VR/AR

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Partners of the LOMID project aim to manufacture flexible OLED microdisplays of exceptionally large area (13×21mm) with a screen diagonal of 24.9mm at acceptable yields, over 60%. The European consortium aims to achieve this by developing a robust silicon-based chip design supporting both high resolution (1200×1920 - WUXGA) with pixel sizes of 11µm×11µm for a pixel density of 2300 ppi, and a highly reliable manufacturing process for the backplane.

European project aims at 2300ppi OLED microdisplays | Electronics EETimes

At CES 2017, Panasonic (Kadoma, Osaka Prefecture, Japan) demonstrated a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) prototype featuring a 220° Field-of-View, double that of typical VR headsets for a more immersive experience. To accommodate the larger field of view and maintain excellent resolution, the prototype is built up with four LCD panels each featuring 1600x1440 pixels

Panasonic VR headset doubles the field-of-view | Smart2.0

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Intellectually, I know this drone is an elaborate simulation, but as far as my eyes are concerned it’s really there, in that ordinary office. It is a virtual object, but there is no evidence of pixels or digital artifacts in its three-dimensional fullness. If I reposition my head just so, I can get the virtual drone to line up in front of a bright office lamp and perceive that it is faintly transparent, but that hint does not impede the strong sense of it being present. This, of course, is one of the great promises of artificial reality—either you get teleported to magical places or magical things get teleported to you.

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED

But to really understand what’s happening at Magic Leap, you need to also understand the tidal wave surging through the entire tech industry. All the major players—Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Samsung—have whole groups dedicated to artificial reality, and they’re hiring more engineers daily. Facebook alone has over 400 people working on VR. Then there are some 230 other companies, such as Meta, the Void, Atheer, Lytro, and 8i, working furiously on hardware and content for this new platform. To fully appreciate Magic Leap’s gravitational pull, you really must see this emerging industry—every virtual-reality and mixed-reality headset, every VR camera technique, all the novel VR applications, beta-version VR games, every prototype VR social world. Like I did—over the past five months.

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED

Twenty-five years later a most unlikely savior emerged—the smartphone! Its runaway global success drove the quality of tiny hi-res screens way up and their cost way down. Gyroscopes and motion sensors embedded in phones could be borrowed by VR displays to track head, hand, and body positions for pennies. And the processing power of a modern phone’s chip was equal to an old supercomputer, streaming movies on the tiny screen with ease. The cheap ubiquity of screens and chips allowed a teenage Palmer Luckey to gaffer-tape together his first VR headset prototypes, launching a Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift in 2012.

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED

ONE OF THE first things I learned from my recent tour of the synthetic-reality waterfront is that virtual reality is creating the next evolution of the Internet. Today the Internet is a network of information. It contains 60 trillion web pages, remembers 4 zettabytes of data, transmits millions of emails per second, all interconnected by sextillions of transistors. Our lives and work run on this internet of information. But what we are building with artificial reality is an internet of experiences. What you share in VR or MR gear is an experience.

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED

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The most intense and complete sense of subconscious presence that I experienced occurred with a system called the Void, which debuted at the 2016 TED conference. The Void isn’t as advanced as Magic Leap technologically, but it integrates the best off-the-shelf parts available with custom gear to create an unforgettable experience. For several hours I watched a line of people enter the Void. Almost every person squealed with delight, screamed, laughed, and staggered away asking for more. I felt the same; I’d be happy to pay for an hour’s visit.

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED

Real Worlds Virtual, mixed, augmented—that’s a lot of reality. Here’s how to keep it all straight. Virtual Reality VR places the user in another location entirely. Whether that location is ­computer-generated or captured by video, it entirely occludes the user’s natural surroundings. Augmented Reality In augmented reality—like Google Glass or the Yelp app’s Monocle feature on mobile devices—the visible natural world is overlaid with a layer of digital content. Mixed Reality In technologies like Magic Leap’s, virtual objects are integrated into—and responsive to—the natural world. A virtual ball under your desk, for example, would be blocked from view unless you bent down to look at it. In theory, MR could become VR in a dark room.

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED

Magic Leap’s solution is an optical system that creates the illusion of depth in such a way that your eyes focus far for far things, and near for near, and will converge or diverge at the correct distances. In trying out Magic Leap’s prototype, I found that it worked amazingly well close up, within arm’s reach, which was not true of many of the other mixed- and virtual-reality systems I used. I also found that the transition back to the real world while removing the Magic Leap’s optics was effortless, as comfortable as slipping off sunglasses, which I also did not experience in other systems. It felt natural.

