An FUI designer, VR community leader and VR healthcare strategist walk into a bar…
…a virtual bar that is.
Actually, more of a meditation room.
Just before tuning in to the Apple WWDC2017 Keynote on Monday, I had a meeting with Jayse Hansen, master of the Fictional User Interface (FUI), Hologram and HUD design for film franchises like Star Wars, Iron Man, and The Hunger Games, and Alex Colgan, Leap Motion’s digital content and community lead. We met to chat about the future of augmented reality, virtual reality and the newest features of Leap Motion’s hand tracking. As a healthcare marketing strategist, I was excited to chat with Alex and Jayse about Leap Motion and its applications for VR in healthcare. This is my passion— using virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality to impact healthcare including things like surgical training, pain management and treatment. The rapid innovation by companies like Leap Motion fuels my desire to learn more. But this article isn’t about what Leap Motion has in store for the year. After all, Jayse and I had to sign NDAs before talking to Alex.
Pots of Gold Along VR’s Long Road: Why you should be building for VR now and how to identify opportunities by examining “what won’t change”.
Over the last couple months, both Facebook and Google held their respective developer conferences and VR featured prominently in both. It is clear that both companies continue to invest heavily in immersive tech and view it as one of the next big computing platforms. In addition to demoing new tools and technology, both emphasized the long road ahead for VR.
“…I don’t think that there is really a strategy to pull [VR’s trajectory] in from ten years to five; I just think it’s going to be a 10 year thing.” - Mark Zuckerberg
These 12 Amazing Projects Are the Pinnacle of U.S. Brand Innovation Today See the U.S. entries on the Lions Innovation shortlist at Cannes
The Cannes Lions festival announced the Lions Innovation shortlist Wednesday, recognizing branded projects around the world that use data and technology in creative ways to bring game-changing products to life.
There are 35 entries shortlisted. The U.S. leads the way with 13, followed by the U.K. with four, Australia with three, and Singapore, Spain and Sweden with two each. (Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Japan, Norway, Poland, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates all have one entry on the shortlist.)
Realtors Capitalising on the Virtual Reality Technology In the coming times, virtual reality will transform the reality sector, potentially upgrade the user experience and exponentially speed up the construction process with proper implementation of 3D immersion and VR technology.
As the adoption of newer technologies gains pace, Virtual Reality (VR) is set to become far more important in sectors other than gaming. Interestingly, India is at the forefront of exploiting thebenefits of (VR) across various industries. One rather, interesting development has been the slow but steady adoption of VR in the Real Estate Sector. VR is fast becoming the need for the real estate market and developers are adopting to this disruptive technology to yield better business outcomes. Today, a consumer can preview their future properties using VR headsets with accurate display of his or her entire apartment without it even having been built. This is revolutionising the decision making and property hunting power of the consumer by allowing customers to take the entire control of what they wish to see and eventually buy.
REAL-LIFE CALL OF DUTY: US soldiers are training for war using video game-style virtual reality headsets
THE US Army is creating virtual reality headsets for soldiers to see the battlefield as if they are in a video game.
Squaddies wearing the gear can more clearly tell between comrades and enemies and receive GPS locations or use night vision.
Dubbed ‘Tactical Augmented Reality’, or TAR, the new tech has been likened to top shoot em’ up Call Of Duty and spells the dawn of a new type of cyber-soldier.
It is designed to replace handheld GPS devices and frees soldiers up to keep their finger on the trigger while moving through hostile terrain.
And the system can be linked to gun-scopes, meaning they can peep over walls with their rifles and see the area without putting their heads in the firing line.
Virtual Reality technology can relieve the sensation of phantom limb pain by tricking the brain into thinking that it is still in control of a missing limb, researchers have found. A phantom limb is a sensation that an amputated or missing limb is still attached.
Approximately 60 to 80 percent of individuals with an amputation experience phantom sensations in their amputated limb and the majority of the sensations are painful. Even though science has yet to come up with an unambiguous explanation, the most discussed theory concerns the sudden lack of input from the severed neural cords.
Scope AR’s Platform Now Offers Markerless Tracking, Tango Support
Scope AR announced that it’s bringing markerless tracking to the Remote AR remote assistance platform. The company adopted Wikitude’s SLAM Instant Tracking SDK to bring spatial tracking to regular smart devices. Scope AR is also preparing for the future of smart device spatial tracking with support for Google’s Tango platform.
Previous versions of the Remote AR platform provided rudimentary tracking that relied on tracking markers. You could place a fiduciary marker on the object you wanted to track, but it didn’t offer 3D tracking, so the tracking was limited to one plane. One of Remote AR’s features allows you to draw on the augmented image to highlight the area you need assistance with. With the marker-based tracking system, you had to stay in the same place to keep the augmented imagery in the correct location on the screen.
Oculus Is Bringing Free-To-Use VR To 90 California State Libraries The pioneering company continues its crusade of spreading VR by donating 100 headsets for educational purposes.
Oculus has always been a major supporter of the virtual reality community. The company is responsible for some of the industry’s most influential initiatives such as their VR For Good program, as well as teaming up with other manufacturers to establish VR industry standards and supporting VR art incubators. Now the Facebook subsidiary is focusing on making virtual reality more accessible than ever by bringing their Oculus Rift headsets to public libraries across California all for the low cost of $0.00.
