In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects that imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of uneasiness and revulsion in observers. "Valley" denotes a dip in the human observer's affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica's human likeness.
Chris Milk is an American entrepreneur, innovator, director, photographer, and immersive artist. He is co-founder and CEO of Within, a virtual reality technology company, and co-founder of Here Be Dragons, a virtual reality production company. Milk began his career directing music videos and commercials for leading artists and brands, and in subsequent years became best known for bridging the gap between emerging technologies and new mediums for storytelling.
Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, first announced and released in June 2005 at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as a Mac OS X game engine. The engine has since been gradually extended to support a variety of desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms. It is particularly popular for iOS and Android mobile game development and is considered easy to use for beginner developers and is popular for indie game development.
360-degree videos, also known as surround video, or immersive videos or spherical videos, are video recordings where a view in every direction is recorded at the same time, shot using an omnidirectional camera or a collection of cameras. During playback on normal flat display the viewer has control of the viewing direction like a panorama. It can also be played on a display or projectors arranged in a sphere or some part of a sphere.
Oculus Rift is a discontinued line of virtual reality headsets developed and manufactured by Oculus VR, a division of Meta Platforms, released on March 28, 2016.
SpectreVision is an American film production company founded in 2010 by actor Elijah Wood and directors Daniel Noah and Josh C. Waller. SpectreVision is a genre driven company with a focus on psychological thriller and horror films.
Pixels is a 2015 American science fiction comedy fantasy film directed by Chris Columbus and produced by Allen Covert, Mark Radcliffe and Adam Sandler, who starred in the lead role. It is based on the 2010 short film of the same name by Patrick Jean. The screenplay was written by Tim Herlihy and Timothy Dowling from a screen story by Herlihy. The film co-stars Kevin James, Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Monaghan, Brian Cox, Ashley Benson, Sean Bean, and Jane Krakowski. Combining computer-animated video game characters and visual effects, the film follows an alien race misinterpreting video feeds of classic arcade games as a declaration of war, resulting in them invading Earth using technology inspired by 1980s games such as Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Arkanoid, Galaga, Centipede and Donkey Kong. To counter the invasion, the United States hires former arcade champions to lead the planet's defense. Principal photography on the film began on May 28, 2014, in Toronto; filming was completed in three months.
Reality Labs is a business of Meta Platforms that produces virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) hardware and software, including virtual reality headsets such as Quest, and metaverse platforms such as Horizon Worlds. Reality Labs is the corporate successor to Oculus, a company that was founded in 2012 by Palmer Luckey, Brendan Iribe, Michael Antonov and Nate Mitchell to develop a VR headset for video gaming known as the Oculus Rift. Oculus raised over $2.4 million for the project via a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter—nearly ten times the original goal of $250,000.
Google Cardboard is a discontinued virtual reality (VR) platform developed by Google. Named for its fold-out cardboard viewer into which a smartphone is inserted, the platform was intended as a low-cost system to encourage interest and development in VR applications. Users can either build their own viewer from simple, low-cost components using specifications published by Google, or purchase a pre-manufactured one. To use the platform, users run Cardboard-compatible mobile apps on their phone, place it into the back of the viewer, and view content through the lenses.
Magic Leap, Inc. is an American startup company that released a head-mounted virtual retinal display, called Magic Leap One, which superimposes 3D computer-generated imagery over real world objects, by "projecting a digital light field into the user's eye", involving technologies potentially suited to applications in augmented reality and computer vision. It is attempting to construct a light-field chip using silicon photonics.
Mr. Robot is an American drama thriller television series created by Sam Esmail for USA Network. It stars Rami Malek as Elliot Alderson, a cybersecurity engineer and hacker with social anxiety disorder and clinical depression. Elliot is recruited by an insurrectionary anarchist known as "Mr. Robot", played by Christian Slater, to join a group of hacktivists called "fsociety". The group aims to destroy all debt records by encrypting the financial data of E Corp, the largest conglomerate in the world.
VIVE, sometimes referred to as HTC Vive, is a virtual reality brand of HTC Corporation. It consists of hardware like its titular virtual reality headsets and accessories, virtual reality software and services, and initiatives that promote applications of virtual reality in sectors like business and arts.
Steven Ilous is an entrepreneur, director, writer, and producer. He is the leading founder of Feature, Monolith, and SMI Entertainment. He is best known for his expertise in computer graphics, virtual production, and visual effects, having worked in the visual effects department on over 18 films, including The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions and The Polar Express.
Night School Studio, LLC is an American video game developer and publisher founded on June 6, 2014 by Sean Krankel and Adam Hines, and is based in Glendale, California.
A virtual reality headset is a head-mounted device that provides virtual reality for the wearer. Virtual reality (VR) headsets are widely used with video games but they are also used in other applications, including simulators and trainers. They comprise a stereoscopic head-mounted display, stereo sound, and head-motion-tracking sensors, which may include devices such as gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers or structured light systems.
Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives is a virtual reality simulation video game developed and published by Owlchemy Labs for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Oculus Quest, and Oculus Quest 2, in which players participate in comical approximations of real-world jobs. A sequel, Vacation Simulator, was released in 2019.
Daydream is a discontinued virtual reality (VR) platform which was developed by Google, primarily for use with a headset into which a smartphone is inserted. It is available for select phones running the Android mobile operating system that meet the platform's software and hardware requirements. Daydream was announced at the Google I/O developer conference in May 2016, and the first headset, the Daydream View, was released on November 10, 2016. To use the platform, users place their phone into the back of a headset, run Daydream-compatible mobile apps, and view content through the viewer's lenses.
David Karlak is an American director and writer, known for short films, The Candidate and Rise.
Reverie is an American science fiction drama television series. The series was commissioned on May 12 and aired through August 8, 2018. The first season of 10 episodes premiered on May 30, 2018 on NBC.
Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge is a virtual reality adventure game originally released on November 19, 2020 for the Oculus Quest systems. The graphics were designed by ILMxLab.
