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UK hospital uses VR to reassure children before MRI scans
Entering a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine can be a nerve-wracking experience. You're trapped in a tight space and have to lie perfectly still as loud noises -- produced by the current in the scanner coils -- pepper your eardrums. To help patients, and in particular children, the Kings College Hospital in London has turned to VR. MRI physicist Jonathan Ashmore and technologist Jerome Di Pietro have produced an app that contains a 360-degree video. Slip on a Google Cardboard and you'll see what happens on the day, from arrival to stepping inside the scanner.
Vive Video puts a personal home theater in HTC's VR headset
We've seen VR video theaters for Oculus and PlayStation VR, but now HTC has an upgrade in that department. Vive Video supports all kinds of media: 2D, 3D, 180-degree or full 360-degree, with options to make the environment as much of a realistic theater or distraction-free cinema as you'd like. Also, thanks to those positional sensors, wearers can move around in the surround videos and watch as it adapts to their perspective. Vive owners have already had the Vive Home Cinema app and any number of third party players to choose from, but this one looks a little more polished. The app is available in the Viveport app store, and comes with a teaser for the Invasion! 360-degree video.
PlayStation VR now supports 360-degree YouTube videos
PSVR is still a young whippersnapper in the virtual reality world, striving for parity -- and in games, superiority -- with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Today it's taken another step forward with support for 360-degree videos on YouTube. That means you can boot up anything on the platform, including a New York Times 'Daily 360' video, and move your head to change the perspective. You're stuck in one place, of course, but the experience is still fairly immersive, especially in comparison to the desktop YouTube experience (dragging around with your cursor isn't much fun).
PlayStation 4's YouTube app is slowly gaining PSVR support
We're over two months out from the PlayStation VR's launch and, well, new stuff is a bit sparse at this point. But hey, an update is rolling out that'll put 360 degree YouTube videos on Sony's headset. Before you get too excited, though, Reddit users (spotted by UploadVR) are commenting that the quality isn't so hot. That's likely due to the videos capping out at 1080p resolution, and how it has to stretch across a 100 degree field of view, at 360 degrees. By user morphinapg's calculations, resolution equals out to around 354p.
Brood with Hollywood's finest in VR film noir
As part of a magazine celebrating this year's best actors, the New York Times has put together a murky, monochromatic set of film noir vignettes. The kicker? They were all shot in 360 degrees, giving you complete freedom over the camera angle. You're also a participant of sorts -- a mute character, watching as Hollywood's brightest stars talk to you in flowery, cryptic tones. (The conversations are rather one-sided, of course.) In each video, you take on a different role -- a bartender, a reporter, or a cheating husband, for instance -- and get just a couple of minutes to piece together what's been happening. They're all short, but powerful scenes.
VLC media player now supports 360-degree videos
VLC, the app that lets you play basically any video format on practically any platform, is about to add support for a whole new medium. The company just unveiled a technical preview that enables its desktop app to play 360-degree videos, so folks can watch their dizzying footage on their computers. The preview is now available for Windows and Mac machines, and the full version will arrive with VLC 3.0 , which is expected at the end of the month.
BBC to show the Olympics live in 360-degree video
Watching the Olympics on TV? That's so 2012, apparently. The BBC is launching an "experimental" service on Friday that will broadcast the action in 360-degree video instead. It's not a complete replacement -- only 100 hours will be shown throughout the tournament. But it's more than a token gesture, with one live event and a highlights package planned for each day. They'll be accessible through a new BBC Sport 360 app for iOS, Android and Samsung's Gear VR headset. Coverage will also be available through BBC Taster, a website for the BBC's off-the-wall projects.
One frightening live sex show and the state of 360 video
NSFW Warning: This story may contain links to and descriptions or images of explicit sexual acts. A woman with an enormous, warped vagina stands over you, attempting to situate a pair of naked coeds just so on an overstuffed sectional. Their faces distort and sporadically disappear as they pleasure each other and themselves. Their movements are sometimes smooth, sometimes staccato, like a couple of gyrating marionettes on Ecstasy. They moan with pleasure and talk dirty to no one in particular, but their mouths don't move.
