Hard to believe it’s that time of year again, but the VRLA Winter Expo is here once more and promises no less than 72 Exhibitors and 4 exclusive announcements from Crytek, Survios and Starbreeze and it all kicks off January 23rd at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
Epic Games, the company behind Unreal Engine (not to mention a slew of best-selling titles), has worked closely with Oculus over the years to create VR tech demos. Their latest, Bullet Train, was the first to incorporate the Oculus Touch VR controllers. Creators of the project will take to the stage at VRDC in March to go behind the scenes on making the impressively polished demo, which they say took just 10 weeks.
Virtuix, the company specialising in omni-directional locomotion solutions for VR, was back at CES 2016 and they brought with them 4 Omnis, 4 HTC Vive Pre headsets all hooked up to their new, multiplayer ‘built for Omni’ eSports game, ‘Omni Arena’.
You’ll hear the mantra time and again “you have to use virtual reality to understand what it’s like.” And for the most part that’s true. VR is so new and different that using old media like text, photos, or videos to explain it is extremely challenging. That said, this mixed reality video from Fantastic Contraption might yet be the best non-VR example of what it’s like to be inside virtual reality.
UK theme park Alton Towers just launched their first virtual reality roller coaster, Galactica. We’ve got the launch trailer and some vital statistics for the ride.
Alton Towers, one of the UK’s leading theme parks, has announce they’re to launch their first virtual reality roller coaster called ‘Galactica’, to open in April.
Leap Motion continues to refine their hand-tracking tech for intuitive controller-free interactivity. The company’s latest focus has been on an ‘Interaction Engine’ which usurps standard physics engines when it comes to defining interactions between user input and virtual objects.
Greg Howes is the founder and CEO of the high-tech building company IDEAbuilder, and he’s on a mission to disrupt the $8.5 trillion annual building industry using immersive technologies to bridge design & fabrication directly with consumer demand. He uses computer-aided manufacturing and robotics to fabricate buildings, and he’s been investigating how AR, VR, and MR can help to revolutionize the process of communicating ideas around space. Greg predicts that the combination of computer-aided manufacturing with immersive technologies has the potential to more directly connect the supply and demand of manufacturing resulting in a trend towards more customization and personalization of all types of products and services.
Speaking with The Telegraph, HTC CEO Cher Wang confirms that pre-orders for the company’s Vive VR system will open February 29th. Wang also indicates that HTC is turning its focus primarily to virtual reality.
Michael Aratow is a clinician and health care executive who founded VRecover, which is health care startup making physical rehabilitation exercises more engaging with VR. He says that rehab is like homework, but that sometimes up to 90% of people don’t actually do the exercises. VRecover is betting that gamifying rehab exercises within immersive VR environments will help accelerate the healing process while making it more fun to do.
SMI, a company working in the field of gaze detection for over 20 years, hit CES this year with an application of their latest 250hz eye tracking solution coupled with a holy grail for 2nd generation virtual reality – FOVeated rendering.
With rather curious timing, a day after Oculus Rift pre-orders became available, Amazon Canada let slip a listing for Sony’s PlayStation VR headset.
With the Oculus Rift’s seemingly high $599 price tag coming as quite a surprise to the VR community, one might be tempted to think that it would put a major dent in pre-orders. Indications from Oculus suggest it may only be a vocal minority who have been turned off by the cost.
While the HTC Vive is known for its ‘room-scale tracking space, the company maintains that it works just as well for seated VR experiences. At CES 2016, HTC showed just that, using Elite Dangerous running great on the new Vive Pre.
