Daily Archives: June 5, 2017

Massless showed off a pen for writing in virtual reality at the Augmented World Expo last week. It was a nice surprise at the event, where 212 companies showed their wares for VR and augmented reality.

It is a unique solution, and it demonstrates how some things that are ordinary in the real world can be innovative and marvelous in the virtual world.

The Massless Pen allows you to point precisely at objects in VR, and it also lets you write in VR spaces. The pen uses VR to solve modelling challenges in animation, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering, and it aims to enable betterdesign, manipulation, review, and collaboration.

It is the brainchild of Massless CEO Jack Cohen, who believes the pen can bring the benefits of immersive VR to complex, precision 3D modelling applications. You can use it to navigate in an intuitive way, and it is accessible because everybody knows how to use a pen.

The company is based in San Francisco and London.

Working with large 3D monitors has always been slower and more cumbersome than working on traditional 2D monitors. But in VR, you can rotate the models and understand them better, turningthe images until you get the right view. And you can manipulate 3D models more easily using a pen. Massless hopes to push the boundaries of thinking in design and argues that this pen will improve productivity and profits.

The company said the pen is highly accurate, responsive, and intuitive. You can use it like a drafting pen in VR in a 3D space, and it has precision up to 0.05 millimeters accuracy. Another benefit is that one party can create the design while another reviews the creation in real time.

Investors include Super Ventures.

We did an initial round of investment in Massless last Spring because in AR and VR themouse and keyboard become obsolete and there is a need to reinvent the way we interact withthe world. We were looking for a high precision and intuitive interface device that is afundamental requirement to bring the incredible immersive power of VR to professionals such asdesigners and engineers, said Ori Inbar, founder and managing partner at Super Ventures, in a statement.

TheMassless team has done an outstanding job of taking their prototype product and turning itinto the product they are launching today. The Massless Pen has become one the mostanticipated new product launches in our portfolio.

The pen is expected to debut in 2017. The company hasnt yet disclosed the price. Target customers include product designers and engineers who work with 3D models.

Eearlier in his career, Cohen published academic papers in physics journals and received a doctorate from Oxford University. He was also an enterprise fellow at the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2015, he left academia, and a year later he raised money for Massless.

The Massless Pen requires aVR-ready PC, 16GB of main memory, a NvidiaGeForce GTX 1060 graphics card or better, and an Intel Core i5or better.

Link:

Massless lets you write with a pen in virtual reality - VentureBeat

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The bride is a sleek white robot with accents of pink on her shiny exterior. The groom is identical, except with blue trim around his head and body. They are standing in front of more than a dozen guests some robots, some cutesy human avatars on a platform built over a churning red lake of lava. Glowing clouds loom in the distance of this strange space, as guests unleash smiley face and heart emojis to register their joy, and a disco ball spins overhead.

Welcome to one of the first-ever virtual reality weddings.

On a recent Thursday, Elisa Evans and Martin Shervington, a couple from Wales, did just as so many couples do on their wedding day. She slipped on a white wedding dress, he donned a suit, and then they headed to a local wedding venue.

It was all very traditional, really except that when they got there, there were no guests or officiants present. Instead, they each put on a VR headset and entered a virtual "futuristic disco," as Shervington put it. Their officiant, a community manager from the virtual reality company AltspaceVR, beamed in from San Francisco. Guests gathered from all over the world using the AltspaceVR app all of them sitting in their respective homes and offices, connected only by their headsets.

The very first virtual reality wedding of this sort happened in San Francisco in 1994 back when people were still earnestly using the term "cyberspace." The bride, an employee at an early virtual reality company, and groom, used crude headsets and graphics, with gear totaling an estimated $1 million. But Shervington, a business consultant who recently helped launch a VR company's app, stakes the claim that he and his bride are the first to get virtually hitched in this new age of accessible consumer headset technology and in a legally-binding ceremony.

