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**Techdread** · February 26, 2015, 07:38 AM

Re: Magic Leap Visionary

Was going to post about this but figured That EJ et al would know already as I got technologyreview link from this site.

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534971/magic-leap/

VR without the headset, light scanned directly to the Iris. seems like some futuristic William Gibson cyberpunk type device.

Got that wrong its augmented reality.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/25/m...ner/#continued

**Woodsman** · February 26, 2015, 08:11 AM

Re: Magic Leap Visionary

Originally posted by Techdread View Post

...VR without the headset, light scanned directly to the Iris. seems like some futuristic William Gibson cyberpunk type device.

Magic Leap's marketing is quite hyped and good on Rony for getting so much free press. His claim that HMDs are somehow unsafe or potentially damaging to health is interesting, to say the least. Of course he cites no sources (likely because there are none) and HIS product is safe as mother's milk, dont'cha know.

Anyway, it seems to be an AR system like Google Glass or the Microsoft HoloLens thing and does indeed seem to be a wearable, at least at this stage. Here's the patent if anyone is interested.

**Techdread** · February 26, 2015, 08:26 AM

Re: Magic Leap Visionary

Yep they hope to shrink the equipment to a pair of glasses.

Well you would not want to walk down the street with an HMD....

**Techdread** · February 26, 2015, 10:44 AM

Re: Magic Leap Visionary

While we're talking tech.

This is the best I have seen this year, wish Space Companies would invest in machines instead of bothering with humans in space.

**don** · March 09, 2015, 08:04 AM

Re: Magic Leap Visionary

Virtual Reality�s Potential Displayed at Game Developers Conference

By CHRIS SUELLENTROPMARCH 8, 2015

SAN FRANCISCO � For game designers, virtual reality became a real business last week when the virtual reality equivalent of Apple�s app store for iPhones and iPads opened its digital doors.

If you make a game in virtual reality, or V.R., now you can sell it to customers instead of giving it away free. It�s the biggest step yet toward discovering what kinds of creative works will prove most successful in this new medium � an immersive, sensorially isolating experience that is either the art form of the 21st century or the biggest fad of 2016.

Last Monday, the store inside the Gear VR, a headset powered by a fancy Samsung phone and the technology of Oculus VR (the company Facebook acquired for $2 billion last year), opened for business at the start of the Game Developers Conference here.

Samsung and Oculus don�t advertise the Gear VR as a consumer product. They prefer to call it an �innovator edition� for early adopters. But you can buy it, and if you own it, you can spend your money � for now all the games are $10 or less � on the first wave of virtual reality games to hit the marketplace.

There�s only one catch: No one�s sure what virtual reality goggles are good for just yet.

�That is definitely the million-dollar question,� said Levi Miller, an engineer at Valve, a game developer and distributor, when I asked him what experiences would work best in virtual reality. Mark Zuckerberg might say it�s more like a $2 billion question.

�The truth is, we still don�t know what the best applications are going to be,� John Carmack, the chief technology officer of Oculus, said during a speech at the conference.

I tried on my first virtual reality headset two years ago, when people waited in line for hours on the expo floor at that year�s Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Center to check out the Oculus Rift. At this year�s show, virtual reality transitioned from a glimpse of the future to a plausible holiday gift. Sony announced that its headset, Project Morpheus, would go on sale by the middle of next year as a PlayStation 4 accessory.

Mr. Carmack revealed that a wide release of a new version of the Gear VR is being planned by Samsung and Oculus for this year.

And the closed-door demonstrations of the Vive, a collaboration between Valve and HTC, were the talk of the show. The Vive, which runs on a high-end personal computer, uses lasers � emitted from a pair of base stations � to track players as they move within a space of about 15 feet by 15 feet. It, too, will go on sale, for an as yet undisclosed price, before this year ends.

When you�re wearing a Vive, a white line on the virtual ground demarcates where it�s safe to walk. When I tried to move past it, a white checkerboard rose up in digital space to indicate the existence of a wall in physical space (and the possibility of a broken nose). Its tracking of movements is accurate enough that I could reach out and knock.

