Horizon VR Close Website, “At the request of the VR community”

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The Horizon VR Mockup

HorizonWeb_med4-longIt’s been a turbulent 48 hours in VR – in particular for the company that claimed to have the world’s first 4k, UHD VR Headset in development.

We broke the story that a new website had popped up, purportedly by a new company on the VR scene, Horizon VR. The website confidently claimed that they had developed and was to imminently ship a dual 4k, fresnel lense HMD with an impressive 210 degrees field of view. The website offered pre-orders for the HMD starting at $399 as a deposit, due to ship in January 2015 via Paypal and Bitcoin.

However, the company had chosen to use a concept render lifted directly from InfinitEye and their facts seemed inconsistent plus their target ship date enormously optimistic.

Road to VR got in touch with CEO Kevin Geiger who claimed that the website had gone live by mistake, the result of an over enthusiastic relative of the owner, and had been inundated with order, claiming up to 500 as of yesterday.

After the story broke, the VR community were in uproar and at the advice of Road to VR, Kevin Geiger posted an apologetic post on the subreddit /r/oculus attempting to quell the anger. Unfortunately, it made things worse and when pre-order functionality was not taken down at our suggestion suspicion grew. After a flurry of information dug up by the VR Community by Tuesday’s close, Horizon VR were the target of even more distrust.

It now looks as if Horizon has finally done the sensible thing and taken their website offline, hopefully to resolve questions and issues with the information within. The website reads, at the time of writing, simply:

At the request of the VR community, all advertising and pre-orders for the V have been stopped until further notice. Horizon VR

So, what now? What happens to the 500 reported pre-orders Kevin Geiger claimed they’d received? Is Horizon VR the real deal, simply suffering a catastrophic series of admin and PR errors? At this point we simply don’t know.

There’s no doubt that Horizon VR have made an appalling first impression, if indeed they are a legitimate operation. However, for what it’s worth we really hope that Horizon VR turn out to be the read deal. Seeing such a fantastically specified HMD on the market and in the person would have been quite something.

We’ll try to find Horizon VR’s current position and their future plans, including that pressing question of potential refunds for current pre-order owners.

News Bits: DARPA Uses the Oculus Rift to Visualise Cyber Terrorism

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So here’s a story that brings the use of virtual reality that bit closer to the Hollywood fantasies of l33t computer hackers. DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) have apparently been working for the last 2 years on a user interface to visualise the complexities of modern data networks to help humans detect, investigate and react to cyber terrorism threats.

At a recent DARPA Demo day (how can I get an invite to that!?), they demo’d the system to WIRED magazine which uses the Oculus Rift and the Razer Hydra to enable the processing and navigation of this data more intuitive for operatives tasked with fighting these threats. The interface is just one part of a software platform codenamed ‘PlanX’ (yes, really).

Visually, the interface bear a passing resemblance to 2013’s VR Jam Winner and soon to be full game Ciess. The demo (as seen in the above video) was structured much like a video game, requiring you to select missions, carry out network scans and so on with your target networks represented as a sphere of nodes, navigated using the Hydras.

It’s interesting to see such ‘left at the traffic lights’ thinking from a government body, but then I guess that’s precisely DARPA’s remit. Just how useful the system might be in reality is another question. A UI is one thing, but ultimately actions on a network require low level navigation through switches, routers and firewalls—requiring a serious amount of homogeneous thinking from network sysadmins to bring to life.

News Bits: Elite: Dangerous Enters Premium Beta 2, Impressive New Video Demonstrates Orbis Starport

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We reported earlier that the crowd-funded latest entry in the Elite franchise had entered it’s premium beta phase, opening the doors to many more players keen to explore the game’s vast universe.

