Hasta La Gadget!

Oculus announced its first round of funding today, wherein the company secured $16 million from investors specifically aimed at putting the Oculus Rift in consumer hands. The nascent virtual reality hardware company has repeatedly said its end goal with the Rift is to make it a consumer product; currently, only folks who backed the Rift on Kickstarter and those willing to spend $300 on a developer kit have access. A handful of games support the Rift, though more and more developers are promising not just support in their games, but entire games built from the ground up with VR in mind. An HD version of the headset was also introduced at last week’s E3 gaming show.

Oculus’ new business partners apparently see enough financial potential in the Rift to not only invest heavily, but to also take on board positions — both Santo Politi of Spark Capital and Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix Partners are now on the Oculus board of directors. “What Palmer, Brendan and the team are building at Oculus so closely matches the Metaverse that we had to be part of it. Working with them to get this platform to market at scale will be enormously exciting,” Rodriguez said of today’s news.

The company launched last year with a Kickstarter campaign targeting $250,000 — the project eventually raised just shy of $2.5 million, and now sells its Rift dev kit outside of the Kickstarter campaign.

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We’ve been impressed with Oculus Rift from the start, and have been following the VR headset closely ever since. The developer edition has been in the hands of devs for a couple months now, and while Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell have certainly received rave reviews of the headset from many, they’ve also heard lots of feedback about ways to improve it. The number one request from users and devs? A higher-resolution screen than the 1,280 x 800 panel in the dev device. Well, after months of research and tinkering to find the right hardware combination, team Oculus is finally ready to show off a Rift with a 1,080 x 1920 display, and we got to demo the thing.

Before heading into the land of 1080p, we got to explore a demo built with Unreal Engine 4 in the existing dev headset. After looking around a snowy mountain stronghold inhabited by a fire lord in low res, we switched to the exact same demo running at 60 fps on the HD prototype device — and the difference was immediately apparent. Surface textures could be seen in much higher fidelity, colors were brighter and less muddied and the general detail of the entire environment was greatly improved.

Filed under: Gaming, HD

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We’ve seen the prototypes that led Google to Glass, but there are many devices that predate Mountain View’s smart specs, and Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California was able to gather and display a historic number of such headsets this week. From Steve Mann’s handmade WearComp 1 and EyeTap prototypes to Glass-like precursors from Optinvent and Vuzix, it’s quite the comprehensive collection — over thirty devices in all. While they may make their way into a museum some day, we’re bringing pictures of them all to your screen right now. Enjoy.

Filed under: Wearables, Alt

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Google Glass fever and upstart Meta’s rapidly financed US $100,000 Kickstarter campaign indicate #1. impending altered reality market maturity, or #2. everything new remixes the old, but still the geeks sing “Ohhhhh look, shiny!”

Google Glass: Loudest Voice in the Room
In development for several years and announced way back when, Glass finally got to developers and the geek elite about two months ago (for US $1500, plus getting oneself to a mandatory orientation meeting thingy). Glass is a kind of hybrid between a head-mounted display and augmented reality (AR) prosthetic outfitted with the internets. Really, if you’re reading Akihabara News you’re probably already hip, but if not there’s a search engine very ready to help you. Big G overlord Eric Schmidt indicated last month that a consumer-ready Glass product is about a year away. Realistically, at this point it’s unclear whether Glass is expected to be a viable consumer product or more of a proof-of-concept development platform.

Meta: Quickly Kickstarted, High-Profile Team Assembled – Working Man’s AR?
If you saw last year’s sci-fi short film “Sight” or the YouTube sci-fi series “H+,” you’re already hip to what Columbia University’s Meron Gribitz & pals are aiming for with Meta. While Glass is more of a HUD with some AR, Meta is less with the acronyms and more what the name suggests: information about information, i.e., Meta hopes to overlay manipulatable imagery/data on the physical world, augmenting real reality and projecting virtual reality (VR) artifacts that you can fiddle with in real time.

For now, Meta has a slick video, a prototype, a crack team of engineers and advisors including professor Steven Feiner and wearable computing advocate guy, Steve Mann, and financing to get their dev kit into dev’s hands. To its credit, Meta does seem to aim less at generalized gee-whiz gimmickry and heads-up automated narcissism, and more toward the getting actual work done.

Asian Alternatives:
First: POPSCI, very well done. The image on the above left melts one’s technosnarky heart.

In typical form, China has assimilated and excreted: the Baidu Eye is their Glass clone. There’s no indication of plans to bring it to market, so maybe they just wanted to say “Ha, ha, we can, too!” Or maybe they just wanted to do research and ride the Glass hype, which is understandable. But China, dude – might wanna think about doing some original stuff someday soon. That lack of intellectual capital is going to sting when “Designed in California” meets “Made in the U.S.A. With My 3D Printer.”