As part of a pilot program between Oculus, Cali Group, VRLibraries and the California State library system, 100 Oculus Rift headsets and VR-ready PC’s will be donated to 90 different California libraries spread across half of the state’s 184 library jurisdictions.
Don’t expect Xbox VR to be at E3 this year, or in stores this holiday
Microsoft won’t have any form of virtual reality for the Xbox One or Xbox Scorpio at E3 this year as the company continues its focus on VR for computers, officials tell Polygon.
And when VR does arrive on an Xbox console, potentially still next year, it sounds like it will be wireless.
“Our primary focus is making our mixed reality experiences a success on Windows 10 PCs,” Alex Kipman, technical fellow at Microsoft, told Polygon today. “We believe that right now a Windows PC is the best platform for mixed reality as its open ecosystem and enormous installed base offer the best opportunity for developers, and Windows offers the most choices for consumers.
“Windows has been the birthplace of a variety of technologies, and we believe this will hold for mixed reality too. Given the efforts we have underway on Windows for mixed reality, and our belief that console VR should be wireless, right now we are focused on developing mixed reality experiences for the PC, not on the console.”
‘Breaking Bad’ Virtual Reality Project in the Works From Vince Gilligan
The saga of Walter White may not be over just yet.
Vince Gilligan, creator of “Breaking Bad,” is teaming with Sony’s PlayStation division to create a non-game, virtual reality experience based on the iconic show.
Thanks to Apple updating Metal, their graphics API, to Metal 2, in their new macOS called macOS High Sierra, VR is coming to Mac. Metal 2 can bring up to a 10x increase in draw call throughput over the original, the company says, and it will include a VR-optimized display pipeline.
A new ultra-high end version of the Mac which will offer more powerful processors and AMD’s latest Vega graphics. It will cost $4999 and launch in December 2017
Macbook
Apple will be offering an external graphics enclosure with an AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU which will connect to Macbooks via Thunderbolt.
While Steam has been Mac compatible for some time now, Apple announced that Valve will be bringing SteamVR to Mac too, allowing the HTC Vive to run VR games on Mac systems.
Also, Apple is offering $100 discount on HTC Vive systems for Apple Developers, if they order an External Graphics Development Kit. (See above tweet).
3) Apple is pushing forward VR Creation Tools
Apple is updating their professional video editing application, Final Cut Pro X, to support 360 degree video editing.
Apple also says that both Unity and Unreal Engine will support their VR SDKs on Mac, allowing developers to create VR content on Apple’s machines.
4) Apple announces ARKit
Apple announced its augmented reality platform, ARKit for iPhone and iPad. Because of the large installed iOS user base, Apple is touting ARKit will be the largest AR platform in the world.
AR Kit allows the phone’s camera to recognize the environment around you. In real time while looking at the screen, the AR kit allows you to add computer-generated objects into the environment in real-time.
ARKit will feature support for Unity, Unreal, and SceneKit. Apple also shared these details:
Valve’s Upcoming Base Stations Won’t Work With Existing HTC Vives
The next generation of Valve’s Lighthouse tracking technology for SteamVR will include updated components that will not be compatible with existing HTC Vive systems, we’ve confirmed. Existing base stations, however, should be capable of tracking future headsets and objects on the way from Valve and its partners.
Earlier today we reported on the reveal of details for SteamVR Tracking 2.0. Valve plans to offer a new version of its base stations, which track the position of a VR headset and other peripherals like controllers and the Vive Trackers, with improved performance and efficiency at a lower price. These stations are compatible with a refreshed component from supplier Triad Semiconductor that Valve is recommending those making SteamVR products switch to using soon.
Sony has now sold more than 1 million PlayStation VR headsets, the company announced today. The news follows a reveal back in February that the PSVR had topped 915,000 units sold since its debut last October. It puts PSVR ahead of direct competitors like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift — according to research firm SuperData, the two sold 420,000 and 243,000 units respectively by the end of 2016 — but still well back of Samsung’s Gear VR, which has sold more than 5 million units globally. Shawn Layden, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, admits there’s still plenty of work to be done, especially given the large install base of PS4 owners, which is approaching 60 million. “It’s still just a million units,” he says.
Layden expects sales to pick up this year in large part because of availability. “We’ll have freer supply in the marketplace,” he says of 2017. “We got to a point around Christmas where you would be hard-pressed to find VR anywhere. So we dialed back some of our promotional activity at that time because we didn’t want to be promoting a platform for people to find out they couldn’t get it. I didn’t want to create more unhappy customers.”
1) Unity Technologies, a 13-year-old, San Francisco-based company that makes development tools for video game creators, has raised $400 million in fresh funding from the private equity firm Silver Lake. A “big chunk” of the round went toward purchasing the shares of longtime employees and earlier investors, CEO John Riccitiello told Bloomberg earlier today, explaining that he thinks it “makes sense to let employees buy cars.”The financing follows on the heels of the company’s last round, closed just 10 months ago, in which the company had raised $181 million from investors led by DFJ Growth. Read more on TechCrunch.
2) A startup named Antilatency with a positional tracking solution that recently impressed Upload has raised $2.1 million and is opening an office in the United States next month.According to the company, the seed investment comes from the Europe-based IIDF venture capital fund and will be used to accelerate the release of its “anti-latency tracker,” which goes by the name ALT. The company’s technology uses strips with infrared lights on them that are seen by a small camera you can attach to a mobile virtual reality headset. The solution is said to be expandable up to warehouse volumes for tracking VR headsets. Read more on VentureBeat.
