Virtual Reality Advertisements Get in Your Face

Some companies see virtual and augmented reality as a way to make money from a new type of ads.

I’m sitting in a desk chair in an office in Mountain View, California. But with a virtual-reality headset strapped to my head and headphones over my ears, it looks and sounds like I’m standing in the belly of a blimp, flying high above silent city blocks dotted with billboards for a Despicable Me theme-park ride.

The blimp ride is part of a demo built by MediaSpike, a startup that’s making ads for virtual reality. Even the blimp itself is an ad: before boarding it, I can see its exterior is covered with a larger-than-life version of one of the film’s short, yellow characters.

For now, augmented reality and virtual reality are not widely used. But as new headsets hit the market, advertisers will surely try to stake out virtual ground.

Companies like Facebook-owned Oculus VR, Sony, Microsoft, and Magic Leap are working on consumer-geared hardware, some of which is slated to begin selling late this year. Already, Oculus VR and Samsung have released the Gear VR, a $199 developer-geared headset that lets you experience 3-D games and videos by inserting a Samsung smartphone into the device.

MediaSpike is among several companies aiming to serve brands that want to advertise on these new platforms. Founder and CEO Blake Commagere says the company started out a few years ago working to bring sponsored content to smartphone- and tablet-based games. Now the company is thinking about how billboards, videos, and other kinds of product placement can fit into the computer-generated worlds viewed on devices like the Gear VR, as well as on headsets that don’t yet have a firm release date.

A virtual billboard advertises a theme-park ride related to the Despicable Me animated films.

From inside the headgear, it still looks pretty primitive. Before the blimp ride, I was driving around MediaSpike’s digitally rendered town, which is empty of activity beyond the movie billboards, blimp, and a giant display in a vacant town square that’s showing the trailer for the upcoming Minions film. I found it nauseating, too (a common complaint from people using stereoscopic 3-D technologies because of the disconnect between your visual and physical senses). But it’s still a heck of a lot more interesting than the banner and pop-up ads we’re used to seeing on websites and mobile apps.

The huge value of the online advertising market suggests it could be lucrative to experiment in this area. According to Magna Global, a media market researcher and investor, digital media revenue rose 17 percent in 2014 to $142 billion. It’s expected to climb another 15 percent to $163 billion globally this year.

Dallas-based Airvirtise certainly hopes advertisers will be willing to try to reach people inside virtual scenes. It’s working on virtual 3-D models that are integrated with real-world locations, which it discerns from longitude, latitude, and elevation—think a giant Angry Birds game in a park or a life-size virtual car you can walk around. These things would initially be viewable through smartphone apps and eventually through the lenses of augmented-reality eyewear.

Founder and CEO Kevin Hart describes what the company has been showing off at the SXSW festival this week: a computer-generated drone seemingly hovering in the air about 20 feet away, with a banner flying below it, visible only when viewed through the camera lens of an iPad. As you move closer to the virtual drone, he says, it will get appropriately larger by taking into account motion sensors on the iPad to determine your location and position, allowing you to walk under and around it.

A company that has already had some success merging virtual ads with the real world is Blippar. A smartphone app created by the company can be used to view sponsored augmented-reality content, such as virtual footballers on Pepsi cans, or virtual nail polish shades from Maybelline.

There will be plenty of challenges ahead for companies working to bring ads to virtual and augmented reality. Beyond the obvious difficulty of working with emerging technologies, Hart and others must figure out what kinds of ads users will respond to, and which they might find too overwhelming or obnoxious.

Commagere acknowledges that, as with product placement in movies, it will be possible to overdo it with virtual products. (One example of this occurred during my blimp ride, when I turned around to see a pixelated can of Pepsi perched next to the craft’s control panel.) But he’s hopeful that this will feel less intrusive than conventional pop-ups and other types of distracting Web ads.

“I can’t imagine having a banner at the bottom of a VR screen the entire time,” he says. “That would be infuriating.”

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Reality Check: Comparing HoloLens and Magic Leap

After trying demos of Magic Leap and HoloLens, it’s clear that commercializing augmented reality technology will be difficult.

A mockup shows HoloLens being used to provide remote help with home repairs.

I’ve seen two competing visions for a future in which virtual objects are merged seamlessly with the real world. Both were impressive in part, but they also made me wonder whether augmented reality will become a successful commercial reality anytime soon.

I’m the only person I know of to have tried both Microsoft’s HoloLens and the system being developed by a secretive startup called Magic Leap.

