Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
During the Oculus Connect 4 keynote, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed a stand-alone VR headset called Oculus Go. It won't require an inserted smartphone, nor will it need to be tethered to a parent PC.
The post $199 Oculus Go delivers stand-alone VR with no phone or PC needed appeared first on Digital Trends.
LG Electronics has unveiled it’s first virtual reality (VR) prototype headset at GDC in San Francisco. It is being shown at Valve’s GDC booth. The LG prototype is described as being ‘Designed to deliver a high fidelity, next generation VR experience’.
During the show, LG said they “will meet with developers to gather feedback on the device as part of its move towards the building of commercial units.” Pricing, launch dates and territories have not yet been announced, but LG said they will “be available at the later date”.
It is currently unconfirmed if this means that HTC’s exclusivity period for producing the Vive headsets is now over. Valve did release a press release on the matter confirming that, amongst other things, we can expect the headset to be featured at GDC 2017:
“LG Electronics will unveil its first VR HMD prototype at this year’s GDC in San Francisco, CA. Being shown in Valve’s GDC booth, the LG HMD prototype is designed to deliver a high fidelity, next generation VR experience.
During the show, LG will be meeting with developers to collect feedback and impressions as part of its effort to define the first commercial units. Pricing, launch dates, and territories will be announced at a later date.”
It was also noted on Twitter by Valve VR developer Chet Faliszek that “We are expanding the world of @SteamVR with our friends at LG.”
VRFocus will give you further information on this once Valve, HTC or LG release a statement.
LG Electronics USA. (PRNewsFoto/LG Electronics USA, Inc.)
Last September we reported on the fact that Qualcomm was launching their own VR development kit with the ability to deliver standalone VR. What made the VR 820 so compelling was that it had 6-DoF tracking as well as integrated compute (Snapdragon 820) which was on par with all the latest flagship phones. It even had support for eye tracking, which we now know was through a partnership with none other than SMI. However, there was one thing that was missing, hand tracking. In fact, Intel was already demoing hand tracking this year at CES with their Project Alloy prototype.
Anyone that has used mobile VR knows that controllers are nice, but unless you can ‘see’ your hands and interact with your surroundings with your hands, the immersion is lost. HTC and Valve do this with their Vive controllers that are super low latency and extremely accurate and Oculus does this with their touch controllers and their extremely natural ergonomics. When it comes to mobile, in many cases you’re either stuck with a Bluetooth gamepad on Samsung or a controller like the Daydream controller which simply put isn’t good enough. Thankfully, the team at Leap Motion have been working tirelessly to deliver hand tracking and late last year launched their much more compact hand tracking solution specifically aimed at mobile form factors.
Now that their technology has been miniaturized, it can be integrated into platforms. One such platform that’s launching at MWC and GDC (since both shows are happening simultaneously), is Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 835 VR development kit. This new Snapdragon 835 VR development kit features a 2560×1440 AMOLED display, 6DoF tracking, eye tracking, foveated rendering and many other performance and power saving features. This system is essentially an upgrade over the Snapdragon 820 developer kit that Qualcomm launched at IFA 2016. The real improvements are increased performance, power savings and support for Leap Motion. While we don’t quite yet know the performance of the Snapdragon 835, the expectations are that it will be quite a bit faster on the GPU than the Snapdragon 820, which is a blessing for VR. The Snapdragon 835 VRDK is expected to be available in Q2 through the Qualcomm Developer Network. This device is really designed to help developers optimize their apps for the Snapdragon 835 HMDs that are due out in the second half of this year.
In addition to announcing the partnership and support of Leap Motion and a new VR development kit based on Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm is also announcing an HMD accelerator program. This program is specifically aimed at accelerating the time to market for HMD manufacturers, which has been an issue for some companies. The program is designed to help HMD manufacturers reduce their engineering costs and time to market so that they can seed the market with these HMDs faster. Part of this program utilizes the newly announced Snapdragon 835 VR HMD and will connect OEMs with ODMs like Thundercomm or Goertek, the two leading HMD ODMs in the world. The program is designed to help OEMs modify the reference Snapdragon 835 VR HMD and enable pre-optimized features like SMI’s eye-tracking and Leap Motion’s hand tracking.
