BMW M Virtual Experience showcased on the new HTC VIVE Pro Eye

Unveiled at CES 2019, this collaboration with HTC, NVIDIA and BMW is ushering in a new age of advanced immersive retail, with foveated rendering and real-time analytics delivered through the new VIVE Pro Eye.

Spotlight

Thunderbird Entertainment

Thunderbird Entertainment Group is a Vancouver-based, publicly traded multi-platform entertainment company with offices in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Ottawa. Thunderbird creates scripted, unscripted and animated programming for global digital platforms, as well as Canadian and International broadcasters. The company develops, produces and distributes animated, factual and scripted content through its various divisions, including Atomic Cartoons (kids and family), Great Pacific Television (factual) and Thunderbird Productions (scripted).

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Business

AR in B2B Sales: What to Expect

Article | July 11, 2022

The potential of augmented reality technology goes beyond games and photo filters. It can benefit B2B businesses, especially their sales departments, in more ways than one. B2B sales is about converting potential clients into customers by using all the features and benefits of your product or service. Highlighting the profit the clients will make using your product or service is your priority. But how does augmented reality (AR) play into all of this? Here are three interesting use cases of AR in B2B sales for you to look at: AR in Exhibitions: Stand Out From the Crowd At exhibitions, if you do not stand out among your competitors, you might not attract any visitors to your stand. AR can bring your stand the footfall you expect. At 2017’s North American International Auto Show, Ford used AR to attract visitors. A visitor could sit inside the car and simultaneously see what was happening under the car’s hood on a big display screen. The experience impressed visitors and earned Ford brand visibility. AR in Data Visualization: Present Interactive Insights AR helps in presenting the value of your product or service in an interactive 3D visualization. A great example of this would be IBM’s Immersive Insights, a visualization tool that presents data in 3D space. Spectators can explore and understand data insights without feeling burdened with just numbers. This technology has potential in the B2B sales space as it can simplify complex data visualization and attract your prospects with visual appeal. AR in Product Presentations: Realistic and Immersive Experience There are always aspects of your product or service that you need to highlight in front of your prospective clients in unique ways so they can see the value of your offering. AR allows you to present your product in a realistic way. IKEA used AR to help clients try their furniture in their offices and apartments by superimposing it on their surroundings with the IKEA Place app. Realtor.com and industrial machines like CAT also help customers see what the offerings look like so that they can make informed decisions even without physically interacting with the product or service. Wrapping It Up Using AR in B2B sales is still an evolving concept, but can become a substantial tool in the toolkit of B2B sales teams that want to try new things to boost their numbers.

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Virtualization, Media and Broadcasting

Watch out Warzone and Fortnite: Ubisoft is coming after free-to-play

Article | July 13, 2022

Ubisoft announced last week that it is adding specific focus on free-to-play, alongside its AAA catalogue. In doing so, it is following a route that has been very successful for Activision with its Warzone strategy. Free-to-play games which draw audiences via big franchise names and monetise via in-game spending are going to be increasingly common among AAA publishers. The focus on in-game spending and particularly on the cosmetic, rather than the progress-related, parts will be the key revenue component. As games become less finite and more perpetual (consumer goal is less about ‘finishing them’ and more and ‘playing/spending time in them’), the opportunity to monetise needs that stem from this perpetual engagement (e.g. socialising or expression) starts to outweigh the mere monetisation of access to a packaged product. Simultaneously, free-to-play games also act as a powerful marketing driver for AAA releases as they come out, as well as streamability and word of mouth for the franchise.

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Virtualization

The productisation of music rights

Article | June 21, 2021

News that New York-based Pershing Square Tontine Holdings is planning to acquire 10% of UMGis the latest in a wave of financial transactions in the music rights space. Alongside this, Believe’s impending IPO has the potential to be one of the biggest things to happen to the independent music sector in some time, and comes as part of a wave of IPOs (e.g.WMG,UMG), SPACs (e.g.Anghami,Reservoir) and no end of catalogue funds and acquisition vehicles. This trend, with good cause, has been referred to as the ‘financialisation of music’ but that only captures part of what is at play here. This is more than simply an influx of capital and debt; financial institutions are now becoming part of the plumbing of the music business, and in turn they are changing the definition of what constitutes success. This shift in objectives and desired outcomes has the potential to rebalance how the music industry operates.

