Will we find a way to escape our reality by immersing ourselves in virtual reality?
Category: virtual reality – Page 37
The risks and rewards of investing in the metaverse real estate boom
There’s a land rush happening — and it’s not in New York City or Beverly Hills.
Early speculators, professional real estate agents, and celebrities are buying up land that doesn’t even exist in the real world. They are investing in metaverse real estate, a concept mind-boggling to most people.
So, what exactly is the metaverse? Technologists say the metaverse is the next level of the internet. It’s a virtual reality platform where people can play games, connect with friends, attend meetings, and even go to virtual concerts. Ever since Facebook announced it would change its name to Meta and focus on building its own digital world, interest in metaverse real estate skyrocketed.
Report: Microsoft HoloLens 3 is dead as its mixed-reality vision implodes
A report by Business Insider says Microsoft has scrapped plans for its own HoloLens 3 and has instead partnered with Samsung—but that no one really knows what’s going on.
Microsoft has reportedly scrapped its third-generation HoloLens, leaving the company’s “metaverse” plans in disarray.
According to a report from Business Insider, Microsoft killed off the HoloLens 3 in 2021, shifting to a planned device with Samsung instead. The problem? According to the publication, the company’s mixed-reality/augmented reality/virtual-reality division isn’t sure what it plans to do. That’s resulted in employees leaving for Meta and other companies instead.
The company told BI that it remains committed to HoloLens and future HoloLens development. It said the same to PCWorld in a statement. “Microsoft HoloLens remains a critical part of our plans for emerging categories like mixed reality and the metaverse,” the company said. “We remain committed to HoloLens and future HoloLens development.”
Pluto VR debuts tech that lets you stream virtual reality to a headset without a computer
Seattle-based software company Pluto VR has brought its virtual reality streaming platform PlutoSphere into Early Access.
Initially announced in February 2021, PlutoSphere allows its users to stream VR applications to a headset without the need for a local computer, in order to dramatically reduce the cost of entry for virtual reality. Instead of building a new rig around VR compatibility, you can theoretically just get a headset, then run everything from every library you own via data streaming.
PlutoSphere is currently compatible with the Oculus Quest and Quest 2, with plans to support other headsets and mobile devices in the future. It also requires a 5 Ghz WiFi 6 Internet connection, 50 Mbps of bandwidth, a Steam account, and less than 100ms ping to an Amazon Web Services region.
Apple Embraces VR: Every Virtual Reality Announcement From the WWDC 2017 Keynote
At Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference today, the company made a major shift in their embrace of virtual reality with several new VR announcements during the event’s opening keynote.
Though well loved, Apple’s computer lineup got somewhat left in the dust at the launch of the Rift and Vive, both of which had hardware requirements that exceeded what Apple had on offer. To that end, the company largely steered clear of talking about VR publicly.
Today marks a major shift in Apple’s public support for virtual reality. VR was a recurrent theme throughout the keynote today, highlighting their belief in the importance of the medium. Here’s an overview of everything they announced:
Wearable Synthetic Skin for Virtual Reality
Parents Use AI To See One Last Message From Their Deceased Son ‘…what’s to keep me from showing face, Man?’
Feel Virtual Reality In Mid-Air! ‘…a pressure on the lips — warm and soft, moist and sweet.’ — Frederick Pohl, 1965.
Via Virtual Reality, Mother Encounters Deceased Daughter ‘But that barrier was going to melt away someday soon. The transhumanists had promised…’ — Stephen Baxter, 2008.
Sword Art Online-inspired VR Headset Cancelled Due to Niche Appeal, Manufacturing Issues
The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox.
Diver-X announced that it’s pulling the plug on HalfDive, announcing that all backers would not be charged for funds collected.
The company mentions three major concerns, which essentially boil down to its niche appeal, inability to reduce costs by producing major components in-house, and resultant cash flow issues due to scalability issues. You can read the full text in the company’s blog post.
“We were faced with the brutal reality that no matter how optimized and multifunctional our device may be for use in sleeping-posture, it is only a replacement of existing VR devices and not yet an interface that brings innovative experiences,” Diver-X says.
Building The Metaverse
The talk about metaverse really went ballistic after Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the Facebook Connect event touted the metaverse as the social networking future. But most of the talk is not really about the true metaverse as envisioned in science fiction and first described in in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk science fiction novel Snow Crash. A true metaverse needs to be an interconnected “Internet” of virtual spaces that are open to many different companies, not a walled garden. It will take an open platform offering access to a shared virtual space to create the true metaverse. And it will also require a level of standardization and interoperability that doesn’t exist today.
In Snow Crash, the Metaverse was a phrase coined by as a successor to the Internet. It was a vision of how a virtual-reality-based Internet might evolve and was heavily influenced by early video games. This version of the metaverse resembles a persistent massive multiplayer online game (MMO). Players would have user-controlled avatars, and there were a social hierarchy, but there was pervasive access and a global scale.
The closest we came to open 3D interoperability was VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) back in the 1990s. The HTML approach to creating a metaverse using the VRML standard attempted to create a virtual 3D markup language that could be used to create and link 3D spaces together into one that you could access through a VRML browser. It failed.