My personal opinion about VR in China

VR in China will be huge. Everyone is saying this. Once in a while all major VR blogs and magazines come out with an article saying that VR in China is huge, will be huge and that China will conquer the VR world. They talk about Chinese investments funds, startups, enormous VR centers, lots of VR arcades and with numbers they’ll prove you that US is just a little country compared to China. An example link for such Chinese-friendly articles is this one.

These articles are very interesting because they remember us that we are very Western-world-centered: we all look at US and the Silicon Valley as the tech paradise and we usually forgot the big red giant. China is huge and it’ll grow even more in the next times: it is predicted that in some years it will become the first economical power of the world. So, surely VR will be huge there. But I don’t share the same exact opinion of these articles… I’m not a business expert, but I know something about Chinese people and I know something about VR, so I can have some sensible thoughts on this topic.

Virtual reality locomotion choice in games is not an option

Locomotion is one of the biggest issues in virtual reality: lots of alternatives with pros and cons for each choice have been provided, like:

• no locomotion (like in GearVR): just stay in a fixed place and don’t move, like when you look 360° videos;
• standard locomotion: you use keyboard or gamepad to move forward… very easy to understand but leads to motion sickness;
• teleportation (introduced by Vive): you just move immediately from one place to another. There’s no sickness, but it’s absolutely not natural;
• walk-in-place (like the one used in our full body VR solution ImmotionRoom): you move forward looking at the direction you want to move to and then walking in place in the real world to walk in the virtual world. This is smart since reduces a lot motion sickness, while being natural;
• Freedom locomotion system: like walk-in-place, but you define where to go using your thumb on the VR controller.
• Lots of others: really there are a bazillion locomotion options out there! Every day some new mechanics get invented

Moving with teleportation with Vive inside The Lab

Happy 8th of March, #WomenInVR

It’s the 8th of March and all over the world this is the International Women’s day. Here we’re used to gift some yellow flowers called mimosa and remember our beloved women why they’re important for us.

There’s lot of debate about women and technology and women and virtual reality. As always we men are much more, but in the field that I know best, VR, I know some really valuable women, like Eva Hoerth or Helen Situ, that are very important influencers. They usually use the tag #WomenInVR to help the spread of this wonderful technology among women, in a tech world populated by men.

GDC and MWC 2017 main VR news

This article is just a small recap about the latest VR news and announcement, so if you’ve lost them, you can read it here only in one place! Most of them has been made at GDC or MWC.

First of all, Vive has revealed the price of the Tracker and the Audio Strap: they’ll cost $99 dollars each. Finally we know how much money we will spend to start developing innovative VR applications with pseudo-objects-tracking. As I’ve already said, I hoped price would have been lower for the Tracker, to help adoptions among makers, but the price shows a more business-oriented approach.

Virtual Reality price is lowering, adoption is coming?

After GDC 2017, lots of things have changed in the VR world. Nothing unexpected, but lots of little big news that show how virtual reality ecosystem is evolving very fast.

One of the most interesting news has been the one of Oculus cutting 200$ for the price of Oculus Rift + Touch bundles. Since Touch cost is 199$, this practically means that if you buy a Rift, you get Touch controllers for free! Furthermore, if you want to buy an additional tracking sensor, you’ll get a discount of $20 on the previous price!

Oculus + Touch: I’ve spent too much money for these toys…

Oculus Tracker Update 1.12 makes Oculus a good guy again

After having criticized Oculus about its tracking issues and how its updates were making things even worse (unless you used Duct Tape, of course… duct tape fixes everything!), today I have to say “Bravo!” to its guys.

The new Update they’ve released for the Rift, the 1.12, seems to have fixed lots of stuff: as you can see from the release notes, a lot of work has been done to make tracking good again. The feedbacks from the users have been really positive and now reddit shows people writing “With 1.12 my room scale works” and so the virtual world is a happier place. Surely there will be people that will still experience errors and problems, but their number has been drastically lowered.

Microsoft virtual reality headsets are becoming real thanks to Acer

I have already dedicated some articles about the Microsoft virtual reality headsets because I’m very curious about them. Microsoft promised these cheap VR headsets that works out of the box with Windows 10 and that provide positional tracking without external cameras, claiming that they’re even better than Oculus or Vive! In January they revealed them, but until yesterday no one had ever tried them.

At GDC 2017, finally, the first Windows 10 VR headset has been presented: it is made by Acer and offers all characteristics that Microsoft has promised: good graphical quality, inside-out tracking and cheap price ($299).

Some selected journalists have been able to try the prototype (but they couldn’t shoot photos or videos, damn!) and the feedbacks are:

• It’s a bit like PSVR;
• It is tethered;
• It is not comfortable;
• Framerate is still 60fps;
• Blurred graphics;
• Seldomly the positional tracking has glitches;
• The experience sometimes crashes;
• The controller is a gamepad.
• It has flip-up display: meaning you can flip up the hmd just to return to the real world and flip it down again to go virtual (cool!);
• It has inside-out tracking, so it doesn’t require external cameras;

Gear VR 2017: remote is the new mouse

2 days ago with a post on its blog, Oculus announced the launch of the new Samsung Gear VR. As always, with respect to the older version it is more powerful, more comfortable, more epic, it has more compatible content and blah blah blah. Honestly despite all the marketing words, I’ve not seen that much innovation in the different versions of Gear VR: the only thing that truly changes is the phone that you put inside it and that gives more horsepower to the graphics you see inside virtual reality.

This year, finally, Samsung and Oculus have introduced a true innovation: the remote. Oh, well, actually this is not a true innovation, since something similar was already present inside Oculus CV1 and Daydream, but it’s surely an innovation for this headset. And you know, I love remotes: if  you’ve read my Daydream review, you know that I found it super-comfortable. Gear VR had to introduce it to not fall behind its competitor. Remote of Gear VR has 3-DOF so you can point objects and has 4 buttons and a touchpad to have super-easy interaction with the VR environment. If you’re thinking “it’s almost exactly like Daydream one”… yes, you’re right.

This handsome guy is trying a VR experience using Daydream and its 3DOF controller…

Vive reveals Tracker price and other stuff at MWC 2017

Yesterday finally we got to know the price of the Vive Tracker and all other add-ons Vive revealed at CES! If you forgot what I’m talking about, you can have a look at my wonderful previous post about it or you can go on to refresh your memory.

Basically Vive got lot of hype announcing the Vive Tracker, that is a single sensor that is tracked thanks to SteamVR Lighthouse system and through which you can obtain the position of a single point inside your VR environment with great precision. Tracker is wireless and works thanks to a battery. It streams data via USB (there is a USB dongle you have to put inside your PC ports). Thanks to Vive tracker you can track multiple objects inside your room (you just put a tracker attached to each object) or even the human body (you put trackers on the main joints of your body and obtain all the rest through inverse kinematics).