Category: hardware

Posted on

ODG Opens Preorders For Their Hazard Certified AR Glasses

ODG Opens Preorders For Their Hazard Certified AR Glasses

Founded in 1999, the ODG (Osterhout Design Group) has thrived as a tech incubator specializing in high-performance electronics in a small form factor. Today they build mobile wearable tech and products for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. ODG previously brought their augmented R-7 smart glasses to market featuring 64gb of storage, Bluetooth functionality, and even an HD camera all running on a custom operating system built on Android Kit-Kat.

Now, they’ve announced a “hazardous location” version of the R-7 that will bring some added productivity and efficiency to more dangerous work environments.

The R-7HL is a powerful piece of tech that brings wearable mobility and power to those involved in mining, chemical production, oil production and exploration, energy, and utilities. The smart glasses include all of the functionality of the original R-7, a device in which 50% of its market consisted of workers in harsh environments. The certification for the R-7HL, called HAZLOC, tests criteria surrounding dust, shock, vibration, splash, temperature, and pressure extremes.

“As with the smartphone, the demand is there for robust and rugged devices that can aid productivity, but the benefit with smart glasses is that your hands are free and your head is up, bringing even greater efficiencies and safety protection,” said Mike Jude, Ph.D., Research Manager for Frost & Sullivan in an excerpt from ODG’s press release for the announcement. “We have had the opportunity to review the ODG R-7 and were very impressed with its capabilities.  The new R-7HL offers the R-7’s capabilities in a new hardened package perfect for extreme environments. ODG’s heritage in the space, and existing customer relationships, positions them well for continued success in bringing real value to the enterprise.”

Starting today, the R-7HL costs $3,500 and can be preordered now by submitting a form to ODG detailing your use for the product. It will begin shipping by the end of the 2nd quarter of 2017.

Tagged with: , ,

Posted on

The CaptoGlove Is A VR Hand Controller Already Funded On Kickstarter

The CaptoGlove Is A VR Hand Controller Already Funded On Kickstarter

Whether by haptic claws or well-designed VR controllers like the Oculus Touch, there’s a mission to bring an intricate level of control to VR involving natural interaction with our hands. Since kids, we’ve emulated different devices with our hands like making a gun for cops and robber with index finger and thumb extended from a fist. The CaptoGlove, a wearable piece of tech fully funded on Kickstarter, is taking that idea and bringing gesture-based gaming and computing to life.

The glove itself includes multiple sensors and connects to other hardware wirelessly via Bluetooth 4.0. With it, players are able able to swing, aim, and fire weapons, pilot vehicles, and more with intuitive gestures. The glove also has capacitive ends for the index and thumb so you can manipulate touch screens without having to remove it. With all of these things, it also is said to offer up to 10 hours of continuous play time. There are already quite a few meant to show off the glove in action, most of them involving first-person shooters. There are a few other intriguing demos as well, like using the glove in a handle-bar fashion to steer a speeder bike in Star Wars Battlefront or swiping through menus on your cell phone by just doing a swipe gesture with the glove-equipped hand.

As designed, the CaptoGlove is going to work with old and future games out of the box and include multiple preset control options while remaining fully customizable. It will also work with every VR headset on the market, which is where the device will likely be most impactful. The Vive and Rift have solid controllers, but the CaptoGlove would be a welcome wearable that boosts the immersion of the growing number of virtual experiences.

The CaptoGlove still has more than two weeks left for its funding campaign at the time of this writing, but it has already reached its $50,000 goal. The glove is expected to retail for $250 but promised for $160 via Kickstarter via an early bird special.

Tagged with:

Posted on

HTC Sells Out Initial Batch Of Vive Trackers

vive tracker

HTC sold out its initial batch of Vive Trackers, which are currently geared toward developers so they can prepare VR software and hardware accessories.

The $100 unit can be tracked throughout a room by the same technology pioneered at Valve Software and used with the HTC Vive headset. The Tracker is a small lightweight gadget meant to be mounted to a coming wave of accessories like guns, phones, gloves, cameras and a whole lot more. The real-life object is matched to visuals in VR that end up making a virtual world feel more immersive.

