L’Oreal USA's NYX Professional Makeup is teaming with Samsung to launch a virtual reality makeup tutorial using the Samsung Gear VR headset, said the companies in a joint Monday announcement. The partnership “allows both brands to push the boundaries of shopping at the intersection of beauty and technology,” they said. Consumers can use the Gear VR controller to select products they would like to learn more information about, and at the end of the experience, receive an offer to buy the products featured in the tutorial at a special price, they said. The tutorial will debut Monday in select NYX Professional Makeup stores before rolling out nationally in 2018, they said.
Fraunhofer scientists in Dresden, Germany, produced a compact, lightweight and energy-efficient virtual-reality headset prototype fashioned from a specially designed large-area OLED microdisplay with “extended full HD” resolution of 1920 x 1200 and a frame rate of 120 Hz, said the research organization in a Friday announcement. Fraunhofer’s goal was to "develop a new generation of OLED displays that provide outstanding picture quality and make it possible to produce VR glasses in a compact format,” it said. The OLED component of the microdisplay, which measures about an inch diagonally, is composed of several organic layers “which are monolithically integrated on silicon wafers,” it said. A specially designed chip within the microdisplay controls the pixels for its high resolution and frame rate, it said. Researchers will showcase their prototype at an electronic components technical conference opening Tuesday in Brussels, said Fraunhofer: “Further prototypes are due to follow by the middle of 2018. Industry partners involved in the project have already indicated their interest in converting this microdisplay into a marketable product in the near future.”
The BBC launched a free virtual reality spacewalk video downloadable for the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift that enables would-be astronauts to embark on a spacewalk 250 miles above the Earth, “something only 217 people have ever done for real,” the broadcaster blogged Thursday. Home -- A VR Spacewalk is an award-winning interactive video that has been shown at film festivals around the world, BBC said: “Its launch is the first time it has been made available to the public, and it is the first experience the BBC has released for the HTC Vive.” Viewers of the video are “tasked with making a repair on the outside of the International Space Station, before being confronted with a terrifying emergency situation,” BBC said.
Amazon announced Amazon Sumerian, a service for developers to build virtual reality, augmented reality and 3D apps and run them on mobile devices, head-mounted displays, digital signage or web browsers, it said Monday. Sumerian’s editing tool allows developers to build virtual environments, populate them with 3D objects and animated characters and script how they interact with each other and users, Amazon said. The VR and AR apps created in Amazon Sumerian will run in any browser that supports WebGL or WebVR graphics rendering, including Daydream, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and iOS mobile devices, Amazon said.
There’s now “enough momentum” in the content industry behind virtual and augmented reality that SMPTE soon will form a “study group” to look at needed standards, Howard Lukk, director-engineering and standards, told a Thursday webinar. “A proposal has been submitted” to start the group, “in review right now,” and that “should complete maybe by the end of next week,” said Lukk. “We should have a project up and running” by Thanksgiving, he said. “We don’t have a date for the first meeting, but it’s going to be looking at VR and AR specifically” from content production to “distribution master,” he said. “We’re not diving into consumer technology or headset and display technologies,” though “of course, we’ll review those things,” he said. The study group will determine whether there are existing standards that can be applied to VR and AR, or “are there standards that are missing,” he said. The study group will release a report of findings, he said. Its formal launch is "coming up shortly," he said. "Stay tuned. I think we’ll probably have an announcement once that project gets up and rolling.”
Intel policy principles for artificial intelligence include privacy and other considerations. It seeks to "Liberate Data Responsibly" while maintaining security and data privacy, using machine learning algorithms. The chipmaker seeks to "Rethink Privacy," saying frameworks like fair information practice principles and privacy by design "withstood the test of time" but may need a “rethink.” It would "Require Accountability for Ethical Design and Implementation" and governments "must play a significant role in promoting those advances," it said. Despite major advances in computing power and algorithms "there is still a long way to go before what is called General AI becomes a reality," Intel blogged Wednesday.
Nokia will halt development of future versions of the Ozo professional virtual-reality camera and hardware as part of a strategy shift to “reduce investments” in VR and focus its Nokia Technologies subsidiary more on “technology licensing opportunities,” the company said in a Tuesday announcement. Nokia Technologies will continue to service existing customers on the Ozo, it said. Nokia was prompted to act because the VR market has been slower to develop than expected, it said. The subsidiary expects to eliminate about a third of its 1,090 employees, mainly in Finland, the U.S. and the U.K., it said. Nokia will “sharpen the focus" of Nokia Technologies on “digital health,” while leaving its “successful patent licensing business untouched,” the company said.
Discovery Communications and Google will launch a 38-episode virtual reality series Nov. 3 exclusively on YouTube and DiscoveryVR.com and on the Discovery VR app, they announced Wednesday. Discovery TRVLR can be experienced in VR with the new Google Daydream View headset and with Google Cardboard, as well as through the web and on Android and iOS phones, they said. The series takes viewers beyond the TV screen “and drops them directly into the lives of fascinating locals in every corner of the globe across all seven continents,” using a “visceral 360-degree storytelling experience,” it said.
Combined global shipments of headsets for augmented and virtual reality will rise at a 56.1 percent compound annual growth rate the next five years, reaching 81.2 million units by the end of 2021, IDC said in a Thursday report. VR headsets will have more than 90 percent of the market until 2019, but in the final two years of the forecast, IDC expects AR headsets “to experience exponential growth,” capturing 25 percent share by 2021, it said. “AR headset shipments today are a fraction of where we expect them to be in the next five years, both in terms of volume and functionality," said IDC. They’re also “on track” to generate more than $30 billion in global revenue by 2021, almost twice that of VR headsets, since most AR models will carry much higher average selling prices, it said.
Sony has ideas for adapting virtual-reality head-up display technology for use in cars, said a U.S. patent application (2017/0240047) published Aug. 24 at the Patent and Trademark Office. The application, filed in early 2016, describes an “active window” for vehicle infomatics and VR in which the car’s windshield is partly covered with a flexible, transparent OLED screen so the driver or passengers can see a real-world view of the car’s surroundings overlaid by synthetic images. A camera with GPS would continually capture images of the road ahead, which are compared with location information stored in an in-car server or pulled from the internet. As onboard sensors monitor the outside climate, an infrared transmitter lets the camera capture images in the dark, it said. Using what Sony dubs a “fun selector,” the car’s occupants can decide whether to augment reality with useful information to aid navigation or to add whimsy. “Text may be superimposed on outside images to identify landmarks and interesting items in the view,” said the application. The outside world can be “enhanced to allow amusing things to happen,” such as an image of a dinosaur peering out from between two trees or boulders, or superimposing images of grass, lakes and flowers onto a desert landscape through which the vehicle is passing, it said. The camera can be motor-mounted to widen the view or it can be roof-mounted to capture native 360-degree images, it wrote. Sony didn’t comment on the invention's possible commercial uses.