Virtual & Augmented Reality and 3D News - Page 12

Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth sure know how to make a VR fan jealous. The company founder and Facebook Reality Labs leader both posted images of themselves playing with prototype Oculus VR headsets. That enthusiast in me is crying a little bit today.

Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook profile that he spent that day with the Facebook Reality Labs research team testing out next-generation hardware. The picture that he shared is of himself trying a prototype headset with "retina resolution." It's hard to tell from the image, but it looks like this is in a standalone headset like the Oculus Quest. This could be the Quest prototype with 2784 x 3000 per eye OLED microdisplays that Brad Lynch uncovered in a recent kernel analysis.

Bosworth shared two images. One of a futuristic headset that looks more compact than anything Oculus has ever produced before. The visor resembles a pair of ski goggles, and it seems an awful lot like the leaked images of HTC's new Vive Flow. Amusingly, Alvin Graylin, the President of HTC Vive China, offered to trade one of his company's new "production quality devices" for the prototype. You can probably guess what Boz said.

October is turning into a spicy month for VR fans. No less than four major VR events are happening in the next two weeks from some of the most prominent players in the XR space. Pimax is the latest VR company to announce an event.

As the anticipation for Facebook Connect heats up, more and more VR companies have jumped in on the October announcement bandwagon. Thursday, we have an HTC event with the official reveal of the Vive Flow, and next week, Varjo has a big announcement planned. It seems that Pimax didn't want to be left behind in this exciting news cycle. The company is preparing its own announcement on October 25.

In an invite email sent to press, Pimax said the Pimax Frontier 2021 event would showcase a new device referred to as "code name 'Reality.'" For the full reveal, we'll have to wait until January at CES 2022. For now, Pimax intends to give us a glimpse of its "vision for VR3.0," a device it says is "several generations ahead of anything on the market."

Magic Leap's CEO, Peggy Johnson, announced on her LinkedIn account that she would be a guest on CNBC's PowerLunch today. Along with the post, she shared a screenshot of the company's next-gen AR headset, Magic Leap 2.

Magic Leap has not shared details about its next headset. The company has said that it will be an enterprise-focused device and plans to launch an early-access program in Q4 2021. The company also said the new headset would be smaller, lighter, faster, and cheaper. Now that we're well into October, we expect that details about Magic Leap 2 to come soon.

In the meantime, we can learn a bit of Magic Leap's new design language from the screenshot that Johnson shared today. The new headset appears to be a much sleeker device than the original Magic Leap headset. The first one had a bizarre shape that was sort of bulbous and goofy looking. The new design is much more modern, with sharp edges and sleek features.

Facebook revealed a new name for Horizons. The as-yet-unreleased virtual world-building platform will now be known as Horizon Worlds. Along with the rebrand, the company is dumping more financial support into developing Horizon Worlds' content, with $10 million earmarked for creators and developers over the next year.

Facebook launched the invite-only closed beta of Horizon last summer, and to this day, it remains closed to the public. Over the last year, Facebook has added more features and included more content creators and developers. Now the company is ready to pour some gas on the fire to inspire creators and developers to bring more rich content to the Horizon Worlds platform.

Facebook plans to distribute the $10 million Creator Fund through a variety of opportunities. There will be competitions for world creators with prizes of up to $10,000 for the top three entries for each category.

Varjo just revealed that it would be announcing a new product later this month. The company hasn't revealed any details at all, but it is making it seem like this will be a big deal.

Varjo is a long-time player in the enterprise XR space. The company is best known for making headsets with some of the most advanced technology available. They're also known for making headsets that cost as much as $10,000 per unit. Varjo's claim to fame is its bionic display technology, which embeds a micro OLED screen inside a larger LCD for incredible image clarity in your central focus area.

Varjo's most advanced device is the XR-3 headset, which includes dual Lidar cameras for stereoscopic passthrough and depth scanning. We have no idea what Varjo's upcoming announcement is, but the event signup page makes it seem like we're looking at a forthcoming headset announcement.

Varjo is building mixed reality tools that can bring physical objects into view in virtual experiences through its flagship XR-3 headset. The blending of reality with the virtual unlocks new possibilities for training and entertainment.

Varjo this week showed off a new real-time masking feature for its XR-3 headset, which will be part of the company's upcoming Varjo Lab Tools update. Varjo's real-time masking feature makes it possible to blend any physical object with a virtual experience to create new immersive interactions.

The next Varjo Lab Tools update will give developers the ability to map 3D vertices to physical objects to create a passthrough mask for the lidar cameras on the headset. The company's Varjo Marker tool enables you to anchor the traced mask to the object's physical shape, which allows you to move it around and have the passthrough camera track the changes.

The Oculus Quest 2 is one of the best-selling VR devices ever, and it's arguably the best thing that's happened to consumer VR. On the other side of that token, Facebook's integration with the Oculus platform and its walled garden is arguably the worst thing that has happened to consumer VR. With Oculess, you can have the best of both worlds.

Oculess is a free utility that you can download from Github that enables you to break your Quest 2 free from Facebook's clutches. The utility allows you to log out of Facebook to disable the Oculus Companion, disable telemetry, and disable future updates. Thank you, user basti564, for the contribution!

The idea of severing ties with Facebook's servers will undoubtedly appeal to many people. However, it's important to note that doing so comes with sacrifices. If you run Oculess on your headset, you will lose access to the Oculus storefront. You will need to sideload all of your content from other sources, like SideQuest. You will also lose the social features of the Quest 2. PC VR will still work through Oculus Link, but you will need to sign in to the Oculus desktop app for that to work.

The Kickstarter campaign for the Lynx R1 AR/VR headset went live on Tuesday, and it's off to a great start. The company nearly met its goals in less than 12 hours.

The Kickstarter campaign for the Lynx R1 AR/VR headset is almost fully funded and it has been less than 12 hours.

The Lynx R1 is a new standalone headset from a France startup that offers virtual and augmented reality technology. The R1 is powered by a Snapdragon XR2 SoC, which puts its potential performance on par with the Oculus Quest 2, Pico Neo 3, and Vive Focus 3 headsets. The headset includes 6GB of memory, 128GB of storage, and a microSD card slot for expansion.

HTC Vive's next digital event is coming up on October 14, and it looks like the company has something special to reveal. Could it be an update to Project Proton?

The VR and XR markets are starting to heat up lately, with leaks and announcements coming left and right. Oculus is grabbing lots of attention lately as it leads up to the Facebook Connect conference, but HTC's event is coming first, and the company doesn't want you to forget about it.

Earlier this week, HTC Vive's Twitter account shared a crudely photoshopped image of a black cylindrical case sitting on a desk next to someone using a laptop. The post said only 10.14.21 vive.com #gowiththeflow.

Facebook is about to breathe new life into its discontinued Oculus Go headset. The company is getting ready to release an unlocked build of the Go's operating system so tinkers and hobbyists can keep these headsets out of our landfills.

Facebook discontinued the Oculus Go headset nearly two years ago, and it stopped accepting new app submissions for the platform at the end of last year. Until this week, it seemed like the Go was destined to become nothing but e-waste very soon. However, there's a fresh start ahead for the Oculus Go.

On Friday, John Carmack, Oculus Consulting CTO, revealed that Facebook would soon release an unlocked version of the Go OS to give developers and hobbyists a chance to keep the party going for 3-DoF VR experiences long after the Oculus servers are shut down.