VR Research
ISS Astronaut Uses Oculus Rift in Experiment to Understand How Space Affects Hand-eye Coordination
German ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst is participating in a study aboard the International Space Station (ISS) that's designed to give Earth-bound researchers a better understanding of how sight, sound, and gravity impacts hand-eye coordination. Using a modified Oculus Rift, Gerst...
MIT Researchers Build VR Testing Ground to Safely Train Autonomous Drones
Training autonomous drones to fly around complex indoor environments inevitably means crashes, not to mention a constant cycle of repair and replacement. To remedy this, MIT engineers created a VR training system that allows drones to "see" virtual imagery...
Oculus Research Becomes ‘Facebook Reality Labs’, Creating “further and faster” Leaps in AR/VR
Oculus today announced it's rebranding Oculus Research, the company's R&D lab, to the newly created Facebook Reality Labs (FRL). The shift, the company says, better addresses the increasingly important role of research and development in AR/VR while emphasizing collaboration...
Oculus on Half Dome Prototype: ‘don’t expect to see everything in a product anytime soon’
At Facebook's F8 developer conference Oculus revealed a glimpse at an intriguing new headset prototype dubbed 'Half Dome'. Including a 140 degree field of view, varifocal displays, and what appears to be eye-tracking, the prototype is a tantalizing peek at...
Oculus Claims Breakthrough in Hand-tracking Accuracy
One of Facebook's underlying goals for VR is to use it as a means of connecting distant people. While today friends can talk and play in a range of social VR applications, including Facebook Spaces, the representation of users...
Oculus Reveals 140 Degree VR Headset Prototype with Varifocal Displays
Oculus today at F8 overviewed some of the latest VR technology that they'd been working on internally. Among the projects mentioned is the 'Half Dome' prototype, a Rift-like headset with a 140 degree field of view, varifocal displays, and...
Researchers Exploit Natural Quirk of Human Vision for Hidden Redirected Walking in VR
Researches from Stony Brook University, NVIDIA, and Adobe have devised a system which hides so-called 'redirected walking' techniques using saccades, natural eye movements which act like a momentary blindspot. Redirected walking changes the direction that a user is walking...
Researchers Electrically Stimulate Muscles in Haptic Designed for Hands-free AR Input
Researchers at The Human Computer Interaction Lab at Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam, Germany, published a video recently showing a novel solution to the problem of wearable haptics for augmented reality. Using a lightweight, mobile electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) device that provides...
Oculus Research to Talk “Reactive Displays” for Next-gen AR/VR Visuals at DisplayWeek Keynote
Oculus Research's director of computational imaging, Douglas Lanman, is scheduled to give a keynote presentation at SID DisplayWeek in May which will explore the concept of "reactive displays" and their role in unlocking "next-generation" visuals in AR and VR...
Stanford VR Lab Founder’s Academic Journey with VR, and new Book ‘Experience on Demand’
Jeremy Bailenson founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his latest book Experience on Demand traces his academic journey through virtual reality. It's an intellectual memoir that focuses on his personal work in VR, and the...
Exclusive: Summoning & Superpowers – Designing VR Interactions at a Distance
Manipulating objects with bare hands lets us leverage a lifetime of physical experience, minimizing the learning curve for users. But there are times when virtual objects will be farther away than arm’s reach, beyond the user’s range of direct...
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 to Improve AR/VR Rendering & Reduce Power Consumption “by 30%”
Qualcomm introduced it's new Snapdragon 845 mobile processor at the company's tech summit in Hawaii this week, which Qualcomm says improves mobile AR/VR headset (branded to as 'XR', or 'eXtended reality') performance up to 30 percent in comparison to...
Google Shares New Research into Foveated Rendering Techniques
Display resolutions are growing, but the graphical processing power to serve these displays with content isn't growing at the same rate. Enter foveated rendering, a technique commonly held as one of the next logical steps in making VR headsets...
1,350 Student VR Education Study Measures Attitudes, Interest in VR Learning & Building
Foundry10, a Seattle based philanthropic educational research organization, wanted to explore what happens when you bring VR into the classroom. Following a pilot project started in 2015, Foundry10 has now put VR in the hands of 40 schools and community...
‘Haptic Shape Illusion’ Allows VR Controllers to Simulate Feel of Physically Larger Objects
In a study lead by Eisuke Fujinawa at the University of Tokyo, a team of students created a procedure for designing compact VR controllers that feel physically larger. Exploring the concept of ‘haptic shape illusion’, the controllers have data-driven,...