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Virtualization

Instagram continues to perform strongly despite inconsistent brand identity

Article | June 30, 2021

Over the last few months Instagram has done its best to capitalise on the latest social media success tactics, often at the cost of its own original user proposition. The photo-sharing app for friends now offers Reels, imitating TikTok’s success. It has rolled out an option to hide Likes, the iconic feature which has characterised social media as a whole since inception. And it now is introducing ‘suggested posts’ to users’ feeds, sorted by topics a profile states they are interested in – potentially putting these ahead of photos and videos shared by profiles they actually follow. Directly mimicking TikTok, this seems to diverge very little in practice from hashtags, which are its original discovery feature. Instead, it seems to want to emulate the usability which younger users are familiar with from TikTok, in order to entice them to increase their Instagram engagement.

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Spotlight

Thunderbird Entertainment

Thunderbird Entertainment Group is a Vancouver-based, publicly traded multi-platform entertainment company with offices in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Ottawa. Thunderbird creates scripted, unscripted and animated programming for global digital platforms, as well as Canadian and International broadcasters. The company develops, produces and distributes animated, factual and scripted content through its various divisions, including Atomic Cartoons (kids and family), Great Pacific Television (factual) and Thunderbird Productions (scripted).

Related News

HTC Vive Pro Starter Kit Now Available To Pre-Order In UK

vrfocus | January 25, 2019

Launched last year during CES, the HTC Vive Pro upgraded the original headset with better resolution and the Deluxe Audio Strap already built-in. To begin with, just the headset was available then HTC Vive confused things by releasing a ‘starter kit’ in North America, while European customers got the ‘full kit’. Today, just to even things out a little, the HTC Vive Pro Starter Kit has now been made available for pre-ordering in the UK.The HTC Vive Pro Starter Kit is retailing for £1,119 GBP, coming complete with a Vive Pro headset, two Lighthouse base stations 1.0, two controllers 1.0 and the link box. You’ll also get a free 2-month Viveport trial subscription to start you off. The official website doesn’t say when shipping will begin, but it does list everything as ‘in stock’, so customers will likely get a date when completing the transaction.For comparison, the HTC Vive Pro Full Kit which has been available on the site for a while now retails for £1,299, and comes with two Lighthouse base stations 2.0, ideal for much larger installations such as location-based entertainment (LBE) centres. The kit also comes with some snazzy blue controllers to match the headset. Currently, the HTC Vive Pro Full Kit is out of stock on the official UK website.HTC Vive has yet to confirm when or if the HTC Vive Pro Full Kit will be made available in other territories such as North America.

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HTC Vive Pro Eye hands-on: Gaze into VR’s future with foveated rendering

Venturebeat | January 10, 2019

Unexpectedly announced at an early CES 2019 media event, HTC’s latest and highest-end VR headset is the Vive Pro Eye — an upgraded version of the already premium Vive Pro with integrated eye-tracking hardware. The eye tracking can be leveraged for in-app controls, analysis of user attention during training sessions, and foveated rendering.If you’re not already familiar with foveated rendering, it’s about to be a big deal for VR. Cameras inside a headset precisely and quickly track the position of your pupils, enabling the GPU to know where it needs to focus its rendering resources — and where it can skimp. One Vive Pro Eye developer said that with foveated rendering the GPU was saving 30 percent of its power over standard rendering, performance that can be saved to conserve energy or used to increase detail within the area viewed by the pupil.The technology would be ideal for high-resolution gaming, but Vive Pro Eye is specifically being marketed at enterprise customers, and HTC suggests the still-unconfirmed price will be another step up from Vive Pro. Most gamers aren’t willing to pay extra for the standard Vive Pro, so game developers won’t likely make eye-tracking games for the Vive Pro Eye.

