LG Prepping Upgraded SteamVR Dev Kit For Broader Developer Use
Here’s What a Nintendo Switch VR Headset Could Look Like
Nintendo’s new game console, the Switch, is a really nice piece of hardware. It’s incredibly comfortable to play in handheld mode, switches seamlessly to docked TV mode, and has a wealth of playstyles to fit any situation. The fact that it also happens to be the best way to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is just a huge dollop of gravy on top.
Back when the Switch was first announced, a lot of people were wondering if it would include any VR or AR support given the multitude of rumors. As it turns out, that wasn’t meant to be. We’ve made wishlists of game franchises we’d want to see in VR from Nintendo and the company’s president, Tatsumi Kimishima, has even stated that they’ve been experimenting with the technology, but won’t get involved util comfort issues are resolved.
© 2017 Antoine Beynel
The Joycon controllers are impressive with motion-sensing and incredibly precise rumble features that would be great for VR games, similar to the Oculus Touch, HTC Vive, or PlayStation Move. Realistically if the Switch does ever get VR support, a bit more work is needed though. The screen’s resolution is far too low (and too large and heavy to be comfortable) but it’s still fun to think about.
Down below we’ve included a bunch of mock-up images from industrial designer Antoine Beynel that give us a glimpse into what a future design from Nintendo might look like. As long as it doesn’t suffer the same fate as the poorly conceived Virtual Boy, we’d be all for it!
h/t – NintendoLife
Tagged with: Nintendo Switch
Qualcomm’s Standalone VR Is Getting Embedded Leap Motion Hand Tracking
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
Valve Removes $3,000 SteamVR Tracking Hurdle, Will Offer Base Stations This Year
Back in August of last year, Valve started to roll out of its innovative and royalty-free tracking technology. The company made a development kit available to licensees, but only if they attended a $3,000 training session that would teach the ins and outs of the tech. The introductory course was likely a bit of quality control, but the price of the session was also a daunting obstacle to some. This is no longer a concern, as Valve is removing the requirement of the course, thus making the highly regarded tracking technology more readily available.
Valve has over 500 companies signed up currently, though that number is sure to change a great deal in response to this new development. The original in-person training course will still be available, but the coursework (in English or Chinese) will be available for free.
On top of all this, the SteamVR base stations that emit lasers to track sensors throughout the room will be available directly from Valve later this year.
The tech itself opens up a plethora of opportunities for enhancing the immersion of VR. SteamVR Tracking is a system that works with low-weight sensors that can be placed on various objects so they can be brought into virtual spaces. For example, players could be handed realistic props for baseball, ping pong, or even shooters and they’d be tracked accurately in whatever experiences were built around them.
At the beginning of the year, we addressed the idea of SteamVR Tracking potentially being 2017’s most important VR technology, and it is very encouraging to see it made available in such a way. As it makes its way into the hands of more creatives and engineers, we’ll hopefully be able to find out if a more immersive hardware and accessory ecosystem will bring VR into more homes.
Tagged with: htc vive, oculus rift, Royalty Free, SteamVR, tracking, valve
The Void Upgrades Display, Aims For 20 Installations This Year
If you wanted to see one of the most complete VR experiences available last year you would have paid for a ticket to Madame Tussauds in New York for around $50 and included the extra Ghostbusters: Dimension VR experience. You would enjoy catching ghosts with three other players moving freely around the virtual world alongside you.
What makes the experience so immersive is that it is a completely untethered multiplayer walk-around experience complemented by real-world effects, like heat or wind. So you aren’t tethered to a computer, you aren’t alone and when you walk up to a flame you can actually feel it. The experience is a product of The Void, a Utah-based startup.
If you try out the same experience in the next few months you’re going to see a much improved experience, according to co-founder James Jensen. That is because the Ghostbusters experience last year was, according to hands-on reports, initially put together using a modified Rift development kit 2 (DK2) combined with expensive Optitrack tracking. This allowed the system to be deployed in a large area. While the approach allowed The Void to deploy the Ghostbusters: Dimension experience relatively early, it came online as Oculus and HTC started shipping improved consumer hardware. As consumers started receiving headsets that displayed 90 frames per second using the highest resolution displays possible, The Void was using a headset with an older display that only showed 75 frames per second.
This meant that despite wearing a backpack that feels just like a Ghostbusters proton pack, and catching ghosts with three other players in a virtual world enhanced by impressive environmental effects, you could still get an experience at home that was superior in some respects. But 2017 is shaping up to be a big year for The Void as the startup looks to provide the ultimate “hyper-reality” experience. The startup’s newest “Rapture” unit features more pixels in front of your eyes and more frames each second smoothing out the experience. They have more than 100 people working at The Void now, though Jensen declined to discuss financial backing.