The Vive demos were breathtaking. Using a pair of motion controllers that come with the system, I painted colored lines in the air and then circled around them on my feet to admire my work. I looked into the eye of a blue whale as it floated past while I stood on the prow of a sunken ship.

Project Morpheus, a Sony virtual realty project, was a topic of discussion at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Experiences like these � and similar ones that can be had inside an Oculus or Morpheus headset � are probably enough to sell millions of units. But you can invite your neighbors over to watch a blue whale float through your living room only so many times. Once the novelty wears off, how are you going to spend your time inside these new virtual worlds?

For now, no one at Oculus, Sony or Valve has given a persuasive demonstration of how players will travel inside virtual reality, beyond exploring a small area on foot for the Vive. Like video games, virtual reality is a spatial medium, one that people are going to want to explore and interact with, not merely observe.

�In V.R., there is this amazing but very unforgiving 360-degree view of the world,� said Daniel Smith, a software developer at Weta Digital, during a panel discussion at the conference. �Just bringing stuff in from film is not an option.�

Weta, in collaboration with Epic Games, adapted a scene from the movie �The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug� for virtual reality, putting players in the furry feet of Bilbo Baggins as he faces the titular dragon. Equally impressive was Crytek�s Back to Dinosaur Island, which gave players a small degree of interactivity � you could knock over enormous eggs, or try to get a Tyrannosaurus rex to mimic your movements.

Neither scene, however, allowed players to move outside of the tiny space where they were planted. For that, virtual reality participants may have to rely on vehicles: cars, airplanes, spaceships and the like, instead of walking or running as they are accustomed to doing in so many video games.

New, previously unimagined experiences are coming, too, ones that will exploit the sense of isolation that virtual reality creates, rather than (perhaps fruitlessly) trying to alleviate it. Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, a cooperative game of bomb defusal, is one inventive example. It�s an interactive version of the ticking-bomb scenario from an espionage thriller. The player wearing virtual reality goggles is faced with a countdown clock and an array of wires and buttons, while another player, in real space, furiously flips through a 23-page manual and tries to tell the player what to do.

Most virtual reality demonstrations at the Game Developers Conference aimed for the thrills of action games and films. But Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is just one example of the potential for virtual reality to create sensations like tension and intimacy.

Shuhei Yoshida, the president of worldwide studios for Sony Computer Entertainment, said he was �totally relaxed� about figuring out how best to use virtual reality before Morpheus goes on sale next year. He mentioned Summer Lesson, a demo that puts players in the role of a tutor for a Japanese schoolgirl, as an example of a new kind of experience that would prove extremely popular.

The most memorable virtual reality experience I encountered last week � and I tried more than a dozen � occurred when a developer working on a game about time traveling in search of dinosaurs decided to show me, instead, pornography.

We stopped before any virtual sex, graphic or otherwise, took place. The point was to show how the intimate aloneness and immersive sound of virtual reality � you can hear a character talking around you in digital space � is as tantalizing as the 360-degree visuals.

�Imagine Nicole Kidman whispering in your ear, �I love you,� � the developer, Vander Caballero, said.
Trying out virtual reality for the first time � or the 50th � is jaw-dropping. Speculating about its potential for interactive storytelling is fascinating. But so far, almost no one has shown an experience that people will want to spend more than 15 minutes inside.

Until that happens � and it may happen as soon as the E3 trade show in Los Angeles in June � I�m going to regard the dawning age of virtual reality storytelling as equivalent to the prospect of Nicole Kidman whispering in my ear: a fantasy.

A headset lets a player experience Back to Dinosaur Island, a game from Crytek.

**don** · May 28, 2015, 06:30 AM

Re: Magic Leap Visionary

�There will be people crying in this, people falling in love, people falling over. For all sorts of reasons, this strikes at the core of being a human being. It�s so compelling � this is as big an opportunity as the internet.�

Dr Jonathan Waldern, standing in a meeting room in Silicon Valley, wearing a lab coat and grinning from ear to ear.

