Extended Reality (XR) - Page 35

Like the rest of the tech world, HTC is gearing up for CES 2019 and will likely show off new VR hardware at the event.

HTC's Vive platform has expanded a lot over the years with the Vive Pro, a new $799 VR headset with expanded 1440x1600 resolution and tweaks, and the mobile SoC-powered standalone Vive Focus with built-in 6DoF tracking. The company also rolled out a new wireless adapter that alleviates one of VR's most cumbersome problems.

So what's next for Vive? Outside of a new higher-end headset that's probably wireless and mirrors the Vive Pro's enhancements, we should expect other peripherals like new wands (or maybe even knuckle-style controllers) with more haptic feedback. And the Vive might go to the cloud at some point, possibly with game streaming.

Just in case you've ever wanted to enhance your gaming experiences by smelling those in-game worlds you frequent, FeelReal has you covered with its new VR headset attachment.

Smell-o-vision isn't real for a very good reason, as the Nosulus Rift taught us. But that hasn't stopped FeelReal from creating a new device that lets your olfactory senses get a whiff of Skyrim's musty tombs. The Feelreal Sensory Mask clips onto VR headsets like the PSVR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift and essentially blasts scents into your nose based on real-time gaming feedback. "Have you ever wondered what a dragon smells like? It's your chance to experience Skyrim like never before by downloading a free mod that will add Feelreal support."

But the FeelReal mask isn't just about smelling your games. It also injects tactile sensations like vibrations, cooling breezes, heat, and even light mists. This admittedly sounds pretty cool and could be used in conjunction with specific games to deliver truly immersive arcade-style VR experiences. Right now the FeelReal is compatible with VR games like Beat Saber, Skyrim VR, and even YouTube's VR app.

The ZeniMax vs Facebook saga is finally over.

ZeniMax and Facebook, who were once up in arms over Oculus Rift VR tech, have settled their long litigation for an undisclosed sum. ZeniMax, parent company to Bethesda Softworks, alleged in 2014 that ex-employees including John Carmack (of id Software fame) took trade secrets with them when moving to Oculus. These secrets included specific code that ZeniMax says was used in making the Oculus Rift VR headset. ZeniMax wanted to block all sales of the headset and sought damages from Facebook, who had then bought Oculus for $2 billion.

In 2017 a Dallas court ruled in favor of ZeniMax, finding that Facebook violated NDAs and awarded the plaintiff $500 million. That sum was lowered to $250 million, causing both companies to appeal. Now the lawsuit has been settled for an undisclosed sum, ZeniMax today announced in a press release.

It looks like Valve is working on a new VR headset, with UploadVR reporting about a new prototype VR headset from the company that rocks a Valve logo on the circuit board, with images leaking out onto Imgur.

You'll notice we haven't said HTC in this post, with Valve working with the smartphone maker on the Vive and Vive Pro headsets, but this is a prototype VR headset made in-house at Valve it seems. The new headset seems to have SteamVR tracking photodiodes, with UploadVR explaining: "The leaked headset features what appear to be SteamVR tracking photodiodes under the plastic (similar to how Oculus hides IR LEDs under the Rift). It also has 2 cameras visible and integrated headphones. The padding on the back is visually similar to the padding on Valve's "Knuckles" controllers prototypes.".

The prototype VR headset seems to have a higher field of view, which should in turn mean it has a higher resolution display as well.

HTC has just announced it has now joined the VirtualLink consortium, with the movement pushing a new VR standard with a single USB-C connector that has already been deployed on NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX range of graphics cards.

AMD, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oculus and Valve are all part of the VirtualLink consortium, but there were eyebrows raised over HTC now being in the ranks. Daniel O'Brien, the GM of Vive in the US said that the company was "working to define not only a connection standard for future VR products but are also undertaking important work to help to define the future of what VR can be".

The news of HTC joining the VirtualLink consortium happened during the 2018 XRDC event held in San Francisco recently. VirtualLink, if you didn't already know, is a next-gen VR standard that will be capable of driving the entire VR experience (HMD, sensors, cameras) from a single USB-C cable. VirtualLink has enough bandwidth for four lanes of HBR3 DisplayPort, 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 for cameras and sensors, and 27W of power.

Oculus co-founder Brenden Iribe, who helped lead various initiatives across the Facebook-owned company's VR sector, is departing the virtual reality pioneer.

With its Rift headset, Oculus helped form springwell of virtual reality we now have today--and the decades of mixed reality experiences that lay in wait in the future. But one of the key players has now left the digital stage. After six long years helping push the forefront of virtual reality, Oculus co-founder Brenden Iribe is stepping away from the platform he helped create.

While Iribe announced his exit from the VR business in a Facebook post, he didn't give exact details for leaving the company, but he did note this would be his first "real break in 20 years." Unnamed sources claim Iribe clashed with Facebook's current mobile-oriented strategy. Iribe, the sources say, wanted Oculus to push into more dedicated and powerful hardware instead of rolling backwards to more widespread consumer-oriented gear.

Forget watching Twin Peaks (well not really, it's a great show and you should totally watch it): soon we'll be able to walk right into the strange universe thanks to VR.

