General Gaming Article |
- Microsoft Prototype Keyboard Has E-Ink Panel
- Newegg Daily Deals: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 FTW, Asus GeForce GTX 750 Ti, and More!
- Parents of Sick Student Blame School's Upgraded Wi-Fi Setup
- Razer Outs Custom NZXT S340 PC Case
- Seagate Adds 750GB Model to Ultra Portable Hard Drive Line
- Infidelity Website Ashley Madison Faces Second Class-Action Lawsuit
- Augmented Reality: State of the Art
| Microsoft Prototype Keyboard Has E-Ink Panel Posted: 25 Aug 2015 12:41 PM PDT Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group recently published news of a new prototype keyboard the company is working on called DisplayCover. The peripheral is designed for tablets and provides a "thin film" E-ink display with a resolution of 1280x305 pixels. Given this device is merely a prototype, there's no telling when we'll see the peripheral actually on the market. This isn't Microsoft's first keyboard with a touch-sensitive display. Back in 2009, the Applied Sciences Group revealed the Microsoft Adaptive Keyboard, which featured a touch-sensitive display at the top of the peripheral and extended down underneath the keys. According to the company, users could display command icons and change the character set to a different language. Now it's 2015, and the company's DisplayCover sets out to serve as a peripheral cover for touch-enabled tablets like Microsoft's own Surface Pro 2. The company says the new E-ink "strip" extends the overall tablet display by up to eight percent—not a huge number in our book but the tech is neat nonetheless. The company chose E-ink technology because it doesn't suck up battery juice quite like a full-color version. "DisplayCover supports dynamic UI manipulation, concurrent access to multiple applications, stylus annotation, gestures and trackpad interactions on the horizontal plane," the company says. Microsoft's blog demonstrates how the E-ink strip is used, including pulling two fingers in different directions to zoom in, using two fingers to move a window, and using one finger to hold a window while the other is pulled to the edge, allowing the user to rotate the screen. The panel can also be manipulated using a stylus, or serve as a trackpad, the latter of which emulates a notebook keyboard. "DisplayCover extends the available screen real estate of tablet computers while mitigating occlusion issues associated with direct pen and touch input," the blog adds. To see this prototype tablet keyboard in action, check out the video below. |
| Newegg Daily Deals: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 FTW, Asus GeForce GTX 750 Ti, and More! Posted: 25 Aug 2015 12:14 PM PDT Top Deal: Unless you live in one of the desert states, you can feel summer packing up its bags so that autumn can move in. There's a chill in the air that wasn't there before, and rather than go outside to enjoy the sunshine, you may find yourself preferring to stay inside to play some video games, including the ones you stocked up on during Steam's summer sale. That's a fine idea, though if you find your graphics card screams out in pain when dialing up the eye candy, consider a GPU upgrade. One option is today's top deal for an EVGA GeForce GTX 980 FTW Video Card for $477 with free shipping (normally $530 - use coupon code: [EXLAWNS29]; additional $30 mail-in-rebate; free Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain game w/ purchase, limited offer). That's a lot of value, and EVGA ups the ante with its ACX 2.0 cooling solution that promises lower temps and quieter operation. Other Deals: Asus VG248QE Black 24-inch 144Hz 1ms 3D Monitor w/ Built-in Speakers for $235 with free shipping (normally $250 - use coupon code: [EXLAWNS26]) Dell S2715H Black 27-inch IPS LCD Monitor w/ Built-in Speakers for $215 with free shipping (normally $250 - use coupon code: [EXLAWNS27]) Asus GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Video Card for $120 with free shipping (normally $125 - use coupon code: [EMCAWNS36]; additional $20 Mail-in rebate) Acer G6 Series G226HQLBbd Black 21.5-inch Monitor for $90 with free shipping (normally $110 - use coupon code: [EMCAWNS55]; additional $20 Mail-in rebate) |
| Parents of Sick Student Blame School's Upgraded Wi-Fi Setup Posted: 25 Aug 2015 11:23 AM PDT Wi-Fi woes The parents of a 12-year-old student attending a private elementary school in Southboro, Massachusetts believe the school's recently upgraded Wi-Fi setup is making their son sick, the Telegram reports. In a lawsuit related to the claim, the parents have asked for an injunction that would force the school to either switch to Ethernet or turn down the wireless signal. They're also seeking $250,000 in damages. According to the suit, the elementary student, referred to as "G," suffers from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity Syndrom (EHS), a diagnosis that was issued after he began suffering from frequent headaches, nosebleeds, nausea, and other symptoms that the parents claim resulted from the school upgrading its Internet system to have a more powerful wireless signal in 2013. So far, the school has been unwilling to accommodate the parents' requests. However, the school did hire a company called Isotrope, LLC to perform an analysis of its wireless setup in January. "Isotrope found