Oculus Rift

[Winjer]

Cá está uma demonstração impressionante para o Oculus Rift, utilizando o Unreal Engine 4, para simular uma visita à International Space Station.

[Jorge-Vieira]

Excelente demo

[Jorge-Vieira]

Report: AR and VR devices will surge, 3M units in 2015 to 55M in 2020

Augmented and virtual reality devices will drastically increase in popularity, rising from 3 million units in 2015 up to 55 million in 2020, according to ABI Research. Head-mounted displays (HMDs) will lead the way, but mobile-reliant devices will see early success, with tethered solutions needing a bit more time to mature.

"There is a lot of excitement and hype focused on getting consumers to try out virtual reality, including the LG G3 shipping with an HMD in some markets, and Mattel's View-Master AR toy," said Michael Inouye, senior analyst at ABI Research. "These early experiences will be like any new toy-novel for a while and then fall off in use, with new content potentially driving periodic re-engagement."

It's unknown if gaming and movies will help drive VR, even though hardware developments are being made. Meanwhile with AR, which is increasingly popular in the enterprise, consumers find a lack of apps difficult to help embrace the technology - and ABI Research thinks it may be a matter of time:

"For true breakthrough products to be embraced, technology, usability, and content must meet at the critical time. For AR & VR, the inflection isn't likely to occur until 2016."

Noticia:
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/43817/...020/index.html

[Jorge-Vieira]

Björk’s Next Music Video Made For Oculus Rift

Icelandic music artist Björk is known for her pioneering use of technology, both in her songs and their accompanying videos (Chris Cunningham’s video for her song All is Full of Love, below, is a particular highlight), and now she has announced that her next music promo has been created especially for virtual reality headset Oculus Rift
Björk told innovations magazine Fast Company that she sees Oculus Rift as “almost more intimate than real life” and that she is wowed by its “crazy panoramic” abilities. The song, Stonemilker, along with its VR video, will be launched at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on 8^th March as part of a retrospective on Björk’s career.

Noticia:
http://www.eteknix.com/bjorks-next-m...e-oculus-rift/

[Jorge-Vieira]

Google X display head joins Oculus VR

Oculus VR is continuing to siphon up some of the world’s top tech talent with a rumoured new hire right from the heart of Google’s X facility. Mary Lou Jepsen, who for the past three years has headed up the display division there, is reported to have left to join the Facebook owned virtual reality developer.
Although not announced officially, ReCode has it that Facebook has confirmed the move, though it’s not clear in what capacity Jepsen is expected to operate at Oculus. Presumably it will be to help further development on the types of displays that the Rift headset will utilise as she has plenty of experience in that regard. Not only did she help Google push its own display technologies forward, but she was also one of the founding members of the One Laptop per Child program, where she invented the readable-in-sunlight display and co-pioneered its low power draw system.

While viewing the Rift display in sunlight won’t be necessary, keeping its power usage low may well be important one day if Oculus were to make a headset that was capable of wireless streaming without all the inherent problems it would have with latency.
Jepsen is just one of many recent hirees at Oculus, which Facebook bolstered by as many as 50 new team members back in January.

Noticia:
http://www.kitguru.net/channel/jon-m...ins-oculus-vr/

[Jorge-Vieira]

AMD LiquidVR – Technologies for Virtual Reality

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD), has announced today, at the Game Developers Conference, an initiative focused on delivering the best possible VR tools for developers and users, through new AMD technologies and partnerships. The first product of this initiative by AMD is LiquidVR, which essentially makes everything for developers much easier. One AMD rep stated during the presentation:

“You can plug an Oculus Rift into a computer and start 3D rendering directly to the headset, even without Oculus’ SDK.”












LiquidVR marks AMD’s first step toward VR support

LiquidVR is a solution for making various VR headsets work easily on various devices, and it also optimizes the use of that headset for that particular computer, presumably powered by AMD chips. LiquidVR is AMD’s first step toward VR support, with upcoming partnerships and more in the coming future. Anuj Gosalia,Oculus VR director of engineering, reported that his company is extremely excited about the things AMD is doing in VR, and Oculus is working in implementing AMD’s work.

These tools will result in the experience of VR being seemless to the end-user. The Alpha version of the SDK will be available to select developers today. When asked whether AMD is also working with Valve and HTC on the HTC Vive headset, AMD reps, asked whether they could talk about that, so the answer would be yes.

“The number one rule [in AMD VR] is ‘do not break the presence, from the first moment the first photon hits your eye, the presence must be maintained. If your graphics card can’t keep up, you throw up.”

said Raja Koduri, Vice President of Visual and Perceptual Computing, and continued to explain:

“Content, comfort, and compatibility are the cornerstones of our focus on VR at AMD, and we’re taking a big step in all three areas with the introduction of LiquidVR today. With LiquidVR, we’re collaborating with the ecosystem to unlock solutions to some of the toughest challenges in VR and giving the keys to developers of VR content so that they can bring exceptional new experiences to life. AMD will continue to collaborate closely with the VR ecosystem to deliver new LiquidVR technologies that aim to make the virtual world every bit as accurate as the real world.

