Paris Games Week (PGW) is just about to kick off, starting officially November 1st and lasting until November 5th. Sony is announcing a few new games ahead of time at their annual pre-PGW keynote though, which they say will include 7 titles spanning PS4 and PSVR. Watch the keynote here starting today at 8AM PDT (your local time here).
Best Buy’s consumer electronics brand, Insignia, has released a charging station for the Oculus Touch controllers.
At Google’s big October 4th press conference, the company announced a new Pixel 2 phone and a range of new ambient computing devices powered by AI-enabled conversational interfaces including new Google Mini and Max speakers, Google Clips camera, and wireless Pixel Buds. The Daydream View mobile VR headset received a major upgrade with vastly improved comfort and weight distribution, reduced light leakage, better heat management, cutting-edge aspherical fresnel lenses with larger acuity and sweet spot, as well as an increased field of view of 10-15 degrees more than the previous version. It’s actually a huge upgrade and improvement, but VR itself only received a few brief moments during the 2-hour long keynote where Google was explaining their AI-first design philosophy for their latest ambient computing hardware releases.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Audio PlayerI had a chance to sit down with Clay Bavor, Google’s Vice President for Augmented and Virtual Reality to talk about their latest AR & VR announcements as well as how Google’s ambient computing and AI-driven conversational interfaces fit into their larger immersive computing strategy.
YouTube VR is on the bleeding edge of Google’s VR strategy, and their VR180 livestream camera can broadcast a 2D version that translates well to watching on a flat screen, but also provides a more immersive stereoscopic 3D VR version for mobile VR headsets.
Google retired the Tango brand with the announcement of ARCore on August 29th, and Bavor explains that they had to come up with a number of algorithmic and technological innovations in order to standardize the AR calibration process across all of their OEM manufacturers.
Finally, Bavor reiterates that WebVR and WebAR are a crucial part of the Google’s immersive computing strategy. Google showed their dedication to the open web by releasing experimental WebAR browsers for ARCore and ARKit so that web developers can develop cross-compatible AR apps. Bavor sees a future that evolves beyond the existing self-contained app model, but this requires a number of technological innovations including contextually-aware ambient computing powered by AI as well as their Virtual Positioning System announced at Google I/O. There are also a number of other productivity applications that Google is continuing to experiment with, but the screen resolution still needs to improve from having a visual acuity measurement of 20/100 to being something closer to 20/40.
After our interview, Bavor was excited to tell me how Google created a cloud-based, distributed computing, physics simulator that could model 4 quadrillion photons in order to design the hybrid aspherical fresnel lenses within the Daydream View. This will allow them to create machine-learning optimized approaches to designing VR optics in the future, but it will also likely have other implications for VR physics simulations and potentially delivering volumetric digital lightfields down the road.
Google’s vision of contextually-aware AI and ambient computing has a ton of privacy implications that are similar to my many open questions about privacy in VR, but I hope to open up a more formal dialog with Google to discuss these concerns and potentially new concepts of self-sovereign identity and new cryptocurrency-powered business models that go beyond their existing surveillance capitalism business model. There wasn’t a huge emphasis on Google’s latest AR and VR announcements during the press conference as AI conversational interfaces and ambient computing received the majority of attention, but Google remains dedicated to the long-term vision of the power and potential of immersive computing.
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Halloween is nearly here, and there’s no better way to scare your friends and family (and you poor cat or dog) than a disturbingly immersive VR horror game. From now until 11:59 pm PDT on October 31st (local time here), selected Rift and Gear VR titles will be available from 25% to 50% off.
Brian Blau is the vice president of research for personal technologies at Gartner Research where he’s in the business of making predictions about the consumer adoption of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. I last interviewed Blau in 2015 when he was saying that his predictions were a lot more conservative than other analysts who were predicting more explosive growth for VR, and Blau tells me that his more conservative estimates have more closely matched with reality where he slightly overestimated PC VR market and underestimated how fast the mobile VR HMD market would take off.
Announced at the Samsung Developer conference last week, the 360 Round is the company’s new camera for creating and streaming 4K 3D content. The camera appears to be a reboot of the ‘Project Beyond’ camera that the company introduced back in 2014 but never brought to market.
Following a two-part blog series in partnership with Crytek, where the studio shared some of its research into VR locomotion comfort, Oculus has now added eight new experimental locomotion methods to the SDK. A recent entry on the official Oculus blog provides an introduction to the techniques.
Waltz of the Wizard, an uncommonly high-quality VR wizard experience from Reykjavik-based Aldin Dynamics, just got an update today introducing a new locomotion system and a “significant” expansion to the potion-mixing magical experience including an entirely new area full of traps and supernatural guardians.
Pimax, the company aiming to deliver three flavors of its high field of view (FOV) headset via their Kickstarter, have recently blasted past the $2 million funding mark. With only a week left in the crowdfunding campaign and now more than $2.45 million to their name, the company has reached arguably a more important milestone: they’ve surpassed the original Oculus Rift Kickstarter, becoming the top funded VR headset campaign in existence.
Ramez Naam is the author of The Nexus Trilogy sci-fi novels, which explores the moral and sociological implications of technology that can directly interface with the brain. He gave the keynote at the Experiential Technology Conference in March exploring the latest research into how these interfaces could change the way that we sleep, learn, eat, find motivation to exercise, create new habits of change, and broadcast and receive technologically-mediated telepathic messages.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Audio PlayerI had a chance to catch up with him after his talk where we do a survey of existing technologies, where the invasive technologies are headed, the philosophical and moral implications of directly transferring data into the brains, and whether or not it’ll be possible to download our consciousness onto a computer.
Read Further:
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Looking to get scared in VR this Halloween season? Steam’s Halloween sale runs through November 1st, bringing discounts to fright-themed VR titles.
One of our favorite VR titles, SUPERHOT VR, won’t be getting that additional DLC we reported on in a previous version of this article announcing the supposed update. Despite this, if the game has been on your list, now might be a good time to snag it thanks to a 25% discount via Steam through November 1st.
Today HTC Creative Labs is debuting a beautiful new SteamVR Home environment—the hub space for when players aren’t inside any VR apps—called Driftwood. The environment takes players virtually outside on a beachfront wilderness inspired by the United State’s Pacific Northwest.
Space Pirates and Zombies 2, a single player, space-based survival-exploration game from indie studio MinMax Games, is officially heading out of its year and a half-long stint in Steam Early Access on November 7th, including its fully featured VR port that supports the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