The unit went on sale last week and quickly sold out, with the company still accepting new orders or future batches. An HTC spokesperson declined to share how many were sold in the initial batch, and said the company is “working hard to get more stock quickly.” The spokesperson said more information on availability would be coming soon.

The 1-year anniversary of the Vive going on sale is coming up this week and HTC will soon be expanding its ecosystem with the Tracker as well as a $100 audio strap that integrates headphones into the headband much like the Rift. Also, one of the startups funded through the Vive X program, TPCast, said it would ship in April an accessory to Chinese customers that would make the headset wireless.

The Tracker accessories should enhance both arcades and home experiences and we can’t wait to see what clever ideas developers come up with for the hardware.

Tagged with:

Posted on

Testing the Future of AR Optics with Avegant Light Fields

Testing the Future of AR Optics with Avegant Light Fields

UploadVR paid a visit to the Avegant offices in California last week to try out its prototype light field display.

Avegant is best known in the VR/AR scene right now as the creators of the Glyph — a headset that puts users inside their own virtual movie theater. The Glyph arrived at an awkward stage for immersive tech and was quickly overshadowed by full VR headsets from Oculus, HTC and Sony.

Since releasing the Glyph, Avegant has been relatively quiet. Now, however, the company seems prepared to move into pioneering display technologies for augmented reality devices.

The term Avegant uses for its prototype displays is “light field,” which is a bit of a buzzword in the industry. As defined by Edward Tang, Avegant’s co-founder and CTO, a light field is “multiple planes of light coming into your eyes that can create what you would normally see in real life.”

Avegant is far from the first company to theorize and attempt to execute this sort of optic, but they are angling to be the best at its creation and distribution. According to Tang, Avegant is working on ways to make light field displays not only functional, but affordable as well. Tang thinks that widespread commercial AR will be a total “non-starter” without light fields and hopes that, by making the technology affordable, Avegant can help fast track AR’s path to commercial maturity.

During our demo at Avegant the actual tracking of the headset (done with external motion cameras throughout the room) was not emphasized. It was clear that Avegant was prioritizing one thing over every other: the display.

All the regular AR problems persisted in the Avegant demo including a restricted field of view and sub-optimal-positional tracking. However, the display itself was transformative. True to its word, Avegant has created a display capable of rendering multiple planes of focus with freakishly high resolution.

Photographers understand something called “depth-of-field” and so do your eyes. Essentially this is the realization that not all objects in an image should be in full focus at any given time. Your eyes are naturally able to focus on closer objects while blurring out others and standard VR experiences can mimic this somewhat using software. Avegant’s solution, however, aims to create true depth-of-field for AR. Its light field displays allow your eye to switch focus on multiple virtual objects via a hardware solution, not a software illusion.

I could feel my eyes working to refocus as I switched my attention between objects during my demo. That alone is a significant breakthrough for creating realism in augmented reality.

Tang describes what we saw as an “optics prototype only,” one that is only meant to show what Avegant’s new displays are capable of. The company declined to comment on what its final market strategy will be and whether or not it will continue making its own headsets or license these displays to other OEMs.

You can see our full impressions in the discussion below:

Tang made it clear the Avegant prototype is “in no way a commercial product” and that we may end up seeing Avegant light fields in a “variety of form factors.”

One of these form factors could be the separate “cosmetic prototype” of which we only got the briefest glimpse. This design suggested the displays could one day fit inside a much more ergonomic, and fashionable, headset.

Posted on

First Impressions Of The New 2017 Samsung Gear 360 Camera

First Impressions Of The New 2017 Samsung Gear 360 Camera

Yesterday we attended the Samsung Unpacked 2017 event in New York City where company launched new products including the new Galaxy S8 and S8+ as well as the new Samsung Gear 360 camera. In fact, at the event Samsung gave everyone in attendance their own personal Gear 360 device to record the launch experience together at the same time.

