We’re now seeing a move toward mid-range, standalone VR headsets with everything built into the device. Some include their own processors, while others, like the forthcoming Microsoft headset, will work with current desktops. Microsoft’s device claims to do both VR and a modified version of mixed reality
The low end of the VR spectrum has been dominated by Google Cardboard, with over 10 million distributed
Augmented Reality
AR burst into the public’s consciousness with the Pokemon Go craze in 2016. And Snap (formerly Snapchat) expanded the range of their social media platform with the release of Spectacles, their wearable glasses and World Lens filters that add digital objects to your environment. A second version of Spectacles may include far more extensive AR capabilities.
At Facebook’s spring F8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg made the case that our mobile cameras will be the first popular AR platform. Apple just announced ARKit for iOS at their June WWDC developers conference.
Mixed Reality
Meta Glasses has been developing its own mixed reality unit that offers a wider field of view than the 40° of HoloLens. And Intel’s Project Alloy promises a “Merged Reality” headset prototype combining both VR and AR by the end of this year.
Kickstarter Projects
Aryzon which is creating a Google Cardboard-like device for simple AR experiences. Another is the NOLO Project, which offers an HTC Vive-like experience with full freedom of movement using only a plastic headset and your phone.
Market research firm Technavio has identified the top five vendors in the global augmented reality (AR) in education market. The companies are EON Reality, DAQRI, GAMOOZ, Magic Leap and QuiverVision, according to a newly published report.
Maya Georgieva, an ed tech strategist, author and speaker with more than 15 years of experience in higher education and global education. Georgieva is co-founder of Digital Bodies, a consulting group that provides news and analysis of VR, AR and wearables in education
Microsoft has been collaborating with its partners, such as HP, Acer, Dell and Lenovo, to develop VR headsets that will work with lower-end desktops. Later this year, the companies will debut headsets for $299, “which is much more affordable compared to HoloLens
many Kickstarter crowdfunding efforts are bound to make high-end headsets more accessible for teaching.
the NOLO project. The NOLO system is meant for mobile VR headsets and gives users that “6 degrees of freedom” (or 6 DoF) motion tracking that is currently only found in high-end headsets.
2) Hand Controllers That Will Bring Increased Interactivity
AltspaceVR h uses avatars and supports multiplayer sessions that allow for socialization and user interaction.
Facebook has been continuing to develop its own VR platform, Facebook Spaces, which is in beta and will be out later this year. LectureVR is a similar platform on the horizon.
Voke VR, a virtual reality (VR) company founded by two former Washington State University (WSU) professors, is working to build Intel-backed immersive tech for live events.
At the core of the platform is Voke’s TrueVR product, which delivers full stereoscopic 3D video that is integrated with augmented content in a 360-degree VR environment. It uses multiple camera angles with zoom capabilities and synchronized DVR, so that viewers can control what they want to watch. Additionally, with TrueVR, content is captured, encoded, synced with scores, metadata and audio and delivered in real time to multiple platforms.
Last year at the Windows 10 event, Microsoft announced a slate of upcoming Windows-compatible virtual reality (VR) headsets from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and other PC manufacturers that would work without desk- or wall-mounted sensors (similar to its HoloLens device). Lenovo is the first to showcase the prototype for its own self-contained VR headset, which is making its debut this week at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
Lenovo’s prototype headset is compatible with Microsoft’s Windows Holographic platform. Like the HoloLens, its design features depth-sending cameras located on the front of the device, allowing full-room movement tracking.
VR’s applications for education have been much lauded, and tech heavyweights have begun investing in the technology, in part to both enable and capitalize on educational opportunities. Google, for example, has been offering its low-cost Google Cardboard kits, which, coupled with the Google Expeditions service, provides VR-based educational experiences and learning activities.
according to market research firm ABI Research, some 6 million consumer and prosumer cameras are expected to ship by 2021. (That’s out of a total of 70 million VR devices that are forecast to ship by then.)
My (his) main research interests are augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) as well as camera networks. This includes building novel 3D user interfaces (e.g., using projection mapping or VR headsets) that adapt the layout of spatial UI elements based on implicit user input (e.g., gaze data) and building toolkits for room-scale interfaces. More recently, I also investigate different realities afforded by the combination of VR devices and camera networks.
Apple’s upcoming mixed reality headset will reportedly weigh less than an iPhone
Ming-Chi Kuo says it will weigh less than 150 grams
A weight of 150 grams would make Apple’s headset lighter than the Oculus Quest 2 (503 grams), Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 (645 grams), and the Valve Index (809 grams). It would be lighter than Google’s Daydream View, a fabric VR headset designed to hold your phone, which weighed 220 grams. The headset could even be lighter than your iPhone, given that the standard iPhone 12 weighs 164 grams.
The headset, codenamed “N301,” may also have 8K displays, eye-tracking technology, and more than a dozen cameras to both track your hand movements and capture footage that can be displayed inside the headsetapp
Apple’s working on solving this problem, too, according to a report in Nikkei Asia. The newspaper says that Apple is working with TSMC, its primary processor manufacturer, to develop a new kind of augmented reality display that’s printed directly on wafers, or the base layer for chips.
If Apple does eventually reveal a big leap forward in AR display technology — especially if the technology is developed and owned by Apple instead of a supplier — Apple could find itself with multi-year head-start in augmented reality as it did when the iPhone vaulted it to the head of the smartphone industry.
Apple is also adding hardware to its iPhones that hint at a headset-based future. High-end iPhones released in 2020 include advanced Lidar sensors embedded in their camera.
Microsoft has invested heavily in these kind of technologies, purchasing AltspaceVR, a social network for virtual reality, in 2018. Before it launched Hololens, it paid $150 million for intellectual property from a smartglasses pioneer.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks the most in public about his hopes for augmented reality. Last year, he said, “While I expect phones to still be our primary devices through most of this decade, at some point in the 2020s, we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology.”
Cabada, E., Kurt, E., & Ward, D. (2021). Constructing a campus-wide infrastructure for virtual reality. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 0(0), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2021.1881680
As an interdisciplinary hub, academic libraries are uniquely positioned to serve the full lifecycle of immersive environment needs, from development through archiving of successful projects. As and informal learning environment that or discipline neutral and high traffic, the academic library can serve as a clearinghouse for experimentation and transmission of best practices across colleges.
these foundational questions:
1. What VR infrastructure needs do faculty and researchers have?
2. Where is campus support lagging?
3. What current partnerships exist?
4. What and where is the campus level of interest in VR?
As marketing for workshops and programs can be challenging, particularly for large institutions, data was collected on where workshop participants learned about Step Into VR. The responses show that users learned of the workshops from a variety of ways with email ( 41 % ) as the most cited method (Figure 4). These marketing emails were sent through distributed listservs that reached nearly the entire campus population. Facebook was called out specifically and represented the second largest marketing method at 29% with the library website, friends, instructors, and digital signage representing the remaining marketing channels.
While new needs continue to emerge, the typical categories of consultation support observed include:
• Recommendations on hardware selection, such as choosing the best VR headset for viewing class content
• Guidance on developing VR applications that incorporate domain-specific curricular content
• Support for curricular integration of VR
• Recommendations on 360 capture media and equipment for documenting environments or experiences, such as the GoPro Fusion and Insta360 One X
• Advice on editing workflows, including software for processing and rendering of 360 content
Alex Fogarty
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While many library patrons understand the basic concepts of recording video on a camera, 360 cameras present a large divergence from this process in several primary ways. The first is a 360 camera captures every direction at once, so there is no inherent “focus,” and no side of a scene that is not recorded. This significantly changes how someone might compose a video recording, and also adds complexity to post-production, including how to orient viewers within a scene. The second area of divergence is that many of these devices, especially the high-end versions, are recording each lens to a separate data file or memory card and these ftles need to be combined, or “stitched,” at a later time using software specific to the camera. A final concern is that data ftles for high-resolution 3 D capture can be huge, requiring both large amounts of disk space and high-end processors and graphic cards for detailed editing to occur. For example, the Insta360 Pro 2 has 6 sensors all capable of data recording at 120 Mbps for a grand total of 720 Mbps. This translates into 43.2 gigabytes of data for every minute o