Friday FOV: 2 Million HMDs in 2016, VR Cadavers, Samsung AI
VR news for the week ending December 16, 2016
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This week in There Is Only R:
Westworld lingers in our memories, and Game Of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin now says he expects the AI-themed HBO show to eclipse his at this year’s Golden Globes. If this excitement has you nostalgic, or if you’re just beginning to watch the show — or are anywhere along the continuum — all our Season One recaps (by The Insurrection’s Elizabeth Spiers and Steve Bryant of Dicks & Betties) are now all in one place. (Or just wait for Season Two, coming in 2018!)
Alice Bonasio reports on the first BBC release for Oculus, which follows the journey to Europe of a Syrian refugee family.
Here’s some of the rest of the week’s VR news:
Story of the Week: Body Business
Medical students at Case Western in Cleveland, Ohio, will soon be learning anatomy from augmented reality instead of real cadavers. Radiology professor Mark Griswold tells ZDNet that VR offers an alternative to the cost, infrastructure, and environmental issues associated with the donation of cadavers. Students will be taught using Microsoft’s HoloLens, which has already been using an anatomy app as a demo:
HoloLens wearers can see a representation of a human body in 3D, and navigate through the layers of skin, muscle, blood vessels, and organs to the skeleton below. HoloLens users can see the heart in the chest, how it pumps blood around the body, and how and where each of the veins and arteries feed into it. You can walk around it, see all the different structures in 3D dimensions from whatever view you choose: you can even stare down through the top of the head into the body below.
Not to be outdone, St. Anthony’s High School in Huntington, NY is adding a $75,000 VR cadaver table from Anatomage to its new $10 million science center, reports Long Island Business News. Students will be able to operate upon over 1,000 virtual cadavers.
Tech
- Samsung is working on a HoloLens-like interactive augmented reality headset. According to Digital Trends, Samsung’s Sung-Hoon Hong sees the device as the “next step in the Pokémon Go AR experience, where players would see a Pokémon in a tree, and then move the leaves and branches aside to get to it.” The push is part of Samsung’s AI plans.
- A new demo for drawing tool Oculus Medium looks very promising! Inside VR & AR says it “could transform how we create art in the digital space.”
- “The latest beta of Chrome for Android has adopted the WebVR API which will allow users to enjoy online content through Chrome with a VR headset,” Techcrunch reports.
Business
- A very interesting Reddit AMA with Reed Albergotti of The Information, including how he was able to demo Magic Leap without signing an NDA. Meanwhile, Recode’s Peter Kafka reports that the “devastating” article spurred the departure of Magic Leap’s PR chief Andy Fouche.
- Job changes at Oculus, too: CEO Brendan Iribe has been shifted to head a PC-focused VR team at Facebook, Upload reports, and beleaguered chief Palmer Luckey will soon have a “new role.”
- “Tiny” British startup Improbable, with $20 million in backing from the likes of Andreessen-Horowitz, has joined forces with Google to make its cloud-based SpatialOS platform for creating virtual worlds widely available. Wired’s Cade Metz says “this partnership also points to something bigger down the road: the future of AI.”
- AR is going to be bigger than VR. But you knew that.
- Robert Hernandez writes in Nieman Lab that women are at risk for being excluded from VR, as has been true throughout the tech industry’s history.
- Over 2 million VR headsets will have shipped worldwide in 2016.
AI Watch
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s new book, The Fourth Transformation: How Augmented Reality & Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything, describes AR and AI as a transformation that will outstrip the combined impact of previous tech revolutions, Forbes’s John Koetsier reports.
Content
- Wevr launches Transport, “an independent virtual reality network for exceptional creators and extraordinary simulations” to help find an audience for the “creative community producing brave cutting edge VR.”
- WordPress now allows users to create panoramic 360 video for all its sites, viewable on Cardboard, Gear, Daydream, Rift, and Vive.
- And finally, Nokia’s Oscar-winning Ozo team hosted a masterclass for 360-degree filmmakers at Upload Collective in SF, reports Upload. The class is available at the link or on Nokia’s YouTube channel.
Don’t forget to catch up with last week’s “Friday FOV: Magic Leap Falls Short, VR Sex Survey, Oculus Touch, and Vive Studios Launches.”
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