ZEISS will showcase VR ONE Connect for the first time at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas at booth #21730 in South Hall, January 9 – 11, 2018.

Attendees will be able to demo this first of its “kind VR product at the booth,” a provided release notes.

The ZEISS VR ONE Connect bridges the gap between PC-connected VR gaming and mobile VR by connecting the smartphone in the mobile VR headset to your gaming PC. The product gives mobile VR users more interactive gaming possibilities than ever before by allowing them to play games through SteamVR, which currently has roughly 300,000 users. It boasts a high-quality VR experience with a comparatively low investment. The product may be used with iOS® and Android smartphones.

“This solution is a first of its kind in the VR space,” said Franz Troppenhagen, senior product manager at ZEISS. “Users will now be able to access games on SteamVR in a much different way than previous options, and they’ll also have access to traditional VR apps and 360 video content.”

To stay up-to-date on the availability of the ZEISS VR ONE Connect, visit www.zeiss.com/vrconnect and register for the ZEISS VR newsletter.

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Vertebrae is showcasing the new capabilities via a partnership with Lionsgate to market the upcoming October release of ‘Jigsaw,’ the newest film in the ‘Saw’ series. It’s the first-ever AR movie promotion via Apple’s iPhone Safari mobile Web browser.

Vertebrae’s AR ad units work across mobile Web via Chrome and Safari browsers giving advertisers instant scale to reach hundreds of millions people across the globe.

Vertebrae’s expanded augmented reality offering currently features five mobile Web AR ad templates — Virtual Try On (like Ray Ban), Dynamic Experience Mask (Jigsaw), Interior World View (inside 360 imge/video), Interactive 3D Object, a Portal, and swipeable static branded filters — with plans for several more.

“We see so much room for growth with the limitless scale the mobile Web has to offer, and we are creating the AR advertising templates through which the industry will take shape,” said Vince Cacace, founder and CEO at Vertebrae. “As we execute more campaigns in verticals like automotive, retail and more, we’ll have an ever-expanding rolodex of mobile Web AR templates for advertisers to choose from.”

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The study compared consumer responses to three forms of VR advertising — a pre-roll video ad, brand logos present in-game and 3D branded objects inserted into interactive game play.

The findings revealed that, overall, VR advertising is highly memorable with 70% aided recall across all ad formats. The highest levels of brand recall occurred with the pre-roll video ad, which achieved 90% aided recall on the day the study was conducted.

“We believe our study indicates that VR advertising is highly memorable in any format. It’s encouraging to see that a video ad, the most familiar and high-performing digital format, also delivers the highest rate of ad recall in the VR world,” said Mireya Arteaga, Research Lead, YuMe. “We believe immersive advertising is on the rise. Its ability to deliver a compelling branded-content message that is interactive, engaging and offers consumers the ability to own their ad experience is very attractive to today’s advertisers.”

To learn more about the report and YuMe, click here.

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Working closely with Thrive Analytics’ Virtual Reality Monitor, ARtillry authored survey questions as well as today’s narrative report.

Highlights include content’s place as the most desired area of improvement (volume and quality) among VR owners. VR headset owners also showed high satisfaction compared to other categories of consumer tech products. However many non-owners (38%) reported disinterest in VR ownership; and the top reason (53%) was “just not interested.”

“Together, these figures validate that VR’s immersive experience presents a double-edged sword: It produces highly visceral and satisfactory user responses… but you have to see it to believe it,” said ARtillry Chief Analyst Mike Boland. “This creates a challenge to scale distribution, given inherent adoption barriers like price and technological invasiveness. Education, retail installations, VR arcades and mobile VR will be the ‘gateway drugs’ to reduce that friction and cultivate tomorrow’s VR owners.”

To learn more about ARtillry and its report, click here.

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Immersv, an interactive advertising platform for Mobile 360 and Virtual Reality, has completed a $10.5 million Series A round of financing.