“We spent a good part of 2016 getting all of our equipment on manufacturing lines so that we could just pump this stuff out and install in locations worldwide,” said Jensen. “Each of our ‘stages’ can have an experience on it, so locations could have two or three stages at them. We’re hoping to install 20 stages this year.”
Jensen said they wanted to get their first location up and running quickly, which is why they launched using the hardware they did. They also needed to build a VR helmet for safety reasons that would let them get people in and out of a headset very quickly, according to Jensen.
“Our HMD is actually a helmet because you’re walking around untethered in a space with multiple people…if you take a hit on the front of it then it acts like a bicycle helmet. It bounces off your forehead, there’s padding in here,” said Jensen. “If you look at those [business] models where people are just taking an at-home system and deploying it in a mall, if you really break it down on the mechanics of how long people are in the experience, how long it takes them to get out of the experience… then those businesses kind of fall apart. It’s all in the details of getting that equipment on, getting it off and providing an amazing experience for the end user.”
The unit notably also includes a detachable facial interface so you aren’t sniffing a previous wearer’s sweat when you put it on. Jensen also said their backpack computer should be around 1.5 pounds lighter and the headset should be half a pound lighter. Lights are embedded along the surface of the gun accessory and headset so they can be spotted by the Optitrack cameras for tracking. The Void showed the newest gear for the first time at an event in Los Angeles earlier this week where we tried on the vest and took the photos embedded throughout this article. The photo at right shows the facial interface being inserted, and you can see stickers over the lenses which look exactly like those included with the consumer Rift. I asked The Void if it is a consumer Rift buried under their modifications but they declined to comment.
With this upgraded hardware rolling out and more locations planned, it is looking more and more like The Void will be bringing the ultimate VR experience to a number of cities around the world this year. We can’t wait to check out what they have in store.
Tagged with: ghostbusters, New York, rapture, The Void
This Prototype App Lets Gear VR Users Mirror Their Screens to Other Devices
One of the most frustrating things about introducing people to virtual reality (VR), especially on a Samsung Gear VR, is that they can’t see what you see while you’re wearing the headset. Sony smartly included a mirror feature on the TV screen when using the PlayStation VR (PSVR) headset with a PS4 and most Oculus Rift and HTC Vive applications do something similar. But in the case of the Gear VR and other wireless headsets, you’re out of luck. Mobile devices, by default, don’t have a way of displaying their screens on other, larger screens.
There are some apps and workarounds out there that require installing third-party software on a PC, or things that potentially introduce significant lag, but there still isn’t an accessible and easy to use solution. That is, until now.
“We created a prototype of a ‘live viewer’ for the Samsung Gear VR,” said David Robustelli, Head of Digital at CapitolaVR, in an email to UploadVR. “This application makes it possible to see on a tablet what the Gear VR user is seeing in real-time.”
Robustelli sent me footage of the prototype, which you can watch above, showing a man progressing through a virtual store inside the Gear VR headset. The footage is perfectly mirrored onto a tablet that anyone could then watch to get a better idea of exactly what the VR user is looking at. This prototype application goes a step beyond simply mirroring the footage as well, even allowing creators to track where a user is going and looking while inside a VR application.
“This specific tool focuses on following the user journey though a (digital) showroom and it creates a heat map so store owners can determine how to design their stores based on the users path,” said Robustelli. “The software can also be used to make VR games even more interactive by adding a multiplayer option for the non-VR user.”
Luckily the concept doesn’t end at just tablets, as this application will theoretically work on most any network-connected device, such as TVs and computer screens as well.
“The live viewer was setup through the network of Unity,” explained Robustelli. “The Gear VR is the host, which can connect to any device/screen which allows you to connect to a network. This is in a nutshell how we made it work. So yes, any screen with connectivity would work.”
There’s no word yet on if or when this will become a consumer-facing application, but the usefulness should certainly elevate it above other non-consumer prototypes. CapitolaVR has released pieces of content for VR in the past, such as Duckpocalypse, a simple and fun wave shooter, as well as other prototypes, such as a HoloLens concept for Pokemon Go.
Tagged with: app, gear vr, live viewer, mirror, PC, tablet, tv
New LCD Tech Could Give Us Sharper VR Displays
VR fans are eagerly awaiting the introduction of 4K displays into major headsets, but new LCD technology could help get them there and even go beyond in the near future.
The Optical Society this week published a research report carried out by an international team looking into ‘blue-phase liquid crystal for field-sequential-color displays’. That might mean very little to you at first glance, but research team leader, Shin-Tson Wu of the University of Central Florida’s College of Optics and Photonics, claims this tech could deliver a resolution density of 1500 pixels per inch in screens around the size of Apple’s iPhones, and use less power doing so.
“This is especially attractive for virtual reality headsets or augmented reality technology, which must achieve high resolution in a small screen to look sharp when placed close to our eyes,” Wu added in a prepared statement.
