If you are like me, the first time you used Virtual Reality, you probably ran into one of the more painful problems with VR: you can’t see real life obstacles with a device that blocks your view. While it might seem that mapping an entire room…
Anyone that watches SciFi knows that the big downfall to holograms is that you can’t touch them. You just pass right through them, ruining the illusion. However, in real life there are several projects working on creating touchable holograms. …
One of the biggest problems with Virtual Reality that I keep coming back to (other than cost and ethical concerns) is the lack of interaction in most VR simulations. There are many ways around this, but many of them still involve tracking hands or movements. If you want to go sit on a virtual horse, you can’t. Until now it seems. FutureTown has created a device that converts into a motor bike, a mechanical horse, and a standing ski/surfing simulation board (see the promo video above). Connect this device to your favorite VR headset, and its like you are almost there! Well, not really, but it probably does bring us closer to Holodecks. But it also highlights the problems with the whole idea: how expensive is it going to get to create a new set-up for every way you could use this? Cars, boats, biking, etc all have different contexts for motion. Will this be useful for education anytime soon? Not really. But I did get to play in something like this in a mall - basically, an eggshell that worked like a space ship while I fought off an alien invasion. It was pretty cool, bur practical? We will have to see.
One thing you have to give Google - they are always willing to try new things. Of course, I can’t remember what the last new Google “thing” was that I read a few months ago, so that could be good or bad. But today Google announced Google Allo,…
The headline pretty much says it all: “Apple to meet with augmented reality contact lens firm EPGL, discuss possible iOS support.” Articles like this are a sign that innovations are going mainstream. Or at least attempting - many still don’t m…
Even though some ideas aren’t very practical for everyday usage, they are still pretty cool nonetheless. One such project is the one where a team from Framework turned an actual school bus into a virtual Mars ride. It’s a pretty intense projec…
One of the problems with virtual reality is that it is virtual - the things yopu see and interact with are not really there, so you can’t reach out and touch them. Which generally makes most VR experiences pretty passive - even adding a joy stick makes VR more like a game than a simulation. Of course, many companies are working on ways to add touch to virtual objects. One recent company is Dexmo, which adds an exoskeleton to your hands to enable simulated touch. While the set-up looks clunky, the idea that it is recreating the shape and consistency of virtual objects could be very useful in medical, educational, and manufacturing realms, among others. Apparently, no price is given, and the manufacturer wants to wait until VR software begins programming touch into their games and simulations. But this is still one step closer to Star Trek Holodecks (or at least the immersion suits described in Ready Player One).
Web annotation tools are not really that new, but have mostly been utilized for contextualized commenting or personal note taking. A more innovative use of these tools is for constructive criticism or group critique. Tools like hypothes.is can…
Intel has been showing off Project Alloy, a self-contained headset that combines augmented reality with virtual reality. My first thought was “isn’t anything that isn’t virtual reality just augmented reality by default?” Well, the answer seems…
Brought to you by a team of developers led by the guy that invented the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee), Solid is a new project designed to “radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.” The basic idea is that the data in an application is “decoupled” from the data inside it, meaning that if your favorite service shuts down (like MySpace, Jaiku, etc), you can switch to another and not lose what you did on that service. You would control your data and what happens to it. Stephen Downes looks at some of the applications being built on Solid. Solid is probably quite a way away from going mainstream, so don’t plan to use it this Fall in classes. However, for people that want to get serious about data ownership, this is a project to keep your eyes on.