Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality Network

Read the latest stories about Virtual Reality on TIME

Instead of hanging out with your friends in real life, why not spend time with them in outer space?

vTime, the first virtual reality social network, wants to make that possible. Developed by Starship Group, a VR/AR innovation company, the service launched on Google Cardboard on March 11 and the app works on the Samsung Gear VR too.

The social network lets you create a virtual avatar and interact with other 1-3 other users in 12 different virtual worlds. You can create chatrooms and invite your friends, or have the system randomly pair you with a user to talk to-called Random Match. The company told Quartz it has “tens of thousands of users in 150 countries.”

In my many years working in print and documentary I have enjoyed extensive editorial control. I can very specifically edit a story so that the “cuts” read or view well, without worrying what might happen to someone’s body if they are “experiencing” the story. Virtual reality can definitely cause what’s known as sim sickness, a feeling like motion sickness. So when you design a piece that makes your audience feel as if they are actually present on scene, you have to respect that you have brought their entire body along for the ride. This type of spatial narrative requires very specific considerations for design and key is to imagine truly standing in the middle of the story.

The other crucial element that always needs to be considered is the speed of the refresh rate on the goggles. It has been so great working with some of the top technologies committed to making imagery on the screen track any viewer movement without the lag that can cause sim sickness. I have had incredible support from the motion tracking camera company Phasespace and the whole team at USC’s ICT MxR Lab headed by VR veteran Mark Bolas. Working with Palmer Luckey and Oculus Rift has also been a game changer–we are now able to offer large audiences access to these pieces.

Five free VR apps you can download to your phone today

The Augmentarium is a revolutionary virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) facility that brings together a unique assembly of projection displays, augmented reality visors, GPU clusters, human vision and human-computer interaction technologies, to study and facilitate visual augmentation of human intelligence and amplify situational awareness. Our goal is to transform human augmentation research for driving applications in science, engineering, medicine, commerce, and education.

With more developers working in virtual reality than ever before, the technology is rapidly becoming more accessible to consumers and producers. A Q&A on what’s coming next with VR evangelist Tipatat Chennavasin.

The world’s hottest startup isn’t located in Silicon Valley—it’s in suburban Florida. KEVIN KELLY explores what Magic Leap’s mind-bending technology tells us about the future of virtual reality.

The medium of virtual reality is just beginning to blossom and developers are experimenting with how to take advantage of the technology. There have been first-person video games, immersive films and interactive dioramas, but the worlds of live streaming video and VR have yet to really meet.

That's about to change. The team behind VideoStitch, a program that stitches together multi-directional camera footage to create 360-degree video, announced the Orah 4i, a camera that streams 360-degree VR video at 4K resolution to the Internet. You can watch the stream on any connected VR headset.

This study suggests the potential of using virtual reality technology with young children in school settings. It provides a new pathway for teachers to engage young learners in developing their abstract thinking skills. For educational technologists, it also provides a good example for designing and developing adaptive virtual reality technologies to foster children’s cognitive learning in a playful way.

"The University of Maryland hosted a demonstration of its new virtual and augmented reality laboratory recently, showing off the lab's potential to support research, education and training in the sciences, engineering, medicine and industry.

"The lab, called the Augmentarium, is housed in a 1,000 square foot facility at the University of Maryland's College Park campus. It opened in December 2014 with the help of more than $1 million in funding, including a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

"The university is using the Augmentarium for practical purposes such as surgery and medical training. According to information on the Augmentarium's site, the technology enables surgeons "to effectively 'see through' a patient before any incision is made," and helps industrial organizations train technicians to install, calibrate and maintain complex systems in a safe environment."

Two years ago, Facebook bought a company making a virtual reality headset, Oculus Rift, for two billion dollars. This week, lucky people who pre-ordered the Oculus Rift are getting their deliveries. The sleek device is incredible, but there are some barriers to entry, especially for teachers and students: one needs a lot of money to get it and a high-performing Windows computer to use it. That said, there's no doubt that Oculus Rift is a strong entrant in what is about to be a very crowded field. Although most virtual reality experiences and "apps" for Oculus Rift revolve around gaming or entertainment experiences in these early days, the education community is showing some early enthusiasm, and ed-tech companies are creating software, tools, and content for what Mark Zuckerburg predicts is the next computing platform.  

I tried out the Oculus Rift, and my co-founder has tried on the HTC Vive (see the photo of Cederik below). No doubt about it - it was a powerful, lasting experience, a "wow" moment with technology that I hadn't experienced since playing with my first smartphone. Although exciting, wading through hyped up pieces about how virtual reality will "revolutionize" education or any other field is tiring, and you won't find that here. After hearing the same about laptops, smartboards, and tablets, we can only bear so many revolutions. While not predicting rampant disruption, transformation, and revolution, we are interested, along with many other teachers and students, in exploring how these devices can be used for the sake of learning. We've always imagined that Edorble would reach its fullest potential on VR headsets, and we're planning our build of Edorble for Oculus Rift and others. Here's why.