Over here in Japan we’ve got startup Telepathy One pushing a Glass-looking, but as they openly declare, not Glass-like AR headset (above-right). While technology writers rhetorically speculating as much in a headline makes for good Search Engine Optimization (other adjectives include: disingenuous, blithe, lame), rather than compete with Glass, Telepathy One is focusing on social networking & multimedia – but they too are clearly attempting to catch the contemporary current of AR hype – which is understandable. And hey, even if Telepathy One flashes and disappears, that fact that the phrase “Japanese Startup” can be used without the usual preface of “Why Aren’t There Any…” is a positive thing.

Okay Then, It’s Almost Doable – But Still…
Indeed, the apps, core software, computational capability, and the ubiquitous-enough network connectivity essential for decent AR are quickly ramping up. Along with innovative concepts like the AR/VR mashup Eidos Masks, alternatives to and more advanced versions of the above devices will likely continue to crop up. In fact, the never-even-close-to-being-vaguely-realized promises of VR are also showing signs of decreased morbidity. So…

We Actually Want It vs. They Want Us to Want It
Glass, the engine of the current VR hype machine, is of course conceptually nothing new, but it has the word “Google” in the name, so people are paying attention. Of course even Google gets ahead of itself from time to time (Buzz? Wave?), but lucky for them selling ads pays well, and they’ve got a boatload of cash to pour into whatever sounds cool. Millions have benefited from Google’s side projects and non-traditional ventures (Gmail much?), but the expectations leveled on Glass are… perhaps a bit much. Suffice it to say, Google absolutely nails search and software and web apps, but thus far big-G’s hardware projects have but limped.

But if we’ve got the cash, that probably won’t stop us! The soft tyranny of the tech elite is the ability to ring a shiny bell and then watch the doggies line up to pay. Luckily, actually useless products, products produced with too much hype, products produced with too much variety, products out of touch with the people who ultimately finance their creation – no matter how awesome they seem at first blush – they will fail. Hard. (Note: Sony, if you’re here, please reread the last sentence!).

Until AR & VR technologies can out-convenience a smartphone, shrink into a contact lens, dispense with voice controls and the confusing non-verbal communication of fiddling with a touchscreen on your temple, i.e., until such devices can move beyond relatively impractical novelty, it’s unlikely they’ll amount to much more than narrowly focused research and demonstration platforms.

This is to say, along with inventing Google Glass, the search giant might also want to invent something for us to like, you know, do with it. Or maybe that’s not fair – so to be fair, one can concede that no new technology is perfect at 1.0, and any awesome innovation has to start somewhere…

Maybe it could start in 1995. Ask Nintendo about that.

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Reno J. Tibke is the founder and operator of Anthrobotic.com and a contributor at the non-profit Robohub.org.

Props to io9 and Meta’s Kickstarter and Meta (but come on guys, tame that website – autoplay is really annoying). PopSci article/image; Watch the augmented reality-themed “Sight” and “H+” by clicking on those words.

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Now that Google Glass and Oculus Rift have entered the zeitgeist, might we start to see VR and AR products popping up on every street corner? Perhaps, but Meta has just launched an interesting take on the concept by marrying see-through, stereoscopic, display glasses with a Kinect-style depth sensor. That opens up the possibility of putting virtual objects into the real world, letting you “pick up” a computer-generated 3D architectural model and spin it around in your hand, for instance, or gesture to control a virtual display appearing on an actual wall. To make it work, you connect a Windows PC to the device, which consists of a pair of 960 x 540 Epson displays embedded in the transparent glasses (with a detachable shade, as shown in the prototype above), and a depth sensor attached to the top. That lets the Meta 1 track your gestures, individual fingers and walls or other physical surfaces, all of which are processed in the PC with motion tracking tech to give the illusion of virtual objects anchored to the real world.

Apps can be created via Unity3D and an included SDK on Windows computers (other platforms will arrive later, according to the team), with developers able to publish their apps on the upcoming Meta Store. The group has launched the project on Kickstarter with the goal of raising $100,000 to get developer kits into the hands of app coders, and though it’s no Google, Meta is a Y Combinator startup and has several high-profile researchers on the team. As such, it’s asking for exactly half of Glass’ Explorer Edition price as a minimum pledge to get in on the ground floor: $750. Once developers have had their turn, the company will turn its attention toward consumers and more sophisticated designs — so if you like the ideas peddled in the video, hit the source to give them your money.

Filed under: Wearables

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Source: Kickstarter