These three announcements are very closely intertwined and show where mobile VR and more specifically standalone VR is going. Mobile VR itself will still benefit from the advances that result from these new developments, however standalone VR is currently the focus of this platform. The interesting thing about the mobile industry and players like Qualcomm is that they can iterate so much more quickly than their PC counterparts that we are seeing mobile HMD feature sets leapfrog PC. The fact that the Snapdragon 835 VR platform will support both eye tracking and hand tracking is huge because both of those are natural interfaces. Combining hand tracking, eye tracking and voice recognition into a single device means that a user can naturally interface with their VR HMD without ever needing to touch anything. Ultimately, hands free VR is the holy grail and I think that Qualcomm has brought us one step closer to that reality.
Disclosure: My firm, Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided research, analysis, advising, and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including Google, Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung cited or related to this article. I do not hold any equity positions with any companies cited in this column.
Tagged with: GDC, GDC 2017, HMD, leap motion, MWC, MWC 2017, odm, OEM, qualcomm, snapdragon, Snapdragon 835, VRDK
My home office isn’t the most organized place on the planet. To my left is my Blue desk microphone, which lets me record sultry smooth audio for stuff like this Resident Evil 7: Biohazard video review. To my right is a printer, but I have to unplug and move it off my desk if I want to set up extra Oculus sensors to use Touch. I’ve got my base stations set up in opposite corners of the room for the Vive. On the ground to my right, in a muddled heap, are the Vive headset, my audio headphones, the Rift headset, two Touch controllers, two Vive wands, and a bunch of cords.
Meanwhile, the living room is very nicely maintained. I’ve got the PSVR on a great Power A display dock with two Move controllers and a DualShock 4 (all charging) right next to the couch, the breakout box cord is stuffed into the entertainment center (where the PS4 Pro lives) when not in use. It’s very tidy. My PC area admittedly lacks that sort of organization, which is why this VR hardware display and charging dock from VRGE is particularly appealing.
We’ve seen a few different charging dock prototypes in the past, including from Nyko, but they lacked the polish, versatility, and sheer functionality of this offering from VRGE. You can tell from the video above and their Kickstarter page that they’ve mostly thought of everything.
You can order variations that are designed for either the Rift, Vive, or PSVR, and each edition has a spot to place the headset and its accompanying gamepads or motion controllers. The cord slides through the slit in the front, the headset rests in the middle, and the controllers stand on the sides. USB dongles are fed into the units for easy charging all in one spot.
Best of all is the creators even provide mounting hardware with each charging dock so you can neatly mount it on the wall next to your desk instead of taking up a big chunk of precious space. For a proper office or game studio it wouldn’t be as big of a deal, but at home, every inch of desk space feels like a rare commodity these days for me.
The folks at VRGE sent UploadVR two production prototypes, very similar to the ones shown in the video above, and I can thankfully report that it exceeded my expectations. It’s hard to judge build quality from a video, but the units were extremely sleek and attractive. They feel much weightier than they look, which is great considering they’re designed to support relatively hefty and expensive VR HMDs. The rubber feet on the bottom kept them still on my desk when not in use and the wall mounting process was very simple.
If you only have a single headset it’s a great choice if you’re not interested in a head bust for display. If you have multiple and want to wall mount your setups, then these are by far the best options available. As of the time of this publication, the Kickstarter still has 7 days to go and it’s sitting at just about half of the $30,000 goal with approximately $15,000 raised.
We don’t report on a lot of Kickstarters at UploadVR, but since this one is already such high quality and the production prototype feels close to a consumer product, we can’t help but recommend these charging docks.
Tagged with: charging dock, HMD, kickstarter, station, VR, vrge