This camera

First of all, the new Gear 360 is smaller than the previous version with the lenses being closer together making the stitching look better and the device more portable. The new Gear 360 is also shaped much more ergonomically than the previous generation without the need of a tripod to allow for it to stand up on its own, and with a much smaller footprint. The previous model could stand on its own but it sat almost flush with the surface. The new Gear 360 (2017) also sealed the battery inside the device rather than making it removable. However, they also moved the USB port for charging to the side and switched from microUSB to USB Type-C. The new model also moved the record button from the top of the camera to the base where a user would normally hold it. From our experience this already resulted in a few accidental presses, but they aren’t that common or as annoying as having the record button at the top. With the new design, you can use any tripod that you want to mount the Gear 360 and you can mount it almost any way you want.

One of the biggest gripes users had about the original Gear 360 was that it was only supported by Samsung’s latest devices. This new version is essentially standalone from other Samsung devices and allows you to hook up other Android devices or even iOS devices since it connects via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The current model supports Bluetooth 4.1 and 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi and microSD card sizes of up to 256GB (double the original) which should be enough. Samsung provided us with a 32GB memory card and at the current settings that yields over 2 hours of 4K footage, 10,000 15 Megapixel photos, three hours of 1/2 second time lapses, three hours of 5 minute video loops and over 10,000 HDR landscapes.

The resolution for video has also been bumped from 3840×1920 at 30 FPS to 4096×2048 at 24 FPS indicating that we probably won’t see a huge improvement in image quality. Speaking of image quality, the new Gear 360 only captures 360 images at 15 megapixels instead of 30 which seems to be indicative of the smaller sensors which are 8.4 megapixels as opposed to 15 on the original model. Video is recorded as MP4 files using the H.265 codec much like the previous Gear 360. Below are the supported video formats for the new Gear 360.

Supported Video Formats: 4096×2048 – 24 FPS, 2880×1440 (30 fps), 2560×1280 (60 fps), 1920×960 (30 fps), 1440×720 (120 fps)

They have also reduced the battery size from 1,350 mAh to 1160 mAh, which is also likely why the new camera is so small and makes sense because it uses smaller sensors which should drain less power.

First Impressions

Overall, this new Gear 360 is more comfortable to use and solves the original’s biggest problem — compatibility. Samsung realizes that they need users to generate as much content as possible to enable demand for VR and 360 content in general. Without content, VR will never survive and the 2017 edition of the Gear 360 is a step in the right direction.

We are still waiting on official pricing, but I genuinely hope that it comes in under $299 because cameras like the Insta360 Air is already $129 and the Insta360 Nano is $199. Admittedly, those are not for 4K footage, but they are much cheaper. Price is a factor for mass market adoption and $349 for a device that was only compatible with Samsung devices was unpalatable for many. The app for the new Gear 360 (2017) is still in beta and the old app is not compatible with this new Gear 360 (we tried).

We will be following up with a more in-depth review once we’ve spent more time than a day with the camera. Including multi-device usage and more.

Anshel Sag is an analyst for Moor Insights & Strategy and, like all research and analyst firms, provides or had provided research, analysis, advising, and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including Samsung and others. I do not hold any equity positions with any companies cited.

Tagged with: , , , ,

Posted on

Insta360 iPhone and Android Cameras Now Stream Live To Facebook

Insta360 iPhone and Android Cameras Now Stream Live To Facebook

The Insta360 cameras attach to the charging port your Android or iPhone for filming in 360 degrees, and with a new update to the company’s app today owners will be able to livestream that view to Facebook.

The Insta360 Nano ($200 for iPhone) and Insta360 Air ($130 for Android) get the capability through an update to their dedicated apps. The company is also planning the Insta360 Pro, a “professional-level” 8K camera, for release in Q2 that is said to also be integrated with Facebook.

The Nano for iPhone also supports 360-degree live-streaming to Twitter and Periscope, and according to company it is possible to go live on YouTube with its cameras as well.

The Facebook integration lets camera owners go live on timelines, groups and pages. According to the company, while broadcasting live “on-screen indicators in the Air and Nano apps will let users see how many viewers are tuning in, watch ‘Likes’ and other reactions update in real time,” as well as monitor live comments.

