Sony used its annual PlayStation Experience two-day fan event in San Francisco to unveil new virtual reality games for its upcoming PlayStation VR headset. While some of these games are exclusive to Sony’s 2016 virtual reality platform, others will also play on competing PC platforms like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, which runs on Valve’s SteamVR.
Piper Jaffray senior analyst Gene Munster forecasts sales of virtual reality headsets will grow from 12.2 million in 2016 to 100.2 million by 2020. That gives game developers a very large audience to tap into. There are over 30 million Sony SNE -1.18% PlayStation 4 consoles in the market today, all capable of running the new PlayStation VR. Munster believes approximately 10% of current PCs will be able to run virtual reality platforms like HTC Vive and Facebook FB -3.24% -owned Oculus Rift out of the box, with another 10% requiring a $300 graphics card upgrade.
With over 50 games in development for PlayStation VR, and dozens in production for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, there will be plenty of new content for gamers. Here’s a list of 10 virtual reality games to look out for in 2016.
See the full story here: http://fortune.com/2015/12/11/virtual-reality-games-2016/
Chaos Group Labs has released a free virtual reality (VR) guide that teaches artists how to create successful VR projects with pre-rendered content and V-Ray. Common pitfalls associated with VR are addressed through scientific research and production insights, culminating in step-by-step instructions that explain how to make VR stills and video.
The paper was written by a trio of artists with vast experience in professional visual effects and architectural visualization. Contributors include: Christopher Nichols, Director of Chaos Group Labs; Justin Denton, a VFX Supervisor who leads Legend3D’s VR Division; and Kim Baumann Larsen, a former architect and current Creative Director for The World Building Institute.
See the full story, including a link to the free download, here: http://www.awn.com/news/chaos-group-labs-releases-virtual-reality-guide
According to founding managing partner and serial entrepreneur Paul Bragiel, Presence Capital was founded to create a healthy pipeline of startups to fuel innovation, creativity, and forward movement within the emerging virtual reality and augmented reality markets.
Founding managing partner Phil Chen originated the Vive project at HTC and brokered the Valve and HTC partnership when he was at that company. He says Presence Capital is looking up and down the hardware and software stack, targeting the most strategic parts to invest and develop at an early stage.
Presence Capital has invested a third of its money into video game companies, which the founders believe will be an early driving force of virtual reality. Founding managing partner Amitt Mahajan co-created Zynga’s FarmVillegame and was an engineer at Epic Games on the Unreal Engine technology and Gears of War game.
Bragiel is already seeing companies driving a lot of the innovation in terms of new use cases for VR and AR. He says Presence Capital is actively looking to invest in enterprise-focused companies to keep balance in its portfolio.
See the full story here: http://fortune.com/2015/12/10/presence-capital-invests-in-vr/
Market research firm PitchBook said that about $4 billion has been invested in virtual reality firms since 2010. The most active has been Rothenberg Ventures and its River virtual reality accelerator, which have made 23 investments, followed by Intel Capital with 10 and Google Ventures with six, PitchBook said.
Another story: http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/VC-firm-creates-10-million-fund-to-spur-virtual-6687482.php
Here is the presentation I gave to the USC Entertainment Technology Center membership at the 12/11/15 All Members Meeting on things to think about and look for at CES related to VR and AR. It starts off with UHD TV data generously supplied by Benjamin Arnold of the NPD Group.
USC ETC CES prep deck
via GIPHY
Flickr's new virtual reality app, Flickr VR, does just that. The app works with Samsung Galaxy smartphones and the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VRheadset, allowing you to view Flickr photos in an immersive 360-degree experience.
If you don't have a Gear VR or Samsung Galaxy smartphone, you can still view 360-degree photos on the web, too. Supported photos will start rotating when you visit them. You can use your mouse to click and drag around the photo.
See the full story here: http://mashable.com/2015/12/11/flickr-vr-app/?utm_source=KZero+Website+Subscribers&utm_campaign=1ffd17ae63-Template_for_VR_News_Weekly71&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6f364169c5-1ffd17ae63-117770001#qqmVO6H63uqu
Each product in the new B8ta store—many of them new techie gadgets you probably last saw on a crowdfunding website like Kickstarter— sits next to an iPad showing real-time pricing across multiple online sites versus B8ta’s in-store cost. B8ta takes a small cut of each in-store sale, but overall the process is meant to be agnostic; customers are encouraged to order from whichever outlet they wish.
The point is to mimic the sales environment customers encounter online. Product makers set their own in-store price and can change it instantly, bringing e-commerce tactics like flash sales into the real world.
Even the products B8ta offers are normally constrained to the Internet. At launch, it will carry the Hexo+ and Lily drones ($1,349 and $799, respectively), which are built to autonomously film their users. An in-store mock kitchen will invite you to brew tea with the Internet-connected Teforia tea maker ($699). A space is even set aside to test the Internet’s farthest-fetched products like Avegant’s Glyph ($599), which is a pair of headphones with a strap that converts into a virtual-reality screen.