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HTC���s Prototype Vive Focus Controllers Look Strangely Familiar

VRFocus | January 11, 2019

When it comes to designing a controller for a virtual reality (VR) head-mount display (HMD) which features inside-out tracking, there’s one design that’s proven to be almost universal. If you follow VR news with any regularity you’ll know what this design looks like. Commercially seen for the first time in conjunction with Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) headsets, at CES 2019 this week VRFocus came across the prototype pair of controllers for HTC’s standalone headset, Vive Focus.Vive Focus is the company’s standalone headset that’s currently only available in China. While the headset has 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF), the supplied controller is only 3DoF – much like the Oculus Go controller.But HTC Vive has been working on a 6DoF version, which AMD had on demonstration with an HTC Vive Focus to showcase its ReLive livestreaming technology.

Read More

HTC Vive Pro Starter Kit Now Available To Pre-Order In UK

vrfocus | January 25, 2019

Launched last year during CES, the HTC Vive Pro upgraded the original headset with better resolution and the Deluxe Audio Strap already built-in. To begin with, just the headset was available then HTC Vive confused things by releasing a ‘starter kit’ in North America, while European customers got the ‘full kit’. Today, just to even things out a little, the HTC Vive Pro Starter Kit has now been made available for pre-ordering in the UK.The HTC Vive Pro Starter Kit is retailing for £1,119 GBP, coming complete with a Vive Pro headset, two Lighthouse base stations 1.0, two controllers 1.0 and the link box. You’ll also get a free 2-month Viveport trial subscription to start you off. The official website doesn’t say when shipping will begin, but it does list everything as ‘in stock’, so customers will likely get a date when completing the transaction.For comparison, the HTC Vive Pro Full Kit which has been available on the site for a while now retails for £1,299, and comes with two Lighthouse base stations 2.0, ideal for much larger installations such as location-based entertainment (LBE) centres. The kit also comes with some snazzy blue controllers to match the headset. Currently, the HTC Vive Pro Full Kit is out of stock on the official UK website.HTC Vive has yet to confirm when or if the HTC Vive Pro Full Kit will be made available in other territories such as North America.

Read More

HTC Vive Pro Eye hands-on: Gaze into VR’s future with foveated rendering

Venturebeat | January 10, 2019

Unexpectedly announced at an early CES 2019 media event, HTC’s latest and highest-end VR headset is the Vive Pro Eye — an upgraded version of the already premium Vive Pro with integrated eye-tracking hardware. The eye tracking can be leveraged for in-app controls, analysis of user attention during training sessions, and foveated rendering.If you’re not already familiar with foveated rendering, it’s about to be a big deal for VR. Cameras inside a headset precisely and quickly track the position of your pupils, enabling the GPU to know where it needs to focus its rendering resources — and where it can skimp. One Vive Pro Eye developer said that with foveated rendering the GPU was saving 30 percent of its power over standard rendering, performance that can be saved to conserve energy or used to increase detail within the area viewed by the pupil.The technology would be ideal for high-resolution gaming, but Vive Pro Eye is specifically being marketed at enterprise customers, and HTC suggests the still-unconfirmed price will be another step up from Vive Pro. Most gamers aren’t willing to pay extra for the standard Vive Pro, so game developers won’t likely make eye-tracking games for the Vive Pro Eye.

Read More

HTC���s Prototype Vive Focus Controllers Look Strangely Familiar

VRFocus | January 11, 2019

When it comes to designing a controller for a virtual reality (VR) head-mount display (HMD) which features inside-out tracking, there’s one design that’s proven to be almost universal. If you follow VR news with any regularity you’ll know what this design looks like. Commercially seen for the first time in conjunction with Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) headsets, at CES 2019 this week VRFocus came across the prototype pair of controllers for HTC’s standalone headset, Vive Focus.Vive Focus is the company’s standalone headset that’s currently only available in China. While the headset has 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF), the supplied controller is only 3DoF – much like the Oculus Go controller.But HTC Vive has been working on a 6DoF version, which AMD had on demonstration with an HTC Vive Focus to showcase its ReLive livestreaming technology.

Read More

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