that the combined levels of access point emissions, broadcast radio and television signals, and other RFE emissions on campus 'were substantially less than one ten-thousandth (1/10,000th) of the applicable (FCC) safety limits'," the school said in a statement. The school also requested that G visit with another physician. According to the lawsuit, the parents agreed, but were miffed that the physician came to the conclusion that "there was not enough study yet done to link Wi-Fi emissions to symptoms such as those G is experiencing" after speaking with the boy for just 10 minutes. "This doctor stated in essence that he does not believe in EHS," the lawsuit says. "Yet he made no alternate diagnosis." There is some debate in the medical community whether EHS is a real thing. "The majority of studies indicate that EHS individuals cannot detect EMF exposure any more accurately than non-EHS individuals," the World Health Organization says. "Well controlled and conducted double-blind studies have shown that symptoms were not correlated with EMF exposure. It has been suggested that symptoms experienced by some EHS individuals might arise from environmental factors unrelated to EMF." WHO also contends that EHS is not a medical diagnosis and that any perceived symptoms "may be due to pre-existing psychiatric conditions" and/or stress associated with worrying about the effects of EMF. |
| Razer Outs Custom NZXT S340 PC Case Posted: 25 Aug 2015 11:17 AM PDT During E3 2014, Razer introduced its first custom chassis as part of the company's new "Designed by Razer" licensing program. The H440 was manufactured by NZXT and went on sale the following month for $149.99. Now the two companies are revealing another custom-designed PC case, the NZXT S340, at a lower price point. "'Designed by Razer' candidates are subject to vetting by the award-winning Razer design and engineering team prior to approval. Once greenlit, the joint enterprise mobilizes Razer's design expertise and product engineering sensibilities," the company said in a press release. The product page shows that the new S340 is a compact midtower, measuring 200x445x432mm. The case has an all-steel design: a steel frame with steel panels, steel-plated audio jacks, an integrated power supply shroud, and capacitive thumb screws. There's even a grommet-less steel cable-management bar. The specs show space on the front for two 140mm or two 120mm fans. Included, however, are a 120mm FN V2 fan on the back and a 120mm FN V2 fan on the top. Also included are filters for the front fans and a filter for the back fan. Want to install a radiator? Support includes one 280mm or two 120mm fans on the front and one 140mm or 120mm fan on the back. If installing a rad, the front clearance is 58mm and the rear clearance is 75mm. The specs also show that the case has a GPU clearance of 364mm, a GPU clearance with a radiator of 334mm, and a CPU cooler clearance of 161mm. As for other features, the case supports mini-ITX, microATX, and ATX motherboards. There are seven expansion slots, one audio jack, one microphone jack, an I/O panel with an LED on/off switch, and two "signature green" USB 3.0 ports on the top of the case. Other lighting options include the power-on switch, the Razer logo mounted on the front, and two light bars mounted underneath the case, which spills a nice "signature green" blanket on a desk's surface. "We had great success with our first collaboration with NZXT and the H440 – Designed by Razer PC case," says Min-Liang Tan, Razer cofounder and CEO. "Our team couldn't wait to get started on the next project that brings premium NZXT PC cases with the iconic Razer design to PC gamers everywhere." The new NZXT S340 can be pre-ordered for a cheap $99.99 here. The estimated ship date is September 18. |
| Seagate Adds 750GB Model to Ultra Portable Hard Drive Line Posted: 25 Aug 2015 10:25 AM PDT Portable storage without the bulk Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, Seagate was able to expand its ultra-portable "Seven" line of hard drives to 750GB (STDZ750100), which offers 50 percent more unformatted storage capacity than its existing 500GB (STDZ500400) model. The additional storage space doesn't come at the expense of size or weight -- like its 500GB sibling, the 750GB measures a scant 7mm thick and weighs just 178 grams (less than 0.4 pounds). Seagate was able to accomplish a super thin profile by sandwiching a 5mm hard drive inside a 100 percent stainless steel enclosure consisting of two slabs of metal for the top and bottom. These are held in place by side braces. This also gives the Seven series a premium look, which Seagate supplements with an included braided USB 3.0 cable 45.72cm (18 inches) in length. Speaking of which, the drive is bus powered, meaning it draws power directly from the USB port -- no external power supply is required. We haven't tested either Seven drive ourselves, though according to Softpedia, the 500GB model posts reads and writes of around 101.2MB/s and 102.3Mb/s, respectively, which is about half the performance it saw from Seagate's Backup Plus Fast drive. That's not very fast, though if you're looking for lots of storage in a portable and attractive form factor, the 500GB and 750GB Seven drives are viable options. The new 750GB model streets for around $130, which is about 36 percent more than the street price of the 500GB model ($97). |
