Hasta La Gadget!

Disney Research, a partnership between the mouse-eared entertainment juggernaut and universities around the globe, is on a virtual reality roll. Its latest development, an algorithm that turns 2D photographs into 3D landscapes, can transform a regular photo into a video game-style environment, using consumer-grade computer hardware.

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Virtual reality only immerses two of your senses: sight and hearing. Not that we’re dying for smell and taste in video games (bleh! Imagine first person shooters), but tactile feedback makes things feel a lot more real. Disney Research’s Aireal does this by blowing puffs of air in your face, and it’s not nearly as crazy as it sounds.

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Zeiss is a name best known for its camera lenses, but the company also has entertainment in mind with the Cinemizer OLED wearable display. A chunk set of oversized video glasses, where Google’s Glass takes the approach of augmenting the real world with digital tidbits, the Cinemizer blocks out the real world and allows you to replace it with 2D/3D video and motion-tracking games. Is all that worth the $750 price tag, however? Read on for the SlashGear review.

Hardware and Design

Video glasses aren’t new, though they’ve traditionally been oversized and clunky in their design. Zeiss takes a more streamlined approach: if it wasn’t for the blank white expanse where lenses might normally be found, you could mistake the Cinemizer for sunglasses when viewed head-on. Their depth gives the game away from any other angle, though, with large rubber eyepieces fixed to a thick display assembly.

Inside, there are two OLED displays – one for each eye – that each runs at 870 x 500 resolution. That’s obviously less than HD, in fact short of 720p never mind 1080p, and so while the Cinemizer has an HDMI input, you’ll not be seeing anything in Full HD resolution through it. That input is in the battery box, a compact black block that offers both HDMI and analog connections, along with a 450 mAh rechargeable power pack which Zeiss claims is good for up to 6hrs of runtime, depending on what you have connected.

There’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack, if you want to use your own headphones, though the Cinemizer has a pair as well. Those who would normally wear glasses get individual diopter adjustment for both sides, with dials shifting them from -5 to +2. As with any such system there’s a limit to how much you can accommodate – if you have an astigmatism, for instance, there’s no option to adjust for that – but if you wear a relatively straightforward prescription then you should be able to make the setup comfortable.

Comfort and Performance

Overall, the Cinemizer headset tips the scales at 120g, with the battery box adding another 60g to that, and the HDMI adapter a further 30g. However, since part of the weight of the video glasses themselves is supported by your ears, Zeiss quotes around 75g of weight on your nose specifically.

In practice, they’re comfortable enough for up to a couple of hours playback, but after that point they start to feel noticeably heavy. It’s a similar problem we’ve observed with other wearable displays; Google gets around it with Glass by only offering a monocular screen and trimming the battery down, bringing its wearable to 36g in total, but then again Glass isn’t exactly made for immersive movie consumption.

The sub-HD resolution means you’ll get better video performance from your regular TV, and the supplied earbuds aren’t exactly audiophile-standard. They lack bass, and the trebles don’t have the sparkle that rivals offer. Zeiss’ use of OLED means that the colors and contrast are at least impressively rich – though there’s a purple shadowing in paler areas of the display – and the rubber eyepiece keeps out most extraneous light. Zeiss suggests you’ll get the equivalent of a 40-inch TV viewed from 2m away, and there’s 3D support that looks clear and has minimal crosstalk.

Thanks to HDMI, you can easily hook up a console or computer to the Cinemizer, but our results are mixed. The 870 x 500 resolution means anything with significant amounts of text needs outlandishly large font sizes if the writing isn’t to be fuzzy, and most games assume there’ll be more pixels on hand whether they’re PC or console.

The Cinemizer also supports head-movement tracking, though we weren’t particularly impressed by how usable it is. For a start it’s an add-on dongle, which costs extra on top of the Cinemizer itself, snapping onto the earpiece and making the whole thing even more cumbersome. It hooks up via USB to your PC where it’s basically recognized as a mouse: moving your head left and right, or up and down, and the mouse pointer moves. In games, you can do the same thing, though we struggled to achieve the same efficiency of control as with a regular mouse. It’s also not full VR, as you might get with the Oculus Rift.

Zeiss quotes up to six hours of battery life when you’re using the AV input, or up to 2.5 hours when you’re using the HDMI port. In practice, we saw roughly that sort of runtime, though the battery invariably lasted longer than we could handle wearing the Cinemizer.

