Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve been hearing alot about virtual reality lately, especially with the popularity of the Oculus Rift headset gaining massive traction. While the team at Oculus has been focused on improving the hardware (such as upgrading it to 1080p), they’re also putting their efforts towards solving latency issues and cutting down on motion sickness.

Latency can be a huge problem when gaming, but it’s even more of a problem when gaming using a virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift. The company says that “latency is widely recognized as a key source of disorientation and disbelief,” since the brain can’t be fooled. To fix latency problems, Oculus is working on something called “predictive tracking,” which gives the VR headset the ability to predict where the head is going to be, rather than just stay in the present or the past.

As for motion sickness, that’s something that’s a bit more difficult to tackle, since it depends on the person using the VR headset and their vulnerability to get sick. Rather than a hardware or software issue, it’s purely a natural issue that can’t really be fixed 100%. However, Oculus notes that game developers can at least reduce motion sickness by using some clever design techniques.

The company notes that “the causes of most forms of motion-induced illness…are poorly understood. Although we don’t understand the physiology well, we do understand many of the things that cause it,” and they “can be solved with good (though complex) engineering.” Things that developers can improve to reduce motion sickness are things such as camera calibration and distortion correction, but there also a heap of things are hard to improve, like disparity between focus depth and vergence.

In the end, the best solution that game developers can come up with, according to Oculus Rift, is “do the math right, don’t cut corners, be kind to your sensitive players, and encourage them to take it slowly at first.” That’s sound advice, and can almost even be applied to any game out on the market today.

VIA: Engadget

Oculus Rift latency and motion sickness issues addressed is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Happy Saturday! We brought presents! Tips on how to lock down your Facebook account now that search graph is here, and what it’s like to have a phone explode on your leg, for instance. With a healthy side of 100 years of Tour de France bikes and why people still pirate. Dig in!

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We knew Halo: Spartan Assault would be making its debut sometime this month; what we didn’t know, however, is that it would only be reaching Verizon-branded Windows Phone 8 handsets initially. According to the Big Red network, its subscribers will be the first in the US to be able to download the popular franchise’s mobile title, although no word was given on when exactly we can expect it to launch. Halo: Spartan Assault is set to cost $6.99 once it eventually hits the Windows Phone store — the good news is July’s almost over, so it won’t be much longer before you can get in on the action. For now, it looks as if our hands-on preview will have to hold you over.

Filed under: Cellphones, Gaming, Mobile, Verizon

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Source: Verizon

It’s been a long train ride and you’re starting to get drowsy. So you lean a bit on the window and take in the scenery flashing by… when you suddenly hear a voice telling you about some new gadget or some recent markdowns.

This newest advertising marvel is aptly called the Talking Window and it was developed by Audiva.

It’s part of an advertising experiment from Germany’s BBDO for Sky Deutschland. The transmitter uses high-frequency vibrations and streams this onto the glass to send out the audio message. The vibrations are then interpreted as sound by the human brain. This technology is called “bone conduction” and is currently being used by deaf people, the military and Google Glass among other things.

The cool thing is that only the people seated next to the window can hear this message. The uncool thing is that it bugs most people who experience it, probably because their nap or rest time is being interrupted by a window that’s churning out ads.

In fact, if you look at the video closely, you’ll notice that the people who heard the messages look confused and somewhat irked. I know I would be.

[via BBC via Dvice]

The Nokia Lumia 1020 features PureMotion HD+ technology, a ClearBlack display, and supersensitive screen. Beg pardon?

(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)

The smartphone industry tosses around a whole bucket of names and numbers to describe the viewing experience on your smartphone screen: ClearBlack, 1080p, Retina, AMOLED, supersensitive. And the list goes on.

Some designations are marketing monikers cooked up to give one company an edge; others are more scientific. That isn’t to say that flashy names like Apple’s Retina Display are worthless and empty. Sometimes the trademarked name masks a unique process too technical to quickly explain.

To make things simpler, here are some common terms you might see attached to smartphone screens, and some factors that actually go into making your screen a standout, like the physical screen materials, LCD versus OLED, brightness, color accuracy, and pixel resolution. Got all that? Good. Now let’s dive in.

Common smartphone screens The terms often used to describe smartphone screens aren’t always so clear.

• Retina Display: Apple’s proprietary name for its LCD screen, which serves up a 1,136×640 pixel resolution.
• HD Super AMOLED: Samsung’s name for its high-definition smartphone displays, which use the OLED screen technology.

Read more Smartphones Unlocked

• … [Read more]

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