iMyth

Category: Immersive Theme-worlds

  • Interview with Jeff Wirth

    • Not so much expert on immersive as interactive
    • Engage the audience in co-creator role
    • Implied Story
      • Audience is generating story
      • Guests are generating story
    • Role of Interactor is CRITICAL
      • Humans are better informed
      • Only they have the understanding of the capacity of other humans
    • Children do it best
      • They can fully engage in any world they want
    • It’s not so much a “suspension of disbelief”
      • Its really an investment of belief
    • Implicative Technologies
      • “sound”
      • “Smell”
      • communicating in ambiguous terms and allowing immagination to fill in all of the blanks
      • “reading” is an implicative activity
      • avoid the explicit
      • The audience becomes participants in the co-creation of reality
    • The spectrum if interactivity is a personal and aesthetic choice
      • However, if the experience is tailor made to the individual then it becomes a risk of becoming a “google Search”
      • The experience becomes bland, un-exciting and unchallenging
      • The individual does not grow
      • Things from outside become less valued
      • The experience becomes a “MonoCulture”
        • individuals needs are not addressed
        • Can’t grow
    • Objective of interactive experience is to transform
      • Objective of games is to win
      • Objective of Film, novel is to communicate theme
      • Objective of interactive experience is to create an opportunity for transformation
        • Transformation is rarely the same for every individual but that’s OK
        • Creating the “opportunity” for the transformation is where the magic happens
    • Interactivity is not an accident
      • good interactivity needs to originate in initial design
      • Interactivity needs to be included in the early stage\
    • Talk with Ken Ingraham – Interactor training!

  • First Exposure to “The Void”

    There is a lot of hope riding on this one company. We are all hoping they can really pull things off  since they seem to be one of the leaders in immersive experiences.

    Upload VR just posted its first impression experience of the Void in their article, “We step into the Void”.

    Overall the reviews are positive which are very inspiring! We look forward for new updates to the Void’s experience.

    You go guys!

     

  • Cloadhead’s “Blink” Locomotion System

    I just read an interesting article on Upload VR about Cloadhead’s  “Blink” Locomotion system. I’ll need to study this article further. However, it looks like they are developing a system to allow a user to navigate and move around in VR space without the feeling of nausia or fear of bumping into things. They seem to have a good system which adjust where the user can teleport to and control what their destination orientation will be. This evidently helps ground the player visually.

    Cloadhead will be releasing their game “The Gallery, Call of the Starseed”. We’ll definitely need to check them out. Their concepts may help us with our first prototype.

  • NVidea SDK update

    NVidia has jumped into the VR development fray, big time. As mentioned in this article from Upload VR, Gameworks SDK from Alpha to Beta, NVidia is developing its new SDK platform devoted to the acceleration of the VR experience.

    You’ll need to read the full articles to get he full gist. Some of the improvement in technology include:

    • Multi-Resolution Shading
    • Virtual Reality Scalable Link Interface (VR SLI)
    • Context Priority
    • Direct Mode
    • Front End Buffering

    Exciting developments!

  • Follow the Money

    In my early business experience, I learned that if you want to know what’s really going on, follow the money.

    In an article from Upload Vr, These companies are leading the way, they go over all the big companies doing VR development and how much money has been raised by each. It seems like a huge grab-bag money pit. IT is also very intimidating that if you don’t have the business chops you’ll get eaten alive.

    Here is a quick list of the list companies with the amount of money they have raised:

    • Magic Leap – $542M
    • Matterport – $30->$56M
    • Razer – $50M
    • Jaunt – $35M
    • Improbable – $20M
    • WeVR – $18.6M
    • High Fidelity – $17.5M
    • NOD Labs – $16M
    • Altspace VR – $15.7M
    • Virtuix – $7.5M
    • NextVR – $5M
    • Merge VR – $2.5M
    • Reload – $2M
    • WorldViz – $1M
    • VRideo $1.8M

  • 5 Early lessons of VR Story Development

    I recently created an article of my own based on the findings of Sashka Unseld of Oculus Storystudio.

    5 early lessons of VR Story Development

  • Emotion and Rapport

    I was reading through my web pages this morning and two very similar articles came up. I had written neither as being significant enough to create a post for. However, when I realized these were two very different article dealing with similar issues it made me think of the relevance they will have in immersive experiences.

    The first of these was a video from the Oculus studio discussing the emotional relevance and importance of their new short called Henry. They discuss the importance of creating rapport with the audience and making them care about the protagonist. They further mention that this task is all the more important when dealing with VR. Because of VR’s immersive potential, audiences will demand a strong emotional connection with its characters.

    The second article was written by Matthew Code on the replayability of games. While he is primarily talking about games I could not help but think that replay is one of the primary motivations behind immersive VR experiences. Matthew writes about what he thought makes game replayable. While we would agree that the lighter more commedic the game is the more attractive it is to watch again. But He also goes on to explain that sometimes characters are just so interesting you want to immerse yourself in their existence.  There was the connection between the two articles.

    Neither of the articles really suggests how to do these things but identifies the need to have them present for an enriching, replayable experience. These will be some of the milestones we need to achieve when developing immersive theme-world experiences.

  • Warren Spector on TellTale

    I cam across this interesting blog By Warren Spector. In this long winded evaluation he explains her perception of Why Telltale does not producer games but interactive narratives and Interactive stories. He odes identify the limitations Telltale places on its interactors withing their theme-worlds. In fact one may argue that Telltale does not really create interactive experience since they cement their characters on rails and the experiences are very pretentious. However, Spector does go on to claim that Telltale does produce Magic and currently they are doing it better than anyone else. I would not argue about this. I did play “Wolf Among Us” and thoroughly enjoyed my experience. I realize it was a very linear story with a “few” parameters that could be manipulated. I still enjoyed it anyway. This is part of the Magic Spector was referring to. If you are interested at all in the interactive narrative evolution then check out this article for an interesting perspective.

  • VR D& D

    UploadVR recently posted an article about a fellow wring his experiences while “hanging out” in Altspace VR and watching a VR game of D&D. THe author had many problems with the technology, as would be expected.  He seemed rather patient. This is good because we’re going to need to wade through a lot of crap getting to cleaner experiences.

    However in this article was a video blog posted by the folks at Altspace VR and their first VR game of Dungeons and Dragons.

    The video only shows a few snippets of the actual game and focuses on the room and the tools to support the VR experience. This is all very cool and I found myself wanting to participate in this new experiential form.

    This still inspired me to take this further and create Immersive role playing experiences in mythical theme-worlds.

    IMyTH is going to rock!

  • Dave & Buster’s Sporting Games created by VRcade

    Check out this posting from Road To VR  informing about Dave and Buster Using a Setup from VRCade in one of their operations. The setup looks pretty cool and is definitely a nod in the direction the theme-park industry will follow. It would be very interesting to test this out first hand. I’m thinking a road trip to Dave and Buster’s and The Void in imminent in the near future.