Sensomotoric Instruments (SMI) is a German-based eye tracking company who has released an eye tracking kit for the Oculus DK2 & Gear VR, and most recently for the HTC Vive. At SIGGRAPH this year, Nvidia was showing a foveated rendering demo where it...
TheWave VR coordinated two days worth of DJs playing musical sets in the world's first VR Rave at VRLA. It was TheWave's first event since announcing that they raised a round of $2.5 million to build out an interactive, VR music concert platform. I...
Originally launched in 2012, Sketchfab has grown to be the largest social media website for sharing 3D objects and scenes with over 500,000 members and close to 1 million experiences. At SIGGRAPH, Sketchfab launched their VR browser to be able to...
There was a VR Village again this year at the SIGGRAPH conference where a lot of experimental interactive technologies were on display. Virtual Reality was the common thread, but there were other immersive technologies like different prototype...
Back in February, Amazon announced that they had purchased and forked Crytek's Cryengine and made the full source code available in a free AAA game engine offering called Lumberyard. The only catch is that if you want to use any public cloud...
At Google I/O this year, Google announced the Daydream VR platform and mobile headset that will be coming to the latest Android phones later this year. There's a DIY dev kit that you can start using today to start developing Daydream-ready apps, and...
The artist Zenka has been documenting the evolution of virtual reality by making raku sculptures of head-mounted displays. She's also created an interactive timeline of some of the major VR and AR HMDs. Technology has been progressing so quickly...
The Khronos Group announced that the open standard of glTF was gaining momentum by some of the key players within the graphics industry before SIGGRAPH this year. glTF provides a standardized baseline and interchange format to deliver 3D meshes to...
Visionary VR premiered their Mindshow interactive storytelling platform at VRLA, and was quite a unique experience to be able to record an improv acting session within the body of a virtual character and then step outside of myself to then watch my...
Cerevrum Inc is building an ambitious educational platform starting with training people to become better public speakers with Speech Center VR. The basic mechanic is that you stand in a variety of different virtual rooms in front of an animated...
SIGGRAPH is a conference where GPU manufacturers announce new versions of professional graphics cards designed for the visual effects industry and high-end virtual reality content producers in architectural visualization and engineering. NVIDIA...
Team training scenarios are often difficult to schedule due to the logistics involved coordinating many different people's schedules. One solution has been to use virtual humans as stand-ins for actual humans in team training scenarios where the...
One of the gold standards of a VR experience is being able to achieve presence, but presence is an elusive concept to precisely define. Mel Slater is one of the leading researchers into presence and Mel says that it's a combination of the Place...
People were waiting in lines for over an hour to see Pearl both at SIGGRAPH and VRLA, which is one of the best narrative VR experiences that I've seen so far. The central character in the story is a car named 'Pearl' who gives selfless service to...
AMD has made a number of different announcements over the past couple of weeks at both SIGGRAPH and VRLA. They announced some new Radeon Pro graphics cards designed for professional visual effects creators, as well an open source VR video stitching...
Digital lightfields are a cutting-edge technology that can render photorealistic VR scenes, and Otoy has been a pioneer of the rendering and compression techniques to deal with the massive amounts of data required to create them. Their OctaneRender...
During the Enlightenment, René Descartes declared that the mind and body were split and that we should think about them as separate dualistic entities. But more and more evidence is pointing to the fact that our bodies are much more involved in...
When the recession hit in 2008, book publisher Charlie Melcher looked to reinvent how Melcher Media told stories using the latest smart phone technologies. They developed an iOS app for Al Gore's Our Choice, and started having a lot of conversations...
Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward has been fascinated by the idea of virtual reality since he first read Snow Crash as a teenager. He backed the Oculus Kickstarter, and has been exploring many of the early VR prototypes over the last three years...