Twin Peaks VR is happening, and it'll let us wander the strange interdimensional conduits of the small Washington town. The game is an interactive experience where users play as a lost soul caught in the Black Lodge, using clues from Special Agent Dale Cooper along the way.

"Twin Peaks VR takes the surreal world created by David Lynch and lets players explore its depths. It includes iconic moments and settings from 2017's 18-part limited event series Twin Peaks: The Return, as well as the original landmark television series. Utilizing lines and sounds from the show itself, players will travel to Glastonbury Grove, only to end up in the puzzling Red Room. Fans of the series will follow in the footsteps of Special Agent Dale Cooper and try to make their way back into the life they left behind. Twin Peaks VR is being developed for HTC vive and Oculus Rift and will be available on Steam."

Oculus' new all-in-one headset will be surprisingly versatile and powerful for gaming, company CTO John Carmack confirms.

Although the new Oculus Quest is a wireless, self-contained headset powered by a Qualcomm chip, the portable HMD is actually comparable to last-gen consoles in terms of CPU and GPU power. The conjunction of firmware utilities and tools alongside optimized hardware will theoretically allow the Quest to hit up to 72FPS in specific games and apps running at 1280x1280 resolution.

"In terms of raw processing power, there's lots of hedges and if buts when you're discussing different things, but Quest is in the neighborhood of the power of a previous gen like Xbox 360 and PS3. Now that's just in terms of CPU and GPU and what you can expect to do on it," Oculus' John Carmack said in a recent OC5 keynote speech.

Bandai Namco and Nintendo are bringing Mario Kart VR to the United States for some hilarious and ultra-fun virtual reality shenanigans.

Every time I play my HTC Vive, one thing becomes more and more clear to me: VR was made to be played with friends. VR really belongs in arcade environments where everyone can get in on the fun, and the industry has seen various "VRcades" pop up over the years. One of the most intriguing is Bandai Namco's and Nintendo's VR Zone Portal arcade, which breathes new life into Mario Kart. Previously only available in Japan, Mario Kart VR first came to the UK and is now coming to the U.S. for a limited time.

HTC today announced that the Vive-powered Mario Kart VR experience will come to Washington, DC's Union Station alongside other interactive games in the VR Zone Portal banner. Sadly the games will only be playable for six months and won't be a permanent fixture.

Oculus unveiled their mobile-friendly Oculus Quest VR headset for $399, but the VR giant also announced some new projects - one of which was a trailer for the upcoming three-part series Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series.

Vader Immortal: A Star Wars VR Series has been made by ILMxLAB, which announced back in 2016 that it was working with writer David S. Goyer on a VR experience starring Darth Vader. We don't know what you'll be doing inside of the VR experience, but they're clear on it not being a game with Oculus explaining Vader Immortal is a "VR story series, not a game".

Some might remember the previous Star Wars VR experience 'Trials on Tatooine' which was a lightsaber VR experience that was kinda cool, as well as Star W ars: Secrets of the Empire and its immersive VR installation in the collaboration with The Void.

Oculus announces Oculus Quest, a new standalone VR headset platform built from its Santa Cruz prototype.

With its new wireless Oculus Quest headset, Facebook aims to break many of VR's biggest hurdles including price and accessibility. The Quest tracks your movements and the environment around you with 6DoF (six degrees of freedom) sensors, is totally self-contained and doesn't require any extra hardware like a phone or a PC graphics card to operate, and comes with wireless Touch controllers for input. The platform is intended to sit between the lower-end Oculus Go and the higher-end Rift.

Spec details are still light, but we do know Oculus Quest's panels have 1600x1400 per-eye resolution, 64GB of storage, and built-in audio. Exact processing power, system memory, and other internal hardware features weren't revealed.

Sony's new VR HMD patent is pretty weird. It features some interesting add-ons like eye-tracking tech, but it can also monitor the words you say--or words that are spoken to you--to help avoid "ill health effects". The aim here is to tackle different forms of virtual reality sickness and it may be a huge focus for Sony's next-gen PlayStation VR headset.

The patent, which was originally filed in 2017 and published this month, is largely focused on making VR safer and more healthy for users by tackling a huge accessibility barrier: discomfort. The HMD can be outfitted with various biometric sensors that monitor key signals and warn users if they're doing unhealthy things while in VR. It's also linked to an external remote device that processes data and can send it to a smartphone, or via on-screen HMD indicators.

Eye-tracking cameras can adjust in-game images based on your eye movements or pupils, or flash a warning message on the HUD if your posture starts to slouch. There's even mention of the HMD being complimented with other sensors that monitor blood pressure, glucose levels, breathing, and even neural activity.

Oculus plans to release its new self-contained Santa Cruz VR headset sometime in early 2019, sources tell UploadVR.

The virtual reality pioneers at Oculus may release their new middle-grade VR HMD sometime in first quarter 2019, sources say. With its new headset, Oculus aims to break one of the biggest drawbacks with VR: cumbersome, snaking cords. The headset, codenamed Santa Cruz, will make VR gaming and interacting much more accessible with its wireless functionality.