MMW can confirm that Rogers Venture Partners led the investment round, with participation from a top-tier group of institutional and strategic investors including Foundation Capital, The Venture Reality Fund, Initial Capital, East Ventures, HTC Vive, MCJ Co. Ltd., GREE, i-mobile, Metaps, and Gigi Levy.

Rogers Venture Partners General Partner, Paul Sestili, and Gumi’s Founder and CEO, Hironao Kunimitsu, have joined Immersv’s Board of Directors.

The Series A financing builds on a year of significant product and market momentum for Immersv, which combines interactive 360 advertising with a programmatic real time bidding platform. The company has recently signed programmatic deals with more than 15 of the world’s largest Demand Side Platforms (DSP’s) and Supply Side Platforms (SSP’s). Partners now include leading firms such as Tremor Video, YuMe, Bidswitch, ironSource, Supership and United in Japan. Major brands such as Nissan, Hawaii Tourism Bureau, and Mountain Dew have executed successful campaigns as well.

“Immersv is the leader in the next wave of interactive digital advertising,” said Mr. Sestili, General Partner with Rogers Venture Partners. “Mobile 360 and VR advertising provides some of the highest view completion rates, click through rates, and overall engagement rates for both brands and performance advertisers. As the central marketplace for buying and selling these new ad formats, Immersv is well positioned to drive significant value for both advertisers and publishers.”

“We’ve been really pleased with the Immersv partnership on our sell-side platform,” said David Arslanian, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Tremor Video. “We look forward to helping advertisers programmatically engage with 360 video at scale.”

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According to a comprehensive report from VRJournal, these demonstrations included the world’s first VR calligraphy and streaming VR gaming exhibits, COMPUTEX’s first eSports and PC modding competitions, the G.SKILL OC World Cup overclocking competition, and HWBOT World Tour overclocking events.

“These activities were part of COMPUTEX’s Gaming and Virtual Reality exhibit, a featured exhibit this year for the first time at COMPUTEX,” event organizers tell us.

As for the standouts from the show, that much is clear. From a provided statement:

The world’s first virtual reality calligraphy exhibit and a related VR painting exhibit were created in partnership with Taiwan’s National Palace Museum. The virtual reality calligraphy exhibit, “The Spirit of Autobiography – National Palace Museum Calligraphy,” transported participants into a fantasy world of Chinese calligraphy based on “Autobiography,” a world-famous running script produced by Tang Dynasty monk Huaisu in the year 777 A.D. A related exhibit, “Roaming Through Fantasy Land – National Palace Museum Painting,” immersed viewers in a walk and boat ride in a Chinese village and landscape painting, “Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains,” created in 1295 A.D. by early Yuan Dynasty painter Zhao Mengfu.

The world’s first VR eSports exhibition, hosted by hardware manufacturer, ZOTAC, as part of its ZOTAC CUP MASTERS eSports tournament at COMPUTEX, featured two teams wearing ZOTAC VR GO backpacks with HTC Vive headsets competing in the VR first person shooter, “Smashbox Arena.” Two American rivals, Chad Lawson and Robert Blanford, who are among the top three “Smashbox Arena” players, had competed almost daily in “Smashbox Arena” for six months and met in-person for the first time at COMPUTEX. Friends and families gathered during the early morning hours to watch the streaming competition live on the ZOTAC CUP Twitch channel back home. Chad’s team won this time at COMPUTEX, but there will be many rematches ahead.

Robert and Chad highlighted the benefits of the new horizon in gaming, virtual reality gaming, which includes full-body movement, exercise that led to weight loss for both men, improved coordination and response time to stimuli, and mental stimulation. Both men agreed VR gaming is the future because of its immersive quality and ability to move the full body while playing the game.

For a complete recap of the event and additional insight, click here.

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At its developer’s conference last week, the digital giant hyped a “cable-less virtual-reality headset” that works without a corresponding phone or PC.

