Aparna Chennapragada, VP of Product for AR/VR at Google, took to the stage at Google’s I/O developer conference today to tease some of the work the company is doing to integrate augmented reality into Google Maps.
Matt Miesnieks is creating an AR cloud with 6D.AI, which aims to “synchronize 3D computer vision data across devices, time and space” in order to enable “persistent content, occlusion, and real-time shared experiences.” Miesnieks has founded a number of AR startups including Dekko, and he’s also a partner with the early-stage AR fund Super Ventures. I had a chance to catch up with Miesnieks back in October 2017 after the Google Pixel 2 announcement to get an update on the state of the AR industry.
X-Plane 11 (2017), the highly-touted and expansive flight simulator for PC, now has a few new badges under its Steam listing, which includes support for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
The PlayStation VR platform is understandably heavy on games, but PSVR owners now have a paint program all their own that appears to be very similar to Google’s Tilt Brush (2016), the art program that supports Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Cave Digger is an upcoming room-scale mining game for SteamVR-compatible headsets that places you deep into the Earth using your handy mining elevator and a number of mining tools and devices to extract valuable resources.
Oculus today announced it’s rebranding Oculus Research, the company’s R&D lab, to the newly created Facebook Reality Labs (FRL). The shift, the company says, better addresses the increasingly important role of research and development in AR/VR while emphasizing collaboration with Facebook’s other skunkworks, something Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash says is allowing for “further and faster” development of leading-edge AR/VR tech.
Beat Saber, the VR rhythm game in Early Access that made its way to the top spot on Steam this past weekend, is getting a level editor soon that will let anyone build and slice away to whatever music they like.
Google announced Seurat at last year’s I/O developer conference, showing a brief glimpse into the new rendering technology designed to reduce the complexity of ultra high-quality CGI assets so they can run in real-time on mobile processors. Now, the company is open sourcing Seurat so developers can customize the tool and use it for their own mobile VR projects.
I AM A MAN is an interactive VR experience that lets you participate in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike and the events leading up to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Created by Dr. Derek Ham, an assistant professor of Graphic Design at NC State University, I AM A MAN was a winner of Oculus’ 2017 Launch Pad, a program designed to help fund VR content from diverse backgrounds.
Vive Focus dev kits are headed outside of China today to international developers looking to create for the company’s standalone VR headset, which first arrived to Chinese consumers back in January. Apparently HTC is lowering the price for some devs, although the total price sans discount appears to be approximately the same premium price tag the headset carries in its home country.
Vive Focus, HTC’s standalone VR headset which first launched in China back in January, is gearing up for its Western release it seems. HTC today announced that it’s making Vive Focus developer units available to devs outside of China.
Tis the season of standalones, it seems. Right on the heels of the Oculus Go launch, the Lenovo Mirage Solo is here. The headset promises to bring one of the top features of high-end VR headsets—positional tracking—to Google’s casual Daydream VR ecosystem. Does it succeed? Read on to find out.
