I meant to finish this earlier in the week. I spent the past weekend in Los Angeles at the VRLA conference in order to hear Jasper Brekelmans speak about the state of the art in depth sensors and visual effects. One of the great things about VRLA is all the vendor booths you can visit that are directly related to VR and AR technology. Nary a data analytics platform pitch or dev ops consulting services shill in sight.
Walking around with Jasper, we started compiling a list of how we would spend our Bitcoin and Ethereum fortunes once they recover some of their value. What follows is my must-have shopping list if I had so much money I didn’t need anything:
1. Red Frog HoloLens mod
First off is this modified HoloLens by Red Frog Digital. The fabrication allows the HoloLens to balance much better on a user’s head. It also applies no pressure to the bridge of the nose, but instead distributes it across the user’s head. The nicest thing about it is that it always provides a perfect fit, and can be properly aligned with the user’s eyes in about 5 seconds. They designed this for their Zombie Maze location-based experience and are targeting it for large, permanent exhibits / rides.
2. Cleanbox … the future of wholesome fun
If you’ve ever spent a lot of time doing AR and VR demos at an event, you know there are three practical problems you have to work around:
- seating devices properly on users’ heads
- cleaning devices between use
- recharging devices
Cleanbox Technology provides a solution for venue-based AR/VR device cleaning. Place your head-mounted display in the box, close the lid, and it instantly gets blasted with UV rays and air. I’d personally be happy just to have nice wooden boxes for all of my gear – I have a tendency to leave them lying on the floor or scattered across my computer desk – even without the UV lights.
3. VR Hamster Ball
The guy demoing this never seemed to let anyone try it, so I’m not sure if he was actually playing a hamster sim or not. I just know I want one as a 360 running-in-place controller … and as a private nap space, obviously.
4. Haptic Vest and Gauntlets
Bhaptics was demoing their TactSuit, which provides haptic feedback along the chest, back, arms and face. I’m going to need it to go with my giant hampster ball. They are currently selling dev units.
5. Birdly
A tilt table with an attached fan and a user control in the form of flapping wings is what you need for a really immersive VR experience. Fortunately, this is exactly what Birdly provides.
6. 5K Head-mounted Display
I got to try out the Vive Pro, which has an astounding 2K resolution. But I would rather put my unearned money down for a VRHero 5K VR headset with 170 degree FOV. They seem to be targeting industrial use cases rather than games, though, since their demo was of a truck simulation (you stood in the road as trucks zoomed by).
7. A globe display
Do I need a giant spherical display? No, I do not need it. But it would look really cool in my office as a conversation piece. It could also make a really great companion app for a VR or AR experience.
8. 360 Camera Rig with Red Epic Cameras
Five 6K Red Dragon Epic Cameras in a 360 video rig may seem like overkill, but with a starting price of around $250K, before tripod, lenses and a computer powerful enough to process your videos – this could make the killer raffle item at any hi-tech conference.
9. XSens Mocap Suit
According to Jasper, the XSens motion capture fullbody, lycra suit with realtime kinematics is one of the best available. I think I was quoted a price something like $7K(?) to $13K(?) Combined with my hamster ball, it would make me unstoppable in PvP competitive Minecraft.
10. AntVR AR Head-mounted display
AntVR will be launching a kickstarter campaign for their $500 augmented reality HMD in the next few weeks. I’d been reading about it for a while and was very excited to get a chance to try it out. It uses a Pepper’s ghost strategy for displaying AR, has decent tracking, works with Steam, and at $500 is very good for its price point.
11. Qualcomm Snapdragon 845
The new Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Chip has built-in SLAM – meaning 6DOF inside-out tracking is now a trivial chip-based solution – unlike just two years ago when nobody outside of robotics had even heard of SLAM algorithms. This is a really big deal.
Lenovo is using this chip in its new (untethered) Mirage Solo VR device – which looks surprisingly like the Windows Occluded MR headset they built with Microsoft tracking tech. At the keynote, the Lenovo rep stumbled and said that they will support “at least” 6 degrees of freedom, which has now become an inside joke among VR and AR developers. It’s also spoiled me, because I am no longer satisfied with only 6DOF. I need 7DOF at least but what I really want is to take my DOF up to 11.
12. Kinect 4
This wasn’t actually at VRLA, and I’m not ultimately sure what it is (maybe a competitor for the Google computer vision kit?) but Kinect for Azure was announced at the /build conference in Seattle and should be coming out sometime in 2019. As a former Kinect MVP and a Kinect book author, this announcement mellows me out like a glass of Hennessy in a suddenly quiet dance club.
While I’m waiting for bitcoin to rebound, I’ll just leave this list up on Amazon for, like, in case anyone wants to fulfill it for me or something. In the off chance that that actually comes through, I can guarantee you a really awesome unboxing video.