Extended Reality (XR) - Page 67

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."

The Texas A&M University Viz Lab, focused on visualization, wants to find ways to bring virtual reality to mainstream consumers in a number of different ways. It hopes recent graduates of the program will create new solutions so casual consumers can begin enjoying - and embracing - VR on a larger scale.

Specifically, a post-grad from the program has taken VR a step further after founding a startup in San Francisco focused on creating a mobile app that allows for VR movie captures using their devices. The content can then be shared so others are able to use a virtual reality head-mounted display or smartphone.

"It's the first medium we're attacking because I want us to be the Instagram of virtual reality," said Chris Wheeler, co-founder of Emergent VR, in a statement published by The Eagle. "It's enabling anyone to capture moments from their lives... and share that with your social network."

Lockheed Marting has been developing the F-35 fighter jet for what feels like forever, but it could be the helmet that the F-35 Lighting II pilots will be wearing is the most interesting part of the fighter jet.

The helmet itself costs a huge $400,000, with teh fighter jet itself being one of the "most complicated weapons systems ever developed" reports The Washington Post. The helmet allows the pilot to see through the plane, so that when they look down, instead of seeing the floor of the F-35, they see the ground beneath them. If they turn around, they'll see the sky or the enemy flying behind them.

This is all thanks to the F-35 having six cameras embedded into the skin of the aircraft, so that when the pilot turns their head in a particular direction, they're actually just looking through that camera. The camera captures the imagery, blasting it to the projector inside of the headset. The helmet is pretty much a glorified augmented reality headset, allowing F-35 pilots to see things on the ground that they would not normally see, or would have to fly past and turn back around to get a better view.

Hardware powering virtual reality head-mounted displays (HMDs) is accelerating, but consumers are looking for an enjoyable VR experience to embrace. That "killer experience" is more than just a series of apps that draw attention, according to a specialist from the Sony PlayStation Magic Lab.

"It could be anywhere. It could be a virtual space, or a real place that's here on Earth," said Richard Marks, director of the Project Morpheus for Sony, in a statement to CNBC's "Squawk Alley." "Everyone would like to visit somewhere else, whether it be Mars or Hogwarts, and just feeling like you're standing in a place like that is really the killer experience."

VR hardware is improving with better presence - and latency times are getting better - with huge potential for gaming and other markets. It may not just be gaming and movies, as VR provides more realistic simulators and training experiences for the workplace. Once software development matures, there is huge potential in the consumer and business industries.

Although this video is currently sitting at 10.6 million views, many technology and 3D-printing enthusiasts still haven't discovered or thought about the possibilities ranging around developing weapons out of their newly-found printing machines.

VICE talked to Cody R Wilson two years ago and looked at his life surrounding 3D-printing of weapons conducted out of his own home. This 25 year old Texas law student lists himself as an advocate for 3D-printed weapons with this documentary covering the making and firing of a real-life 3d-printed rifle.

Are you against 3D-printed weaponry of some or all kinds, or is it something you encourage and support? Let us know in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

Smartphone company HTC wants to continue its expansion away from just smartphone hardware, and the Vive head-mounted display (HMD) is an important next step. Partnering with Valve gives HTC the chance to build trust among hardcore gamers, and the experiment will begin soon. Vive is expected to be released before the end of 2015.

The room scale experience, full-room virtual reality, is something that HTC and Valve hope is great for gamers.

"We look at it similar to the way we looked at smartphones in the late 90s - as really, the future," said Jason Mackenzie, president of HTC America, when speaking of the HTC Vive. "Gaming is where it will start. Plenty of application for that right away. As soon as you experience it, you will see how it can change the world of education, travel, real estate. There are so many different vehicles."

VR is a hot topic right now, with Impression Pi hitting Kickstarter with a funding goal of $78,000 and bursting through it in just four days. At the time of writing, they have $145,000 raised with 37 more days to go.

Impression Pi sees a slew of technologies built into the VR headset, with the mobile VR HMD featuring 3D gesture input, position tracking and AR overlays. It features custom-designed sensing hardware, computing unit and advanced algorithms. The 3D gesture control side of things collects the image of your hands and their movement, and generates 3D gesture modelling. From there, you have full gesture control for mobile VR devices.

The position tracking will see the Impression Pi using "unique techniques" designed to track your head position, inside-out. The AR overlay will use its dual camera module to capture everything around you, overlaying this with VR images and virtual objects. This includes collision detection capabilities, and a warning-based obstacle system when it detects objects in the real environment.

