The unholy, skinless, bloody creatures shambled toward me on all sides. My pistol was pitifully inadequate. For the first time ever, I pulled a VR rig off my head in the middle of a demo.
Not even extreme nausea had caused me to do so before Thursday, when I demoed the HTC Vive game The Brookhaven Experiment at Valve Software’s booth at the 2016 Game Developers Conference. I’d always choked down the bile and forced myself to finish the demo rather than bail, even though this is almost always a bad decision. Call it stupid gamer pride.
The Brookhaven Experiment is what happens when Resident Evil is ported into VR. I had known in advance that I was about to play a survival horror game. I had not known that this would result in my actually fearing for my life, because it was the first survival horror game I’d played on the Vive.
Augmented and Virtual Reality are two areas that tech companies and IT shops can make huge impacts in multiple areas. Enterprise Apps and Services such as with ERP & CRM solutions, Content & Media Management, BI, Security, Testing, Training, etc. List just goes on and on. For Consumers it is everything from theme parks, to movies, to home theaters & streaming TV/ Videos, etc. The real question who will get there 1st on the enterprise apps & services piece as well as who has the most to offer in all areas?
Another concept to think about is how can VR be leveraged in security screening and identity management more as well as leveraged more in electronic currency and transactions in the near future.
Growing numbers of manufacturing professionals in the automotive space are embracing augmented-reality technology, leveraging powerful new tools to optimize efficiency and minimize mistakes.
As automotive manufacturers understand all too well, the pressures applied by an increasingly competitive marketplace create extreme and at times competing demands for safety, quality, consistency and efficiency.
MasterCard is bringing the future of commerce to life with virtual and augmented reality commerce experiences and payment enabled wearables at the. Arnold Palmer Invitational Presented by MasterCard (API) in Orlando, FL. Soon, golf fans may be able to shop for Graeme McDowell’s equipment and G-Mac apparel, while teeing off with him on a virtual fairway. Or, while out on the course, golfers might simply tap their golf glove at the point-of-sale to buy refreshments from the beverage cart—no wallet required.
Directed by Carl Loeffler, The Networked Virtual Art Museum was a pioneering project that investigated telecommunications and virtual reality, and provided a basis for multiple users located in distant geographical locations to be conjoined in the same virtual, immersion environment. The project employed telecommunication hardware, as well as the hardware associated with virtual reality: data eyephones and multi-directional navigation devices. The immersion environment was an art museum with galleries offering various exhibitions.
Considered as a whole, the project was on the advancing edge of telecommunications thru the exploration of immersion environments, networked over long distance, while supporting multiple users. The use of agents, and the articulation of physics and other details like reflective mirrors, places the project at the forefront of the design of virtual worlds. The Networked Virtual Art Museum utilized the WorldToolKit, a virtual world development software, that was available from Sense8 Corporation. The Virtual Research head mounted display, and the Ascension Technology 6-D mouse (The Bird), and 486/50 compatible with DVI and MIDI comprised the basic system hardware.
A few weeks ago DJI unveiled its newest drone, the Phantom 4, the first craft to offer robust obstacle avoidance at a price the average consumer can afford. It relied on computer vision to power its autonomous flight, and since DJI had shown off this kind of tech before, we assumed that all the hardware on the Phantom 4 was homegrown, or backed by a giant like Intel. But today the chipmaker Movidius announced that its latest offer, the Myriad 2, was at the center of the onboard processor powering the Phantom 4’s incredible new abilities.
As it turns out this isn’t the first time Movidius has partnered with a big name to develop cutting edge technology. Back in 2014 its first chip, the Myriad 1, was revealed as the brains inside of Google’s first generation of Project Tango tablets. After a decade toiling in relative obscurity, the small 125 person company is suddenly poised to emerge as a leader at the intersection of several major markets — from drones to phones to virtual reality — which are looking for ways to enable cheap, power-efficient computer vision.
“The company was founded in late 2005, so we’ve had a long gestation,” says CEO Remi El-Ouazzane with a laugh. In its early years it found some business converting old movies into 3D, helping to shore up content offerings for the 3D TV market that never took off. In 2010 its chips were put to use as an engine for 3D rendering, but it was competing with plenty of established chip makers in that market. It wasn’t until 2013, and its partnership with Tango, that the company realized how widespread the application of computer vision could be, and focused in on optimizing for what it believed would be the next wave of devices.
Chipset maker Qualcomm Technologies has introduced a virtual reality (VR) software development kit (SDK) targeting VR-capable Android smartphone and headset makers.
The Snapdragon VR SDK offers access to optimized VR features, to simplify development and to help developers with attain improved VR performance and power efficiency with the Snapdragon 820 for Android smartphones and upcoming VR headsets.
Qualcomm will be offering the SDK in the second quarter of 2016 through the Qualcomm Developer Network.
