VR/AR
Driving augmented reality in our everyday world
Recently I heard someone from Google talk about the next-gen Google Assistant, which promises to evolve search in new and incredible ways. The speaker talked about being able to stand in front of a public statue and simply say to your phone “Who made this?”, then your phone will be able to capture the contextual data of your location.
VR 'Cave' uses cutting-edge technology
Nestled in a nondescript room in Wichita State's MESA Building is something known simply as "the Cave." It doesn't look like much – that is, until the lights are turned off and the 12 LED projectors are turned on. Suddenly you're immersed in a 3D, full-color VR experience from the floor up to the three surrounding walls. The Cave was created by a partnership between WSU's National Institute for Aviation Research, Dassault Systèmes an...
VR 'Chinook' will help train medics in UK Armed Forces
A simulator of a Chinook helicopter, bringing together VR and an inflatable enclosure, has been conceived to help to support the future training of the UK Armed Forces' Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT). The University of Birmingham's Human Interface Technology (HIT) team designed the high-tech solution to help medical personnel to train for battlefield incidents that require emergency medicine, often administered in the back of the helicopt...
3D VR Colonoscopy allows better colorectal cancer prevention
At UCSF's 3D Imaging Lab, radiologist Judy Yee, MD, pulls up an image that looks more like a birthday party balloon animal than a patient's colon: a vibrant, color-segmented tube, torqued and twisted in on itself. Created from thin slices of a CT scan, the image appears in 3D on the flat screen. It can even morph into video "fly-through" views, enhancing polyps, lesions, and other precancerous anomalies.
AR enables helicopter flight in degraded visual environments
Fog, blizzards, gusts of wind – poor weather can often make the operation of rescue helicopters a highly risky business, and sometimes even impossible. A helmet-mounted display, developed by researchers at the TUM, may in the future be able to help pilots detect hazards at an early stage, even when their visibility is severely impaired: the information required to do this is created in an on-board computer and imported into digital eye glas...
Ray tracing poised to bring astonishing realism to VR
Imagination Technologies and 3Glasses are collaborating to promote ray tracing technology in mass-market consumer VR devices. 3Glasses, product brand of Virtual Reality Technology, is a provider of innovative VR devices. Imagination, whose PowerVR graphics IP leads the market in technological capability, provides hardware ray tracing technology that raises the bar for ray traced graphics in consumer and mobile products to a dramatic new level.
VR helps advance physical therapy
Northeastern's Danielle Levac develops video games to make physical therapy more fun, motivating, and rewarding for patients—especially for children with movement impairments, such as those with cerebral palsy. Levac, professor of physical therapy in the Bouvé College of Health Sciences, invited a group of fifth-grade students from Boston's Ellis Mendell Elementary School to visit her lab last week.
World's smallest 3D camera brings AR to a smartphone
Lenovo is the first manufacturer worldwide to bring Tango technology to a consumer product. Google's technology that allows devices to understand spatial information is an exclusive feature in the PHAB2 Pro smartphone launched today. Based on the Time-of-Flight principle, the REAL3 image sensor chip from Infineon equips the smartphone with a 3-dimensional perception of the surroundings in real-time.
AR will aid the visibility of firefighters
An EPFL team is working on a smart visor that, combined with a thermal imaging camera, will help firefighters see what's around them in real time, even at night and in smoke. All firefighters, volunteers and professionals alike, have to learn how to deal with flames. But fire is not the only risk they face. Toxic, impenetrable smoke and darkness add to the dangers and slow the firefighters' progress.
The importance of PowerVR GPUs
At this week’s I/O conference, Google announced Daydream - a platform for high performance mobile VR built on top of Android N with optimisations called Android VR Mode.