We really don't know when to expect the Consumer Version 1 (CV1) of the Oculus Rift, but according to Facebook, we should expect the Facebook-owned company to release the first retail Oculus Rift headset later this year.

The news is coming from Facebook's annual F8 developers conference, where Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said that the social network is working on VR, and showed off a space shooter game. He said: "You're going to be able to play incredible games in VR later this year". Schroepfer also added that Facebook wants to bring people together with VR, where he said that in around ten years you'll be able to join your friends and family in birthday celebration by "being there" in VR.

The Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) platform has partnered with more than 20 research institutions and universities for its OSVR Academia program. As part of the initiative, OSVR Academia provides hardware development kits and support to universities, so they are able to develop VR-based software.

Universities and research institutions include facilities in the United States, UK, Canada, Italy, Poland, Spain, Germany and Austria - with US institutions including Johns Hopkins University, University of North Carolina, and Virginia Tech.

"OSVR is an important piece of the emerging consumer VR ecosystem," said Eric Hodgson, director of the Smale Interactive Visualization Center at Miami University. "The ability to make so many devices and software interfaces standardized, interoperable, compatible, and interchangeable has the potential to change the way people interact with their hardware and software."

It seems like a given, but NVIDIA is preparing another VGA card for release in the very near future: the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. The GTX 980 Ti would be a cut down version of the GM200-powered Titan X, with 6GB framebuffer and it'll be around 10% faster than Titan X, too.

According to SweClockers the new GeForce GTX 980 Ti would be the flagship card that NVIDIA will push, versus the Titan X. One of the reason this is, in my opinion, is that the new GTX 980 Ti can have add-in-board (AIB) partners play with the PCB and cooling setup, something that can't be done on the Titan X.

This will allow for some huge overclocks on the GTX 980 Ti, and some very exotic cooling setups. We should expect NVIDIA to unveil the GeForce GTX 980 Ti sometime in the second half of the year, after AMD launch its Radeon R9 390X.

Leap Motion has teamed up with Razer for its OSVR headsets, where it will supply its motion-tracking technology directly into the Open Source Virtual Reality headset.

Razer's upcoming Hacker Development Kit (HDK) headset for OSVR will be made available later this year, where developers will have the option of buying one with the faceplate that feature's Leap Motion's gesture-tracking hardware and software baked inside. Developers who opt for this will receive a bundle that includes the ability to create apps and experiences that will use Leap Motion's hand-tracking technology.

Leap Motion's CEO, Michael Buckwald, has said that this partnership is just the first it will have with VR headset makers. Buckwald was coy on which other partners it is working with, but teased that Leap Motion's long-term goal is to have their technology in as many of the leading VR headsets as possible. Buckwald said: "The peripheral [the Leap Motion controller as a standalone device] is still our biggest business but VR is our priority now. We can be in at the ground floor and help shape what it means to have input and help shape what the [VR] operating systems look like".

After a few delays, Project Cars is nearly here and it is shaping up beautifully. During an interview with Daily Star, the studio talked about the crowdfunded game being one of the best car simulators ever created.

Andy Tudor from Slightly Mad Studios said that the game is pretty much already a success, as it's "the first AAA title to ever be crowd-funded, a racing game that's being considered a contender in the same sentence as Forza and Gran Turismo, one of the first titles to be publicly shown running at 4K resolution, the premium racing experience on Oculus Rift, the most beautiful and technically-advanced racing game on the planet, and one that's captured the imaginations of gamers, media, real drivers, and motorsports fans around the world".

He continued, adding: "The concept of releasing a game and moving on are long gone. Project CARS both from a technology and design standpoint are built for the future, so expect to see A LOT of content coming out for the game on a regular basis long after launch. We'll have more info on this soon but looking at what Destiny is doing is a good starting point ;-)".

Former Epic Games president Mike Capps is hesitant to believe virtual reality is going to find its way to a widespread audience, as the technology must overcome numerous hurdles. The first issue is price of VR headsets, as there are only a few different models currently available for consumers to choose from.

"There's so little tolerance at the consumer level for that kind of an investment," Capps said during the GamesIndustry International. "And I like one of the things I'm most curious about - you look at 3DTV as a super easy-to-use technology that is really unfettered. Just a pair of polarized glasses and people didn't use it because it wasn't worth the trouble."

