NGCodec, a cloud video processing company creating low latency codecs for video and interactive VR, announced the closure of an $8 million Series A funding round, bringing their total funds to $15.9 million. Investors in the most recent funding round include Belmore Capital, Xilinx and the National Science Foundation.
Alongside its reveal of the TPCast Plus product range, the company also announced plans to bring their wireless technology to Windows ‘Mixed Reality’ VR devices. With the intention to transition into an OEM business model, TPCast is creating a reference design to support all WMR headset manufacturers.
With day two of CES 2018 behind us, we take a look at some of the bigger news to come out of the show in today’s news roundup: Pimax 8K impressions, Pico Neo brings Viveport mobile out of China, Blade Runner: Revelations to include 6DoF tracking for Daydream, and a hands-on with Survios’ upcoming music tool Electronauts.
HTC says that the new Vive Pro controllers, due out later this year, will be an updated version of the current Vive wands, rather than Valve’s anticipated ‘Knuckles’ controllers.
This week at CES 2018, Tactical Haptics debuted a new prototype of their haptic VR controller which allows the devices to attach and detach on the fly in several different poses for different types of gameplay. The controllers are being piloted in IMAX’s VR arcade.
Viveport, HTC’s VR content store for Vive, just received a significant overhaul aimed at improving content discovery and consumption.
StarVR, a joint venture between Acer and Starbreeze, and SEGA Entertainment announced a collaboration to bring the eponymous wide field of view (FOV) StarVR headset to SEGA Game Center locations across Japan. The StarVR headset will be featured at three SEGA arcade locations by March 2018, and expand to a total of more than ten locations by the end of 2018.
Survios, the studio behind Raw Data (2017), is getting into the music business with their upcoming music creation tool/experience Electronauts. I got a chance to go hands-on with an early version of Electronauts at this year’s CES, and I left feeling hope for my budding carrier as an EDM artist.
A new adventure set in the Blade Runner universe from developer Seismic Games is coming soon to the Daydream mobile VR platform. The game is optimised for WorldSense, a new six degrees of freedom (6DoF) positional tracking system developed by Google, found in upcoming mobile devices such as the standalone Lenovo Mirage Solo.
When the China-based headset manufacturer Pico Interactive announced they were bringing their six degrees of freedom (6DoF) Pico Neo VR headset and 6DoF controllers to the West, it wasn’t clear what content store they’d be drawing from when they released the headset out of China. As it turns out, the company may beat HTC to the punch by being the first to bring Viveport mobile to the rest of the world—at least that’s the way it appears currently, as HTC hasn’t yet released word on a possible Western release for Vive Focus.
The official HTC Vive Twitter account has posted a reminder of their public invitation to anyone looking for a Vive Pro demo, with a “daily open house” from 4–6pm through Thursday at the Wynn’s Alsace Ballroom. The Vive Pro was first revealed to press at the Wynn on Monday; check out our hands-on first impressions here.
Following many announcements on ‘day zero’ of CES, we’ve rounded up some of the most important bits from ‘day 1’ of our CES 2018 coverage: hands-on with the Vive Pro, Google introduces new VR180 cameras, Lenovo Mirage Solo detailed, and HTC’s official wireless adapter for Vive and Vive Pro.
Pimax, the Chinese VR startup honing in on a consumer headset with a huge field of view, is said to soon be shipping the first Pimax “8K” headsets to Kickstarter backers. While the company executed a very successful Kickstarted and parlayed that into a healthy investment, it remains to be seen if Pimax can go the final mile to meet the fevered expectations set upon it by the West’s high-end VR community. We go hands-on with the company’s latest prototype headset at CES 2018 to see where things stand.
During HTC’s pre-CES event where the new flagship Vive Pro headset was revealed, the company also announced an official Wireless Adaptor for Vive. The optional accessory will allow for a tether-free VR experience, and will support both the Vive and Vive Pro systems when it launches in the summer.
Lenovo today unveiled the first standalone VR headset in Google’s Daydream mobile VR ecosystem, the Mirage Solo. Revealed today at CES, the headset integrates Google’s WorldSense six degrees of freedom (6DoF) positional tracking alongside the headset’s 3DoF controller.
