VR and Neuroscience – Virtual reality’s promise, risk loom large for health researchers
“If you’re exposed to stimuli without giving your body reinforcement (in the form of drugs), you kill the link, which in psychological terms is called extinction,” says Bordnick, associate dean of research at the university’s Graduate College of Social Work.
“The truth is we don’t know what VR does to the brain yet, in part because the best brain studies require MRIs where the head needs to be still, and that’s not happening with VR,” says Bailenson.
“But I can tell you that after working in VR for 20 years, I never spend more than 20 minutes (with a headset on) at a time,” he says, noting that it is typical to feel somewhat ill after being deprived of real-world stimuli for long periods of time.
At UCLA, neurophysicist Mehta's lab rat studies indicate that when the animals walk down a corridor in VR, 60% fewer neurons fire than when the rats walk the same hall in reality.
“Is this good or is this bad? It’s not clear yet,” he says. “But these are very surprising things in that we haven’t really seen the brain behave this way. I’d be happier if more studies were done to test the consequences of VR.”
Mehta says he has reached out to a variety of headset manufacturers with his research. Some have expressed interest in the results, but he has yet to get any to help fund more in-depth research. VR headsetmakers Oculus Rift, Sony and HTC declined to comment for this story.
See the full story here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/02/02/virtual-reality-promise-and-concerns-both-loom-large-researchers/79360096/
VR sales data we can count on – Neil Schneider
[Philip Lelyveld note: this article focuses on VR in Gaming, not the broader uses of VR.]
Oculus and HTC are each recommending an AMD 290 series or Nvidia GTX970 series graphics card or better. In fact, there are already signs that the Oculus SDK will detect if your graphics card isn’t up to spec and their software won’t work for you. So everything that performs less than these GPUs is out of the virtual reality universe — settled.
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For argument’s sake, let’s aggressively predict that by the end of 2016, 7 million high-end GPUs are sold, and this includes the qualified GPUs sold in 2013 and 2014. Factoring in that many gamer PCs use SLI or Crossfire, I estimate there will be three million gaming PCs powerful enough to play in virtual reality.
Whether it’s SLI or Crossfire or single GPU doesn’t matter –three million PCs is the potential universe for modern virtual reality. If an optimistic 10 percent of these PCs own a dedicated virtual reality device, the industry is looking at 300,000 head-mounted displays sold within 12 months from launch.
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Estimate that with nearly 22 percent of the market share, Samsung sells 300 million units a year. 20 percent of these are high-end, so that means Samsung’s Gear VR has a potential reach of 60 million phones. If they can achieve an aggressive 5 percent early adoption rate within 12 months of Gear VR launch, that brings it to about three million units sold. I think that’s very aggressive, but it’s not crazy.
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If Google takes their Cardboard platform seriously, designs their own chips as pseudo-publicized a few weeks ago, and effectively flips the virtual reality switch in all their compliant phones, they have a potential reach of 200 million Android phones each year including Samsung’s.
Combined with their dirt cheap cardboard option and more premium clam-shell virtual reality vendors like ImmersiON-VRelia, they could achieve a 10 percent adoption. So that brings their take to about 20 million Android phones within a twelve month period.
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Console in every way, shape, and form has it made. I estimate that Sony PlayStation 4 will have 35 to 40 forty million units sold by the end of 2015. Thanks to their console’s fixed specification and their head-mounted displays’ committed resolution limit, it’s an easy sell. If there are 35 million PS4’s in the world, and if they could sell the PlayStation VR head-mounted display to 10 percent of them — that’s 3.5 million units sold in the first year with sequential market growth to follow.
The genius of it is that PlayStation is suddenly in the display business as well as the console business. Even if they have a modest success, their hardware consistency makes for a promising future.
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See the full story here: http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2016/01/vr-sales-data-we-can-count-on/
Eugene Chung Wants To Be Virtual Reality’s First Auteur
The problem is, for VR right now, there isn’t any canon to speak of, and the rules to entry aren’t going to be clear for quite some time. Chung may be well-positioned to become the medium’s first auteur, but to do that he has to figure out what makes for a VR classic before anyone else.
“Allumette” takes place in a cobblestone-paved city dominated by canals. It’s based on Venice but it’s in the sky, the waterways replaced with clouds. The protagonist is a young girl, alone, dragging a suitcase behind her. She settles on a corner and opens the case. In it are three long matches, almost as tall as her, each one a different color. She strikes one and it glows, iridescent, brighter until it takes up your entire field of view and all you can see is a gold that brightens into a white screen.
When the light from the match fades, you see empty sky filled with clouds, and a ship, powered by clockwork gears, flying across it. The match girl has a mother in this scene, and when they dock in the city they sell a match to a pedestrian. The scene fades, back to the little match girl alone again, at night, where she strikes another match.
See the full story here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/brendanklinkenberg/eugene-chung-wants-to-be-virtual-realitys-first-auteur?utm_term=.jlKl190L3#.sbnDLOKZ2
The Step Needed to Make Virtual Reality More Real
Eyefluence is building eye-tracking technology that it believes will be good enough to let you do anything in virtual reality, from hitting subterranean mammals to navigating different menus and apps, all by simply looking around.
“People are now really starting to see that interaction in VR is far from a solved problem,” says Evan Suma, a research assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. “This is something the VR research community has been looking at for a number of years, going back decades.”
Oculus and HTC have some solutions. Oculus plans to ship its headset with a wireless Xbox One controller, and to release a more immersive set of button-bedecked, hand-held trackable controllers called Oculus Touch later in the year. HTC’s headset will come with a pair of wand-shaped controllers. But such controllers are not always ideal because they don’t match the ways you use your body when, say, exploring the dark depths of a cave (no buttons to press there, in my experience).
A startup called Gest is trying to take advantage of another body part: your fingers. The San Francisco startup is building a motion-sensor-filled device that wraps around your palm and includes rings that slide around four of your fingers (see “Get to Grips with Virtual Objects Using This Stripped-Down Glove”).
Apple just bought Flyby, a company working on some impressive augmented reality tech
Flyby says its technology can be used for "indoor mapping and navigation, autonomous navigation for drones and automotive vehicles, and advanced tracking for Head Mounted Display (HMD) systems."
Apple Building Secret Team To Work On Virtual Reality
Customers enter the Apple store on 5th Avenue beneath an Apple logo in the Manhattan borough of New York City, July 21, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Segar -
Apple Inc has assembled a large team of experts in virtual and augmented reality and built prototypes of headsets that could one day rival Facebook’s Oculus Rift or Microsoft’s Hololens, the Financial Times reported.
A secret research unit, housing hundreds of staff assembled from acquisitions or poached from other companies, is working on next-generation headset technologies, the FT reported, citing people familiar with the initiative.
See the full story here: http://www.oann.com/apple-building-secret-team-to-work-on-virtual-reality-ft/
and here: http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/apple-vr-ar-team-development-1201692104/
Reggie Watts’ VR Project Is as Hilariously Bizarre as You’d Expect
Waves is one the first VR projects to offer a glimpse into what humor will look like in VR, where nuance is even more necessary than it is for comedy IRL.
“I think the first thing that we talked about that made us laugh hysterically was that once you get inside the VR piece you have to put another VR helmet on,” Dickinson says. “That’s so dumb!”
And Wevr needed them to get as weird as possible. The California startup, which hopes to be a player and platform for VR creators to share their work, wanted Watts and Dickinson’s project to push the limits of what its technology could do. “We had to have them push the creativity to the edge so that our technology could meet them there,” says Wevr co-founder Anthony Batt.
See the full story here: http://www.wired.com/2016/01/reggie-watts-comedy-vr/