Virtual & Augmented Reality and 3D - Page 140

While Oculus VR is on its fourth headset before it even goes retail: DK1, Crystal Cove, DK2, Crescent Bay, Sony is still tinkering away with its Project Morpheus headset. Sony Worldwide Studios' President, Shuhei Yoshida, spoke with The Wall Street Journal recently, about the company's adventures in VR.

Yoshida said that Sony "finished 85 percent of the work needed to make the product available" but didn't elaborate on when Project Morpheus would launch, or what type of price to expect. Yoshida did say that most of Project Morpheus' components are found in smartphones, which would help keep the price from floating up.

From what we can expect, Sony's Project Morpheus headset offers a 1920x1080 display with a 90-degree field of view (FOV) and full 360 degrees of head tracking. Considering Oculus just announced, and showed off, Crescent Bay, with an improved display, less latency and full 360-degree head tracking, Sony has its work cut out for it, big time.

Oculus Connect is currently underway in Los Angeles, with Oculus VR announcing the latest prototype of the Rift, known as Crescent Bay. Crescent Bay features numerous improvements and new tricks even over the just-released, and still-shipping Rift DK2 unit, such as 360-degree head tracking.

Not only do we have 360-degree head tracking (which is done by having sensors on the back of your head, something completely new), but we have a higher resolution screen (no exact numbers, but most reports and hands-on use point to it being better than Samsung's Gear VR which uses the QHD or 2560x1440 panel from the Galaxy Note 4), lower latency, and a built-in headset.

Crescent Bay has been working out, dropping a little weight, with Oculus providing improved ergonomics so it feels better when wearing it, and with the integrated audio, 3D audio can now be something big thanks to Oculus' collaboration with licensed technology from the University of Maryland, and RealSP. Oculus' Brendan Iribe explains: "We're working on audio as aggressively as we're working on the vision side". For the various reports on the latest VR headset from Oculus, most have said that it is much closer to what is expected from CV1 (the first consumer, or retail Rift).

NVIDIA Editor's Day 2014 - There were two stations to play with the Oculus Rift and Maxwell-powered GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 GPUs at NVIDIA's Editor's Day 2014, with the first being the EVE: Valkyrie station, and the second Epic Games' "Car Flip" VR demo. It's hard to explain, so watch the video below.

As you can see, it's an on-rails VR demo that plays out in slow motion, with a blend of 'The Matrix' meets 'F.E.A.R.'. It was one of the more impressive demos I've witnessed, and while there's nothing you can do during the game with it being on-rails, the experience is like nothing else. Watching bullets fly past you makes you feel like you're in The Matrix, and watching the explosions take place in front of you while the car flips over you, is simply awesome, there's no other word to explain it.

NVIDIA Editor's Day 2014 - After the top press in the world heard about the new GeForce GTX 900 series, and its more-than-impressive Maxwell architecture, the demo room was open for a few hours for us to all go have play around in. One of the demos that I simply had to try was EVE: Valkyrie, on the Oculus Rift DK2, powered by NVIDIA's new Maxwell-powered GeForce GTX 980 GPUs, in SLI.

You can see the video above, a tour of the various demos, toward the end we check out the EVE: Valkyrie setup - with four PCs running GeForce GTX 980 SLI, and the Oculus Rift DK2.

The four PCs filled with various media playing around in the deep space of EVE: Valkyrie.

NVIDIA Editor's Day 2014 - One area of NVIDIA's new direction with Maxwell is virtual reality, with a totally new focus on VR with something NVIDIA calls VR Direct. VR Direct provides multiple technologies from the Maxwell architecture, and previous technologies from NVIDIA, to make the VR experience much better.

First, we have low-latency, which will reduce the amount of time it takes for the scene to be rendered on your PC, and displayed to the VR display sitting just an inch or so from your eyes. Second, we have VR SLI: something that will help your GeForce GTX SLI setup render the two scenes (one to each eye) much better, resulting in improved performance and better yet, scaling between your GPUs.

Latency is something NVIDIA is very concerned about, with the company wanting to remove as much of it as possible, in order to get a better VR gaming experience. As you can see, right now we have around 50ms of delay between the image being rendered and outputted to something like the Oculus Rift, but NVIDIA have some new technologies to remove much of this delay.