He�s talking about virtual reality (VR), the immersive systems that cover your eyes (and ideally ears) and fool your brain into thinking you�re somewhere, or even someone, else. Waldern, 54, is a veteran of the business: in the 90s, his company Virtuality was a pioneer in commercial VR, offering an arcade game experience in which a bulky headset transformed the room into a prehistoric scene in which pterodactyls swooped over and around you, and you tried to shoot them with your gun.

The last time I saw Waldern was in the UK, more than 20 years ago. Virtuality, which he had brought to the London stock market, was in talks with Atari to bring its ambitious Jaguar headset to consumers. But the deal fell apart, and then so did Virtuality. The market for VR shrank to zero almost overnight; its speed and completeness foreshadowed the dot-com boom and bust of 2000-2001.

But, just as the dot-coms evolved and returned like mammals emerging from a meteor strike, VR has come back too. And that�s what Waldern, who now runs a Silicon Valley company called Digilens, is excited about. He sees the field enjoying a resurgence, its long hibernation is over. And survivors like him are emerging to capitalise on the new boom.

�It�s a very small community [in VR] around here,� Waldern continues, referring to the west coast. (Though it transpires that when he says �small�, he means �in the thousands, but geographically close�.) �The cost of development in this realm is so high that very few corporations would take it on. Only the big three � Microsoft, Google, Facebook. Apple is the fourth, but isn�t so prominent.�
Does that mean Apple is looking at VR too? �I couldn�t possibly comment,� says Waldern, and grins. (Apple filed a patent in September 2008 for putting an iPhone into a headset, and another in 2014, but there�s been little other sign of activity on that front from the company.)

Even if it isn�t, the presence of the other three big companies in this space shows how hot VR has suddenly become. Oculus Rift, bought by Facebook for $2bn in March 2014, has been the poster child for the new face of this technology; the company now aims to launch a headset for consumers in 2016. It will have challengers though. Sony is working on Project Morpheus, which has the same aim, and HTC has built Vive, unveiled at Mobile World Congress in March, which will work with the Valve system for downloadable games.

Samsung has its own Gear VR, developed with Oculus. Even Google�s Cardboard, a DIY system which you literally fold together from a cardboard template before sticking your smartphone into a slot a few inches from your eyes, has had around 1.2m downloads since Google introduced it at its I/O developer conference in May 2014.

Meanwhile the parallel development of �augmented reality� (where objects and data are overlaid on to the scene you see in front of you) is growing quickly, too, with Microsoft�s Hololens the most promising offering to date, along with Google-funded Magic Leap. (Google Glass, which is undergoing a rethink, is like a subset of AR.)

But it�s VR that has everyone excited. In March 2014, Chris Dixon, a partner at the increasingly influential venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz, observedthat using an early version of Oculus Rift the year before was one of �a handful of technology demos in my life that made me feel like I was glimpsing into the future� � and his list ran back as far as the Apple II computer from the 70s.
VR, he noted, �has long been a staple of science fiction� (of which Star Trek: the Next Generation�s �holodeck� was only the most recent) but hardware was now cheap enough, and engineers keen enough to explore a new frontier, that it could finally deliver on the science fiction promise. (Dixon�s team cashed out on Facebook�s acquisition of Oculus Rift.)

In the 90s, VR certainly felt like SF. Waldern�s company relied on top-end Silicon Graphics systems with six-figure price tags. There�s a video of him from 1994 at W Industries, showing how pixellated the experience was. �Our system used some of the very first Sony LCDs, with 300 by 200 pixels,� Waldern recalls. �Today you get 1,080p [1,080 horizontal lines] minimum, and by the launch next year you�ll probably have 4K by 4K. And the computational power is transformational � we were working on about a megaflop, and each machine cost about $70,000, which is a massive barrier to adoption. Now with an Nvidia GPU you�re talking about a teraflop.�

VR is a complex real-time computing problem. Ideally, the fictional scene should show no individual pixels, fill your field of view � which in normally sighted people covers 180 degrees � and change without any lag, no matter how quickly you move your head. That means the system has to be able to calculate what the scene will look like at any point, and incorporate the movement of your head, reported from the helmet, into its computation, and update the screens quickly enough to give the sensation of realistic movement.

