Extended Reality (XR) - Page 23

A group of researchers at Balgrist University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, are evaluating the benefits of Microsoft's HoloLens in the operating room. Recently, the team executed the first-ever "holographically navigated" spine surgery.

The researchers are evaluating how augmented, and mixed reality technology can benefit surgeons performing complex and potentially life-altering procedures.

The team at Balgrist University Hospital has put in years of research to get to this point, and the recent surgery marks the first time a surgeon has performed a real spine surgery on a live patient. Prof. Dr. med. Mazda Farshad, Surgeon in Chief and Spine Surgeon, performed the procedure while wearing a Microsoft HoloLens 2 headset.

Facebook is currently battling multiple lawsuits from government officials. The US Federal Trade Commission is going after the social network giant for monopolistic practices. Meanwhile, this week, the German Federal Cartel Office "initiated abuse proceedings" against Facebook for the second time.

The FTC announced on Wednesday that it is going after Facebook for "illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct." The FTC alleges that Facebook's business practices involving the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, which dates to 2012 and 2014, respectively, is illegal. The government is threatening to break up the company as a result.

://Oculus has quietly dropped the price of its last PC VR headset. The Rift S is now $100 off, bringing it down to $299 for the headset with Touch controllers.__

After months of delay for the Oculus Quest 2 VR Cover facial interface replacement, the kits sold out almost immediately after becoming available.

VR Cover recently launched its Quest 2 facial interface in a handful of colors. The company announced the standard black cover alongside a Winter Edition, which offers a white leather cushion and a red plastic interface. The Winter Edition launched at the end of November, and the black version was available started December 8. Both versions are entirely sold out, with no word on when the next shipment would arrive at VR Covers' warehouse.

Additionally, VR Cover worked with two popular VR YouTubers to created branded versions of the VR Cover kits. Thrillseeker, who won the VR Awards VR creator of the year, offered a pink version of the facial interface paired with a white leather cover. At the same time, VR Oasis offered a light blue version paired with a white leather cover.

Menicon, Japan's largest contact lens manufacturer, just signed a deal with Mojo Vision to build augmented reality contact lenses. Yes, you read that right. Augmented reality contact lenses are a real thing.

Mojo Vision is trying to create the worlds' first augmented reality smart contact lens. If any company can pull off Mojo Vision's crazy idea, it's Menicon. It is the perfect partnership and perhaps the only pairing that could pull off this incredible feat. Mojo Vision and Menicon plan to run feasibility studies to evaluate production and manufacturing processes.

Myst, the classic point-and-click puzzle adventure game from Cyan, has made its VR debut. The developer has rebuilt the game from the ground to make the adventure even more immersive.

If you grew up gaming in the '90s, you probably remember Cyan's Myst. This game captured countless gamers' hearts in the early '90s and was re-released multiple times over the last 27 years, including 2000's Masterpiece Edition and 2014's realMyst Masterpiece Edition. The game was subsequently followed up by a full series that included six full games to tell Myst's intricate tale.

Now, Cyan is bringing the original game back for a new generation to experience. Myst on Quest features all the actual puzzles from the original and intertwined storey plots of the original. It's ready for newcomers to dive in, and it's all set for veterans of the series. If you've played Myst enough times to remember the puzzles, you can enable puzzle randomization to bring fresh air to the experience. As if wandering around freely in Myst's four ages in 6-DoF VR isn't a new enough take on the game.

Stan Larroque, the creator of the Lynx-R1 mixed reality headset, has been active on Twitter recently, sharing images of his prototype headset. One of the photos showed off the lenses, and the design is like nothing we've ever seen before in a VR or AR HMD. These lenses are square!

In most headsets, the lenses you find are Fresnel-style lenses, which work well, but they are prone to cause the dreaded "godray" effect that many VR gamers complain about. We're not privy to Lynx's lens design specifications, but we're almost sure they do not incorporate Fresnel technology.

From the image that Larroque shared, you can clearly see that the lenses feature a square shape, and they are installed with the corners oriented like a diamond shape. The image also shows that the lenses comprise four triangular sections, which appear to have a bevelled shape that meets in a valley in the center.

This week, Oculus revealed to developers that its Phase Sync frame timing management technology is now available on Oculus Quest. The technology, created for the Oculus PC SDK, is now part of the Oculus Mobile SDK.

