Advent at Grakn Labs: Virtual Reality
#GraknLovesTech: 7th December 2016
Here at Grakn Labs we love technology. So much so, that, this month, we’ve decided to share our favourite technology moments from 2016. Each weekday during December, we will open a window on our virtual advent calendar, and peek inside to recall some of the greatest innovation or news that the past year has brought us.
Please recommend and share with hashtag #GraknLovesTech if you enjoy our posts. And if you have any favourite links you’d like us share, just leave us a comment or tweet us @graknlabs!
Today we are featuring a range of gadgets that got us way too excited! I am, of course, talking about Virtual Reality. And we can certainly say that 2016 has been the year of VR, with the release of many different VR headsets that have become accessible to consumers.
- At the start of this year, over 5 million Google Cardboard viewers had shipped, and it had come of age:
But well, let’s be honest, as pointed out by Wired, at this price, the Cardboard does not exactly offer you the full-blown VR experience. Let’s skip directly to Daydream, which makes high quality VR more available (Oh what an upgrade!). Reviews are quite enthusiastic and although it is not the most perfect VR headset, it is very inexpensive, comfortable and easy to set up.
2. Mark Zuckerberg had made the headlines in 2014 when Facebook acquired Oculus, but this year, the Facebook VR demo went viral, and I’m sure none of you missed it:
Oculus Connect announced a bunch of releases: in particular, Oculus Rift, which was already offering a great VR experience, but with Oculus Touch (ships since just yesterday, December 6th!), you can push the interactions with this virtual reality much further. It is also getting a ton of games, with more to come. Sadly, it remains fairly pricey for now, but we have no doubt that it will soon become more accessible.
3. The gamers out there will all agree that Play Station Virtual Reality (PSVR) was one of the big 2016 events. Well, using Play Station Pro clearly enhances your overall experience and here is a glimpse of what it feels like:
4. Because we are not going to keep on listing all VR headsets available from Gear VR to Hololens etc. (and because the failed Samsung VR doesn’t deserve it), here is a great Youtube playlist by The Verge and one article comparing the different options available. Just so, you know, you can slip it on your letter to Santa and get a chance to try all that VR has to offer :)
5. And to finish off with, let’s talk about the applications of VR. It’s already started in hospitals,
in schools,
And we can predict more crazy applications for consumers and industries coming up, from health, pain treatment, to architecture and road safety. This is just the beginning!
Let us know which headset is on your Christmas list and which games and apps already blew your mind / you’re looking forward to try! :)
GRAKN.AI is an open-source knowledge graph data platform that brings knowledge ontologies and transactional data together to enable highly intelligent querying of data. Querying is performed through Graql, a declarative, knowledge-oriented graph query language for retrieving explicitly stored and implicitly derived information, and for performing graph analytics and automated reasoning. Grakn and Graql will help you effectively manage and harness large-scale graph data by allowing you to model it expressively, migrate it efficiently, and to draw insightful knowledge from your deep information network.
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