“Daydream will soon also support a new category of VR devices, which we call standalone VR headsets,” Google explained in its blog post. “These devices build on what’s already great about smartphone VR, and they make the whole experience even easier and more comfortable. Standalone headsets don’t require a phone or PC. Instead, getting into VR is as simple as putting the thing on. The hardware is fully optimized for VR, and features a new headset tracking technology called WorldSense. WorldSense enables positional tracking, meaning the headset tracks your precise movements in space – and it does this all without any external sensors to install.”

For now, there are still plenty of questions that haven’t been answered. But it’s enough to know that something new and potentially big is coming from Google to rival Facebook in the VR space.

To check out Google’s full announcement, click here.

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The report in question notes that this 1.0 version is a drag-and-drop SDK that allows VR developers to unlock a variety of monetization options, with a broad mix of immersive ways publishers and brands can advertise natively in VR without disrupting people’s experience.

“We’re building a sustainable alternative to the premium pay-for-play content distribution model, fueled by brands telling interactive, engaging VR stories, that will facilitate quicker mass market VR adoption through accessible F2P content,” said Marc Bennett, Vertebrae’s COO.

The Unity-compatible SDK works across the major VR platforms and is simple to integrate.

“Vertebrae works with publishers to guide them on choosing the best placements and formats within their experiences and then pays them based on impressions,” noted the company in a release.

“We’ve made it a priority to offer a range of immersive, native ways to tell stories in VR,” said Vince Cacace, CEO at Vertebrae. “Options range from simple 360 pre-roll ad formats to more complex in-VR product placement options. Imagine engaging with a virtual product that, when opted into, seamlessly unlocks branded worlds that amplify the VR experience while articulating the brand message.”

Additionally, we’re told that Vertebrae is also currently working with the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) to define standards for the new advertising formats.

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“We set out on a journey over six years ago to build the kinds of games we wanted to see exist. Over those years, we learned that Owlchemy, at its core, cares deeply about a few key things: building quality multi-platform games, solving tough problems with a small but absurdly talented team, sharing our learnings with the community, and Austin’s famous tacos,” the Owlchemy team says, according to the reoprt. “Now, as we look to the future with Google by our side, we couldn’t be happier. Our plan to build awesome things will continue forward stronger than ever.”

As for financial terms, they weren’t disclosed.

Owlchemy, however, “will continue building high quality VR content for platforms like the HTC Vive, Oculus Touch, and PlayStation VR.”

This means continuing to focus on hand interactions and high quality user experiences, like with Job Simulator. This means continuing our mission to build VR for everyone, and doing all of this as the same silly Owlchemy Labs you know and love. We are continuing to do all of this with even more support and focus on building awesome stuff. It’s incredibly exciting that Google and Owlchemy are so well aligned on our goals and vision for the future of VR.

To read the full announcement from Owlchemy and what the acquisition may mean for Google and the near future of virtual reality, click here.

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The report notes that the big reveal came on the heels of the company’s announcement about its latest VR product, the motion-tracking “Hi5 VR Glove.”

Noitom, if you’re not familiar, is a motion capture technology company that dedicates much of its research to all aspects of motion capture and the creation of affordable and accessible tools for VFX, animation, and gaming.

“The company however, has continued to steadily advance into the virtual reality spectrum where it is now focused on making immersion into VR a smoother and even more dynamic experience,” the company told VRJournal.

Noitom’s appearance at SVVR — for the third year in a row — signaled the company’s desire to promote its latest virtual reality products, both of which promise to deliver better, more engaging ways to enjoy virtual reality.

The multi-user mixed reality B2B platform Project Alice and the consumer product Hi5 VR Glove were both demonstrated, as they were at CES in Las Vegas earlier this year.

“This last year we have really been focused on extending ourselves further into virtual reality because we understand the great need there is for this technology not just for entertainment but as a business solution as well,” says Tristan Dai, the CTO and a co-founder of Noitom. “There are just so many possibilities with VR. Gaming and entertainment are only the beginning.”

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