Wrap-Up

Personal video is a concept that has been around for some years now, each generation with its own advantages and, it must be said, flaws. With the Cinemizer, Zeiss addresses some of them – the headset isn’t quite so clunky as previous iterations from other manufacturers – but neither, with its separate battery box, various cables, and adapters, is it as streamlined as something like Glass.

Glass and the Cinemizer represent very different markets, of course, though it’s hard not to compare today’s wearables. The difference is, where Glass’ Explorer Edition is presented as a test move to iron out kinks, the Cinemizer is billed as a final product, complete with a $750 price tag.

At that level, it’s hard to recommend. The image quality is reasonable but lacks in resolution, and we can’t see gamers getting much use out of the head-tracking functionality, especially with the adapter itself costing extra. As wearable video displays go, the Cinemizer is probably the best we’ve seen, but we’re left unconvinced that the segment is mature enough to warrant the expense.

Zeiss Cinemizer Review is written by Vincent Nguyen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The Oculus Rift is making waves with virtual reality gaming, and while only developers can get their hands on the new headset, the general public will be able to grab an Oculus Rift for themselves at some point in the future, but at what cost exactly. The developer kit is priced at $300 right now, but the company would love for their product to be free up front.

Speaking with Edge Magazine, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe says that the company is pondering over different business models with the Rift, including a strategy where gamers wouldn’t have to pay anything up front for the VR headset, but would pay some kind of subscription cost every month or every year.

Iribe notes that “the lower the price point, the wider the audience.” The company has “all kinds of fantasy ideas” and said that they would “love” if the headset wouldn’t cost anything. Iribe says that the Rift definitely won’t be free at the beginning when it first launches to the public, but over time the headset could see a lower and lower subsidized cost.

Iribe also points out that the company is “targeting the $300 price point” with the product’s official launch to the public, which is the price point as the developer kit is right now, but he says that “there’s the potential that it could get much less expensive with a few different relationships and strategies” in the future.

The Oculus Rift raised $2.4 million on Kickstarter last year, and the company recently received $16 million in funding last month from venture capitalists Spark Capital and Matrix Partners in order to fund the Rift’s mass public launch. There’s no official release date for the headset just yet, but we should be expecting it rather soon.

SOURCE: Edge

Oculus Rift aiming for subsidized cost, could be free with subscription is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

The Oculus Rift team still intends to ignore the Xbox One and PS4 and focus on PC and Android, concerned that lengthening development cycles for consoles could see them left behind in virtual reality, even with the cloud’s help. “There’s no reason it can’t technically work,” Oculus Rift CEO Brendan Iribe conceded to OXM, but pointed out that “one of the concerns that we do generally have around consoles is that their life cycles are getting longer all the time.” While the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are considered powerful today, they could be seriously out-performed when it comes to VR in the next few years, Iribe argues.

“I think that you will see VR move fast – AR also, but especially VR” the chief exec suggested. “You’re going to see rapid innovation, and one of the concerns that we do generally have around consoles is that their life cycles are getting longer all the time – it’s a seven to eight year lifecycle, and in eight years, VR is going to be insane. Incredible.”

Instead, the headset – which uses a pair of head-mounted LCD displays to create a virtual gaming environment – will work initially with PCs and Android devices, as that “made more sense” according to Iribe. The fact that both platforms are liberal with hardware and software is key to that decision, the CEO explained.

Even Microsoft’s decision to harness the power of the cloud to bolster the Xbox One won’t be of much use to virtual reality, he says. Microsoft has said that each Xbox One will also have access to cloud-based processing equivalent to roughly three more consoles, which could be used for processing richer backgrounds in games, more realistic reflections and textures, and other detail.

The system has met with keen interest from game developers, but is unlikely to be of use to virtual reality systems like Oculus Rift, Iribe points out, because of the latency involved.

Virtual reality “wants a maximum latency of 20-30 milliseconds from your head moving to the headset updating your eye on screen – what we call motion-to-photon” he explains. “Right now it’s at 30-50 milliseconds in the current versions, but we do expect that to come down and reach that 15-20 millisecond ‘Holy Grail’ timing.”

However, while attention on Oculus Rift has been high since the start-up’s Kickstarter back in August 2012, the company doesn’t want to keep VR all to itself. In fact, Iribe is hopeful that Microsoft or Sony – preferably both – wade in themselves, seeing it as a net-benefit to Oculus Rift’s business overall.

“The more that they push into this space, even if it’s a different device, or their own device, a different experience, the more that they’re throwing into AR and VR, the better it is for everybody” he said.

VIA Trusted Reviews

Oculus Rift unconvinced by Xbox One and PS4 VR potential is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.