At CES 2015 last week, we met up with Leap Motion co-founders Michael Buckwald and David Holz to try their latest prototype motion input camera, codenamed ‘Dragonfly’, and chat with the duo to learn more about their plans for making gesture input part of every VR experience.
FOVE, the Japan based VR headset creator, is using their eye-tracking technology in a new project: ‘Eye Play the Piano‘, a collaborative partnership with the University of Tsukuba’s Special Needs Education School which aims to give physically-disabled students the gift of music creation.
With a recent pivot toward virtual reality, Leap Motion is continuing to discover useful ways to use their motion input controller for virtual reality. The company has devised a new gesture which activates and deactivates passthrough camera functionality with a simple swipe of the hand.
Samsung recently announced a partnership with the NBA at this year’s CES, which, come February, will aim to give Gear VR owners the best seat in the house for game action and behind-the-scenes footage.
It looks like many of you enjoyed our concise analysis of 3DHead. While we had a bit of fun with the company’s massive gaming helmet (making sure here that we don’t confuse it with an actual VR headset), we didn’t arrive at our conclusion lazily. We tested the unit and spoke directly with the company’s COO to try to get a sense of whether or not the folks involved were delusional about their “Oculus Killer” claim or just being dishonest. It seems to be the latter.
Leap Motion’s ‘3D Jam’ dev contest, presented by the independent games festival IndieCade, is now officially over and the results are in. Among the 20 semi-finalists, who were awarded over $75,000 in prizes by a jury composed of Leap Motion staff and members of the IndieCade community, only two teams have received a spot at this year’s IndieCade East festival taking place in New York City on February 13-15.
It is the final day of CES 2015 and Road to VR Editor Paul James is already on his way home. No worries though, because we still have Executive Editor Ben Lang to report on his final day of scoping out VR companies and their wares. There was plenty of stuff to report on, so let’s get this show started!
Paul James sits down with Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson, the masterminds behind the unique augmented reality system CastAR, to review what’s happened in the 12 months since CES 2014.
It’s time for the day three recap as our pals Ben Lang and Paul James report on even more VR stuff from CES 2015. The meetings continue to stack up, and they are running on empty today. Luckily, they were able to call into the podcast from the actual show floor to report on today’s findings. Let’s listen to what fun things they got to experience today.
Correction (January 9th, 2025 – 5:31PM ET): A previous version of this article reported that Meta had revealed that Meta’s VR fitness app Supernatural had reached 110,000 active users. This report was incorrect.
Meta reached out to inform Road to VR that the “110,000 people” figure mentioned in this blog post was not the active user numbers for the Supernatural app, but actually a count of the Official Supernatural Community on Facebook. Meta updated the language in its blog post to prevent any further confusion.
As such, we have archived the original version of this report and removed it from the front (page by setting its publishing date back to 2015) but this correction will remain here for posterity.
We had a chance to talk shop with the minds behind AltspaceVR, a yet unreleased social platform for virtual reality, located at the Intel booth at CES 2015 in Las Vegas. Executive Editor and intrepid reporter Ben Lang spoke with Eric Romo, CEO of AltspaceVR about the social aspects of in-game interaction and the importance of non-verbal communication in virtual spaces.
At CES 2015, Oculus brought their latest Rift Crescent Bay prototype to show off at the show. And while the unit remains identical to what we saw at the company’s ‘Connect’ developer conference in 2014, there’s new stuff hidden in the headphones, specifically the 3D positional audio that the company says is key to virtual reality immersion.
At CES 2015, Road to VR spoke with Oculus’ Head of Mobile, Max Cohen, who confirmed that Samsung’s Gear VR mobile headset would begin its international rollout by the end of January. The company is also working toward developer monetization and the upgrade path for Android 5.0 Lollipop.
