VR/AR

Thanks to the rapid growth of the Virtual Reality (VR) market, substantial private and federal investments is being provided to innovative start-ups, mostly in the areas of video, services and solutions, games and apps. With technological advances and improvements in user experience, VR will become more ubiquitous in industries such as healthcare, automotive, education, manufacturing, retail, design, aerospace and defense and entertainment.

Augmented Reality has become a field with limitless possibilities. It holds huge promise for improving educational systems across the globe. In the last 2 to 3 years, Augmented Reality (AR) has grown into a technology that is set to revolutionise numerous sectors, most importantly education.

AR has once again come into the spotlight since the mobile phone game Pokémon Go attracted more than 75 million fans within the space of a few days. In AR, images or videos of a real scene are enhanced or altered by overlaying the image with computer-generated information. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics have now developed a programme that can edit materials and shading/lighting in videos in a very realistic way.

VR is quickly gaining steam in the gaming industry. But an MIT startup is now aiming the technology at a different demographic, putting it to use as a health care tool for the elderly. At last night’s MIT Sloan Healthcare Innovations Prize pitch competition, Rendever earned the $25,000 grand prize for creating a VR platform that gives residents in assisted-living facilities the chance to explore the world virtually.

  Co-locating with the fourth Wearable Technology Show, the AR, VR & MXR Show is taking place at ExCeL London on 7th-8th March, and will include keynote speakers from Google and Microsoft will talk Daydream and HoloLens.

Virtual Archaeology is a well-established field at the intersection of Cultural Heritage and Digital Technologies. An international team worked to design and evaluate a new kind of VR-mediated experience aimed at enhancing the understanding, social relevance and enjoyment of archaeological Cultural Heritage. The concept of Cultural Presence, a relatively new notion in the area of HCI, can be used to advance the field of Virtual Archaeology b...

According to ABI Research, standalone VR device shipments will hit 110m by 2021. While mobile device-reliant VR shipments - for example Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream - dwarf today’s other VR device types, standalone devices will see a 405% CAGR through 2021, compared to a 42% CAGR for mobile VR.

  Some technologies can be tuned to our personal characteristics, like the voice recognition on smartphones trained to recognise how we speak. But that isn’t possible with today’s virtual reality headsets. They can’t account for differences in vision, which can make watching VR less enjoyable or even cause headaches or nausea.

The VR/AR association, New York chapter, will present 'Virtual Reality for producers: how to create and deliver for the new content frontier' on 15th February 2017, 7 to 9pm at NYU Data Future Lab 137, New York City. Virtual reality – or, the latest iteration of the technology - had a strong market presence in 2016, with releases from Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung Gear, and Sony PlayStation. 

The touchless gesture control system from Crunchfish has been selected by Avantis Systems, a provider of technical solutions for schools, for its educational platform ClassVR.com.