Noticia:
http://wccftech.com/amd-liquidvr-tec...rtual-reality/

[Jorge-Vieira]

AMD announce Liquid VR, with the goal of removing latency from VR

GDC 2015 - AMD has just jumped into the VR game with the announcement of Liquid VR, a new software development kit that wants to see the presence in VR improved.

image: http://imagescdn.tweaktown.com/news/...ng-latency.jpg

One of the biggest problems with the future of VR gaming is the latency - the time in which moving your head, and seeing that movement happen in the virtual world, is measured. This needs to be as small as possible, with the hope of removing it completely. In order to achieve this, the software and GPU need to be tweaked to the max.

AMD has teased that multi-GPU, hardware-accelerated time warp, and direct-to-display technologies within its Liquid VR. Starting with hardware-accelerated time warp, which uses updated information to the user wearing the VR headset, and the position of their head after a frame has been rendered, and then it warps the image to reflect the new viewpoint as soon as it sends it to the headset.

The multi-GPU side of things will see each independant GPU in your system, which would end up being a Radeon R9 390X or so, with each card rendering a separate eye, and then into the single image that is blasted to your VR headset. The direct-to-display part of Liquid VR sees users with the ability to boot directly into the VR display.

Noticia:
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/43896/...ncy/index.html

[Jorge-Vieira]

Harmonix has been working on a VR music visualiser

Harmonix might be most well known for kickstarting the rhythm game trend in the latter half of the ‘oos, but it’s been working on many other games since Rockband died off. Whether it’s the Dance Central series though or an interactive version of Fantasia, Harmonix is always working with music, so it’s not too surprising that its first VR project does the same. However it isn’t so much a game, but a virtual reality visualiser for your personal collection.

Much like the standard visualisers that you get as part of Windows media player, or some of the fancier ones that you can pay a few pounds for, Harmonix’s will send you on a visual ride along with your music. However, being in virtual reality, Harmonix wanted to make it a little more interactive, with the player’s gaze sending them on a journey through the visuals being shown.




For those wanting a quick demo of what they’re talking about, jump to 4:20 and 7:30
Explained in the somewhat lengthy video above, taken during a Boston VR meetup, Harmonix has created several scenarios that apply to different genres and can be changed on the fly depending on the intensity and pace of music being listened to. If the track is quiet and relaxing, a beach scenario with flying birds and rolling shores of colour might be shown, though if it’s something more aggressive the visualiser might opt for some harsher colours and thumping fractals instead.
As part of this development though, Harmonix explored a lot of the difficulties with developing VR. Certain movements were problematic for first time VR users, especially going backwards and any heavy acceleration. Funnily enough, jump cuts were the least jarring way to move around, but only if momentum was maintained. It also addresses issues with body dysmorphia in VR, whereby your avatar (or lack of one) doesn’t look like the real you. To counter that, Harmonix’s system just fades to black if you look down at yourself.

Noticia:
http://www.kitguru.net/gaming/develo...ic-visualiser/

[Jorge-Vieira]

AMD Takes Aim At Exceptional Content With New LiquidVR Technologies

Today, at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, AMD announced an initiative to deliver the best possible VR experience for developers and users through new AMD technologies and partnerships. The first output of AMD’s initiative is LiquidVR™, a set of innovative technologies focused on enabling exceptional VR content development for AMD hardware, improved comfort in VR applications by facilitating performance, and plug-and-play compatibility with VR headsets. The upcoming LiquidVR SDK makes a number of technologies available which help address obstacles in content, comfort and compatibility that together take the industry a major step closer to true, life-like presence across all VR games, applications, and experiences.





In virtual reality, the concept of ‘presence’ is described as the perception of being physically present in a simulated, nonphysical world in a way that fully immerses the user. A key obstacle to achieving presence is addressing motion-to-photon latency, the time between when a user moves their head and when his or her eye sees an updated image reflecting that new position. Minimizing motion-to-photon latency is critical to achieving both presence and comfort, two key elements of great VR.

Noticia:
http://www.hardocp.com/news/2015/03/...s#.VPbhuuFv7P4

[Jorge-Vieira]

Unreal Engine 4 – RISE Oculus DK2 Tech Demo

Nurulize has just revealed a 4K trailer for Rise Oculus DK2 tech demo, at GDC 2015. It is running on Unreal Engine 4. RISE is a fully immersive virtual reality experience that tells the story of a robot uprising from the perspective of a sentient robot agitator who’s been captured. The project explores the confluence of VR and science fiction cinema.

Director David Karlak teamed up with Nurulize to create a unique VR experience that captures every minute detail and allows participants to experience a cinematic moment frozen in time. Creating the VR experience for RISE came with its share of technical challenges, particularly for the more innovative elements. Scott Metzger and the VR start-up Nurulize, that he co-founded, spearheaded the enormous task of creating a hyper-realistic virtual experience. Starting with the environment captured with FARO LIDAR scans, HDR photography, and the XXArray character captures, Scott Metzger and Nurulize used these enormous data sets to reconstruct the scene in its entirety.

