How to fix the USB issue of Samsung Phone continuously disconnecting from PC (useful for GearVR devs)

Today I want to talk about a really annoying issue regarding some smartphones. It is slightly off topic, since it’s not directly a VR topic (and this is a VR blog), but since I use my Samsung Note 4 to do mobile VR… we can say that this is absolutely a VR-related post… can’t we?

The issue is the following: you connect your Samsung phone (in my case a Samsung Note 4, but the issue happens also with the S7 and other models) to a PC and everything works fine. Then you try maybe to move some data (e.g. backup your phone photos to your hard drive… or you try to deploy your APK for an awesome VR game) and suddenly the phone disconnects from the PC. One second later, it reconnects. And then it goes this way, with a connect-disconnect schizophrenia that makes you become completely mad. Even because there’s no exact reason because this happens: sometimes it stays connected more, other times less… but anyway you can’t use it in peace. And for me, during continuous deploy of big APKs of VR applications, this bug has meant an enormous waste of time.

Oculus, USB 3.1 and blue screen of death loop (thread exception not handled)

In these days I’ve completely formatted my VR PC. The reason? A damn blue screen of death loop.

My friend Max was playing with Robo Recall and having a lot of fun. Then suddenly he started having some audio issues, so after a while I decided to restart my PC. Well, blue screen of death. F*ck.

Oh, f*ck (Image from Oculus forums)

Immotionar post mortem: goodbye and thank you

In these days I’ve written a lot of words about my startup Immotionar that is shutting down. I tried to explain you what errors we made that lead to our shutdown and I also tried being of help in telling you how to recover from the psychological downtimes of seeing your company closing. Today I want just to thank all people that have been part of the project and recall some good memories to close this serie… from the next post on, I’ll return talking about VR reviews, tutorials and so on.

First of all I want to thank Gianni, for having taught me so much in these three years and for having been the one starting this virtual reality journey. Actually it was more an augmented reality journey at the beginning, since our first idea was to use Google Glasses to do amazing AR applications… then we tried them and… cough cough… they were really terrible! Right eye had to look at this little display while left eye should look forward… only derp could use such a hardware!!

Derp’s eyes are the ideal ones for Google Glasses (Image by urban dictionary)

Immotionar post mortem: how to recover psychologically from your VR startup failure

In this third episode relative to my startup failure (first one was the failure announcement, while the second one talked about the errors we made that led to our failure), I want to tell you how you, as a startup founder, can help yourself in recovering psychologically from your startup failure.

Seeing your startup failing is fucking hard, trust me. It’s like losing a person you love. When you start your startup adventure, you know that you have 90% chances of failing (these are the startups statistics), but you think that this won’t regard you, since your startup is based on a great idea and you’re super-determined to work to make it become a great success. When things become hard, you keep pushing and you continue think that they’ll get better in the end. You don’t realize it is failed until the moment of the final shut-down decision.

Immotionar post mortem: what errors we made in our VR startup and how to avoid them for yours

In my last post I told you that my startup has just shut down. If you don’t know it, its name was Immotionar: our purpose was to offer full body virtual reality to every kind of headsets, mixing VR HMD with body tracking sensors like Microsoft Kinects. An innovative product, that has failed nonetheless.

With today’s post I want to highlight some errors we made, so that you can avoid them in your startup journey (if you plan in becoming an entrepreneur).

So, this is a list of the main keypoints I want to higlight.

Immotionar VR startup shuts down: f**k you all.

With the classical “thank you all” post, the adventure of my virtual reality startup Immotionar has closed. We tried to push virtual reality beyond its limits for 3 years, adding full body of the user in the virtual world without worn sensors, but in the end we lost the battle.

I made such a strong title for this post not because I hate you (I love you, my readers!) but to mock all those thank-you-posts that are all full of hypocrisy: when you close your company, the last thing that you want to do is be kind and say “thank you to everyone”. When you close your startup, you feel sadness, anger, shame, emptiness: a mixture of all the worst feelings… the ones your mum has told you not to feel in your life. “F*ck everyone” is the title that every shut-down post should have… it would be more honest.

I’ll try to not make this failure useless, explaining you what I’ve learnt in these hard times. Especially I want to explain you:

• The errors we’ve made, so you won’t make them as well;
• How to recover psychologically from such a failure;

My next posts will be about that. It will hurt, but I hope that will help someone else in his/her journey for becoming an entrepreneur. Stay tuned.

 

 

VR in Healthcare for reducing anxiety of patients with Access Med

I’ve been contacted by Sam of Access Sports, a medical facility in New Hampshire (U.S.) that is experimenting with virtual reality. Virtual reality is going to perform a great impact in healthcare: I’ve read articles on patients using virtual reality as an alternative to anesthetics during surgical operations (if you wonder how this is possible: well, properly crafted VR experiences can induce a state very similar to hypnosis, so the brain will be told to ignore all pain stimuli from the body); articles on people that have returned to walk thanks to a rehabilitative VR experience; articles on training applications for medics and surgeons using VR (well, me too have been part in a project for medical training in AR). Today I’ve learnt something new, because Access uses VR to releave anxiety in patients before medical treatments.

Copy and pasting pretending that the following ones are my real words, this is what they do.

Guided Meditation VR review: relax in virtual reality

Some times ago, I made an interview with a great team working on a relaxation app for virtual reality: Just Relax. Today, I’ve been able to actively try another relaxation tool for VR: Guided Meditation VR. Guided Meditation VR is one of the demos that I loved the most at DK2 times (the good old times of Oculus Share, when VR was so pure, do you remember that?) and so when Cubicle Ninja guys gave me a free key I was so happy!

Guided Meditation at good ol’ DK2 times… graphics was quite good, but not awesome… and doing screenshots resulted in that deformed images. How many memories!

After having installed it, I launched it… ready to feel relaxed.

Initial menus were a bit too fast (not so coherent with the relaxation theme) and were strangely controllable only using left hand (don’t know if this happened only to me or if it is a design choice… but I didn’t manage to change this in any way).

How to use Riftcat VRIdge with Kinects: ImmotionRoom Iridge server

A lot of time ago I described you how cool is VRIdge, the solution that makes you play SteamVR games using a cheap Cardboard or GearVR headset. I love VRidge, not only because it allows people to lower the entry point for playing VR experiences (a Cardboard is surely cheaper than a Vive), but also because it is made by very kind people (I’ve interacted with them and I can assure you that these Polish guys&girls are really fantastic).

Some times ago I wrote a tutorial on how to use VRIdge with Kinect and it got its success. Reason is that of course Cardboads can’t offer the positional tracking owned by Vive, so VRIdge users can supply it with other sensors, like Kinects for instance. Tutorial highlighted some issues in this process, since it required some dev skills (one of the required program doesn’t work on standalone, but needs to be run inside Eclipse!) and it used very rough programs. Since we at Immotionar work with Kinect and VR from almost three years, me and Gianni asked ourselves: why can’t we fix this issue? And we did it.

Me, doing funny things with a 3-kinects setup

Now you can use VRIdge with Kinect using ImmotionRoom solution, in particular using its Iridge server. What are advantages of this solution?