Items tagged with Virtual Reality
There's little doubt that Apple has a bit of an interest in virtual reality, but there hasn't been much proof up to this point that the Cupertino company has been planning to take that interest one step further. Well, according to Financial Times, Apple is indeed en route to deliver a VR product to market, and has assembled a large, experienced team, to see it through. The report says that Apple has plucked some VR talent from Microsoft's HoloLens team, as well as from Lytro, the company that gave us our first light-field camera. Beyond that, we learned only last week that Apple has also brought VR expert Doug Bowman into its ranks, which is about as much of a tip-off as we need. Way back in...
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Do you think maybe companies are super excited about the prospects of virtual reality? Samsung certainly is, and its efforts aren't stopping at the Gear VR headset it sells, either. Looking at the content creation side of things, the South Korean electronics maker is opening a studio in New York to produce unique programming and to connect a variety of industry players, including filmmakers, content developers, and industry influencers. Samsung isn't saying a whole lot about its "Samsung Studio" venture, which it announced at the Sundance Film Festival. Only minor details are available—Samsung says it will be located in one of its existing facilities that's currently home to a marketing team,...
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If you have even a passing interest in technology, then you've likely heard about the recent advances in virtual reality. It's the hottest topic in tech right now, particularly as Oculus and HTC ready the release of their respective headsets, and it's drawing in players both big and small. With regards to the former, Apple just added a major player to its ranks.His name is Doug Bowman and prior to joining Apple, he worked as a computer science professor at Virginia Tech. Bowman was also the director of the school's human-computer interaction center, a position he held for five years before taking a sabbatical and joining Apple, and has been involved in several 3D and VR projects.U.S. Navy personnel...
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When it comes to virtual reality technologies, the consensus is that seeing is believing. However, VR isn't just about treating your eyeballs to a plethora of realistic visuals, it's about bombarding the senses as a whole for a truly immersive experience. With that goal in mind, Google today announced the addition of spatial audio support to its Cardboard SDKs for Unity and Android. What spatial audio does is allow users to hear where sounds are coming from. It goes beyond simple left and right side audio and attempts to let developers produce sounds the say humans actually hear it, including above, below, in front of, and behind them. In this case, all that's required is a set of headphones...
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Oculus starting accepting pre-orders for its Rift VR headset yesterday, though at a price many weren't expecting. At a dollar shy of $600, sticker shock reverberated through the Internet community, and not without reason -- Oculus founder Palmer Luckey commented just a few months ago that Oculus Rift would be in the "ballpark" of $350, setting up what would turn out to be an unreasonable expectation. So what happened? In a Reddit AMA, Luckey apologized for the disparity and explained that his "ballpark" comment was made in haste. At the time he, he was trying to dispel the notion that Oculus Rift would cost $1,500, a figure that represented the all-in cost of owning Rift after you factor in the...
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Brace yourselves folks, this could be a breakout year for virtual reality. We know, you've heard that before, maybe even long before the Oculus Rift resurrected the category with a high profile Kickstarter run. But here's the thing, the industry at large is captivated by VR, and some big names are making preparations for what lies ahead. Obviously Oculus is one of them as it gets ready to open pre-orders for its Rift headset. But it's far from the only company enamored with VR -- so is NVIDIA, which has partnered with a whole bunch of companies to offer "GeForce GTX VR Ready" PCs, notebooks, and graphics cards. Sure, it's a marketing play, but it's not an empty one. "NVIDIA's GeForce GTX VR Ready...
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HTC had originally hoped to make its Vive virtual reality headset available to consumers right about now (by the end of 2015) but those plans have changed. Instead, it will make several thousand additional units available to developers in early 2016, followed by a commercial launch in April of next year, the company announced in a blog post today. "We remain committed to delivering the HTC Vive to a broader group of content creators and partners, and remain focused on delivering the very best experience possible for a consumer release.," HTC said. In the meantime, HTC will continue to work with developers, content creators, and companies to "create content that spans gaming, medical, education,...
