HTC Vive shows new controllers and wireless version

We were all expecting it: after all the hype generated by Oculus technologies at Oculus Connect 3, HTC and Steam had to react somehow.

We didn’t have to wait that much: at Steam Dev Days, Steam has announced great news: a new base station system for Vive and a new type of VR controllers!

3 Things We Need To Get Better At While Working With VR

Today I’m proud to host here a post written by Marvin, a great VR passionate from England, owner of blog Moments in VR and of a great VR Youtube channel. I invite you to see his great work… but before that let’s all read his new post! Let’s go Marvin!

Virtual Reality is here. It’s new (almost), it’s exciting and It still has a long way to go.

No matter how we look at it, we’re only scratching the surface of this new technology and it’s close cousins Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality

Before we go any further let’s define just what these technologies are.

I preordered the Oculus Touch!!!

Yesterday evening has been a great moment for me… I preordered my Oculus Touch, reserving my front seat having been one of the people that pre-ordered the Rift CV1 in January!

As we already know, I paid them 199€… and I hope they will be great! My controllers will arrive in December, so I’ll have something to do during my Christmas vacations… 😉

And you, have you preordered your Touch Controllers? Have you ever tried them? Let me know in the comments section!

 

Highlights of Oculus Connect 3

Some days ago I wrote a blog post about what to expect from the Oculus Connect 3, the greatest Oculus event of the year. I made some predictions… and I got right with three and a half out of five! Am I a magician? Well, it would be cool, but actually it’s only matter of being informed on the VR world and just being a bit visionary… even if the magician story is the one I actually tell girls to impress them:)

Ok, so… what have been the most important announcements of Oculus Connect 3? Oculus has made a short recap on its blog and I want to enhance it with some thoughts.

Google announced Daydream

Yesterday Google announced its new flagship phone, Pixel, and a lot of new epic stuff, among which its new virtual reality platform: Daydream. If you, like me, didn’t watch the live streaming (too lazy to do it), you can read the main points of the conference here.

So, Google abandoned Nexus brand to start the Pixel one: the phone is quite powerful, has a good design and has reduced the gap with Samsung and Apple phones. New software features like Google Assistant and free cloud storage to store your photos at high resolutions make it a lot appealing to consumers. This is an image of two Pixel phones… cool, aren’t they?

Google Pixel phones… look at how the design is beautiful (image from The Verge)

With this new phone, the company has launched its new virtual reality platform, that is Daydream and its new headset, the Daydream View.

Virtual sickness: it depends on age or sex?

Some days ago I published this article about motion sickness. I shared it on Linkedin groups where I got in touch with a very interesting man, Steven Aukstakalnis, that gave me more info about this topic. He gave me some references and I started doing some researches with them and through Wikipedia. It has been very interesting and I want to share some info I got during this process. Obviously this article won’t be a complete review on motion sickness, but will provide some useful hints. If you want, there is a lot of research papers out there that you can read: people are researching on virtual sickness since a lot (some articles date in the 80s). I wonder if these researches from long time ago still hold today, when the headsets are completely different, but this is just another topic. Before beginning, to show my kindness to Steven, I want to say that he’s written a great book, Practial Augmented Reality, with this and many other considerations on AR and VR.

Oculus Connect 3: what to expect from it?

From 5th to 7th of October, Oculus will hold its annual event in San José, California: the Oculus Connect. It will be a day where super-smart people (like god-like programmer John Carmack or super smart-man Michael Abrash) will hold super-interesting talks and where Oculus will make lots of important announcements.

It will be an event totally worth to be seen. The talks of Oculus Connect are always interesting… look at this one made by Michael Abrash some times ago when he talked about illusions perceived by our brains:

But the thing we are waiting the most are the announcements. What will Oculus announce? We don’t know… but we can make some speculations. And I hope you will speculate with me in the comments, saying your predictions about the next Oculus Connect!