• Gear,  HMD's,  VR News

    Quest 2 Pro and controllers’ appearance may have been leaked!

    Reddit user Samulia, that is used to analyze the Quest firmware (and made some “predictions” about the Quest 2 Pro), has found in the Quest runtime some videos that depict a new headset with new controllers, most probably the upcoming Quest 2 Pro! The news has been shared with me by the other great technologist Basti564 (subscribe to his Youtube channel!), that has shared them with me over Twitter. You can see all the leaked videos in the tweets here… MORE

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  • Gear,  Haptics,  VR News

    New wearable skin lets you touch VR stuff and really feel it

    Modern wearable skin lets you touch and feel things in virtual reality, new technology makes you feel human without artificial vibrations. They designed the skin to give users a virtual, virtual reality touch of feedback that feels natural without using electronic vibration. They published the study in Soft Robotics, describing soft skin with a thickness of less than 500 mm. They equip the skin with pneumatic actuators that will make you feel you are touching something real and not just the simulation of an electronic aperture engine that really feels like a real thing at all. The artificial skin also has integrated sensors which transmit the data used to modulate…

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  • Gear,  HMD's

    Zuckerberg explains why an Oculus Quest ‘Pro’ is necessary

    It’s easy to think Facebook doesn’t care that much about high-end PC VR headsets. After all, the company just unceremoniously killed off its Rift S headset, leaving the standalone Quest 2 as its only current VR product. With the addition of Air Link, which lets Quest 2 owners wirelessly stream VR from gaming PCs, there doesn’t appear to be an immediate need for a true Oculus PC headset. But it turns out, the company is actually working on a more powerful VR headset, the Quest Pro, according to Facebook VP Andrew Bosworth and consulting Technical Officer John Carmack. Now, in an interview with CNET’s Scott Stein, Mark Zuckerberg is offering…

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  • Gear,  HMD's,  VR News

    Hacking Our Eyes for Better VR Headsets

    Virtual reality technology has come a long way since its wacky roots in the 80s and 90s. It is difficult to describe the joy today’s VR can provide, be it slicing glowing neon blocks to a K-pop song with light sabers, or dodging bullets while controlling the speed of time. However, if your vision is 20/20, you may still be disappointed with the relatively low resolution of even the best VR headsets. Today, high-definition TVs and smartphones boast “retinal resolution,” where the pixels are smaller than what the human eye can discern. In comparison, the relatively grainy display inside VR headsets may seem lackluster — so bad that you can…

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  • Gear,  HMD's,  VR News

    Quest 2 Will be Updated to 120Hz Refresh

    120Hz Refresh Rate Likely Coming to Quest 2 Facebook originally launched Oculus Quest 2 with a default 72Hz refresh rate and ‘experimental’ support for 90Hz, which has since become the new default. A faster refresh rate makes the virtual world inside the headset smoother, more comfortable, and more immersive. During a Q&A session on Instagram, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the VP of Facebook Reality Labs, responded with a literal ‘thumbs up’ to a question about whether Quest 2 would see an update to 120Hz. The headset’s display is ostensibly already capable of a 120Hz refresh rate, but running it that fast raises concerns about performance and battery life. In order to…

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  • Games,  Random and weird,  VRChat

    Why So Many VRChat Users Play as Female Anime Avatars

    Why do so many VRChat users look like cutesy anime girls, anyway? If you assume the snarky and simplistic answer is, “Because it’s full of otaku geeks with a weird waifu fetish”, watch this video which suggests the actual story is much deeper and far more fascinating than that. Created by “Strasz”, who’s becoming something of an anthropologist of VRChat on YouTube, his insights are based in part on a survey of over 200 hardcore VRChat users, heavily skewed (at 85%) toward people who access the virtual world through a VR headset. His thesis for why so many VRChatters play as female anime avatars, he tells me, boils roughly down…

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  • Computers,  Gear

    Next-Gen HAMR Platters Promise 80TB Hard Drives

    We’re about to get 20 terabyte hard drives, but the path looks clear to scale up to 80TB. As the world’s demand for storage continues to grow, so does the need to find the next storage density breakthrough. It looks like one just happened, though, and it paves the way to 80TB hard drives. As AnandTech reports, Japanese company Showa Denko K.K. (SDK) is the world’s largest manufacturer of hard drive platters, which are the disks stacked inside each drive to store the data. This week SDK announced it had improved upon Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology to allow for next-generation hard drives. More

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  • Games,  Medical,  Random and weird,  VR News

    Co-founder of Valve believes brain interfaces will create games superior to reality

    Brain-computer interface technology, or BCI, is the future of immersive gaming says Gabe. Gabe Newell says the future of gaming may lie in brain-computer interface technology, or BCI for short. In an interview with 1 NEWS, a television network in Newell’s home away from home, New Zealand, the co-founder of Valve talks about his vision of what gaming might look like once powered by BCI tech and it sure sounds immersive at a level us mere mortals could hardly imagine—or existentially scary. Take your pick. Valve is currently working on an open-source BCI software project, he tells 1 NEWS, which would allow game developers to begin interpreting the signals within…

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  • Media,  Productivity,  Software

    Tilt Brush going open source

    Google is turning Tilt Brush over to the open source communityThe VR drawing app will still be available to download through stores. Google is winding down support for yet another one of its marquee VR products. In a blog post spotted by Protocol, the company said it’s halting development on Tilt Brush and open sourcing the project so that the community can continue to use the app. “To some, this may look like the end of Tilt Brush. To me, this is immortality,” said Tilt Brush co-creator Patrick Hackett of Google’s decision. Incidentally, Hackett left the company earlier in the month. For its part, Google said the move will allow…

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  • AR Augmented Reality,  Gear,  HMD's,  Mixed Reality,  VR News

    Canon mixed reality headset

    By James Artaius The Canon MREAL S1 is a mixed reality headset with four cameras to mix the physical and virtual worlds. Canon is releasing its smallest, lightest mixed reality (MR) headset in February. The Canon MREAL S1 can be head-mounted or used handheld… The Canon MREAL S1 is much smaller and lighter than the manufacturer’s previous mixed reality devices, being about the size of a camera phone and weighing in at just 137g – which is 250% lighter than the 480g Canon MREAL MD-20, and will carry a price tag of… More

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