Panasonic – Page 2 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

May 26, 2020

Influx of Qualcomm XR2 Powered 5G XR Viewers are Coming

Technology isn’t quite there yet when it comes to a stylish pair of sunglasses which have virtual or augmented reality (VR/AR) tech built-in, but steps towards that end goal are being made. Today, Qualcomm has unveiled a selection of ‘XR Viewers’ which use its XR2 5G platform slated to arrive in the next 12 months.

Some of these have already been seen before, most notably the Nreal Light and the Panasonic UHD VR Eyeglasses which appeared during CES 2020 in January and XRSpace. What all of these represent is an immersive ecosystem of companies from smartphone makers to global telecommunications operators looking to drive a new category of headsets which are consumer-friendly.

All the XR Viewers are designed to tether to the latest 5G-capable smartphones powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 or 865 processors, thus providing quality XR content via 5G’s high bandwidth and low latency technology. Currently, XR viewer manufacturers include 3Glasses, iQIYI, Nreal, OPPO, Panasonic, Pico and Shadow Creator, while smartphone OEM’s who are participating are ASUS, BlackShark, OnePlus, OPPO, Smartisan, vivo and ZTE.

While devices like Nreal Light are slated for a 2020 release, Qualcomm expects most of these to arrive within a year, although some will likely be specific to certain markets like China. To ensure seamless connections for a consumer-friendly experience, Qualcomm’s XR Optimized Certification Program tests performance and validates compatibility between both devices, looking at head tracking, power, thermal, motion to photon latency and other variables.

“With the support of Qualcomm Technologies, we plan to optimize these VR glasses to work seamlessly with 5G-enabled smartphones,” said Michiko Ogawa, CTO, Appliances Company, Panasonic Corporation. “With a combination of 5G connectivity and compact, lightweight, ultra-high image quality VR glasses, we hope to deliver highly immersive experiences for live music & sports events in 2021 and beyond.”

At the same time Qualcomm has laid out its expectations for the future of this sector, envisioning that the tether will disappear within the next four years; devices wirelessly connecting to phones. While a full 5G standalone headset is somewhere between 5-10 years away.

As development continues and the XR Viewers come to market, VRFocus will bring you further updates.

January 15, 2020

CES 2020 Interview: Peeking Into Panasonic’s VR Eyeglasses

So was CES 2020 amazing for the virtual reality (VR) industry? There was some interesting tech shown but there wasn’t a lot of truly standout advancements. One that did gain a lot of attention was Panasonic’s VR Eyeglasses, a rather stylish looking device which could actually make VR look cool. VRFocus managed to not only demo a prototype model but also spoke with Panasonic’s Makoto Morise to learn more about the project.

Panasonic VR Eyeglasses

It was four years ago that VRFocus first reported on Panasonic developing a head-mounted display (HMD) with a kit which connected to a PC whilst employing glasses like ergonomics for wearability. That initial glasses like aesthetic has proven to be a core design choice with the latest CES 2020 design looking like some high-tech sunglasses.

It’s the look of the headset which has attracted such interest from media and consumer alike, moving away from the often bulky VR devices currently seen on the market. Yet there compromises with the design such as 3DoF, instead of 6DoF, limiting user interaction for gaming purposes. On the other hand, the headset features a 2k micro OLED display for each eye, offering 4K content consumption of standard and 360-degree videos.

There are other interesting design choices such as the IPD adjustment, the eye cowling to avoid light leakage and the use of Technics audio for high fidelity sound. Check out VRFocus’ hands-on article to see what we thought of the early prototype.

Panasonic VR Eyeglasses

Morise, Industry Alliance and Partnership executive at Panasonic R&D Company of America was on hand to chat about the prototype and detail a little more information about this new product and its debut showcase at CES 2020.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Panasonic’s VR Eyeglasses as development progresses and keep an eye out for further CES 2020 interviews coming in the following days.

