Sony appears to be finally experimenting with augmented reality and virtual reality on their HMD line. The company has traditionally marketed their HMZ-T1 and HMZ-T2 head mounted displays as a “personal 3D viewer” rather than anything to do with VR or AR. At the famous Tokyo Game Show, which starts on the 20th of this month, Sony will be presenting to a limited audience a head mounted display prototype that incorporates head tracking and pass-through video for augmented reality.
Probably since the first time humans laid eyes on flying creatures we’ve wished we could fly ourselves. With apparent ease, birds, insects, and even some mammals take to the sky. The mere idea of flying has inspired song, art, and plenty of failed inventions, all long before we were even close to achieving real flight. Leonardo da Vinci famously tried his hand at creating some flying machines toward the end of the 15th century, but it wasn’t until the 1900s when the rather novel concept became a reality thanks to the Wright brothers. Since then you could probably say we’ve mastered the skies. Jumbo jets carry hundreds of passengers to the opposite side of the globe in less than a day, most modern military air superiority fighters are capable of surpassing the physical limitations of human pilots. But it isn’t really us that is doing the flying. We just ride inside of machines that can fly. Some experimental aircraft travel so fast that an on-board human pilot is nothing but a limitation. Such tag-along flying fails to satisfy the vivid dreams of many… flying with no machine; speeding over your house, over your town, over the ocean — perhaps even into space — all under your own effortless control. Maybe one day we really will be able to fly; who’s to say that humans won’t develop wings after a few billion more years of evolution?
For those that are a bit less patient, virtual reality is the answer to dreams of flight and we’ve got the technology for you to experience it today.
Palmer Luckey has been a virtual reality junkie since before the Oculus Rift. He claims to have the largest private collection of head mounted displays in the world, totaling some 43 units. And as the Rift has shown us, Luckey doesn’t just collect, he also builds. As such, he’s built a number of prototypes that push the field of view far beyond what the Rift will deliver — among them 120 degree and 270 degree HMDs.
Valve, the beloved makers of the Steam digital game distribution service and a number of famous games like Half-Life 2, Portal, TF2, and more, has never made any hardware products. New broke last week that they were looking to hire someone with hardware expertise and that they are doing so explicitly to explore potential hardware devices. The head of Valve, Gabe Newell, and Valve’s AR/VR researcher, Michael Abrash, have both publicly endorsed the Oculus Rift — could this upcoming hardware product be related to virtual reality? Meanwhile Oculus is doing it’s own hiring, the company is looking for experienced individuals to assist in the production of the consumer version of the Oculus Rift head mounted display.
Last week Silicon Micro Display made an announcement on their blog that the company’s South Korean factory lost power due to a hurricane and was rendered in-operable. Now the company has announced that utilities have been restored to the factory and that it is re-opening.
The Oculus Rift Kickstarter officially ended last Saturday. Reeling in an impressive $2,437,429, the campaing achieved a whopping 947% of its original 250k goal and secured the #6 position of top grossing Kickstarters of all time. Last week, Adhesive Games announced that Hawken would support the Rift at launch. This week, two new games a pledging support for the Oculus Rift. Furthermore the Oculus Rift continues to impress the press, but not without a few issues.
Sony has quietly announced a refreshed version of their HMZ-T1 head mounted display. The HMZ-T2 reduces weight by 20% which is good given that weight was one of the top issues with the original. The press release making the announcement calls the HMZ-T2 “all new” and “totally enhanced” but in reality little has changed. A more appropriate name would have been ‘HMZ-T1.5’.
I’d like to present two excellent AR concept videos which give a little glimpse into our world, not too far into the future, where AR is an integral part of life. Wearable computing and augmented reality are almost inevitable, but exactly how they’ll be utilized — for better or worse — is anyone’s guess. These two videos not only show realistic possibilities of advanced AR technology but also present smart commentary on the ramifications of such connected technology.
Aurasma is a free augmented reality app that runs on iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad), and Android. Using your phone’s camera and other sensors, the app projects digital scenes onto the real world through your device’s viewfinder. Aurasma is definitely a neat piece of demo technology but the question that haunts augmented reality remains: what is it good for?
PCGamer’s Owen Hill met with Palmer Luckey and some folks from Oculus to try out the Rift at Gamescom. After using it, he opines “The Oculus Rift is the most exciting peripheral I’ve ever used. This is the virtual reality headset I’ve been dreaming of since I was a little boy; true future tech that will redefine what it means to play games.”
With 3 days left, the Oculus Rift Kickstarter has passed the $2 million funding threshold. This is a huge landmark for the campaign which originally sought to raise $250 thousand in funding. Sitting pretty at 803% of its funding goal, the Oculus Rift Kickstarter is likely to end as the 6th highest grossing Kickstarter campaign of all time. Palmer Luckey, the mind behind the Oculus Rift, has shared some behind-the-scenes data about the funding.
Here’s some excellent news for anyone interersted in the Oculus Rift. Adhesive Games, the studio behind the upcoming (and awesome looking) Hawken has announced in conjunction with Oculus that the title will be Oculus Rift ready when it launches this December. Hawken is an upcoming free-to-play ‘mech‘ title which I’ve had my eye on for some time. The game world has gone too long without a standout mech game. What already looked to be a visceral experience, with a world full of gritty detailed environments and massive battling robots, is now being taken to the next level thanks to Oculus Rift support.
With just 7 days remaining in the Oculus Rift Kickstarter which is nearing $2 million in funding, the campaign easily passed my early $1 million estimate. I took all of the publicly available data from the Kickstarter and compiled it into an infographic to get a visual overview of the campaign thus far.
Inreal Technologies is a German-based startup that is offering a virtual reality terminal which is targeted toward architecture visualization. The terminal incorporates the Carl Zeiss Cinemizer head mounted display which is combined with a head-tracker developed by Inreal which will be sold as the official Cinemizer headtracker. Inreal looks to focus on consumer virtual reality products, including a locomotion device, in the future.
In the last 9 months we’ve seen two consumer-oriented HMDs hit the market, Sony’s HMZ-T1 and Silicon Micro Display’s ST1080. Now the Oculus Rift VR headset is on the way and seeks to create an affordable HMD that could change the face of gaming as we know it. The natural question to ask is how these three devices compare. Here I’ve gathered all the available technical specs for these three head mounted displays / VR headsets and put them in one easy to view place, right here:
