Starbreeze partners with Acer in development of StarVR.

Acer Inc. formed a partnership with Starbreeze AB to provide support for their StarVR Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Display . The two companies aim to cooperate on the design, manufacturing, promotion, marketing and sales of the StarVR HMD to the entertainment market.

This is part of a big push for Starbreeze during the legendary Cannes Film Festival currently taking place. Starbreeze  premiered its first cinematic VR experience “Cockatoo Spritz” directed by Stephane Barbato in Cannes during the first week of the festival. The company has also been working on a VR experience for John Wick, which wasn’t ready in time for a Cannes demo.

“Since our launch in June 2015, we have had an amazing start with StarVR. By partnering with Acer we shift gears yet again to firmly position us as the leader in top-end VR experiences. Acer is an excellent, experienced and prominent hardware partner that will accelerate us in realizing and producing a high-definition, high-fidelity VR headset,” said Bo Andersson Klint, Starbreeze CEO. “We’ve been working with a clear roadmap for our VR strategy from day one, and are now about to realize one of the first major collaborations we set out to achieve. The future for StarVR is now set and extremely exciting.”

"Acer is thrilled to join forces with Starbreeze in bringing the StarVR head-mounted display to the market,” said Jason Chen, Acer Corporate President and CEO. “We are devoting R&D resources across multiple aspects of the VR ecosystem for a coherent and high-quality experience, while just last month Acer announced powerful desktops and notebooks fully-ready for StarVR. Starbreeze and Acer share the same goal of delivering best-in-class VR applications, and we look forward to unlocking new VR possibilities together with this partnership. ”

Starbreeze launched StarVR with a VR-experience at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June 2015 by the acquisition of French company Infinite Eye. 

Cats And VR

That one time VR made me cry. Imago is an amazing work of VR art.

This past weekend I got the chance to work with some great people in creating 360° film projects at an event called VR Weekend. At the end of the event our group had the opportunity to hear some insights from Chuck, Tsung-Han Lee, one of the visionary minds behind Imago.

You can check out his shared experience with making Imago in a video posted on our preferred 360° video platform Metta: http://www.mettavr.com/v/q4dZbBrmedQ5tdCP2

Imago left a real impression on me, this may be due to the fact of having a family member with a disability but also due to the techniques Chuck and his team, Project Hypnos, used to create the feeling of isolation and freedom in a VR space. Actually building a camera around a physical representation of a disabled person really put me in a space of sadness at points.

There is a moment in this film that I actually shed a tear. Imago is not just a good VR experience, it is a true work of art that should be showcased as such as well as be accessible to many. I look forward to seeing how Project Hypnos will help to define cinema as well as real emotional experiences in VR. Imago was honored by the Vision VR/AR awards and has been accepted into Siggraph 2016.

Imago is virtual reality short film produced by Project Hypnos, an interdisciplinary team of graduate students at the Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology center. This project was developed to explore questions of film language, story structure and production techniques for 360 degree film.

Cats And VR