Measurement of head movement is done using accelerometers and gyroscopes; the screens can now offer millions of pixels just inches from your eyes; computing power aims to cut lag and latency. The latter can quickly induce nausea if the scene isn�t redrawn quickly enough as the body�s balance system disagrees with what the eyes tell it they�re seeing; that was a key problem with early VR systems.
But those are being overcome, thanks to the rapid growth of the smartphone industry. That has made accelerometers and gyroscopic chips cheap, plentiful and fast, while also pushing the quality of displays to a level where you can�t distinguish pixels even in screens a few inches from your eyes. That though requires graphics processors that can handle huge numbers of floating point operations per second (flops) � but, as Waldern says, that�s available.

Among those eagerly exploiting that space is Professor Bob Stone, chair of interactive multimedia systems at the University of Birmingham, and another British veteran of the 1990s boom and bust. After another 20-year gap, I caught up with him as he travelled from a location where he had been using a drone to create a 3D �point cloud� of a church and archaeological dig in Wiltshire; in just five minutes of flight it captured enough data to create a realistic 3D model that one could �fly� through at leisure.

When we spoke, Stone initially seemed unimpressed by Oculus�s offering, suggesting that �it�s not much different from the headsets of the late 1990s�. He cited �pixel bleed� (where the pixels don�t appear sharp) and limits on the field of view. �We�re using Oculus Rift development kit 2 [the latest version] in defence projects, because it�s the best of a bad bunch,� he said. Why bad? Stone feels that if you have to wear something, �you aren�t really experiencing total immersion�; he thinks ideally VR should simply feel like life. �More than 20 years on, shouldn�t we be further ahead than this?� he asks.

But later he emails, relenting on his apparent negativity: �VR has been my career for over 28 years now, and I genuinely believe in what VR can deliver when the technologies are applied appropriately and with the needs of the end users and end organisations well and truly in mind. As I said, it seems that every seven years we see the same old issues and hype coming through (these days via the web, YouTube, etc) that people out there seem to believe without question!�

The original bust in VR came when first-generation products were crushed by the weight of expectations. So what led to the renaissance of VR � and why has it taken so long?

Waldern reckons a key reason is that games, which were the main consumer-facing use for VR, shifted to a different set of genres. �There are periodic cycles in the games industry, for technologies and genres. People want change from time to time.� After a couple of decades of 2D and pseudo-3D offerings (think of Nintendo�s games, and Quake and Doom), gamers are ready for an �immersive� experience, he argues.

Digilens�s work involves building optical waveguides, so that projected images can fill or overlay the field of vision. Most of the uses on the company site involve business, rather than consumer, application, but Waldern sees all sorts of potential. �Why do you think Microsoft bought Minecraft?� he asks. �Hololens is perfect for it.�

Stone agrees: �One thing that saved VR was that while we were running around talking about headsets and gloves, the gaming community was coming up underneath, and came up with software and hardware in the quest for the best quality games. That drove down the cost of computing with graphics, and also made available a number of toolkits for games-quality virtual worlds that people could sympathise with.� Games drove costs down: �Things that in the late 1990s cost six-figure sums you can now do on an �800 laptop.�

Brian Blau, research director at analysis company Gartner, forecast in March � before Oculus�s announcement of a tentative release date � that there would be 2m VR headsets sold in 2016, rising to 8m in 2018; in all he thinks there could be 25m in use within a few years.
That doesn�t sound quite like the gigantic opportunity that Waldern described. But VR is seeing a growing number of uses in commercial spaces, where the ability to train people, or give them a new perspective, is valuable.

