The Disruptive Technologies Conference

I’m proud to announce that we of ImmotionAR, with the help of some sponsors and some friends of Gianni’s (that are Microsoft MVP like him) are organizing a super-cool conference here in Turin, Italy about new disruptive technologies! We’ll talk about virtual reality and will showcase our full-body VR solution ImmotionRoom

There will also be another cool guy showing VR + mind control (uuuh) and three speeches about Hololens, with people actually taking Hololens devices there (and I hope they’ll make me try it!).

If you’re in Italy, come and see us! See agenda and registration info here. It can be a great occasion to talk about AR and VR together! If you’re not from Italy, share this event to let other people know!

Is PSVR going to rule VR market?

Hello everyone! Today I just want to write down some thoughts and start a discussion with you. The topic is the third important headset that is going to be released: PSVR.

PSVR is the headset of the Playstation, that you can plug directly in your Playstation 4 and have virtual reality straight from your console! As controllers you can use PS Move, so you can have the exact setup of the other competitors, with an high-end HMD and two controllers in your hands.

DeoVR review

Some days ago I found on reddit a post about a new video player for virtual reality: DeoVR. I got curious about this new product, since I couldn’t understand the need of having a new video player for VR where products like Whirligig already exist. So I decided to try it.

DeoVR has a nice website but it’s a product so new that it’s still hard to find it using Google (ah, thanks reddit for providing me the link). The name should be something that reminds of Matrix Neo, but to me reminds only of deodorants… so, mission failed 😀 😀 :D. It will be cross-device, but at the moment the only supported headset is Oculus Rift (and Vive in some days). If you want to download it, the website will provide you a dirty zip file with an executable (really? C’mon guys, provide us an installer at least… you can use Wix and make it feel really cool and professional, even if the only thing that it does is copying some files ;)…. we all do like this!)

What VR headset should you buy?

In my last article, I explained how to decide if you have to buy a virtual reality headset. In this new one, I’ll try to explain you which one you should buy, depending on what you want to do.

CAUTION: before reading this article, you must be aware that virtual reality is becoming full of fanboysm, so expressing the wrong opinion about a virtual reality headset to your friends (like saying “Oculus Rift is great” to a Vive owner) can make them kill you with a shotgun or, even worse, can be the beginning of WWIII. So, use the contents of this article at your own risk.

Every day, new VR headsets come to the light. In this article, I’ll just review the most known ones, i.e.: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PSVR, OSVR, Gear VR, Google Cardboard.

My experience at the European Innovation Academy

Last month I attended the EIA (European Innovation Academy) accelerator with my Immotionar team! It was really interesting, so I wrote a review to let other startupper know what to expect if they want to attend it! You can find it on Immotionar blog! Don’t miss it!

How to use VRidge with Kinect

Yesterday I’ve told you what VRidge is and wrote a review about this cool product that lets you use virtual reality PC experiences with your Cardboard mobile headset.

Today I want to focus on one of its features: the ability to use a Microsoft Kinect to emulate positional tracking of the headset: this way you can have what mobile headsets really lack, that is the positional tracking, the room-scale functionality. The system works in a very simple manner: they use the head position detected by the Kinect as the position of the headset in the virtual world, in a way very similar to what we do in our ImmotionRoom solution. But how to make it work? And is it really working well? I’ll try to answer these questions in this article.

UPDATE: I’ve written a new article that offers a more elegant way of using VRidge with Kinect using ImmotionRoom system. You can find it here. Otherwise, go on to keep reading on how to use the standard way involving opensource software like OpenTrack.

What is VRidge and how to use it

Today I tried VRidge. VRidge is a cool software that lets you use your Cardboard to play virtual reality PC games for Oculus and Vive. The premises were just too awesome that I had to try it, so I spent some time trying to figure out how it works. VRidge just installs DLLs, drivers and stuff, so that when you launch your PC virtual reality game, it thinks that the required headset is attached. Instead, the service just streams all sensors data (gyroscopes and stuff) from the phone to the PC game and all visuals data (the images to show to the user) from the PC game to the phone screen.

Twitch: first impressions

Some days ago Max and me had the crazy idea to publish our full-body virtual reality game experiments on Twitch. The idea turned out to be great, since now we’re on first, second and third position if you search for “Oculus” on twitch! (wow, a whole podium!) If you lost our last broadcast, well, you can still found it here or in the highlights here.

I know since a lot about Twitch, but I never streamed to it and never had even a look to it. So, today I wanted to try this famous website, to have my own opinion and be able to write it to you.

AltspaceVR: first impressions

Hello everyone! Friday we spent the whole day doing trials of our new virtual reality game. After a whole day of work, every normal person would have gone home, but since I’m a nerd and not a normal person, I felt the need to try AltspaceVR.

But… what is AltspaceVR? It’s a new virtual reality social platform… some kind of Second life. In AltspaceVR you can meet other people, organize and attend events (like watching a football match all together with other people, or making interviews with people, like the head of Leap Motion) and do other kind of activities. Lots of different inputs are supported (mouse+keyboard, but also Leap Motion, Kinect, etc…), as well as different headsets (Oculus, GearVR, etc…). They got lots of attention from the virtual reality ecosystem and with that, shitload of investment money (eeh, I’m such envious…)