"Santa Cruz is the future," said Oculus product design engineer Adam Hewko in a 2017 update. "This is what VR should be. I think it's only going to get better as the technology keeps pushing the envelope."

The VR market just got a whole lot more interesting over the last 24 hours, with a new consortium that involves NVIDIA, AMD, Valve, Oculus, and Microsoft introducing the new VirtualLink specification.

VirtualLink is a new open standard for the next generation of VR headsets that will see the entire VR experience powered by a single USB Type-C connector, removing the current need of HDMI and multiple USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports for the HMD, cameras, sensors, and power.

VirtualLink uses a single USB Type-C connector that provide four high-speed HBR3 DisplayPort lanes, something that is future-proof for next-gen VR headsets. There's USB 3.1 data for high-res cameras and sensors, and a huge 27W of power on tap with the new VirtualLink specification.

Magic Leap has finally announced some of the specifications that'll be inside of its upcoming Magic Leap One mixed reality headset.

During a presentation in the last 24 hours, Magic Leap announced that Magic Leap One will be powered with an NVIDIA Tegra TX2 chip with a Pascal-based GPU. NVIDIA's original Tegra TX2 featured two Denver 2.0 cores and four ARM Cortex-A57 cores, but Magic Leap One will feature just a single Denver core, and two 64-bit A57 cores.

Inside, MLO will also pack an NVIDIA Pascal-based GPU with 256 CUDA cores. Magic Leap has said that the GPU in question is capable of pumping out 200,000 to 400,000 polygons on-screen, with the company expecting this number to increase as developers get used to the hardware.

Microsoft seemed keen to push VR into the arms of Xbox gamers, but now it seems they're putting the brakes on any virtual/augmented/mixed reality devices for their Xbox consoles.

Mike Nichols, Microsoft's chief marketing officer of gaming explained in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz: "we don't have any plans specific to Xbox consoles in virtual reality or mixed reality". He continued, saying that the PC is "probably the best platform" for virtual and mixed reality experiences, and that with Xbox "our focus is primarily on experiences you would play on your TV".

If we rewind the clock back to 2016, where Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that the named-at-the-time Project Scorpio console that later became the Xbox One X, would support "high-end VR" like the PC. Microsoft went as far as teaming with Oculus to support Xbox controllers with the Rift, too.

Tonight at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, Qualcomm has debuted their brand new Snapdragon XR1 Platform. This is the world's first dedicated extended reality (XR) platform.

Qualcomm's latest offering gives mainstream users high-quality extended reality experiences while enabling OEMs to develop mainstream devices. Special optimizations for Augmented Reality (AR) experiences as well as integrating artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities will provide devices with better interactivity, power consumption and thermal efficiency.

The focuses of the new platform are to provide improvements in audio and visual technologies, as well as user interaction. Ultra high-definition 4K video resolution at a rate of up to 60 frames per second for high-quality VR HMDs will enable consumers to be immersed in their favorite movies, programs and sports.

Oculus has just unveiled its latest prototype VR headset, something it calls Half Dome. The new headset has an interesting twist in the world of VR HMDs by using varifocal displays.

These new displays move up and down depending on where you're looking in the VR world, with a tease of eye-tracking technology from Oculus in their new Half Dome prototype VR headset. Right now all VR headsets have trouble displaying items close to your eyes in a good way, with these new varifocal displays showing them much sharper and in more clarity.

Oculus has a wider 140-degree field of view compared to the Rift with its smaller 110-degree FOV, which lets you see more at the corners of your eyes in your peripheral vision. Even with all of the new tech on-board, Half Dome is the same physical size and weight of the current Rift headset.

Facebook and Oculus have announced something surprising during their F8 developer conference: Oculus Venues. Oculus Venues is a new app that Oculus made in-house that will handle live sporting events, comedy shows, and concerts that are shot and broadcasted in VR.

Facebook and Oculus partnered up with multiple companies to include content from the likes of NextVR, who have been streaming sporting events with its own partnerships with companies like the NBA, NFL, NHL, and WWE.

NextVR CEO David Cole explains: "Oculus Venues is a bold move to provide profound social VR engagement and we are honored to deliver such an important part of this new product release from Oculus. NextVR has built a passionate fan base around leading VR content experiences. Venues will satisfy our fans who want to enjoy this type of content on a massively social scale".

The rumors of Apple working on their own AR/VR headset have been around for years, but the most exciting rumors of their purported headset have just arrived, teasing dual 8K displays.

CNET is reporting that Apple's purported 'T288' headset rocks dual 8K displays (one 8K display per eye) but unlike Mashable who seem to not know how resolutions and pixels work (they said "Most impressive is the resolution it reportedly packs: an 8K display per eye, for a total resolution of 16K. That would be an insane amount of pixels") it is 'just' 8K per eye (7680 x 4320).

The site reports that Apple's purported headset would "connect to a dedicated box using a high-speed, short-range wireless technology, according to a person familiar with the company's plans. The box, which would be powered by a custom Apple processor more powerful than anything currently available, would act as the brain for the AR/VR headset. In its current state, the box resembles a PC tower, but it won't be an actual Mac computer".