Companies are just beginning to capture weddings with 360-degree cameras, so that couples, along with family and friends, can relive the big day in immersive VR. A truly virtual wedding like this one, though, has a bizarre, niche appeal which is, perhaps, why Evans and Shervington are likely only the second couple to do it.

Shervington proposed to Evans in November, after just a few months of dating, and a friend was quick to suggest that they do it in VR. "It was fun," he said of the idea. "That was where it began. It's also been a challenge conceptually. With new technology, I enjoy exploring, so it's been an experience going through and putting together the pieces. Along the way, though, we just want to laugh."

Plus, Shervington who has done stand-up comedy, including in VR, about things like "the singularity and artificial intelligence" is a bit of a sci-fi and tech geek. Evans not so much, but she's gamely gone along with the plan. "I thought it sounded like a lot of fun," she said. "It's so different, and we knew we didn't want to have a conventional wedding."

During the ceremony, Evans and Shervington stood several feet away from each other with a wall in between them to avoid any audio feedback from the mics in their respective headsets. In VR, their avatars stood next to each other in front of a large screen that Shervington used to display a Powerpoint-like presentation that took up most of the hour-long ceremony and could easily have been mistaken for an awkward standup routine. He told the story about how they met and fell in love, peppering his speech with inside jokes, random YouTube clips, many of which took a painful amount of time to load, and snippets of music Queen and The Rolling Stones made appearances.

It was an indulgent, self-involved affair rife with technical difficulties in other words, a whole lot like a regular wedding. And, just as with any wedding, there were a lot of details to decide on. Only, in addition to the usual questions around things like the guest list and music, they also had to design their avatars, choose a virtual venue, and work out a bunch of technical challenges. In fact, as he put it, "the virtual has had much more attention than the real world" in the details.

Some of those challenges were unsurmountable. When the officiant instructed the couple to seal their vows with a kiss, their avatars leaned in toward each other, not quite touching and, of course, Evans and Shervington were physically separated and wearing bulky headsets in the real world, none of which exactly allows for that picture-perfect moment.

For guests, too, it was a somewhat awkward experience. To prevent total chaos, only a limited number were allowed to attend with a physical avatar, while the rest could watch a YouTube livestream of the virtual wedding. Our avatars milled about at will, with nowhere to sit. I would try navigating in front of another guest for a better view, only to have someone else step right in front of me. At one point, as the couple was preparing to exchange vows, I accidentally directed my avatar to stand right in between Evans' and Shervington's avatars embarrassing. (I wasn't the only one either it was as though we'd all already gotten tanked at the open bar.) Also, forget showing up in the same dress try discovering that you've chosen the exact same avatar as another wedding guest.

But, most notable of all, my VR goggles kept fogging up, as they tend to do over prolonged periods of use. So, instead of the usual periodic wiping of tears at a wedding, I was routinely cleaning my headset.

This article originally appeared at Vocativ.com: This couple just got hitched in a surreal virtual reality wedding.

Originally posted here:

Virtual reality weddings are here and they're very weird - The Week Magazine

Scientists have developed a new virtual reality (VR) technology that can relieve the sensation of phantom limb pain by tricking the brain into thinking that it is still in control of a missing limb.

If a hand, an arm or a leg is amputated due to accident or disease, eight out of ten amputees experience a feeling of discomfort in the limb that is no longer there. The phenomenon is called phantom limb pain.

"The tactile representation of different body parts are arranged in the brain in a sort of map," said Bo Geng, from the Aalborg University in Denmark.

"If the brain no longer receives feedback from an area, it tries to reprogramme its signal reception map. That is the most common conception of how phantom limb pain occurs," Geng said.

Tests have shown that phantom limb pain can be relieved if the brain is tricked into thinking that the amputated limb is still attached to the body.

By placing a mirror at an angle in front of the chest you can create the visual illusion that the body is symmetrical.

If you then pretend to do the same movements simultaneously with both hands, the brain in many cases can be convinced that it is in contact with an amputated hand.

