The graphics pipeline in NVIDIA’s new ‘Pascal’ GPUs has been rearchitected with features which can significantly enhance VR rendering performance. Here the company explains how Simultaneous Multi-projection and Lens Matched Shading work together to increase VR rendering efficiency.
At Oculus Connect 2015, SVVR’s Karl Krantz told me that he accidentally spent 12 straight hours in VR and only thought that 3 hours had passed. I then started hearing a lot more time dilation stories from Owlchemy Labs’ Alex Schwartz and Devin Reimer as well as Fantastic Contraption’s Sarah Northway. These time perception underestimation anecdotes were both fascinating and really scary, and they found that some of the likely causes were achieving the ‘flow state’, having a deep sense of presence, and even the sense that ‘time flies when you’re having fun.’
Are you the sort of person that has a hard time installing surround sound stereo equipment, or building IKEA shelves? Well, HTC is now offering customers a premium installation service to take the hassle out of setting up the Vive, a process that can be intimidating for the uninitiated.
Brandon Jones has been one of the lead developers on the WebVR API over the past couple of years as part of his 20% project at Google. He announced this week that he’s now going to be working on WebVR full-time, which is a great indicator that Google is putting more resources in supporting VR on the open web. I had a chance to catch up with Brandon at GDC to talk about all of the web technologies enabling web browsers to drive room-scale Vive experiences and WebGL exports from Unity & Unreal Engine. Some of the highlights include a new WebVR 1.0 draft spec, the Gamepad API, WebGL 2, and WebAssembly.
I expect that there will be more announcements about what Google is doing in VR next week at Google I/O. Google is definitely investing in the future of VR and the open web with Brandon now working on this full-time, as well as with their recent hiring of Josh Carpenter to the WebVR team.
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You can now walk in web pages with A-Frame + #WebVR! (scene by @EricaLayton) https://t.co/0AMaCdjFOi
— chris van wiemeersch (@cvanw) May 13, 2016
I'm joining Google VR to work on #webvr with @borismus and @Tojiro. VR is for everyone, & WebVR is going to help make it happen. Stay tuned!
— Josh Carpenter (@joshcarpenter) May 9, 2016
Now that @joshcarpenter is joining Google to work on WebVR it would be a good time to announce that I'm also working on WebVR full time now!
— Brandon Jones (@Tojiro) May 10, 2016
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Walter Greenleaf has been researching medical applications of virtual reality since 1984, and he believes that healthcare is going to be transformed by consumer VR & AR technologies. Walter says that VR is fitting into a number of different healthcare trends including the digitization of tools, moving from subjective assessments to objective measurements, moving towards patient-centered medical care, and moving away from a fee-for-service to a result-driven business model. These are all pointing towards the desire to collect more and more objective measurements, and VR technology has the capability to capture and present a lot of this data in entirely new ways.
I had a chance to catch up with Walter at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference where he give me an overview of the medical applications of VR, and why he believes that VR is going to transform healthcare. There’s many different industry verticals within healthcare, and he believes that we are just at the very beginning of seeing how consumer VR could help improve many different dimensions of our health and potentially even help save lives.
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Here are the slides from one of Walter’s recent presentation on “How VR & AR Technologies will Transform Healthcare.”
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
AxonVR, a Seattle-based startup fresh out of a 4 year stint in stealth mode, recently revealed a piece of hardware that seems to have been lifted directly from science fiction. Promising a full-body haptic suit and an exoskeleton walking platform, AxonVR is the first company to tease an all-in-one solution that aims to deliver simulated pressure, hot and cold sensations, and the ability walk freely through the virtual world. But is it feasible? Sure, but maybe not as soon as you think.
Negotiator is a first-person strategy-based narrative that action fans will especially resonate with. Like something straight out of Patriot Games (1992) or … well … The Negotiator (1998), the game promises to deliver high-stakes missions that test your reasoning and manipulation skills, but more importantly, your ability to extract hostages alive.
One of the defining features of Minecraft is its procedurally-generated landscape which creates unique and effectively infinite maps for players to explore. Now, with Minecraft on Gear VR and the Virtuix Omni VR treadmill, you can walk that infinite landscape on foot.
One of the best driving games in recent years, Dirt Rally from Codemasters, will soon patch their virtual reality support to work on the recently release Oculus Rift consumer edition.
Thanks to the recent, headline-capturing releases of both the Vive and the Rift, investment money is continuing to pour into VR-based initiatives and complimentary hardware. An additional $40 million in Series C funding has gone into the coffers of 360fly, a company that makes a single-lens camera that captures stichless 360 video. Hydra Ventures, an investment arm of Adidas, joins the Series.
Felix and Paul Studios, creators of the Daytime Emmy Award-winning Inside the Box of Kurios and Inside Impact: East Africa, today launched Nomads—a new 360 video app that takes you inside the lives of the some of the world’s far-flung nomadic tribes.
Oculus today announced a major milestone for Gear VR, the company’s mobile VR headset made in collaboration with Samsung.
