Owlchemy Labs has something to celebrate, as the Google-owned VR studio announced that its tongue-in-cheek parody simulator game Job Simulator (2016) has officially broken the one million unit sales mark.
Switzerland-based CREAL is developing a light-field display which it believes will fit into VR headsets and eventually AR glasses. An earlier tech demo showed impressive fundamentals, and this week at CES 2020 the company revealed its progress toward shrinking its tech toward a practical size.
VRLEO is a company based in Los Angles and Shanghai that’s looking to shake up the out-of-home VR scene with its arcade kiosks. At CES this week we got a chance to go hands on with the company’s flagship product, the LEO cabinet system, which includes a few novel technologies that aim to give it an edge over the competition.
Pimax announced some new additions to its line of wide field of view VR headsets recently. With the constantly growing number of headset variations and mind-boggling additional prefixes to account for, you’re certainly not alone if you can’t keep all of their headsets straight.
This week at CES 2020, China-based Jade Bird Display (JBD) revealed its latest portfolio of micro LED displays which the company is positioning as an ideal fit for AR and VR devices. Among the company’s miniscule displays is a one that’s smaller than a penny but capable of a blinding 3,000,000 nits.
Qualcomm has been using its heft as a mobile chip maker to accelerate the development of AR and VR devices because it believes the ‘immersive compute’ category is the long term future of the smartphone. It’s still early days, but with more than 30 headsets with Qualcomm chips now on the market, the company has become the key enabler of mobile XR devices. With the recent launch of Snapdragon XR2, its latest and greatest made-for-XR chipset, the company has further expanded its commitment to the sector.
Mozilla announced at CES this week that it’s bringing Firefox Reality, its VR web browser, to Pico headsets soon.
Despite the growing age of PlayStation VR, Sony has continued to effectively market and sell the headset, leading to steady sales which have now reached 5 million units total, the company has announced.
This week at CES 2020, VRgineers, makers of the enterprise-focused XTAL headset, plan to debut the latest version of their ultrawide FOV headset which will use a 4K display for each eye, which the company calls “8K,” and bring improved lenses and a video passthrough add-on.
Before the holiday season, Pimax announced a new VR headset called Artisan that looks to fill the low-price gap in the company’s product offerings. Although the headset is able to use Valve’s SteamVR tracking standard, a model is set to arrive with a NOLO VR tracking and controller kit, a move that’s meant to appeal to entry-level users without SteamVR base stations or controllers.
VR gamers running NVIDIA’s newest RTX graphics cards will be able to take advantage of a new ‘Variable Rate Supersampling’ (VRSS) feature designed to increase the sharpness of VR games without reducing performance. The feature uses a foveated rendering approach which focuses sharpness toward the center of the lens without wasting extra processing power toward the edges where the image will be blurred by the lens anyway.
After a slow start, 2019 rounded out to be an undeniably strong year for consumer VR, setting up a springboard into a big 2020. Here’s an overview of the major happenings in VR over the last year, and a glimpse of what will come in 2020.
