Lifeboat Foundation

Oculus Quests a re some of the best wireless VR headsets you can buy. But they can’t run high-end games like those found in the Steam Store. You can connect to a PC with a cable, but that’s inconvenient. Wirelessly streaming VR games required jumping through hoops with using developer mode and SideQuest. But with the $20 Virtual Desktop app, that’s not the case anymore.

Virtual Desktop always had the capability to wirelessly stream SteamVR games, in truth. You could install the streaming app on your PC and then your Oculus Quest VR headset, and as far as the app was concerned, you would have been good to go. But Oculus prevented the app from streaming VR games and limited it to just controlling your PC in a VR environment. It did so in the name of customer experience.

Enter the cow matrix.

Meta’s much-anticipated virtual reality project Metaverse is expected to be the beginning of a whole new era. And while we are excited for all the opportunities this new virtual world might offer us, not all uses of VR are meant for humans.

You might remember our previous coverage about Russian cows that are fitted with VR goggles. These VR headsets were claimed to help cows relax by offering them sun-filled views of green pastures so that the animals would be happier and produce more milk.

The immersive tech could eventually allow park visitors to interact with Mickey Mouse and Elsa as images, not cast members in costume.

Disney is joining the metaverse party.

We aren’t talking online gigs or business meetings with avatars. Disney wants to enhance the virtual dimension of its theme parks with its Virtual World Simulator, new technology for which it was granted a patent in the U.S. on December 28.

Continue reading “Disney Patents Virtual World Simulator That Doesn’t Require Headsets, Goggles, Or Smartphones” »

Nreal is a China-based startup behind the Nreal Light AR glasses, which aim for a sunglasses-like design. By hooking it up to your (Android) phone, it’s able to project virtual objects in your real environment and even allow you to walk around with position tracking. While we’re not quite there yet, I think the Nreal Light is definitely getting us closer to fully fledged AR glasses.

Continue reading “Hands-on with Nreal Light, One of the First Consumer-available AR Glasses” »

Schell Games today announced that Lost Recipes, its upcoming historical cooking sim, is set to release January 27th on the Quest platform, bringing with it the chance to cook ancient recipes in period accurate kitchens from around the world.

Arriving from the VR veterans known for I Expect You to Die, Until You Fall, and the upcoming VR adaptation of Among Us, Lost Recipes throws you into a time portal to recreate dishes from centuries past.

Continue reading “Historical Cooking Sim ‘Lost Recipes’ Coming to Quest January 27th” »

Of course, a minimum level of fidelity is required, but what’s far more important is perceptual consistency. By this, I mean that all sensory signals (i.e. sight, sound, touch, and motion) feed a single mental model of the world within your brain. With augmented reality, this can be achieved with relatively low visual fidelity, as long as virtual elements are spatially and temporally registered to your surroundings in a convincing way. And because our sense of distance (i.e. depth perception) is relatively coarse, it’s not hard for this to be convincing.

But for virtual reality, providing a unified sensory model of the world is much harder. This might sound surprising because it’s far easier for VR hardware to provide high-fidelity visuals without lag or distortion. But unless you’re using elaborate and impractical hardware, your body will be sitting or standing still while most virtual experiences involve motion. This inconsistency forces your brain to build and maintain two separate models of your world — one for your real surroundings and one for the virtual world that is presented in your headset.

When I tell people this, they often push back, forgetting that regardless of what’s happening in their headset, their brain still maintains a model of their body sitting on their chair, facing a particular direction in a particular room, with their feet touching the floor (etc.). Because of this perceptual inconsistency, your brain is forced to maintain two mental models. There are ways to reduce the effect, but it’s only when you merge real and virtual worlds into a single consistent experience (i.e. foster a unified mental model) that this truly gets solved.

(Pocket-lint) — Panasonic has been working on VR glasses for a while. Originally revealing its future offerings back in 2020. Now we have a proper device in the form of the MeganeX.

At this year’s CES, the company has shown off a tiny pair of compact VR goggles designed to work with SteamVR. These VR goggles use MicroOLED technology capable of delivering 2,560x2,560 pixels per eye with a 120Hz refresh rate and 10-bit HDR.

It’s also building chips for Microsoft’s AR glasses.

At the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) currently taking place in Las Vegas, chip maker Qualcomm’s CEO Cristiano Amon announced several key new initiatives.

Continue reading “Qualcomm Unveils Gambit to Build ‘Digital Chassis’ for Self-Driving Cars” »

Meta announced a slate of big name virtual reality concerts set to take place entirely in the metaverse last month — and nobody seemed to notice.