SEER, an augmented reality device from San Francisco/Shenzhen based Caputer Labs Inc, launched their Kickstarter campaign in late January, and have already reached beyond $75,000 of their $100,000 funding goal. The device, which takes advantage of the user’s smartphone, boasts having the “world’s largest FOV” (field of view) at 100 degrees.
Not like taking a few jumps on a raked path in the woods behind my house like I used to do as a kid—I mean really mountain biking, the kind of thing you’d see on a GoPro commercial. The kind of thing that would almost certainly result in my death if I tried it without practice. Thanks to a motion bike and a VR headset, I got to taste the thrill without the risk. But can I really say “I went mountain biking”?
Bei Yang, the ‘Creative Technologies’ leader at Walt Disney Imagineering, will be holding a talk on March 5th at this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) and revealing VR strategies learned by the R&D arm of Disney over the past 20 years of its existence.
I am a big fan of open source stuff, so when I heard that Razer and Sensics have decided to team up to bring an open source virtual reality platform to the VR space, I knew I had to talk to them.
John Carmack, legendary developer and CTO of Oculus, will be taking to the stage at GDC 2015 to get technical in a presentation titled ‘The Dawn of Mobile VR’. Carmack, who is known for presentations of detail and length, was closely involved in the development of Samsung’s Gear VR, which is expected to be the focus of the talk.
Sony is bringing back Project Morpheus to this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, now with updated information on the VR headset that promises to expound new applications for the VR side of their PlayStation ecosystem.
After the announcement of the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) initiative last month during CES, it seems that the idea might be catching on. Today OSVR is announcing the addition of 13 new partners, like Jaunt and VisiSonics, and the organization is also launching the OSVR Academia Program which it says will provide 10 of its ‘Hacker Development Kit’ VR headsets to qualifying universities.
Recognized as the largest game developers jam in the world, Global Game Jam (GGJ) attracted more than 28,000 developers, scattered across 78 countries this year. With over 5,400 games produced, more than 60 were designed especially for use with the Oculus Rift Dk2. Here we take a look at some of the more memorable VR demos to come from the event, which ended on January 25th.
VRLA, a virtual reality community organization based in Los Angeles, is firing up a series of quarterly expo events designed to showcase virtual reality and the community creating it. The first expo event will be held at the end of March. You can save 50% on early-bird tickets starting today.
Convrge, a social virtual reality environment for the Oculus Rift DK2, is once again opening its doors for some virtual ‘dancing’ (as much dancing as you can do with headtracking alone). The developers are hoping to draw some 100 people into their virtual forest setting which has both a dance floor that’s reactive to music and a peaceful campfire around which to chat.
Every year the Global Game Jam (GGJ) assembles game developers worldwide—this year spanning 488 locations across 72 countries—and presents them with a theme, something to base their work on for the next 48 hours of feverish game development. This year’s theme, ‘What do we do now?’ admittedly gave participants a pretty loose framework to build upon, but seemed to fit perfectly with the open-ended nature of virtual reality. One VR tech demo caught our eye in particular, HoloCommander, which brings real-time strategy (RTS) to the virtual tabletop.
The latest prototype design of a new augmented reality device was unveiled at last month’s CES: Seebright Wave is an AR headset that plans to use the graphical power of your smartphone to make augmented reality a low cost affair. Seebright claims that the Wave has the widest field of view of see-through AR devices in its class, a poignant advantage given the commentary of the narrow field of view on Microsoft’s recently revealed HoloLens.
Sulon had an impressive presence at CES 2015, their sizeable booth on the show floor accompanied by eye-catching prototype headsets clearly designed to announce to the world that they’d arrived. Their product, an AR/VR headset named the ‘Cortex’, has an interesting ‘mixed reality’ approach and practical uses of computer vision. Ben Lang sits down with Don Henderson from Sulon to find out more.
Google will be demoing some of their new sensor-assisted virtual reality technology at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, which promises to “enable Holodeck-like experiences with less than $100 add-on cost” to mobile devices. While not explicitly named, we’ll eat our access badges if they’re not going to talk about their realtime environmental mapping dev kit, Project Tango.
Announced last month at CES 2015, the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) project encompasses a $199 ‘hacker development kit’ (HDK) VR headset, and an SDK designed to interoperate with a range of headsets, peripherals, and game engines. Both facets of the project are open source, with their components freely available to be modified and redistributed. Sensics, who spearheaded OSVR with Razer, played a major role in the development of the HDK headset. Sensics CEO Yuval Boger joins us to explain the unit’s dual-element optics, one of the things that sets it apart from most other consumer VR headsets now approaching the market.