I got a peek at what Magic Leap is building back in December (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2015: Magic Leap”). In that demonstration, 3-D monsters and robots looked amazingly detailed and crisp, fitting in well with the surrounding world, though they were visible only with lenses attached to bulky hardware sitting on a cart, and no release date has yet been revealed.

I had my chance to see HoloLens during a recent visit to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. HoloLens is a holographic system that the company plans to pack into a visor about the size of a pair of bulbous ski goggles. In January, Microsoft said HoloLens would be available “in the Windows 10 time frame,” and the company said this week that the new operating system will be released this summer.

I experienced three HoloLens demos. The first, HoloStudio, showed the possibilities for 3-D modeling and manipulation. The second let me explore the surface of Mars with a virtually present NASA scientist. And the third gave a sense of how I might use HoloLens in combination with a Skype video chat to get help with a real-world problem (in this case, installing a light switch).

Unlike with some stereoscopic virtual-reality 3-D technologies I’ve tried, such as Oculus Rift, HoloLens did not make me feel nauseous, which bodes well. Microsoft would not say how it works, but a bit of explanation in a Wired piece makes it sound as if it may be doing something somewhat similar to Magic Leap, which is using a tiny projector to shine light at your eyes that blends in very well with the light you get from the real world around you.

The final form Microsoft’s HoloLens will take.

But I was not blown away by what I saw in Redmond. The holograms looked great in a couple of instances, such as when I peered at the underside of a rock on a reconstruction of the surface of Mars, created with data from the Curiosity rover. More often, though, images appeared distractingly transparent and not nearly as crisp as the creatures Magic Leap showed me some months before. What’s more, the relatively narrow viewing area in front of my face meant the 3-D imagery seen through HoloLens was often interrupted by glimpses of the unenhanced world on the periphery. The headset also wasn’t closed off to the world around me, so I still had my natural peripheral vision of the unenhanced room. This was okay when looking at smaller or farther-away 3-D images, like an underwater scene I was shown during my first demo, or while moving around to inspect images close-up from different angles. The illusion got screwed up, though, when it came to looking at something larger than my field of view.

Microsoft is also still working on packing everything into the HoloLens form it has promised. Unlike the untethered headset that the company demonstrated in January, the device I tried was unwieldy and unfinished: it had see-through lenses attached to a heavy mass of electronics and plastic straps, tethered to a softly whirring rectangular box (Microsoft’s holographic processing unit) that I had to wear around my neck and to a nearby computer. I was instructed to touch only a plastic strap that fit over the top of my head; demo minders placed it on me and took it off at the end of each experience.

Even this level of limited mobility was more than I got at Magic Leap, but it’s clear the HoloLens team has a big task in getting the technology to fit into its smaller, consumer-ready design.

For instance, during the Mars demo, the room around me was blanketed with realistic images of the surface of the planet, and a detailed-looking rover sat in front of me, slightly to my right. But I could only see it one rectangle at a time; if my eyes strayed beyond that rectangle in front of me, I’d see bits of the room, but no hologram.

The issues extended to the opacity of the images, too. The demos were all held in rooms that had no windows, but lighting was kept at a normal level of brightness, and the rooms were decorated with furniture, knick-knacks, and other items on and near the walls—not unlike your average living room, and the kind of environment in which you’d be likely to use a HoloLens if you bought one for yourself. Yet I could often see bits of the room peeking through the images themselves in a way that interrupted, rather than worked with, the illusion.

The most impressive part of the HoloLens demos was the use of sensors to track where I was looking and gesturing, as well as what I was saying. My gaze was effectively a mouse, accurately highlighting what I was looking at. An up-and-down motion with my index finger—dubbed an “air tap” by the HoloLens crew—functioned as the mouse click to do things like paint a fish or place a flag in a certain spot on Mars. (I screwed this up a number of times; mostly because I wasn’t holding my finger up high enough.) Simple voice commands like “copy” and “rotate” worked well, too.

HoloLens is also really good at having virtual objects follow the user around. As I chatted with a Microsoft employee over Skype, the simple diagram he drew about how to connect a light switch hovered in the air near the electrical box on the wall, while his video-chat window remained in my field of view, even as I moved about. This fits neatly with the idea that augmented reality could help employees in the field make repairs to things like air conditioners (see “Augmented Reality Gets to Work”).