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED

Microsoft is now selling development versions of its mixed-reality visor called the HoloLens. The technology is unique (so far) in that the entire contraption—processor, optics, and battery—is contained in the visor; it is truly untethered. Meta, another startup, has released an MR device that began, like Oculus, with a Kickstarter campaign. The headset is tethered to a computer, and dev kits should hit the market this fall—likely well before Magic Leap.

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED

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VR still hasn’t tipped the balance into mainstream adoption, but it’s on the verge of being handed one of the most significant updates in its development. Continuing the trend of rapidly advancing screen technologies, researches have suggested that pixel densities could triple in the coming years. Although this will have notable benefits in the living room, it’s not your next TV, but smartphones and a future wave of virtual reality headsets that are set to be the biggest winners. With VR headsets placing small screens just inches in front of the user’s eyes, a high pixel density is needed to ensure content appears smooth and detailed. The new tech that could make that possible is blue-phase LCD displays. Unlike traditional LCD panels that feature three sub-pixels - one red, one green, one blue - the blue-phase displays are able to quickly transition between the three colours fast enough to trick the eye into seeing just a single hue.

This new LCD tech could change the face of VR as we know it

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Within two decades, when you look into a state-of-the-art virtual-reality display, your eye will be fooled into thinking you’re looking through a real window into a real world. It’ll be as bright and crisp as what you see out your window. Once this small display perfects realism, it becomes the one display to rule them all. If a near-eye screen offers sufficient resolution, brightness, breadth, and color richness, it can display any number of virtual screens, of any size, inside it. While I was wearing the photonic spectacles of Magic Leap, I watched an HD movie on a virtual movie screen. It looked as bright and crisp as my 55-inch TV at home. With Microsoft’s HoloLens on, I watched a live football game on a virtual screen hovering next to a web browser window, alongside a few other virtual screens. I could fill my office with as many screens as I wanted, as big (or small) as I desired. I could click for a screen overlaid anywhere in the real world.

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED

One of Microsoft’s ambitions for the HoloLens is to replace all the various screens in a typical office with wearable devices. The company’s demos envision workers moving virtual screens around or clicking to be teleported to a 3-D conference room with a dozen coworkers who live in different cities. I found virtual screens and virtual media within a virtual reality surprisingly natural and practical. At Magic Leap, the development team will soon abandon desktop screens altogether in favor of virtual displays. Meron Gribetz, founder of Meta, says that its new Meta 2 mixed-reality glasses will replace monitors in his company of 100 employees within a year. It’s no great leap to imagine such glasses also replacing the small screens we all keep in our pockets. In other words, this is a technology that can simultaneously upend desktop PCs, laptops, and phones. No wonder Apple, Samsung, and everyone else is paying attention. This is what disruption on a vast scale looks like.

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED

All that said, it was not the reality of artificial reality that surprised me most. It was how social it is. The best experiences I had in VR or MR involved at least one other person. More people made it better. In fact, just a few more people made it exponentially better. It’s a network effect: The joy of VR is proportional to the square of the number of people sharing it. That means VR will be the most social medium yet. More social than social media is today.

The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup | WIRED

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That’s all thanks to Holo, the new app announced today by the mixed reality startup 8i, which is a pioneer in what’s known as volumetric capture, a technology that allows VR and AR content creators to integrate photo-realistic human avatars in their projects. With Holo, 8i is hoping that a wide variety of creators, including musicians, celebrities, brands, and more will be able to release content featuring holograms. The idea, explained CEO Steve Raymond, is that those creators could "put a hologram of someone famous, funny, or talented, in [their own] environments and create [their own] short-form videos [to] share out to social."

Photo-Realistic Holograms Are About To Get A Whole Lot More Real | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

As Business Insider previously reported, the board meeting next week is seen as a milestone in the product's development, and a chance to prove that Magic Leap can shrink its technology to fit inside the smaller form factor that will be released to the public. But the prototype is a long way from being a market-ready product or from being truly portable — the person's left hand in the photo is holding a large battery pack, for example.

Magic Leap prototype first-ever leaked photo - Business Insider

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Fast-forward to today, and HoloLens, despite having made some real progress, is still only in the hands of a small number of developers and early adopters. That makes a new report about Microsoft's hardware plans for HoloLens a little concerning -- particularly given how its peers have gotten AR religion. Tech journalist Paul Thurrott, responsible for many Microsoft scoops in the past, reports Microsoft has adjusted its HoloLens hardware roadmap to cancel the planned launch of a second-generation device. Instead, the company will focus on launching a third-gen product that provides something "closer to a generational leap" relative to the current model, but that isn't expected until 2019. This might effectively mean that a commercial, mass-market version of HoloLens won't arrive for two years. The current model is only available through a developers kit that launched about a year ago. Developers -- the list includes Autodesk (ADSK) , Twitter (TWTR)  and many indie game developers, as well as Microsoft itself -- have come up with a number of intriguing productivity, entertainment and communications apps. But since the kit costs $3,000, few consumers or office workers are currently using them.

