Atmosphaeres at Gamescom 2015

I recently presented the Atmosphaeres at Gamescom 2015. The 360 video of this talk is available on a number of platforms. Please scroll down for the transcript.

Vrideo

Littstar

YouTube

Transcript:

Thank you to the two speakers who were before me. I used to be an academic, so I very much come from a scientific background. However, I lived in the northern territory in Australia, in the far north of the Northern Territory in Darwin, which is probably the most isolated city in the world. I was living there for six years and worked there for the Charles Darwin University. It was very hard for me to establish virtual reality research in such a small university. I basically . . . I was the research group. So after I realized that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do at the university, I started my own company, and that’s what we see here. Atmosphaeres – 360 degree videos for stress, pain and anxiety relief.

Now, there’s a Gamescom brief which goes like this [points at slides]. I picked a couple of points from the brief that we got. So the long road of the rise and fall and rise of virtual reality and the main factor for these is the games industry. To a certain degree, I agree because the games industry has definitely given us the hardware. However, 360 degree video is actually a surprise for the entire industry, because this was developed for games, but later on people started to say, well hang on, we can put panoramic 360 degree photos and videos into these devices. And that’s when they started to realize, oh there’s a totally, completely new use case for what used to be a gaming platform.

Now, the other thing that I took out of the Gamescom brief, because it very much concerns me, is the monetization of the content. And there’s a lot of demo’s, two minute, one minute, “Ah, look at this fancy stuff that I’ve done over here,” and “Ah, me on the beach and with my buddies at the bar and all that sort of stuff, but there are no commercial products. Very few commercial products. There’s very little content available, even in the ecosystems of Samsung, of Oculus and so forth.

Now, that’s over now, because I do have the commercial system, well commercial product. That is relaxation environments, so the complete opposite to VR Coaster, I’m actually taking you to a quiet and peaceful place, where you can relax.

Now a little bit of background, so you understand maybe a little bit about my history. As I said, I’m a research academic and I’ve worked in academia for a little bit more than three years, and working in virtual reality and my research, my PhD topic was the effect of music on learning in virtual realities. So how can we use music to facilitate learning in virtual realities.

I also used to be a tour guide, as you can see up in the middle and top right. And I used to, and still am, a nature sound recordist. Which, is for multiple reasons. I was born in Germany, moved to Australia for my honors thesis and in Australia it was the first time that I experienced what it was like to be in an environment without man made noise, and that made such an impact on my life that I decided to capture those moments. First in audio so I recorded nine nature sounds, pure nature sound recording albums just to capture nature sounds and the peace and quiet. And together with my virtual reality research and my background as a tour guide, everything sort of came together and now I’m creating virtual environments where I take people into remote areas where they can find peace and quiet. And you can see I’m also a relaxation expert.

So, that’s . . . I love being out in nature, and I want to share that with people. I want to give people the opportunity who cannot go into these places because they’re sick, because they can’t go physically they, don’t have the money, they don’t have the time, you know, the elderly etc…

So just a couple of pictures from production, so you can see the camera holder that I’ve got here. This is really my workhorse, there’s a lot of copycats of this design by Joergen Geerds. This is a Freedom360 that I’m using. This is the original and it has held up very, very well. There’s other copycats that fall apart and that you can’t put them through the paces. So I very much love this.

That’s us at the Cliffs of Moher, and there you see me actually using my own relaxation environments on the plane. It’s actually fascinating, you would think that, “Ah, well you know that looks dorky, that looks strange.” But as soon as you pop on the glasses you don’t see people around you. And you are in a different place and you’re actually relaxing. There is no plane. One thing you feel of course is the chairs, they’re restrictive. And I reckon in two to three years’ time you will see people in the plane like this all over the place.

Okay, relaxation at home. So these are some of the places that I have the absolute pleasure and luxury, you might say, and privilege to go to these. So this is an island, you will find this place actually in one of my Atmosphaeres. That’s what I call my 360 relaxation environments. And you can sit here by this lake for four or five minutes and you can just relax. It’s very beautiful.

This is in the Northern Territory, the Daintree Rainforest (correction the Daintree Rainforest is in Queensland). This one was taken before I actually started recording 360 video, but I’ll go back. So next year I’m doing a circuit around Australia to record more of these environments for my Atmosphaeres.

