Dieter Bohn and Tom Warren at The Verge had an amazing mixed realities experience at Microsoft. They tried out the HoloLens, a headset that projects holograms into real space. They report about having Minecraft on a coffee table and about an amazing experience during which an engineer who was communicating… Continue reading
A short but beautiful video featuring the grandfather of virtual reality, professor Tom Furness. He can be situated directly into a tradition which goes back to Vannevar Bush, who in 1945 described the Memex-device in As We May Think – a technological dream of making knowledge accessible in ways corresponding… Continue reading
Virtuix, the maker of the virtual reality treadmill Omni, prepares applications beyond gaming. Here you see the treadmill in a gaming context: http://youtu.be/aTtfAQEeAJI Roel Verrycken, the US correspondent of the Belgian newspaper De Tijd, had an interview with founder Jan Goetgeluk and asked which new applications his company is developing…. Continue reading
Neal Stephenson is the author of Snow Crash, a book which helped me ‘get’ virtual worlds. Today he announces in a blog post that he agreed to become Chief Futurist of Magic Leap, which is a secretive company working on something which seems to get rid of keyboards and other… Continue reading
In June 2014 Google showed the world the Cardboard VR headset, today it has been announced 500,000 of those devices have been shipped. This is extraordinary, realizing the project was ‘just’ an experiment done by two engineers in the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, David Coz and Damien Henry, during… Continue reading
Connectivism guru Stephen Downes is right to point out alternatives for Oculus Rift such as Google Cardboard. You can buy these things (which allow to convert smartphones into VR devices) from others or build it yourself. I never tried it out myself so I cannot compare with Oculus Rift, but I… Continue reading
People don’t get ideas, they make them. That’s the pedagogy of constructionism explained in the shortest possible way, I guess, and Colin Lewis at RobotEnomics is very good at that. He posted about why employees should be playing with Lego Robots – because it makes it so more obvious what… Continue reading
Last week a colleague at my newspaper told me about Oculus Rift experiments by data visualization experts. It seems logical to use virtual reality for data visualization – after all that’s what people also did and I guess still do in virtual environments such as Second Life and OpenSim. Personally… Continue reading
I had some very nice Oculus Rift experiences. I tried Titans of Space, an exploration of our solar system. The head tracker of the DK2 proved very useful: I could use the dashboard of my small spacecraft by nudging and tilting my head. Here you find a video by VR… Continue reading
This is the Berlin 1920 area in Second Life is testing for Oculus Rift. They scaled part of the environment to fit the Oculus Rift immersive environment. It also implies one should downsize one’s avatar (avatars are typically unrealistically big in Second Life) – but one can use the Oculus… Continue reading