Interesting articles about VR – week #14

Why Magic Leap is Set to Fail

Magic Leap is one of the most hyped and closely followed tech startups on the scene right now. With all of this excitement, can the company live up to the expectation?

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We can’t allow privacy to be an afterthought with eye tracking

The cool thing about the virtual reality conversations at GDC this year is how focused everyone seems to be on improving what we have now. Developers are having great conversations about what they have done wrong so far, and sharing best practices to ensure everyone’s next project has a better chance of survival. While these conversations are happening in the convention center, hardware people are off in different rooms showing people what features the next piece of hardware will have behind closed doors.

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Macy’s is using VR instead of AR to sell furniture

VR and online shopping are often portrayed as enemies of brick-and-mortar retail, but shopping mall anchor Macy’s plans to embrace both technologies in a bid to improve its sales, reports FurnitureToday. Speaking at the ShopTalk retail conference in Las Vegas, Macy’s CEO Jeff Gennette announced that he will bring VR furniture-selling tools to 50 stores by this summer and plans to offer the immersive shopping technology in “as many stores as possible.”

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The Essential Guide to Mobile AR Gestures

ARKit and ARCore have made it easier than ever to build mobile AR experiences, but designing them is harder than traditional Apps. It requires a different way of thinking about gestures and user interactions.
This guide explores the challenges and solutions of adapting touch gestures to mobile AR. Whilst also suggesting some new categories of gesture that can be used in complement to, or as alternatives to touch. Specifically how a user might control an App with their look and proximity.

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Industry Leaders Adopt NVIDIA VRWorks to Push Boundaries of 360-Degree Video Storytelling

Z CAM, STRIVR, Pixvana integrate VRWorks 360 Video SDK. New 1.5 SDK with Linux support released at GTC.

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Augmented Reality (AR) & Virtual Reality (VR) in Healthcare Market Analysis By Component (Hardware, Software, and Service), By Technology (Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality), And Segment Forecasts, 2018 – 2025

The global Augmented Reality (AR) & Virtual Reality (VR) in healthcare market size was valued at USD 568.7 million in 2016 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 29.1% during the forecast period. The growing integration of technology & digitalization in healthcare, increasing healthcare expenditure & focus on delivery of efficient health services, and its significance in training healthcare professionals are some of the key factors driving the increasing adoption of AR and VR technologies.

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Virtual Reality in Retail

Virtual Reality technology is coming to gaming, movie theaters, shopping, education, and it also presents opportunities for retailers to attract customers. With big leap into buying things online people seek detailed product descriptions, video reviews, colorful images when making purchases. Rich and engaging content is what makes a crucial difference between winning and losing. So what news are there on the front of Virtual Reality in retail?

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Virtual reality as sharp as the human eye can see?

Finnish start-up Varjo has developed a prototype virtual reality (VR) headset that its makers claim gives an image 50 times sharper than most other headsets currently on the market.

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Virtual Reality for Non-Ordinary Consciousness

Virtual reality (VR) technology is currently seeing a surge of interest in industry, academia, and the public. Myriad developments are already underway, aiming to bring the technology directly to users in ways that offer access to rich virtual multisensory experiences. The immersivity that VR offers is enabled by the brain’s constraints on processing bodily self-consciousness (BSC), which anchors self-identity and -location to the physical body. Current developments are focused on leveraging the face-value constraints of BSC to craft immersive VR experiences that are plausible to the human user; i.e., most VR applications today take advantage of BSC as a “trick” or illusion that the body plays on the mind.

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Lucasfilm: The Future of VR Is ‘Story-Living’ and Cross-Platform Play

Ready Player One, Snow Crash, and other sci-fi stories predict that, one day, virtual reality will be so ubiquitous that everyone will end up in a persistent digital world. But the future of VR and augmented reality might be more nuanced than that.

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