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.
MasterpieceVR recently released its latest set of VR creation tools which aim to get artists quickly sculpting and animating characters by hand from the comfort of their VR headsets.
Oculus quietly released Quill Theater on Quest last month as a way to bring immersive art and animations made in VR to more of its VR userbase. The free app offers up a curated selection of content, including the incredible short film ‘The Remedy’, which shows the incredible potential of VR as a content authoring tool.
Like all Oculus Studios titles, Stormland officially only supports the Oculus platform. Thanks to an update to Revive, a free unofficial mod, Stormland is now compatible with Valve Index, HTC Vive, Cosmos, Windows VR, and other SteamVR headsets.
Back at Microsoft’s annual SharePoint Virtual Summit in May 2018, the company announced it was getting ready to ship a new VR maker tool set called Spaces for SharePoint, the web-based collaborative platform for enterprise customers. Now, Microsoft says Spaces is nearly ready for a general release to all SharePoint users, which is slated to happen at some point in the first half of 2020.
Although the Feelreal scent mask for virtual reality isn’t a nicotine vaping system or e-cigarette, it does vaporize aromatic liquids for user inhalation, which according to the company puts it in same FDA certification bracket as those devices. While the company was confident back in November of its chances to pass FDA approval, it’s looming near a final roadblock that could make or break the product.
Action-physics adventure game Boneworks released earlier this month to a strong reception despite little formal marketing. The title surpassed 100,000 players in its first week, reeling in an estimated $3 million in revenue despite being available on just one of several key VR platforms.
