fleet of cars driving for a year and collect the data or we could simulate this in Virtual Reality and collect the data more effectively and scalable.

Q: What do you predict Apple will do to enter the immersive media industry?

Answer: I do not comment on behalf of other companies, but I believe that Virtual Reality will change the world for the better. I believe that with Virtual Reality we will finally democratize access to experiences. Experiences that were only available to the few, rich or privileged, are now are available to everyone. The power of true Virtual Reality is that you can achieve “presence” — where your brain believes you are actually there — that it is real. This makes the VR media unparalleled in its ability to deliver experiences and emotions you will never forget. Experiences that may change your life, and inspire you to change the world to be a better place.
Any media and technology company that do not grasp this and take action, will find it hard to be a leader in the future.

Philip Rosedale

Founder of High Fidelity and Second Life

Q: What type of virtual reality tool or experience do you wish existed today?

Answer: Gloves that let me talk with my hands (so I don’t have to hold a controller), and show my finger movements to the other people in-world, and also have a little button that lets me accurately grab/release things.

Q: In what ways will artificial intelligence affect virtual reality?

Answer: AI is increasingly moving toward bots that can help people (Alexa, etc). These bots will naturally want to become more like people — able to follow us around and help us. But it will be MUCH harder to do that with robots than with avatars. Therefore, I suspect that VR or AR environments are likely to be the most common places where we actually interact with AIs. Put another way… our AI children are likely to grow up in virtual worlds.

Q: What do you predict Apple will do to enter the immersive media industry?

Answer: I think they will first release some sort of neat AR glasses that connect to a phone in your pocket and let you more easily do your email or browse the web — on a larger screen. I think that they will (correctly) focus on the replacement of the desktop/mobile screen as their next step.

Timoni West

Principal Designer at Unity Labs

Q: What type of virtual reality tool or experience do you wish existed today?

Answer: Two things: I’d like to have a variety of small, flexible sensors I can attach to anything. Trackable nail polish is one of my favorite ideas, but even tiny sticker sensors would be a great start. Second, I’d love to have more Sketchup-like creation tools. I’m downloading Gravity Sketch as I type this and am tremendously excited to try it out.

Q: In what ways will artificial intelligence affect virtual reality?

Answer: 3D object recognition is a key aspect to bringing virtual and the real world together. We’ll be leaning heavily on AI to create the connections between what rigs see and what users can interact with. That’s the obvious use, and we do it all the time even now, from Snapchat stickers to filters to Tango. Voice recognition, semantic analysis, and contextual queries are also getting better all the time. Less obvious but equally useful: more accurate NPCs, better pathfinding tools, and more realistic special effects.

Q: What do you predict Apple will do to enter the immersive media industry?

Answer: When I step back and look at Apple holistically, from the 1980s to today, you can see their vision is similar to what we’re working on across computing even today: a contextually and semantically aware experience. There’s some UI, but the bulk of the heavy queries and interactions are voice commands used to bring up data. The iPad, the wearables, and even things like the Touchbar are all steps in this direction.

My guess then is that Apple might go two directions in the near future. The first option is that they will create an VR/AR experience that plays nicely with their current gestural interaction patterns. In this case I assume it will be lower-quality mobile VR, and will come out around 2019–2020. Apple has increasingly shown they’re willing to have products with good design but missing high-end functionality (iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, new Macbook series). There’s no reason to think they’d switch gears to support a high-end immersive rig.

But if Apple has decided even that lower bar isn’t worth going for, I’m anticipating they’ll go embrace semi-immersive design with a combination 3D-in-the-display product. Something new, but something that fits in even more neatly with their current design patterns around gestures and voice.

Apple already has 3D touch, and Apple products work well with 3D; it’s no stretch to assume they could extend that metaphor in anticipation of making immersive hardware to scale. In this case, I anticipate they’d move directly into AR hardware whenever the necessary breakthrough happens. Speaking as realistically as possible, I don’t anticipate Apple (or anyone) making a full-coverage, fully opaque, fully tracking wireless AR headset for at least eight years.

But hey, if they announce it at WWDC in 2017, I’ll be happy.

Michael Yang

Managing Director of Comcast Ventures

Q: What type of virtual reality tool or experience do you wish existed today?

Answer: I’m intrigued with the possibilities of virtual reality in education and training. Whether it be allowing educators to teach an immersive lesson for students or for a corporate trainer to offer stimulating compliance training (an oxymoron today), I’d love to see someone transform pedagogy and leverage VR’s enablement of presence, empathy and interactivity for tomorrow’s classes.

Q: In what ways will artificial intelligence affect virtual reality?

Answer: AI technologies (machine learning, deep learning, neural networks) can help the VR industry push further ahead on the sensing side — knowing what’s in our physical environment as we are in AR/MR. VR technologies on the character creation front (be it CG rendered or volumetric captured) could be applied to AI-driven avatars or conversational chat bots to bring those interactions more to life.

Q: What do you predict Apple will do to enter the immersive media industry?

Answer: I’m not expecting any Apple VR/AR eyewear or wearables in the near future. I think they will continue to add more capabilities and functionality to the next generation of iPhones/iPads so that they will be more “suitable” for mobile VR/AR, either in a magic window mode or slotted into a 3rd party HMD. But, I suspect Apple will take their time, continuing to tinker on what the right consumer experience should be, before committing to the space.

Stephanie Llamas

Vice President of Virtual Reality at SuperData Research

Q: What type of virtual reality tool or experience do you wish existed today?

Answer: Well, I’ve always wanted to ride the Magic Schoolbus! But aside from that, I wish there was a way to traverse through real spaces in 360 video. Traveling in VR would be so much more educational and interesting if you could do more than look around. Also, with refined facial recognition and AI it would be amazing to have dinner with all my heroes — you know, that hypothetical question about having dinner with anyone from history? Being able to talk politics with Oscar Wilde, color theory with Josef Albers and comedy with Rob Williams would be incredible.

Q: In what ways will artificial intelligence affect virtual reality?

Answer: There are so many ways, but first is social. There’s a real opportunity for creating characters in virtual worlds who can interact with users in a realistic way. Secondly, VR will increasingly become a tool that can control devices and vehicles from afar. Military technology, self-driving cars, drones — those will all require a certain level of AI that can adapt to their environments and situations while considering the user’s instructions. Third, AI will help training simulators accommodate more situations in response to a user’s actions. And finally, hands-free text communication will require accurate voice recognition and response, which will primarily affect business and social applications.

Q: What do you predict Apple will do to enter the immersive media industry?

Answer: Based on their rumored partnership with Carl Zeiss and expressed interest in AR over VR, they will likely come out with AR glasses next year. In the meantime, there are some interesting AR apps that are compatible with existing smartphones, so there is an opportunity for them to grow their offerings there.

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter! If you would like to see a new one next month, click here to let me know.

❤ Thank you to Rikard Steiber, Philip Rosedale, timoni west, Michael Yang, and Stephanie Llamas.

On a personal note and as a daughter of immigrants, I urge you to make a donation to ACLU and double your donations here.