Virtual & Augmented Reality and 3D News - Page 125

Samsung believes there is potential for virtual reality in the workplace, and wants to explore possible opportunities. The company already has the Gear VR headset, but that product is designed for consumers - something a bit more rugged would likely be required in the enterprise world.

VR headsets could become appealing in the office because they create an immersive way to give presentations or sales pitches. However, developing and sharing content designed for VR headsets would need to be customized for every company based on their work environments.

Samsung says the automotive industry has shown the most interest in VR, but real estate agencies and other niche companies could benefit from VR. Unfortunately, it could be years of testing and development before VR begins to take off in the workplace - with more dedication needed from software developers and hardware manufacturers

We still don't know if Oculus VR will be releasing the Oculus Rift this year, but the Facebook owned VR giant has just announced it has secured two very important people to join its growing team.

Mary Lou Jepsen, who is "one of the top display innovators in the world" has joined the Oculus team along with Anna Sweet from Valve. Jepsen has been honored as "one of the 100 most influential people in the world in Time Magazine, is the Pixel Qi founder, as well as as co-founder and former chief technology officer of non-profit One Laptop Per Child" reports Polygon. Before she joined the Oculus team, she was the heads of the display division of Google X, one of the most secretive parts of Google.

Under her new position at Oculus, Jepsen will be "developing displays that will make it possible to push the boundaries of virtual reality technology". In a statement, Jepsen said: "Virtual reality has been seen as a niche product for the wealthy. Like One Laptop Per Child's vision of computers for the poorest children, we imagine VR as an enabling technology, a platform for mass adoption, for women and men, adults and children, rich and poor, everywhere".

Often referred to as the 'most intelligent man on Earth', Professor Stephen Hawking has told audiences in Australia that the future of humankind is grim if we don't master interplanetary travel by the end of the millennium.

From his office in Cambridge, Hawking appeared via hologram to sold-out crowds at Sydney's Opera House, telling crowds that he didn't "think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet... We must continue to go into space for the future of humanity". Hawking's comments echo many other respected scientists who urge authorities to prepare for the need to leave our big blue planet - a topic at the heart of the 2014 feature film 'Interstellar'.

In a lighter topic, Hawking also fielded a question on the "cosmological effect of Zayn leaving One Direction and consequently breaking the hearts of millions of teenage girls across the world", to which he replied "Finally, a question about something important" before delivering a response outlining the theory of an alternate universe where the boy band member stayed.

The week is starting off quite well, with two rumors about AMD's upcoming video cards. The first was that the Radeon R9 390X should feature 8GB of HBM thanks to a "Dual Link Interposer" slapping two 4GB HBM stacks together, but the second rumor has us excited.

Reports have surfaced on the dual GPU from AMD, the Radeon R9 395X2. The Radeon R9 395X2 will most likely be unveiled later on in the year at its own event, but it is currently known as the "Fiji VR". An interesting name, but AMD has really doubled down on its VR investment, something we saw at the AMD event Down Under last month.

But the Radeon R9 395X2 is going to be quite the beast, with up to 16GB of stacked HBM, and its huge 4096-bit wide memory bus. We should expect up to 17 TFlops of performance, and two Fiji VR GPUs to drive its price up to around $1499. The big note to this is the Fiji VR codename, which should gel well with Liquid VR. This is something AMD was very open with last month, and something I think we're going to see much more of going into the second half of 2015, and even more so as we move into the New Year.

We're four months into 2015, and we still don't know when the Oculus Rift is coming out. But during Facebook's recent earnings call, where we found out 1.44 billion people use the social network each month, the company said: "We have not announced any specific plans for shipment volumes in 2015 related to Oculus". The last time we had a play with the Oculus Rift, was the Crescent Bay prototype at CES 2015 earlier this year.

The statement came from Facebook CFO David Wehner, who added: "Oculus is very much in the development stage, so it's very early to be talking about large shipment volumes".