The Project was nominated for Best Art Direction and the first annual VR Proto Awards

The project was one of the Oculus/Tribeca Storyscapes curated selections to be featured along at the Tribeca Film Festival 2014 Storyscapes event and was nominated for best Art Direction and the first annual VR Proto Awards.

Philip Lunn, CEO of Nurulize, said:

“All of this technical work and the immense level of detail that we’ve added to the scene and characters in particular, create this truly amazing look that will just blow people away. The RISE VR experience is just one of the ways we are experimenting with this exciting technology as we work to build experiences and software solutions that will shape the way we interact and consume media in the future.”

The Tech demo uses Graphine’s advebced texture streaming middleware ‘Granite SDK’.
Nurulize’s tech demo also uses Graphine’s advanced texture streaming middleware ‘Granite SDK’. The Granite texture streaming library can is rock-solid and highly optimized for real-time rendering, and enables extremely detailed object surfaces needed to render in high definition.

Noticia:
http://wccftech.com/unreal-engine-4-...#ixzz3TSEJy8Yn

[Jorge-Vieira]

RISE Oculus Tech Demo Gets 4K Trailer and More!

Noticia:
http://www.eteknix.com/rise-oculus-t...ts-4k-trailer/

[Jorge-Vieira]

Facebook hiring 1200+ people ramping up to the Oculus Rift launch

It looks like Facebook is ramping up to the hopefully absolutely gigantic launch of the Oculus Rift CV1 (Consumer Version 1), with the social network reportedly going on a huge hiring spree. Facebook is hiring over 1200 new employees, which would see its global workforce increase by a large 14%.

image: http://imagescdn.tweaktown.com/news/...ift-launch.jpg

Facebook acquired Oculus VR this time last year for $2 billion and has since collaborated with the company on its VR HMDs, but until now it hasn't made Oculus change anything at its core. Even to this day, Oculus still operates virtually separately to Facebook, but enjoying Facebook's deep pockets for acquiring talent, companies and I'm sure, getting contracts signed for displays, and other parts that will go into the first consumer version of the Rift.

This huge hiring spree is great news for the Oculus Rift, as Facebook is looking to secure logistics managers that will work their magic on the global supply chain. Facebook's Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, has said: "We are an ambitious company run by an ambitious CEO. Our users are growing and our business is growing and we want to support that".

Noticia:
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/43967/...nch/index.html

[Jorge-Vieira]

Rift add-on adds smell, heat and more to VR

Since the Oculus Rift was initially announced and debuted, showing the earliest of adopters that the future of gaming could very well be virtual, companies have been coming out of the woodwork to release companion products. There was the Omni treadmill, the Leap Motion, Nimble VR (which Oculus bought out) and many more. Now there’s a new kid on the block though, called FeelReal, a device that is said to give users the ability to feel and smell the virtual world that they’re exploring.

Although announced late last month, it was officially made available last week at the GDC and as those of you that have read Ready Player One might have expected, early reports of its effectiveness are not particularly great. It works by using a mix of heaters, fans, misters and a vibration engine to give you the feel of wetness, heat or air moving across your skin and there’s a cartridge full of seven unique smells – including fire, jungle, ocean, powder, flowers, metal and grass – which is replaceable as they run out.





Unfortunately as varied as the company’s attempts are at making us smell our games as well as see them, most people that tried the FeelReal device were not impressed. As TechCrunch reports, the additional bit of kit hooks underneath the Rift headset, which can’t be great for balance, and delivers an experience that the writer describes as really scary. The problem as it turns out, is that when you put something underneath a headset mounted on your eye level, it covers your mouth and nose, so your breathing suddenly becomes dependant on some third party gear.
Although the cooling nature levels turned out to be quite pleasant for the writer, ultimately they claim that it was just as easy to stick an adjustable fan in-front of you for rollercoaster demos. The added bonus of that being that you didn’t need to smell horribly artificial scents while you did it.
When released, FeelReal will be compatible with the Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Project Morpheus and the Zeiss VR One. You can pre-order one today for $250.

Noticia:
http://www.kitguru.net/channel/gener...nd-more-to-vr/


Elevar a realidade virtual a outro patamar com sensações e cheiros.

[Winjer]

[Jorge-Vieira]

Oculus falling behind the VR game, might not release the Rift in 2015

After being the only one talking the VR industry seriously, Oculus VR might not be the first to the market with a serious VR device with its Rift. Company founder and brainiac Palmer Luckey has talked about the launch of the consumer version of the Rift at SXSW 2015, where he had some interesting things to say.

image: http://imagescdn.tweaktown.com/news/...-rift-2015.jpg

He was asked if Oculus plan to launch their consumer VR headset this year, but he didn't reveal any dates. Luckey didn't state that anything had gone wrong with the Rift, but he did say that the Facebook-owned giant has changed its roadmap and that they're having to ramp up target quality for CV1.

Luckey said: "I did say that, before we made a lot of changes to our roadmap, including ramping up the target quality level of the consumer device and partnering with Facebook. I cannot comment on the date one way or the other, but I can say nothing is going horribly wrong. Everything is going horribly right".

Noticia:
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/44053/...015/index.html