The method has proven effective in a number of amputees and is the foundation for the new VR technology.

By using VR it is possible to create an experience of being present in a three dimensional world where you can move around freely, grab things and interact with them, researchers said.

"The mirror therapy has some limitations because you have to physically sit down in front of a mirror, do the same movement in a confined space with both hands at the same time and keep your eyes on the mirror. The illusion can easily be broken," Geng said.

"With virtual reality there is a much better chance of creating a convincing alternative reality," she said.

In the new method the patients have to put on VR goggles and a glove. At the same time, small electrodes are placed on the residual limb, known as the stump.

By stimulating the stump with tiny electrical impulses, researchers try to recreate the sensation of the phantom hand.

The amputee plays a number of different VR games that involve doing the same thing with both hands such as grabbing a pole that has to be twisted into different shapes or pushing different virtual buttons.

In the virtual reality it feels exactly as if you were using both hands, researchers said.

"Even though a person who has had a hand amputated can no longer see it, in many cases he or she can still feel it. This sensory conflict may be interpreted by the brain as pain," Geng said.

"With this new method we try to overcome that conflict by providing an artificial visual and tactile feedback and in that way suppress the pain," she said.

The new approach underwent its first clinical test at the China Rehabilitation Research in Beijing last year.

Two out of three amputees felt their phantom limb pain ease whereas the third one experienced a decrease in the frequency of phantom limb pain attacks.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Original post:

New virtual reality tech eases phantom limb pain - Business Standard

Rhys Yu, For Pacific Daily News 4:29 p.m. ChT June 5, 2017

Tech Life(Photo: Cid Caser/PDN)

What is the difference between virtual reality and augmented reality?The two are in the news a lot these days.Some of the largest companies in the world are creating products and services around these fascinating technologies.

Simply defined, augmented reality (AR) places digital images on top of the real world. An example would be Snapchat.Take a picture of yourself, or of friends, and place a digital hat or mustache on them.With virtual reality, you and friends step into an artificial world where everything around you is created.An example would be the headsets by Facebook (Oculus) and Microsoft (HoloLens).Put the headsets on and everything you see is a created environment.

The history of augmented reality is interesting.A Boeing researcher, Thomas Caudell, created the term in 1990 when he was assigned to replace the expensive process used to assist factory workers.At the time, paper schematics were placed on large plywood boards that contained the designs of the wiring for each airplane.When the wiring changed, each schematic was manually reprinted and placed on the plywood board. Caudell and his colleague, David Mizaell, simplified that process by creating a headset devise that would project the wiring schematics for the planes on a blank wall. Each wiring schematic was stored in the device and could easily be altered through a computer system and sent to each worker without having to reprint and manually repost every new design.

Football fans see an example of augmented reality every week on television.The first down line, first appearing in 1998, was one of the first commercial uses of this technology. Googles Glass, car windshields heads-up displays and the popular game Pokemon Goare just a few of the many examples of augmented reality.

Virtual reality (VR), on the other hand, is a computer technology that uses headsets to create images and environments around the person wearing the device. The device generates sounds, imagesand other sensations to replicate or to create a specific environment, or to recreate a real one.A virtual reality environment is usually three dimensional, using the software to move and adjust to the person wearing the headset device. When the person walks, the environment changes to match the motions and changed environment around the person. When the person looks around, the environment changes to match the landscape to what the person is looking.

The headset device sends sounds to the user through speakers to mimic the sounds of the virtual world. Other realistic sensations used in the headset device include advanced haptic systems that replicate motion or tactile feedback.These are used in medical or video gaming and military training that transmit vibrations through a type of game controller.

Rhys Yu is The Software Guy at iConnect.He has more than 10 years of computer programming experience in Guam and the Philippines.

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The difference between augmented and virtual reality - Pacific Daily News

Depending on how virtual reality (VR) is defined, its history started a long time ago. Most observers of the scene agree that VR in the sense that we understand it today began to emerge sometime in the 1950s. However some elements of it can be found much earlier in history.

