Immotionar - Official Blog Copyright © 2014-2016 Immotionar. All rights reserved. http://www.immotionar.com Sun, 23 April 2017 18:20:00 Sun, 23 April 2017 18:20:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/april/23/the-curtain-falls-thank-you-to-everyone/ After 3 years of trying to change virtual reality by adding to it the full body user experience, without the user wearing any kind of sensors , we have to wake up from our dream. It’s over. Reasons are many and we don’t want to discuss them here ( Tony will cover them on its personal blog The Ghost Howls ). Here we just want to highlight 2 good points . First one is that we have upgraded ImmotionRoom Runtime to version 0.4.2 . With this update you will: get a FreeTrack server that will let you use ImmotionRoom runtime with VRidge, to easily use Kinect as positional tracker for your Cardboard get a C# client to make any kind of .NET applications to communicate with our tracking service Second one is that this website will be online for some more months, so that you will be able to continue downloading our software as-is to live full body virtual reality . Unfortunately we won't be able to provide any kind of support anymore. We want to close our adventurous journey thanking all the people who have tried to help us in these years… thanks to those who downloaded our software, to our mentors, to people coming at our booth in exhibitions… everyone, even people that just gave us a smile or a thumbs-up after having tried our system . Thank you all, really. A special thank you to: Beps Engineering , a great IoT company that gave us the possibility to follow our dreams Max Ariani , who believed in our dream like no one other did and helped us in all possible ways Andrea Basso , who has been an important mentor for us (when available!) Sasha and Johnathan for being our supporters and for giving us strength. We’ll love you forever. Closing Immotionar has been one of the hardest decision we took in our life and we’re really sad about it . We hope that our hard work for advocating full body virtual reality and to evangelize virtual reality has been useful to make this technology evolve… hope that we’ve been that butterfly that moving its wing has been able to create a tornado. See you around in the metaverse. Goodbye. http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/april/23/the-curtain-falls-thank-you-to-everyone/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/april/23/the-curtain-falls-thank-you-to-everyone/ Sun, 23 April 2017 18:20:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/march/02/techtyche-the-technology-social-venture/ Some times ago we got in touch with the guys of Techtyche , thanks to the fact that they said that Tony’s blog The Ghost Howls was one of the best 50 virtual reality blogs of the world (thanks guys!). From that day on, we started chatting with them and we discovered that they’re very interesting people. So, we decided to do a little interview with them and to write an article about it, so you can learn about them, too. We made some question to this website’s founder, Shayan ( @shayanahmed1993 ). He seeks to create sustainable global impact through the deployment of innovation and technology. And he has a firm belief that we can have a safer, better and prosperous future via establishing and scaling up impact focused initiatives in the domains of emerging technologies, sustainability, climate change, economy & entrepreneurship (cool isn’t it?). So, here you are with some cool questions and answers! Are you curious about Techtyche? So, keep on reading! 1. What is Techtyche? Techtyche  is a digital media platform that aims to drive a positive global change by highlighting real world problems, featuring emerging technologies and creating opportunities to connect these two. With the vision of, “Spreading Goodwill through Technology and Innovation” - one of the major objectives is to create a sustainable social impact in the emerging countries . This is done in three main ways. The major issues that we aim to highlight are mostly in accordance with the sustainable development goals by the United Nations. This broadly includes areas such as health, poverty, economic inclusion, education and more . We believe that, technology and innovation has played a major role to solve real life problems. However, this fact cannot be negated that there are areas which need proper implementation of suitable technologies to make lives easier. This gap is quite prominent in the developing countries and one of our main goals is to eradicate this problem.  The main purpose is to advance the human civilization and especially the developing countries towards a better, safer and prosperous future . 2. What do you mean by “technology social venture”? Technology social venture is either a technology empowered organization or an organization that deploys technology to create social impact. Here we are using, digital media to bridge the gap between real world problems and the technology that could potentially solve it. Powered by the technology of digital media, our organization aims at highlighting real world issues and creating opportunities to solve them through suitable technology and Innovation. 3. Do we even need it? Yes, definitely. We are trying to create opportunities that would solve the real world issues through technology and innovation. If you consider only the magnitude of problems in the developing world then the issue turns out to be grave. This requires collective efforts at a global level. For example, according to the Sustainable Development Goals of United Nations - there is a set of global issues that needs attention. Consider a review of stats and figures for just 3 out of 17 areas. Education - 57 million children in developing countries remain out of school Economy - 202 million people are unemployed in developing countries (as of 2012) Clean Water and Sanitation - More than 1.8 billion people globally fecally contaminated source of water Now, these issues are grave. Our goal is to create opportunities that would reduce these problems through innovation and technology and create a better world to live in.  The possibilities to solve these issues through technology and innovation are endless however, a lot needs to be done. 4. Where are you from? We are based in Pakistan which is one of the developing countries of the world. 5. How do you think that we technology people can make this world better? Human civilization is advancing at a much faster pace than ever. If you look back, you would realize that the same progress which took centuries - now takes decades. The advancement accounted into decades, now takes years or may be even months to achieve. All of this can be credited to the scientific breakthroughs and technological advancements . There is no doubt about the fact that human civilization will advance towards a better, safer and prosperous future - with major credit to the technology people and their contributions. The ability of tech guys to identify real life problems and coming up with efficient solutions is what separates this superb silicon age with conventional stone age.  6. How do you envision VR and AR in the next years? Just the way, Internet changed the way we communicate information - VR and AR are going to change the way we communicate experiences. There are three main dimensions to the future of VR and AR. One of these approaches is where virtual reality and augmented reality will open pathways to the advent of new advancements, technologies and innovations. While on the other hand, the same technologies will be deployed to completely revolutionize how the current industries operate. For example education sector, healthcare, work environments, gaming etc. And finally, the use of these technologies will become very common to solve the very basic level problems that humanity is facing these days. This particularly pertains to the issues faced by the developing world. In conclusion, the possibilities of AR and VR are endless and they have the potential to make this world a better place to live i 7. What’s the dream objective for your platform? “Better, safer and prosperous future.” 8. Anything more to add? We believe that there is a lot of work that needs to be done in order to achieve the ultimate dream objective that we have. In this regard, we are always identifying the problems that the humanity is facing and looking for the most appropriate technological and innovative solutions to drive a sustainable global impact. If you believe that you can help us identify issues that you believe are huge or know about some technology that is aiming to solve a particular problem or just have an idea that you believe should be shared then do get in touch with us . We would love to hear from you. So, what’s your opinion about these guys? Do you like what they do? If so, contact them on Twitter  or write directly to their CEO via email (shayan AT techtyche DOT com)! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/march/02/techtyche-the-technology-social-venture/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/march/02/techtyche-the-technology-social-venture/ Thu, 02 March 2017 22:30:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/february/13/sognando-la-realtà-post-mortem-plus-a-little-daydream-review/ Hello all! Do you remember when I told you that we had been invited to the event Sognando La Realtà by GDG Torino ? If not, you can refresh your memory here  :-) Well, the event has gone good and this is a little post-mortem about it (“little” in my scale of reference… of course). In the event we had a workshop and a little exhibition of what we do . Plus there was a Daydream that we were eager to try (later on this article, there will be a review about it!). Guys of GDG Torino have done all the possible to make the event a good event and in my opinion they did a great job: They took there people from almost all VR companies of Turin . This has surely required lot of effort (we did something similar for our DTC event , so we know what we’re talking about). They took there an innovative device like Daydream + all other major headsets were present thanks to the tech exhibition of we VR startups (we took there a Gear VR, other took the Vive and the Rift; also some Cardboards were there). So it was great for people wanting to try VR. The final tech exhibition was a great showcase of what we VR startups of Turin are working on : model reconstruction, games, VR arcades and innovative full body technologies (guess who took the last one?) There were workshops, lessons and a debate about virtual reality. So it was really educative for people wanting to enter into this world. The event was sold out, so lots of people were in there. There was a really nice atmosphere: young people smiling everywhere…  loved it. Of course there have been little problems, but I don’t want to highlight them here :D. So thanks to all organizers, especially Davide and Wilfried, who made an enormous job . About us… how did it go? Well, sweet and sour . The “sour” part has been the practical workshop, the “sweet” everything else. Let’s start from the bad things: we did our technical talk about the differences between AR and VR and a little Unity introduction; then, for the first time, I had to do a practical workshop , where people in 20 minutes should develop their first mini-app in VR (just a program were you gazed a cube and the cube jumped in VR… if you’re curious about it you can download it from Gianni’s GitHub repo ). After ONE HOUR I just completed 20% of the workshop and then we had to go away . People just wanted to kill me, I guess… luckily on their tables there were only Cardboards and the meals were served with plastic knifes :-), so I’ve been safe. So, why have I made a so terrible workshop? Inexperience. That’s it. I thought that doing a workshop was like recording a YouTube tutorial video, but this is not the same, because in a frontal lesson: Not everyone comes with the computer configured in the right way : so people came with different versions of Unity, for example. People make many questions and so you waste a lot of time . This is especially true if this is a workshop for beginners. Unexpected things happen (the more educated way to say “s*it happens”): so for example people downloaded Unity Google VR integration and the package had bugs (thanks Google, seriously). I had prepared my workshop so that it was modular and I could strip away parts… and this was a great idea, but it has only saved me partially. Lesson learned: you have to take the time that you thought you needed for the beginner workshop and multiply it by 3 . Then, as Gianni suggested me, it’s better to distribute the slides with all workshop passages to all the participants… so that, if they fall behind, they can still continue with the workshop with their time by themselves. Furthermore, make the workshop material and the final version of the program available online, so people can re-do and continue learning at home (I’ve made this and people appreciated it). If someone of GDG or of the workshop alumni is reading this post… I’m sorry, guys! Now let’s talk about things that gone good: The theoretical part of our speech went very well and created curiosity in people : we got lots of questions. We enjoyed the nice atmosphere of the event and laughed a lot with the GDG guys. We have many new friends now! The showcase of our tech went very good : despite the fact we were only two people with a reduced setup of ImmotionRoom , we made a good amount of people to try our full body VR system. Everyone liked it and we got lots of compliments… and questions. Apart from this, we also exchanged business cards with potential future partners . At the exhibit participated most of the VR companies of Turin, so we got the opportunity to talk to all of them. Furthermore, in the public of the event were people from other companies in disguise and after having them to try our system, some of them said us that they were interested in what we do! As I always say in these post-mortems : go to the maximum number possible of events and there talk to the maximum number possible of people. You will make lots of unexpected meetings that could turn into business partnerships. We tried a Daydream device ! Wow! It was the first time for us. I know I know, you’re curious about the last point… so, here you are a little Daydream review . Google Daydream is a mobile virtual reality headset, meaning that it works simply inserting your phone inside it . Thanks to some NFC magic, you open the lid, insert the phone into it and then you close your headset… and voilà! Virtual reality for you! Currently the only supported phone is Google Pixel , but more compatible phones of different brands (and especially prices: the upcoming ZTE’s Axon 7 will be Daydream compatible and will cost half of a Pixel!) are to come. If you’re thinking “It’s like Cardboard or Gear VR”… yes, it kinda is. More similar to Gear VR ( almost identical to Gear VR, to be precise ), since this is a high-end mobile headset. Graphical quality is really awesome , like the one of Gear VR with Samsung S7. I tried it and the graphics were really luminous, well defined and smooth. Loved it. Furthermore, the headset is super-comfortable, thanks to the fact that all its external parts are made of foam and fabric. I want to underline this point a lot: Daydream has set a new bar for comfort in virtual reality . The external in fabric is something truly original and Google thinks that this makes the headset more natural to wear, since it feels less like a techie thing and more like a piece of clothing. A Big G on the side makes it clear that this is a Google product. You can interact easily with the demos in VR thanks to a super-practical remote . It is a 3DOF controller (meaning that it can detect only rotations, so you can use it to point objects) that lets you perform simple interactions (especially clicking and swiping) on the objects of the scene. It is very interesting, since it lets you interact in a very efficient way with your hand making very little effort : I liked it a lot ( even more than I liked the Oculus Remote ). When you’re done with the headset, you can put it inside the headset using the rubber band that is in the lid . Many people has said to me that they didn’t get that this is the place for the remote… so be careful… this is its place! In the end, I can say that I liked Daydream headset a lot… it’s a great piece of hardware supported by a great phone like Google Pixel . And that’s it with my post-mortem. In the next days we’ll see if all the business cards we exchanged will lead to anything.. It is always beautiful making VR networking. We’ll see you around in some VR events… in the meanwhile, let’s all dream about virtual reality! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/february/13/sognando-la-realtà-post-mortem-plus-a-little-daydream-review/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/february/13/sognando-la-realtà-post-mortem-plus-a-little-daydream-review/ Mon, 13 February 2017 11:45:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/31/oculus-touch-vs-immotionroom/ Last month we started experimenting with Oculus Touch (they’re really awesome controllers… I’ve written my first impressions here and here ) and we’ve also made our first experiments in using Oculus Touch with ImmotionRoom system . This video showcases some of the experiments we’ve made. From those tests resulted clearly the differences between the use of Oculus Touch and the one of our ImmotionRoom system , that employs Kinects  with virtual reality headsets to obtain full body VR. These are very similar to the ones that we’ve already announced in our previous post where we made a comparison between ImmotionRoom and HTC Vive solution. Oculus Touch is clearly amazing because of its precision and stability : despite the fact that Vive is better in room-scale tracking, Oculus Touch still do a great job. Infrared tracking with 2 or 3 cameras has some glitches, but it is stable, responsive and precise. ImmotionRoom uses Kinect tracking, which has not been made with virtual reality in mind, so it is surely slower and less precise . You can see this at the beginning of the video, where you can see the same avatar of the player with ImmotionRoom and Touch together: Touch is faster and more precise, while ImmotionRoom avatar’s hands are fairly slow and jitter a lot. But what Touch still lacks is the use of full body : when something has fallen to the floor in Oculus First Contact, I tried to kick it, but my avatar had no feet. With ImmotionRoom you have your full body and this improves the presence enormously . Try to look better the secondary third-person avatars in the video: full female avatars are something that makes you feel like you’re interacting with another human being, while Oculus Avatar SDK blue partial avatars are obviously a synthetic object. Futhermore with ImmotionRoom you can kick objects and even walk nausea-free in VR walking in place in real life, like I show in the video. Finally, with Immotionroom you can have your hands free of controllers and this is a great advantage if you have to put on and off your headset lot of times. By the way, if you’re interested, you can download ImmotionRoom and try it for free now by  clicking on this link . So, there are pros and cons in both solutions… but, wait a moment… why not use both? ;) We’ll keep you updated! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/31/oculus-touch-vs-immotionroom/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/31/oculus-touch-vs-immotionroom/ Tue, 31 January 2017 10:00:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/24/immotionar-at-sognando-la-realtà/ We are very happy to announce you that we have been invited by local GDG community to participate as speakers to their event Sognando La Realtà ! GDG means Google Developer Group : they are lots of Google communities all around the world and this one is located in our city, Turin, so it is called GDG Torino . We know them well, since they helped us in marketing our DTC event and most of them were inside Jetop when we participated at our first exhibition ever, the WTT . They are young, enthusiastic and smart people and we love them, so when they called us, we immediately answered yes! Event has this wonderful name of “Sognando La Realtà”, that in Italian means “Dreaming the reality” and will be focused on virtual reality, especially Android-oriented virtual reality (so, Daydream and Cardboard). The picture of a girl wearing an OSVR headset is a clear signal that they’re open towards all technologies, though. There we will make one of the two workshops : as always we will give a brief introduction between the different kind of realities , then we will introduce Unity, we’ll showcase our ImmotionRoom full body VR solution and… for the first time we’ll also do a practical session ! You can come and develop with us a little application for Google Cardboard that shows how to use gaze-interactions mechanism for this headset! Wow, it would be super-cool! This is a shiny preview of what you’ll do… So, what are you waiting for? If you’re near Turin , on February 2 nd come and follow our workshop at 17.00 at Holden School! It will be a pleasure for us! Get more info here or register here ! We’re waiting for you! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/24/immotionar-at-sognando-la-realtà/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/24/immotionar-at-sognando-la-realtà/ Tue, 24 January 2017 10:40:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/16/immotionar-at-holo-dev-day-milan-italy/ After the great success of our DTC event , we have been invited by epic HoloLens experts and Microsoft MVPs  Matteo Valoriani and Marco Dal Pino as speakers to their Holo Dev Day event in Milan (Italy) on January 21st! Wow! The event, organized by DotNetLombardia , DotNetToscana and NuiWorld will be a super-interesting day where everyone can learn the basics of HoloLens device and related Unity 3D development . In the afternoon there will be a guided lab where people will develop their first HoloLens app. Let’s all remember that Augmented Reality will surely be a technology that will change our everyday life in the next ten years , so learning how to develop for the best present AR glasses, the HoloLens , can be a great opportunity for you to take a leap towards the future! We will have a 45-minutes talk at 10.15AM and we will give an introduction to AR/VR theory, we will explain the basics of Unity 3D and will also talk about our ImmotionRoom solution ! What are you waiting for? Get more info and sign up for the event at this link ! We would be very happy to meet you face-by-face and talk about augmented and virtual reality! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/16/immotionar-at-holo-dev-day-milan-italy/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/16/immotionar-at-holo-dev-day-milan-italy/ Mon, 16 January 2017 19:15:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/13/immotionroom-v042-is-out-now/ We’re very proud to announce the first upgrade to our ImmotionRoom system ! We’ve listened to feedbacks from testers and communities (so, from you!) and made some fixes to make you appreciate more our software! Of course our TO-DO list is still enormous , but since today there are some less elements on it! First of all we fixed some bugs on the Management App… and we added some little explanations to each screen , as our fantastic tester Sasha Le Baron asked us! Look… aren’t they pretty? Then we fixed something in the SDK… for example now the right hand in our UMA avatars closes correctly… and most importantly hands are better-placed in the world (we tested this using Oculus Touch!). We also fixed that nasty orientation bug that we had with Vive. And point-of-view from Cardboard is now much better! And then the most important thing: we brought ahead our develop-once-deploy-everywhere vision! Now there is a new feature that lets you actually import all headsets plugins and then switch between one target headset build and the other just clicking on a menu item!!! All settings, prefabs and all the required stuff will be automatically set! It’s awesome for cross-platform building! We strongly believe in software freedom, that everyone should build every game for every possible platform … so we’ve taken a great step in this direction! Our game Hit Motion follows exactly the same pattern, and it is the first one to use this new build facility. Hope you’ll like this... come and download our latest version here to check it out! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/13/immotionroom-v042-is-out-now/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/13/immotionroom-v042-is-out-now/ Fri, 13 January 2017 10:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/12/oculus-touch-full-review/ Hello all! Here’s Tony from Immotionar! After having given my first impressions on Oculus Touch on my personal blog and having made first experiments with them and our ImmotionRoom system , it’s time for an Oculus Touch full review ! One of that flood-of-words reviews, like the one I did for HTC Vive , Oculus Rift CV1 and Razer OSVR . Are you excited by this? I hope so! So, fasten your seatbelts and let’s take a look together at this awesome controllers ! (ah, you don’t have the time? No problem, go simply to the TL;DR section at the end!) At first, let me show you the unboxing operation . This is the box that arrived at my house. I was so excited I received Touch controllers! Opening the box… voilà, Touch are there! The box has same design of the Oculus Rift one: very neat and elegant … look the two boxes one next to the other! They’re like mother and child together! Inside, exactly as with Oculus Rift there is a black box containing all the stuff. But while Rift one was a hard plastic box, this is a cardboard one, so it is slightly less elegant. But it’s cool anyway. Inside this medium-sized box, there is all the Oculus magic stuff. Let’s open it. Take a moment to see its wonderful elegance. Oculus has nothing to learn from anyone regarding elegance and design. The choice of the font, the black color, the design of the controllers, the positional tracker… everything conveys the idea of pure elegance. Inside the box the most important things are obviously the two Touch controllers and the additional positional tracker, necessary to use the controllers. Here you are with a zoom of one of the controllers. And a photo of the controllers with the Rift all together. In the box there is also other stuff. On the lid there is a little cardboard box with the Touch label. Let’s open it! Inside there is the controller for Rockband VR (I’m quite skeptical about its usefulness, but Palmer Luckey was so happy about distributing it with the Rift…), some batteries for the Touch controllers and… Yes! It’s it! The absolutely useless health & safety guide! The piece of paper no one has ever read in his entire life!! Awesome! I’m so glad having spent $199 to have it!! The most precious part of the package! You can slide a little plastic lid of the Touch to insert the batteries! Every Touch needs only a battery. This time Oculus didn’t give us DURACELL batteries but very famous MITSUBISHI ones (guess that they’re finishing the money… cardboard boxes, Japanese batteries… :D :D :D). Still don’t know how much time a battery can last inside a Touch, but I can say you that there’s no OFF buttons on Touch controllers and this is a nuisance. After you’ve inserted the batteries and set up the second positional tracking sensor, you are finally ready to start using your brand new Oculus Touch!   Inside hands, Touch fit very comfortably : again, Oculus about design and comfort is absolutely the king among all VR companies. Touch stay very well inside your hands and are very well crafted as well. People on reddit report that they’re also very solid : if you punch with it the furniture of your home, they will come out intact. I can confirm that random collisions don’t ruin them… but be careful the same… they’re very precious! If you’re asking yourself if every Touch can fit inside both hands, the answer is no: Left Touch can fit only in left hand and the same holds for Right Touch . Both controllers have a specular setup: that is, both have 3 buttons on top of them (but with different labels) and a thumbstick to be selected with your thumb, one trigger for the index finger and one for the medium finger. Little and ring finger role is holding the controller all the time, so even if you release all the other triggers, the controller stays inside your hand. Once you’ve tried their comfort, it’s time to do some setup. You have to go to your Oculus Home app and select to perform a full setup. I will not cover all the setup stages here, but basically you have to pair the controllers (like with all Bluetooth devices), then select your height, then set your play area (the Guardian system, that is like Vive Chaperone or our ImmotionRoom Girello) and make some final configurations. Setup is quite straightforward, but in my opinion Vive one is better (and our setup is even better and more usable, since it’s done using your full body through a smartphone app). Reasons are: I prefer Vive “funny” setup with little cartoon men telling you what to do, instead of black elegant Oculus setup. This is just a matter of taste. Oculus setup contains a moment that I just don’t get: you have to go in the center of your play area, while still looking at instructions at your screen and make some kind of calibration putting your Touch controller in front of your face, then confirming your orientation and then waiting to see if your setup is ok (and if it is not, you have to modify it). As a technician I know why this has been made this way, but this is absolutely not user-friendly as all other Rift stuff. This setup is again mixed on the screen with a final moment inside your Rift headset. I hate this choice: Vive room setup is made entirely without wearing the headset and in my opinion this is better (and putting the headset on and off having the controllers in your hands is something really annoying). Anyway, 5 minutes later, you’re ready to try your new awesome toys! After the setup the system will start a little tutorial that will teach you the basics of Touch , so which are the triggers and the buttons and how to activate them. After this very short tutorial, it will launch Oculus First Contact for you .   