Oculus created Phase Sync more than three years ago for the Oculus Rift platform. It gives the rendering pipeline dynamic control of frame timing to reduce positional latency and works in conjunction with Asynchronous Time Warp, another Oculus-specific latency reduction technology. Phase Sync helps limit positional latency by giving the application just enough time for each frame to render, and no more.

When Oculus launched the original Quest, the mobile SDK used a fixed-latency approach, which gave each frame the same interval of time to complete. That worked fine when developer optimized their games for one set of hardware specifications, but with the Quest 2, that shortcut no longer works. Oculus said that Quest apps on Quest 2 often receive "early frames," which can cause framerate judder.

The first Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond in nearly a decade is about to launch, and this time it's the series debut in VR. Just as people are getting excited about it, the developer spoiled some people's excitement by revealing the recommended specifications. This is not a minimum VR spec type of game.

VR games have always been somewhat demanding, but you could also get away with playing on relatively modest hardware. When Oculus and HTC launched the Rift and Vive, you needed at least a GTX 970 to drive the headsets.

These days, you'd be hard-pressed to play the most recent games on a modern headset with a card like that. But you could still have a great experience on something like a GTX 1070. And when it came to the CPU, any i5 or better from the last 4 or 5 years would suffice in most games. Not so with Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. This game needs everything you can throw at it.

In Death: Unchained, one of the top titles on the Oculus Quest platform, just got a new game mode that expands the game in new ways. The developer described the Siege of Heaven DLC as a "game within the game" that adds further depth and challenges to the already excellent title.

The Siege of Heaven DLC adds a new mode called gate defence, which, unlike the standard game, is a stand-your-ground type of shooter. In Siege of Heaven, the enemies come to you; you don't need to find them.

Superbright, the development studio behind the game, said that the new gate defence mode is much easier for newcomers to jump into. The rounds are short, at 15 minutes per battle, and you don't need to learn movement mechanics to play the game because you're defending one spot.

HP is dealing with a bit of egg on its face after it sent a couple of unfortunate owners for failed Reverb G2 headsets the wrong model to replace the. Somehow something got mixed up in HP's system, and it sent the wrong model as replacements.

At least two people reported on Reddit this week that they received replacements for their failed HP Reverb G2 headsets, but they didn't quite get what they expected. To add insult to receiving a faulty headset through a pre-order, HP support somehow sent these customers the last-generation Reverb G1 to replace them.

Of course, HP isn't going to leave these customers high and dry. HP's VR team is very active on r/HPReverb, and they very quickly dealt with the issue. The first report was escalated directly to Joanna Popper, who's been the face of HP's VR department for some time, and a proper replacement will be sent to the customer.

Magic Leap's new CEO, Peggy Johnson, spoke to CNBC's "Squawk Alley" on December 3 and laid out her vision for turning the struggling company around and it doesn't involve the consumer market for at least three to four years.

Peggy Johnson left her leadership role at Microsoft over the summer, where she was the head of the company's business development efforts, to take the helm at Magic Leap. She joined the company at a rough time in its history, but she believes she can turn the ship around.

Over the last year, Magic Leap has taken a big tumble. Investors lost faith in the company, which forced it to lay off half of its staff, and spur Rony Abovitz, the company's founder, to step down as CEO. Johnson said she saw the potential in the company and stepped up to the plate. She told CNBC that she "intentionally raised [her] hand" for the job.

The latest Steam Hardware survey from Valve shows that Oculus has a massive foothold on the VR consumer market, with more people using Oculus headsets to play SteamVR content than every other brand combined.

The Oculus Quest is really changing the game in the consumer VR space. For over five years, VR adoption has been steady but very slow. Although with the launch of the Quest 2 in September, consumers seem to have warmed up to VR. According to the November Steam Hardware Survey results, the number of Quest users increased by 5.53%. There are now more Quest owners on Steam than there are Valve Index owners on Steam.

Valve doesn't distinguish between the Quest and Quest 2. It lumps all the Quest owners into one group for the report. The survey does distinguish between Rift and Rift S owners, though, and Rift S is the reigning champion of headsets right now. Rift S alone holds a sliver more than 25% of the market. Pretty impressive for a device that will be discontinued in a few months.

Google quietly announced that it would be shutting down its low-polygon 3D asset distribution platform, Poly, next June. The platform has been around for three years.

It's tough to rely on Google products these days. It seems like every other month that the company announces that it will kill off yet another product or service. There's even a website that tracks these things.The most recent Google service to hit the chopping block is Google Poly, a 3D asset repository for low poly-count models for mobile projects.