But it�s not the military, or even games, which might be the most effective users of VR. One can imagine scores of scenarios where it would be transformative. Planning your next holiday? Why not �visit� the alternatives first, via a headset? Games, exploration, psychiatry and many other fields could all be revolutionised. �Sex, of course,� says Stone. �We�ve seen some crazy devices coming out of Japan.� He points to healthcare, education and training as other fields that are most likely to take it up quickly.

Facebook�s purchase of Oculus, though, suggests that it sees the capability to transform how we interact with friends � which is what Waldern is thinking of when he talks about it potentially being bigger than the internet.

�Even back at the start, the biggest kick we got was when we used ISDN lines between Berlin and London, and we linked players up in a game. It was amazing: you could meet, play, talk with people. Now, games have been doing that virtually for a while. But when you can feel you�re really meeting someone, right there, as a jolly alien or Robin Hood �� He stretches for the words. �Immersivity is the main thing. This has many years to run, and we have to get to where we are totally convinced � but we�re looking at something which has transformational capability for society.�

Charles Arthur

**don** · May 28, 2015, 10:26 AM

Re: Magic Leap Visionary

In related news, what the E-experience can't do . . . .

Before I got into regular games nights, my usual gaming was with high school buddies and the only thing that mattered was winning. I hated losing in those situations.

When I got into the regular game nights with people from my meetup group, I learned very quickly that the point of games is to play them and the winning and losing part were the lowest things on the list of why to play a game. Playing games with new people taught me very quickly how to lose and sometimes win and have those things not matter. The interaction with people at the table and the enjoyment of playing a game and doing something that was outside the routine of life was more important than winning or losing.

Games have found a way to allow me to find enjoyment while removing the need to win or lose. This is important to me because when I was a kid, I was a terrible loser. Should the day come that I have a child and I need to teach them about winning and losing, I hope that I can use games to teach them that the experience of play is more important the the perceived life or death situation that is winning and losing.

Chris

**don** · June 18, 2015, 09:19 AM

Re: Magic Leap Visionary

TECHNOLOGY

Virtual Reality Headsets, Gaining Scrutiny at E3 This Week, Raise Very Real Concerns

By NICK WINGFIELDJUNE 14, 2015

Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, center, demonstrating the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and the Oculus Touch hand controllers at an event in San Francisco last week. Facebook paid $2 billion to acquire the company

Every Friday, a dozen or so people strap on virtual reality headsets, log on to the Internet and do something that would normally require driving to a local multiplex: watch a movie with a bunch of strangers.

Their avatars all sit in the seats of a virtual movie theater, staring at a screen playing a movie from Netflix. The sound from the theater is so accurate that if participants munch potato chips into their microphones, it sounds as though it is emanating from their avatars.

�When all of a sudden 10 avatars turn around and look at you, you know you should be quiet,� said Eric Romo, the chief executive of AltspaceVR, a Silicon Valley start-up that organizes the virtual movie gatherings and other virtual reality events.

The ability of virtual reality to transport people to locales both exotic and ordinary, is well known. Yet how the medium will fit into people�s online and offline lives is a new frontier. The best known of a new league of virtual reality headsets, HTC�s Vive by Valve, will start going on sale by the end of the year, and the devices will be a hot topic this week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, one of the largest annual gatherings for the video game industry.

That makes the thousands of developers and early adopters, who already have prototype virtual reality headsets, effectively lab rats for these devices. They�re the ones figuring out how to navigate their real-life surroundings when their vision of the real world is shut out.
They�re learning which virtual reality experiences are fun, which are creepy and which might make people nauseated from motion sickness.

Etiquette around social forms of virtual reality is already taking shape since this technology has the potential to turn some of the more noxious forms of online behavior into something far more menacing.

�We�re kind of at the Pong level of working with this,� said Chet Faliszek, who works on virtual reality at Valve, a game developer in Bellevue, Wash., referring to one of the earliest arcade video games to help popularize video gaming. �There�s so much more we�re discovering.�

Virtual reality has flopped in popularity before and could again. But its proponents, speaking in awe-struck terms about the coming wave of headsets, promise the technology has finally caught up to the hype. Facebook paid $2 billion to acquire Oculus VR, a start-up that last week showed the final design of the virtual reality headset that it plans to begin selling in the first quarter of 2016.