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There's little question that VR and AR technologies have the potential to make a major impact across a seemingly endless number of applications and industries. Today we're shown another example as Google and its friends at VISA and Bank Of America step up to showcase another fantastic application for the technology in the burgeoning Virtual Reality market. This time of year, Sunday is game day here in the U.S., with football fans all across the country gearing up to rally behind their teams of modern day gladiators. Constructing tactical offensive strikes with surgical precision or battering ram annihilation, and assembling demolishing defensive stands, the NFL and its armies of physical specimens...
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Remember Nokia's fancy pants Ozo camera? It's billed as the first virtual reality camera system specifically designed for professional production, and today we learned it will have a price tag to match -- $60,000. Ah, but turn that frown upside down, you don't have to come up the full amount right off the bat. It only requires a $5,000 deposit! All kidding aside, the price tag reflects the camera's target audience and intended purpose. This isn't a toy or even a high-tech device for hobbyists, but a serious tool for creating professional level content in the emerging VR field.Is it just us, or does Nokia's Ozo VR camera look like Q*bert? To do that, the Ozo sports eight 2K by 2K video sensors,...
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Facebook is a social media monster, boasting over 1.5 billion active users per month in its Q3 earnings release. But in order to stay ahead of the pack and continually fuel growth, the company is looking to virtual reality as a new way to keep users engaged. Back in September, Facebook enabled 360-degree video support via its website and the official Facebook Android app. Today, Facebook has announced that it’s extending 360-degree videos to the the iOS platform, which brings in the hundreds of millions of users with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad mobile devices. In addition, Facebook is supporting the Samsung Gear VR, which is now available for $99 on preorder. Samsung smartphone users with Samsung...
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Though it's still a bit early, virtual reality has the potential to be the biggest thing to happen to gaming since the advent of 3D graphics. We'll have a better grasp of VR's impact once devices like the Oculus Rift ship, but in the meantime, Epic Games put together a new demo that gives us a glimpse of where we're headed. The demo, called Bullet Train, was unveiled by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney during a keynote by Oculus boss Brendan Iribe at the VR company's Connect 2 conference in Hollywood, California. Epic Games designed the demo to showcase what's possible when storytelling and VR technology collide. There aren't a lot of details on the hardware used to power the demo, though on the graphics...
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Given the fervent hype surrounding the technology, virtual reality is going to be a big part of our future. Of course the same thing was said about 3D content, and we all know how popular that is nowadays, but VR is quite different. Unlike 3D, it actually manages to immerse you in the content, and when a good solution is used, the effect can simply be amazing. But, with all good things, there must be some caveats, and similar to 3D once again, one of those caveats with VR is the potential dizziness or similar symptoms in some users. But according to Stanford researchers, who presented their own VR headset at SIGGRAPH, it's possible to develop a solution that can get rid of...
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We use a bevy of benchmarks here at HotHardware to measure everything from computational power to SSD speeds to the graphical prowess of $1000 video cards. I employ 3DMark's Fire Strike software on a near-daily basis for my GPU testing and find that, while it can't perfectly mirror in-game performance, it's a pretty accurate representation of a graphics card's -- and by extension your PC's -- gaming chops. But as we collectively rush toward the proliferation of Virtual Reality hardware and games in 2016 and beyond, we lack a standard for testing how well our systems can handle VR. Enter Crytek and Basemark. But Can It Run VR?"Can It Run Crysis?" has become an iconic question for PC gaming...
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Autodesk is no stranger to 3D animation and professional software. The company offers several design tools for developers, including Maya, 3ds Max, Fusion 360, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, and the list goes on, though up until now, one thing you wouldn't find in Autodesk's portfolio is a game engine. That changes today. Announced at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Europe 2015, Stingray is Autodesk's entry into the game engine business. It's built on the data driven architecture of the Bitsquid engine, which Autodesk scooped up in 2014, and supports a bunch of industry standard game development workflows. It also includes connectivity to Autodesk 3D animation software to simplify game development across...
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