A key difference compared to Magic Leap was that I was able to walk around some 3-D objects, such as an X-Wing fighter sitting in front of me; it looked fairly solid up close, though not intricately detailed. I was also able to modify 3-D objects, which was pretty cool. Using my gaze, gestures, and voice commands, I enlarged, copied, colored, and changed the angular position of a fish that was part of the ocean scene, for instance. And I could move objects from one spot to another, like a cartoonish pony I seated on a couch between the two HoloLens team members who were in the room with me for a mixed-reality photo.

Despite the issues yet to be overcome, Microsoft is making progress toward getting the technology behind HoloLens into a device you can actually wear. That’s not the same, though, as making an augmented reality device that is so useful and slickly packaged that millions of consumers will want to buy it. To do that, HoloLens, Magic Leap, and any other competitors must do much more.

It’s impossible to compare HoloLens and Magic Leap at this stage and declare one winner, at least given what I’ve seen in two very different demonstrations. What I can say is my experiences illustrate the enormous challenge of creating a truly engaging augmented reality experience in a practical, consumer-ready device.

It’s clearly incredibly hard to make this kind of stuff work in a convincing way on a headset—once you’ve figured out how to make good-looking virtual images, there’s the task of cramming all of the necessary computer hardware into a wearable device, making sure it looks good as the wearer is walking around, and figuring out a way to power it. This raises big questions about how good augmented reality can really get, and how useful it will be in the near future. If it doesn’t wow you, both in form and function, why would you buy it?

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PC Gaming Week: How virtual reality could revolutionise PC gaming

document.write(calculate_time('29 Mar 2015, 18:16'));Samsung has recently showcased us the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge in India. Both these devices are available in 32GB / 64GB / 128GB capacity and already on pre-order in India.

document.write(calculate_time('29 Mar 2015, 17:59'));Meerkat is reportedly getting ready to make some changes to its app in order to better compete with Periscope, the live streaming app that Twitter just scooped up earlier this month.

document.write(calculate_time('29 Mar 2015, 17:43'));HTC has let details of the One E9+ slip on its Chinese website, but something doesn't quite add up.

document.write(calculate_time('29 Mar 2015, 17:34'));Back at the Google I/O developer conference in June 2014, Google officially unveiled the Android One project, a program in which Google would work hand-in-hand with low-cost smartphone manufacturers in emerging markets.

document.write(calculate_time('29 Mar 2015, 17:30'));We answer the age-old question of whether you should build or buy your gaming rig.

document.write(calculate_time('29 Mar 2015, 16:00'));From Richey Edwards's love of John Madden's American Football to Massive Attack's Kick Off 2 addition.

document.write(calculate_time('29 Mar 2015, 15:30'));Cover the country properly before boasting about tiny pockets of lab-perfect 4G.

document.write(calculate_time('29 Mar 2015, 12:50'));Whilst VR inevitably dominated the company's F8 developer conference, Messenger Platform was a big move on the business front.

document.write(calculate_time('29 Mar 2015, 05:11'));World's first dual-curved glass display is almost here, and it's an idea that is here to stay.

document.write(calculate_time('28 Mar 2015, 20:30'));We venture to a galaxy far, far away to highlight the greatest Star Wars games to ever hit the PC.

document.write(calculate_time('28 Mar 2015, 19:30'));We look at what pieces of virtual reality tech are likely to change PC gaming forever, and the problems some genres present to VR.

document.write(calculate_time('28 Mar 2015, 18:30'));And why Apple might have made a slghtly better running watch than we all thought

document.write(calculate_time('28 Mar 2015, 18:30'));Are there really any differences between the two technologies that aim to smooth your PC games?

document.write(calculate_time('28 Mar 2015, 18:00'));Remembering Ocean's surreal platformer through Amiga Power's 1991 review.

document.write(calculate_time('28 Mar 2015, 16:31'));These are the television shows you need to be watching on Amazon Prime right now.

document.write(calculate_time('28 Mar 2015, 16:08'));Talking the future of game design with some of the most important names in the business.

document.write(calculate_time('28 Mar 2015, 15:30'));And why Bloodborne has made me a loner.

document.write(calculate_time('28 Mar 2015, 15:30'));For years, Mac gaming has been almost an oxymoron - not really worth considering if your love of games extends beyond Football Manager. But things are changing.

document.write(calculate_time('28 Mar 2015, 15:20'));Star Citizen is a game of almost unfathomable scope, from the creator of the classic Wing Commander, Chris Roberts.

document.write(calculate_time('28 Mar 2015, 14:36'));If James Bond had an external hard drive in his Aston Martin, it would be the Seagate Seven.Load more

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Your iPhone Might Make You a Reality TV Star

Broadcasting everything your smartphone sees and hears could be the next trend in social media.