VR has the potential to change much of how we deliver learning and development. Success will depend on customers being willing to experiment, and developers’ ability to apply lessons to ever more immersive experiences.

These are early days for VR. Berry said in the future, virtual reality will create more opportunities for people to learn together in a shared experience. “VR eliminates learning that was forced on people by less capable technology, such as how to communicate about 3-D data at a distance, and brings it back to a more natural, intuitive activity that just works.”

VR is going to create an opportunity like we’ve only seen twice before.

First there was the Internet. This was a trillion-dollar opportunity. It’s still ongoing, but the Internet is the present—not the future.

The app store was the second trillion-dollar opportunity. The entire ecosystem of smartphones and tablets and the cloud and applications moved computing into our hands.

And now the third trillion-dollar opportunity has finally arrived: virtual reality. This year for virtual reality is like 1994 for the Internet. The first commercial AI headsets will be launched. The chips are being developed. The storage is getting prepared. The entire infrastructure for the third trillion-dollar opportunity has been created in the past 20 years.

The headset from Facebook’s company is pricey. Setup is clunky, use is taxing and content could use more inspiration. But the technology transports.

VR will soon become an open canvas for educators to create learning experiences. Eventually, fitting VR into the curriculum will be limited only by an instructor’s imagination and budget, says Christopher Sessums, the program director of research and evaluation at Johns Hopkins School of Education.

"The classroom could be on the deck of a boat. This might be a wonderful way to experience life at sea, perhaps as sailors felt in Moby Dick or The Old Man and the Sea. Such empathetic experiences could deepen students’ knowledge and understanding of a variety of historic and contemporary events," says Sessums. “Perhaps experiencing life as slave on a slave ship or an infantryman on the battlefield might enlighten future generations and prevent them from repeating similar outcomes."

The world of virtual reality (VR) was once dominated by interactive games. The special effects enhanced the experience by providing realistic action and lifelike creatures that were, literally “in your face.” Creative producers, supported by funding from established organizations, are now creating experiences that can invigorate classroom activities and enhance learning.

Last fall, I wrote about the educational possibilities of Google Cardboard, the affordable viewer that allows you to use your smartphone to view three dimensional worlds. Since then, the number of VR experiences available has increased dramatically. I’d like to share some VR apps that you can use for different subject areas, grade levels and learning goals.

Samsung wants you to watch more 360-degree video content, even if you don’t own one of the company’s Gear VR virtual reality headsets: Samsung released a new MilkVR mobile app on Google Play Monday night that plays back 360-degree videos in a kind of magic window mode, allowing users to look around by simply panning with their mobile phone.

The newly-released Milk VR mobile app offers access to many of the same videos that Samsung has been featuring within the Milk VR app on its Gear VR headset, with the exception of a few more interactive videos that require access to the Gear VR’s touch pad controls.

Big players are committing to mobile VR. Intel’s RealSense technology features many of the same ideas as Project Tango, and Intel has released a developer kit phone with both. (It has, um, a lot of cameras.) Nvidia’s designing graphics chips with VR in mind. Lenovo, LG, and Samsung have headsets that are cheap and even free add-ons when you buy a new phone. These things are pushing VR into the mainstream. That, in turn, amps up the pressure for manufacturers to build phones that can do even more.

Your next phone may not be an incredibly realistic window into virtual reality. But the one after it almost certainly will be. And when it arrives, it will democratize VR in a way no headset tethered to a PC ever could.

Even though new technologies to enhance student learning are constantly cropping up, they aren’t always successful at helping students develop a coherent and holistic understanding of new material. Technological tools often feature more abstract representations of concepts simply because they are intangibly behind the screen. Due to this rift between the physical and the virtual, four researchers set out to find ways to bridge that gap.

"Did you know that an Egyptian temple can be recreated in a 3D environment and that it is possible to walk through it as a true surround environment without leaving the classroom? Or view on your screen a complete Roman house, with all its rooms, and move its figure to see all its views; Watching oneself attired as a Roman centurion, while all the drapery accompanies your movements; moving to anywhere in the world and feel its temperature and odors; stroll along the ocean floor surrounded by cephalopods or watching a complete heart beating in the middle of a classroom... These are just some of the possibilities that technologies offer to the world of education. It has already ceased to be science fiction and is entirely feasible if you have the appropriate devices.

So, we visited David Fayerman, passionate about new technologies applied to education, looking for him to tell us which devices can be used and what uses are they giving them from training companies, institutions, and publishers in Spain. We were received at inMediaStudio, where all these tools are exposed, and he invited us to learn and to use them. Our experience was as follows:"