Liveblog: GTC 2018 – ‘Extreme Multi-View Rendering for Light-Field Displays’

VRFocus is once again providing liveblog coverage of sessions (where we can) at this year’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) hosted by NVIDIA in San Jose California.  At GTC we’re expecting a number of sessions that will be touching on the fields of virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and also how mixed reality (MR) and related technologies might fit into the creative mix of both the present and future.

Next up, Thomas Burnett CTO of FoVI3D takes to the stage.  “A light-field display projects a 3D aerial scene that is visible to the unaided eye without glasses or head tracking and allows for the perspective correct visualization of the scene within the display’s projection volume. The light-field display computes a synthetic radiance image from a 3D scene/model and projects the radiance image through a lens system to construct the 3D aerial scene. Binocular disparity, occlusion, specular highlights, gradient shading, and other expected depth cues are correct from the viewer’s perspective as in the natural real-world light-field. There are a few processes for generating the synthetic radiance image; the difference between the two most common rasterization approaches is the order in which they decompose the 4D light-field (two dimensions of position, two dimensions of direction) into 2D rendering passes. This talk will describe Double Frustum and Oblique Slice and Dice synthetic radiance image rendering algorithms and their effective use for wide-area light-field displays.”

Your liveblogger for the event is Kevin Joyce.

Sensics, uSens & More Namechecked as Future Industry Leaders By ABI Research

The leaders of tomorrow are the innovators of today. If you can predict just who that would be well, then you can ‘get in’ on the ground floor with investment and reap the benefits of your foresight financially. It’s a common thing to do, as, after all, financial traders do just that. As such research on markets is particularly valuable to companies and there are a number of different firms who specialise in data analysis working within and around the technology market. It’s all why you see so many stories relating research and market predictions throughout the year.

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What is somewhat more unusual in these stories is for one of these research firms to actively name-check specific companies as ones to watch out for. However, that’s what one – ABI Research – has done in their latest press release. The consultancy company, a 25 year veteran of the tech arena have focused in their latest report on companies to watch in both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) tech spaces.

Fovi3D, Meta, and Sensics, the latter of which has featured several times on VRFocus in the past. With the last instance connected to OSVR’s receipt of official Steam support back in November last year. Other names include Eonite Perception, Occipital, and uSens – another familiar name to regular VRFocus readers – with those companies invested in markets adjacent to AR and VR that will make the most traction. Machine vision companies being specifically highlighted. ABI Research also sees a time ahead where the named companies could help bolster the development of mixed reality (MR) to a point where it impacts the development of AR.

“Machine vision is the driver behind advanced mobile AR solutions, particularly in education and marketing, and will define the future success of mixed reality solutions in enterprise. The development and evolution of user input technologies is key as AR and MR markets grow, as the technologies will support accurate and intuitive hands-free interaction as implementations within the workplace become more commonplace.” Explains Shelli Bernard, a Research Analyst at ABI Research. “As vendors work to improve their AR and VR solutions, innovations through adjacent and enabling technologies will spur future market development. The push to implement MR, as evident in work from companies like Microsoft, remains the goal for the clear majority of enterprise implementations due to its ability to offer the immersion of VR with the safety and convenience of AR solutions.”

The release also mentions the prediction that AR will overtake VR in 2019, comprising a 53% majority of a combined $57 Billion (USD) head-mounted display (HMD) market. It expects shipments of HMDs to reach 37 million by next year.

VRFocus will bring you more information on future market reports as they become available.