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Legendary director and provocateur Werner Herzog has some thoughts on the future of entertainment.

The post Werner Herzog Believes Animation is More Convincing in Virtual Reality Than Live-Action appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

For a look at path-breaking VR animation, Sundance 2016 is worth checking out.

The post Look Out For These 5 VR Immersions From Sundance’s New Frontier Program appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Title: Cardboard
Platform: Android and iOS
Cost: Free

It's more than a high-tech Viewmaster. Google Cardboard that takes advantage of the gyroscope in your phone to replicate 365 degree, stereoscopic viewing. Cardboard itself is an app which helps you get started, calibrate your device, and learn to manipulate the navigation and controls. A whole stable of apps and games build upon the Cardboard concept, but the populist VR trend is so new that the content is very uneven. Even in Google's demo, the international capitals captured through Street View pale next to the underwater landscape of the Great Barrier Reef.

Google Cardboard is truly low-barrier. It works as well with Android as with iOS, so more students can use it, manufactured Cardboard cases are inexpensive and you can download a kit to create your own headset.

Some of the apps viewed through the Cardboard headset offer the most generational kinesthetic gaming improvement since the Wii. I use Cardboard to play Debris Defrag, what is essentially an immersive version of Asteroids that makes having a space gun seem absolutely fantastic. The virtual reality experience itself is leaps and bounds beyond holding your phone at arm's length to view a HistoryPin photo screen or an Aurasma layer.

All those online video watchers can use Cardboard as another wrinkle to their experience. I spent a lot of time looking at standard video through Cardboard Viewers, but it was kind of like watching 2D television on a 3D television set, the effect was minimal. It seems to work more as a way to experience high concept video and games that others have created. I had a much better experience exploring the products posted by savvy marketers capitalizing on the nature of the medium. The North Face has a fun video. For teens waiting on the Oculus Rift, Cardboard is a fun stopgap.

Our App of the Week Archive features more great apps. Got a suggestion for App of the Week? Let us know.

After directing Pixar's "Blue Umbrella," Saschka Unseld has moved into the world of VR filmmaking.

Challenges and lessons learned from interactive animation storytelling.

Disgusting or delighting, exciting or boring, sensual or expected, no matter what you think about it, 50 Shades of Grey is certainly not a movie that passes by without leaving a mark on your skin. Based on E.L. James’ novel (honestly, somehow even more breathtaking than the movie), it tells the story of the complicated relationship between the dominant multi-millionaire Christian Grey, and the newly graduated, inexperienced, and shy, Ana Steele.

The post 50 shades of touch appeared first on OUPblog.

Title: Sphere 360º

Platform: iOS, with some limitations

Cost: Free

Sphere 360º bills itself as "the future of photography." It adds a three dimensional aspects to your panoramic shots, with sometimes startling results. Be it a Siberian forest or an Italian coastline, there's a definite concrete virtual reality aspect to viewing a "sphere."

The gallery of shared spheres is pretty intimidating. Many are taken with a rotating gadget called a Motrr, which can be controlled wirelessly. There is an "easy" mode, but there is a definite art to creating a sphere. Additionally, you must be connected to a network, which could make capturing nature scenes difficult

To begin your sphere, you can scan a panorama or upload one saved to your camera roll. To complete the sphere, you use your finger to create details and depth, essentially zooming in and moving around to flesh out the experience of being there.

If that's not enough to get your teens interested, Kendall Jenner recently recommended it her recent Vogue interview with an enthusiastic "Download immediately."

Even is you never create a sphere, the curated collections with their intuitive and smooth navigation could be a boon for teachers  and librarians looking to take student beyond the herky-jerky vagueness of Google Earth. And it's too kinesthetic to it justice outside the app.

The current version doesn't seem to be supported on the latest Apple hardware, so it's the rare case where something interesting isn't available on the newest devices.

Creator Spherical also has a 4D video app called Play, which is also free for a limited time.

If you have a suggestion for an App of the Week, let us know, and be sure to check out more great Apps of the Week in our archive.

Bruce Timm is working with tech company Otoy to recreate the Batcave from "Batman: The Animated Series" as an immersive entertainment experience.

From Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR Inc. to the latest medical developments, technology is driving new explorations of the perception, reality, and neuroscience. How do we perceive reality through the sense of touch? Alberto Gallace is a researcher in touch and multisensory integration at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, and co-author of In touch with the future: The sense of touch from cognitive neuroscience to virtual reality. We recently spoke to him about touch, personal boundaries, and being human.

Out of all the human senses, touch is the one that is most often unappreciated, and undervalued. When did you first become interested in touch research?

I was in Oxford as a visiting PhD student and working on multisensory integration, in particular on the integration between tactile and visual signals in the brain. Soon I realized that, despite the fact that is a very important sensory modality, there was not much research on touch, and there were not even a lot of instruments to study such sensory modality. I started by working more with engineers and technical workshops then with psychologists and neuroscientists, just because I needed some device to test the sense of touch in a different way as compared to what was done in the past. Touch was mainly studied with reference to haptic object recognition, mostly on visually impaired individuals or in terms of its physiological mechanisms. Many of the most relevant aspects of touch were very little, if not at all, investigated.

We use touch for walking, talking, eating, nearly everything basically. It also plays a major role on our interpersonal relationships, it affects the release of hormones and it contributes to define the boundary of our self.

To my students I often say, where our touch begins, we are. I wanted to understand more of these topics. I wanted to compare touch with other sensory modalities. In doing that I was convinced that research on touch had to get away from the fingertips or hands and extend to the whole body surface. The more I studied this sense, the more I became interested in it. For every question answered there were many more without responses. I like touch a lot because there are many things that still need to be understood about it, and I am a rather curious person, particularly when it comes to science.

What do you think has been the most important development in touch research in the past 100 years?

I am not sure if it’s the most important development, but what I certainly consider important is the recent study of certain neural fibres specialized in transmitting socially-relevant information via the sense of touch. That is, the C tactile afferents in humans, that are strongly activated by ‘caress like’ stimuli, might play an important role in many of our most pleasant social experiences. However, I should also say that my personal way to think about science is much more ‘future oriented’. That is, I believe that the most important developments in touch research are the ones that we will see in the next years. I am really looking forward to reading (or possibly writing) about them.

Why did you decide to research this topic?

Most of the previously published books on touch — there aren’t many, to be honest — were focused on a single topic. Most of them were based on research on visually-impaired individuals, and the large majority of them were authored books, a collections of chapters written by different people, sometimes with a different view. Charles [Spence, University of Oxford] and myself wanted something different, something more comprehensive, something that could help people to understand that touch is involved in many different and relevant aspects of our life. We envisioned a book where the more neuroscientific aspects of touch were addressed together with a number of more applied topics. We wanted something where people could see touch ‘at work’. We talk about the neural bases of touch, tactile perception, tactile attention, tactile memory, tactile consciousness, but also about the role of touch in technology, marketing, virtual reality, food appreciation, and sexual behaviour. Many of these topics have never been considered in a book on touch before.

Philippe Mercier’s The Sense of Touch

What do you see as being the future of research in this field in the next decade?

I think that research in my field, pushed by technological advances, will grow rapidly in the coming years. One of the fields where I see a lot of potential is certainly related to the reproduction of tactile sensations in virtual reality environments. Virtual reality will likely become an important part of our life, maybe not in the next decade, but certainly in a not so distant future. However, if we want to create believable virtual environments we need to understand more of our sense of touch, and in particular how our brain processes tactile information, how different tactile stimulations can lead to certain emotions and behaviours, and how tactile sensations can be virtually reproduced. Following the idea that ‘where our touch begins, we are’, research will certainly invest a lot of resources in trying to better understand the neurocognitive mechanisms responsible for supporting our sense of ‘body ownership’ (the feeling that the body is our own) and how this sense can be transferred to virtual/artificial counterparts of our self. Here research on touch will certainly play a leading role.

If you weren’t doing touch research, what would you be doing?

I think I’d work as a scientist in a different field, but always as a scientist. I am too curious about how nature works to do something different. Since I was twelve I’ve always had a special interest in astronomy and astrophysics and I can easily picture myself working in that field too. Understanding the secrets of black cosmic matter or studying the mysteries of white brain matter? Not sure which would be better. What I am sure about is that I like my job a lot, and I won’t change it with anything else that is not based that much on creativity and curiosity.

Alberto Gallace is a researcher at Department of Psychology, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, and co-author of In touch with the future: The sense of touch from cognitive neuroscience to virtual reality. His research interests include spatial representation, multisensory integration, tactile perception, tactile interfaces, body representation, virtual reality, sensory substitution systems, and neurological rehabilitation of spatial disorders.

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Image credits: (1) Via Catalana Barcelona Plaça Catalunya 37. Photo by Judesba. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (2) The Sense of Touch, painting by Philipe Mercier. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The post A conversation with Alberto Gallace appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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by Michael Saler

Sherlock Holmes could figure out almost anything, and had he bothered to discover a longevity pill he would have turned 158 years old on January 6, 2012. Or sometime during this year: Arthur Conan Doyle indicated that Holmes was born in 1854, but never divulged an exact birthday. That feat of deduction was carried out by one of the detective’s innumerable fans, Christopher Morley. Like many of them, he obsessively mined the Holmesian Canon of sixty narratives to establish both the known and unknown facts of this fictional character’s existence.

Perhaps Holmes didn’t bother to seek the grail of immortality because his creator had already discovered it. Conan Doyle’s sleuth has become one of the most famous fictional characters in literature’s history, and his popularity shows every sign of increasing, Robert Downey, Jr. notwithstanding. Holmes was the first to be the subject of “objective” biographies, complete with footnotes and other scholarly devices, as well as magazines dedicated to establishing that he was factual and Conan Doyle largely irrelevant. (For many years one fan group, the Baker Street Irregulars, identified Conan Doyle as Watson’s literary agent.) Indeed, Holmes was the first “virtual reality” character in Western literature, the model for innumerable other fictional beings and worlds that have transcended the printed page to assume an autonomous life, from The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter.