The first time I learned about live streaming was also the first time I realized you could play shuffleboard in Brooklyn, at the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club.

As my friends and I learned the rules, my teammate, Kevin Porter, started talking to his iPhone. He’d just downloaded Yevvo, he explained. The premise was simple—everything his phone could see and hear, his followers could also see and hear. His girlfriend had stayed home that night, but she was (hypothetically) watching his every move, thanks to this app. He had become the star of his own reality television show, albeit with a very small audience, and we were all his cast mates.

It seems like just about everything you say and do might wind up on the Internet someday. But this was something different: with Yevvo, everything we said and did was on the Internet, right then and there. And after a few minutes, my shuffleboard teammate had a new follower. And then another. And then another.

Yevvo, which relaunched last year with new features and a new name—Air—isn’t the only app to allow people to broadcast their lives live. With the spread of high-quality smartphone cameras, not to mention camera-equipped wearable devices, the use of such apps is sure to become more common. And such personal broadcasting could start to change the social media landscape.

Back at the shuffleboard club, we weren’t really considering any of this. Air’s users notify contacts when they begin a broadcast, and then anyone following that feed can push-notify their followers to check it out too. Nothing is saved or stored for later. If you missed it in real time, you missed it. Our fans—my friend’s girlfriend, at least—rooted for us, via comments on the stream. We had a blast.

Air is not just about catering to attention-starved 30-somethings, one of the company’s Israeli co-founders, Ben Rubin, told me in an interview a while later. Rubin and two others founded Yevvo after trying to figure out which parties to go to at a tech conference in Austin, Texas. They decided it would be nice to be able to actually show each other what a given scene was like.

Since launching as Yevvo in August 2013, Air has raised more than $4 million. Rubin wouldn’t disclose how many people have downloaded Yevvo or its new incarnation, but it clearly isn’t threatening Instagram yet. The highest Yevvo was ranked in Apple App store, back in December 2013, was 223rd.

Still, there’s good reason to think live-streaming video could thrive. A service like Vine, which makes it easy to post short videos on Facebook and Twitter, is appealing because it reduces the amount of time between when something happens and when other people get to see it. Meanwhile Snapchat’s ephemeral promise makes it a medium for sharing even the most impulsive and unguarded moments, delivered to recipients instantly rather than crowded into a feed. Live-streaming apps offer a similar, even more colorful method for unfettered and unfiltered communication.

Josh Elman, a partner at the Silicon Valley investment firm Greylock, told me he’s considering getting involved with Rubin’s company because it is positioned at television media’s latest shift, from “being curated, and heavily produced, to tuning into who you want, based on who you know.”

This novel participatory medium also raises questions, though—about privacy, intimacy, and appropriate behavior on social media. Porter, the guy who first showed me Yevvo, told me several months later that he eventually deleted the app from his phone. As he continued to explore the service, he said, he increasingly found the whole concept gross.

“You can only imagine how many ‘take off your shirt’ requests an aspiring model received while streaming her photo shoot to a bunch of lonely teens,” he told me.

What ultimately convinced him to walk away was seeing older men following underage girls, something that basically creeped him out. “If only these poor parents knew that their child was upstairs being watched by (and responding to) creepy old dudes,” he wrote.

Ryan Cooley, the company’s community manager, acknowledges the “perv factor,” but he points out that Air has made many changes designed to reduce it substantially. Now you can only invite people to follow you via SMS; the app doesn’t promote particular users (and thus expose them to strangers); users have the option to approve everyone that follows them. “We won’t recommend anybody for you to follow unless we are confident you know them from the physical world,” Cooley says. “I don’t think the dirtbags are going to go away, but you’re going to see a lot more transparency.”

Despite these misgivings, I found live streaming a fascinating thing to try. It’s fair to imagine that live-streaming services could become compelling new forms of social connection. If that happens, I can’t promise I won’t ham it up on screen after a few cocktails, but at least my viewers might find it entertaining.

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A Film Studio for the Age of Virtual Reality

A Montreal-based film studio is making movies that you’ll watch with a virtual-reality headset, pointing the way to a whole new form of entertainment.

A still from Wild—The Experience, a short virtual-reality film.

Imagine sitting back in a chair, sliding a headset over your eyes and headphones over your ears. Suddenly, you’re sitting on a rock in a sun-dappled clearing, surrounded by tall trees, alone with the noises of the forest. Alone, that is, until you turn your head and spot Reese Witherspoon walking toward you, looking like a haggard camper with a giant pack on her back.