Along with the release, a new video demonstrating the attention to detail lavished in Elite: Dangerous’ craft and structures, has also been released. It’s a tour of the exquisitely detailed Orbis starport and shows the internal and external structures plus the traffic it services. It’s an impressive demonstration of the game’s ambitions and another reminder of why this game is so hotly anticipated by Oculus Rift users. The scale alone of the scenes on offer are tantalising to say the least, especially with the prospect of Oculus’ imminent release of the 1080p DK2 in July.

Key new features in this release:

  • Three new star systems are available to explore and trade within, Aulin, LHS 3006 and Styx.
  • Giant Orbis class starports have been added, which are complex 8km diameter structures, larger and more luxurious than Coriolis star ports.
  • A new space ship type, the Hauler, is the first flyable Zorgon Peterson ship to be added. It’s an entry-level trading ship, to follow on from the Sidewinder. It has four times the cargo capacity of the Eagle, the entry-level combat ship,
  • Additional language support has been added, with German as the first such language to be added to English.
  • A high resolution screen capture facility has been added (capturing at four times the current screen resolution)
  • Improved functionality in the installer, giving incremental updates going forwards.
  • Improved performance.

And, in case you missed it, you can check out our community Q&A with the founder of Frontier Developments and one of the two developers of the original Elite, David Braben here.

Interested in signing up to the Elite: Dangerous world? You can grab early Premium Beta access here or pre-order the standard beta edition here.

News Bits: Oculus VR Agree to Acquire Design Carbon Design Group, Multiple Unannounced Projects in the Works

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carbon-teamThose of us wrapped up in the dizzying (sometimes literally) world of virtual reality have been so focussed on following the progress of how the hard, pure technical problems are being solved by those smart eggs at Oculus VR, that we may lose sight of the fact that the Oculus Rift needs to be a real, physical thing—probably kinda soon too.

More than most consumer electronics devices we own, good industrial design for virtual reality devices and in particular VR headsets is of critical importance. The Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2 are examples of function over form, people ordering these products are already enthusiasts or developers (or both), they’ll put up with the way the unit looks just as long as it performs. Oculus’ first consumer product will have a much more difficult time with its target demographic—everyone everywhere. Oculus are clearly acutely aware of this and have just announced their acquisition of top design studio Carbon Design Group.

You may not know who they are, but you sure as hell know their designs. In the gaming sphere alone, the firm is responsible for the classic Xbox 360 controller, which won over so many converts to Microsoft’s fold back in 2005. Microsoft’s Kinect, another iconic form which became the fastest selling consumer electronics device ever.

Oculus claim the team have already been collaborating on “multiple unannounced projects” for nearly a year. Which of course throws a hunk of meat to the speculation hounds. It’s fairly certain Carbon’s first and primary brief will be the long awaited Oculus Rift CV1 (consumer version of the Rift), but what else have they already been working on for all that time? Let’s face it, almost certainly peripherals. And, frankly, given the Carbon Design Group’s pedigree in this area, they seem like an incredible choice.

Also, yet another tantalising view on Oculus’ latest prototypes comes from Carbon’s Creative Director, Peter Bristol:

A few seconds with the latest Oculus prototypes and you know that virtual reality is for real this time. From a design and engineering perspective, building the products that finally deliver consumer virtual reality is one of the most interesting and challenging problem sets ever.

This is an entirely open product category. With consumer VR at its inception, the physical architectures are still unknown — We’re on the cutting edge of defining how virtual reality looks, feels, and functions.

We’re incredibly excited to be part of the team and we’re looking forward to helping design the future

Oculus expect the deal to be ‘done’ by this summer; the cost of the acquisition has not been announced.

Alert: ‘Horizon V’ HMD Legitimacy Concerns Grow, What We Know So Far

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It’s been an interesting and somewhat sordid 24 hours since we broke the news a company supposedly called ‘Horizon VR’ who claimed that not only that they had a brand new VR Headset that comprised 2 x 4k / UHD screens, 2 x 2k front facing cameras and a whopping 210 degree field of view but that their product would be ready to ship in January.

