PBS News Hour aired a new report last night on ‘Tricking the brain with transformative virtual reality’. It’s well worth 6 minutes of your time –

Jan Goetgeluk is the inventor of the Virtuix Omni, the omni-directional treadmill for virtual reality applications which had a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign earlier this year. He recently delivered a 9 minute talk at TEDxHouston 2013 where he explained how Virtual Reality will change the way we work, play, meet, learn and live. Quite a claim but one that’s hard to dispute after watching his presentation –

The Open Virtual Worlds group at University of St. Andrews in Scotland are doing much pioneering work in the area of virtual worlds and virtual reality. I absolutely love their latest ‘hack’ which combines the immersion of the Oculus Rift with the gestural control of the Kinect camera to allow a user to fly around her virtual world with Superman-like ease. It looks like incredible fun but more importantly underlines the added sense of immersion when the user interaction is ‘as 3D’ as the visuals –

We’re in danger of becoming a Kickstarter news site here but it’s where most of the really interesting new projects in virtual reality are making their public debuts. We’ve written quite a bit about the visual side of VR but just as important is the more ‘touchy feely’ side, or rather Haptics.

In technology terms haptics is a tactile feedback technology which takes advantage of the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, or motions to the user. I remember when I bought my first games console in 1996 and experienced the Rumble Pak on the Nintendo 64 controller for the first time when playing GoldenEye 007. It was an extraordinary sensation to feel force feedback when firing a weapon, regardless of how primitive it was.

But the Reactive Grip™ – Touch Feedback for VR & Video Games promises to deliver an entirely more realistic experience. “Tactical Haptics aims to bring a revolutionary new touch feedback technology to virtual reality and video games that blows the doors off traditional “rumble” vibration feedback. Reactive Grip touch feedback works by mimicking the friction and shear forces that we feel in the real world when holding an object or touching a surface. This is accomplished by measuring the movements of the player’s hand and actuating small sliding plates in the grip of the controller to recreate the friction and shear forces you expect when holding an actual object such as a sword, slingshot, gun, or fishing rod. We call it Reactive Grip feedback because it reacts to your actions and motions in the virtual world.”

I can’t wait to get my hands on this technology (no pun intended).

The great John Carmack, now with Oculus Rift, explains eloquently why virtual reality is a bigger step forward in computing than “the next factor of 4 difference that we get in GPU power” –

Matt Johnston is one of the organizers of Belfast’s 3D Dojo – ” a place to try, learn and play with computer animation for free!“. He asks, and answers, an important question in a blog post entitled ‘Why 3D #3ddojo‘ –

“Yesterday we had record numbers at #3D Dojo at the University of Ulster. There were kids designing game objects, real-world objects and expressing their imagination. The future for this is preparing children for a world where they will be interacting equally with virtual objects as real-world objects.”

Make sure to read the full article.

With 13 days still to go it’s incredible to see Occipital’s Structure Sensor hitting $1,014,278 in pledges on Kickstarter with a mere goal of $100,000. With the promise that you can – “Scan objects and rooms in 3D, play augmented reality games, and develop mobile apps with 3D vision” – it’s not hard to understand why there are, as of now, 2,796 individual backers.

But a the key to this success, I believe, lies in a single word on the Kickstarter campaign page – ‘hackable’. 

Dr. Gary Bradski, President & CEO of OpenCV underlines the importance of that word, “I really like how this device was designed from the beginning to be open and hackable because we don’t know which way it’s going to go.”

That’s what makes this an extra appealing and exciting gadget. And indeed the Kickstarter page hints at how Occipital imagine the hackers can take advantage to create exciting virtual reality control systems –

Of course control systems are only one possibility. Imagine using the room scanning capability to recreate a digital simulations of real places (museums, monuments, etc.) in VR. And imagine the implications of that for education and training.

Via the Sixensense channel on YouTube: “Nathan Burba and James Iliff, the creators of Project Holodeck have a vision of a fully mobile, Virtual Reality gaming experience that includes the STEM System. We asked Nathan and James to share their vision for VR gaming and motion control, and thoughts on the STEM System.”

The success of crowd-funding campaigns for virtual reality devices such as the Oculus Rift, the Virtuix Omni and the STEM System have amply demonstrated that there is a huge latent demand for virtual reality gaming and experiences. And the stream of innovation shows no signs of abating with two hugely exciting projects hitting Kickstarter recently –

Firstly we have (the oddly named) vrAse – a case for smartphones that delivers a very affordable entry level virtual reality experience to a mass audience –

Having successfully ended the campaign with £66,556 pledged towards a £55,000 goal the vrAse looks like a worthy competitor to the Durovis Dive (which, interestingly, appears to have no intention of going down the crowd-funding route)

Secondly we have castAR which claims to be “the most versatile AR & VR system” yet and $335,094 already pledged towards a goal $400,000 with 29 days still to go, it seems that plenty of people agree. While the AR side is impressive it seems that the VR aspect isn’t much more than an after-thought and hardly delivers an impact that will keep the Oculus Rift team awake at night –

Hypergrid Business met with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and asked him for his thoughts on augmented & virtual reality –

He said he can see a lot of uses for it. ”Especially for games, but also education and training people, and preparations for missions.”

Its nice to see that the ‘woz’ isn’t biased towards Apple products, and can openly praise Google Glass as well as the Oculus Rift. Although I’ve no doubt but that Apple are doing more than keep a close eye on this space, as some of their patents have revealed.