See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544226/in-palo-alto-a-brick-and-mortar-store-for-test-driving-the-latest-high-tech-gadgets/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20151210
MIT researchers have shown that by exploiting the polarization of light — the physical phenomenon behind polarized sunglasses and most 3-D movie systems — they can increase the resolution of conventional 3-D imaging devices as much as 1,000 times.
“Today, they can miniaturize 3-D cameras to fit on cellphones,” says Achuta Kadambi, a PhD student in the MIT Media Lab and one of the system’s developers. “But they make compromises to the 3-D sensing, leading to very coarse recovery of geometry. That’s a natural application for polarization, because you can still use a low-quality sensor, and adding a polarizing filter gives you something that’s better than many machine-shop laser scanners.”
To resolve this ambiguity, the Media Lab researchers use coarse depth estimates provided by some other method, such as the time a light signal takes to reflect off of an object and return to its source. Even with this added information, calculating surface orientation from measurements of polarized light is complicated, but it can be done in real-time by a graphics processing unit, the type of special-purpose graphics chip found in most video game consoles.
The researchers’ experimental setup consisted of a Microsoft Kinect — which gauges depth using reflection time — with an ordinary polarizing photographic lens placed in front of its camera. In each experiment, the researchers took three photos of an object, rotating the polarizing filter each time, and their algorithms compared the light intensities of the resulting images.
See the full story here: http://news.mit.edu/2015/algorithms-boost-3-d-imaging-resolution-1000-times-1201
The company recently filed two patents intended to help AR make its debut in America’s living rooms. One patent displays a method of using light beams to display AR scenes in a room and to track what’s going on. A second patent would allow a user to control the AR scene by interacting with a computer through body gestures.
The first patent describes a system that includes “a single light source, a reflector, a shutter mechanism associated with the light source, and a camera.” The document goes on to explain, “More particularly, the light source may output light that is directed towards the scene (a first set of light beams) and towards the reflector (a second set of light beams) utilizing the shutter mechanism.”
The second patent, which details 3-D tracking, explains, “In a particular implementation, 3-D images of the environment may be captured and 2-D contours of objects within the environment may be generated.”
See the full story here: http://news.discovery.com/tech/gear-and-gadgets/headset-free-augmented-reality-coming-from-amazon-151208.htm
Topcon has announced a new collaboration on a hard hat equipped with augmented reality for construction.
Though the Smart Helmet was unveiled last year, it isn’t widely available as Daqri is working with a range of companies, like Topcon, on exploring the potential of the device. Topcon says it hopes this collaboration will bring wearbles and augmented reality to “a wider arhitecture, engineering and construction (AEC) user base.
“DAQRI is a leader in providing solutions in outdoor environments, which will meld well with our positioning and software innovations,” said Jason Hallett, Topcon vice president of product management. “It’s the first step in utilizing our mutual synergies to develop rugged, heads-up display technology for our marketplace.”
See the full story here: http://www.equipmentworld.com/daqri-collabortating-with-topcon-on-development-of-smart-helmet-augmented-reality-hard-hat/
While many of the lessons learned from tinkering with Oculus can no doubt carry over to HTC’s headset, the Vive’s take on VR is far more complicated, consisting of two extra hand-held controllers tracked by a pair of “base stations” that allow you to roam around a 15-by-15-foot physical space. The Oculus Rift will ship with a traditional gamepad and is designed for seated use.
The story behind the story: Besides the extra mobility provided by the hardware, being the first major VR experience to market was going to be a major advantage for the HTC Vive. Now, the Oculus Rift (which is also scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2016) and HTC Vive are due to launch in the same basic time frame. We’ve got us a standoff, folks. Will consumers prefer the presumably lower cost of the Oculus Rift, or the superior VR experience of the Vive? We’ll know for sure sometime around April.
See the full story here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3013117/software-games/htc-delays-the-release-of-its-steamvr-powered-vive-virtual-reality-headset-until-2016.html
Sony used its annual PlayStation Experience two-day fan event in San Francisco to unveil new virtual reality games for its upcoming PlayStation VR headset. While some of these games are exclusive to Sony’s 2016 virtual reality platform, others will also play on competing PC platforms like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, which runs on Valve’s SteamVR.
Chaos Group Labs has released a free virtual reality (VR) guide that teaches artists how to create successful VR projects with pre-rendered content and V-Ray. Common pitfalls associated with VR are addressed through scientific research and production insights, culminating in step-by-step instructions that explain how to make VR stills and video.
Each product in the new B8ta store—many of them new techie gadgets you probably last saw on a crowdfunding website like Kickstarter— sits next to an iPad showing real-time pricing across multiple online sites versus B8ta’s in-store cost. B8ta takes a small cut of each in-store sale, but overall the process is meant to be agnostic; customers are encouraged to order from whichever outlet they wish.
MIT researchers have shown that by exploiting the polarization of light — the physical phenomenon behind polarized sunglasses and most 3-D movie systems — they can increase the resolution of conventional 3-D imaging devices as much as 1,000 times.