Microsoft's Reported HoloLens Delay Is Creating an Opening for Apple, Intel, Google and Others - TheStreet

And just maybe the 2019 HoloLens will support outdoor usage. The fact the current model can only be used indoors prevents it from taking on many of the AR applications currently supported by mobile apps that leverage a phone's camera view. On the other hand, two years gives rivals a lot of time to launch a competing product. Apple (AAPL) , which has made multiple AR-related acquisitions and whose CEO has been making positive remarks about the technology's potential, was reported in November to be thinking about creating smart glasses that could be paired with iPhones, and show images and information in a user's field-of-view. The report added such glasses would launch in 2018 "at the earliest."

Microsoft's Reported HoloLens Delay Is Creating an Opening for Apple, Intel, Google and Others - TheStreet

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Next year Microsoft (MSFT) will bring its Windows Mixed Reality technology to its Xbox gaming system as a way to compete with Sony's (SNE) PlayStation VR. The company announced that it will launch mixed reality content on the system and the next version of the console at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco on Thursday. Microsoft's Mixed Reality technology is the same tech that powers its Hololens augmented reality headset. The next-gen Xbox code name is "Project Scorpio." In the past Microsoft has said that it wants the device to be VR-capable, Varity reports.

Microsoft Takes on PlayStation VR with Mixed Reality Content - TheStreet

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For enterprise users, AR and VR is expected to raise productivity, allowing workers to see and interact with data, like a building blueprint or the organs of a human being, instead of viewing a static image on a screen. Changes and procedures can be mapped out ahead of time before moving on to the actual work, saving companies two precious resources: time and cost. Vertical markets, such as manufacturing and design, health care, transportation, and retail stand to benefit the most. Meanwhile, for consumers, AR and VR will provide immersive experiences to consume content. Already, content providers are developing solutions to bring “as-if-you-were-there” experiences, like attending a concert or sports event from the comfort of one’s couch. Additionally, gaming on AR and VR will transport players into outer space or the battlefield, several steps beyond what they currently experience on a PC or television screen. Layer on top of this the social element that users will have sharing experiences and it becomes clear how AR and VR will appeal to consumers. The firm thinks that augmented reality will be a much bigger market in dollars by 2021, perhaps $49 billion annually by then, up from $209 million last year. That compares to a potential market of only $18.6 billion for VR in 2021, up from $2.1 billion last year.

Virtual Reality and AR About to Hit ‘Breakneck’ Growth, Says IDC - Tech Trader Daily - Barrons.com

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Samsung's latest superphone will be officially unveiled on March 29, but one of its implied accessories has already seen the light of day. The newest version of the Gear VR was already shown off weeks ago at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona. The new model -- the fourth iteration of the accessory that turns various Samsung Galaxy phones into a virtual reality helmet -- now includes a dedicated controller, too. While the nascent virtual reality movement has struggled since bursting on to the scene in 2016, the Gear VR has been a bona fide hit. In fact, with over 5 million Gear VR headsets sold as of January, Gear VR may well be a larger VR platform than Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR combined. (The Gear VR incorporates Oculus tech, too.))

Samsung's Gear VR may be the Galaxy S8's greatest fringe benefit - CNET

The ultra-cheap Google Cardboard may beat Gear VR on numbers if you count all the giveaways handed out over the years, but it's also not a platform in the same way: there isn't a Cardboard app store, per se. Gear VR, like the Daydream View -- which is basically Google's answer to Gear VR -- is connected to its own app ecosystem. It's more finely-tuned. And, it's far more of an immersive experience. No, Gear VR isn't as advanced as a Vive, Oculus Rift or PlayStation VR. You can't walk through rooms or lean into objects. Like with Google Daydream or Google Cardboard, you need to sit down or stand still and turn your head around to look at things. But its impressive app library includes a host of channels for 360-degree videos and streaming 360-degree content. .

Samsung's Gear VR may be the Galaxy S8's greatest fringe benefit - CNET

Consumers are giving the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive a tepid reception, but organizations like NASA and BMW think the VR headsets are great for things like training and design. HTC is today launching MakeVR, a program built in collaboration with Sixense that lets you do modeling and sculpting in VR, then export the results to a CAD program or 3D printer. As we saw last month, it uses the Vive's controllers (and maybe the new trackers, more on that in a sec) to let you do freeform modeling and design..

MakeVR turns the HTC Vive into a virtual design tool