Alarm bells rang and we dug a little deeper, noting some irregularities with the website – most notably the use of a modified product concept render directly lifted from the very real and very genuine InfinitEye team. What’s more, the Horizon V specification bore a striking resemblance to InfinitEye’s excellent HMD. Dual, discrete display panels, 210 degree horizontal FOV fed by dual HDMI cables – this all looked a little too close for comfort.

We wrote to Stephane Portes of team InfinitEye who in no uncertain terms condemned the use of their rendered imagery and confirmed they were in no way affiliated with Horizon VR and were understandably upset at someone potentially tarnishing their good name.

We emailed Horizon VR using the contact form on the website and received a somewhat staccato response from a Kevin Geiger, apparently CEO of Horizon VR. He claimed that he was bewildered by the apparent storm of interest they’d received, when they realised their work-in-progress website was actually live and being indexed by Google – bringing as it did a swarm of VR enthusiasts to the website.

Kevin went  on to state that the specifications on the website “aren’t right” and the claimed delivery date of Jan 2015 was “not correct yet” stating that May 2015 was their intended target. A portion of the email is quoted below:

Firstly our website has been up for three days- in ‘test’ mode, though we
started accepting preorders for our project.  Though we are confident in
in the design, some of our specs are incorrect- we simply weren’t prepared
for the enormous interest so quickly, and we’re a bit in damage control at
this point- so some things are in the process of being rapidly updated.

A short answer is, we’re not yet ready- our site was put up in a hurry and
we need to  hold off on any publicity until we can straighten some things
out.  Might take it down until then- but google is already indexing us,
etc. and we’d hate to abandon any interest.

And when challenged about the use of InfinitEye’s imagery:

About the Infiniteye ‘similar’ image, yep- good eye- the infiniteye which
is a great idea in many ways, but it’s a placeholder until ours is
eye-friendly.   It was simply a concept if you will until our unit is
ready.  It’s currently a mass of 3d printed plastic at this point-  the
photo is simply representational, and we’ll be changing it soon with our
own.  Didn’t intend for people to see it in three days, but google indexed
us almost immediately.  -There are some differances in the head strap
design for example though where we go thinner than them to cut down on
weight, and also ours will likely be more ‘blocky’.

Most worryingly though, the payment gateway portion of the site was partially functional (accepting Bitcoin and Paypal only), Kevin claimed they’d received some 500 orders already. Based on the lowest price tier, the deposit at $399, that’s a cool $199,500 in less than 3 days! When we suggested that they should disable the payment gateway immediately until the facts were straightened out, Kevin responded “As recommended we’ll be removing the pre-order option for the moment.” That response was 7 hours ago and as of writing this, the pre-order page seems still fully functional, presumably continuing to accept payments.

We suggested that the team also visited the /r/oculus subreddit to try and engage with the concerned VR Community and try to explain their situation. Kevin did so, reiterating much that was in the email received initially by us. With an additional answer to my query as to proof that the company’s legitimacy, to this Kevin Geiger responded: “Yep, started the company from our garages in the winter of this year (Rift, anyone?) Check back in a week the secretary of state pages for the business listing.”

What we Know

The VR community kicked into gear and tried to sniff out what facts they could. First up, we noticed something odd when checking they’re (very) recent domain registration used on the website:

Domain Name: HORIZON4K.COM
Registrar: PDR LTD. D/B/A PUBLICDOMAINREGISTRY.COM
Whois Server: whois.PublicDomainRegistry.com
Referral URL: http://www.PublicDomainRegistry.com
Name Server: NS33.ALTUSHOST.COM
Name Server: NS34.ALTUSHOST.COM
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Updated Date: 18-jun-2014
Creation Date: 18-jun-2014
Expiration Date: 18-jun-2015

The domain was freshly registered just 6 days ago. Seems like a quick turnaround between deciding a product name, company name and registering.