We're much closer to see Oculus VR to release its consumer version of its Rift VR headset compared to before, but some of us may get early access of those VR headsets as the company plans for a public beta of these units by April 2015.

As one would expect from a beta, the distribution of these units will be very limited to a certain number of users initially. Its assumed that Oculus is going to use this opportunity to check if the consumers will be interested to own such a headset by having a limited launch. It is said that Oculus will send its public BETA headsets in the similar way how Google launched its public beta for Google Glass. The criteria to qualify for getting a public beta headset is unknown for now.

The specification of these consumer-final version has significant improvements over the Oculus Rift Dev Kit 2 version. The consumer version will have a significant increase in resolution compared to the dev kit's 1080p. To add further, the refresh rate is expected to be 90Hz or higher. As one would expect, Oculus really wants its Rift headset to provide the best virtual-reality experience you can provide.

Oculus VR is pushing for the future of VR to be awesome, so what better way than donating millions of dollars to a University to build a new VR lab? That's exactly what Brendan Iribe, CEO of Oculus VR has done, donating $31 million to the University of Maryland.

The money will be used to build a new computer science building that will feature a VR lab. Iribe had the idea of donating the funds after the acquisition made by Facebook in March of this year for $2 billion, after he met with Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, where he walked around the University and noticed that not much had changed around the place.

Iribe met Michael Antonov at the time, who is now the Chief Software Architect of Oculus VR, who will be donating $4 million the university to help with the construction of the building, and establish a scholarship. Iribe spoke with Business Insider, where he said: "It will have a big focus on robotics and computer vision, computer graphics, and human computer interaction. In the past, computers have been used regularly as a tool, so you don't need to bring in psychologists or the biotech side of things to understand how the computer affects the brain in order to make a great operating system. But in VR, you actually do".

A few days ago we were introduced to the Samsung Gear VR headset, a mobile VR headset that is powered by the Galaxy Note 4 smartphone. Oculus VR, the makes of the Oculus Rift, were instrumental in the design, technology and path of the Gear VR, but now you can pre-order the headset for yourself, at $249.

The Gear VR uses the 5.7-inch QHD Super AMOLED panel as its display, which should provide a clearer picture than the Full HD-based Oculus Rift DK2 unit. The pre-orders were spotted on Mobile Fun, with the retailer defining itself as a 'Samsung Authorized Dealer'. We don't know when Gear VR will launch, but I think we'll see the start of it next month.

Samsung only unveiled the Galaxy Note 4 and Gear VR at IFA 2014 a few moments ago, with the Gear VR "Powered by Oculus". Oculus VR has just announced the new Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition, which is a new mobile VR headset powered by the Galaxy Note 4 smartphone.

The Gear VR was "created by Samsung and powered by Oculus" and over the "last 12 months, we've been collaborating with Samsung on the future of mobile virtual reality," according to Oculus. The Facebook-owned VR startup continues: "The project actually began as an experiment to see if great VR was possible on next-generation mobile hardware. Oculus CTO John Carmack and the mobile team at Oculus were able to blow everyone away in an extremely short amount of time, quickly proving that we were on to something special."

The Galaxy Note 4's internal GPU and CPU to power Gear VR, using the 2560x1440 low-persistence 5.7-inch AMOLED panel as its display. John Carmack's role as the CTO of Oculus VR is becoming more clear, as he has worked with the mobile team at Oculus on Gear VR. The year was spent between developing a new Oculus Mobile SDK, as well as optimizing Android and the GPU drivers for VR.

Something that wasn't too much of a surprise, but is an interesting new step for Samsung, is the just-announced Gear VR. Samsung has been rumored to have been working on a VR headset for a while now, but it is now official.

The South Korean electronics giant has teased that Gear VR works with the just-announced Galaxy Note 4 smartphone, which features a 5.7-inch 2560x1440 display, so it'll be interesting to see what Gear VR looks like against the Oculus Rift DK2 which features a 1920x1080 display.

The one big note here is that the Gear VR doesn't work with any other smartphone other than the Galaxy Note 4. The Note 4 will snap into the Gear VR, in front of dual-lenses that provide the 3D effect in the VR headset. There's a trackpad and back button on the right side of the Gear VR, with most of the movements and menu navigation to be performed through head movements and taps on the side-mounted trackpad. The Verge has already enjoyed some hands-on time with Gear VR, with some shots of the Gear VR teasing "Powered by Oculus".