Scalefast launched the official online store for the Pico Goblin virtual reality headset, it said in a Thursday announcement. The store is offering Pico Goblin in a preorder bundle of $249, $20 off the suggested retail price, with five VR games thrown in. Scalefast positions Pico Goblin as a “completely portable and instant gateway” into the VR world, differentiated by price. It uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 processor and two high-resolution VR displays capable of a 2432 x 1366 resolution, said the e-commerce company. Fifty VR titles are available for Pico Goblin at launch, it said.
Nokia and Technicolor will partner to create virtual-reality content using Nokia's OZO+ VR camera and OZO content creation tools, the companies said in a joint announcement Tuesday. The first project in the partnership will be a series of “Masterclass” courses taught at the Technicolor Experience Center in Los Angeles, they said. Professionals who take part will get an “in-depth look on how to create compelling VR films and how the medium differs from traditional cinematic experiences,” they said.
IDTechEx sees virtual- and augmented-reality headsets becoming a $37 billion global market opportunity by 2027, Harry Zervos, principal analyst, told a Thursday webinar. The research firm forecasts 220 million devices will ship in 2027, 130 million of them for VR, the rest for AR, he said. “We’re looking at a market that is really going to massively grow.” IDC, in a separate Thursday report on VR and AR headsets, said global unit shipments jumped 77.4 percent in Q1 to 2.3 million units. “With a long list of new products scheduled to ship in the second half of 2017, IDC is forecasting triple-digit growth for the full year,” it said. The VR market “is still very young and consumers seem to be taking a cautious approach," it said. "With plenty of headset options already in the market and even more coming soon, hardware isn't the issue. The bigger challenge is the slow growth in content that appeals to a mass audience, combined with the confusion associated with a lack of cross-platform support."
A virtual reality device must have the ability to “blend the real-world elements into the virtual world, and enable natural interactions with the digital content” if it’s to be considered “fully immersive,” said Achin Bhowmik, vice president-general manager of Intel’s Perceptual Computing Group, in a Wednesday blog post. VR devices today can “transport” the user to a front-row seat at a live concert, said Bhowmik. But “rather than just watching the concert, imagine dancing with your friends in attendance and experiencing the same excitement from your living room through lifelike visuals, sound, touch, haptics and complete freedom of movement!” he said: “The future of immersive VR experiences will provide an indistinguishable merging between real and virtual experiences with compelling sensory-based content. This journey will certainly take time and a lot of hard work.”
Samsung partnered with the UFC, X Games and Live Nation to stream live sports and music events through the Gear VR platform, said the company in a Tuesday announcement. VR Live Pass on Gear VR events will be available through the Samsung VR app beginning Saturday, said the company. The events, free to Gear VR users, include UFC 212: Aldo vs. Holloway, a featherweight boxing match on June 3; X Games Minneapolis, July 13-16, featuring BMX riders and skaters; and an unidentified international music artist in concert on an undisclosed date in August. Gear VR users will be given a “live pass” to shows with access to action shots and “extreme close-ups,” said Samsung. The platform is available in 45 countries.
Speakers at NCTA's The Near Future event on April 27 (see 1703060044) will include Google VR Senior Staff Engineer Paul Debevec and 20th Century Fox futurist Ted Schilowitz discussing virtual and augmented reality's role in future storytelling and entertainment, NCTA said in a blog post Tuesday. Other speakers will include Zoom CEO Eric Yuan to talk about technology's future role in work, and David Traum, director-natural language research at the University of Southern California, and Skoolbot founder Liam McKinney talking about machine learning and networked apps.
Allowing audio, visual and touch senses through a virtual-reality headset and its accessories “are crucial to the immersive experience of VR,” said Strategy Analytics in a Monday report. “The ability of a user to interact with items in a VR world using their own hands heightens the sense of immersion that user feels,” said the firm. That “drives emotional engagement with VR content by stimulating the tactile sense,” it said. “Full-hand tracking should be considered the ideal solution in the future as it is the most natural way of reaching out and grabbing objects, and would enhance the levels of interaction with a VR world with things such as finger tracking.” But achieving “total sensory engagement” through use of a VR headset “is not without risk,” said the report: “The inability to hear things in case of an emergency, combined with the inability to see what's going on in the immediate surroundings, can prove hazardous. Options need to exist that allow users to maintain spatial awareness of their surroundings, such as quick exit from games.”
EMagin’s recent signing of a multimillion-dollar agreement to supply its OLED microdisplays for consumer virtual-reality head-mounted displays (HMDs) to a “major Tier 1 consumer electronics company” was its third such “success” in the past 15 months, CEO Andrew Sculley said on a Tuesday earnings call. “While I am not at liberty to disclose any names, I am comfortable telling you that you would easily recognize them all,” said Sculley. The company also is experiencing “interest from other parties and will opportunistically continue our dialogues with all of them,” he said. While others are attempting to do microdisplays with OLED for augmented reality and VR, “we believe that our proprietary direct patterning technology gives an unbeatable advantage in the very high level of brightness needed to satisfy several pending military programs, as well as surpass current consumer HMD threshold requirements,” Sculley said. In Q&A, Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Lucas confessed to being “a little cautious” in predicting when its supply agreements with top CE makers will yield HMDs that actually reach the commercial market. “We have been in discussion with these folks quite a while,” said Lucas. “They are large companies, large players, with their own level of administrative and bureaucratic complexity. These things don't happen quickly. And even when we think we are getting very close in something, invariably another element can come into play.” Bottom line, said Lucas: “We are making solid forward progress with these folks, but we're not in a position nor would we be able to say it's going to happen soon or in the very near future or in the later future. And it could happen relatively quickly, but there are so many variables involved here that we are just a little cautious here in terms of setting any specific timeline expectations.”
ABI Research estimates more than 460 companies are in the hunt for the consumer and enterprise pieces of the virtual reality prize, the company said Tuesday in its inaugural “ecosystem tracker” report for the VR and 360-degree video markets. Broad market appeal for both consumer and enterprise VR will see the global market exceed $60 billion by 2021, and it's that projected market growth that will continue “to attract a wide variety of players,” ABI said. Apps, software, content distribution and “core technology” are “the most common business model,” accounting for more than 60 percent of the companies involved in VR, “roughly split evenly” between consumer and enterprise, it said. “VR is not 3D,” ABI said. “With first-generation hardware sales lower than expected, some industry professionals suggest parallels between VR and 3D, but the wealth of companies active in this space and deep-seeded belief in VR stand in marked contrast to the short-lived heyday of 3D.”
Imax and Warner Home Entertainment will develop and release three “premium” interactive virtual-reality “experiences” over the next three years under a “co-financing and production agreement,” the companies announced. One such experience a year will be developed, based on Warner’s “most highly anticipated upcoming blockbuster films,” including Justice League, Aquaman and a third project to be named later, they said. All the projects will debut at Imax VR Centres for “an exclusive window” before being released to other VR platforms, including in-home and mobile offerings, they said. Imax officially opened its “flagship” Imax VR Centre in Los Angeles Jan. 6 and plans to have a total of six “pilot locations” up and running throughout the world by midyear (see 1702240002).