Blue phase LCD differers from the nematic liquid crystals commonly seen in current LCD displays. The latter uses red, green, and blue subpixels as filters to color an LED backlight. Blue phase, however, removes the need for these subpixels by having the LED itself change color fast enough so that the human eye sees only the color that comes from mixing these different shades. With no need for the subpixels, more pixels can be crammed into the same space, thus allowing for more to be fitted into an inch.
This approach also lowers the overall voltage needed to create an image, making it more power efficient.
Now that the research has been carried out the team is looking to create a prototype that Wu predicts could be finished by next year. If that’s the case, then this technology could be implemented into VR headsets, allowing for crisper, clearer images that we currently see in devices like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
These displays have actually been around in concept for nearly ten years; Samsung unveiled a prototype panel at 15 inches in size with a refresh rate of 240 HZ all the way back in 2008, though it’s not been utilized in a mass produced product thus far.
Tagged with: Blue phase LCD, VR displays
Intel’s Project Alloy Round 2: RealSense Hand-Tracking and Optimized Software
During last week’s CES conference in Las Vegas one of the largest and most unforgettable booths on the sprawling show floor belonged to Intel.
The chip manufacturer occupied a two story main booth, a stage and bleacher for keynotes, with demo stations scattered around as well. Housed inside this labyrinth was Intel’s prized pig for this year’s conference: Project Alloy. The self-contained virtual reality headset makes use of Intel’s vision technologies to create a wireless, inside-out positionally tracked headset. Our initial hands-on report of project Alloy was only part of the story, and we came back for a second demo with a different Alloy prototype.
The difference between the Project Alloy headset we tried originally and this new version is the software inside. A member of the Alloy engineering team told us the second headset we would be trying is the unit they themselves work on every day. The “Mk. II,” as we will refer to it for the remainder of this story, was said to include more software optimization than the other demo units inside the booth. We were told the experience we encountered in our first Alloy demo was not optimized properly to show off the headset’s true potential.
Let There Be Hands
This new experience was essentially a developer testing ground. Inside, there were grids and cubes an engineer would use to gauge how colors and assets are rendering inside the headset. The virtual room also included two spinning golden cylinders. These cylinders are where we tried out the Mk. II’s built in RealSense hand-tracking.
Alloy’s many built-in sensors allow for real world objects, such as hands or other people, to be visualized once the person comes close enough to you. This feature is heavily dependent on light. Inside our dimly lit demo room my hands looked a bit ghostly through the headset. My hands appeared as a densely packed point cloud, but in the dim light some of these points were missing. The area in which the hands appear is also smaller than the overall field of view of the headset itself, which means there’s only a small rectangle of space that you hands or other people can appear inside.
However, the tracking of these ghostly hands was excellent. I could chip away at the spinning gold tubes with an entire hand, two fingers, one finger, etc. with precision. I only tried the hand tracking briefly and haven’t tried a comparable sculpting demo with Leap Motion, but Intel’s controller-less VR hand tracking showed some of the smallest movements of my finger resulting in notable change in the shape of the tube.
Tracking and Performance
Our biggest problem with the original Project Alloy demo was the performance of its inside-out positional tracking. That initial experience had a good amount of drift. The Mk. II was said to be running a “new low latency compositor and better prediction algorithms” to create a more solid experience. We were able to walk across the room, duck down to the ground, lean in toward objects, and jump into the air without noticeable latency. Importantly, though, the second demo was performed in an open room with fewer people in it while the first demo included a physical object in the center of the room that was mapped onto the virtual experience. No similar point of reference was seen in the second demo.
The biggest problem we encountered in Mk. II was curved visuals. A cube, for example, would noticeably stretch when you turned your head. We were told this was due to the image correction needing to be fine tuned, and that it could be solved in future builds.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that Alloy is not hardware Intel is planning to manufacture and sell itself. Instead, the plan is to develop it into a workable state and then license the technology to outside manufacturers that will turn these ideas into a product. We’ve seen two demos from Intel that show different pieces of a very complicated puzzle which needs to come together for a self-contained headset to be ready for the market. We still remain skeptical it will all come together with the polish needed to make it a successful consumer product this year, and hope to be pleasantly surprised.
Tagged with: CES 2017, demo, hands, inside out, Intel, mk. II, optimization, project alloy, round two, tracking
Pimax 8K VR Headset Not Yet Ready For Primetime, But 4k Model Impresses
Several weeks ago, we published a story about a company called Pimax. The scrappy startup was announcing its CES 2017 lineup and this year that included an 8K (4K per-eye) resolution, 200 degree field of view virtual reality headset. The implications of an HMD that powerful would be highly disruptive to the current VR industry, where resolution and FOV are two of the most difficult problems to solve and scale. We had the chance to try the Pimax headset for ourselves on the show floor at CES and what we found was a device that did have promise, but fell far below the mark of being a Vive or Rift-killer like we were promised.