Oculus First Contact is like a mega-tutorial for Oculus Touch controllers . It is a lab-themed playground where a cute robot makes you do stuff using Oculus Touch, teaching you how to use triggers and buttons. If you want, between an instruction and another, you can play with surrounding objects, picking up objects and launching them. You can even be rickrolled! After the little tutorial and First Contact the user is able to do a basic use of Touch controllers. Surely some practice is still needed, but I think it is enough to teach the basics. During this mega-tutorial stage I got my first true impressions of Oculus Touch ( the one that I’ve already described here ), that is that they are awesome controllers, but they’re still controllers . Forget all that marketing stuff about “True hands presence”, this is all false. You have no true hands presence and if you try Touch controllers looking for it, you will have a great delusion , like in fact I had. Oculus Touch DO NOT TRACK YOUR HANDS FINGERS . They track only the controllers and thanks to some sensors on Touch surface and some heuristics, they’re able to reconstruct an estimate somehow plausible of your hand position and rotation and of your fingers pose. All fingers have only fixed states that gets detected based on how they touch the controllers (so, if you index finger presses its trigger it is detected as closed, otherwise it is detected at extended). Fingers are tracked this way: Thumb has opened and closed stage. Thumb closed stage can have different positions, since all the upper surface of Touch is sensible to contact… so if your thumb is on the X button, for instance, you will see it on top of X button even in VR. If your thumb does not touch the surface, it is considered as opened Index finger has three states: opened (when it doesn’t touch its trigger), semi-closed (when it touches its trigger) and closed (when it pushes the trigger). Index position is fixed, like the one of all other fingers with exception of the thumb Middle finger has two states: opened (when it doesn’t push its trigger) and closed (when it pushes the trigger) Ring and little finger are not tracked: they have opened and closed states that match exactly your middle finger status. Our friend Alberto says that “it’s like having 3 fingers, like Homer Simpson”. This means that you have exactly a controller that emulates somehow the use of a hand, but it is absolutely not as having your hand in VR . This is why a tutorial is needed: because you need to know how to use that controllers. Since I love natural interactions, I don’t like this approach a lot: I prefer Leap Motion where you have nothing to explain, because you see your hands tracked exactly as it is in real life and you move it exactly as you would have moved it in real life: no tutorial is needed. But Touch can give you more tracking stability, precision than Leap Motion… and, most importantly, haptic feedback. Touch can give you haptic feedbacks through their physical presence (pushing a button gives you physical feedback for sure) and controller vibration (software controlled). Don’t misunderstand me: Oculus Touch are awesome ergonomic controllers for virtual reality, the best VR controllers I’ve ever tried . But they’re controllers and cannot guarantee you true hands presence. About tracking stability: I’ve not been able to try room-scale yet, so I tried the standard two-camera frontal setup. I found tracking very precise and super-satisfying. Only some glitches when tried tricky situations (like controllers very close each other or parts of my body occluding the controllers). As everyone says, Vive room-scale is slightly better and works out of the box with 360 degrees tracking (it doesn’t need additional sensors, USB extending cables and this stuff), but trust me that this is satisfying as well. Remember that with 2 frontal sensors setup, you can’t turn around 360 or tracking will be lost. Just some words about available content. There are already lots of great games for Touch (lots of people love SuperHot, for example…) This is some free content that I’ve tried: Oculus First Contact . Great mega-tutorial, very nice to introduce people to Oculus Touch. Oculus Quill/Medium.  Two awesome art applications. Quill is like Google Tilt Brush, it lets you draw in 3D, while Medium is more like a sculpting program, where you can model something in 3D and then even making screenshots to your creation or exporting them to a 3D model! These programs have a very usable interface (of course you have to follow a tutorial) that really outperforms the one of Tilt Brush. Very beautiful apps… unluckily I’m very bad at drawing, so this is the best that I’ve managed to create in Medium… Avatar . YOU MUST DO IT. It is not an app that you download… you access it through your profile inside Oculus Home. It will let you customize your avatar so that it somehow resembles you: it is a very simple app, but its environment is surely beautiful, its interface is very neat and creating your avatar is very funny. So, give it a try! Gary the Gull , I didn’t get it that much… I supposed I’ve had to talk with that stupid seagull, but it every time gets bored and flies away… FFFFFF Dead and Buried : firing game, western-zombies style. Nice, but in single player you can only practice with bullseyes… Bullet Train . JUST EPIC. My favorite game. This is only a small demo, where you find yourself inside a metro train and then you have to shoot all enemies inside the station. Firing with Oculus Touch is simply fantastic, since pushing the index trigger resembles a lot pushing a gun trigger, so presence is enhanced. This is the game that I enjoyed the most… so, give it a try! The Unspoken. Great magical-fight game… seeing a fireball growing inside your hand palm is awesome. The problem with this demo is that there is a super-long tutorial to teach you all the controls, so if you want to just give the game a little shot, it is far from optimal. I wanted to try VR Sports Challenge too, but all the other game filled my hard drive!! (Some games occupy really an enormous amount of space). Some considerations on my little gaming experience: Lots of game asks you if you are left or right-handed and this is really good. In some games I miss full body really a lot! Experimenting every day with full body VR makes me very sensitive on this point… sometimes I just want to kick things but this proves to be not possible! Eh, with ImmotionRoom system all this is better! Touch controllers need some time to get used with them . Lots of time I got confused on what controller button to press (I confuse a lot index and middle triggers) and this proves again that they are not completely natural controllers. But after some training, this problem diminishes a lot. I’ve VR legs, but after playing with them for 2 hours, I got some dizziness . Maybe there are some little tracking problems that can cause little side effects (with Vive I haven’t had the same problem). Last topic is about developing with Oculus Touch SDK in Unity. I’ve already talked extensively about this on my blog, so I will not make again a full review or you will need an entire day to read this post! Anyway, if you’re developer and want to start developing for Touch with Unity follow this link  and read all my SDK review. Here I’ll just say that developing with Touch in Unity is very easy : Oculus has provided lots of facilities to read their input in a very simple way. There are still some little issues in implementing the Avatar SDK to see your avatar, but they can be solved in few minutes once you know how to solve them. We’ve also made some experiments in mixing Touch with ImmotionRoom and the integration has been done in few minutes . This is the video of our first results: Amazing isn’it? And Oculus tracking system doesn’t interfere in any way with Kinect ( like Vive does , instead…) so our full body VR system can work very well with them! (ah, if you want give it a try for free, you can download ImmotionRoom full body VR solution here ! We’d appreciate a lot!) It’s time for some recap! Pros : Very well crafted controllers Precise tracking Super ergonomic VR controllers Great content available Cons : Price (199$ are not that cheap) Non optimal room-scale Hands interaction not 100% natural Some people don’t like Oculus because it is like the Apple of VR Do you have to buy it? If you have a Rift and you have the money, OF COURSE ! These are amazing VR controllers! Do you still want to use the gamepad?! And that’s it… if you have any questions or considerations, feel free to express them in the comments! (And if you want to share this article, we’ll be very grateful to you). See you at next review! TL;DR Oculus Touch are amazing ergonomic controllers made for Oculus Rift CV1. They’re very well crafted and fit perfectly in your hands. Their tracking is great and give you a good-enough emulation of your hands pose, that lets you have quasi-natural interactions in VR. Best VR controllers so far. Available content is already great. They add to Oculus Rift a new kind of VR interaction, so if you can afford them my strong advice is to buy them. http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/12/oculus-touch-full-review/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/12/oculus-touch-full-review/ Thu, 12 January 2017 09:15:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/02/virtual-reality-in-turin-italy/ Hello everyone. Some times ago I was talking on reddit with a guy that, once he discovered that we are Italians, said to me that Immotionar was the first Italian virtual reality startup he had heard of . This someway makes me happy, but on the other side makes me sad, since this means that my country has not a great technological reputation. Let’s be honest: we’re quite behind the others . USA and China are far before us. France and England, too and even The Netherlands has come out with interesting companies, like VRee. Here in Italy, when we began with this adventure (it was 2014) it was very complicated for us talking about virtual reality, since very few people knew it . Now the situation is far better. Even in our home city (Turin) we know lots of other startups that work in the VR field , like for instance: Crehome : that makes interior design using Google Cardboards Tiny Bull Studios : an indie game studio that is developing Blind , an innovative game for PSVR Funix : another indie game studio 34BigThings : the indie game studio that has developed Redout, the well-known racing game that supports VR Immodrone : a startup that uses Samsung Gear VR to sell big houses NoReal : a company that makes 3D models, even VR-optimized ones VTopia : a company that scans big environments with laser scanners and puts them in VR experiences Furthermore there are communities that deals someway of VR, like T-Union or the GDG . And last but not the least, obviously there are us of Immotionar ! We keep pushing for full body virtual reality using Kinects and are open in talking about every project that regards VR! (contact us if you have any VR project you have to realize!) And you? How is it going virtual reality in your country? And in your city? Let us know in the comments! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/02/virtual-reality-in-turin-italy/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2017/january/02/virtual-reality-in-turin-italy/ Mon, 02 January 2017 09:40:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/23/happy-virtual-reality-holidays-card/ Hello all! Holidays are coming and we of Immotionar want to wish the best to you all . It has been a great year for virtual reality, where the technology has made great steps further and epic devices like Oculus Rift CV1 or HTC Vive have been released… and every day we’re more sure that this technology, with its cousin AR, will change the way we interact with computers . And 2017 will be even more epic (we’re waiting for HTC Vive 2 and Microsoft headsets…). We want to wish happy holidays and a marvelous 2017 to all the people with which we share the passion for virtual reality : our ImmotionRoom beta testers that believe in our project; people of the communities of reddit (like /r/virtualreality , /r/oculus , /r/vive , /r/osvr ) that are amazing in share all the latest news on VR and that are always ready to help and to discuss about VR; communities of Hacker News , Linkedin, Twitter and DISQUS; UploadVR and RoadToVR guys for all their amazing work in giving us the latest news in VR; great Facebook community of VIRTUAL REALITY ITALIAN DEVZ which we love a lot; our friends of Tiny Bull Studios , Crehome , Funix , etc...; our fans Sasha, Johnathan and Peter; and lots of other people. We wanted to make you an amazing virtual reality greeting , so we remembered about our side project ErYue that we made during last Easter… and prepared a Virtual Reality greeting card for all of you! Unluckily we didn’t have much time, so we took some Asset Store models and tried to create as fast as we could something that could be nice (sorry if it is not super-polished!). You can download our Christmas greeting card from our home page , by looking for the download of “Best Christmas 2016” for the headset you own . If you have a Kinect you can experience the greeting card with your full body using the ImmotionRoom system , otherwise you can also live it simply with your HMD! Hope that you will like this little gift and we wish you the best for this Holiday and for the next year with the bottom of our heart! If you like it, please share it with your friends and comment below or on  reddit . See you in 2017! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/23/happy-virtual-reality-holidays-card/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/23/happy-virtual-reality-holidays-card/ Fri, 23 December 2016 22:25:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/15/we-ve-released-the-first-cross-platform-full-body-virtual-reality-game/ After the Kinect v1 integration  we’ve announced just 2 weeks ago, it’s time to make another great announcement: Immotionar has finally relased Hit Motion in pre-alpha! What is Hit Motion? Well, before explaining it… look at this cool trailer we’ve made! OK, now that you are full of coolness, I can explain you: Hit Motion is a game where you find yourself in a ring in the outer space and you have to hit every enemy that comes near you with punches, kicks or hitting them with whatever part of the body you prefer . It is the first full body virtual reality game that is cross platform , in the sense that it works with every headset ( Oculus Rift , Gear VR, HTC Vive , OSVR , Google VR) and with every supported sensor (at present time only Kinect v1 and Kinect v2). We want everyone to have fun! The game can make you sweat and stay fit while having fun, and while you play you can look like a true kung-fu master. Our vision is that everyone should use his/her full body in VR , because only using the full body you can have true virtual reality. That’s why we are developing the ImmotionRoom system to let you see and use every part of yourself…  and even if at the moment it uses a sensor like Kinects, our testers reactions are pretty cool… So, what are you waiting for? Download ImmotionRoom system  and try it now for free ! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/15/we-ve-released-the-first-cross-platform-full-body-virtual-reality-game/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/15/we-ve-released-the-first-cross-platform-full-body-virtual-reality-game/ Thu, 15 December 2016 11:30:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/09/full-body-vr-with-htc-vive-is-here-and-it-s-great/ Few days ago we made new tests with our ImmotionRoom system and HTC Vive . As we already said in our post about our first integration with HTC Vive, Vive had great interferences problems and so it was difficult to be used with our system. The headset screen became frequently grayed out and the user experience was greatly affected. Now it seems that things have gone better: Vive and Kinect still interfer, but not as bad as before . Valve people maybe have made their tracking algorithm more robust and so now there are less problems. But yesterday we discovered another super-interesting things: the just integrated Kinect v1 does not have problems with Vive! You can put your headset straight in front of the sensor and notice no issue! It’s a super-great news!! Full body VR with Vive is finally possible!! Download ImmotionRoom and try it out! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/09/full-body-vr-with-htc-vive-is-here-and-it-s-great/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/09/full-body-vr-with-htc-vive-is-here-and-it-s-great/ Fri, 09 December 2016 16:40:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/01/full-body-virtual-reality-with-kinect-v1-is-here/ Today is a great day here at Immotionar, because we can announce you that finally our full-body VR ImmotionRoom system  does not support only Kinect v2 anymore, but it is fully compatible with Kinect v1, too! This is the first time in more than 2 years that ImmotionRoom has abandoned its Kinect v2 monopoly to finally embrace its vision to support all possible sensors and offer every user the ability to choose the one he/she prefers. We chose this as the second supported sensor because lots of people have asked its support on reddit and because our great supporter Sasha asked for it… and we care our customers’ opinion really much ! Surely Kinect v1 is an old device and offers worse performance than its version 2, but this also mean that you can buy an used version for very few money: having a look an Amazon, I found that buying this + this  you can have a fully working Kinect v1 for Windows for only $70, but people has reported us that at GameStop they can buy a used one for $30. This means that with only $30 you can have a taste of full-body virtual reality!! Even with a wireless headset! You can try the experience of seeing yourself, kicking objects and walking in place to walk in virtual reality! What are you waiting for? Download our ImmotionRoom system now and give a try to the future of VR! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/01/full-body-virtual-reality-with-kinect-v1-is-here/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/december/01/full-body-virtual-reality-with-kinect-v1-is-here/ Thu, 01 December 2016 19:30:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/november/14/wtt-2016/ Hello everyone! If you’re one of our fans since long time, you should already know that last year in November we participated in an exhibition called Wearable Tech Torino , where we had really a great time. It has been the first exhibition I participated in as exhibitor and it was the first time that ImmotionRoom  has been showcased to the public, so I’m really attached to it. I wrote a super-long post mortem about it, that you can start reading here and finish here . This time the Wearable Tech Torin o (often shortened as WTT) will hold again! It will be again a great exhibition where you can attend super-interesting workshops and have a look at booth of companies showcasing cutting-edge technology, like virtual reality, drones and augmented reality. You can find all info about this year edition at its official website . Unluckily this year we will not showcase again our ImmotionRoom solution at the WTT. Reasons are pretty practical: we are in a rush for a new launch of ImmotionRoom and don’t have time and money to organize a good quality booth for our company. We’re really sad about it, because this year we could take there the new Oculus CV1, our new avateering system and in-game-interactions! People would have been amazed! But hard decisions have to be taken if you’re a startupper… and this is one of them. But we’ll be there Saturday 19 November (4.30PM) doing a great workshop about virtual reality , as we did in Brescia and at the DTC … so, come and see us! Please support this great event : spread the word about it as much as you can and attend it if you’re here in Italy (it’s free, so why don’t you go and have a look?). I’ll surely go and see what great products are there this year, so if you come too, we can meet and chat a bit about VR! Don’t miss this opportunity! Have a nice VR day… see you at WTT 2016! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/november/14/wtt-2016/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/november/14/wtt-2016/ Mon, 14 November 2016 15:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/27/immotionrooms-of-the-world-unite/ Hello everyone! Just a post to show you how we’re happy that there are finally other ImmotionRooms in the world and showcase you some photos of them! First of all there is the ImmotionRoom of Massimiliano Ariani , the great game designer of NTW who is developing a little game with us.   Look this photo I took at his home: there are some underpants here and there, but this is how true gamers live virtual reality. And the Kinect is so important for him that he has assigned it its own bed!   While he plays, all the actual room around him doesn’t count anymore: he’s in the outer space fighting with spaceships! Max is a great man and a great evangelist of our technology and has also recently made an ImmotionRoom test in Tuscany! Kudos to him! Going out of Italy borders, our great fan and VR Enthusiast Sasha Le Baron  has recently installed a little ImmotionRoom in the UK! England has recently voted for the Brexit, but ImmotionRoom is unifying Europe again!   Look how beautiful it is: a gamer PC, a Kinect v2, a Gear VR… and a Kinect v1 waiting for our upcoming integration! Sasha is going to test our game and we hope he’ll like it a lot! He’s a very supportive person, so deserves the best VR experience possible! And we’d like you to share your ImmotionRoom photos, too! If you have an ImmotionRoom installation, share its photos with us! We’re very curious to see your setups and we’ll share the best ones! If you want to see some photos of our setups, you can download them from our presskit . I’ll just leave you with a smiling Gianni to brighten up your day! Cheers! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/27/immotionrooms-of-the-world-unite/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/27/immotionrooms-of-the-world-unite/ Thu, 27 October 2016 15:00:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/11/turin-view-conference-2016/ Organizers of View Conference asked us to talk a bit about their event that will be hold here in Turin… and we were like "It’s a great event… so, why not?" and so we’re here spreading the word for them. View Conference is an annual event hold in Turin, Italy (our city) where for a few days there will be super-interesting talks about animation, 3D, graphics and this kind of cool stuff; hackatons, awards and job proposals will be at the fair, too. It’s a comprehensive event around the computer graphics world. Some friends of ours have gone there in the last years and always found it very interesting, because the talks are all made by very very skilled people. This year, virtual reality too will be a topic, and some talks about it will be made, like this one . If you’re wondering why they didn’t call us to make a VR speech, I don’t know… mail the organizers and ask them! We’re very very skilled too! :) Such a cool event ain’t cheap, and you can find all pricing information at this page . For more information, you can visit their website . If you’re in the computer graphics world, our advice is to give it a look! Happy CG! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/11/turin-view-conference-2016/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/11/turin-view-conference-2016/ Tue, 11 October 2016 23:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/04/supernova-brescia-post-mortem/ You know, last Saturday we went to Supernova Festival in Brescia (Italy), to hold a session about gaming, VR and ImmotionRoom . This is a very little post-mortem about this experience, with the typical Q&A structure. We’ve already read lots of post mortems about your events (like this or this ). What has this experience taught you the most? Why it has been different from the others? Well, it was the first time that we were in front of a non-optimal audience . Supernova is a festival hold in the streets of cities, so your audience is composed by people that were passing by, students forced to be there by teachers and elderly just there because they were bored at their homes. Yes, there are also young interested people, but they’re not the majority… and that’s a great problem. The guy that was holding the speech previous to ours had an audience full of high-school students just playing with their phones. When the teachers took them away, he found himself speaking in front of all empty rows… yikes! The location was also non-optimal for our ImmotionRoom setup : the weather was sunny and the location was an open space… and we all know how Kinect doesn’t love sunlight… :-( So there were tricky conditions… how to overcome that? Well, as always, as I love to say in every post-mortem: sh*t happens, so keep your blood cold, think fast about a solution and solve the problems . For example, to cope with the sunny weather we positioned the Kinect so that it was influenced the less by the sunlight. About the audience… how to handle them? Well, it’s hard talking to an audience where half of the seats are empty and where some people just randomly get up and go away. What I did was focusing on that 3-4 guys that were super-careful about my talk : I just ignored all the others… I knew that those 4 guys were listening to me, I knew that they wouldn’t have abandoned the room and so I concentrated on them. Having enriched 4 new people on how to develop with VR is anyway something very good. Another curiosity: it is true that sh*t happens… but I wouldn’t have imagined that this sh*t would have attracted lots of flies! While we were talking a lot of flies were flying alla round us… they were very disturbing! Unluckily I have no advices on how to solve this issue, I’m sorry. Was it useful in the end? Surprisingly yes. I thought that speaking in a public square, with only 40 people listening to us would have been quite useless… but the truth is that it proved to be very useful because we get 3 new contacts for possible VR projects! Wow! Every event, even the smallest one, can give you unexpected work contacts … so attend all the most possible events! Some other good stuff to add? Well, Brescia is a small but quite beautiful city. Maybe too much flies :D, but it’s beautiful nonetheless. I’ve also seen for the first time a Tesla Motors car… wow, it’s really wonderful!! Some final thoughts? Like in every event, something has been good, and something else has been bad, but we managed in overcoming all difficulties and that’s really good ! Gianni, Beppe and me did a great work and a good talk :-) Thanks a lot to Supernova organizers to have invited us… see you at our next event! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/04/supernova-brescia-post-mortem/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/04/supernova-brescia-post-mortem/ Tue, 04 October 2016 17:30:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/04/dtc-post-mortem/ Hello everyone, finally I have some time to talk you about our experience in organizing an event, the Disruptive Technologies Conference (DTC) . It has been rough, but we did it in the end! This post-mortem, as all the other ones (like this one or this other one ) will be in my lovely Questions & Answers structure… what are you waiting for? Start reading! What was the DTC? The DTC was an event designed to talk about disruptive technologies . We wanted to hold it in our city (Turin, Italy) because we want to create a VR pole here, we want to shape a local virtual reality community. But we didn’t want to focus only on VR, we wanted it to be a wider-range conference, so we included AR and mind-reading devices in our agenda. It has been held in Turin, inside the local incubator rooms ( I3P ) on September 23rd, 2016. Was it the first event you’ve ever organized? Yes, absolutely. We had other events where we went as speakers, but this was the first one completely organized by Immotionar . Obviously Beps gave us a big hand in organizing this. What was the roughest part in organizing the event? Well, organizing an event, even if so little, is not as easy as you may think . Every little aspect of the event may be a nuisance. Things like organizing the lunch, coordinating the speakers, check that everything is going to work in the place where the event will be live and so on, make you loose a lot of time. The roughest part in my opinion has been the budget management . We started organizing the event too late (1st of September when the event was only three weeks later), due to our participation to EIA and vacations, and so we had to do everything in a hurry. The problem is that if you want to ask some sponsorships to some big brands in the VR world (like Unity, Razer, Leap Motion, etc.), you have to start the request months before the event (someone says 6 months before), otherwise they’ll answer you that they have no more budget left. And that’s what happened to us: for example Unity was very kind to us, but refused to be a sponsor due to the too few time of forewarning. Having few sponsors mean having few budget, so we had to make compromises for the lunch we offered, the location and the coffee-break we didn’t offer. Thanks a lot to sponsors that accepted our proposal anyway, like Jetop . Here the lesson we learnt the hard way is: if you want to organize an event, start organizing it 6 months before the event date . When the 23rd of September has arrived, how did you feel? Very tired and stressed. The days before it have been very hard, because we had to make sure that everything would be alright for the speakers and the audience : so we had lots of meetings, sent lots of emails and made lots of rehearsals to verify that Youtube streaming would work as expected . Anyway, thanks to this lot of beforehand work, we were quite sure that things would have been good. Here the lesson is: work a lot the days before the event, to make sure that the day of the event everything is organized to be good . Seems obvious, but I think that it’s important to remark it. Did things go all good? Of course not :-). You can work the hardest to make everything alright, but Murphy with his laws will come nonetheless and will ruin something . First of all, the food for the lunch arrived a lot late. When we discovered it, we were quite frightened because it was lunch time, people were hungry and we didn’t know how to distract them. You can’t go on stage and say "Ok, now it would be lunch-time, but there is no lunch yet so we’ll stay here frozen waiting for the food!". You have to find a way to not let people notice there is problem. Gianni had a marvelous idea and said the speaker of the last session to go on and make some demo on the stage: this has been super-useful to keep people watching the session, while we, behind the courtains, were trying to fix things for the lunch. In the end the food arrived and very few people noticed that there have been some issue . Pheeew. Some speakers came with all the material on their laptop, despite the fact we had said them to give us all the materials beforehand, because we had to run  everything on the PC that was performing the Youtube streaming. Even in this case, Gianni had a great idea and used Remote Desktop to let speakers use their PC through the streaming PC. The setup for the mindwave-reading device took more time than expected and the audience began to grumble. I understood that this was no good, so took the microphone and went on stage to entertain the public saying… something. Well, I felt myself like the commentators of football matches when the match is really boring and they have to say something just to fill the void and don’t let the people to fall asleep while watching TV. I just started saying things about the next talk, maybe stupid things but kept the audience calm until the moment when everything became OK. The lesson is always the same of every post-mortem: be prepared, because sh*t will happen . Always. And you have to keep your blood cold, think very fast and solve the problem. Come with a solution, even not the smartest one … maybe not the one that makes you appear smart (like me saying random stuff on the stage), but something THAT WORKS. OK, but was there something that went good? Almost everything. We went sold-out in 10 days , and had more than 100 people there in the room, and more than 130 in streaming. They’re very good numbers for a such little local event. There were only very little inconvenients and lots of people made us compliments for how the event went: the topics were super interesting; a lot of people were able to try HoloLens, mindwave-reading devices or our ImmotionRoom solution for the first time in their life; a lot of speakers from startups and communities (like CreHome ) were happy to have exchanged some business cards with other people in the room. It has been a super-event! This was thanks to the fact that we proposed a lot of interesting topics and have spent a lot of time in organizing it the right way. How has your speech been? Well, Gianni talked about the difference between AR and VR, while I talked about how to develop in VR using Unity. Then we showcased our ImmotionRoom solution. Our talks went super-great! No problems with the microphone, the audience or the demos. People kept interested. Some funny stories to add? Well, in the afternoon I wanted so bad to try mindwave devices that I asked Sebastiano Galazzo to try a little game made by him where there is a little snail on the left part of the screen, that moves towards the right only if you’re concentrated on something. Well, I tried it… but… the snail didn’t move in any way! Then some people helped me in concentrating, but the snail kept moving and stopping… and so Sebastiano jokingly said to me: "You’re a psychopath with a lot of attention desorders!!". Ahahahahah OK, it’s true I think :-) What has this event left to you? First of all, the consciousness that we’re able to organize good events… and the willing to organize a bigger and more important one in the future. Then the awareness that there is a lot of interest in AR and VR. Finally some useful contacts for future projects for our startup! Any final thoughts to add? We’ve been very happy of this event. We want to thank all the speakers (you can read their names at the official website of the event ), especially Clemente Giorio because he made me try the Hololens for a lot of time ;) and thanks a lot to the friends that has come to see us (like Andrea, Claudia and Davide that we met at EIA… or Max, who's working with us to make our demo game). Hope to see all of you at our next event! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/04/dtc-post-mortem/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/october/04/dtc-post-mortem/ Tue, 04 October 2016 16:30:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/29/htc-vive-vs-immotionroom/ A lot of people ask us always the same kind of questions, like "What do your product offers more than HTC Vive?", "Why ImmotionRoom is different from HTC Vive?", "Aren’t Vive controllers better because you’ve got the haptic feedback?"…, so I’ve decided to write a post to actually explain why we’re better or worse than HTC Vive. Actually, the title of this post is not completely true: ImmotionRoom CAN work with HTC Vive , so it’s not one against the other, but with the "vs." every title becomes automatically cooler, so I’ve written it like that :-) What do we offer more than HTC Vive? You can see your body : with our system , thanks to Microsoft Kinect tracking, you can see the avatar of your whole body, while with Vive you can only see your hands (or VR controllers). You could say that this is not that much, but when we made people try ImmotionRoom at the WTT exhibition , we saw that the user is truly amazed by seeing his own body and that it gives him a great sense of presence. You can interact with your whole body : again, since you have your whole body, you can use it to interact with the surrounding virtual world: you can use your feet to kick objects (e.g. great for a fitness or soccer game), you can use the basin to dance, you can use all your arm in a fighting game. With Vive you’ve only hands and head. You can walk in a natural way : with ImmotionRoom, you walk in place to walk in the virtual world and this is a nausea-free and natural walking mechanic. With Vive you have to use teleportation, that breaks all the immersion magic. Actually, a somewhat-similar mechanic exists in some games for Vive, but involves you moving your hands to walk… and this is not that natural and surely blocks you from interacting with your hands while walking. You have hands free : no controllers, only your body! This is the same as for Vive, if you use Leap Motion. You can use any headset : our product is completely cross-device. You can go wireless : ImmotionRoom supports lots of different headsets, including wireless ones. So you can have your full body in virtual reality, with no cables. This is impossible for Vive. OK, so, we’re really cool. But… Vive costs less . ImmotionRoom requires you to buy Kinect sensors and stuff and this is not cheap. Vive controllers give you haptic feedback : you can touch the Vive controllers and so have haptic feedback of what you’re doing. Since we use no controllers, we can’t provide this kind of important feedback. Vive is more precise : thanks to laser tracking of Lighthouses, it’s really precise; Kinect is more rough. …but we’re working hard on these points! Hope to have answered to these questions once for all. Vive is super-cool, but with ImmotionRoom it’s even better… ;) http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/29/htc-vive-vs-immotionroom/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/29/htc-vive-vs-immotionroom/ Thu, 29 September 2016 17:00:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/29/festival-supernova-brescia-2016/ From September 29th to October 2nd 2016 , the third edition of the Supernova Festival, the innovation and creativity fair , will take place in Brescia (Italy). An event organized by Talent Garden, focused on innovation, technology, companies and people. This edition will answer to the question " What is the impact of technology, innovation and creativity on the environment? ". Current and future changes to the environment will be analyzed, in order to prove that technology and creativity can limit damages and improve our lives. Reality and digital world, social, sharing, virtual reality, and many more will be topics discussed in workshops and conferences. Me, Antony Vitillo and Beppe Platania , will be speaking on Saturday October 1st, from 12PM to 2PM , presenting  a workshop focused on the future of gaming, what is Virtual Reality and how to develop for it . After a short introduction to VR fundamentals, hardware and "the" Realities, we'll see how to develop using Unity 3D. We'll see how to interact and move in Virtual worlds and we'll showcase ImmotionRoom , with a short live demo. See you in Brescia! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/29/festival-supernova-brescia-2016/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/29/festival-supernova-brescia-2016/ Thu, 29 September 2016 11:00:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/21/dtc-announcements-streaming-beta/ Hello all, since we’re approaching our upcoming super-cool DTC Event , we have 2 great announcements to make to you ! First of all, if you will not be able to attend the event personally, you’ll be able to watch its live stream ! On September 23 rd , have a look at our YouTube channel and watch our conference! Of course you’ll not see physically the Microsoft HoloLens and our ImmotionRoom system , and that will be a pity, but you won’t miss any of the super-interesting talks! ;) Second big news is that we are re-opening our beta program ! This means you will be able to download and try our ImmotionRoom system at your home! What are you waiting for? Hurry to request our beta ! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/21/dtc-announcements-streaming-beta/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/21/dtc-announcements-streaming-beta/ Wed, 21 September 2016 14:20:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/16/a-big-thank-you-to-our-sponsors/ We’re completely committed in organizing our DTC event , solving logistics and technical problems , trying to make sure that everything will just be fantabulous. We’re learning a lot from this experience and surely we’ll write lots of this learning process in the post-mortem that will come after it. One of the things that we made for the first time was looking for sponsorships for the event . Due to unexperience and the short time available (event is on 23rd of September, but we were unable to organize it until the end of August, due to EIA and vacations), this has proved to be pretty hard. But in the end we found someone that has believed in us and so we want to thank them with all our heart. So, thank you to: Treatabit , that is our incubator that is helping us in organizing the event Microsoft YouthSpark and Fondazione Cariplo , which have provided room and food coverage through one of their programs TTG , the local technical community where Gianni and Beppe are organizers, which is great in making interesting tech workshops and seminars here in Turin FifthIngenium , the company where Matteo Valoriani, one of the Hololens speakers, belongs to JETOP , a no-profit organization of students of the Politechnic of Turin. We want to underline the last name in a particular way: JETOP guys are the one that have organized the WTT event that has been our first exhibition, where we got a great success , they have been very kind during the exhibition and in all other occasions we had to deal with them . So, we’re very happy to have them supporting us in this project and we’ll surely support them for the WTT edition of this year ! Be sure not to miss it, because it will surely be a very interesting event! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/16/a-big-thank-you-to-our-sponsors/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/16/a-big-thank-you-to-our-sponsors/ Fri, 16 September 2016 22:00:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/12/the-dtc-is-sold-out/ We’re super-happy to announce you that our tickets of the Disruptive Technologies Conference we’re organizing are gone sold out in about 10 days! W00t! We didn’t expect such a success! Thank you all for your love! We’ll be very happy to meet you on 23 rd of September to talk with you about augmented reality, virtual reality and our ImmotionRoom system ! It will be an awesome day! You can still register for the waiting queue, in case somebody cancel his booking. http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/12/the-dtc-is-sold-out/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/september/12/the-dtc-is-sold-out/ Mon, 12 September 2016 10:00:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/august/31/join-us-at-the-disruptive-technologies-conference/ Hello everyone! Immotionar is proud to announce the first event organized by us! It will be a super-cool day, with interesting speeches about the virtual realities: we’ll talk about our ImmotionRoom solution to have your full body in virtual reality; after that, Sebastiano Galazzo, Microsoft Azure MVP, will talk about the use of brain waves with virtual reality (wow, amazing!). The afternoon will be mixed reality oriented, with three talks by three Microsoft Emerging Experiences MVP (Gian Paolo Santopaolo, Clemente Giorio and Matteo Valoriani) about the device everyone is talking about: Microsoft HoloLens! Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality are cousin technologies and are all super-interesting topics. We’d like you to join us to learn more about them and to have a debate around these new evolutions of technology! You can find the event agenda and the registration link at this page (sorry, only in Italian). What are you waiting for… join us! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/august/31/join-us-at-the-disruptive-technologies-conference/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/august/31/join-us-at-the-disruptive-technologies-conference/ Wed, 31 August 2016 17:30:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/august/26/our-experience-at-the-european-innovation-academy/ Hello everyone! It’s been a long time since the last time I’ve written an article for this blog! How have you been in these months? Have you had great vacations? I hope so. We had to rush to finish the beta for our ImmotionRoom SDK and then we had to attend the EIA program for which we won a grant . Now we’re developing a game for our virtual reality system and I’ve just started my personal blog , dedicated to VR and startups too. So, a lot of things have happened in all this time! Today I want to talk you about our experience at the European Innovation Academy. European Innovation Academy (shortened in EIA) is one of the most important accelerator for startups in Europe and in the world . It’s a 3-week acceleration program where people is called to try to turn their business idea into a successful startup. This organization has born in Estonia and then it spread across Europe, before in France (Nice) and then in Italy (Turin). To participate in it, you (or your company) have to invest lots of money (about 1500€) to attend this high-specialized program. We attended this program in July 2016 and so many things have happened that I should write an entire book to have a comprehensive talk about it. I like telling EIA stories in front of a good coffee, so if you come near Turin, offer me one and I’ll tell you some nice anecdotes :-). I’ll try to summarize my opinion in 4 bullet lists: how EIA is, things that you have to know before attending it, personal considerations, what we’ve achieved. So, let’s start talking about the course organization: 3-week program, 5 days a week (Monday-Friday) from 10am to 8pm. Every day is organized as follows: lessons in the morning; lunch; afternoon lessons; break; exercises relative to the followed lessons to perform with the support of a tutor; team work without external support. The very first day you have to create teams composed by 5 people. You may have an idea that you want to develop and so you have to find other people that will join your team; or you may just want to learn and so you have to find a team to join. Team must be heterogeneous: engineers, business and marketing people, UX designers, should all be part of every team. This is to have a team ready to create a startup (because e.g. you can’t create a startup formed only by nerd people). The lessons and the exercises follow a complete path from the business idea until the funding search: first lessons are about good business ideas; then they talk about teams; startup ecosystem; market definition; revenue model; prototyping; marketing; business model; how to get the money; how to pitch in front of investors. Lessons are made by speakers from all over the world, including Silicon Valley speakers. During exercises you’re followed by international and very skilled mentors (from various sectors: there are marketing mentors, IT mentors, speech mentors, etc…). If you feel stressed, Life Coaches are there to help you. The last day you have to pitch in front of some investors, who will judge if your startup is eligible of a prize. First 5 startups get prizes. What you have to know before attending it: It’s a very stressful mind-consuming program . If you think about it as a relaxing summer school (as I did), you’ll be disappointed. You have to learn new concepts every day and apply them the same day you have learnt them. There’s no pause: if you fail your tasks one day, you’ll have to recover it the day after, together with all new tasks of the new day. Every day there will be new difficulties, new dramas and new things for which you’ll have to push yourself further your comfort zone limits. The previous point is true especially if you go there with the idea in mind of creating a new startup and so you’re playing with your future and with your life. There are people that go there just to learn… and while some of them are really dedicated in helping their team, others are just lazy and do not put that much effort in the program. These are the people that go out all the nights with other EIA alumni and that can say that the program is funny. I’ve envied them a lot! Try to have breaks and have fun sometimes anyway : it’s hard, but you have to do it. No lunch offered and that’s a pity. But usually the sponsors offer you lots of good stuff: we had access to free coffee, water bottles, Tic Tac candies, Esta Thé iced tea and a free Ferrari ride! The program is all in English language: if you can’t speak or understand English, don’t attend it. 80% of mentors and speakers are really skilled people that can teach you a lot . Use them as much as you can, make lots of questions, listen carefully to their lessons, exchange business cards with them . Even all alumni are skilled people: talk to them as much as you can, exchange ideas, opinions, meet people from all around the world: make connections, make friends. The program is particularly useful if you don’t come from a business background and if your startup is still in an early stage. Business people find it interesting, but they already know at least 50% of topics covered by the lessons; techie people like me find everything really interesting. If you’re startup is already estabilished in the market, this program is useless; instead, if you’re in early stage the program can make your startup push the throttle . The program is really Silicon Valley oriented: they require your startup to reach 100M$ of income (Yikes!) at the 5 th year, as in the US these are the rules to have investments. These principles may not be true in all parts of the world (in Italy if you reach 5M$ in enough, for example). All the program is like a big game: sometimes they say you to do things that are ok to play and learn, but are not super-great for a company that wants to have a solid reputation. Criteria for choosing the winners are not that clear and some of judges decisions may disappoint you. The cake is a lie : there is no actual prize for the program . Even if you reach the fantabulous first-five bubble, you just win some biscuits and a certificate. No money and no investments, keep this in mind. The great part should come AFTER the program : after three weeks you end having nothing in your hands, apart from notions, connections and a good start. So use the network you’ve developed to actually create your startup and have success. Personal considerations and what I’ve learnt: Don’t trust anyone: we have two people that promised to be part of our team and then betrayed us. That has been terrible for us, because we couldn’t find the fifth member for our team. The program has been really stressful for me… I was always one of the last people to leave the room and sometimes I had to work in the evening too. Three weeks have passed like three months. I’ve learnt more in 3 weeks of EIA than in 2 years as a startupper. One of the greatest things of the EIA is that it makes you push your comfort zone limits really further. Every day you have to absolutely work hard if you want a chance to succeed, and even do things that you don’t want to do, things that you were to shy to do the month before: I contacted strangers via email, had to do a public speech, write about our product on reddit… and so on. You get so stressed that either you learn to handle stress in the end or you give up. During the program you receive lots of bad feedbacks… really lots : I’ve received as an individual bad feedbacks about my public speaking skills; as a team, we get destroyed a lot on the business side by mentors and investors. One of the investors started telling us the world “bulls**t” so many times while listening to our pitch that we almost got depressed. The right attitude here is to always recover from problems. It’s ok to get depressed for a while after a tremendous bad feedback or a great failure. I know that motivational quotes on facebook say that you should be some kind of robot and don’t feel any kind of pain… but let’s be honest, we’re humans so it’s quite normal to have bad moments. The important thing here is that all your bad attitude has to last only until night . The day after you have to wake up with a positive attitude, take the failure of the day before as a simple feedback and find a way to take in count that feedback to make your project better. Don’t surrender, don’t fall without getting up really quickly . Being sad will take you nowhere. Listen to feedbacks of people more skilled than you , even if it can hurt. As an example: I had lots of bad feedbacks about pitch for my startup, everyday. It has been hard, but they really helped me at becoming a better speaker: when I had to pitch our idea in front of the cinema room with 150 people listening to me, I, with the epic support of Gianni, made a great pitch in the end. If I had just ignored all the feedback, I would have made a poor pitch; Due to lots of bad feedbacks and problems you’ll have lots of problems and dramas with your team. Try to remain calm and take the right decisions. Investors are people that in some seconds decide what they think about you and your idea and they have no problems in saying you that you’re an idiot saying bulls**t. You have to have thick skin to talk with them, be prepared. You have to create a startup only if there is a market for which your product is solving an actual problem… otherwise you’re only toying with technical stuff (and we, as nerds, tend to make this error a lot!). Whatever happens, try to smile the most possible. Riding a Ferrari is super-epic! I only made a little lap as passenger of a California T, but it has been the most epic lap of my life! Is like riding a missile, with all internal organs going places when the driver pushes the throttle! A must do for everyone. So, what have we achieved? We’re better entrepreneurs now . We’ve a new potential collaborator in our team, Davide! We’ve a broader network of contacts , including super-smart and connected people from the Silicon Valley. We’ve had great feedbacks from people that have tried our system and from reddit and hackernews communities ! We’ve met investors! It has been our first time and now we have contacts and a good knowledge on how to talk with them. We’ve a new business model. We’ve been nominated as one of the 10 most awesome technical solution of EIA! (With our IT mentor saying that it’s the best technical innovation he’s seen in 3 years of EIA! Wow!) EIA has been very stressful, but super-useful and I advice anyone that wants to be a startupper to follow this program. I enjoyed it with the team composed by me, Gianni, Antonella, Davide (a business student from Milan) and Warren (an investor from South Africa). I was the (terrible) moderator of this team and I want to thank them for the time spent together. I want to also personally thank Andrea Basso, Jari Ognibeni, Remigia Spagnolo, Rick Rasmussen, Stephan Reckie, Kaarel Oja for what they’ve taught to us and for having helped us a lot during the program. I also thank all the volunteers and all the EIA people and all mentors/partners/investors that have participated to the accelerator because they have made this program so awesome! Now Immotionar is stronger than ever! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/august/26/our-experience-at-the-european-innovation-academy/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/august/26/our-experience-at-the-european-innovation-academy/ Fri, 26 August 2016 08:30:00 Gianni Rosa Gallina http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/july/01/immotionroom-sdk-private-beta-dev-testers-needed/ Hi everybody! It's been a very busy time here in our labs: after many many months of hard work we're finally approaching to the first release of our ImmotionRoom SDK ! In the upcoming days we're going to start a private and limited beta testing round. If: you are an enthusiast VR developer with Unity 3D you are interested in full-body avatar , room-scale and  natural hands/feet interactions you have one or more Microsoft Kinect sensor with its USB adapter for Windows you have one or more supported VR headset (Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, HTC Vive, OSVR HDK or Google Cardboard) you love hacks and workarounds, bugs, crashes, minimal documentation, experimental stuff, etc. you are willing to try our ImmotionRoom solution before anybody else in the world then fill out this short form and we'll contact you shortly. Apart from being very thankful for your time and help, we will provide you special offers when the product will be officially released. Keep in mind that testers spots are very limited so, if you are interested, apply immediately! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/july/01/immotionroom-sdk-private-beta-dev-testers-needed/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/july/01/immotionroom-sdk-private-beta-dev-testers-needed/ Fri, 01 July 2016 13:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/31/oculus-cv1-my-first-impressions/ 大家好！ Finally our Oculus Rifts have arrived and so we have managed to try them!  Ready for a super-review? It will be like the one I did for  OSVR , so fasten your seatbelts!  ( If you’re in a hurry, read only the TL;DR at the end ;) ). Also, if you are curious about the HTC Vive, you can read our other review here ! Oculus arrives in a quite heavy box. Outside is very pretty and well crafted. The magnetic lid is just a touch of class I can’t forget to mention. And inside it’s even better. Very elegant and solid, with all the stuff put inside with great order. Honestly I liked a bit more the interior of the OSVR box, even if it is a cardboard one, but this is a matter of taste. The first thing we took off has been, obviously, the headset. I was positively surprised by it: it’s really really elegant, smaller than the DK2, made with superior materials and light-weighted . Really a great product: this device costs a lot, but it has been made keeping in mind design and quality: In the box is also present the positional tracker, designed to stay on the desk and not attached to a display: Oculus ships with two controllers. The first one is the “Oculus Remote”, a really light remote controller for the headset, that lets you interact easily with Oculus Home menus and some demos. I like the controller a lot: it fits naturally in your hand and does its job really in a great way . It is the thing that I’ve appreciated the most among the devices that ship with the headset. It’s wireless, so you can freely move with it everywhere and frees you from the pain of having look-and-stare interfaces. Great product! There is a lot of other stuff in the case and among them there is the second controller. I just can’t stand it: it is a Xbox Controller: come on guys, you’re sending me the future of virtual reality and you’re giving me as a controller this thing dated as the Roman Empire? Awful choice, sincerely. Why don’t give me a mouse or a keyboard at this point? Or the joystick of the Commodore? As I’ve experienced after, when I tried the Vive, appropriate controllers for virtual reality are really really important ; and Xbox Gamedpad is not one of them. All praise the remote! But the first prize for the most useless thing goes to the little book titled “Health & Safety and Warranty guide”: I can’t tell you anything about its contents, but I can assure you that it’s great when thrown outside the window. It flies really fast… OK, so: done for the unboxing. Time for some installation: The software installation takes some time, but it goes pretty straightforward . It’s not supershort, but it’s really easy. You also have to accept some Health & Safety warning… you know, that kind of things that you say “OK, whatever” and click ok even if it’s written inside that Oculus can kill you or can hypnotize you to wear flip-flops all the day. After a classical installation, a setup stage must happen inside the Rifts, where you see yourself inside a portal, a black room and you have to configure your height, the lenses distance and the reset orientation on the up-axis. This happens to be the first time you wear your Rift. My first impression when I’ve worn them? F**king comfortable! Really, it’s the most comfortable headset I’ve ever tried : Vive, Gear VR, OSVR… are all behind Oculus in this. They’ve worked a lot on ergonomics and the results are great: the headset is really light on your head, and you can wear it for hours. The integrated audio means that you have not to wear additional headphones and this is really handy. Congrats to Oculus for this. Even the cable that binds you to the computer is very light, so I appreciate it a lot. But there are two main drawbacks: To wear the headset you are forced to push the rear part behind and wear the headset completely. This mechanism is a bit awkward and doesn’t let you to take a glimpse inside the headset just putting it against your face … you have to wear it completely. Besides that, using Oculus covers, like VR Cover ’s one, becomes really a PITA. If you have long hairs, your hair will just struck inside the headset… That said, let’s return to initialization stage. You perform all the operations using your head and the lovely remote. The graphics of the initialization are awesome and neat: it is super easy to perform . The only problem is in the setting of zero-orientation. Oculus positional tracker requires you to stay at certain distances and orientations or it will report problems in this stage (e.g. I tried to set zero orientation at 180 degrees w.r.t. the tracking sensor and it didn’t allow me to do this… why???). After the initialization, you find yourself inside what Oculus calls the “Dreamdeck” (Google has DayDream, Oculus has DreamDeck… I just wonder when people choosing names in VR companies will wake up…), a white environment looking like a virtual paradise, where you can try some experiences. These are short demos to show VR capabilities: I’ve been on the top of a tall building, then in a hall waiting for a T-Rex to walk over me, then just saying hello to an alien. These demos are a nice appetizer, and they’re short but will amaze you with their graphics. CV1 is far above DK2 in everything . The graphic is astonishing, guys! Less screen door effect, faster response, clear images… everything we’ve always dreamt of! Really loved it! After this, you go to the Oculus Home: an enormous house (eh, it would be great to live in there!) with the same menu you can see in the Gear VR. You command it with gaze and with the remote. Great and comfortable. You can see Facebook hand in all that “connect with your friends” stuff, to which I kindly reply with: There are some great titles in the store… but really, almost nothing is free . You see a lot of games priced in the range 9.99$-59.99$ and in my case they were not worth the price (I was just giving a short try to the headset, couldn’t spend money for that). These are the things that makes me understand why a lot of people on Reddit are angry with Oculus: Oculus Home gave me the impression of a closed ecosystem, taking care of exclusivity and aimed at social integration. Personally, I don’t like this approach, but it’s my personal opinion. Wasn’t able to try Lucky’s Tale because the Xbox Controller doesn't work on my buddy's workstation for an unknown reason, so I tried some free demos: Henry . Henry is just what animation in VR should be: a short movie, giving you strong emotions, focusing your attention exactly to what you should look to follow the story. Oculus Studio has made a great work, it’s really great. And the fact that is rendered in real-time means a lot… you have positional tracking, so you can just go near to Henry and try to hug that cute hedgehog. The graphical quality is impressive. The story is a bit too simple, but, this is what it made me feel: Invasion . Invasion is another super-interesting animation short movie, about some stupid aliens trying to kill a smart rabbit. Very short, but very well made. I can’t say you more to not spoiler anything. Watch it! Showdown VR . The same demo I tried for OSVR: really really awesome. I’ve read they made some render optimization stuff to make it VR-ready for 90 FPS and with Oculus graphical quality, it’s really worth a shot. The Body VR . Found inside the Concept section, it should be a new way to teach you how the human body works. The idea and the graphics are good, but I didn’t like it that much, especially because there are lot of unrequested movements of the camera, so it just gives you a lot of motion sickness. And that’s all for the demos I’ve tried. My final opinion is that Oculus Rift CV1 is really a great product for seated experiences: easy-to-use, ready for every consumer, very comfortable and with great graphics . But what about my experience as a developer? Well, as a nerd, I can tell you that Oculus Unity package ( the Oculus Utilities ) are almost the same I’ve used in the last months , so I’ve nothing more to add to what we all already know: they’re easy to use, have fancy prefabs for the Camera and the Player Controller and have a great community behind. We used already existing ImmotionRoom integration, and almost everything went fine . There has been only one single problem: with latest Unity + Oculus Integration, you’re unable to stop positional tracking. If you say to the OVRManager that you don’t want positional tracking, everything will just get mad and you’ll see a lot of objects doubled inside your headset (bad stereoscopy) that will make your eyes cross and your stomach puke a lot. We solved this using a dirty hack (a father game object just un-doing the positional translation), but this is a problem that has to be solved. So, today we can proudly say: ImmotionRoom works with Oculus CV1! One last thing: if you’re interested in Oculus specs, compared to Vive, look at this awesome link . Well, just a time for a recap now: Pros: Super-comfortable headset Headset and companion stuff is really well-crafted Easy to use, consumer ready Clean and neat graphics Awesome remote controller Lot of awesome demos and titles to try from the first day Unity stuff is the same we’ve all used in the last months Cons: Xbox Controller is NOT a VR controller: a true controller is missing Headset design has some minor flaws: it is impossible to take a glimpse in it Oculus Home too closed and Facebook-oriented All the shipping mess (Pepperidge Farm remembers, Palmer!) Poor positional tracking (no built-in room-scale), because it is optimized for seated experiences Do you have to buy it? If you’re focused on seated / standing experiences, you do have enough money and you don’t mind a console-like ecosystem, surely it’s a fantastic product . So my advice is yes, buy it! Otherwise, if you want room-scale and a more open ecosystem, go for an HTC Vive . If you’re a maker with a pure open-source heart, or you want to start experiencing VR spending few bucks, go for OSVR . Hope you liked this super-long review! Let me know what you think about it in the comments! Cheers! TL;DR Oculus Rift CV1 is the first consumer headset by Oculus. It’s quite expensive (699$), but it’s really elegant and well-crafted. Very easy to use and to setup, it also has wonderful graphics; it is the most comfortable headset and maybe the best for standing / seated experiences. At the moment it lacks a lot the presence of a valid VR controller and its ecosystem is a bit too closed. Wonderful product, anyway! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/31/oculus-cv1-my-first-impressions/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/31/oculus-cv1-my-first-impressions/ Tue, 31 May 2016 10:25:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/31/htc-vive-hands-on/ Hello, everyone! Here in ImmotionAR we are always working on cutting-edge technology,  so my buddy Gianni has bought a set of HTC Vive and let me try them!  Cool, isn’t it? I’ll write you a review about my experience with them… so you’ll know how they are. Ready? Go! ( If you’re in a hurry, read only the TL;DR at the end ;)  ). Also, if you are curious about the Oculus Rift CV1,  you can read our other review here ! It’s my habit to start each review with a storyboard of the unboxing… but Gianni took the Vive here already unboxed, so I can only say some word about the unboxing operation I’ve performed here with Gianni’s packaging. The Vive system comes inside a diaper box made by Pampers and it’s packaged in a really weird way, with the headset inside some plastics and the other stuff just lying around in the cardboard box. Not a great packaging for a hardware worth $800! :D Just kidding, obviously the Vive comes with an elegant packaging . If you want to see a true unboxing operation, just look at YouTube videos, like this one .  You can see the content of the box in this photo (together with some mobile headsets): The headset seems an improved DK2, with a frontal camera . Its surface is covered of “valleys” containing the markers for the Lighthouse system: the result is a black plastic surface that reminds me the moon land. The frontal camera is there, but at the moment is unemployed. The headset is attached to a really heavy cable that is connected to the computer. The device is accompanied by the two famous wireless controllers. They’re more heavy than I expected and I didn’t find them super-comfortable . Their donut-like design is cool, anyway.  The device has to be plugged to the PC and to the electricity using a box , that reminded me the “damn belt box” of OSVR system . The great advantage of this one is that you don’t have to attach it to your belt, but stays on your desk. So this box is not a damned one :-) Gianni had already performed an installation of a Vive system, so he just taught me how to do it. The setup is not as easy as Oculus one, so I can tell you for sure that Vive is still not consumer ready . If you’re a technician, you’ll find it easy, anyway. You have just to plug everything to the PC using the box and you’re ready to go for a standing experience. To use room-scale, you have to mount the two Lighthouse stations. Each station will need a power socket in the surroundings, so be sure to have enough of them. You also have to position them very carefully. They must constantly see each other during all the time (to guarantee sync between their data), so you have to put them at a maximum distance of 5m and you have to put them at a high position (near the ceiling is ideal), or they’ll give you a lot of problems during virtual reality experiences.  If you can’t attach them to your wall, you have to find some workaround… we just used an Oculus CV1 box to help in putting a lighthouse station in high position (who’s said that Oculus and Vive can’t work together? :D ) After all this stuff have been done, you’re not ready yet. You have to have Steam installed, then install SteamVR . At this point, you have to configure everything using their configuration tool. The configuration tool of SteamVR is really awesome . While Oculus has focused a lot on design and elegance, Steam has tried to make a fun experience about everything: so, all the configuration process is full of funny cartoon guys showing what you have to do. I love this approach a lot, so thumbs up for Vive Room setup ! At first, you have to choose if you’re configuring the system for room-scale or for standing experiences . As you know, room-scale is the ability of Vive to let you move in a 4x4m space freely, with controller in your hands. If you have bought a Vive and don’t try the room-scale experience, you’re just insane. It’s like going to Paris and not going to see the Eiffel Tower. So, choose “Room scale” and don’t have regrets :-) The funny cartoon guys will guide you throughout all the process, telling you all the steps required to calibrate the system . This steps serve to give the system an origin and to tell Chaperone how big your game area is (Chaperone is the system that warns you that you’re exiting from your safe game area and that probably you’re going to punch some valuable object inside your house). This steps are very easy for a dev, but a bit strange for a non-technician. After all this setup, finally, you can play with your Vive! This is the moment when I’ve worn it for the first time. My impression with the headset ergonomics is that it is like an improved DK2, more well-crafted and more-comfortable, but absolutely not comparable to the comfort level of the Oculus CV1. Inside, the screen and lenses are like CV1 ones, obviously, but external design is not ultra-beautiful. The cable connecting it to the PC is really large and heavy and this is absolutely another great problem. As I’ve said, the controllers are more heavy than I thought and in my opinion they have too many buttons and touchpads, so my final first impression is : great, but there is still a lot to do on design and ergonomics . I started playing the tutorial, where a robot just tells you everything about the headset, the various buttons on the controllers and Chaperone. This tutorial is just fantastic: great graphics, great animations, clear explanations and everything is full of fun : you see balloons inflating from your controller, laser rays, the little funny men… it’s really amusing. And it makes starting appreciating all the work Steam and HTC have done: room-scale is really awesome and the ability to see the controllers in virtual reality exactly with the same shape and pose of real life one is something astonishing. I can’t describe it. And the precision is fantastic … the tracking error is matter of millimeters, so I can say it’s really accurate. I tried making the controllers lose their tracking, but it’s really hard: you have to occlude them completely. I’ve been really impressed by room-scale . And you know that I work on a immersive virtual reality system , so it’s not easy to impress me. Kudos to Steam! After the tutorial, I tried some demos. Vive is backed by the power of Steam, the greatest videogame store, so it is obvious to find a lot of demos, paid and free. Steam interface in VR is really great and easy to be used using the controllers (and you can also control your PC Desktop in VR using the controllers!) The most important demos I tried have been: Tilt Brush . We’ve all seen that great video online showing you Tilt Brush potentialities. It is really an interesting demo showing you the new artistic potentialities of virtual reality. Its interface is not perfect (controls on the left hand are not easy to pick) and if you’re not an artist, you’ll just end up doing awful things in VR instead of doing them on paper :-), but it’s really cool to try. It’s well made and unique in its genre. Job Simulator : one of the most well-known game for Vive, it makes you try different jobs, with cartoon graphics and funny environment. It’s really epic, because it just exploits all potentialities of the Vive: with the controller you can just pick every object around you with your hands and interact with them in a natural way: to eat a donut you have just to grab one and put it near to your mouth! The thing that I love most about this game is that you can interact with almost everything. My favourite game. The Lab : a collection of short experiences, showing you some cool stuff, like the ability to shot enemies like if you were an archer, just shooting them using your hands as you had a bow and an arrow in your hands. This is the game where I experimented HTC Vive locomotion system: the teleportation. Using triggers on your controllers you just point the direction where you do want to the teleport, and you go instantly there. Not very immersive and natural, but surely efficient . Don’t like it a lot. Fantastic Contraption : a puzzle like game, where for each level you have to mix the pieces you have to create a machine that has to go to some target point. Building an object with room-scale is really cool… is like being a child and playing with Lego. I could stay there for hours. Really awesome. After all this time playing…ehm, working, I can state that I love room-scale of Vive a lot. Its headset has convinced me with its superior features. You know, I'm working on ImmotionRoom , that is similar to Vive room-scale for a lot of things , so it is obvious that I like this feature. But after having tried it, with its laser accuracy, I can say that I’m sure that this is the way I want virtual reality ! Anyway, I’ve experienced some problems, too. Sometimes has happened that I occluded the Lighthouse station communication with my headset and so everything went black, blocking me from playing. Sometimes the system just went crazy and we had to reboot SteamVR. They have still to work on stability a bit . Room scale is cool, but it’s also tiring : you can’t stay standing in a room, moving your hands and feet all the day: you begin to sweat and to feel the strain after some time. Then, being used to work with ImmotionRoom, I felt the absence of an avatar a great problem for feeling truly immersed in the VR world . And the two controllers always in the hands are uncomfortable if you have to wear and remove the headset a lot. So, we decided to integrate ImmotionRoom with Vive .  The use of SteamVR plugin for Unity has not been so straightforward for me . All other headsets plugins (Cardboard, Oculus / Gear VR, OSVR) are very similar, because their headsets are similar: there is a player controller, a custom camera, etc… Since Vive is made for room-scale and not for a walking scenario (it uses teleportation), it is completely different . So, integration with our system required a lot of hacking into existing scripts, and some matrix transformation knowledge (I hate it!!!). Then, we discovered that our system network initialization just created problems for Vive initialization (Unity just got mad and headset froze a lot of times) and so we had to perform some hack to make everything work… but in the end… …voilà! Finally we have HTC Vive with full avatar!! ! And with controllers completely mapped correctly, and also the ability to not use them, but go with your bare hands! And, most important: you can walk in place to move inside the virtual world , so you don’t need that awful teleportation mechanics! We did the integration as a Proof-of-Concept : keep in mind that it is just an experiment and a lot of work has yet to be made before it can be used in our SDK. I forgot to mention about their plugin that SteamVR is completely open source  and cross-platform, with the community expanding it every day! One last thing: if you’re interested in HTC Vive specs, compared to Oculus CV1, look at this awesome link . OK, time for some recap: Pros: Room scale is really awesome: gives you freedom of movement Controllers really VR oriented and tracked with great precision, that enhances immersion Lots of great demos to try from the first day Setup quite simple to do if you are a nerd guy A lot of stuff is open-source and the community is implementing a lot of features (like Leap Motion support in SteamVR) Cons: Not consumer-ready: still requires some technical skill for the setup Not perfect from an ergonomics and design point of view You really miss the avatar Teleporting system breaks the immersion a lot Unity plugin that has to be studied a bit, before using it Do you have to buy it? If you have the money and the space to use room-scale, surely yes. HTC Vive are awesome! If you don’t have the space for room-scale, go for Oculus CV1 and its marvelous seated/standing experiences. If you’re a maker with a pure open-source heart, or you want to start experiencing VR spending few bucks, go for OSVR. Hope you liked this super-long review! Let me know what you think about it in the comments! Cheers! TL;DR HTC Vive is the headset produced by HTC in collaboration with Steam. Its cost is high (799$), but it offers a complete and truly innovative system. Vive comes with the so-called room-scale tracking, that is the ability to move freely inside a 4x4m area, with the head and the controllers in the hands tracked with an astonishing precision. It is the first headset with natural interactions. This innovation comes with a price: the system is still not super-easy to setup and so it is still not consumer ready. There is still some work to do on ergonomics, but the device offers features that are so epic, that is surely worth a try! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/31/htc-vive-hands-on/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/31/htc-vive-hands-on/ Tue, 31 May 2016 10:25:00 Gianni Rosa Gallina http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/12/iot-conference-2016-in-naples-review/ The fourth edition of the  Microsoft Embedded/IoT Conference , that, as every year, brings together all the Italian Microsoft Windows Embedded/IoT MVPs and the Microsoft Evangelists related to the IoT world, took place on  Saturday May 7th, 2016 at Centro Direzionale in Naples (Italy) , thanks to the sponsors  Microsoft ,  BLEXIN ,  BEPS Engineering ,  Innovactive ,  adam|Factory  and  DotNet Campania  and  TinyCLR.it  communities. The day has been very interesting and many people participated. Above all, there has been a lot of interest for  Virtual Reality  and  our ImmotionRoom project , which we setup since the morning to allow people test it (and, for the first time in public, with 4 Kinects and fully wireless )! If you want a detailed review of the day, you can read my post dedicated to it on my personal blog or another review (in Italian) by Beppe Platania . Regarding our day, a t the coffee break (for those who did it...:-) ) I've been "assaulted" by people to know more about Virtual Reality and test ImmotionRoom . After launch, it was time for our session where we introduced Virtual Reality technologies and our  ImmotionAR ImmotionRoom solution . Curiosity and hands-on testing for moving in VR wirelessly and without any wearable device (apart from the Samsung Gear VR headset), pushed many participants to skip also the coffee break in the afternoon, to not miss the opportunity to test the system. My advice is to contact us or  subscribe to our newsletter  in order to know where and when we'll present  ImmotionRoom   next time ;-) Before closing, we let the last people in the room try  ImmotionRoom  and live such amazing immervise and natural VR experience. It has been a great day and, above all, everything worked very well and without any issues or new bugs! If you read some of our past event post-mortem, you already know that each time we had some new issue or strange behaviours. That surprised my a lot:  Murphy, this time, didn't strike. But I'm confident, probably he's planning something for our next events :-) Stay tuned for news about them! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/12/iot-conference-2016-in-naples-review/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/12/iot-conference-2016-in-naples-review/ Thu, 12 May 2016 14:15:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/12/immotionar-at-european-innovation-academy/ Hello everyone! We are proud to announce you that  our startup ImmotionAR is one of the 5 innovative projects selected by the Chamber of Customs of Turin, for a grant to participate to the  European Innovation Academy  (EIA) here in Turin in July! We are very happy that we will be able to participate in such a cool event, where we will learn a lot and we will meet a lot of interesting people (and potential customers and investors). It is a three-week full immersion in the world of entrepreneurship , where they will help us to go from our business idea to a full-defined business model. It will be a hard acceleration program, but we are going there with the mindset of dedicating ourselves completely in making great our startup! On Monday 9 th , we (Gianni, the CEO of Beps Engineering Antonella and me) went to the Chamber of Customs of Turin to participate to the award ceremony. The President of the Chamber, with some people from EIA, made a short introduction about this program and why they are giving these grants. Among these presentations, there was the one by Kaarel Oja, a great guy that helped us for preparing this event and that I want to personally thank.  After this long introduction , they asked us to make a micro-pitch about our startup . They had told us they’d have given us 5 minutes to make a short pitch using some slides, but… the program changed, so we had only 1 minute with no slides… uh-oh… and guess who was the first company that had to talk so that had no time to organize itself for this surprise? Yeah, ImmotionAR. And who is the PR of ImmotionAR? Guess who? Me. (Oh God, why have I chosen this job? I’m a developer after all). This is a great lesson: be prepared for everything: whatever happens, smile, think as fast as a 1 bazillion teraflop super-computer, and come out with a fast solution . And so I did, and made a micro-pitch for my company with which I broke the ice for the others. Not super-great, but not that bad, so I’m satisfied. After all the pitches, a new surprise came out: an interview for a local TV! And who is the PR that had to go in front of a camera for his first time? Yes, it was me! Luckily, the reporter has been very kind with all of us: she asked me who I am and what my company does… so I just came out with the best fluff-story about VR (it’s magic, guys!) and my first time with TV has been alright! The TV that has interviewed me is Rete7 a local TV of Turin and the Piedmont (if you’re here around… look at my interview on the TV !). I tried to be the least technical possible, to speak easily and to do not speak too much, to not result boring. After the pitch, the interviewer said to me that I’ve been great respecting the TV times… wow, I’m ready to work in the show business! (Hollywood, I’m coming!!). Every time you pitch, you have to change what you say and how you say it, depending on the context, on your audience, on the particular media: don’t forget it! During the event, we met very interesting people, like Elena, another startupper who has won the grant like us! After the event, the President of the Chamber of Customs, received our five teams in his office. He looked at all of us and said: “Ok, now tell me… what do you think will be your income in the next years?”. Panic moments. That has been a question that has surprised us a lot: I tried to answer bravely, but it was very difficult to me to say numbers, when the virtual reality market is so unknown at this time. I’ve made some big errors in this little pitch (still have to learn) and this situation has taught me two great lessons: 1)  Be always prepared to every kind of questions about your business: everywhere, everytime, about everything 2)   In doubt, say big numbers about your possible future income! After that, the event finished. It has been very interesting, a great day in which we’ve learned a lot of things! And we’ll learn a lot more in the acceleration program in July!!! Hope to live this kind of events every day… wish you all luck, goodbye! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/12/immotionar-at-european-innovation-academy/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/12/immotionar-at-european-innovation-academy/ Thu, 12 May 2016 10:15:00 Gianni Rosa Gallina http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/01/immotionroom-at-the-mvp-open-day-2016-in-rome-italy/ The Microsoft MVP Open Day is an event where MVPs can meet peers coming from Western Europe countries and networking and sharing is what it is all about! The MVP Open Day is also well-known among Corp (people from Redmond) and DX/Evangelist people. The Open Day event has a long and proud tradition in the worldwide Microsoft MVP community and, this year, Microsoft tried something different by having a Western Europe MVP Open Day event (Italy, Portugal, Spain) + Benelux and Scandinavian countries, organized in Rome (Italy) on April 29th. Every year, some of us MVPs, present sessions to the others and, this year, together with  Beppe Platania , I had the opportunity to present  ImmotionRoom and our works with Virtual Reality. In the session we presented a short introduction to Virtual Reality and related technologies (Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard, HTC Vive, Razer OSVR, etc.). We also presented which are the most important problems and challenges inside the VR world, natural interactions and locomotion above all. At the end of the session we have given to other MVPs the opportunity to test the solution using the Samsung Gear VR and live the emotion to move inside a Virtual world without any wired connection and without dressing or handling any kind of sensor or controller. All the feedbacks have been positive. A special thank you to  Cristina Gonzales Herrero  (our MVP Community Leader) and to all the other MVPs that voted for our session, and for giving us very useful and interesting feedbacks on our work. We will present a similar seminar next week at the  Microsoft Embedded Conference 2016  in Naples (Italy), stay tuned to know more. http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/01/immotionroom-at-the-mvp-open-day-2016-in-rome-italy/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/may/01/immotionroom-at-the-mvp-open-day-2016-in-rome-italy/ Sun, 01 May 2016 20:30:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/30/my-experience-with-razer-osvr/ Hello everyone! Today I’ll write a (long) review about my (short) experience with Razer OSVR , because I think there is so much attention about Oculus Rift and HTC Vive that we often forget that there are lots of other headsets here in this world. So, I’ll write a bit about OSVR. Ready… go? ( If you’re in a hurry, read only the TL;DR at the end ;) ). What is OSVR? OSVR , Open Source Virtual Reality , is a project by Razer (yes, that company that makes cool controllers for gamers) with the idea in mind to create an open source environment for virtual reality . The environment consists in two parts: The hardware: an headset that is completely disassemblable , so that everyone can easily substitute a single piece of the hmd without affecting all the other components. This is a really cool feature in case of damages, or to upgrade the headset: this means that while companies like Oculus distribute a new whole version of their visors every year, with fantastic new features, Razer distributes “upgrade kits” with only the upgraded pieces (e.g. the screen), so you can have upgrades of your headset every some months or so. At the moment OSVR is at version 1.4 (Version 1 + 4 upgrade kits) and I’ve tested the 1.3. Since this is really a nerdy thing, their headset is named HDK (Hacker Development Kit). You can buy it here , specifying exactly what do you want from your headset (all the upgrades needed, etc…). Ah, I forgot: all the hardware components are open source too … w00t!! The software: OSVR contains a set of services and utilities useful to run virtual reality applications on your OSVR device . All this software is open source and can be compiled for all platforms (so it is not a Windows-only world, check e.g. this to see how to compile OSVR-Core for Linux). Besides that, the service that commands the distortion parameters and stuff is so customizable that you can put distortion parameters of the lenses of the other headsets and use OSVR games with Oculus Rift, too! This is a list of all software and hardware compatibilities of OSVR software. About the specs: I’ve searched a bit on the web: 100° FOV, 1920x1080 screen resolution and 60 FPS screen (but it can go up to 240 Hz if configured properly). The price is 299.00$, super-ultra-competitive. Ok, now you know what OSVR is and how great is its philosophy… but, how we obtained it? We asked Razer to take part in their partnership program and integrate OSVR inside our ImmotionRoom system. We asked this because our system is really a nerdy thing to set up, so it is compatible with the HDK philosophy :-). They were really enthusiast about this idea, and so we are now OSVR Partners and have a received a free HDK 1.3 (I love free things!) . I must be really thankful towards Jeevan and Marquis of OSVR marketing office, that have been really gentle in helping creating this partnership , despite all the difficulties we had (custom office, strange Skype behaviors, ImmotionAR servers going down, etc… this partnership looked like doomed!). You know, we are partner, so you’re thinking this review is a bit biased (and I admit that in some parts, it could be), but I think that being partner means telling all the good and all the bad about a product, so to help in making a better product, so I’ll try to be as sincere as possible . When the HDK arrived, we were really excited and we started the unboxing operation. I tweeted a lot about it last week (you lost my tweets? NOOOOOOOOOO, such a shame! ;) ). Here you are some photos: the box is made of cardboard. And it is really elegant inside: where it contains the headset, that, despite the fact that is disassemblable, seems very solid . I like its design more than the one of the Oculus DK2 and the orange gives a colourful touch that I personally like. Then there is the positional tracking kit, with the IR camera and its very interesting stand, that lets you put the camera onto your screen or on the desk just bending its legs: Then there are lots of accessories (cables, adapters, etc…) to connect the device to the electricity and to the PC (I’ll talk about them in a while) and then there is this cute air-blowing brush to clean the lenses (I think it is the cuter lens cleaner I have ever seen in my life): Then some piece of paper with security concerns (no one ever reads it, we all know) and the instructions to assemble all! I started assembling all… and with the assembling operation the first problems begun. Assembling Razer OSVR is not super-easy and straightforward . I mean, if you are an IT guy, it’s OK, but it requires more time than expected… the first time you perform this operation, you have the impression you are mounting an IKEA bookshelf… I can’t imagine my mother assembling it: it’s just impossible. This was the mess of my desk while trying to mount it: Other bad things are: you have to plug your device to the electricity (really?) and connect a lot of cables to a little plastic box that you have to wear attached to your belt all the time (really???!!). This box is really a strange thing, and once you have it attached to your belt and you have strap the HMD on your face, you feel like you’ve become a cyborg (and that you have to kill John Connor :-) ). It’s also a nuisance that everytime you want to go away from your PC, you have to remove the damn box (and if you forget this, the risk is that you make everything fall to the floor). So, about the hardware, my opinion is that I like its design, but Razer has to work a lot with ease of use and assembling . The device should auto-aliment itself through USB port, and the damn belt box should disappear. OK, ready to try the device. When you wear it, it seems quite comfortable and the nice thing is that, at least for me, it closes completely yourself from the world around you. No holes near my nose, I can’t see a thing of my desk, and it’s cool for immersion . The bad thing is the lens regulation mechanism and the area of the HMD near the nose: it really hurts my nose a lot. I tried to loosen the HMD, but it was useless: I still have a red spot here on my nose because of OSVR o_O. And lens regulation makes the lens cylinders to move against my nose, so it’s even worse. So, OSVR guys has still to work to make the chassis more comfortable for the nose zone of the user (at least for people with a nose like mine). Time to try some games! Well, but where to find them? OSVR gives you links on where to download content for their headset . I found very useful the links to the VR sharing platform WEARVR , where I downloaded games like Mental Torment 2 and Dreadeye ; on itch.io I downloaded Mythgreen-vr , the demo onto which I made a lot of experiments with the osvr_server. Obviously I also tried the Showdown VR demo . Let’s admit it: at the moment you won’t find lots of games for OSVR and surely not the most advertised AAA games for virtual reality, but you can find some interesting titles and have some time of fun. Dreadeye is really scaring… I love horror demos in VR (I’m the developer of The Time of Conundrum demo , so obviously I love them). This is, in my opinion, the biggest problem of OSVR: there is not that great number of available games out there, and so there is the famous chicken-egg problem : no games, no players; no players, no devs; no devs, no games; loop. After have downloaded some demo, I realized I had to download the OSVR services installer , so I went to the download page and saw all that bazillion links (drivers, runtimes, SDK, etc…) on that page. After a little WTF moment (seriously… why do you not provide a single installer??!), I downloaded the SDK, run the first game and… nothing worked as I expected. Because I discovered I had to start the service by hand (seriously???). So I started osvr_server.exe and… nothing worked as I expected the same. So I installed the RenderManager, the Windows Driver Pack (why there is not a single installer ??!) and… nothing worked as I expected nonetheless. I searched on the web (found links like this and this ) and… cough cough, you know. I’ll cut you two-three days of getting mad to make my headset to work properly… and I’ll explain you shortly how things work. OSVR provides its service that lets you use virtual reality in the way you prefer: it is highly customizable (extended/direct mode, portrait/landscape, distortion parameters to make it work with all headsets, different trackers support, etc…) and to customize it, you have to pass to it as a parameter the path to a JSON configuration file. It is absolutely a non-user-friendly but very-powerful tool . This means that if something does not work, you can get mad with all its configurations . So, in the end I managed to obtain two possible configurations: Completely distorted screen, but reactive to mouse+keyboard input; Perfect screen visuals, but no detection of input. I solved using a hack: I take the second configuration (extended mode, because direct mode does not work for me), then move on my laptop screen the black window of the builded application, while moving on the HMD screen the split screen for VR, then give focus to the all-black window and insert input there while watching the other window (a bit insane, I know, but it works). In this way, I managed to try all the demo. If you are thinking that OSVR is cr*p because of this, I have to say you that I have similar problems with Oculus DK2, too (direct mode not working, strange hacks to make the demos work properly, etc…). Maybe it is my laptop that is doomed, who knows. And I have to say that the single installer exists . If you have a non-doomed PC, when you insert the HDK the first time, a pop-up will tell you if you want to install the runtime and will guide you in its configuration (this actually happened on my buddy’s PC). If this popup doesn’t popup, my piece is advice is to use Razer Synapse that, if updated, will install the configurator when you plug in your device. Pretty cool, because it can also install you a osvr_server service that runs on startup for your pc. But… on my laptop the installed service had not the right settings (it is doomed, I’ve told you!), so I reverted using the manual files. Anyway, before doing anything, I advice you to give a look at the OSVR documentation . Razer & Sensics are on the right path to make something more user-friendly. How about the headset inside the demo games? Well, to me HDK1.3 is like a Oculus DK2 : screen door effect, limited FOV, etc… I found it a bit slower to react to head movements and more distorted near the lens edges, though… it is something that must be fixed in future updates. The positional tracker has higher range than DK2 one. As a Unity developer, I downloaded their Unity package and read its documentation and tried the sample Unity Palace . The Unity integration is coherent with all the rest of the OSVR software : super open to customizations and integrations (there is already integration for pupil trackers!), but with the easy-to-use prefabs we VR developers need (like the VR First Person Controller). I found it nice to use . You have to use Unity 5.2 or above, or something will not work. I had problems with their plugin with my laptop (you don’t say) and I couldn’t see anything on the Game window while developing (in build I had no problems), so I had to force the Show Direct Mode Preview to see something in the Game Window. So, my overall experience was like this: But, as I have said, this is quite normal with dev kits of a new technology like virtual reality . I was able to integrate OSVR inside ImmotionRoom quite easily (it took me half an hour), so I can say my experience with their Unity plugin was positive. I’m very happy that now our system supports OSVR, too! Look at this screenshot! That’s all for my first OSVR experience! It’s time for some recap! Pros: Opensource philosophy Upgradable hardware A clear roadmap of the future of the device Super-customizable OSVR guys are really supportive and opened towards developers collaborations Discrete performance Very cheap device A great community, super open to help you and to hear about your works and support them Cons: Still not user friendly Some bugs to be fixed Hardware not at the same level of HTC Vive or Oculus CV1 Too few games The damn belt box :D So, buy it if: You are a maker You love opensource You have to develop vr applications for Linux You want to learn VR development and you have not the money for Oculus or HTC devices You want to make cross-platform games or apps that support OSVR, too You need an opensource environment to integrate a headset inside a proprietary system of yours You want to be part in the process of making this headset better and a valid alternative to Oculus and Vive Don’t buy it if: You need a user-friendly device (maybe GearVR is the best of all in this sense) You want your headset to play all the latest AAA VR games (choose HTC Vive or Oculus CV1) You want the super-cutting-edge technology in VR and you can afford it (choose HTC Vive or Oculus CV1) You want to showcase what VR is to your boss and want something out-of-the-box super easy to setup and that works like a charm (choose Gear VR) Any last word? I like the philosophy of OSVR and hope that this product will follow its roadmap and that it will become a valid alternative to Rift and Vive! Come on, Razer guys! Hope you liked this super-long review! Let me know what you think about it in the comments! Cheers! TL; DR OSVR is Razer full open-source headset. It is really cheap (299$) and offers Oculus DK2-like features. It is not a product for consumers (it may need some expertise to use it and configure it) and does not use cutting-edge vr technology. There are not many games for OSVR and surely not AAA games. But it has a great philosophy and it is highly customizable. Buy it if you are a maker or a nerd; if you use a lot Mac or Linux; if you need a system completely open so that you can customize it; if you have few money but want to start VR development anyway. Don’t buy it if you are a gamer that wants to try cutting-edge technology with AAA games. http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/30/my-experience-with-razer-osvr/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/30/my-experience-with-razer-osvr/ Sat, 30 April 2016 23:00:00 Gianni Rosa Gallina http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/14/vr-session-at-the-iot-conference-in-naples-italy/ As usual since the past years, a new appointment with the Embedded and IoT world returns to Naples (Italy): the "IoT Conference" . The free event will be on  Saturday, May 7th 2016 in Naples (Italy) , organized by  DotNetCampania  community and  Microsoft  Italy. It will be about Internet of Things  and all related technologies, from micro-devices to the cloud, passing through wearables , Virtual Reality and other technologies. As in the past years, there will be all the Italian Microsoft Windows Embedded/IoT MVPs. I will be there, together with Beppe Platania , and we'll present a session about Virtual Reality : we'll have a short introduction to VR, its technologies and devices (wearable headsets, sensors, Kinect, etc.) and we'll see how to develop for VR using Unity 3D and Samsung Gear VR. In addition, we'll see the ImmotionAR ImmotionRoom solution which enables room-scale tracking (and beyond) for Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Razer OSVR and Google Cardboard. You can't miss it! For further information have a look at the  official page . The event is free, but there are very limited seats, so  please register ! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/14/vr-session-at-the-iot-conference-in-naples-italy/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/14/vr-session-at-the-iot-conference-in-naples-italy/ Thu, 14 April 2016 13:30:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/12/the-time-of-conundrum-lesson-2-how-to-take-gear-vr-screenshots/ Welcome to the second episode of the Time Of Conundrum Lessons serie!  Today’ll teach you how to take screenshots while using your Samsung Gear VR!  Well,  if you have a Samsung S6 , you can  use this trick  and  use essentially a Bluetooth or USB keyboard connected to your Gear VR and then press the "Print" key to make a screenshot  and save it to the camera roll. But… if you, like me, have a Samsung Note 4? Or you don’t want to use a physical keyboard? Well, things become a little more nerdy… and you have to use adb inside the command line prompt. Ready for the nerdiness? OK, let’s go! Open a command line, and instruct adb to connect over WiFi (obviously you need a common WiFi network between the PC and the smartphone). Notice: in the following commands I’ll assume you have added adb tool directory to your system PATH environment variable… if this is not your case, add it immediately (adb.exe is in the folder <android_sdk_path>\platform-tools ) Plug your smartphone to USB port of PC, then type: C:\> adb tcpip 5555 to instruct adb to connect over TCP/IP (and not over USB) using port 5555. You can change the port number, if you wish, but this is tipically unused. After having written this line, unplug your smartphone and then type: C:\> adb connect <ip_address_of_your_phone> (e.g. adb connect 192.168.202.83, if this is the address of your phone over the WiFi network) Now your smartphone is connected to you PC over WiFi, so you can take a screenshot of your phone at every time writing this weird line : C:\> adb shell screencap -p /sdcard/<temp_image_name> && adb pull /sdcard/<temp_image_name> <image_name_on_pc> && adb shell rm /sdcard/<temp_image_name> Here, <temp_image_name> represents a temporary image name, like output.png (this image will be stored and deleted on the phone, so its name is not really important); while <image_name_on_pc> instead is the full path of the screenshot image you want to store on the PC. So, an example of this command is the following: C:\ >adb shell screencap -p /sdcard/output.png && adb pull /sdcard/output.png D:\myScreenshot.png && adb shell rm /sdcard/output.png. But… what actually does this long line command do? It is actually a compound of three commands: The first one gets the actual screenshot and saves it inside the file specified inside the SD card of your phone The second one copies this image from the SD card to your PC hard-drive The third one deletes the temporary image created by the first command Ok, that’s all: now you can play your favourite game on the Gear VR, then execute this line on the command line to grab a fantastic screenshot like this one: Pretty cool, isn’t it? I’ve discovered this method using these sources: https://www.learn2crack.com/2014/08/capture-screenshot-record-screen-using-adb.html , http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29573291/capture-android-device-screenshot-with-adb-perl . Hope you liked it… if you know alternative methods, let us know in the comments! If you liked this tutorial, please consider supporting us in any ways, like having a look at our ImmotionRoom system videos , subscribing to our newsletter or sharing this article on the social networks! Have a nice screenshot day! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/12/the-time-of-conundrum-lesson-2-how-to-take-gear-vr-screenshots/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/12/the-time-of-conundrum-lesson-2-how-to-take-gear-vr-screenshots/ Tue, 12 April 2016 08:20:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/08/vr-session-at-the-gamedev-tour-turin-italy-april-21st-2016/ TecHeroes loves GameDev Tour  is a series of free Italian events focused on  Game Development . On  April 21st , there will be an event in Turin, Italy, at the Microsoft Innovation Center. The day will be divided in two parts: in the first one there will be a number of  technical sessions , while in the second part there will be a  hands-on lab : during the morning, speakers will present  tools  and  technologies  for  game development , while in the afternoon you will have the opportunity to  develop your game  with the help of the tutors using  Unity 3D . You need to bring your laptop with  Unity 5  and  Visual Studio 2015  installed. You can download them for free! In Turin you will also have the opportunity to follow a special session/lab on  Virtual Reality , where Antony Vitillo and me will present you technologies, devices for VR and how to develop with Unity. If you are interested, there will also be the exclusive opportunity to try the  ImmotionRoom system . For further info, write to the Italian Microsoft Gaming Evangelist  Marcello Marchetti ! There are limited spots,  register here as soon as possible ! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/08/vr-session-at-the-gamedev-tour-turin-italy-april-21st-2016/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/08/vr-session-at-the-gamedev-tour-turin-italy-april-21st-2016/ Fri, 08 April 2016 09:15:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/01/immotionar-innovative-headset-and-controllers/ Hello everyone!  Today we come with a huge news for you all!  Something that will revolutionize the world of virtual reality! We have tried different headsets and controllers for  our ImmotionRoom solution  but were never really satisfied about them. And the specs of the upcoming products by Oculus and Vive are terrible in our opinion. So we contacted some manufacturers all around the world, and with our great technology skills,  we designed a brand new set of products: the SockVR headset and the BananaVR controllers! SockVR is an innovative fabric device that you can put in front of your eyes to obtain exactly the same things provided by the other headsets: You don’t see anything of the world around you. So you can play games and kicks and punchs to all the furniture surrounding you Looked from the outside, you look like a complete idiot while using it Plus, it gives lots of additional features: No screen door effect No motion sickness 360° FOV No tethering! Its fabric is produced by an ancient Chinese shaman that will make your brain project the game images produced by your imagination in front of your eyes, that will really amaze you and will make you feel incredibly immersed! You will not believe yourself! Look at this comparison of our product with our competitors’ ones:   But… how to interact precisely inside this dreamlike world? To obtain the level of precision we required, we built two innovative controllers: the BananaVR . Assembled by artic monkeys, this fruity controllers will make you feel like your hands are in the virtual world. It’s a sensation I’m not able to describe using my words… you should really try it yourself! Wow… it’s like… being there! And no motion sickness, guys. Plus, if you get nausea, you can eat one of the controllers to have a fast relief ! Can you have this effect with SteamVR controllers? Have you ever tried eating one of them? They are hard to crunch and taste awfully!   Using this whole system is amazing! Look at this short video of me while I use it to play Half Life 3! The system will come with a full downloadable SDK, with APIs and plugins for Unity, UE4, XNA, Native C++, Assembly 8086 and ArnoldC . Obviously, it is fully integrated with ImmotionRoom SDK . We’ve also made a super interesting video tutorial to teach you everything that you need to know about our system ! So… what are you waiting for? CLICK HERE TO PREORDER OUR SYSTEM  and enter the future of virtual reality! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/01/immotionar-innovative-headset-and-controllers/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/april/01/immotionar-innovative-headset-and-controllers/ Fri, 01 April 2016 13:40:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/march/26/happy-easter/ From the bottom of our heart, we wish to all of you and your families to have really great Easter Holidays! We hope you’ll eat lots of chocolate eggs and have a lot of fun! To celebrate better this event, we’ve made a really cool demo to tease our upcoming side-project… ;) Have a look! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/march/26/happy-easter/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/march/26/happy-easter/ Sat, 26 March 2016 00:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/march/04/the-time-of-conundrum-lesson-1-how-to-develop-a-reduced-nausea-first-person-controller-in-vr/ Hello everyone and welcome to the first episode of this serie that talks about what we’ve learned during the  developing of our concept demo "The time of Conundrum" . Today I just want to talk about one of the biggest problem about Virtual Reality: locomotion . OK, I know, you’re thinking this is just another post about  our ImmotionRoom system , but no, this is not a post about how cool our system is, about how it has the potentiality to remove all the motion sickness in player movement and all this stuff (that is all true, anyway ;) ). Today I just want to talk about traditional input systems , because yeah, Vive room-scale and ImmotionRoom walk-scale are cool, but not everyone has them  at this moment,  so I think we, as developer, should publish games that support at least a double input scheme , with one using gamepad or other traditional input methods, to let the greatest number of players experience our games. But this leads us to a problem: gamepad and keyboards, with the traditional first person controllers, lead to the so-called motion sickness , because of the well-known problem of the disparity of the visual cues from the proprioception of the body, so they’re not good to be used. The dev community has created a lot of interesting alternatives, where movement is performed using teleporting schemes, but, let’s be sincere, for most of games, this kind of movement mechanics just su**s. Can you imagine some kind of first person shooter with teleporting mechanics? It would be weird… So, how can we solve the problem? Honestly I don’t know how to solve it, but I know how to mitigate it, with a wonderful method: my buddy Gianni suffers a lot from motion sickness, so he wasn’t able to play "The Time of Conundrum" for more than 1 minute on Gear VR with a traditional FPS controller… but after having applied this method, he was able to stay even 10 minutes inside the game! (This seems one of those sentences you can read on banners on the web that promise you to loose weight in one month using a strange method!) Actually, this ISN’T even OUR method. I’ve read it on Gamasutra and other websites, but I’ve discovered it is still not widespread, so I’m helping in spreading the word about it, because we tested it and we found it is a valid method. The secret is: REMOVE ALL THE ACCELERATIONS AND DECELERATIONS . So, your player can’t go faster or go slower, it has no realistic physics: it goes immediately from 0 to a constant speed when the user wants to go forward and decreases from that speed to 0 when the user provides no input. I know, I know, it is not a great way to provide a realistic control, but… do you really think that teleportation is better? This method works because the human body feels the sickness when it feels an acceleration, so removing all of them, makes the game way more comfortable. But… how can you remove them? Well, let’s make our hands a bit dirty and dig into the code of the OVRPlayerController inside Unity (here I’m using code from Oculus Utilities v0.1.3). At first remove all references to the word acceleration. At line 34, replace this: 31 32 33 34 /// <summary> /// The rate acceleration during movement. /// </summary> public float Acceleration = 0.1f ; with this: 31 32 33 34 /// <summary> /// The rate ConstantSpeed during movement. /// </summary> public float ConstantSpeed = 0.3f ; and this (line 85): 85 private Vector3 MoveThrottle = Vector3.zero; with: 85 private Vector3 MoveSpeed = Vector3.zero; Substitute all occurrence of the names Acceleration and MoveThrottle accordingly. Now we don’t consider acceleration anymore, we consider only speed. A simple name change isn’t enough, though. We have to wipe out all the changes of speed present inside the code. So, let’s go to lines 180-182 and comment out the following lines: 180 181 182 MoveSpeed.x /= motorDamp; MoveSpeed.y = (MoveSpeed.y > 0.0f ) ? (MoveSpeed.y / motorDamp) : MoveSpeed.y; MoveSpeed.z /= motorDamp; to remove damping (that is a speed variation). Similarly, comment out lines 197-201, to remove change in speed due to uneven ground: 197 198 199 200 201 if (Controller.isGrounded && MoveThrottle.y <= transform.lossyScale.y * 0.001f ) { bumpUpOffset = Mathf.Max(Controller.stepOffset, new Vector3(moveDirection.x, 0 , moveDirection.z).magnitude); moveDirection -= bumpUpOffset * Vector3.up; } OK, we’ve killed a bit of reality of our game. We feel bad, I know. But we must go on. Before line 216 (at the beginning of the UpdateMovement method), add this line: 216 MoveSpeed = Vector3.zero; to initialize the movement of the player to zero at each frame: so, if player will not press any input key, we’ll have a still player. Comment out line 251: 251 MoveScale *= SimulationRate * Time.deltaTime; because this talks about acceleration (in disguise). Then at line 304, substitute this: 304 moveInfluence = SimulationRate * Time.deltaTime * Acceleration * 0.1f * MoveScale * MoveScaleMultiplier; with: 304 moveInfluence = ConstantSpeed * 0.1f * MoveScale * MoveScaleMultiplier; Essentially, considering that MoveScale will always be 1 (if the controller is grounded), we’ll have a moveInfluence that is proportional to the constant speed and the delta time of execution of the game. Et… voilà, we have our nausea-reduced-player controller! Try it your own and verify if you feel less nausea, too! (and be happy like a reindeer playing a guitar)!!   