| Infidelity Website Ashley Madison Faces Second Class-Action Lawsuit Posted: 25 Aug 2015 09:45 AM PDT Cheaters never prosper? An unnamed individual living in the United States has filed a federal lawsuit against Ashely Madison, a website that facilitates affairs among married men and women, and parent firm Avid Life Media, Inc., which is based in Toronto, Canada. The suit alleges negligence, invasion of privacy, and emotional distress. Avid Life Media, Inc. was already hit with a class-action lawsuit in Canada last week that's seeking around $760 million in damages. The US-based lawsuit also seeks class-action status, with unspecified damages. Both lawsuits are the result of a recent security breach in which a hacking group known as the Impact Team stole and ultimately published "highly sensitive personal, financial, and identifying information of the website's some 37 million users," according to court documents. After stealing the data, the Impact Team threatened to disclose the information it obtained if Avid Life Media, Inc. failed to shut down Ashley Madison. At the time, it appeared that the Impact Team was equally perturbed with Ashley Madison's $19 fee that purports to erase all details about a customer, which the hacking group claimed was misleading, and the fact that the site encourages extramarital affairs. "Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn't deliver. We've got the complete set of profiles in our DB dumps, and we'll release them soon if Ashley Madison stays online," the hackers said at the time. The hackers made good on their threat last week when they dumped nearly 10GB of data for all the web to see. In a note accompanying the data dump, the Impact Team said "the site is a scam with thousands of fake female profiles." According to Reuters, the collection of data included email addresses and other information belonging to government officials and high-level executives at European and North American corporations. |
| Augmented Reality: State of the Art Posted: 25 Aug 2015 12:00 AM PDT This article was published in the July 2015 issue of Maximum PC. For more trusted reviews and feature stories, subscribe here. Why augmented reality technology is more than just virtual reality's kid brotherRead the tech and games press, and the buzz is all about virtual reality. Valve revealed its long-hidden VR product Vive, built with HTC, in March. Oculus Rift, meanwhile, has been bought for a cool $2 billion by Facebook, with Facebook's owner Mark Zuckerberg calling it "the dream of science fiction" that will "unlock new worlds for us all." Yet, quietly, people are whispering that the real story is augmented reality (AR). Influential data firms such as Juniper Research have even put figures on it. Juniper's "Augmented Reality 2015–2019" report predicts revenues of $4.1 billion for AR apps in 2019, with 1.3 billion apps in use. By contrast, Digi-Capital is advising that AR could be worth $120 billion by 2020, with VR valued at a mere $30 billion. That reflects fundamental differences in both the underlying experience, and the progress made, in each field. We'll explore why that is, and whether virtual reality has any chance of catching up. We'll delve into the way big media corporations—including Microsoft, Valve, Google, Apple, and Sony—are looking at this space. Several have already invested billions—such as Google with Magic Leap, and Microsoft with HoloLens—while others have already walked away, such as Valve, with its deliberate pivot toward VR. That also means examining how AR tech is currently working, and where the next steps will be. After all, low-grade AR has become commonplace in several types of mobile application and is looking to become more widespread. Digi-Capital's prediction is based on AR capturing a large chunk of the cell phone market—with over a billion smartphones already shipped, you could say $120 billion is a conservative estimate. But then it's only talking about five years away. It took 20 years for cells to move from the Nokia Ringo, which could merely call people, to today's all-singing, all-dancing smartphones. Will AR move faster? For the lowdown, read on. Google's Ingress certainly has good press shots, but the AR game looks nothing like this. The core difference between virtual reality and augmented reality technology is the worlds they move us into. One replaces, the other improves. Virtual reality creates a new world for you. It may be a world identical to the one you're in now, or it may be a world built entirely from bones and elves, but it's a world that's fundamentally separate from the world we inhabit. No perception that you see through virtual reality is what's outside of that headset. You're totally immersed. It's therefore a tech for totally immersive experiences—escapism like movies or games. Augmented reality, by contrast, focuses on the real world as the base, and builds on top of it. AR generates virtual items in this world by either using a whole mess of sensors to ensure they're correctly placed on its surfaces, or ignoring them completely and placing it on a much nearer plane. Though this sounds easier, as you don't have to generate an entire world, there are technical challenges that make versions of it just as