January 14, 2020

Hands-on With Panasonic’s VR Eyeglasses: A Stylish Step Forward

One of the biggest announcements relating to the virtual reality (VR) industry during CES 2020 came from an unexpected source, Panasonic. The company revealed a device currently called ‘UHD VR Eyeglasses’ – a snappy title if ever there was one – which promises not only a rich visual experience for the wearer but also a fashionable take on strapping technology to your face.

Panasonic VR Eyeglasses It’s certainly the design which has caught most people’s attention, offering what many hope VR headsets will become in the future, trendy and compact devices which don’t look like monolithic stones. Whilst augmented reality (AR) headsets have gone down the glasses design path due to the nature of that particular technology, the same can’t be said for VR headsets which do need a design overhaul yet are limited due to lenses, displays and other factors.

Panasonic had two units on display at CES 2020, the working prototype and one designed to portray the final unit weight. The reason for this is that the working model was hooked up to a PC with a myriad of cables, adding extra weight and pull. This meant holding the VR Eyeglasses to your face instead of neatly resting on the face. It’s a prototype after all.

On first inspection, the headsets’ fit and form factor bode well with the rubber eye surround neatly fitting around each eye. Not only did it feel comfortable but there was no light leakage whatsoever, ensuring the display didn’t have to compete with unwanted rays which could affect the image quality. A novel little feature was the manual IPD adjustment controlled via a bar across the bridge. This could be twisted to widen or narrow the glasses accordingly. It wasn’t too fiddly to use (even with the cables and weight) although, those with large hands and stocky fingers may find the process a little more awkward.

Panasonic VR Eyeglasses

It’s also worth noting the VR Eyeglasses won’t support wearing actual glasses due to the design. The prototype did have a range of removable lenses which sat just behind the rubber cowling to cater for those that did. This will most likely be the path Panasonic chooses when catering for glasses although the company did note a final decision had yet to be made.

The VR Eyeglasses are a combination of Panasonic and Kopin technologies, with the latter providing the display panels. A 2k micro OLED panel is used per eye offering Ultra HD quality (UHD) and it certainly shows, with very crisp, vibrant video footage. Due to the size of the panel, the field of view (FoV) is far narrower than other VR headsets, offering an almost square image. The final model will use a wider panel to help improve the FoV.

Complimenting the screen will be Panasonic’s audio expertise, provided by its Technics team. The final version will have the audio provided by in-ear headphones but for the prototype small external speakers were used instead, so we’ll have to wait and see how that turns out.

Panasonic VR Eyeglasses

So how will the VR Eyeglasses work without the PC? Well, in one of the arms will be a USB-C connector which can either go to a smartphone or an external battery/processor unit – sounding similar to Magic Leap 1. No details have been mentioned at this time apart from a brief mention of 5G connectivity which was a hot topic at CES 2020 and likely so next year as well.

When it eventually comes to buying and using the glasses that’s where the real disappointment starts to set in. Offering 3DoF, Panasonic isn’t aiming the device at the consumer market as some sort of Oculus Go competitor by the looks of it. Applications will be focused towards enterprise use cases such as entertainment consumption whilst travelling.

Testing the VR Eyeglasses a couple of days after the hype certainly felt a little underwhelming, as they’re really just a fancy video viewer. With no mention of a controller or what sort of content platform would support the device, the brief demo created more questions than answers – which will probably come at CES 2021.

January 10, 2020

UploadVR CES 2020: Best Of Show And People’s Choice Award

CES 2020 is coming to an end. We’ve been in Las Vegas, NV all week trying out cutting-edge hardware and software demos from companies all over the world trying to push the boundaries of VR and AR technology. As a result, we’ve collected our list of the best and most exciting things we saw for you right here.

Just like we did at E3 2019, we’re giving out two awards: Best of Show and People’s Choice. The Best of Show award winner and its nominees are all selected by UploadVR Editorial staff and the People’s Choice award winner is picked by you, our readers! We looked at our website traffic and social media engagement to determine the four nominees for that award and are using social media polls to pick the winner. This was done across two Facebook polls (Part 1 and Part 2) and a Twitter poll.

And if you want the full rundown on our impressions and all of the top news stories of the week from CES 2020, we chatted about it all live in our VR studio for a special episode of The VR Download this week, embedded above!

UploadVR People’s Choice Award For CES 2020: The Nominees

NVIDIA’s Variable Rate Supersampling

Panasonic VR Glasses

Pimax Artisan VR Headset

Rebuff Reality’s VR Ears and VR Power for Quest

UploadVR People’s Choice Award For CES 2020: The Winner

NVIDIA’s Variable Rate Supersampling

The votes are in and the winner of our People’s Choice Award for CES 2020 is NVIDIA’s new Variable Rate Supersampling feature. Just released this week for RTX GPUs, it will dynamically apply up to 8x supersampling in the center of the view only, the area you usually look at the most in VR, to improve fidelity. It’s sort of like the inverse of foveated rendering, which downgrades the quality of the areas in your peripheral vision to allow for a sharper center.

nvidia ces 2020 peoples choice winner.png

Read more about the new feature here.

panasonic vr glasses ces 2020 best of show nominee

rebuff reality ces 2020 best of show nominee

UploadVR Best Of Show Award For CES 2020: The Nominees

HaptX VR Gloves and Robotic Telepresence

NDI’s Atraxa 6DoF Electromagnetic Tracking

Panasonic’s VR Glasses

Spatial’s Cross-Device Multi-User VR/AR Communication Platform

VRgineers XTAL Dual 4K Military-Grade Headset

Rebuff Reality’s VR Ears and VR Power for Quest

UploadVR Best Of Show Award For CES 2020: The Winner

HaptX VR Gloves and Robotic Telepresence

At CES 2020 the company that impressed us the most in terms of the technology feeling groundbreaking and truly impactful for the future of the VR/AR landscape, was definitely HaptX. Their haptic feedback gloves worked great and the telepresence robot demo was surprisingly articulated. It will be a long time before this technology is consumer-ready, but the future looks bright for haptics (and HaptX) in VR.

For more on HaptX, check out the demo and interview we conducted at CES 2020.

And for more on CES 2020, check out our Coverage Hub or our news roundup to see what you might have missed.

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January 10, 2020

Panasonic zeigt UHD VR-Brille mit besonderem Design

Panasonic zeigt derzeit auf der CES 2020 eine UHD VR-Brille (3DoF), welche sofort durch den besonderen Formfaktor ins Auge fällt. Zudem hat Palmer Luckey, Gründer von Oculus, die Brille auf Facebook als “sehr cool” bezeichnet und die Anpassbarkeit auf die eigenen Augen gelobt.

Panasonic zeigt HDR UHD VR-Brille mit besonderem Design

Die vorgeführte VR-Brille von Panasonic ist ein Referenzdesign und das Unternehmen geht mit dieser Brille eigene Wege. Zusammen mit Kopin Corporation habe man die weltweit erste HDR UHD VR-Brille mit micro OLED Panels entwickelt, welche sich tatsächlich wie eine Brille beim Tragen anfühlen soll.

Wegbereiter für die Brille soll die 5G-Technologie sein und Panasonic möchte die Arbeit an dem neuen Gerät fortsetzen und sinnvolle Anwendungen entwickeln, um die Attraktivität für die Kunden zu erhöhen.

Palmer Luckey zeigt sich auf Facebook von der Brille beeindruckt und lobt besonders die Anpassbarkeit an den eigenen Augenabstand und eine Fokusanpassung. Wie bei der VR-Brille von Panasonic der Abstand zwischen den Displays eingestellt wird, seht ihr im Video von Upload VR:

The Verge konnte die Brille ebenfalls bereits testen und schreibt, dass die Displays zu klein und somit der sichtbare Bereich deutlich begrenzt gewesen wäre. Zudem soll die Brille nicht bequem und sicher auf der Nase gesessen haben.

(Quelle: The Verge, Facebook, Reddit)

Der Beitrag Panasonic zeigt UHD VR-Brille mit besonderem Design zuerst gesehen auf VR∙Nerds. VR·Nerds am Werk!