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Already at the beginning of the last century, playwright Antonin Artaud was considering illusion and reality to be one and the same. In 1938 in a collection of essays, Le Thtre et son double, he considered characters and objects in the theatre as la ralit virtuelle . Just a few years earlier, in 1935, Stanley G. Weinbaum in his short story Pygmalions Spectacles described a goggle-based virtual reality system that displayed a holographic recording of fictional experiences.

More than 80 years later, two large FX brokers have introduced their own VR applications for trading. Japanese GMO Click Securities launched its product GMO-FX VR Trade on the 31st of January 2017. Shortly after, on the 3rd of February, Swissquote Bank introduced its own solution. In both cases the trader is provided with access to a virtual room and the ability to view it in 360 degrees. Is this how trading rooms will evolve?

VR in the financial industry is still a new phenomenon. But so was mobile trading 10 years ago, and for some brokers today it is as important a platform as traditional desktop applications.

It is simply too early to call. So when will we know if it has succeeded? The answer to this question is not only in the hands of the financial industry.

No one will ever buy a VR headset for financial services. Thats why the future of this technology in the financial services is strongly tied with VR becoming a mainstream technology otherwise it will always be a niche gadget.

Maciej Wolaski, CTO and Head of R&D, Comarch Financial Services.

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Should the Financial Industry Enter the World of Virtual Reality? - Finance Magnates

Weve learned a lot in the last year about how far virtual reality can reach beyond gaming. While video games get the most attention, there are almost too many other applications to count.

VR is going to impact retail shopping and travel planning, helpwith medical training and different kinds of therapy, anddisrupt the television industry. These are all significant areas in which VR may prove to be a legitimate game changer.

But its still the gaming industry that generates the most headlines.

This is because thats where the averageperson will be able to enjoy VR. Its where well choose to buy headsets, download games, and sit down to enjoy new experiences for the first time.

This is why its interesting to keep an eye on video game trends and watch out for the genres that are positioning themselves to dominate the industry. Despite being more than a year into the so-called era of VR, it still feels very much like developers and hardware manufacturers are still figuring out what works best.

Thats not to say there arent a lot of good games out there already. There are plenty. But weve yet to see what type of experience really captures players imaginations. Here are a few to keep tabs on.

For better or worse, the shooter genre will likely end up largely defining VR. This is the most popular genre in console gaming, and there are already several renowned shooters that have been specifically designed for virtual reality.

There are a lot of problems with the genre, as player movement can be disorienting and on-rails shooters have their disadvantages. But developers are already showing some encouraging creativity in getting around these issues to create new and innovative experiences.

The real challenge will be for major franchises in this category like Call Of Duty, Battlefield, and others to adapt accordingly.

This is a genre that has yet to really burst out of its shell in VR despite one mainstream attempt. A simple look at the evolution of poker and casino gaming online shows the potential of a fully immersive medium. With better graphics and more interactive features, online poker has done an unbelievable job of combining the perks of real-life, brick-and-mortar poker offerings with the advantages of online gaming.

In other words, theyve taken a more convenient experience and made it feel like the real thing. VR can and will take that a step further to give players the sensation that theyre playing in real poker rooms. There are more than enough online poker players in the world for this to be a very big deal.

This could be called its own genre these days, in large part thanks to the mobile branch of the industry. A couple years back an article was circulating about five games so pretty youll forget theyre being played on mobile devices, and those games arent isolated incidents at all.

If anything, theyre part of a larger trend. With limited means for control and scope, many mobile developers have focused primarily on the looks and sounds of their games, creating gorgeous worlds that wed all love to see more of.

Whether or not any of these are directly adapted to VR remains to be seen, but the focus on atmospheric exploration came about just in time for the VR revolution. Atmosphere is in some ways the entire point of VR, and the fact that people have gotten used to games like these should make for easy emergence of this type of experience.

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3 Video Game Genres That Will Propel Virtual Reality - IoT For All (blog)