Sony is expected to reveal more this week at E3 about its own virtual reality headset, called Project Morpheus, for the PlayStation 4. None of these companies has announced prices yet.

�We feel very strongly that virtual reality is going to be the next big thing for entertainment,� said Kim Libreri, chief technology officer at Epic Games, a game developer investing in virtual reality projects.

One question about virtual reality is what will happen to people in the real world when they are transfixed by virtual space. All of the screens in consumers� lives � whether on televisions, smartphones and computers � can be absorbing. They do not, however, completely occlude what�s happening around someone the way virtual reality headsets do.

People immersed in a virtual reality game can easily lose track of where furniture, windows and humans are around them. At Valve, developers plan to minimize unwanted collisions with a feature that it calls a �chaperone� system.

The technology maps the terrain of a room: furniture, walls and all. When someone wearing a headset gets close to an object, a wireframe model of the room materializes in the virtual space in front of their eyes, fading as they move away.

More than a half-dozen virtual reality developers at Valve are crammed into a room, and they often have their headsets on at the same time, playing games on their own. �Rule No. 1 is if someone has a headset on and you don�t, it�s your fault if you get punched,� said Mr. Faliszek.

Mobile virtual reality involves other hazards. There are headsets already on the market that cradle smartphones in front of peoples� eyes, using lenses and the screens on the devices to create 3-D images.

No wires dangle between the mobile headsets and a computer or console, as they do with other systems, so users are free to tune out in virtual space while sitting in a restaurant or park. In fact, this year, the Australian airline Qantas started testing mobile virtual reality headsets, made by Samsung, in some airport lounges and first-class cabins on some flights.

But wearing a virtual reality headset in public could make someone a target for derision and, more seriously, theft. Patrick O�Luanaigh, the chief executive of nDreams, a British developer of virtual reality software, put on a mobile headset earlier this year on a train ride from Reading to Bristol. He turned on an nDreams app called Perfect Beach that simulated the experience of lying in the sand as waves gently lapped at his virtual feet.

�You forget where you are other than the vibrations and bouncing,� said Mr. O�Luanaigh, who did not forget to stuff his bag between his actual feet.

The protocol for interrupting someone�s virtual reality session isn�t clear � a light tap on the shoulder, developers say, is the best way to avoid startling someone. Researchers who have spent years studying virtual reality believe it will be less socially awkward than it may seem to encounter someone who�s wearing a headset.

�When you�re in a room with somebody and you have a mobile device in front of you, they think they have your presence,� said Mark Bolas, an associate professor of interactive media at the University of Southern California. �In a virtual environment, they know they don�t have your presence. You almost want to leave that person alone.�

A trickier challenge could be policing virtual reality games that are social in nature. Developers are buzzing over the possibilities of immersive virtual worlds in which people connect with each other. The potential for harassment, though, which is bad enough in conventional online video games, and other forms of abuse � especially in online settings that permit anonymity � are very real for virtual reality.

�It creates these lifelike experiences in a space pretty abstracted from the real world,� said Matt McIlwain, managing director of Madrona Venture Group, a venture capital firm in Seattle that is pursuing virtual reality investments. �That has the opportunity to amplify both the positives and negatives of human nature.�

When players in a virtual reality game are inhabiting the perspective of an avatar, other players who get too close to them can feel like they are inappropriately violating their personal space.

Mr. Bolas believes social virtual reality games will come up with �bounding boxes� � essentially, force fields that players can place around their avatars to keep others away.

�We are going to have new conventions that deal with that,� Mr. Bolas said.

**Woodsman** · June 19, 2015, 09:56 AM

Re: Magic Leap Visionary

Timely stuff, as is this!

http://mashable.com/2015/06/18/virzo...ng-fitness-vr/

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Magic Leap Visionary

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