But why Holmes? There have been many other fictional characters that have caught the public’s fancy over the course of centuries. None of them, however, commanded such a sustained and growing devotion. Falstaff, Don Quixote, Pamela, Werther, Little Nell, and others have populated the collective memory, but sober biographies of them, and societies devoted to them, are thin on the ground now and were unthinkable before Holmes’s fandom pioneered the phenomenon in the early twentieth century.

It’s a mystery, but a solvable one. We need only follow Holmes’s sage injunction to “eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.” Here are the relevant factors to consider in the Case of the Cerebral Celebrity:

(1) Holmes and Watson are marvelous characters, and their intimate interactions have made them the ultimate “Buddy” team.

Yes, the two are an interesting spin on the “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup” approach to literature, which includes such opposing and delectable pairs as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Falstaff and Prince Hal, Boswell and Johnson, Pickwick and Sam Weller. But are Holmes and Watson demonstrably superior to their predecessors? Arguably not: all of these pairs are wonderfully unique, and it would be hard to choose among them. The “Hope & Crosby” hypothesis is a necessary but not sufficient cause to explain the Holmes phenomenon.

(2) Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories combine wit, imagination and narrative drive in irresistible short packages; cumulatively, they created a rare series that delights adults and children alike.

Ah, the “nobody-can-eat-just one” hypothesis. Certainly Conan Doyle was a gifted writer, whose creations have outlasted that of many of his contemporaries. But he didn’t pull his punches when he wrote other series characters, such as Brigadier Gerard and Professor Challenger – and few read their tales now. Despite the application of his considerable skills, Conan Doyle’s other works have not captured the popular im

Writers live in their own little worlds much of the time. Hey, I can’t help it if everyone can’t find the time to work and play the way we do. Our minds think up so many fantastic scenarios. And SF writers think up some doozies that have stuck with us as everyday objects in our homes.

Those SF writers do the mental designs, write them down, creating written Virtual Worlds for any reader who picks them up to read. Afterwards, they have the privilege of sitting back and seeming smug when the world takes hold of one of their ideas and makes it tangible and available.

I find myself mind-boggled when I think about how much has been created in the name of using one’s mind. Billions in research has gone toward producing a viable Virtual World application that can be enjoyed by the masses.

For instance: The Air Force put together a specialized helmut a bunch of years ago that would allow the pilot to simply think about a maneuver and have his plane perform it. It was tested and found plausible and usable if the pilot was specially trained to use it. And before you wonder how I know that, I saw a documentary on it several years ago and leave it at that. Nothing classified here. It came from SF.

Serious talk had it that the military purchased the rights to quite a few of the designs and concepts used on the original Star Trek series. Researchers are reportedly working on several applications taken from the Star Trek series. When Next Generation warped out to the Rim, the concepts and designs used were sold off, or so the story goes.

Japanese researchers have been working on a working holographic TV since the 80’s as reported on the Discovery channel during ‘88-‘89 or thereabouts. They’d managed it, too. A research facility in California reported a few years ago about having actually “transported” an inanimate object from Point A to Point B without inherent damage to the object. That’s impressive.

So here we have transporters, holo deck capability (at least up to a point), other researchers are working on replicators with some success, and one engineer has figured out how to build a hydrogen collecting ram-jet (if I heard what he said correctly on the Science Channel.) Think about it. We’re almost to and point of creating an Enterprise to rival the UFoP.

Nanotechnology is ready to explode. It’s being tested now for medical applications. I think it was AP that reported that a few months back.

I know that you’re wondering what all that has to do with a Virtual World. Well, it’s like this. When I was a kid, everyone under the age of 18 lived in a virtual world as routine. It was called an imagination. We figured out everything. I think I was 11 when I figured out how to biuld everything I could think of, including a pedal car, out of various diameter bamboo.

Gilligan’s Island did that, you say. That’s true. They did. But I did it in the fifties. I didn’t know about all the SF greats at that time and had never read any of their books. I just knew that there were planets out there beyond our knowing that had intelligent life on them and that sometime before the world ended, we’d get to see them. That subject is still being debated.

Kids back then all knew how to make up stories and see them in their heads. As far as we were concerned we really were on those other planets, in that hot desert looking for a watering hole, or designing a new two story house from whatever we could find on the forest floor.

Today, kids have video games that present images that might as well be real. Many are violent. All I’ve heard are loud enough to wake several zombies and send them out on the street to get away from the noise.

The idea of actually thinking up their own stories and games seems to have escaped many of the last two generations of children. I wonder if we’ve paid too heavy a price for the actual reality of virtual reality.

Would it have been so terrible to leave our children to the devices of their own imaginati