tricky to do as VR. AR's not so good for immersion, because the real world is always there in the background. But that makes it an excellent tool to use to add virtual things to the real world. Voice calls, advertising, mapping, social networks… or even what Tim Merel of Digi-Capital calls "a-commerce." Yes, we're talking about augmented shopping. There are degrees of augmentation, of course. Device-led AR, where the AR is imposed on a screen that's distant from the viewer, is a mediated reality that allows developers to more simply judge the environment. At its simplest, this acts as a head-up display (HUD) that sits over the scene like a 3D movie title sits on its background. This basic tech is at the level that firms such as advertising innovators Blippar or Aireal use. It simply uses your existing device and an app, and then imposes a new image on an existing scene, for example by putting an animation of a football player near his promotional merchandise. At a slightly more advanced level, this tech can detect a surface or shape in the environment, and use that as a marker to estimate relative depths in the scene. You'll have AR apps that use special "fiduciary marker" cards to anchor their sim, and allow the app to scale and rotate a virtual simulation to fit the environment. The more VR-like AR requires a lot of extra tech. You need to be able to track the position of the viewer's head and eyes, and judge relative distances, to make the illusion of something virtual be convincing. Most of these AR devices use a headmounted display (HMD), which is a headset supporting a display device (or two) in front of the user's eyes. The sort of HMD we're interested in also tracks head position along six degrees of freedom—a phrase that means three components of translation (up-down, forward-backward, left-right), and three components of rotation along those axes. There are more extreme techs in the works as well. Two different sets of contact lenses are in development, one academic, one military. The military ones are called iOptik and function much like bifocal lenses, with the twist that they're designed to work only with AR goggles. These contact lenses will allow humans to focus both on the background scene and the HUD on the goggles at the same time. Though they're being developed for the US Department of Defense, the company behind them hopes it can sell them as consumer products soon. The more interesting academic tech comes from the University of Washington, and is a set of "bionic" contact lenses powered by radio waves and with LED displays built in. (The microfabrication process that means they self-assemble their circuitry using osmotic pressure is fascinating and totally irrelevant). At the moment, the lenses have only been tested on rabbits, so it's still at an early stage, and there are questions about the quality of the images it produces. Still, it's an impressive glimpse of the future. Of course, this is all minor stuff, mostly built in the hope that the big technology firms will buy out the company behind it. What's of greatest interest right now is what those firms are focusing on, and what they think they can do with it. Blippar and Aireal want to push ads in your AR experience. Valve's Blown OutWhat's most interesting about Valve's AR offering is that it's no longer Valve's AR offering. After a Night of the Long Nerds in 2013, Valve released 25 people, including its entire AR team, to focus, we presume, on VR. The two AR project leads were given Valve's permission to do whatever they liked with the tech that they'd made, which they've called CastAR. They've created a company called Technical Illusions to finish it off. CastAR is a bit different from other AR. It consists of a pair of polarized glasses with built-in projectors and cameras, and a separate retro-reflective surface studded with infrared LEDs. The camera uses the LEDs to track your head movement, so it can adjust the images that the projectors cast onto the surface. This means each polarized lens gets a different, but coherent, image. Low latency lets you do things like look around an object. In other words, it projects a self-contained virtual reality into the real world. As a result, it's used for static purposes rather than something more mobile, like the existing Samsung Gear VR and Nintendo 3DS. CastAR's pitch video focuses on a variety of ways that it can be used: preview 3D architectural blueprints, play 3D board games remotely on unexpected surfaces, create 3D presentations, and just for use as a 3D desktop computer. As long as you put that retroflective material all over your house. Microsoft Does EverythingYou've almost certainly heard of Microsoft's contribution to the AR party—its HoloLens system for Windows 10, and possibly Xbox One. It seems revolutionary, but its use of the word "holographic" might be suspect (and mainly due to affection for Star Trek's Holodeck). Kinect seemed revolutionary in the hermetic demonstration settings you get at big tech trade shows. HoloLens definitely looks impressive from the screenshots scattered around these pages. It's a futuristic headset that superimposes 3D creations into the world and allows you to interact with them. The impressive element here is how high-quality the images it produces are—from the videos and reports, it's