Hardlight VR $499 Haptic Suit Kickstarter Passes $80k Target

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Hardlight VR is a new haptic suit from Nullspace VR that launched its Kickstarter last week. It’s already set to pass its original goal and the team have announced the project’s first stretch goal.

Watch: Tobii Tease Unnervingly Effective Vive Eye-Tracked VR Demo Ahead of GDC

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This short but ingenious video snippet from eye-tracking specialists Tobii was built to tease a social VR demo they’ve been working on for GDC next week. It aptly highlights the subtle yet striking enhancements that eye tracking may being to social VR applications.

Using VR as a Tool to Cultivate Compassion with Condition One

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Danfung-DennisDanfung Dennis of Condition One has an ambitious vision for the potential of virtual reality, and it’s one of the most radical ones that I’ve come across. He believes that VR can be used as a tool to cultivate compassion through having an embodied experience of witnessing suffering within VR. He says that the process of witnessing suffering can be used as a type of advanced Buddhist mind training to focus your attention, contemplate on your visceral reactions, and grow compassion through taking action. These brief VR experiences have the potential to impact day-to-day consumer decisions that people make, which can taken collectively could radically change the world.

ARM and SMI to Showcase New Mobile VR Eye-Tracking Demo at GDC

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Photo by Road to VR

ARM Holdings and Sensormotoric Instruments (SMI) are teaming up at GDC to showcase the potential of powerful mobile GPUs, eye-tracking and foveated rendering technologies in a new made-for-VR demo that will debut at GDC next week.

SteamVR Tracking HDK Now Available for Anyone to Buy

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Valve is increasingly opening its SteamVR Tracking technology—that which powers the HTC Vive’s room-scale tracking—to the world. The royalty-free system requires no permission from Valve to be embedded and launched as part of third-party products. And now one of the final barriers to entry has been removed: anyone can buy the development hardware to begin building products with the tech.

Qualcomm & Road to VR Industry Mixer Kicks Off GDC 2017 Next Week

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Qualcomm and Road to VR are teaming up to kick off next week’s GDC 2017 with a gathering of VR and AR industry insiders.

‘Bigscreen’ Social VR Desktop App Raises $3 Million Seed Investment Led VC Firm Andreessen Horowitz

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Bigscreen Inc, the company behind the social VR desktop app, Bigscreen, last year told us they’d raised a seed round from “Tier 1” VC firms. Today the company has announced details of that round and where they’re heading next.

On the Hunt for VR’s Killer App with Epic Games’ Technical Director of VR & AR, Nick Whiting

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Everyone in the VR industry can envision a world in the next 10 years that’s radically changed by virtual reality. From healthcare, education, social, training, cinema, gaming, and more, VR has a lot of Killer Use-cases. But it seems most of the industry is in agreement that the Killer App—a single, platform-defining piece of software that compels buyers—has not yet arrived. Epic’s Nick Whiting weighs in on how we might come to find it.

Samsung and Six Flags Re-up Collaboration with New VR Coasters Combining ‘Mixed Reality’ and ‘Complex Gameplay’

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Six Flags Entertainment Corporation—which runs theme park properties across the americas—and Samsung Electronics America, Inc. recently launched a renewed collaboration on new rides at two Six Flags theme parks which place users on real roller coasters while using a VR headset to add virtual visuals. ‘Galactic Attack’, which improves on the existing ‘New Revolution’ VR rides, introduces a ‘mixed reality’ element and ‘complex gameplay’.

ZeniMax Seeks Injunction to Halt Oculus’ Use Rift & Gear VR SDK and More

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Based on a photo courtesy Dallas News

Following a prominent lawsuit between ZeniMax and Facebook/Oculus which resulted in a $500 million award to ZeniMax, the company is now seeking an injunction to prevent Oculus from continuing to use code that was found by the jury to infringe upon ZeniMax’s copyright.

Valve Launches Free Steam Audio SDK Beta to Give VR Apps Immersive 3D Sound

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Valve today announced the Steam Audio SDK, a spatial audio plugin that the company says is made is designed to “enhance all interactive products, specifically VR applications.” The company has launched a beta of the SDK today supporting Unity, and support for Unreal Engine is on the way.

Samsung’s In-house Incubator to Showcase New VR/AR Experiments at MWC

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Although the Samsung Galaxy S8 may not make its big entrance at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next week, the company will however be presenting a few new VR/AR projects coming direct from their in-house incubator Creative Lab (C-Lab). Just recompense? Maybe not, but there’s at least two in the bunch that ought to raise an eyebrow—and all of them will undoubtedly explode your computer’s spellcheck.

AR Specialist Zappar Nets $3.75m in Funding, Aims to “Democratize Augmented Reality”

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Zappar, a London-based developer in the Augmented Reality space, is announcing the closing of its Series A funding round. The $3.75m investment will accelerate the development of several new products along with increased support for ZapWorks, their flagship content creation tool.

On the Hunt for VR’s Killer App with Samsung’s VP of Immersive Products & VR, Nick DiCarlo

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Everyone in the VR industry can envision a world in the next 10 years that’s radically changed by virtual reality. From healthcare, education, social, training, cinema, gaming, and more, VR has a lot of Killer Use-cases. But it seems most of the industry is in agreement that the Killer App—a single, platform-defining piece of software that compels buyers—has not yet arrived. Samsung’s Nick DiCarlo weighs in on how we might come to find it.

YouTube Spaces Studio Explores the Basics of Mixed Reality Video Capture

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Prolific YouTuber Tom Scott recently visited the Mixed Reality Lab at the YouTube Space studio in New York in order to showcase mixed reality capture. The lab is using a technique involving a green screen and a tracked camera to combine real world footage with a virtual reality environment, and helpfully lays out the basic concepts of the technique.

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