Google Poly first launched while Google's Daydream VR platform was still a thing that existed. Google killed off Daydream recently, and without its mobile VR platform to drive the need for Poly, the company is no longer keeping the service around.

Vodafone announced that it would distribute the Nreal Light mixed reality smartglasses in its European markets next year. The company will first focus on Germany and Spain, followed by other European Vodafone markets later in the year.

The Nreal Light is a lightweight, compact smartglasses device, which resembles a pair of sunglasses. Nreal kept the device compact by forgoing include computational hardware. The headset consists of cameras and sensors for tracking. It also features a pair of waveguide displays along with speakers and a microphone. But the headset relies on a tethered Android smartphone for its processing power.

"Nreal Light is a breakthrough product and we are excited to announce that Vodafone is bringing Nreal's cutting-edge glasses to Europe," said Phil Patel, Vodafone Group Director Products & Services. Nreal Light combined with Vodafone's high speed, ultra-low latency Gigabit 5G network will give consumers and businesses an affordable, accessible way of experiencing the latest augmented and mixed reality experiences and brings the future a little closer for everyone."

Medal of Honor Above and Beyond is just over a week away, and we now know the game includes five action-packed multiplayer modes on top of the full single-player campaign.

Respawn Entertainment is gearing up for the launch of the VR debut of Medal of Honor. The studio is taking the beloved franchise into the future with it's fully VR Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. I've been excited about this game for months, but I had no idea it was a multiplayer experience.

Respawn released a new trailer for the game today that shows off the exciting multiplayer experiences. The five multiplayer modes include Mad Bomber, in which players must successfully plant explosives amidst a gunfight; a free-for-all Deathmatch mode, as well as Team Deathmatch; Blast Radius, where players fight with RPGs, and Domination, where you need to capture and hold all the zones on the map.

Pimax has been working hard to build out the Pimax Experience virtual environment where you can control your headset's settings and launch your games. The newest feature is a virtual desktop mode.

The Pimax Experience virtual desktop mode enables you to access your Windows desktop from within the headset. This feature is perfect if you want to work in a virtual environment. You can bring up your browser or any 2D application. You can also use the virtual desktop mode to watch 2D videos on a gigantic virtual screen.

Pimax said that it's not ready to deploy the virtual desktop to everyone, but the company is looking for users willing to test it and provide feedback for further development.

Wacom revealed an experimental device that hopes will carry the company through the next generation of digital art creation. It's taking its expertise with digital pens into the future with a VR Pen.

Wacom's new VR Pen device is a pressure-sensitive pen input device made for both 2D and 3D artists. The new VR pen supports 3D drawing with a full 6-degrees of freedom tracking solution while also supporting traditional 2D surface-based drawing with a digital tablet.

Wacom said the VR Pen uses "pen grip force" to determine your intended pressure in 3D space. It also includes an EMR pressure sensor in the tip, making it compatible with Wacom's drawing tablets. You can use the VR Pen for both 3D and 2D mediums. And it works with any VR headset thanks to Wacom's independent tracking system.

Oculus has started informing customers who purchased MARVEL Powers United VR that their game will cease to function on March 1, 2021. They won't even be able to play single player.

The Oculus Studios' produced MARVEL Powers United VR multiplayer co-op game launched in late July 2018, and sadly, it won't survive until its third birthday. Oculus has revealed that you won't be able to play it after March 1 next year.

Oculus and Sanzaru Games sent out a disappointing email to owners of the game on December 1, informing them that their purchase will soon be taken away from them.

Varjo today introduced its third-generation professional VR and XR headsets for enterprise professionals. The new headsets offer significant display and ergonomics upgrades, and the XR version features integrated LiDAR cameras for accurate spatial awareness. And to top it off, these headsets come in at half the cost of the outgoing models.

Varjo isn't just another headset maker. It sets itself apart from everyone else with its proprietary Bionic Display technology, which features an ultra-high-resolution display embedded in a larger display that fills the peripheral vision. You could think of it as a form of physical foveated rendering, whereby the central focal area where your eyes focus most of their time gives you human-eye resolution.

Varjo introduced the Bionic Display technology with the VR-1 headset several years ago, but the VR-3 and XR-3 feature a new and improved version of the technology. The new headsets feature a tiny uOLED screen with an incredible 1920 x 1920 px per eye. That may not seem like much, but it's important to understand that the 1920 x 1920 section comprises just 27-degrees horizontal and vertical field of view, which works out to a pixel density of 70 pixels per degree (PPD); an unheard-of number for VR devices.