utterly compelling, if nowhere near as immersive as the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift. The actual headset is a lot bulkier than a comparative AR headset—Google Glass, say—but then, this has the power of a true virtual reality headset because it's not doing a simple 2D overlay. It reportedly weighs around 400g, is adjustable to all head sizes, and is totally wireless. It consists of holographic lenses, depth cameras, and three separate processing units—one central, one graphics, and one holographic. HoloLens is intended more for business functions than entertainment. The depth cameras are built from the same tech as Kinect, but are lower power, have a wider viewing angle, and are placed around the front and sides of the headset. They track both the user's head and hands, as HoloLens is controlled entirely by gesture and voice, Minority Report–style. This lets you interact with the 3D virtual models of the apps, from building blocks in Minecraft, to sculpting the bodywork of a motorcycle. MS is working on "pinning," which will let you stick these models in place in the environment, so you can move around them, and "holding," so you can pick them up and manipulate them. The apps are really what wowed us when HoloLens was announced. Microsoft recently bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion, and it's already made a version of it that runs on HoloLens. Similarly, NASA has an app that lets you explore Mars, and there's a version of Skype that runs on it so that a builder can explain to you why you should have spent more time in carpentry classes at school. Though the reports are mostly positive, the tech was in an early stage, and there were concerns over whether the hardware could fit into a consumer unit, and the regularity with which the illusion was broken. That's not all, however, as Microsoft also has several other AR and VR projects underway. It definitely has an AR headset ready to go—Microsoft bought the smart glasses firm Osterhout Design Group in March 2014. And another project called RoomAlive was shown off in October 2014, consisting of a set of projectors that transformed the walls of an entire room into an interactive environment. Digressing for a moment, there are also persistent rumors about a VR headset for Microsoft's Xbox One console. After all, the Wall Street Journal said back in March 2014 that the company already had 3D virtual reality tech ready to go. HoloLens has reduced the chances of that coming to market, but we assume Microsoft has it ready as a backup. Microsoft has bought Minecraft and intends to use it on its HoloLens platform. Google Does It BetterGoogle Glass was Google's high-profile effort in the field of augmented reality, and you might argue that it was the company's first high-profile failure, given that Glass has currently been removed from sale ahead of a redesign and a new model. The device is a set of (quite pretentious-looking) plastic and metal glasses, with a HUD projected onto it and a smartphone-like processor behind it all, which was on sale for $1,500. Glass did everything you thought it should, like understand natural voice commands, record video, take photos, and all the update elements of your phone. It had a small touchpad on the side of the device, which let you browse a timeline of recent events. The screen was a liquid crystal on silicon device with an LED-illuminated display that used polarization and reflectors to bounce the image into your eye. It had a wide range of supported Google apps, including Now, Gmail, Maps, and Google+. All good then? The fact that it's on a forced hiatus says otherwise. That's not all of Google's AR efforts though. It's also making simple augmented reality games for its Android phones, such as Ingress, a massively multiplayer location-based game built on Google Maps. And it has Project Tango in the wings. This is a standard tech for mobile devices that allows them to navigate the physical world in the same way we inefficient meat-bags do. It uses advanced computer vision, image processing, and special image sensors to make an end-to-end navigation technology that understands its own 3D motion in the world, can perceive depth, and use visual cues about areas or objects they know to constantly self-correct. At the moment, it's only available to core developers, but we assume it'll be integrated into next-generation Android hardware. Magic Leap is yet another Google-funded project, coming in at $542 million, and a direct challenge to HoloLens. It's being built by a team of tech and games industry veterans, including the author Neal Stephenson and the 3D team at WETA (who made the Lord of the Rings special effects). Reports have it as more believable and solid than HoloLens. It works using a virtual retinal display, that is, a display projected straight onto the retina itself. Magic Leap's stated aim is to reintroduce magic into our lives. Similar to HoloLens, the simulation looked utterly convincing. The animated 3D creatures it portrayed looked detailed and sharp, and sat well in the surrounding world. And similar to HoloLens again, it ran on a huge piece of hardware (essentially a PC) sitting nearby, rather than in the headset itself. It's worth looking at the promo video to see what it's capable of. Magic Leap hasn't really been