When they are not preparing new lines of virtual reality (VR) ready GPUs with more cores, more processing speed and more raw power than ever before. And when they’re not filing a whole range of VR related trademarks connected to said graphics cards. NVIDIA can still often be found involved in immersive technology on the software side, one way or another.
Primarily that is through acts involving NVIDIA VRWorks, NVIDIA’s development kit for VR devs, which provides a suite of APIs, libraries and engines to enable high-end graphics performance when creating things under the VR umbrella. Their latest update sees, once again, improvements made to their 360 Video SDK which has already gotten companies like STRIVR and Pixvana excited.
“When you experience a situation as if you are actually there, learning retention rates can soar.” Commented Chief Technology Officer of STRIVR, Brian Meek, to NVIDIA’s official blog. “The new Warp 360 will help ensure our customers stay fully immersed, and the functionality and performance that Turing brings to VRWorks can’t be beat.”
The new version 2.0 update accelerates the speed of stitching together 360 degree videos as well as a host of other features that mean recording and streaming in 360 degrees becomes a lot easier. It also adds additional support for NVIDIA CUDA 10 and of course the most recent additions to their GPU line-ups.
Updates include:
Ambisonic Audio – increases the immersiveness of 360-degree videos by enabling 3D, omnidirectional audio such that the perceived direction of sound sources change when viewers modify their orientation.
Custom Region of Interest Stitch – enables adaptive stitching by defining the desired field of view rather than stitching a complete panorama. This enables new use cases such as 180-degree video while reducing execution time and improving performance.
Improved Mono Stitch – increases robustness and improves image quality for equatorial camera rigs. Multi-GPU setups are now supported for up to 2x scaling.
Moveable Seams – manually adjusts the seam location in the region of overlap between two cameras to preserve visual fidelity, particularly when objects are close to the camera.
New Depth-Based Mono Stitch – uses depth-based alignment to improve the stitching quality in scenes with objects close to the camera rig and improves the quality across the region of overlap between two cameras. This option is more computationally intensive than moving the seams, but provides a more robust result with complex content.
Warp 360 – provides highly optimized image warping and distortion removal by converting images between a number of 360 projection formats, including perspective, fisheye and equirectangular. It can transform equirectangular stitched output into a projection format such as cubemap to reduce streaming bandwidth, leading to increased performance.
You can download the latest version of the VRWorks 360 Video SDK here. VRFocus will bring youj more news on the developments in VR hardware and software throughout the day.
Xion is a title inspired by the arcade-style voxel shoot ’em ups of the nineties, that sees you flying your customisable and upgradable spaceship (that you put together by hand) through an array of randomised levels before you come upon some chunky and challenging bosses at the end of each one.
TPCAST have been hard at work on a number of wireless solutions for VR, augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) headsets, but today’s announcement sees the company concentrating on trying to move the capabilities of wireless forward to benefit wireless VR and comes as Huawei continue their 5G Ecosystem Conference.
“This collaboration with TPCAST will help us to support the introduction of 5G-based cloud VR use case to the market. Huawei, through establishing the Middle East 5G ecosystem program, provides the cloud-based use case development platform, and supports the integration and verification of 5G use cases.” Added Vice President of Marketing for Huawei Middle East, Wang Su. “Huawei’s E2E 5G low latency solution and TPCAST’s codec technology will together offer an enhanced experience of VR services. This partnership will promote organizations in the region to seize these new opportunities for growth.”
tional geograBut we don’t deal in reality round here, so we’ll have to make do with a 360 degree video from two names we’re pretty familiar with: Framestore and National Geographic Documentary Films.
Today at Augmented World Expo (AWE) Europe, Upskill followed up that announcement with one about its expansion of the Early Access, previously only available in America, to global customers. As well as confirmed that its version of Skylight AR for mobile will be getting an updated release on an expanded array of mobile devices.
“Our customers see augmented reality as the force multiplier that allows them to fully realize the potential of their workforce and digital investments,” said Ballard at the initial release earlier this month. “Skylight for Microsoft HoloLens will serve as the foundation that delivers the latest advances in visualization, cloud computing and artificial intelligence in a mixed reality environment.”
“The VR Awards is at the centre of recognition and celebration of outstanding achievement in VR.” Says the organisation, “Combined with year-round international initiatives, the VR Awards brings together a night of red carpet highlights, the celebration of excellence and unique access to the world’s most influential names in immersive technology.”
“We have successfully launched three predecessors to MagiMask, and can’t wait to get this new headset out to tech enthusiasts, developers, and anyone else who loves AR as much as we do. Having spent almost two years developing MagiMask and its tracking system, we are now at the manufacturing stage and to ensure an on-time delivery we using our previous manufacturing partners. The money you put into the campaign goes directly toward creating the MagiMask you ordered. We have done all the developmental and technological hard work and are now just getting ready to manufacture.”
The company has already expressed an interest in righting some wrongs in the AR market with existing hardware with their smartphone-based system. While the use of a smartphone as part of the setup might concern some, it seems there will definitely be another headset on the way to users.
Fortunately, there are other options to have some robot battling fun that don’t involve pre-planning a trip to IKEA to replace everything you own. For instance, there is MekaMon a robotic spider you can control, customise and fight with 
“Similarly, our brand new Virtual Meka experience offers augmented reality MekaMon gameplay wherever you are, without the need for your robot. Don’t own a MekaMon yet? Jump in for a quick round just by downloading the official MekaMon companion app to see what all the fuss is about! The Virtual Meka experience offers quick access and short rounds to satisfy your need for cutting edge AR wherever you are. Use your MekaMon robot in our traditional AR mode for the full experience!”
It’s a popular one too, and even established titles are still looking into the possibilities of adding virtual reality (VR) support, as seen earlier this week 
Key changes listed are as follows: