HTC Wants to Send Its Vive VR Headset to 100,000 Chinese Internet Cafes
To make virtual reality truly popular, you have to make cheap and accessible. And HTC is zeroing in on a huge market: Chinese internet cafes. It’s the latest example of tech companies worldwide trying to get VR in the hands of massive groups of users, quickly and cheaply.
At a VR conference in Beijing last Friday, Taiwan-based HTC announced plans to promote its Vive VR headset by partnering with Hangzhou Shunwang Technology, a Chinese internet cafe operator that could demo the headset to its 100 million customers for a small hourly rate.
The pilot program’s already underway in Hangzhou, Road to VR reports, charging players anywhere from $2 to $5 for 10 minutes of Vive time. Shunwang Technology provides software for over 100,000 Chinese internet cafes, totaling 70% of the market, which serves over 100 million people. (It’s still unclear how many of those cafes will actually be participating in the Vive program, though.)
Chinese internet cafes, infamous for being huge and filled with gamers for hours on end, have seen drops in numbers in recent years.
See the full story here: http://gizmodo.com/htc-wants-to-send-its-vive-vr-headset-to-100-000-chines-1749439260
Estonia’s Flagship Tech Conference Latitude59 Will Discuss Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and Virtual Nation
One of the key sub-divisions of the Virtual Nation block of topics is e-Residency and building new services on its platform. Estonia’s e-Residency is a transnational digital identity that was revealed at last year’s Latitude59. Since then the project, also considered the world’s first government startup, has gained more than 7,500 e-residents. But e-Residency is not willing to stop there – its goal is to make Estonia the world’s biggest country that has only 1.3 million physical inhabitants. The e-Residency program has set a goal of recruiting 10 million e-residents by 2025.
See the full story here: http://www.investinestonia.com/en/about-estonia/news/article/1062-tech-conference-latitude59-will-discuss-artificial-intelligence-virtual-reality-and-virtual-nation
Marxent Positioned At Center of $100 Billion Virtual and Augmented Reality Market
Marxent positions itself as the leader in branded Augmented Reality experiences for retailers and manufacturers and virtual 3D products. Companies like SanDisk, Baxter Pharmaceutical and Lowes, among many others partner with them for AR apps that get results, delight customers and defy reality.
The 45 year-old Beck Besecker and his brother Barry (Marxent CTO) founded the company in 2011. But the venture-backed creator of 3D virtual products has experienced more than his fair share of business-related obstacles. Throughout his career as an innovator, Beck has experienced failures ranging from unenthusiastic audiences to over-saturated markets to failed business models that he changed again and again.
See the full profile here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucerogers/2015/12/21/marxent-positioned-at-center-of-100-billion-virtual-and-augmented-reality-market/
Nvidia, EA, Facebook Among Jefferies’s Top Virtual Reality Picks
Jefferies & Co. analysts Marc Lipacis, Brian Pitz, and Brian Fitzgerald, and colleagues, today offer up a 48-page think piece titled the “VR Handbook” that promotes the view the technology is “the next computing platform.”
“We view 2016 as a watershed in computing with at least three Virtual Reality Platforms launching within the next 6 months,” the authors write, by which they mean Facebook’s (FB) Oculus division’s forthcoming head-mounted display (HMD); Sony‘s (SNE) competing effort, “PS VR“; and an HMD from phone maker HTC (2498TW), developed in collaboration with video game studio Valve, called “HTC Vive.”
[10M units in 3 yrs] would put VR somewhere in the vicinity of recent console gaming machines in the time they took to reach levels of sales, as laid out in this handy chart.
Among content providers, the authors mention several for these more broad applications: MedVR, PatientVR; NextMed; Lensar; Psious; VR Studios; EvolVR; YouVisit; Augmented Pixels; STRIVR; MetalO; River Studios; WevR; EEVO.
See the full story here: http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2015/12/22/nvidia-ea-facebook-among-jefferiess-top-virtual-reality-picks/
Disney-backed virtual reality company brings 360-degree videos to Apple TV
If you have an Apple TV, look out for the Littlstar app, which brings 360-degree videos to the platform for the first time. The company says that it has thousands of videos in its library, including ones from major brands like Discovery, Disney, Fusion, MLB, Mountain Dew, National Geographic, PBS and Red Bull.
Littlstar, which already has an iOS app, is backed by Disney Accelerator, which provides both financial backing and mentoring for tech companies launching products in the consumer entertainment and media fields.
See the full story here: http://9to5mac.com/2015/12/23/360-degree-video-apple-tv/
A Look Into a More Social Virtual Reality With the Makers of Second Life
Linden Lab's CEO Ebbe Altberg “We want to lower the barrier of entry for VR experience creation. Project Sansar will do for virtual experiences what WordPress has done for the Web: empower a broad range of people to create with professional quality and reach global audiences.
By greatly expanding who can create virtual experiences, Project Sansar will also extend the value of VR to a wide variety of usecases—from gaming and entertainment to education, architecture, art, community-building, business meetings, healthcare, conferences, training, and more.”
See the full story here: http://www.psfk.com/2015/12/social-virtual-reality-makers-of-second-life-oculus-rift-linden-lab.html
Magnets could soon track your fingers in virtual reality
Oculus and University of Washington researchers might make it a reality, though. They've developed Finexus, a control method that uses a combination of fingertip electromagnets and sensors to track your hands. The system detects the distances between each finger and the sensor, and uses the intersection of each distance to determine a given digit's exact 3D position. Unlike with camera tracking, you don't need a direct line of sight to the sensors for this to work -- you could tie your virtual shoelaces if you wanted.