announced or promoted yet, but we're expecting it to launch in 2016 or 2017. Sony's "Me Too" MentalityThe Japanese giant always seems to want to get involved in any new tech, but recently it hasn't been leading the market here. Its However, SmartEyeGlass is its main foray into AR. The currently available SmartEyeGlass SED-E1 Developer Edition is very similar to Google Glass, though much cheaper at just $840. It uses "holographic waveguide technology" in 3mm AR lenses, which produces something very similar to Glass, with overlaid green text and diagrams operating at 15fps. It also has a 3MP camera that can take pictures or video. Sony's SmartEyeGlass has a low battery life and a cheap look. It connects to compatible Android phones by Bluetooth, and is controlled by a small, ugly-looking puck that sits on the user's lapel, which also doubles as microphone, speaker, NFC, and battery (which comes in at only 150 minutes). At the moment, we'd stay well away from this device. It's ugly as sin, with a poor battery life, and not many apps. Version two could well be worth looking out for, though. Apple of the EyeThere haven't been any official reveals of Apple's research into VR, but then Apple is more tight-lipped than a close-mouthed clam ahead of any announcement. Apple does have several patents for AR tech—there's a very interesting one for a "transparent electronic device" that sounds very much like a piece of augmented reality tech. Examples in the patent include using the device to overlay information about a museum exhibit. Interestingly, the device would be able to make itself opaque, and only display selected elements of the background world, otherwise being a normal opaque LDC or OLED display. That said, an analyst from investment bank Piper Jaffray (annoyingly, but understandably, investment bankers get a lot more access to tech firms than journalists do) published a report in March saying he believes Apple has a small team experimenting with the AR space, but that they think consumer AR is still 10 years off. We'll see from Microsoft and Google efforts whether they're wrong, but they might be on the money when it comes to mass-market success. The State of the ArtAs that $120 billion valuation by Digi-Capital might indicate, there's a lot of hype around AR and VR at the moment. Hundreds of firms are trying out strange new tech to augment the senses. UK firm Ultrahaptics, for example, uses targeted ultrasound vibrations on a user's skin to form tangible shapes and textures from thin air, so the users can feel them without the need for worn equipment. That, combined with the hand-detecting Leap Motion device, makes for delicately convincing sims, like brushing your hands over ghosts. For VR, we've seen every type of treadmill under the sun—giant balls, resistant pads, harnesses around the waist—anything to convince you that you're in the virtual world. On balance, the hype is justified. It's not like the first tablets, when Microsoft launched them stillborn into the market. Too many big companies are competing here for this to not be a success for one of them. But challenges remain, and they're not insubstantial. The biggest are in shrinking the tech down to a headset, or headset-and-pack model; in maintaining persistent simulations while doing that; and in preventing object placement errors. It's likely that, after all this experimentation, smartphones will be the first devices that give us a real taste of this. As always in that field, Apple will be the company to watch. That said, Google's Magic Leap investment is considerable enough and the tech advanced enough that we'd cautiously predict it'll be first to market, albeit in a reduced form. One prediction we're happy to make is that in 20 years time we'll be looking back at this tech the way we now look back at the first cell phones. These innvoations are going to revolutionize many things—anything that requires 3D knowledge, such as architecture or warehouse management; anything that requires management of large data sets, such as programming; and anything that simply wants to look pretty, like art or video games. Now we just have to wait for the hardware to catch up. Try AR TodayThere are many ways to try augmented reality today. As it's a more mature technology, there are some basic devices that take advantage of it already, as well as many cell phone applications to try. The Carl Zeiss VR One headset, for example, supports AR features and will work with any iOS or Android headset between 4.7 and 5.2 inches. Google Glass V1.0 may have been canceled, but that's out there too. There's a huge array of AR apps for smartphones. One of our favorites is GoSkyWatch Planetarium for iPhone and iPad. This is one of many stargazing apps that use the device's accelerometer and GPS to orient your device, so wherever you're pointing, it shows constellations, stars, and nebulae. See also Anatomy 4D, Google Goggles (which can translate text on the fly), Field Trip (which lets you know about nearby attractions), and iOnRoad Augmented Driving, which gives speeding alerts, crash warnings, and driving analytics. The Playstation Vita has AR features, and comes with a package of free AR games, such as Table Ice Hockey and PulzAR. Similarly, the Nintendo 3DS comes ready-loaded with AR Games and six AR cards. Every game is