Next up ‘thebloodshed’ on /r/oculus noted that the company address used at the foot of the page, “4800 Hampden Lane, Suite 200, Bethesda, MD 20814” – seems to be the address of a recruitment agency called Hire Strategy.

ir-ledsUser ‘bilago’ noted that the staff photos were lifted from elsewhere on the web, this goes for the entire supposed Horizon VR team. And the ever diligent ‘BOLL7708’ pointed out numerous inconsistencies including the motion tracking IR LEDs added sloppily to the InfinitEye render.

——

There is still a chance that this whole affair is a monumental administrative bungle, but with the evidence above we’re repeating what we said in our original report, do not buy from this website!

We’ll continue to look at new evidence as it arrives and liaise with the alleged Kevin Geiger from Horizon VR on what on earth is going on – we’ll keep you in the loop.

Rev VR Podcast (Ep. 69): Binaural Audio, ASMR Videos, and VR Content with Ally Maque

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rev-vr-podcast-feature-image

A friend recently sent me a video of a gal whispering into her microphone and tapping her nails on a coffee mug, with the message, “You have to talk to her about VR!” I invited Ally onto the Rev VR Podcast, and she explains how her videos are going to contribute to the growing VR space.

Alert: Horizon V ‘4K VR Headset’ May Not Be Legitimate, InfinitEye Team Deny Involvement

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The Horizon VR Mockup

HorizonWeb_med4-longThe VR headset race has seen many entrants in the last two years other than Oculus’s Rift. But none has managed to convincingly best the Rift’s raw technical specifications quite so dazzlingly as the InfinitEye 210 Degree, dual 720p HMD that I was lucky enough to try first when I visited the team in Tolouse back in October of 2013. I was impressed and to this day have never experienced quite the same expansive FOV.

Now, a new VR headset has appeared sporting a very similar approach to that monster virtual reality device. Horizon V claims to be the world’s first ‘UHD’ (Ultra High Definition) virtual reality headset. The unit sports dual discrete 4K (3840 x 2160) panels and claims to deliver an InfinitEye-equalling 210 degree horizontal field of view with 90 degrees vertical.

As if all that wasn’t enough, the device supposedly also houses Dual 4k front-facing cameras – presumably for a window on the world to flip to once you have the HMD on – and perhaps augmented reality applications some way down the track.

If Something Sounds Too Good to be True …

Too good to be true? We reached out to Stephane Portes from InfinitEye for comment on the Horizon V. Stephane told me that this project is absolutely not affiliated with InfinitEye in any way, but does use their HMD design renders. Therefore, please treat this device with extreme caution – we’d recommend not sending any money to this company before we’ve confirmed their legitimacy.

We’ll do our best to try and establish the HMD’s credentials as soon as we’re able and report back soon. If you’ve any information concerning Horizon 4K, drop us an email at info@roadtovr.com.

Hands-on: Kor-FX Haptic Gaming Vest Doesn’t Pack Enough Punch for VR

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kor-fx preview hands on e3 2014

At E3 2014 I had the chance to try out the $150 Kor-FX gaming vest which has far exceeded its Kickstarter goal with 31 days left in the crowdfunding campaign. The vest seeks to add immersion to gameplay by rumbling appropriately with events happening in the game world around you.

News Bits: Waiting For Your DK2? This Guys Knows How You Feel (Video)

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The wait for the Oculus Rift DK2 is almost over. Oculus VR have stated that they’re confident they can ship 20-30k DK2 units in the month of July, which means that there’s likely to be a lot of very happy VR fans by then.

Right now though, one fan in particular is finding these last few weeks so tortuous, he felt he had to express himself in this short film. An accurate and emotive piece I think you’ll agree. Nice work meepsblah, you managed to occupy us for almost a minute – but we still have many more to go.

News Bits: ‘Affordable’ Oculus Rift 3D Camera Rig Demonstrated (Video)

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Virtual Reality cinema and video is quickly becoming the hot topic. A seemingly endless stream of ‘360’ cameras are spawning, Jaunt VR of course recently won $6M+ backing for it’s 3D 360 VR cinema venture and it seems even James Cameron wants to hop along the bandwagon.