January 9, 2020

CES 2020 Hands-On: Panasonic ‘VR Eyeglasses’ Tease An Intriguing Vision In Need Of A Platform

I’ve written plenty of words complaining about the shameful state of a VR market heading into 2020 in which Oculus Go is a best seller with its limited interactions and a nearly defunct 3DoF development platform. So I’ll accept being called a hypocrite to report Panasonic’s 3DoF headset at CES 2020 is one of the most interesting VR prototypes I put in front of my eyes at the consumer electronics event this year.

Panasonic calls these “VR Eyeglasses” a prototype so consider any specifications shared in this article as placeholders for whatever could ship from the company or a partner. For example, a Panasonic representative said they could achieve a 100 degree field of view with this slim design using larger OLED microdisplays than the ones inside the headset I tried. This is to say the smaller OLED panels in the CES prototype produced a noticeably smaller field of view than most current consumer designs — 77 degrees measured diagonally, according to Panasonic.

Panasonic VR Weight and Limits

So why is this interesting if Panasonic’s prototype glasses are worse than Oculus Go in a critical way? I’m not really interested in VR with a significantly smaller field of view than current designs. So my interest relates to Panasonic’s suggestion they can expand on what I saw to levels comparable with current designs. With that in mind, I found very alluring this sleek lightweight approach coupled with lush visuals. Panasonic says it uses multi-element pancake lenses with panels produced in partnership with Kopin.

The weight loss is considerable compared with current VR headset designs. Panasonic reps said they are somewhere in the range of 150 grams, which is only about a third of one pound, but that could change based on the path they take to turn this prototype into an actual consumer product. The Oculus Quest, by comparison, is about 570 grams, which is about 1.25 pounds–roughly four times as heavy.

Though I only spent a few minutes with its 60 Hz display, I twisted the interpupillary distance (IPD) mechanism (said to adjust from below 60 millimeters to more than 70 millimeters) near the bridge of the glasses and tuned the lenses directly in front of my eyes. Then I found myself observing crisp text and recall no impression of a screen door effect. I enjoyed a look inside a temple that seemed to live up to the promise of extremely high resolution high-dynamic range panels.

I should note that I saw some kind of “ghosting” visual artifact in a few places where there were white text subtitles or white lights. A second almost transparent image of the text or lights seemed to float at an angle nearby.

USB-C

This was running from a high-powered PC but Panasonic intends for these VR glasses to operate over a USB-C connection running to a phone from the tip behind an ear. Panasonic representatives said they have “multiple” candidate designs for the addition of 6DoF tracking, though that would likely add some weight. The connected phone could obviously be used as an input device and provide content to the glasses but this is where things get sort of dicey for this approach.

What platform is this?

Google and Facebook just spent the past two years receding from the phone-based VR market, with the latter devoting 2019 to its Quest standalone platform and the former abandoning Daydream. Plus, Apple doesn’t always play well with partners and Samsung develops its own display technology. So what exactly would people do with this hardware and where would that content come from? Those are great questions I’m not able to answer with this early look.

Even if these glasses added some cameras and somehow became compatible with, say, Oculus Touch controllers and Oculus Quest apps — could you really play active games like Beat Saber and keep a pair of sunglasses from flying off your head? Or if Panasonic sticks with 3DoF would these glasses reach a low enough price and have enough software and content support they could actually appeal to a decent number of people who just want a private movie viewer?

I don’t know the answers to any of those questions from my short demo, but this slim design fit well enough I hope we get to find out.

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January 9, 2020January 9, 2020

Join Us On YouTube LIVE To Discuss The VR/AR Of CES 2020!

It’s been another big year for virtual reality at CES 2020, with lots of announcements and showcases. Join us at 10:30am PST (18:30 UTC) LIVE on YouTube to discuss it all!

This is a special episode of The VR Download, our weekly podcast broadcast from a virtual studio.

Unlike regular video podcasts, The VR Download is broadcast from virtual reality! Our team are together in a virtual space, giving us many of the benefits of a studio even though we live on different continents.

This won’t follow our normal show structure, and we won’t have a guest. You’ll get our opinions, insights, and hopes about everything shown at CES 2020.