YouTube's first live 360-degree videos were little more than tech demos
Last week, YouTube started supporting live 360-degree video streams in a bid for more-immersive video content. Though users have been able to upload and watch 360-degree video for over a year, it's only now that Google is introducing the option to beam such content live to thousands of viewers. Still, having the ability to broadcast this video in real time isn't the same as delivering a compelling visual experience. Indeed, the first uses of YouTube's new technology show that it's going to take a lot of creative thinking from directors and designers to actually make interesting content.
Google takes you on a 360-degree tour of the Sydney Opera House
It's never been easier to visit historic places around the world, at least virtually. And now, thanks to a partnership with Google's Cultural Institute, the Sydney Opera House is letting people take a 360-degree video tour of its iconic arts center. The experience, which is roughly nine minutes long, features a performance from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and views of different areas around the location. It's perfect for those of you who haven't been to the Sydney Opera House, especially if you're hoping to go one day.
The 'Game of Thrones' credits are more fun in 360-degrees
There are still ten days to go until Game of Thrones season six debuts, but HBO is doing its best to keep fans' appetites for new footage satiated until then. After dropping a dingy new trailer on Monday, and some behind-the-scenes footage yesterday, it's now released a 360-degree video of the show's opening credits on Facebook.
Take a 360-degree video tour of Google's Oregon data center
Google's latest 360-degree video provides a virtual tour of its data center in The Dalles, Oregon. We've seen glimpses of Google's server farms before, through Street View and other high-res photography, but this new upload offers a better sense of immersion. It's also presented by Sandeep, one of Google's developer advocates, who explains each room and interviews some of the data center staff. The video is highly curated, but there are some fascinating shots and tidbits, including a biometric eye scanner that every employee has to pass through. There's also a monstrous hard drive shredder and a look at Google's colorful mechanical equipment room.
Google uses VR to put you inside a Bruegel painting
The Google Cultural institute has been working for half a decade to make the world's art accessible to everyone (with an internet connection). It's done a decent job of it so far, digitizing thousands of paintings and sculptures from hundreds of museums and galleries across the globe. More recently, it created a 360-degree video to put you inside the orchestra pit of New York's Carnegie Hall. Building on that experiment, it's now used a lot more creativity to produce a similar video for the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium. A video that takes you inside Bruegel's The Fall of the Rebel Angels.
YouTube reportedly plans to support live 360-degree videos
360-degree videos are all the rage nowadays, and YouTube is at the forefront of that trend. The internet service began supporting this type of content last March, which it later expanded to be compatible with virtual reality headsets. But it's not stopping there. According to BuzzFeed News, YouTube's now working to bring live 360-degree videos to its platform, although there isn't a timeline of when it plans to launch said feature.
Google's immersive storytelling app launches on iOS
Google is getting serious about 360-degree video content. And it's not only about supporting it through YouTube or, by extension, Cardboard. The search giant's also behind an app called Spotlight Stories, which it created with Motorola in 2013 and has been on Android since. As of today, that application is also available for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad -- as long as those devices are running a version of iOS 8. Google describes Spotlight Stories as a "mobile movie theater" that combines 3D and 2D animation with 360-degree spherical video, sphere audio and sensor-triggered interactions to create an immersive experience. Right now there are four stories you can watch: Buggy Night, Help, Duet and Windy Day, all of which are original and were created exclusively for Spotlight Stories.
You can now post your interactive 360-degree footage on YouTube
If you picked up a camera that captures video in 360 degrees, sharing that footage just got a little easier. YouTube now supports 360-degree video uploads, so getting the action to eager viewers is a breeze. What's more, if folks watch with the YouTube Android app, moving a phone or tablet pans around all the different angles. I tried it out with the Red Bull F-1 video above, and it's pretty awesome. The same action is done with a mouse click in Chrome too, and support for iOS is on the way. When you upload the file, there's a script you'll need to run to tack on the appropriate metadata, insuring that the footage displays its 360-degree views properly. Soon, that process will be automatic, but for now, it's a necessary step. Ready to see it in action? Well, there's a playlist on the other side of the break that'll allow you to do just that.