This is what it’s like to watch the opening bit of Wild—The Experience, a short virtual-reality film made as a promotion for the Witherspoon-led movie Wild, which is based on Cheryl Strayed’s book about her trek along the Pacific Crest Trail. Despite the clunky feeling of a headset on your face, for a few moments you feel transported to someone else’s reality. You sense the calming stillness of nature and see it all around you—a contrast with the weirdness of watching Witherspoon stopping to rest on your left without acknowledging your presence.

This is just one immersive experience that Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël are creating at Felix & Paul Studios, their Montreal-based film production company that focuses on live-action 3-D and virtual-reality films. Their studio and a few others are exploring ways to take virtual reality beyond video games. “We like to think of virtual reality not as a medium to actually create horror stories and heavy adrenaline-driven emotions, but rather to use it as a way to enhance the human experience,” Lajeunesse says.

The world of virtual-reality films is still small—it’s not much more than a collection of experiments, and to check any of them out you’ll need a headset of some sort. But the continued development of headsets such as Oculus Rift, the Samsung-Oculus Gear VR, and Sony’s Project Morpheus signal that immersive display technologies may finally be about to go mainstream.

Felix & Paul Studios focuses its filmmaking efforts on the Gear VR headset, which is made by Samsung and includes Oculus’s technology.

And as demand for virtual-reality devices heats up, Lajeunesse and Raphaël believe a desire for new forms of cinematic experiences will come along with it. “We believe it’s going to grow into a new, totally distinct art form,” Lajeunesse says. Hollywood seems intrigued: Wild–The Experience was commissioned by Fox Searchlight Pictures, which released Wild. Fox Searchlight did not respond to requests for comment, but Mike Dunn, president of 20th Century Fox’s home entertainment business, has said he expects to start selling virtual-reality clips related to Fox movies this year.

Making VR movies is much different from making a regular movie—for one thing, it’s much harder to control where the viewer is focusing attention. And there are still many challenges to overcome in figuring out how to enable users to really explore a live-action virtual world the way you can an animated one or a virtual-reality game. Still, the early results hint at how entrancing the results can be, suggesting how virtual reality might be used for things like education and work collaboration as well as entertainment.

Lajeunesse and Raphaël have backgrounds in traditional filmmaking, and so far they’ve focused their virtual-reality work exclusively on short, live-action pieces. Their first film, Strangers, with Montreal singer-songwriter Patrick Watson, seats you on an ottoman inside Watson’s studio so you can hang out while he plays music. It debuted at SXSW in Austin, Texas, in 2014. Since then, the duo has made several more, including Herders, which brings you into the world of Mongolia’s nomadic yak herders, and a scene from the Cirque du Soleil show Zarkana.

To make films that look and sound real, Lajeunesse and Raphaël built a 360°, stereoscopic 3-D camera system and an audio system that can record sound from all around. They had to build their own postproduction software, too, and essentially edit while wearing a Gear VR headset, Lajeunesse says. In editing, they add in a virtual spot where the viewer is meant to be sitting while taking in the virtual world.

The Wild film is the first that Felix & Paul made as a reactive experience. That is, your behavior while watching the film (such as where you look) determines whether or not a second character appears: Strayed’s mother (played by Laura Dern), who in this scene would be a figment of Strayed’s imagination.

“We like that notion of reactivity because it also enhances the sense of presence,” Lajeunesse says. Even the basics of VR filmmaking have been challenging. Early on, the most difficult task Felix & Paul faced was figuring out how to film scenes so that scale of the virtual world didn’t seem off to some viewers. And the studio’s films thus far haven’t incorporated any computer-generated effects to give the viewer a body, so you feel a bit like a ghost while watching—if you lift your real-world arm in front of your face, you won’t see anything.

There’s also the problem of standing up or even leaning over. While it’s possible to make virtual-reality games and films with computer-generated 3-D models that keep track of a user’s changing position and adjust to that shifting perspective, thus far this isn’t the case with live-action films made for VR. Right now, for instance, you can turn around while watching a Felix & Paul piece, since it’s filmed in 360 degrees, but if you get out of your chair while watching one, the whole universe will rise with you.

Despite the issues, Jeremy Bailenson, an associate professor at Stanford and the founding director of the school’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, thinks virtual reality is an exciting medium for short live-action films. With such pieces, he says, “you get to leverage what I call the paradox of virtual reality: the brain treats it as real, yet anything is possible.”

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