Hasta La Gadget!

The Eidos masks are really, really cool.

New toys like Google Glass are neat, but augmented reality (AR) has been around forever. Going back to WWII-era active gun sights, forward to the heads-up displays of modern aircraft & automobiles, to smartphone apps that overlay directions, traffic conditions, restaurant reviews, or, through facial recognition, the name of an acquaintance or colleague; throughout the basic concept and implementation of AR has remained fundamentally unchanged.

The same could be said for virtual reality (VR), with one caveat: for practical purposes, it doesn’t really like, you know, exist. In 1992, when Lawnmower Man came out and hundreds of computer scientists died in tragic eye-rolling incidents, VR and enthusiasm for it pretty much crawled into the sci-fi/fantasy corner where it’s spent most of the last 20 years. VR is an endlessly fascinating concept, and it’s endlessly unavailable (though the Oculus Rift shows promise).

The novel and intriguing Eidos project, consisting of a pair of prototype sensory enhancement masks developed by students at the Royal College of Art in London, has very simply but cleverly shoehorned together both AR & VR into an indirect, yet direct augmentation of analog perception.

Basically, the system is digitally processing analog reality and then feeding it back to the user’s organic sight & sound receivers in real time – which is neither discretely AR nor VR, but kinda simultaneously both.

Potential applications abound, so have a watch below, and the admittedly convoluted explanation above should make sense:

Via Mashable – Eidos Home

Akihabara News Contributor Reno J. Tibke is the founder and operator of Anthrobotic.com.

If you’re looking for more virtual worlds to explore using the Oculus Rift, MTBS3D forum user StellaArtois has developed something that might strike your fancy: a Minecraft mod dubbed Minecrift that bakes in support for the virtual reality headset. The modification still needs refining, but it already incorporates head tracking and warping. Not only did the intrepid forum goer grapple with the OpenGL API to devise the solution, but they also created the altered software before their own Rift dev kit arrived, relying on others to provide feedback for tweaking.

Mojang has has expressed interest in the VR headset and already has one in house, but official support for the Rift doesn’t seem close at hand for Minecraft.”Would take a lot of work to get it working for Minecraft, but not impossible – especially with the new launcher,” Mojang dev Nathan Adams tweeted yesterday regarding the Rift. Click the first source link below to give the mod a shot or head past the break to see it in action.

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Via: Road To VR

Source: MTBS3D, @Dinnerbone (Twitter)

Sure, Omni-directional treadmills are nothing new, but Virtuix’s take is worth a mention now that it’s been shown off working in conjunction with the Oculus Rift. The company’s been posting videos of its Omni treadmill working with Kinect for months, but last Thursday it upped the ante by adding the Rift. All told, it makes for what looks to be an intense VR session of Team Fortress 2 — one-upping SixSenses’ Razer Hydra demo for the VR headset. The company’s been working on this unit as an affordable solution for households, aiming to eventually try for funding via Kickstarter. Catch the video demo after the break and please resist throwing money at the screen in an attempt to get in on the action early.

Filed under: Gaming

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Via: Mashable

Source: Virtuix (YouTube)

Although the Oculus Rift is one of the more ambitious attempts at making virtual reality accessible, its lack of peripheral version is all too familiar — it’s much like staring into a pair of portholes. Rather than let the disorientation persist unaltered, though, Hack A Day has taken matters into its own hands. Its Oculight hack puts an RGB LED strip inside the headpiece, with the colored lighting set to match the edge of the screen through Adalight code. The result is much like Philips’ Ambilight, but arguably more useful: the virtual world’s light “leaks” into the wearer’s real peripheral view, adding to the immersion. Oculight clearly isn’t for sale and needs a refined installation to create the ideal effect, but the readily available resources will let anyone with an Oculus Rift development kit build their own solution.

Filed under: Displays, Wearables

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Source: Hack A Day

Oculus Rift is in the mail! Development kits began shipping to customers on Wednesday, and even if you have yet to receive a tracking number of your own, a kit may very well be on its way. The Oculus team has been “tied up at GDC” this week, which explains the delay in sending out tracking info, but folks taking care of logistics have apparently been hard at work, prepping some 10,000 development kits for shipment. Of course, not every set will be on its way to a developer right away — it does take time to get that many kits out the door — but if you’re expecting one at your front porch, it’s likely to arrive very soon. In the meantime, the Developer Center has opened up to devs, with access to the SDK, Unity and Unreal Engine integrations, forums, wiki and other documentation. The team also published a video of its SXSW panel in full for your enjoyment — you can catch it just past the break.

Filed under: Displays, Gaming, HD

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Source: Oculus VR