This week, we were fortunate enough to have presentations from: Hedd.Space, Hooke Audio, Polhemus and a presentation from Shakhruz Ashirov, a VR app developer.
Hedd.space is a platform that is humanizing the way online information will be presented in VR. Founder, Eric Neuman believes that the current UI for online information (2D and with lots of text on the webpage) is unnecessarily taxing to human minds. He believes that with his VR platform, discovering information data should feel natural and organic; something that presents data in a way that allows you to understand passively, being noticed consciously only if it’s important. For example, if a Wikipedia article is ‘dense’, it should hang heavy on it’s VR-world tree-branch, or if you are on Twitter, maybe you should see large flocks of birds flying around the hottest trending topics.
Eric is still in an early phase development, but to date, has built it entirely with three.js and and webVR-polyfill. You can check out his demo here on Google Cardboard and Oculus and keep up with his project on Twitter!
Brooklyn based Hooke Audio is the maker of wireless bluetooth headphones with built in binaural microphones. Hooke is both a playback and a capturing device that instantly brings video to life in what the company calls Mobile 3D Audio. Mobile 3D Audio is audio captured identically to the way our ears process sound. To begin recording, simply put on the headphones and open Hooke Audio’s integrated app that allows users to record Mobile 3D Audio and pair it with their phone’s video camera. Founder, Anthony Mattana, is a firm believer that sound is essential to storytelling, but thinks that there has been little innovation around sound and is trying to change that with the newly announced Hooke Verse. When you playback the sound recorded via the Hooke Verse, it’s a 20X better experience than if you were to have recorded the sound with your phone. The best part? You can listen to Hooke’s recorded 3D sound with any storer headset of speaker configuration!
Hooke’s Audio raised money from Kickstarter last year and shipments are expected to ship in Winter 2015. You can pre-order on their website for $139 and will retail at $189. You can watch their NYVR presentation here and hear more of their sound here.
Polhemus http://polhemus.com/ was one of the very first companies involved in VR, having pioneered motion tracking over 45 years ago. Their first VR application was designed for pilots who used head tracking for pre-aiming and targeting in F16 planes. At NYVR, Neil Schel, Director of BD, was proud to announce that they will continue making VR applications for healthcare and the industrial industry. Their technology uses electro magnetic trackers because of their high accuracy with tracking and low latency performance, which is great for VR. Due to their many years of working in the field, they have created electro magnetic trackers that can track up to 30 meters, far beyond their original capability of only a few meters. Neil Schel shared some projects that they are working on including a welding simulator, which is using VR to bring down the cost down of training welders in the US. HE also noted that it is unlikely that they will use their technology for consumer products, for the reason that their tech is expensive and is not in their current roadmap.
Shakhruz Ashirov has recently left building for mobile to exclusively build for VR applications. To date, he has created 7 Google Play apps including: VR Chess Trainers, Dinosaur Park VR, Forest Animal VR and Space Movie Theatre, and generated over 5K downloads. He believes now is the perfect time to get into VR development because you should ‘catch the VR wave’ while it’s new, focus and be persistent with your ideas an remember to take small steps towards your big dreams. He has created a VR Toolbox on Github that should help you get started developing for VR.
This post was written by Sophia Dominguez, founder of AllThingsVR, a weekly curated newsletter that highlights the best VR news, innovators and content! Please subscribe to receive the best updates in VR!
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