Another issue is that the headsets might provide an environment that is too immersive, distracting users from other activities.

GTC 2015 - One of the things we didn't quite have the time to talk about yesterday was the 3D Memory and HBM 2.0 side of the upcoming Pascal architecture form NVIDIA. This architecture should find itself onto a new VGA card sometime in 2016, rocking a huge 32GB of VRAM.

NVIDIA briefed the crowd at its GPU Technology Conference here in San Jose, California where they displayed a slide with the amount of VRAM per GPU architecture. We can see that Kepler in 2012, which the last flagship card based on Kepler was the GeForce GTX 780 and GTX Titan Black featuring 3GB and 6GB of RAM respectively, while the Maxwell architecture provides between 4GB (on the GTX 980) and 12GB (on the GTX Titan X) respectively. The slide teases that Pascal will feature 32GB of RAM, and Volta will rock up to 72GB of RAM in 2018.

The way NVIDIA will do this is thanks to SK Hynix's High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) which allows for four-layer stacks, which is also known as 4-Hi. This will come in 1GB and 2GB varieties, but eight-layer stacks will eventually arrive, which should see a huge increase in the amount of framebuffer on the next generation of GPUs.

Microsoft started 2015 with a bang, announcing its HoloLens augmented reality headset - providing wearers the chance to enjoy their physical world blended with digital features.

There is great potential for HoloLens to be used for gaming, entertainment, workplace functionality, and many other uses - but some have wondered if Microsoft planned to focus on AR and ignore the rising popularity of VR.

"I don't think we've locked ourselves out [of virtual reality]," said Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, in a statement to Eurogamer. "We've looked at a mixed reality space that we could do with HoloLens and think about it as a unique set of features and technologies to enable, that doesn't preclude us from doing anything in the VR space either from a first-party or partnership prospective. I've used Morpheus, I've used Oculus, I'm going to see more of the demos here."

After being the only one talking the VR industry seriously, Oculus VR might not be the first to the market with a serious VR device with its Rift. Company founder and brainiac Palmer Luckey has talked about the launch of the consumer version of the Rift at SXSW 2015, where he had some interesting things to say.

He was asked if Oculus plan to launch their consumer VR headset this year, but he didn't reveal any dates. Luckey didn't state that anything had gone wrong with the Rift, but he did say that the Facebook-owned giant has changed its roadmap and that they're having to ramp up target quality for CV1.

Luckey said: "I did say that, before we made a lot of changes to our roadmap, including ramping up the target quality level of the consumer device and partnering with Facebook. I cannot comment on the date one way or the other, but I can say nothing is going horribly wrong. Everything is going horribly right".

VR is a super-hot thing right now, but Crytek hasn't made much noise on the wearable gaming world just yet. Until now. Crytek's Managing Director, Faruk Yerli, has now talked about Crytek entering the VR world.

Yerli said: "We are exploring VR right now. We want to show the world true VR experience can only come from CryEngine, the best one. We see VR as an important device for enthusiasts, then going to mainstream probably. We want to elevate what we can do here... we hope to one day deliver a fully-fleshed VR experience".

Yerli talked about the challenges of delivering VR to a wide audience, with the obvious physical limitations "in terms of what gameplay actions you can do". When it comes to motion sickness, Yerli added that Crytek has "already found solutions" for it. Yerli added that CryEngine is capable of using AMD's new LiquidVR technology "directly out of the box" in order to usher in lower latency in multiple GPU systems.

It looks like Facebook is ramping up to the hopefully absolutely gigantic launch of the Oculus Rift CV1 (Consumer Version 1), with the social network reportedly going on a huge hiring spree. Facebook is hiring over 1200 new employees, which would see its global workforce increase by a large 14%.

Facebook acquired Oculus VR this time last year for $2 billion and has since collaborated with the company on its VR HMDs, but until now it hasn't made Oculus change anything at its core. Even to this day, Oculus still operates virtually separately to Facebook, but enjoying Facebook's deep pockets for acquiring talent, companies and I'm sure, getting contracts signed for displays, and other parts that will go into the first consumer version of the Rift.

This huge hiring spree is great news for the Oculus Rift, as Facebook is looking to secure logistics managers that will work their magic on the global supply chain. Facebook's Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, has said: "We are an ambitious company run by an ambitious CEO. Our users are growing and our business is growing and we want to support that".