With competition heating up in the VR space thanks to the likes of Sony and its Project Morpheus headset, but more so with HTC and Valve with their Vive headset, Oculus VR might not have the dominance in the VR industry that most thought they did previously. Things could change very quickly, and I think they will, which is why I'm hoping is the reason behind Oculus VR being so quiet about it all.

AVADirect has been on top of custom PCs for a while, but with the Omni VR desktop announced last month, the custom PC maker is adding to that with the new Sixense VR desktop.

The new Sixense VR desktop is a custom PC that has seen the company partner up with Sixense, so that their PC is ready for the STEM system when it launches. We had a play with Sixense's STEM system back at CES 2015 and thought it was revolutionary, but now AVADirect has taken it a step further with a custom PC ready for the STEM.

AVADirect has deployed an EVGA GeForce GTX 980 SuperClocked VGA card, with the option to upgrade to the GeForce GTX Titan X to handle everything you throw at it. This has ensured gamers that they can run games at 1080p at 75FPS minimum. The stock system rocks a Core i5-4460, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB mechanical HDD, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. The AVA Sixense VR Ultimate Desktop cranks it up to the Core i7-4790 processor, 16GB of RAM, a 500GB 850 EVO SSD from Samsung, and Windows 7 Professional. Both systems are housed in EVGA's Hadron Air Black Mini Tower, with a Sixense etched side panel.

Exclusive: We are knee deep in our benchmarking of Grand Theft Auto V, where we've benchmarked it on various VGA cards at 1920x1080 (1080p), 2560x1440 (1440p), 3840x2160 (4K) and even 6480x3840 (triple 4K).

During our testing, we were pushing our VRAM usage up to around 7GB or so, but it was when we had our triple Acer XB280HK monitors in NVIDIA's 4K Surround that we saw something that had our jaws drop: 14GB of VRAM was being used. Yes, Grand Theft Auto V at maxed settings at 6480x3840 with anti-aliasing enabled has the game using 14GB of VRAM, and beyond.

Facebook decided to purchase Oculus VR and has shown a serious amount of dedication towards developing the virtual reality market. The company expects great things from VR, including its Oculus Rift headset, while promoting what users can expect from the surging market.

"It will be pretty wild," Zuckerberg recently said when asked by Facebook members. "Just like we capture photos and videos today and then share them on the Internet to let others experience them too, we'll be able to capture whole 3D scenes and create new environments and then share those with people as well."

VR was described as "potentially world-changing and incredibly cool" by Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash during the F8 Facebook Developer Conference last month.

Crytek was showing off a demo that was impressing everyone at the Game Developers Conference last month, but it has only seen the light of day outside of GDC 2015 just now.

The "Back to Dinosaur Island" VR demo is embedded above, and was shown off at GDC 2015 on the Oculus Rift to showcase Crytek's impressive VR technology inside of its CryEngine. The environment and attention to detail on the dinosaurs is pretty impressive, with Crytek Producer Fatih Özbayram taking to Twitter to describe the demo:

"Our demo has a variety of interactions. One of them is the interaction with a Hollywood feel T-Rex which mimics your head movements. The narrative [of] our demo is you being a baby dinosaur sitting in the middle of a nest of other dinosaur babies about to hatch. We've chosen dinosaurs as we wanted to nod to the origins of Crytek".

3D printing is helping push the boundaries of modern surgery, allowing surgeons and other medical practitioners to work on more accurate models before live operations. Violet Pietrok, a two-year-old born with a rare cleft deformity, is undergoing a series of operations in large part because of 3D printing.

Trying to make precision cuts in the skull, which would be extremely close to the optic nerve, has serious consequences - but doctors were able to practice on a 3D model first. The firsthand experience gave them a better idea of sawblade trajectory - and to better understand how they would be able to make the cuts.

"We were actually able to do the procedure before going into the operating room," said Dr. John Meara, plastic surgeon-in-chief at Boston Children's Hospital, in a statement to CBC. "So we made the cuts in the model, made the bony movements that we would be making in Violet's case and we identified some issues that we modified prior to going into the operating room, which saves time and means that you're not making some of these critical decisions in the operating room."