In case you were wondering about the rotational movement… well, actually I still haven’t find a solution for this problem, but I can say three things: 1)  At line 327, substituting this: 327 euler.y += secondaryAxis.x * rotateInfluence; with this: 327 328 329 330 if (secondaryAxis.x > 0.1f )   euler.y += rotateInfluence; else if (secondaryAxis.x < - 0.1f )      euler.y -= rotateInfluence; makes sure you’re rotating always at the same speed, independently from the present time pressure on your gamepad thumbstick. This helps a bit in having a constant rotation speed. 2)  One way to reduce rotational nausea is to make the rotation non-continuous, so make your player rotate jerkily, having short abrupt burst of rotation of a little degrees amount alternated with longest periods of stillness (the same mechanism provided by the RotationRatchet  mechanism of the class OVRPlayerController ). I’ve tried this method and I think that it is true that it reduces the nausea, but it makes the player controller unusable for most situations. 3)  If the player does not rotate using gamepad, but rotates only using a fully-rotating chair, it is far better and the problem is solved… but you can’t force your player to use it. One final notice: I provided this code as an example … I’m quite sure there will be somewhere a bug that will set your PC on fire and that if a StackOverflow pro programmer read it, it would have a heart attack… but it somewhat works… take it as a start to make your own implementation! Hope this will be of help to someone… if you have suggestions, feel free to point them out in the comments! If you liked this tutorial, please consider supporting us in any ways, like having a look at our ImmotionRoom system videos , subscribing to our newsletter or sharing this article on the social networks! Have a nice nausea-free day! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/march/04/the-time-of-conundrum-lesson-1-how-to-develop-a-reduced-nausea-first-person-controller-in-vr/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/march/04/the-time-of-conundrum-lesson-1-how-to-develop-a-reduced-nausea-first-person-controller-in-vr/ Fri, 04 March 2016 16:10:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/march/04/the-time-of-conundrum-lessons-serie/ Hi everyone! As promised,  today I’ll start a new serie that tells you what we’ve learned while developing and submitting  our demo "The time of Conundrum" . I’ll split it in various different articles, to be focused on a single, well-explained topic in every part. These are the main topics I’ll cover: How to create a reduced-nausea first person player controller in VR How to grab screenshots with Gear VR How to create an APK ready for Oculus submission How to read current FPS while playing with your Gear VR Unity demo Tips & Tricks to stay near 60FPS on Gear VR Hints on how to create games with natural VR interface Hints on how to develop cross-platform, cross-input games Are you ready? Do you like my topics? Next episode will be published today! Stay tuned! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/march/04/the-time-of-conundrum-lessons-serie/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/march/04/the-time-of-conundrum-lessons-serie/ Fri, 04 March 2016 09:30:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/23/developing-the-time-of-conundrum/ Hi to all! How are you doing? We’re well… we’re developing our first game for the ImmotionRoom system: “The time of Conundrum!”. Do you like its name? Haven’t you noticed how sophisticated are we in the use of the word “Conundrum”? The game plot is as follow: one day you wake up in a strange and disturbing basement, with all rusty stuff and blood around you. The door is closed and there seems to be no escape. Besides that, a not-so-reassuring clock on the wall ticks the time that remains to you to live if you don’t escape. Why are you there? How can you escape? What is there beyond the door? You can know it only if you play our game! This concept inspired us because we love old style point-and-click adventures… and I’m a huge fan of Resident Evil… so we decided to make a small horror adventure in VR, evolving the point-and-click paradigm to immersive VR . The game is playable with mouse+keyboard, gamepad and the ImmotionRoom system, so you can play it the way you prefer. Obviously, after you played it with the ImmotionRoom system, and felt so immersed, there is no turning back to gamepad or mouse … you can only stick to ImmotionRoom. You can watch the full trailer here: We’ll release the concept demo for Samsung Gear VR & Oculus Rift in the coming weeks, so stay tuned! In the next post, we’ll talk about the difficulties we found while developing this short game… in the meantime, if you could let us know your opinion about the game concept, we’d be very happy! Have a nice day! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/23/developing-the-time-of-conundrum/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/23/developing-the-time-of-conundrum/ Tue, 23 February 2016 09:15:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/20/the-startupper-faqs-vol1/ Today I’ll start a new serie of our blog: The Startupper FAQs. In these posts, I’ll just write some questions a wanna-be startupper could want to make to the people who have this job and provide some short answers… like in the FAQ section of a website. I’m not the best startupper in the world and I’ve (still) not a Fortune-500 company, but in these almost 2 years of rollercoasters to become my own boss, I can say that I’ve learnt something about this world. Ready? Go! 1. What is a startup? It’s just a… just founded company? Kind of. A startup is a newly founded company (but can also be not founded yet) that: a. Has an innovative product; b. Is made to grow very fast (grow the user base, the incomings, the number of employees, etc…). So if you start a pub, it is not a startup. If you found a company that will make a product that can transform water in beer, that is a startup. 2. I’ve an innovative idea. Should I found my startup, then? Maybe yes, maybe not. The first questions you have to make to yourself are: a. It is really innovative your idea? b. What problem does it solve? (this is the most important one) c. Can it have a lot of customers? d. Do you have enough money to start the development of your company? e. Do you have enough time to develop a prototype? (if you have another full-time job, it can be a problem) If the answer is yes to almost all the questions, the answer is yes. Otherwise, you have to think carefully about your situation. 3. In the question number 2 you were just kidding with all that points, weren’t you? Of course! That 5 things are not enough You need also to ask you: f. Are you ready to work really really hard? g. Have you someone to start the company with? h. If you dress as Popeye, are you badass like The Rock? i. Do you know an experienced entrepreneur or a consultant that can help you in the first phases of you startup? j. Are you in contact with incubators or accelerators? 4. Ok. It's enough for the question points. No. There are still: k. Are you able to talk with customers, investors or make a public speech? l. Do you know how to use social media? m. Are you ready to see less your family and your friends? n. Are you ready to live an emotional rollercoaster when one day you feel like an hero and the day after you think you are the most idiot person in the world? o. Do you know how to beat a Korean in Starcraft? OK, it's enough, the alphabet letters are ending. I think you got the point: startupping is a hard work, emotionally and physically. It can satisfy you a lot, but you must take it seriously. 5. I don’t trust you, I just read on the Internet that a 15-year-old guy just had an idea that Google bought for 1 bazillion dollar! Yes, and I’ve read on the Internet that the son of Tom Cruise is an alien and that you can cure cancer singing Gangnam Style for one hour a day. Internet is not that reliable source of information :-) 6. But… NO. You are not 15-year-old, Google doesn’t know you and “bazillions” do not exist. And the son of Tom Cruise is human. You have to take the hard way. Ok, it's enough for today. Next times I’ll write other questions, going deeper in the details of the various points I’ve written. Do you like this FAQ section? Do you have other questions to make? Or better answers to add? The comments section is the right place where to write them! See you for the next FAQs! Happy startupping! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/20/the-startupper-faqs-vol1/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/20/the-startupper-faqs-vol1/ Sat, 20 February 2016 17:40:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/08/happy-new-chinese-year/ 大家好！我们祝你们都新年快乐！ We hope that for all you this new lunar year of the monkey will be a great year full of satisfactions and of great virtual reality experiences! Cheers from the ImmotionAR team! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/08/happy-new-chinese-year/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/08/happy-new-chinese-year/ Mon, 08 February 2016 13:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/06/global-game-jam-2016-post-mortem/ Hello everyone! How are you? Were you missing another post mortem of ours? With that Q&A structure that you like so much? Don’t worry, today I’ll provide you with a brand new one! :-) As said in this post , we proposed as technical sponsors for the Global Game Jam 2016 event here in Turin (organized by Treatabit and T-union ) because we wanted to see what developers think about our virtual reality solution  and its related SDK .  It has been a truly great experience, so we decided to write an article about it. Ready? Go! First of all, what is a game jam? Well, a game jam is a contest where people related to the development of videogames (game designers, programmers, 3d artists, etc…) meet themselves and form groups that have to complete the creation of a videogame prototype in a short amount of time (in this case was 48 hours) around a certain theme that gets unveiled just before the jam start (this year was “Ritual!”… I do not know what it did mean… actually no one did :D). So there is this big rush of adrenaline where people code a lot, eat very few and sleep very bad on the jam location floor. You can find a more professional definition on Wikipedia , obviously. But… why the heck would someone ever spend 48 hours without eating and washing himself just to code a game prototype? What’s the purpose? There must be a very huge prize… Actually… prizes are not the best part of a jam. There are very good reasons to participate in a game jam: It’s a competition based on fun , where all organizers try to keep atmosphere informal and goliardic. This year we all had badges that were really coloured and recalled game symbols It’s something so insane that you can tell to your children one day It’s an event where you meet a lot of interesting people , with which you can exchange ideas, business cards, etc… In a jam you can test your ability to work in a complete game development team, with high pressure because of the so limited time The little amount of time forces you to cut features, so you in a way learn how to meet a deadline by sacrificing the perfection of the gameplay you had in mind It’s a creative place where you can experiment with crazy things , like new kinds of UI, new kinds of controls, etc… You can meet people inside your team with which begin a serious collaboration for the creation of a real product . Some famous games were born inside a game jam (e.g. Goat Simulator) I’ve already read all this stuff on the web. Do you confirm it? Absolutely. I was skeptical about it, I thought it was just a crazy event with a lot of people coding and a lot of mess… and yes it is a big coding mess, but I’ve experienced myself the beautiful things I’ve said before. I liked a lot the friendly and creative atmosphere of all the event. It was really cool asking people the fantastic ideas they were having, looking at all their prototypes, giving them advices, getting advices from them . And I’m not talking only about the participants. Also mentors, tutors and guests were great. My truly sincere advice is: participate to game jams! You’ll really meet a lot of interesting people and you will come out truly enriched! Tell me something more about the interesting people you met! Well, between the organizers we met very interesting people from T-Union (Marco, the organizer was super-cool), Hub09 (another Marco, another super-cool person), Treatabit (Alessia taught me a lot about communication), University of Milan… and also from Unity! There was Sean, that works on clothes simulation inside Unity! Wow, I use Unity almost every day, meeting a person that works inside Unity Technologies has been like meeting a rockstar for me! And I made him see a video of our ImmotionRoom system and he liked it! Wow! Among the participants there was a guy that had an amazing idea about a local multiplayer AR game using Cardboard and Vuforia; Gabriele, which tried our ImmotionRoom system and gave us very very interesting and original feedbacks about it… he also created a very peculiar game concept; Massimiliano, a VR passionate guy, which was very enthusiastic about our system, and pointed out about its crucial problems that we must solve. I hope to collaborate with all this people in the near future! Cool. But… what was your role inside the jam? We were technical sponsor. This meant that we offered people the ability to use the ImmotionRoom system inside their game prototype , with our VR mentorship and a virtual-reality-equipped room offered by us. As prizes, we proposed a free license for our SDK and a Cardboard for one of the winning teams.  Besides that, we gave advices to guys about AR/VR and the startup ecosystem here in Italy: we really exchanged our ideas with a lot of smart people. With so little time to develop, were there people so crazy to use a SDK they have never seen before? We were aware that we were trying something a bit crazy, but we are a bit crazy, so we tried it and we found a guy like Massimiliano that wanted so hard to see our system work with his demo . We have been really lucky to meet him. So, the game of his team, “ Kano VR ”, includes a scene that is playable with the ImmotionRoom system! What have been the difficulties of using ImmotionRoom inside Kano VR? The difficulties where inherent to the game jam ecosystem: the team had so little time, and the obligation to make a game that was also playable with traditional input systems (gamepad in this case). Since the traditional gameplay would have been the one to be played during the showcase, they designed all the game to be visualized on the screen and played using gamepad. When we tried to insert the ImmotionRoom system, we had to port a classical game to VR interface in so little time (1 hour), that it was almost impossible. We made our best and created an hybrid solution that worked with ImmotionRoom+mouse: it was not great, but it somewhat worked. As always, ImmotionRoom added a great level of immersion and presence. Here the lesson is: if you want to make a VR game, design it since the principle to be played inside virtual reality with a natural interface. You can’t add it in the last moments, it’s nearly impossible. Who won your prizes? Obviously the Kano VR team, the only one so brave to try using ImmotionRoom ;) What feedback did you get about ImmotionRoom by the guys who tested it? As I said, Gabriele and Massimiliano where the two guys that tested our system the most. They both said that our prototype is really cool, but we have to absolutely perform a better hand tracking and give hand opened/hand closed triggers . We care about devs opinion, so we have put these things at a higher level in our to-do list for the next releases. We thought that we could insert this feature later in the future… and that’s why it is so important the lean startup model : you have to make a prototype, make your potential customers test it, correct it accordingly to the feedbacks and re-iterate. You have to listen to your customers, you can’t decide features they will like by yourself. Have you made a public speech about your system during the event? How did it go? Yes, it was my second public speech! It went good, I was more relaxed than last time  and I tried to capture the attention of the developers that were in front of me. I’m a developer, so I know what I’d like to hear and I tried to say it to the other devs. Remember that you have always to tailor the pitch to the event and to your public. I remember from your last post-mortems that every time you have an exhibition or similar, you find a new bug in your system… how about this Global Game Jam? You remember really well, we had strange bugs at WTT  and at  Wonderlight Night . Well, I can say that this time was different: Saturday morning we had BAZILLIONS of bugs that strangely popped out : the most remarkable of them was that the player in the game was in always-go-forward mode, so there was no way to stop the virtual avatar from running! It was terrible. It took us hours to solve all these problems. And when at the end of the jam we called one of the judges to test the VR integration: a new bug in the integration came to light… :-( The curse continues, we need some kind of exorcism, I think. What are the things that you liked less of this event? Uhm… let me think: The bugs we had The aversion of people to experiment in so few time with a new control system The smell of the rooms (where there are in a place a lot of people that can’t wash themselves… and the rooms didn’t have windows… well, it is not great) What you liked most? Almost everything else, in particular: Every people I met The amazing time I spent with all the KanoVR team The network of contacts we created The creativity process Being part of a worldwide event, where all we devs were connected by a common spirit Any last words? The Global Game Jam has been a truly great experience and I want to thank you everyone that was involved in it! I advise you to participate, with any role you want to the Game Jam that is next to you , because… yeah, it’s cool! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/06/global-game-jam-2016-post-mortem/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/february/06/global-game-jam-2016-post-mortem/ Sat, 06 February 2016 16:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/26/faber-day-post-mortem/ On January 22nd, we participated to the award ceremony of  Faber Day . As we told you in our  previous post ,  we were selected among the 12 winners of the contest, with our ImmotionRoom solution. I’ll write here a short post-mortem about the event, in the classical Q&A form that I use in every postmortem (like in  this one  and  this other one ). Ok, so this your first award. How has been receiving a prize? Well, this is not our first award. Gianni has already received some international awards, especially in Microsoft contests and we, as ImmotionAR, have already won some prizes in the Intel Realsense AppChallenge 2015. But this is the first time ImmotionRoom received an award and the first time we as a group participate to a physical award ceremony. It has been nice, receiving a prize is always something beautiful, makes you see that there are other people that finds you are doing a great work . It is obvious that friends and relatives say you that your work is great, but when other people you don’t know award you of something, it is great because you receive a truly positive feedback from unbiased people. So yeah, it was great! Have you had a public pitch? How you prepared it? And how has it been? Yeah, a short pitch of 5 minutes about our startup and our work (actually, ceremony times were shrinked, so we had only 4 minutes). Gianni has already made a lot of public talk (he’s a cool man), but for me…ehm, it was my first time! So I was a lot scared! We prepared the slides and made some rehearsal of the whole presentation 4-5 times the day before , so we were prepared to speak with some kind of auto-pilot :-) . I also gave a try to SpeechCenterVR which make you try a pitch in virtual reality, with people that try to distract you, that laugh in your face while you speak, and that helped me a lot to not get distracted during the actual pitch. The pitch went great: we adapted well to some technical problems and to the shortened time: everyone said we were really OK. Here the advices are: Prepare the pitch the days before and try it a lot of times before going actually on the stage, otherwise it will be a suicide Don’t be scared to talk publicly: just think that you are talking about your work to a lot of friends and everything will go well Have you found partners, customers, investors? Mostly not. The big defect of this ceremony is that it was absolutely not business-oriented. So there were no investors, few possible partner companies, few possible customers. This was really a pity for our beautiful pitch. It was more like an event of brainstorming, to meet other smart people that one for B2B interaction. Anyway, we were really happy to talk to a lot of smart guys, exchange with them business cards and our ideas. And even in this sterile context we met a possible future partner and a possible future customer. As I always say in every postmortem: DO NETWORKING. Always. There is always someone that can become your partner one day, in every event. So go talking to everyone you can :-)  . Trust me, you’ll never regret it, because even if you won’t meet a partner, you’ll have exchanged your ideas with other smart people and you’ll come out enriched from the event. So, have you met interesting people? A lot. There were a lot of very young guys with great ideas that they hope could become a startup product; some business specialists that talked about how to get fund for your company; some marketing guys with which we talked about advertising nowadays; a founder of a small videogame studio here in Turin, with which we exchanged ideas about videogames business in Italy and virtual reality. Talking with smart people is always great, you learn a lot of things. The important thing, in my opinion, is learning from people more expert than you and help less experienced ones: creating a community means not only taking, but also giving . Have you had press coverage? Yes: the online version of La Stampa , a well-known Italian newspaper, cited ImmotionAR along the other winners! And the Italian Television RAI3 talked about the event and we were in some frames of the local TV news reportage. Being on the TV, even for that short time has been… well, great! :-) Something funny that happened…? Well, one man asked me to go out the conference room because I refused to participate in some kind of philosophical auction… I’m some kind of outlaw now :P One last word? We’re happy to have received this prize, and hope it will be only the first one of a long serie…and the Faber ceremony has been really interesting because of the people we met. Hope we’ll be in similar ceremonies for all the year! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/26/faber-day-post-mortem/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/26/faber-day-post-mortem/ Tue, 26 January 2016 07:45:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/25/global-game-jam-2016/ We are excited to announce you that we will participate as technical sponsors to the  Global Game Jam  here in  Turin !!!  It will be held on January 29-31 st  in the  I3P building, the Startup Incubator of the Politechnic of Turin . It’s our first time in a game jam… and we’re really excited (and also a bit scared) about it! We’d like to see one of the participant team use our  ImmotionRoom  system in their game proposal. They will be the first world-wide people to be able to try our upcoming SDK! Will it happen? Will their game be the winner? We’ll let you know after the Jam weekend!! Bye! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/25/global-game-jam-2016/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/25/global-game-jam-2016/ Mon, 25 January 2016 18:30:00 Gianni Rosa Gallina http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/15/how-to-see-what-users-are-seeing-in-vr-demos/ Hi all! This is a new technical post about Virtual Reality and related technologies. The previous post  was a theoretical article about the differences between VR, AR and Contextual Reality. This one, instead, is a (hopefully) useful and short guide to solve one of the biggest problem everybody will face sooner or later: when introducing a friend or a relative to VR for the first time, how can we help and guide the newbie within the immersive world, while assisting him from the outside? With Oculus Rift is very simple: applications built with the latest SDKs have a built-in mirror option. Therefore, if you are using a Rift, just start the application and you will be able to see what the user is doing in VR on the PC display. If you also need to record the experience, you can obtain optimal results using OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) . Instead, if you use a Samsung Gear VR or a Google Cardboard ( with Android ) a little bit of additional setup is required, but you can obtain the same mirrored experience . I tried various alternatives but, in  the end, you have two main options to choose from that work quite well: Use a screen streaming app installed on your Android smartphone. Currently I am using Mobizen : with this app (and its desktop PC companion client), you will be able to maintain an optimal VR experience and a quite good streaming quality. In addition, you will also able to record the VR experience at 60 FPS! Use a Google Chromecast   and stream the smartphone screen contents to a near HDMI display. The VR experience will not suffer too much and the streaming quality is excellent. Both solutions, to work, require a local high-speed WiFi network (which has to be the same network which your target desktop PC or the Chromecast itself are connected to) and an Internet connection (important note: the mirrored stream does not use Internet bandwidth ). To complete the solution, if you need to record the VR experience on the smartphone, there has recently been an announcement from Oculus regarding a built-in option to record the VR experience also on Gear VR (but it has to be enabled by app developers). In the meanwhile, as said, you can use Mobizen, which works for Google Cardboard applications as well. To conclude this post, here is what I suggest you based on my experience: if you can, use a Chromecast . You will obtain the best mirroring experience and very little efforts for setup: once the Chromecast is up and running, everything is already in place for smartphone display mirroring. If you use the streaming app Mobizen, you need an additional target PC to receive the streaming and a companion client, but additionally you will be able to record the experience (as a technical note, I need to remark that I experienced some stability issues and the mirror connection sometimes has to be stopped and re-started). What about you? What do you do to mirror/record the VR experience? If you have alternative solutions or tricks, let me know in the comments below. http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/15/how-to-see-what-users-are-seeing-in-vr-demos/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/15/how-to-see-what-users-are-seeing-in-vr-demos/ Fri, 15 January 2016 10:45:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/14/faber-day-2015/ We’re proud to announce you that ImmotionAR is among the winners of Faber 2015! Faber  is a creative contest organized by  Treatabit  held here in Turin (Italy), which gives credit to the most innovative works in different categories. Among more than 100 contestants, we have been selected in the group of 12 winners!  