Since we’re live, you can give your view by commenting in the YouTube live chat. Our team will be able to see your comments and may even read them out on air.

The post Join Us On YouTube LIVE To Discuss The VR/AR Of CES 2020! appeared first on UploadVR.

January 7, 2020

CES 2020: Panasonic Showcases Ultra-Compact VR Goggles, But Details Are Light

At CES 2020 this week, Panasonic revealed ultra compact VR goggles with HDR displays. However, details are light and it’s not yet clear whether this is an actual product or just a concept.

The headset uses OLED microdisplays jointly developed by Panasonic and Kopin. Microdisplays are significantly smaller than regular panels and thus allow for significantly more compact headsets.

However, microdisplays tend to have a much higher production cost and their small size makes magnifying them over a large field of view challenging. Most existing headsets using microdisplays have had a relatively narrow field of view, and short of a breakthrough in optics Panasonic’s is likely no exception.

Panasonic describes the resolution as simply ultra high definition (UHD), which usually means 3840×2160. It’s unclear whether this is per-eye or shared between each eye.

The displays support High Dynamic Range (HDR) content. HDR is a feature which allows digital content to show a greater range of colors and luminance compared to the standard range we’re all used to, which makes the colors and ranges of brightness better resemble what the human eye sees.

Audio is provided by earbuds developed by Panasonic’s Technics subsidiary. The drivers use magnetic fluid to allow “the accurate stroke of the diaphragm” and achieve “ultra low distortion reproduction”.

The goggles are not described as being either a product or a concept. No description of whether this is powered by a smartphone or PC was given, nor what kind of content platform it will support. In the images provided there is no sign of a port where a cable would even plug in.

In a statement, Panasonic said it will “continue to further develop the new VR glasses so that they can be used in a variety of applications, thereby creating new customer value“- whatever that means.

VR headsets today are bulky and heavy, making wearing them for extended periods uncomfortable. For VR to become a mainstream device the form factor will need to shrink. Projects like this show what that future could look like, but it likely makes sacrifices in field of view to get there. Not to mention there is no mention of tracking, a microphone, or other features you’d expect in an actual product.

Don’t forget to check out our CES 2020 Coverage Hub right here for all of the latest announcements for VR and AR tech from the show!

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February 24, 2017

Panasonic’s Autonomous Car Design Includes An AR Equipped Cockpit

In many works of science fiction, from books to film, you’d be hard-pressed to not come across some sort of augmented reality. From glasses and goggles to cell phones and viewing screens, writers and filmmakers regularly lean on AR to express a futuristic aesthetic. In the real world, engineers have tried to recreate those futuristic objects and vehicle concepts regularly include AR features that are eventually scrapped. As consumers are treated to functioning self-driving cars, though, it’s not unrealistic to think an AR standard is right around the corner and Panasonic’s self-driving concept is next up with AR displays and a 4k tablet table.

At CES in January, Panasonic shared a concept for a car’s interior that fully invested in the self-driving vehicle experience. It has a driver and co-pilot seat with seating in the rear, but the two front seats can completely turn around to share a table with the rear passengers. The idea is, while the autonomous car pilots you to your destination, you and friends and family can have a comfortable social experience inside without having to pay the road any mind. If conversation among the crew isn’t enough, you can turn on the Connected Interactive Table (CIT) that’s made up of four 4k touchscreen tablets that can be used independently or combine for digital board games.

In addition, the side windows have AR displays that show weather information and details on local points-of-interest as you travel. They also showed off the electric Renault Twizy concept that included an augmented portion in the front windshield, so their engineers are definitely experimenting with different ways to add a new layer to the glass in their vehicles. There’s no reason a future concept couldn’t include both forms of AR and it’s going to be interesting to see if Panasonic can ever implement their autonomous cockpit ideas with a car manufacturer and drive us right into the fictional future we’ve watched and read for years. For another example of vehicles being the center piece in AR/VR experiences, check out Audi’s utilization of VR to promote their new car.

Tagged with: 4k, ar, car, Panasonic