superimposed on the real world, but has no interaction with it. It's more of a gimmick, really. If you've got a PS3, you could pick up a copy of Wonderbook. It was a Harry Potter–inspired AR tome with blank pages that only filled when viewed on your TV through the Playstation Eye camera. Similarly, the PS4 has Playroom, a much smoother AR sandbox where you can play with small robots that are running around your living room. Kids love it. You can also try the Kinect system, on both Xbox 360 and Xbox One. Though it never got the backing it deserved from developers, it has a uniquely detailed depth camera that means it can track your entire body shape—or several, in the Xbox One's case—on-screen. It's probably the most advanced consumer AR tech available on the market today. Microsoft's Kinect was surprisingly under-used. What about VR?We've covered VR in the past, but it's worth giving you a quick status update as to where the tech is today. There are three projects that are nearing release. Sony's Project Morpheus, Valve and HTC's Vive, and Facebook's Oculus Rift. Of these, Oculus Rift is the oldest, and several developer iterations have been released. A mightily cut-down version of it made to work with Samsung smartphones, the Samsung Gear VR, has already been released. It works by slotting a Samsung Note 4 or Galaxy S6 into a viewing device, and runs with 1280x1440 on each eye, and a 96-degree viewing angle. Despite that, there's still no sign of the Oculus Rift consumer model. The most up-to-date version, the Crescent Bay prototype, has a positional tracking camera for your head, low-persistence OLED display (to eliminate blur), and runs two screens at 960x1080 on each eye, at 90Hz, and a 110-degree viewing angle. No release date has been announced, but late 2015 seems likely. Sony's Project Morpheus is the quickest-developed of the three. Like its AR solution, Sony seems more concerned with getting a working version of its tech to consumers than with making it the cutting edge. The version we tried in July last year was much lower resolution and fidelity than the Oculus Rift versions we'd tried up to that point, but both companies have since substantially improved their hardware. It has a similar OLED screen running at 960x1080 on each eye, a 100-degree viewing angle, and a 120Hz refresh rate. It was very comfortable, presumably because much of the hardware was sitting in a set-top box, not on our heads. It tracked our heads using the Playstation camera, and it had true 3D audio. It's due out in early 2016 for PS4, which already has motion-sensitive controllers. Valve and HTC's Vive headset is the most impressive. It recognizes that some of the joy of VR is in interacting with those virtual worlds, so it does two things. First, it has a pair of bespoke controllers for you to hold, allowing limited interaction. Second, it has a set of cameras that sit in the corner of your room, detect your location and any obstacles, and track your movement, as well as setting the virtual world's limit at your real world limit. Vive has two 1080x1200 screens running at 90Hz. As the screens are narrower, you'll have a wider vertical field, and it should be lighter, as your PC will do all the processing work. Its big selling point is its pair of motion-tracking cameras, which are infrared and wireless, and are used to follow the headset's 37 sensors. This enables you to roam freely in your room and the virtual world. It works with multiple players and should be out this year. If you want to try VR today, you can get a casing for your smartphone, like the free Google Cardboard, or a cheap third-party headset like the $45 Immerse from Firebox. The AR HardwareNot all AR devices share the same hardware and software, but there are some basic technology aspects they all need. First off, you need a processor to work everything out, then a transparent display to show the world and the projections, a light power source, and a variety of sensors and input devices. The sensors can take several forms, but are mostly included as standard in smartphones. An accelerometer lets you measure impetus, a GPS measures global location, and a magnetometer or solid-state compass measures the device's orientation against Earth's gravitational field—that is, the ground. Luckily, modern smartphones contain all of those things. For AR technologies that aren't based on cell phones, if you want all these elements, they have to be built in, which can increase the size and cost of the device substantially. If you choose to go without them, you'll lose a huge amount of functionality. It's notable that Sony's AR glasses system has a relatively large external box clipped to the user's lapel, while both HoloLens and Magic Leap have been demoed with large tabletop external units that were actually running the tech. Input systems are another challenge. Unlike with virtual reality, the user can see their hands, so a keyboard is an option. But also unlike VR, augmented reality encourages users to be mobile. You want to look around the object and touch it, so you want your hands to be either free or holding interactive objects (like Valve's twin pointers). That means the device has to be wireless and the interface has to be voice, gaze, or mediated touch. |
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