This was in Portugal, Praia da Ursa, a very popular scene, people really love watching that, and the same spot just from a little further up the track.

Now, these are the Atmosphaeres that are currently available, we’ve got four videos. Portugal, Ireland, Dream Beach 360. That one has eight scenes and is very serene. Beautiful nature sounds and some soothing music to calm you. A walk on the beach takes you to several locations on a beach and you can sit there and enjoy.

The other two, Portugal and Ireland VR they have between 25 and 30 scenes, so there is a little bit more variety in the scenes. And I would like to show you a quick demo, at least, of one of them.

So this is the Kolor Eyes Player, it’s a 360 video player. Kolor Eyes, it’s also this software company that is providing the software that I use for the stitching those six individual videos into one. And they have just recently been bought by GoPro, recently acquired by GoPro.

So now imagine this, what I’m showing you here on the screen, when you wear this [shows Samsung Gear VR virtual reality headset] and you can actually look in every direction. I actually use these videos myself at home and they actually work on me. And I’m very, very, critical of these virtual environments. Yeah, the sheep are a favorite, I don’t know why, people seem to love sheep. Yeah so, yeah I might make that a theme in all of my videos, one scene with sheep, something like that.

Okay, so that’s enough of a demo, but that’s only one part, one part of the story. There’s also some serious applications for virtual realities and for the 360 videos that I produce, and I’m very happy that one of our collaborators Dr. Sauer from the Klinikum in Westfalen is actually here today, so thank you for coming. We’re still working out the kinks of how we can work together. But yes, it’s very exciting working with him and looking forward to taking this further.

So this is for pain reduction, and there’s already research that’s been going on since 2006 and 2008. You can see the overall [inaudible 00:11:09] the last statistically significant, statistically significant clinically meaningful reduction in pain during their treatment with VR. They were having burn wounds treated, and they could reduce the amount of analgesics that were being given to these patients. Not completely take them out, but reduce, you know. That means less side effects, that means less cost and so forth and so forth.

Stress reduction is another more serious application, which sort of goes in hand with the relaxation as well. Results of these studies, they show that stress recovery was enhanced and people recovered faster while using peaceful forest environments. And anxiety reduction is also another main topic.

Now this is a computer generated environment. However, they still saw some significant improvement on the emotional state of the participants, and even my own personal pride, this is one of the people, one of my customers was actually using the Dream Beach 360 video in his hospital bed, and he says most of the content that he had on his Gear VR made him feel more sick and anxious. After about five minutes of playing the Atmosphaeres, the Dream Beach 360, he was feeling much more relaxed and free. And this made me really, really proud when I saw this posted on Facebook. I had nothing to do with this, it was very encouraging.

Now, corporation partners I already mentioned, Institut für Medizinische Psychophysik with the anxiety free operating theatre. I’m very much looking forward to strengthening that conversation, cooperation. And then Psytech in the U.S. with their anxiety management VR platform Phobos. Counceling Sydney and then also University Hohenheim for stress and recreational break research.

Again, I’ll just get, very briefly, because this is one thing that the Gamescom brief actually asked of us, about the development costs of these environments. The hardware, everything together, roughly €4000 to €5000. There’s another €1000 for the software, roughly, and that is assuming that you’ve got a computer with Adobe software and that sort of stuff.

The amount of work that needs to go into this, roughly for one scene, one minute of video, it takes me one hour of stitching those six videos into one. Then I’ve got a template, and then I can render the scene, and that takes me, for one minute, about 10 minutes of rendering, and then I need to compress that, which is another 10 minutes. For 30 scenes like the Portugal VR for example, which is a 20 minute video all together, it takes the entire process of stitching, rendering and editing in Premiere Pro and authoring in Premiere Pro. Rendering from there, again compressing and publication, roughly four weeks. Man hours, one man working on this almost the entire time.

The time it took me to actually learn how to do this well, nine months. There’s a couple of people who do this in a couple of weeks, but you see the difference. You really do see the difference. I actually do give training and I also do video production for other companies. That website, 360 Galaxies is currently forwarded to my Atmosphaeres website but expect some more coming in the future. Also, I’m a Kolor certified trainer for the stitching software for the production, pre-production, production and post-production for 360 degree video. And watch out for the very Bavarian Alps. That’s coming out soon. Thank you.