Category: ces 2021

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Panasonic Announces AR HUD For Cars With Situational Awareness

This week at CES, Panasonic announced a new augmented reality heads-up display (HUD) system for cars, which claims to offer many more features than currently available in typical car HUD systems.

Heads-up displays have been available in cars for a number of years now, however in their current form, they tend to be pretty limited in scope. In most situations, they simply offer basic navigation and vehicle information overlaid on a small static display that is projected from the dashboard onto the windscreen, visible only to the driver.

However, Panasonic’s new AR HUD system aims to offer much more, including a larger display and situational awareness of the area in front of and around the car.

According to Panasonic, the new HUD system “projects 3D, AI-driven key information into the driver’s line of sight to help reduce driver distraction and potentially increase safety on the road.” It promises an “expanded field of view” and a system that uses AI to dynamically rearrange the graphics to adjust with the vehicle’s movements.

Panasonic AR Hud Car

Panasonic provided the image embedded above as an illustration, however this may not be fully representative of the look of the final product.

Panasonic claim that sudden changes to the environment, such as a potential collision or a cyclist on the road, can be detected and marked by the system, with environmental information updating in less than 300 milliseconds. It uses a 3D imaging radar to achieve this, with “full 180-degree forward vision up to 90 meters and across approximately three traffic lanes,” alongside eye tracking that will correct for any inconsistencies between the projected HUD image and the driver’s line of sight.

“Panasonic’s AR HUD solutions cover more of the roadway, with traditional cluster content like speed and fuel in the near field as well as 3D overlays in the far field, showing navigation and other critical driver data mapping spatially to the road ahead,” says President of Panasonic Automotive and Executive Director of Panasonic Smart Mobility Scott Kirchner. “And in a future with more self-driving vehicles, our AR HUD could provide an important added level of comfort and assurance for AV passengers as well.”

Would you be interesting in trying out this AR HUD in your car? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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CES 2021 VR: 5 Cool Announcements You May Have Missed

Where were all the CES 2021 VR announcements?

Traditionally the start of the year kicks off in flustered fashion for the tech industry as the world forgets festivities and flocks to Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show. But, like so many events before it, this year’s iteration ended up going all-digital for the first time, making it a much smaller deal than usual.

There were, however, a handful of CES 2021 VR announcements. Below we’ve rounded up five you’ll want to pay attention to.

Panasonic’s Super Slim Refresh

Panasonic VR glasses 2021 CES

One of the coolest things we saw at CES last year was Panasonic’s concept for a super-slim VR viewer. The mad-invention design may not quite be at ‘sunglasses’ level of VR comfort and social acceptability, but it’s a heck of a lot closer than even the Oculus Quest 2. The tradeoff, of course, is that it can’t do as much as Quest 2.

Well, almost as much. The 2021 revision does at least introduce a 6DOF tracking system along with other improvements. Still, without trying that for ourselves we can’t talk about how well it works. Plus we don’t even know if it will ever see a real release, but we certainly hope it’s on the cards.

Nolo’s New Standalone

All-in-One ODM Solution

Chinese VR company Nolo is a CES mainstay, often showing off new tracking solutions and headsets at the event. This year it had a new 6DOF standalone device that builds on its previous offerings.

The unnamed headsets uses SodarTraq ultrasonic positioning technology and Nolo’s own dual-camera SLAM solutions for 6DOF tracking for head and hands. Other info is light right now and we wouldn’t expect this to be a serious competitor in western markets but it was basically the only new VR headset reveal at CES this year.

Reachy The Robot

No, not a CES mascot (although there’s always next year), Reachy the Robot is maybe the cutest and most useful application of VR to spin out of CES this year. It’s a humanoid robot that’s controlled using a Valve Index headset. Move your hands, and Reachy will imitate you. Twist your head and it’ll follow your direction.

It’s an idea we’ve seen before, but Reachy definitely looks like the most appealing iteration yet. It might not have much to do with VR presence and immersion, but it has endless potential for safety and convenience. If only we could get Reachy to run out to the store for us right now, eh?

Sony Making High-End VR Concerts

Sony virtual concert madison beer

The possibility of virtual concerts is one VR’s most promising future prospects, especially at a time when venues are closed and artists are performing in front of webcams, not people. But, broadly speaking, current VR concert solutions are a little lackluster. 360 films don’t capture a sense of presence and most digital recreations can’t hope to replicate the in-person experience.

It seems like Sony is hoping to brute force its way past the problem with a new virtual concert featuring Madison Beer. The upcoming show features meticulous production, with performance capture from Beer herself and a digitally recreated version of New York’s Sony Hall venue. It’s due later this year on PSVR and Oculus platforms.

Nvidia’s 3060 and New Laptops

NVIDIA RTX 3000 Laptops

VR seems to be increasingly moving towards standalone as the dominant format (if it isn’t already there), but Nvidia’s CES 2021 announcements could at least make PC VR more accessible than it’s ever been. Firstly, the company introduced the new 3060 card, which ships in late February, starting at $329. It’s the lowest-end card of the new 3000 series, but is still much faster than the VR-ready 1060 cards from 2016, so should be a good pick for PC VR gaming on a budget.

Also revealed were new laptops sporting variants of the 3000 series. Again, these GPUs won’t be as powerful as top-of-the-range cards like the desktop 3080, but you should get good performance for VR on even the low-end mobile RTX 3060 card, which is 41% faster than Mobile RTX 2060 and roughly on par with Desktop RTX 2060 Super. It’s not cheap, though, as laptops start at $999. The first devices should go on sale later this month.

And that’s it for our list of CES 2021 VR announcements. What did you make of this year’s show? Let us know in the comments below!

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This Humanoid Robot Offers Telepresence With VR And Motion Controllers

Meet Reachy, the humanoid robot that’s controlled via VR with motion controllers to offer telepresence to users from around the globe.

Reachy is a robot in development by Pollen Robotics that can be controlled by a remote user wearing a VR headset and holding motion-tracked controllers. This means that the user’s head movements are mapped to the robot and the user’s hand movements are also 1:1 matched by the robot. We’ve already seen hints of this technology popping up across various industries, including for space flight and surgeries, so it’s great to see it slowly seeping out into more areas.

Going beyond the real-time movement mapping, you could theoretically “teach” a robot how to perform tasks using this method as well. In the video above we see the robot using fine motor skills to place blocks in a bucket based on shape, input time on a microwave, and more.

This type of technology is important because, once the tracking gets really, really good, it functionally allows people to “teleport” their “presence” (ie telepresence) across the world and potentially even into space at some point. In terms of potential, that would allow a top surgeon in the USA to perform an operation on an injured soldier on the front line, or to a robot stationed in a hospital in another country. That’s likely very far away from becoming a reality, but this is one step closer to that.

Uses extend far beyond just medical as well, as there are already experiments to get humanoid-style robots into space craft to help simulate effects on the human body, perform simple tasks, and help alleviate deep space isolation effects.

Reachy from Pollen Robotics is an open-source robotics platform available for research and prototyping, starting at $17,000.