But for the VR enthusiast on a budget who wants to quickly and cheaply capture reasonable quality 3D footage that looks great on an Oculus Rift, what options are there?

18Well, the enthusiast in this video claims to have achieved good results bolting 2 x GoPro Hero Black’s together using an extended 5mm rod, then attached to the official GoPro mount. The video author also claims the system emulates a fairly standard 64mm IPD with his hacked mounting technique. Controlling the units using a multi camera remote control, what you end up with is decent quality side by side 3D footage, ripe for processing for viewing in the Rift. The GoPro Hero 3 is capable of capturing footage at 2.7k at 30FPS (and up to 4k at an unacceptable 15FPS) the rigs specs do impress.

It’s an interesting and economical approach that may well allow quick capture of immersive 3D footage. If anyone does try out a similar technique, so let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

‘Kintinuous’ Fuses Virtual and Reality with the Oculus Rift and Kinect

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The Kinect was a great example of cutting edge technology coming from R&D into entertainment. First released as a peripheral for the Xbox 360, it quickly became one of the most successful console peripheral ever launched and then promptly completely failed to deliver on its promise to bring natural human gesture recognition to compelling gaming experiences.

Arguably, the Kinect’s most interesting projects have almost all come from hackers and developers on the PC, after Microsoft released official driver and SDK support for the device back in 2011. The Kinect’s (at the time unique), RGB plus Depth sensors in particular gave those interested in Augmented and Virtual reality development ways to quickly capture the boundaries of physical spaces and project them into the virtual.

One of the projects that was borne from within Microsoft’s own research labs was KinectFusion, which undertook research into grabbing high quality 3D environment models captured from cameras with depth sensors, just like Kinect. The upshot of the project was the ability to scan an environment and reconstruct the geometry digitally in 3D models.

Now, a team of researchers have taken KinectFusion and combined it with the Oculus Rift. Kintinuous captures your surrounding environment as KinectFusion did, but then renders the output directly to an Oculus Rift. What’s more, when the viewer moves their head, the render is transformed based on depth information (and an implicitly aligned point in space, in this case the desk) from the Kinect’s depth sensor and not the Rift’s onboard IMU. The results are an impressive way to capture an environment and move through it physically with positional tracking.

According to Hack a Day, the project is not free for release due to copyright issues. However, the research papers here, here and here. As Hack a Day states, nothing prevents a suitably smart individual from taking the research and producing their own Kintinuous implementation. Fingers crossed the results of the project see the light of day. We’ll let you know if we hear anything.

Of course, now the Xbox One is out, the original’s Kinect’s upgraded offspring imaginatively entitled ‘Kinect Sensor for Windows 2’ is available for Pre-order now. With MS promising better SDK support and the upgraded sensor hardware, Kinect 2 could be an interesting device to watch if you’re a VR hacker.

News Bits: Live For Speed Latest Update Brings Oculus Rift DK1 Support, DK2 Support Soon

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3D2A little while back we reported that the racing simulation genre was embracing virtual reality enthusiastically, with almost all major titles either already having implemented or planning to implement support for Oculus Rift at some level. Games like Assetto Corsa and the hugely successful iRacing have now had fully playable levels of VR support for quite some time.

Now, Live for Speed, a long running favourite with the driving simulation community has announced that it’s latest 0.6F update, has joined the VR fold – implementing support for 3D devices and a special mode for the Oculus Rift VR Headset.

LFS Programmer Scawen Roberts got in touch with Road to VR to pass on the good news. What’s more, the team behind the game have pre-ordered DK2s and plan to support the new headsets soon after receiving them. Will LFS be the first racing sim to implement full positional head tracking? We’ll have to wait and see.

You can find out more about Live for Speed over at their homepage, and download the 0.6F patch here.

News Bits: Xing: The Land Beyond, Public Demo Available Soon

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Frustratingly, Road to VR and the White Lotus Interactive team seem to keep missing each other. Such was the case at E3 this year too unfortunately. It’s especially annoying because, as a backer of the project, I’ve been wanting to get my hands on the game for some time and up to now never had the opportunity.

The Team with Oculus' Joe Chen (far left) Palmer Luckey (middle)
The Team with Oculus’ Joe Chen (far left) Palmer Luckey (2nd from right)

Well, I doubt I’m alone in this sentiment, and it seems the 3 member team have detected this as, in their latest update they reveal we won’t have to wait much longer to get our hands on the game. After listening to feedback from people visiting their stand at E3 this year, they’ve decided to release the very same demo show to attendees. No details on precise release date just yet, we’ll of course let you know when we do.

Elsewhere in the update, the team speak of their success in optimising the demo at the last minute, being interviewed by Gamespot and just generally enthusing about all the awesome people they met. Their update also functions as a neat ‘go to’ guide for those attending shows like E3 for the first time. Best of all? They got into a Kotaku comic!

Catch the whole blog post over at White Lotus Interactive here, and you can pre-order the game here.

‘Dreadhalls’ Gets a Makeover and DK2 Support, Developer Talks Positional Tracking

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I’m a wimp! There, I said it. I never did make it all the way through the dark, dank and terrifying tunnels of Dreadhalls when it debuted as a finalist in last year’s IndieCade VR Jam event. It was a finalist and, despite my inability to spend more than 5 minutes playing before yelping like a girl, one of my favourite entrants. It was also widely adopted by the YouTube community and their never-ending thirst for ‘hilarious‘ reaction vides involving the Oculus Rift.

Now, Dreadhalls is back and in development and on course for a commercial release late this year. Developer Sergio Hidalgo, who originally conceived and built the game in 3 weeks, in accordance with VR Jam’s rules, did a remarkable job infusing everything in Dreadhalls with claustrophobic dread. The visuals were perfunctory, but it didn’t really matter as the sound did a very respectable job of plunging you into the depths. It was a slow, considered and sparse experience – using it’s procedurally generated map and distant echoes of .. something it was a brilliant antidote to the cheap jump scares that comprised the majority of VR horror titles up to then.

The latest Dreadhalls demo has come along nicely since then. Now sporting new textures and an upgraded lighting model the new game looks great. But perhaps the feature we’re most interested in is that it’s now DK2 ready, meaning that if you’re lucky enough to have one of Oculus’ new developer kits on the way, it’ll support it straight away—head tracking included.

Sergio said of his plans for the new Dreadhalls; “You can expect more varied environments, new creatures and scary encounters, etc… I’m also working of having a longer experience that covers more than a single level, with a progression and more backstory.”.

We asked Sergio about launch date plans and whether he’s planning on releasing the demo to the public:

The full game still needs more work, but my idea is releasing it by the same time that the Oculus CV1 hits the market, so I plan to have it finished by Q3/Q4 this year. I can also tell you it will be exclusively for the Rift at launch. Whether I’ll release this demo or not depends on the feedback I get from the people I’ve sent it to, so it’s still undecided. However, if I choose not to release it, I’ll probably add positional tracking support to the already available VRJam version instead.

Finally, we asked Sergio how he tackled the challenges of implementing head tracking with no DK2s yet in the wild:

I wrote an article on this issue here. Basically I’m fading the image to black and muffling the sounds, but not limiting the player’s movements at any point, since I found out that leads to discomfort. I don’t have a DK2, but I had access to one for a couple of days thanks to Oculus, which is how I was able to test this out.

We hope to give this a proper playtest soon, but I’m already very much looking forward to one of my VR Jam favourites getting a full overhaul in time for Oculus’ consumer model. Frankly though, I’m not sure I’ll be brave enough to actually play it.

Head over to the official Dreadhalls website to find out more. We’ll keep you posted on its progress.

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