Interesting articles about VR – week #44

VR industry hasn’t bothered to do safety research

Episode two of this season’s Black Mirror, ‘Playtest’, sparked the question by many including Tyler Wilde, Executive Editor at PC Gamer, to ask the question, “Is there a line where virtual reality becomes dangerous, and will we stop when we find it?”

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VR Startups: Virtelio enables anyone to create interactive VR movies

Content creation in VR will get more interesting for publishers once VR becomes more mainstream. And Google is just about to make this a reality with Daydream. For our “VR Startups” series we are happy to have interviewed Fred Baus, the General Manager of “realab” that develops VR editing software “Virtelio”, a tool that makes it easy for story-tellers to create VR content!

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27 of the best AR and VR apps and games

2016 is the year that virtual reality and augmented reality hit the mainstream – here are our picks for the best games and apps you can download for iPhone and Android.

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25 of VR’s greatest innovators

Time, place, even a sense of self can lose meaning in these creations weaved from the gossamer threads of fact found in fiction, the illusional fancies of magic realism, the mind-expanding nature of synthetic hallucination.

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Microsoft Research has two types of touch for VR haptics

 

Virtual reality is one of the most immersive technologies available today. That is until the illusion shatters when you instinctively reach out to touch something and are met with a one-size-fits-all haptic response or no feedback at all. Microsoft Research (PDF) might have the solution to that. Rather than air-based haptics like we’ve seen before, “NormalTouch” and “TextureTouch” use handheld devices to simulate touching things while in VR — no bodysuit required.

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My first virtual reality groping

Last week I was groped in virtual reality. Did you know that could happen? I didn’t, but now I’m all the wiser.
While visiting my brother-in-law last weekend, we decided to check out his HTC Vive, a virtual reality system. My husband and I stood in his home in Redwood City, on an idyllic 80-degree day, the three of us taking turns on the Vive.

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How Virtual Reality Could Reshape The Energy Sector

Humans have a hard time with numbers. The truth is that our brains are much better at processing images and colors than they are at processing numbers. Give a human a relatively simple math problem like dividing two large numbers by one another and it can take them several minutes to work out the answer. By contrast, humans are great at understanding images and making inferences as compared to computers. Trivial tasks like identifying what a chair is are extraordinarily difficult for computers.

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The real winners in VR are the conference organisers

At the moment we are in what I call the ‘Wild West’ of VR. Hundreds of new companies are cropping up everywhere to capitalise on the new technology and experimenting with how it can be used, for good and for worse. It’s an exciting time where the new kid appearing with a solitary stand and blank walls could be an influential player in a short two years time.

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MAKING VR A LITTLE MORE USABLE WITH A PINCH GESTURE RING

[Florian] wants to browse the web like an internet cowboy from a cyberpunk novel. Unfortunately, VR controllers are great for games but really incapacitate a hand for typing. A new input method was needed, one that would free his fingers for typing, but still give his hands detailed input into the virtual world.

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Is Apple completely missing out on Virtual Reality?

We are living in exciting times. 2016 is THE big year for VR. The year that it finally reaches the consumers. First with the launch of the Oculus Rift and the HTC VIVE, then with the Playstation VR and finally next month when Google throws its hat into the ring with its Daydream VR platform.

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