Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, won’t be here until May, but with registration opening today, Facebook and Oculus is teasing some exciting AR and VR news to come.
Volkswagen Group and VR studio Innoactive revealed the global, multi-brand automotive company is planning to train 10,000 employees this year alone using virtual reality.
Now available in China, and quite possibly on its way to a wider release, HTC is prominently showing its new standalone Vive Focus headset at MWC 2018 this week. The company says the Focus is positioned as the premium option among the incoming wave of standalone headsets; of course, premium features are never far from premium price.
Hatsune Miku, the impossibly saccharine anime pop vocaloid, is coming to SteamVR headsets in a new rhythm game from creators Degica Games and Crypton Future Media.
Moss, the promising puzzle platformer from indie studio Polyarc, has finally arrived on PlayStation VR. You’ll guide Quill, an undeniably adorable mouse, on the start of what could become a grand adventure.
Rec Room, the social VR app, recently updated to include the ability to create your own customized environments. To celebrate the ‘custom rooms’ addition, developers Against Gravity are putting on a contest and offering up the grand prize of a Nintendo Switch, a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) and a few other necessary fixins to get the creative types out in force.
At this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, HTC CEO Cher Wang took the stage to outline the company’s big picture approach to the future. The company is ostensibly putting increased focus on VR/AR with their newly coined ethos ‘Vive Reality’.
Though both products were announced back at CES, HTC showed off the Vive Pro and the Vive Wireless adapter used together for the first time today at MWC 2018.
This year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona is underway, and while the event’s main focus is inevitably on the newest batch of smartphones to hit the market this year, VR’s presence can definitely be felt. Visiting HTC’s booth, we got a chance to see the newer Vive Tracker in action with Valve’s 2.0 SteamVR Tracking system.
Samsung officially launched its new S9 and S9 Plus smartphones today. Though Gear VR wasn’t mentioned during the reveal, the company has confirmed to Road to VR that both the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus will support the 2017 Gear VR, however a new model for the launch of the phones was not announced.
At SIGGRAPH 2017, NVIDIA was showing off their Isaac Robot that had been trained to play dominos within a virtual world environment of NVIDIA’s Project Holodeck. They’re using Unreal Engine to simulate interactions with people in VR to train a robot how to play dominos. They can use a unified code base of AI algorithms for deep reinforcement learning within VR, and then apply that same code base to drive a physical Baxter robot. This creates a safe context to train and debug the behavior of the robot within a virtual environment, but to also experiment with cultivating interactions with the robot that are friendly, exciting, and entertaining. This will allow humans to build trust in interacting with robots in a virtual environment so that they are more comfortable and familiar with interacting with physical robots in the real world.
Chialin Chang, HTC’s President of Smartphone and Connected Devices Business, made his immediate resignation official last week, which HTC now confirms has prompted the company to merge its smartphone and VR divisions—a move that possibly points to the HTC putting greater focus on VR in the face of the company’s waning smartphone business.
There’s no doubt about it; weilding a real controller that matches the weight and feel of a virtual object is far more immersive than having a disconnect between the two. The problem, of course, is that if a controller is made to fit too specific a role, it’s less useful for interacting with a wide range of virtual objects. A novel prototype based on an HTC Vive controller attempts to solve this problem by allowing the controller to redistribute its weight on the fly.