We won in the category “VR, AR and Gaming” with our  ImmotionRoom solution  and will participate to the awards ceremony on January 22nd! We’re so proud of it! Unfortunately, only invited people can take part to the event… so you can’t come to see us, but we’ll make a resumèe of the ceremony the days after! In the meanwhile, we want to thank all the people that have supported us during the development of this product… if we obtained this success is also thanks to you! We appreciate your support a lot!! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/14/faber-day-2015/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/14/faber-day-2015/ Thu, 14 January 2016 20:50:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/12/the-oculus-rush/ We’re happy to announce you that on January 6th, we have pre-ordered 2 Oculus Rift CV1!! They’ll arrive here in April, and we can’t wait to play with them! You know that we’re virtual reality enthusiasts… so you can imagine how curious we are… The preorder moment was really exciting : it has been like purchasing the tickets for the concert of a big rock star , like U2 or Bruce Springsteen. We were all waiting for the beginning of the preorders at 5.00PM, looking at the countdown present at Oculus website . When time went to 0:00:00, the “Pre-order” button appeared and I immediately clicked at it, eager to see the heaven of the Oculus shop. Instead I just saw… nothing. Oculus website had huge problems and we all managed to see only a white page! So we all went to twitter-spamming Palmer Luckey about our problems… and in the meanwhile we continued clicking F5 on our browser page hoping to see something more than that blank. After having destroyed the “Refresh” button on my keyboard, finally the shop popped up.  I don’t know if I was really happy, because I discovered that Oculus price was 700 EUROS!!! (+42 € for shipping). I almost had an heart attack and visualized my future self living in the streets and begging for money because I spent all money for virtual reality hardware. The funniest part was that the price visualized was 69900 €… so it seemed to cost as much as an apartment! Fighting with myself I completed all the operations to buy and… nope. Website had errors with payments and showed “an error has occurred” message. So, everyone went back to twitter-spamming Luckey (not that Lucky , on that day), who answered the anti-fraud system was rejecting a lot of European credit cards (or maybe was the future me trying to make me save some money :-)  ). After several tries, finally the system accepted my money and a confirmation mail said me my purchase was confirmed! I’ll have my brand new HMD on April!! Woooohoooo!! A final personal notice on the price: it is way too high for virtual reality mass consumption, so in my opinion mass VR will happen in 2017 and maybe 2016 is just the year of VR for business . The price has also caused a lot of rant comments on the social networks… on 9GAG a lot of satirical post like these ones ( post 1 , post 2 , post 3 ) showed up. And you? Have you bought your Oculus CV1? Let us know in the comments! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/12/the-oculus-rush/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/12/the-oculus-rush/ Tue, 12 January 2016 14:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/07/bardonecchia-wonder-light-night-post-mortem/ Hello everyone! How are going your holidays? We have not had so much time for relaxing, because we decided to participate to the Wonder Light Night exhibition in Bardonecchia, Italy … so we had to work during the holidays to prepare for the event: we fixed some bugs and make improvements to our demo, prepared all the documents to handle the customers queue and organized all the stuff to be ready for the demo day. This was our second exhibition, so we were prepared to handle a similar event: if you remember, we had the first exhibition more than one month ago: it was the Wearable Tech Torino and there we learned a lot of things, as I explained in the relative post-mortem . I like to write post-mortems using a Q&A structure, as in a fake interview, so I’ll make this article in the same way. Hope you’ll like it :-) . Ready? GO! Ok, so this was your second exhibition… what have you improved in this demo since the last one? Actually, a lot of small things and some important major ones. The most remarkable improvements were: Initialization sequence : it has been made more readable, good-looking, and also usable by color blind people. Besides that, the system has been made capable of informing the user about which sensors are tracking it and which ones do not, helping us in supporting the user during this stage of the demo. Object interactions : interactions with objects were absent in the WTT demo. In this one, there were 3 active objects in the scene: a switch that when activated by user hands, made the fire color change to purple a crazy rugby ball that could be played using feet and hands a punchball that could be punched with naked hands Wireless setup : there was a working demo even for Samsung Gear VR: quality was inferior to the PC one, but it was playable and working. We kept it as a backup in case of Oculus Rift malfunctioning. No multiple people in scene bug : this was a nasty bug that popped up during the WTT exhibition, and we solved it, so now the demo was more stable. I remember you had a lot of queue and time management problem during the WTT. Have you made any improvements to solve them? Yes, we planned queue time management: every disclaimer people had to sign to try the demo had an ID number pre-printed on it, with an estimated demo access time, so people could just register for the demo and have a precise time at which coming back and try the demo, without staying in a long queue . Then we prepared an interactive spreadsheet to compute the estimated time for each user, completely updatable at runtime. Last but not least, we added temporization to the demo : the application had a predefined time written in a file to specify how much time the user could play inside the virtual world. The demo displayed alert messages at certain intervals to specify the remaining time and after two minutes made all the screen black to signal the end of the demo. This was a great idea to have precise timing for each user trying our system. Great! There was something you were worried about? Of course. In particular, this exhibition setup was completely different from the last one : it was an outdoor event, with non-technical people attending it, not in our city and with no days before the event to try our booth and solve logistics problems. And then… our Oculus Rift DK2 is an old device that has been used a lot and it starts showing a lot of malfunctioning: we hoped it wouldn’t break completely during the event... The 4 th of January was the great exhibition day. How was your preparation of the booth? Well, not that good . Due to bad weather during the night, event organizers were late in the booth setup process. So we had to wait 40-50 minutes before beginning our booth preparation. After that time, we could begin putting devices in their position, but there was still no electrical power. And the booth had some unexpected problems: It had no floor : its floor was the plaza asphalt, that was wet, so we could not put our precious small PCs directly on it; we solved using some pieces of fitted carpet to save them from the wet asphalt. Wet floor meant also the inability to put the cables on the floor, so we had to make them fly near the booth ceiling. It was really cold (we were on the mountains!): this made us more uncomfortable during the operations and, besides that, the use of the Oculus Rift with those temperatures made the lenses tarnish themselves. Things got better when a great heater was put by the organizer inside the booth. There was not enough place to put all our stuff : during the WTT our stand had a desk with private places where to put our pens, brochures, backpacks. Now we had only a simple table, so we had to invent new ways to store things, using chairs and boxes. The location was awful for Kinect usage : there were a lot of interferences by lights, infrared sources (the heater itself), materials and other things: Kinect tracking was highly unstable and this led to poor skeletal tracking of the system. We were in a public plaza , so sometimes some people showed up looking us as we were doing some strange things (indeed, we do strange things :-) ). Some old people asked us what was going on and we tried explaining them what virtual reality was, but, judging by their faces, we failed miserably :-) Time was limited : we had to complete all the preparation by 5:30PM. We finished just in time for the deadline. Conditions were critical, but we made it: tracking was not perfect, but it worked. The system was up and running by 5:30PM. And we must thank a lot the organizers : Davide Giordano from Jetop and Roberto Rosati of Lucas were always helpful for every problem we showed them. The lesson here is the same of WTT: be prepared that something will not be as expected and that you have to find workarounds to make everything work. At 5:30PM the show begun. Was it like WTT? No, it was very different. It was an outdoor event, so at first it was cold :-) Then there were few people : Bardonecchia is a touristic place where people go skiing: this winter too few snow has fallen from the sky, so few people went to Bardonecchia to ski and so few people were at this event. This has meant to us a very short waiting queue and a lot of spare time to have dinner. Also, all the strategy with the super-interactive spreadsheet was absolutely useless (but designing it made happy my engineer heart anyway  :-)). Most of people were not technician : they were usually high school guys or families with little kids. In particular, a lot of children under 13 years old really wanted to try our solution, but we discouraged it because of Oculus guidelines (and some of them got really sad). Approaching this kind of people was very different: some were “scared” by our stand and looked at it for long without trying it. We had to use the system by ourselves to make people around us understand what the system was useful for, because a lot of people didn’t even know what virtual reality was. What did go wrong? Well, the fact that there was so few people was not good for us. But it was also some kind of advantage, because our Oculus Rift DK2 went really crazy, and we had to turn it off and on a lot of times during the exhibition: this frustrated our users and made us lose a lot of time . We wouldn't be able to handle a long queue of people, because of this inconvenient. High volume music played by the deejay ReacTJ (that I personally think is very cool) made hard for us to speak to people while they were trying our solution. It is a problem we should solve in the future . And obviously a new crazy bug showed up during the day ! It is some kind of curse for us: a new annoying bug for every exhibition :-) What did go well? Most of the people that tried our system, liked it a lot! Seeing the excited look of the people after having tried ImmotionRoom was priceless. Interaction system was really appreciated : people loved to kick the crazy rugby ball, and almost forgot about all the rest of the demo! This taught us that we have to keep following this path and make all the next demos always more interactive. Temporization of the demo worked really well and people were able to know how much time they could spend inside the virtual world. We are now sure that the system can be used by anyone and that it is very funny for people to try it. And we have known some business people with whom we could start a collaboration in the future. This is a very important part of each exhibition. Something funny to add? A guy who plays football tried to kick the virtual rugby ball so hard, that he kicked a chair in the real world and almost destroyed our booth! What have you learned in this event? I learned that each event is a different story and that it has its peculiar problems. And whatever happens, you have to keep your blood cold and try to serve people and give them the best possible experience. Shit happens and you have to deal with it . Besides that, I’ve learned that people like an interactive virtual reality 1000 times more than an explorative virtual reality. Any last words? I really want to thank again all the organizers for having given us this opportunity and for having helped us during all the event. I hope we will collaborate again in the future. And I want to thank also my adventure-mates Beppe and Gianni for their great work. After this event I’m more convinced than ever that we are in the right path to make something that can make people excited and I’m very happy of it! And… I wonder what nasty bug will show up at the next event… :-) http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/07/bardonecchia-wonder-light-night-post-mortem/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2016/january/07/bardonecchia-wonder-light-night-post-mortem/ Thu, 07 January 2016 17:00:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/24/happy-holidays/ The ImmotionAR team wishes fantastic holidays to all its Immotiofans and their families! Hope you a warm Christmas (or a happy 25 th December, if you don’t celebrate Christmas :-) ) and a new year full of satisfaction and happy moments! And you? What would you like to wish to us for the new year? Let us know in the comments section! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/24/happy-holidays/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/24/happy-holidays/ Thu, 24 December 2015 08:00:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/23/bardonecchia-wonder-light-night/ Hi everyone! We’ve got some big news for you: thanks to the fantastic success of our participation to the WTT Exhibition here in Turin , WTT organizer Jetop  asked us to participate to a new exhibition: Bardonecchia Wonder Light Night . Bardonecchia Wonder Light Night is an exhibition about innovation and entertainment that will be held January 4 th , 2016 in the central plaza of Bardonecchia (Piazza De Gasperi). If you don’t know where Bardonecchia is… well, it is here: It is a beautiful small town not far from our city, Turin, and it is well known as a touristic place where people usually go in winter to ski with families and friends. Unfortunately we will not have much time as tourists and we’ll have to work a lot, but we think that it will be a great opportunity for us to showcase our solution and to make a lot of people have fun with it! It will be a great night (there will be DJs, laser games, ImmotionRoom and much more…), so if you are in the surroundings, come to have fun with us! See you there! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/23/bardonecchia-wonder-light-night/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/23/bardonecchia-wonder-light-night/ Wed, 23 December 2015 09:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/14/wtt-post-mortem-part-2/ We’ve just been at our first exhibition as exhibitors and we think it would be a good idea just to talk to all of you about all our impressions, ideas, problems and so on . So, I’m here writing in this post everything that comes out of my head, hoping it will help someone out there. This is the second (and last) part of this long post. If you haven’t read the first part, you can find it  here . 20 th of November, the exhibition has arrived. How did you feel when everything began? It was so… real! It was the first time we saw a booth with our name, people taking gadgets with our logo, our brochures… ImmotionAR was no longer only an idea, a wanna-be startup… it was a concrete startup! This is an incredible sensation I wish to every guy with an awesome idea out there! Did you had any problems during the exhibition? A lot. You can be sure that something will always not go as expected. New bugs will come to light, people will behave in a way different from the expected one, and so on. Mr.Murphy with his laws will show up and make something go wrong. The first issue we had was that cellophane used to protected the booth fitted carpet interfered with Kinect infrared rays and so all body tracking just was terrible. So we had to cut it out to perform a valid tracking. The second big issue was that for some strange bug, if I was in a certain position at the booth, everything went fine; if I was a step forward, all the program crashed. This strange bug made us restart the program a lot of times for the first users, until Gianni realized the workaround to stay all behind a certain imaginary line and everything luckily went better. Then a lot of other problems showed up: sometimes the OculusRift just turned off by themselves or showed a strange all-white-display; a Kinect froze in always-on mode; two users were very tall and had problems to test our system (it had never been tested with so tall people). And every problem is traumatic if you have a lot of people looking at you and at what you are doing! Then we had queue management problems: at out stand there was a lot more people than we could ever imagine! So we had problems in managing all this big queue: we tried to make a classical queue, but people didn’t like to stand there just to wait for us to make them try the system; so we began giving numbers to registrants, but then a lot of people took their number and then disappear, to return only when their turn was passed; we returned to a classical queue, but waiting time was more than an hour for person; in a word, people were never happy about queue management. Not to mention the fact that we run out of registration forms! There were too many people!!! The lesson here is: there will always be something going wrong, so be prepared to be smart and try to do your best to solve it . And if there are more that one day, try every day to do better than the day before (e.g. the second day of the exhibition we started introducing our system initialization procedure to people waiting in the queue, so when was the turn of a person, he already knew everything about it and his demo last few time than the day before, when we had to explain everything to each user just before putting him the Oculus on his head). Something went good? Actually, lots of things. Gianni’s workshop on Virtual Reality went sold out and was positively reviewed by anyone who attended it. Our demo was a true success: more than 200 people tried it and managed to use it with just a little explanation!! This was a fantastic thing, considering the fact that until that day it was only a program tested in lab by only us. Some people didn’t like it (5 people circa), but all the other found it from good to fantastic. It is so awesome to see someone test a program of yours and like it so much to scream sentences like “It’s awesome!”, “So cool!”, “I want it!”. Two girls were so excited about it they screamed in joy all the time. I liked them a lot… I was very tired that day, but they made me so happy! With this demo we realized that we are in the right path to make something people would like to use! After months of hard working with nothing but our critics, finally see someone that uses and likes our  product was… indescribable! Some press guys came and see our solutions… and now we have some reviews around the web! You can see two of them here and here  (sorry, links are only in Italian!). It has been the first time we had press coverage… and it was marvelous! We made some networking ( Networking! Don’t forget it! Never! ) and exchanged business cards with other companies. And I talked a lot with the organizers: Jetop guys have been awesome during all the exhibition… I love you guys! :-)  I can say some of them are friends now… If you are a startup, you HAVE to meet as many people as possible , make new friends, new work contacts… be sincere and kind with everyone… because everyone could help you one day in this insane journey of becoming the boss of yourself. Ah and I forgot: for the first time in my life, I had a radio interview! It was awesome…  How did you deal with people during the exhibition? As Beppe Platania (of Beps Engineering ) says: “ you have to be very patient during an exhibition” . You’ll meet very different kinds a people: some will try to help and encourage you (a South-american dev tried to give me strength), while others will try to provoke you; some will say “it’s fantastic”, while others will say “It’s terrible”; some will shut up, others will submerge you with questions. But with every person you meet you MUST be calm, keep your blood cold and smile, whatever thing he/she may say to you . Remember this. The hardest part is when you have to repeat the same sentences all over the day to each person enters your booth. After 5 hours of repeating the initialization instructions of ImmotionRoom, I was seriously thinking about committing suicide :D :D :D. Can we see a video of a user testing your solution? We can make you see a video of us testing our solution… you can find it here . The exhibition went as expected? Almost nothing went as I expected! After all, do you think it has been a good idea to participate to WTT? Yes. We met a lot of interesting people (like the guys of the GET wearable ), we started potential collaborations with other companies and incubators, we obtained fantastic feedbacks… but the most important thing is that from now on we exists: we have validated our company with a successful public demo. From now on, nothing will be the same again! From now on… what are your future plans? To rule the world, obviously :-) Seriously speaking, our future plans are to spend the next 2 months making fixes to the current prototype so that it could be sold to developers and to other people that want to use it for experimental setups in different scenarios. Then we’ll begin selling it and in the meanwhile we’ll start a Kickstarter Campaign! Anyone you want to thank? Actually, a lot of people, as we have written in this post . Special mention to Beppe Platania that with his experience helped us during the most difficult moments of the event; and to Mariarosaria Pazzola , that has dedicated herself to produce the user survey and to follow all the survey fillings during the two days of the exhibition. She was marvelous and did an excellent work! Any last words to your readers! Whatever you want to obtain, keep up and fight for your dreams! And if you can support us in the realization of ours… please do it! :-) http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/14/wtt-post-mortem-part-2/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/14/wtt-post-mortem-part-2/ Mon, 14 December 2015 22:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/04/wtt-post-mortem-part-1/ We’ve just been at our first exhibition as exhibitors and we think it would be a good idea just to talk to all of you about all our impressions, ideas, problems and so on . So, I’m here writing in this post everything that comes out of my head, hoping it will help someone out there. (I’ll split this post in multiple parts and I’ll give this article an interview form because I think this will make it more readable than a 20-pages-long-essay about exhibitions that will serve only to help my readers to sleep easily :-) ). Let's start! Wait a moment… who the hell are you? I’ve just stumbled upon this article by chance Ok, 我来介绍一下儿 (let me make the presentations): I’m Antony Vitillo and with my friend Gianni Rosa Gallina I’m trying to found a startup called ImmotionAR, whose purpose is to make Virtual Reality more immersive than ever, where the user can behave in the virtual world in the same way he behaves in the real world. Cool, isn’t it? Can I have more info about your products? Of course: you can check out this web page with a lot of info about ImmotionRoom , our immersive solution. Ok, now I know who you are and that you are very cool. Let’s talk about the exhibition… why do you decided to go to an exhibition? Nice question. The answer can be split in this bullet points list (we engineers love bullet points :-) ): To make people know we do exist . We’ve worked on our ImmotionRoom prototype for months but, apart us, our friends and some partner companies, no one knew we were developing this fantastic thing. And this is very bad: obscurity is the first enemy of each startup and we had to do something against it. We wanted to tell the world “We are some cool guys and we have this prototype for Virtual Reality. Do you like it?”. To meet potential customers, partners . In a technology exhibition, you can meet people that work in the same market as you do, and so you can find customers and partners. To find investors . If you are a startup, surely you need money. Moreover, if you need money, you need investors. Investors are hard to find and to contact, so an exhibition can be the ideal place to find some of them and showcase them your solution live. To make people test our solution . Only 10 people tested our solution in lab. We had to make sure it was usable and we had to make sure people would like it. Remember that we developers are very good at making things technically good, but the users want something that is USABLE and, most of all, something that they NEED. To make a new experience . We are startuppers, so we must learn how to deal with people, with other investors, with customers, to organize events and so on. An exhibition is a great place where to learn all this things. What exhibition did you choose? And why did you choose it? We chose the Wearable Tech Torino (WTT) : organized by Jetop to be the first wearable exhibition of Italy. It was here in Turin, Italy. We chose this because for our first exhibition we wanted something that was manageable for us : WTT was here in our city (this means no travel cost, no risk of forgetting something in our offices and so on), its costs were affordable and was organized by students of the Polytechnic of Turin, that is the University were Gianni and me have studied. For us, it was an opportunity to not miss for our “first time in public”. How did you prepare for the exhibition? Was it a difficult task? We’ve made a lot of posts about our preparation for the WTT. If you are interested in a thorough reading, you can begin here and go on reading our posts until the last one . This way you can have the whole picture about how we got prepared for the event. If you want a short summary, I can say that preparation was much harder than I expected. This were the crucial problems (bullet list is coming…): Prepare the demo. May seem obvious, but if you have to take a demo to the exhibition, the demo MUST be ready the day before the exhibition. You can’t posticipate the deadline, so you have to rush and complete everything by the demo day. We had a lot of work to do, so this meant nights spent working, socializing time reduced to almost zero, a lot of stress, etc. etc. If you don’t have the time to complete the demo… be prepared to have a plan B and a plan C (even better if you can go through to Z). Usually, plan B is always “Cut the features”: if you planned to take something with 10 features and you have not the time to implement them, take only 8 features. IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO TAKE SOMETHING IMPERFECT THAN TO TAKE NOTHING . For example, we planned to make people try our virtual reality fitness game with a monster chasing the player: but last days we did not manage to fully integrate our ImmotionRoom engine into the game… so we gave up and took Oculus Tuscany demo, instead. It was a pity, but better a working Tuscany than a non-working demo of ours. Plan C can be something like: “ok, we don’t have the demo… so, let’s make some nice fake demo clip and let’s bring to the exhibition these movies, the hardware and our smiles, and try to capture people’s interest anyway!”. Never give up… if you have paid to be at the event, you MUST be there and take with you the best you can offer . If life gives you lemons… Organize everything else for the event. This means preparing all the marketing materials (like brochures, roll-up stands, logos, eventual gadgets to distribute at your booth – we gave a branded pen for each people that tried our demo); prepare the surveys users have to fill for feedbacks; organize which people have to be at the event and at which times; prepare hardware for the demo (e.g. we had to buy special VR covers for our headset to be able to clean the Oculus Rift between tests of different people); we had to buy earphones with a long cable just for the event, etc.); organize the event logistics with the event organizers (this means Skype calls, emails, etc.); invite people to the event; etc. (this was a bullet list subtly camouflaged as a colon-separated items list… have you noticed?). I can guarantee you that these are things that make you spend really a lot of time. I am not able to quantify it… but surely, it has been at least 10-20% of the total time of the last two months. Even the most little thing will make you lose many hours: for example, to design this simple roll-up stand, draw it in Photoshop and buy it online, we spent at least 6 hours! Here the lesson is: keep things simple and remember that not all time is “developing time” . OK, so it was a super hard task. How did you manage to keep your mental sanity in all this? We didn’t :-). There is no secret recipe here: try to smile as much as you can and to take breaks sometimes , see friends, make funny things (I went to a Facebook-organized event where we had to go to a Turin plaza and scream SHALALALALALALA OH ROSENBORG for no reason :D)… but remember that you MUST WORK, even if you are tired , even if you think that if you stay other 5 minutes in front of you laptop, your eyeballs will explode. As “Apollo 13” movie says: “FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION”. Anyway, moments of discomfort or tension will happen… deal with it. After all this stress, what were you able to take to the exhibition? A working prototype. With 3 Kinects and a pair of Oculus Rift DK2/Gear VR, you could see yourself inside the virtual world, with a glitchy female avatar (Amanda) following your body joints position. If you walked in place, the player walked in the virtual world. Not bad, but: We couldn’t use our demo ( FearFitness ) and had to use a modified Tuscany demo; Avatar was only female; Avatar had a number of glitches; Hands did not follow finger movements; Etc. I’ve written this (bullet :-) ) list just to make you realize how many features we had to cut out, just because we had not the time to implement or refine them! Not that bad, because our users just saw what THERE WAS there… they did not know what THERE WAS NOT… Here we are at the end of the first part of this Post-Mortem. The next questions will be about the days at the exhibition. Come back next week, if you want to know more. Thank you! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/04/wtt-post-mortem-part-1/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/december/04/wtt-post-mortem-part-1/ Fri, 04 December 2015 11:00:00 Gianni Rosa Gallina http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/27/intro-to-vr-the-different-types-of-reality/ Image sources: Wikipedia and personal collection Hello all! Today I am starting a new introductory blog series about Virtual Reality topics, to spread the knowledge about this interesting world, which, unfortunately, is still unknown by too many people. Arguments will cover technological aspects, programming and experience sharing. If you would like to know more about a specific topic or have something to add or share, feel free to write me an email or comment each post. Your feedback is very important to me! One more thing prior to start. If you are interested in more details about those topics, you can find them covered in my online training course from Pluralsight: Getting Started with VR in Unity . In this first post, we will learn some basic concepts about Virtual Reality and the important difference between "the realities". First, what is Virtual Reality? Virtual Reality, or VR, is often used to describe a variety of applications commonly associated with computer simulations, immersive experiences, physical presence and visual 3D environments. The simulated environment can be similar to the real world in order to create a lifelike experience, for example, in simulations for pilots or industrial operator training, or it can differ significantly from reality, such as in virtual reality games. In the most advanced state-of-art implementations, VR can recreate additional sensory experiences, which also include virtual taste, smell, sound and touch. Unfortunately, common people often identify VR just with strange head-mounted displays, wearable sensors or sensor suits. But Virtual Reality is more than that. Image sources: Wikipedia and personal collection These technologies have started to become increasingly popular in the media over the last few years, and several distorted notions have spread and evolved. First, we need to understand clearly what Virtual Reality is, and how it differs from Augmented Reality, also called AR, and from the Contextual Reality (CR), or, as I like to call it, the Enhanced Reality (ER) . The technologies behind the three types of Reality are very different, as well as their field of application.  Image source: personal collection Augmented reality and Virtual Reality are two overlapping fields in which the lines of distinction are very narrow. Naively, one can think of Virtual Reality as the precursor to Augmented Reality. The main difference between the two technologies is that VR does not use a camera stream and all the things displayed in VR are pure 3D objects or worlds, either static or animated, not related with the physical world.  Users are isolated from the surroundings and do not see through their head-mounted displays . Image sources: personal collection Augmented Reality , instead, offers users a new way to interact with the real world in real-time. It creates a modified version of our reality, enriched with digital information, 3D models or other virtual things, positioned in real world as they were there . This virtual stuff is visible only on the screen of our computers, in our mobile devices or in our binocular smart-glasses, such as Epson Moverio , Meta glasses , or the upcoming Microsoft HoloLens . Image sources: Wikipedia, Epson website, Microsoft HoloLens website, AtheersLab website and personal collection Merging and combining the virtual and the real will bring to a totally new range of user experience, going beyond what common apps on computers, smartphone and tablets are capable of. Things are moving fast, but today we are not yet at the point where everybody can use or leverage these solutions, which just few years ago was pure science fiction. Merging and combining the virtual and the real will bring to a totally new range of user experience, going beyond what common apps on computers, smartphones and tablets are capable of. Things are moving fast, but today we are not yet at the point where everybody can use or leverage these solutions, which just few years ago were pure science fiction. To make things more interesting, Augmented Reality can be easily confused with a third kind of computer-generated reality, the Contextual or Enhanced Reality . This third type is the one made popular by Google Glass or other producers of monocular head-mounted displays, like Vuzix  or Recon Instruments . With Enhanced Reality, the real world is not a modified version of our reality, but it is just an enrichment with digital information shown in a sort of virtual overlay , such as notifications, real-time data, point of interests, messages, related to the place we are in, or to what we are looking at or what we are doing. However, it is not possible, with the technology behind current Contextual Reality, to merge seamlessly the real and the virtual.  Image sources: Wikipedia, Google Glass website, Vuzix website, Recon Instrument website I hope that from now on, you have a clear understanding of the three types of computer-generated realities. In addition, I kindly ask you to spread the word! Each time a friend of yours, a relative or anybody else who talks about VR, AR or ER confusing them, please, tell him or her the difference. Now you know it! It is very important that people know it, and helping them, you will make the world a little better :-) Stay tuned for the next topic, soon! Bye! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/27/intro-to-vr-the-different-types-of-reality/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/27/intro-to-vr-the-different-types-of-reality/ Fri, 27 November 2015 09:00:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/24/a-big-thank-you/ Our stand at the WTT event was a huge success! They have been two very very intense days, full of joy, confusion, satisfaction and hard work. A lot of people tried our solution… and most of them were satisfied. Gianni’s workshop was sold out and positively reviewed. We’ve meet a lot of people, a lot of innovators and made new friends. We just want to say a heart-warmed thank you to all of you who supported us, to Jetop that organized this event, to all our visitors, to all Beps workers and to our family and friends for their support, to you readers of our blog… to everyone! Thank you from us of ImmotionAR: our success has been possible also because of you! In the next day we’ll publish a post-mortem of the WTT… in the meantime… have a nice day! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/24/a-big-thank-you/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/24/a-big-thank-you/ Tue, 24 November 2015 10:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/18/week-8-to-wtt/ Welcome to the last episode of this post serie! The time has come… and we are almost ready for the show . These are frenetic days in which we are doing a lot of things: like preparing slides (we’ll have a public talk about our company and a workshop about VR development!), finalizing the demos (have you seen the picture of the beautiful avatar you can impersonate in our demo?), cutting away features we hadn’t the time to implement, inviting people, writing posts on our blog … and getting really mad :-) Well, gotta go… my company needs me . If you have the possibility, come to the WTT - Wearable Tech Torino , to try our demo or simply say us “Hello!”! See you there! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/18/week-8-to-wtt/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/18/week-8-to-wtt/ Wed, 18 November 2015 21:40:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/17/invitation-to-wtt-wearable-tech-torino/ ImmotionAR , a division of  Beps Engineering ,  has the pleasure to invite all of you to the WTT exhibition here in Turin, Italy, on November 20-21. What we will do: We will make people try our  prototype solution for immersivity in a virtual world , that uses Kinect sensors and an Oculus Rift / GearVR headset Gianni will make a speech about VR and our solutions and  will hold a workshop about how to develop applications for Virtual Reality  using Unity 3D, replicating his successful  Virtual Reality course available on Pluralsight Why come and visiting us: You can try our solution: it’s very innovative and will make you feel like the future predicted by movies like "Total Recall" is almost here  (but no, there will be not  that famous Total Recall girl  in our demo, if you know what I mean…) You can meet us and have a talk about Virtual Reality You can help us in taking the virtual reality to the next step, and be an active part of this technology advancement! You can attend Gianni’s workshop and begin learning virtual reality development The exhibition entry is free (and everything free is good) Beside our stand, you can see a lot of other innovative wearable solutions We are really handsome guys Where you can find us: Padiglione 5, Lingotto Fiere Via Nizza, 294 10126 Torino Italy For more informations, visit the official  WTT . If you want to participate, please  register here ! #BePartOfTheFuture ! See you there! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/17/invitation-to-wtt-wearable-tech-torino/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/17/invitation-to-wtt-wearable-tech-torino/ Tue, 17 November 2015 13:48:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/10/week-7-to-wtt/ Goooood morning to all you Immotiofans ! Were you wondering what we made during this week? Great! Keep reading and you’ll know! Last week Gianni was in the U.S. to attend the Microsoft MVP Summit in Seattle  (if you don’t know what a Microsoft MVP is, read this ). He learned a lot talking with other members of the Microsoft community and dev teams and visited a lot of interesting labs.   He showcased live our solution for the first time and obtained some good feedbacks! Hope this will be the first one of a lot of successful exhibitions! In the meantime… I’ve done a lot of less interesting things. Bug fixing and some improvements on all the solution, bought roller-up banners and brochures, talked with the organizers about our stand logistics… and freezed my PC, that I had to reinstall from scratch (I’m very good at destroying hardware, as you can see ). By the way, our branded pens have arrived… don’t you think they’re marvelous? Their shape resemble a bit the “i” of iAR! :-) Well, I hope everything will come to a good end… goodbye! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/10/week-7-to-wtt/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/10/week-7-to-wtt/ Tue, 10 November 2015 10:45:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/04/week-6-to-wtt/ Hello everyone! I’m writing from Turin, Italy, while my startup buddy is in the USA to showcase our solution in a private exhibition in Seattle , Washington (as we told you in a previous post ). I miss him a bit, but luckily he’ll be back next week, maybe with good news for us! We’ve worked all the past days and nights to be ready for that event… and we obtained a good solution to showcase. Our tracking system works, and the brand new walking detection algorithm is performing well. But the great feature of this v0.2 is that now all the system can be run completely wireless and cross-platform! Now you can use it with the Samsung Gear VR… and I assure you that it’s amazing to be wire-free!!! Look a preview of our system in the video below and let us know your impressions in the comments section! One last thing: as you can see in the photo associated with this post, our T-shirts for the Italian exhibition have arrived! Aren’t they marvelous? See you next week! Bye! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/04/week-6-to-wtt/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/november/04/week-6-to-wtt/ Wed, 04 November 2015 07:50:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/29/week-5-to-wtt/ Hello everyone! This last week has been very very hard and challenging for us . We are currently doing a lot of things: -         Coding : we've completed the porting of the prototype solution to the new architecture; in the meanwhile, we're also introducing a brand new algorithm for walking detection -         Ordering hardware : the  VR Covers  we ordered at  vrcover.com  have arrived! And they are marvelous, aren’t they? -         Breaking things : one of the Kinect Adapter does not work anymore… my laptop has killed it! :-( -         Preparing marketing materials for the exhibition : brochures, roll-up banners, t-shirts, pens and so on. It seems an easy work, but it takes really a lot of time… We are  pretty tired  (like Forrest Gump said… and in fact he resembles a bit me in that scene!), but  we keep our hard work … hoping to finish in time! Cross your fingers for us, we need your help! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/29/week-5-to-wtt/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/29/week-5-to-wtt/ Thu, 29 October 2015 13:30:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/21/week-4-to-wtt/ 大家好 and welcome to the 4th episode of this blog serie about our preparation for the WTT exhibition! (If you miss older episodes, you can begin from here ). This week we’ve another great announcement for you all: our Kinect-based Virtual Reality solution   will be showcased at a private tech event  at the beginning of November. Our proposal has been approved and we are very happy to let some techies see the wonderful things we are doing with the Kinect sensor and VR! We hope someone important will see and love it, and maybe start a collaboration with us. Stay tuned for updates about this event! This event means more joy, but also less time and more work: we must have a working demo before the end of this month : this means a lot of coffee overdose for both of us. About our current tasks: Gianni is porting our prototype solution to the new architecture, while I’m becoming mad with body data, trying to improve our walking detection algorithm. Enough for today (and happy Back to the Future day). See you next week! 再 见 ! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/21/week-4-to-wtt/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/21/week-4-to-wtt/ Wed, 21 October 2015 16:29:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/14/week-3-to-wtt/ Hi everyone! Today I have great news for you all: all work scheduled for the past week by me and Gianni has been completed! Gianni has made a great work: now all the Kinect system is able to auto-configure itself in every situation : you can add a Kinect sensor, remove it, put on fire all the system … and after some seconds, voilà! It can work again without the user pressing even a single key. Very cool, isn’t it? Besides that, all communications have been optimized, so the frame rate and bandwith are almost optimal, now. I’ve completed the first version of the demo! I’m very proud of it: there is a super monster (the one of the previous post , do you remember?) that chases the player in a random maze… and the player has to run away, as fast as possible. All the game has a horror atmosphere that makes it very frightening… and Oculus Rift makes this even more scarying! Do you want a sneak peek of it? Ok, I’ve made a little teaser video for you! Watch the video and tell us your opinion in the comments below! Ok, we’ve made a great work… but a lot is still to do. So, we're getting back at work… and you should do the same! Have a nice day! :-) http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/14/week-3-to-wtt/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/14/week-3-to-wtt/ Wed, 14 October 2015 08:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/07/week-2-to-wtt/ Hi everyone! How has it been your weekend? I hope well…I’ve relaxed a bit, after a week of work. In the past week, in preparation for WTT, we’ve bought some fancy hardware for the demo . First of all, we bought an additional  Microsoft Kinect needed for our tracking solution. Then, we bought some fantastic covers for our Oculus Rift and Gear VR from Bangkok ( http://vrcover.com/ )! But… what is a cover for the Oculus Rift? It is a protection for the sponge part of the HMD, the piece that gets in contact with the human skin when a user is wearing the mount. This is very useful for exhibitions: with a cover like the one we bought (a waterproof one), we could clean the mount between each demo and guarantee a basic hygienic solution for them ! We’ve seen that almost no one in other exhibitions care about cleaning the Rift between different users… but we do… aren’t we the best? :-) In the meanwhile, we’re working on the same things of the last week : optimizations of Kinect data transmission and demo game. The demo game is getting better : now the user can move freely into the maze, while a very frightening monster chases him! As a monster I’ve chosen a fantastic free model available on the Asset Store by BÜMSTRÜM . We’ve chosen it because it is well made, it has animations and… I admit it, also because it’s free! I like it very much… Have a look yourself: don’t you think it’s a lot scarying? The monster can follow the random path I create with the algorithm developed last week . It will chase you… you won't be able to escape from it… maybe… At the end of this week the game should be finished… at least I hope it. In the meanwhile… happy gaming and coding! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/07/week-2-to-wtt/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/october/07/week-2-to-wtt/ Wed, 07 October 2015 12:00:00 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/september/30/week-1-to-wtt/ Hi to all! As promised, I’ll update you about our work in preparation for the WTT here in Turin. First of all, we bought some fantastic Kinect stands! As a colleague of ours says: " they’re like selfie sticks, but for Kinect " :-)   You can see one of them in the photo in this post! Stands are very useful to put Kinect sensors at a certain height above the floor, in an elegant way. Until now, we used card boxes: they are great for lab experiments, but very unelegant and unreliable for a public place use. Besides shopping, we’re hard working for the demo. Gianni is optimizing our algorithm for Kinect inter-communication. You already know that we have various Kinect sensors that communicate between themselves to obtain the 360-degrees tracking: well, this process must be as fast as possible, so he’s digging inside all the bits , trying to make all the process faster. Meanwhile, I’m working on a demo application. It will be a game that… I’ll reveal it another day :-)  But for now, I can say that there will be a path, with turns and obstacles… and I’ve just finished implementing the algorithm that creates a new random version of the path every time the game gets launched… cool, isnt’it? For the path generation algorithm, I’ve searched a lot on StackOverflow (the wikipedia for us developers :-)  ) and then I picked a simple but effective algorithm. Now everything seems working and I started implementing player and enemies movements! Stay tuned to follow the updates! We wish you a marvellous week :-) http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/september/30/week-1-to-wtt/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/september/30/week-1-to-wtt/ Wed, 30 September 2015 05:06:35 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/september/24/road-to-wtt/ Hello again from Turin, Italy! Holidays have lasted too short (as always)… I had a lot of fun with my friends in southern Italy, and you? What about your Holidays? I’m just curious… let me know something in the comment section! :-) We’re back at work! And we’ve a great announcement for you all! We'll partecipate to the WTT here in Turin! If you are wondering what the WTT is: it is the first exhibition in Italy (and maybe in Europe) dedicated completely to wearable technologies… cool, isn’t it? You can find more information at this link http://www.wearabletechtorino.com/ . We’re working very hard to take there something valuable: we are upgrading our current solution for moving and interacting within virtual worlds, wearing nothing but a pair of Oculus Rift . Do you remember the prototype we made some months ago? (If the answer is no, check this link  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw2DrXta2Vk ) Well, we’re trying to push it to the next level! We believe it’s a great idea… even if it’s a bit weird taking our solutions about not wearing sensors to a wearable exhibition… :-) Let us know what you think about our idea and share our passion! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/september/24/road-to-wtt/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/september/24/road-to-wtt/ Thu, 24 September 2015 08:40:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/july/31/happy-holidays/ Summer has come and from tomorrow on, we’ll take some spare days to have a deserved rest. We’ll get back to work by the end of September, to follow our dreams. We’re on the right track, more determined than ever. There have been important developments we’d like to talk to you about… but we’ll do that after the holidays break. In the meantime, enjoy the sun and the sea J Hearty greetings of Happy Holidays to all our  followers ! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/july/31/happy-holidays/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/july/31/happy-holidays/ Fri, 31 July 2015 02:43:15 Antony Vitillo http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/april/24/it-has-been-a-long-time/ Some months ago, we left you with "We will try to keep this blog up to date by writing periodically"… but I have to admit we didn’t succeeded a lot in it… our last post is dated February the 2nd… ops   :-) If in all this time you have wondered if we abandoned our project, the answer is NO . On the contrary, it is due to the passion we are employing in the development of our vision, that it is very difficult to find the time to share our results with the rest of the world. We are determined to go through with it. We owe you an update about our work… so here you are a fantastic bullet point that explains all . We developed two Virtual Reality prototypes for    Intel RealSense AppChallenge 2014  contest . We already won some prizes along the journey, passing the phase 1 selection with excellent results back in November 2014 and an Early-Submission first prize in February 2015.  Winners will be announced in May… so keep your fingers crossed for us! We made a prototype for Augmented Reality e-commerce . Something really amazing… in a while we’ll publish something about it on this website, so you’ll be able to see it and get astonished! We created a prototype for Augmented Reality entertainment . Still  Top secret at the moment :-) We’re doing a Computer Vision consulting ( image analysis and classification), a field that I love (and hate, too) Beside that and above all: We decided to focus on fitness , because it is a sector we love and in which the wearable devices and the aumgented/virtual reality can be of great help. We want to set a revolution in this sector, helping people to exercise better and in a entertaing way! In fact we changed our motto in fitness beyond the real . Cool, uh? In this area, we're participating  to the GoBeyond   contest, targeted to find some collaboration and investors. Have a look at our proposal and, if you Like it, vote it :-) At the end: We became smarter, more handsome and funnier As you can see, a lot of things happened, and all of these things need a long description, which we will give you as soon as possible. Particularly, the decision of focusing on fitness is something huge!  In the meanwhile, please keep on following and supporting us… we need you! And let us know what you think about our projects... Greetings to all our ImmotioFans ! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/april/24/it-has-been-a-long-time/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/april/24/it-has-been-a-long-time/ Fri, 24 April 2015 07:00:00 Gianni Rosa Gallina http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/february/02/wandering-in-a-virtual-world/ Since the first time we tried the Oculus Rift , about 6 months ago, we felt a big limit in its use: being seated in front of the PC and moving around with keyboard and mouse (or using a gamepad) instantaneously made us losing every immersive effect (and, above all, it caused nausea and motion sickness). Browsing on the Internet, we found some interesting solutions to this problem, but all were early prototypes and required dedicated hardware with ad-hoc wearable sensors. Being expert with Microsoft Kinect applications, we wondered if it was possible to develop an alternative solution, which required nothing but our body . It was . On our YouTube channel , you can watch the first results we obtained last fall. The developed solution leverages Kinect for Windows v2 and enables 360° full body tracking of one or more people in the interaction area, without the need for ad-hoc wearable sensors . It lets users moving in a virtual environment in two modes, both naturally walking in the interaction area and walking on the spot, to cover longer distances. As you can see in the videos shot few months ago, the system, even if in early development stage and affected by little instability problems and glitches, was promising. People who tried it already felt immediately comfortable and were able to master the movements in very little time. Everyone, at the end of the tests, commented the experience as " amazing and totally immersive, such to be unable to realize where I was in the real world " . In the last months, we continued the development and improved the solution, by adding new features and interaction modes, for an even more immersive experience. We are currently developing some applications leveraging this walking system and other solutions. What do you think? Would you like to try it? Would you like to buy it for your home? Have you some application idea? Let us know in the comments below this post! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/february/02/wandering-in-a-virtual-world/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/february/02/wandering-in-a-virtual-world/ Mon, 02 February 2015 13:15:00 Immotionar Team http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/january/31/you-dont-have-to-be-great-to-start-but-you-have-to-start-to-be-great/ Welcome everybody! With a little emotion due to the start of a new adventure, we present ourselves: we are Gianni and Tony, two Italian guys that created the ImmotionAR team (sometimes shortened in iAR ). Our dream is to create virtual reality immersive experiences that are able to make our users feel any kind of exciting and amazing sensations. We want to achieve this using the latest cutting-edge technologies: Virtual Reality glasses (such as Oculus Rift, Samsung GearVR, Google Cardboard ) Sensors like Microsoft Kinect , Leap Motion , Intel RealSense , etc... Now it’s been a while that we are experimenting with all these technologies (with the generous help from Beps Engineering) and now we believe that time has come to present our work to the world. Our idea is to start with little projects, and then, with a lot of work and with your precious help, to make something big. This is our first step in this long and insidious journey, and we hope that it will bring us to gaze at the sky from the top of a mountain of satisfactions. In this blog you will mainly find all the news about our projects and products we are developing, but we’ll give also an insider and personal view, keeping you informed about: Difficulties and problems we’re facing Hardware and software reviews Technology news from the world Personal opinions and comments Contest, Prizes, Community events We will try to keep this blog up to date by writing periodically… it is not easy, but we will try.  Please, follow us by subscribing to our RSS feed and to our newsletter and let us know whatever you think about our work. Wish us Good Luck…! http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/january/31/you-dont-have-to-be-great-to-start-but-you-have-to-start-to-be-great/ http://www.immotionar.com/en/blog/2015/january/31/you-dont-have-to-be-great-to-start-but-you-have-to-start-to-be-great/ Sat, 31 January 2015 15:30:00