Form Factor
The Pimax 8K is wide. It’s much wider than any other VR headset on the market today and is reminiscent of the Star VR headset that has moved quietly underground for some time now. The outer limits of the headsets horizontal plane extend a few inches past your head on either side and the overall visor curves in at an angle towards a central point. This makes the entire unit much more curved than either the Rift, Vive, or PSVR. The emphasis here is clearly on prioritizing that big FOV over a sleek or overtly comfortable design.
Fit
The 8K headset fits fairly well on the face and is surprisingly light for such a large headset. The ergonomics are sacrificed a bit however in favor of a wider FOV. The weight all seems to rest on the bridge of your nose and the end result is a new red mark to rival the infamous Oculus oval. The 8K is still in active development, however, so comfort levels could still be increased.
Performance
This is the big question: does the Pimax 8K deliver on the promise of a revolutionized display with industry changing resolution? The short answer is: no.
The long answer is that the Pimax HMD has a lot of promise but stumbles in a few unforgivable areas. The first is a complete lack of positional tracking. The Pimax representatives on site assured me that positional tracking would be added in by this spring, but for now you’re limited to head tracking only which is a far cry below what it will take to unseat the current kings of the VR hill.
The second problem is brightness. All the pixel density in the world doesn’t amount to much if they can’t be properly illuminated. The Pimax undoubtedly has the largest FOV of any VR headset I’ve ever tried, and there was some extra crispness to the image from what I could tell, but its screen was simply too dark to enjoy any of those innovations. The Pimax team took my findings to heart and said that a brighter backlight is expected to be incorporated into their next prototype.
Finally, Pimax headsets do not use OLED displays, instead they have chosen to use software algorithms to aggressively optimize more common LCD screens. They call this technique “brainwarp” and it does work. The LCD images moved with my head movements with less latency than one would expect with little to no bloom distortion (pixels that change color too slowly and cause a blurry image) at all.
Conclusion
The Pimax 8K headset was one of my great hopes for CES 2017 but, unfortunately, it’s still a bit too immature for the big leagues. The company will be launching a Kickstarter and raising additional funding soon and perhaps the extra capital can help them overcome some of these issues and create a more fully realized product. Until then, it’s like they say: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Bonus: A New Challenger Appears
Also at the Pimax CES booth was their older, 4K model. This unit provides 2K resolution to each eye and also employs brainwarp software optimization. Whereas the 8K design was wide and bulky, the 4K edition was lightweight and very similar to the Oculus Rift’s form factor.
The LCD displays inside provided a crisper image than anything I’ve seen in VR personally. This model could have also benefited from a brighter backlight, and there was still no positional tracking, but I felt that the Pimax 4K gave me my best look yet at what a higher resolution future for VR could look like.
Pimax is an innovative and exciting company and while none of their products are ready to come out of the oven just yet, I for one am very excited to see what they can do with just a bit more cooking time.
Image Credits: Pimax, Golem, VRNerds
Tagged with: 200, 4k, 8k, CES 2017, fov, hands on, Headset, pimax
Second Google Daydream Headset Revealed – Manufactured by Huawei
Google continues to make its interest in virtual reality more and more apparent. Last year, the Silicon Valley super giant formed an official VR division within its secretive walls and appointed Clay Bavor as its head. Fast forward to today and Google’s VR platform, dubbed Daydream is in full swing. The Daydream View headset hit the shelves in early November and made Google an official competitor with Samsung and Oculus for the mobile VR marketplace. Now, Google is expanding its library of smartphone powered VR headsets through the revelation of a second headset manufactured by the Chinese electronics giant: Huawei.
From the start, Google made it clear that Daydream would be a VR platform that other electronics manufacturers would eventually participate in with hardware of their own. It’s now clear that Huawei will be the first partner OEM to join Google in the race for mobile VR supremacy.
The new headset was unveiled via a Google blog post announcing an expanded suite of Daydream ready products. The post explains the specs of the Huawei headset more completely, explaining that:
“Huawei has been working on a Daydream-ready headset for launch at a later date. The Huawei VR headset is built to be easy to use. It has an adjustable focus so it can be used without eyeglasses, and provides a 95° field of view. By bringing new headsets onto the Daydream platform, we hope to give consumers even more choice in how they enjoy VR.”
The focus dial, and overall form factor of the Huawei manufactured device is reminiscent of a last-generation Samsung Gear VR. The picture also indicates that Huawei’s headset will also be taking advantage of the Google VR motion controller that features as a cornerstone of the Daydream ecosystem.
In addition to the Huawei headset, Google is also announcing four new Daydream ready smartphones from Huawei, Zenfone and Axon.