Tagged with: ,

Posted on

Oculus Touch And Rock Band Beat Vive Tracker To VR Accessory Market

Oculus Touch And Rock Band Beat Vive Tracker To VR Accessory Market

The competition between HTC’s Vive and Facebook’s Rift is a closely watched battle, with the two leading PC-powered headsets racing to expand upon the groundwork laid by the SteamVR and Oculus platforms in 2016.

It seems the next step for each company is to support a wide range of accessories that can enhance a virtual world with 1:1 tactile feedback. Despite the excitement for a range of accessories compatible with the forthcoming Vive Tracker, Oculus seems to be coming out in front, at least initially.

Jason Rubin, the vice president in charge of content at Oculus, tweeted over the weekend that the imminently launching Rock Band VR game the company funded with developer Harmonix is the “first major tracked accessory VR game.” For $70, the game comes with a guitar to which an Oculus Touch controller attaches. This combo delivers a more authentic experience than has ever been possible before with music rhythm games, with the feel of a realistic guitar in your hands while playing the game in front of a crowd in VR.

This month Oculus released guidelines and 3D models of the Touch controllers “to help you develop accessories for Oculus Touch Controllers.” This likely makes Rock Band just the first in a series of accessories for the Rift headset using an Oculus Touch controller for positional tracking.

HTC is also working with developers on the Vive Tracker that has already been shown with a range of accessories including guns, phones and even a baseball bat. The Tracker is expected to sell for around $100, with no word on included accessories or games that might work with the unit out of the box.

This adds some interesting new dynamics to the decision buyers are faced with when deciding which VR system to buy. After a price cut this month, Oculus is now selling the Rift with a pair of Touch controllers for $600. The competing HTC Vive’s core system remains $800, and HTC “doesn’t see the need to cut the price.”

An extra camera for the Rift is around $60. While this Rift setup requires a plethora of open USB slots on your PC, this third camera (in addition to the two provided in the core $600 bundle) allows the Rift’s system to track smaller but comparable ‘room-scale’ spaces. Add $70 for Rock Band and its guitar, which attaches to one of the Oculus Touch controllers, and the total for all of the above is still slightly lower than the base cost of the Vive. The Rift is also bundled with a number of freebie games, as is Vive, but the Rift has access to the content on both the Oculus Store and Steam. Unless using a hack, the Vive can’t access the great content on the Oculus Store.

While we adore the reliability and versatility of the SteamVR Tracking technology upon which the Vive relies — and the fact that the Vive uses up only a few ports on your PC — this price difference between the systems, inclusion of integrated audio and superior ergonomics of the Touch controllers could mean Vive will have an uphill battle in 2017.

Tagged with: , ,

Posted on

Vuze Is A 360 3D Camera Designed To Bring Quality VR Video To Anyone, Now Shipping

Vuze Is A 360 3D Camera Designed To Bring Quality VR Video To Anyone, Now Shipping

Plenty of companies are making 360 degree cameras, but many of these are aimed at the professional market, especially those that also support 3D capture. Vuze from Humaneyes is a camera looking to change that.

Launched at the 2017 South by South West (SXSW) festival today, Vuze features eight full HD cameras that can capture up to 4K resolution, with four microphones that capture positional audio. It captures up to two hours of video on a single charge. If you want to see what the kit is really capable of, then check out Humaneyes’ online showroom, with a host of videos shot with the device. The picture quality looks pretty good, and we can’t notice any stitching, at least in these static videos.

You can use your phone to control the camera via an iOS and Android app. Captured content can be uploaded directly to supported platforms like YouTube and Facebook. The kit is available to order now from an official website, though take note that the software to make it compatible with Mac devices won’t arrive until summer. Windows users can get stuck in, though. Shipping starts in April.

Humaneyes hopes the camera is accessible for the ‘prosumer’ market, though Vuze is priced at $799/€995. True, that’s a low price for a 360 3D kit, but still expensive for consumers in general, especially with cheaper, non-3D cameras like Samsung’s Gear 360 already out there. Humaneyes believes those devices don’t provide the kind of quality that some are looking for, however. Whether there’s an appetite for this level of product right now remains to be seen.

Tagged with: ,