Next Reality: Page 45

Drones are popular little toys, but they're not the easiest things to control. While hand gestures may not change that too much, donning a HoloLens and flying a physical object with a wave of your hand at least makes the process feel a lot more like a telekinesis.

If you're an Apple user and want an untethered virtual reality system, you're currently stuck with Google Cardboard, which doesn't hold a candle to the room scale VR provided by the HTC Vive (a headset not compatible with Macs, by the way). But spatial computing company Occipital just figured out how to use their Structure Core 3D Sensor to provide room scale VR to any smartphone headset—whether it's for an iPhone or Android.

While you can't turn art into a formula, the film industry has managed to come stupidly close. While many storytelling principles still stand across mediums, successfully crafting a compelling, immersive narrative in virtual reality requires a brand new rulebook. Through trial, error, and success, writer/director/editor Adam Cosco figured out the right rules to follow (and break) in "KNIVES"—his latest 360-degree short film.

Would you like to know what your next house is going to look like? With the HoloLens, you can just plop a hologram down in an open outdoor area and find out.

If you've ever wanted to live in the Matrix—or at least the iconic digital rain data visualization that Neo saw when realizing he was, indeed, the "one"—you can now do that with the Microsoft HoloLens. Just download The Red Pill.

A 2D film can show you something, but a 3D film in virtual reality can make you feel it. If done right, you'll feel immersed in a new world that surrounds you. If done wrong, you'll get nauseous and uncomfortable. SilVR Thread, a 360-degree VR video company, figured out a few important ways to get the feeling right.

Magic Leap, the virtual-reality software group backed by Google, just released a teaser video on their YouTube channel. In a word, it's amazing.

Autodesk offers some of the most popular software for computer-aided design (CAD) projects, which involve all sorts of 3D rendering. Their tools are clearly suited for use with the Microsoft HoloLens, but so far very little supports HoloLens development outside of Unity. Why is that?

Virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive tether to desktop computers with robust GPUs in order to harness their power. The free-roaming, cordless Microsoft HoloLens forgoes those chains but loses a bit of graphical processing power in the mix. However, a recent report suggests we may get the best of both worlds.

Virtual and mixed reality experiences feel immersive because they take over your senses in various ways, but they still lack tactile feedback. Haptic gloves can change that, and you can make a pair yourself.

With most augmented and mixed reality devices, you wear a purchased headset and use it alone, in a place of your choice—but not this one. Ben Sax decided to reinvent the binoculars to create a mixed reality experience that anyone can walk up to and try for free. He calls it the Perceptoscope.

While the early stages of any new technology always seems amazing because of the utilitarian, almost altruistic software concepts it inspires, mixed and augmented reality will still see its fair share of corporate apps. That might be a good thing, however, as Volvo's plan goes past general information and advertising to make a truly helpful tool for prospective car buyers.

You've likely seen light-up musical keyboards that teach you how to play a song with visual cues, but few of those devices exist and have a limited number of songs you can actually learn. But Karl Baumann and his HoloLens Hackathon team figured out that in mixed reality, you can learn music with visual cues with any piano.

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Google's Tilt Brush has proven to be one of the most compelling VR experiences for the HTC Vive, letting you paint with crazy materials like electricity and duct tape. It is clearly an experiment in bringing the joy of imagination to life—or creating some form of virtual LSD—and the app's latest update brings a variety of features that only continue to support that theme.

Most of us don't get the opportunity to see election coverage first hand, but with virtual reality, we're not as restricted. AltspaceVR has teamed up with NBC News to let you log in on your computer or VR headset and actually take part in the action—just not physically.

Mixed reality can give you the feeling that you've uncovered a hidden world layered into the physical one you already know. This can happen in so many ways, from a trading card that births a hologram or a first-person shooter with robots blasting through your walls. Xperiel—a California-based augmented and mixed reality company—wants to create a platform to make that a whole lot easier for developers.

Cancer is a complicated illness, but the more we understand it, the likelier we are to beat it. The 3D Visualisation Aesthetics Lab at the University of New South Wales took to virtual reality to help improve our odds by allowing scientists to walk through virtual representations of actual cancer cells.

The Weather Channel, by virtue of its name, has always been tasked with the difficult problem of making the weather interesting. As Mashable notes, they've turned to augmented reality for a solution and can now render a 3D storm in their studio, as well as help us understand how bad a storm might be with 3D forecasts.

Augmented and mixed reality experiences attempt to break us out of windowed computing experiences and allow us to place software anywhere in the room. But that software doesn't have to take a rectangular form—theoretically, the web doesn't have to restrict itself to a page in a browser any longer.

Microsoft has the HoloLens and Google has their money on Magic Leap (as well as their own Tango and Cardboard, among others), but we've heard next to nothing about how Apple plans to enter the virtual/augmented/mixed reality space. A new patent offers some clues.

The latest beta of the popular open-source media player VLC just hit the Windows Store, which means it not only runs on Windows 10 and Xbox One, but the HoloLens as well.

One of the first things you'll do with the HoloLens is place little holograms around your room, and it'll look like you have a large figurine collection. Ralph Barbagallo, Edward Dawson-Taylor, and their HoloHacks team decided to take that a bit further and created an app that allows the user to produce and tour virtual art exhibits.

Pong, one of the simplest video games ever created, has managed to evolve in some crazy ways over time, from the original basic 2D version and colorful Breakout sequel, to the PlayStation game with power-ups and 3D graphics, and now Cyberpong VR—a virtual reality game on the HTC Vive—where you act as the paddle instead of just moving it into place with a controller.

How do you safely store your augmented, virtual, or mixed reality headset when you're not using it? Cybust hopes you're willing to shell out $89 to display it like a sculpture around your house.

Unless you had a master of visual effects for a parent, you had to imagine the floor was actually lava when playing the classic furniture-hopping game. With a Microsoft HoloLens, however, you don't have to imagine anything.

When you wear a holographic computer on your face, you gain some things and lose others. That's certainly the case when using Skype in Microsoft's HoloLens. Some video chats will work better because your caller can see what you see, rather than your face—but others just feel weird.

Mixed reality filmmaking isn't a new concept. Disney managed to make it work in 1988 with Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but not without an enormous amount of work. We haven't seen many mixed reality films of that scope since, and perhaps that's because it's still hard to accomplish. Filmmakers don't look through a viewfinder or monitor and see the fully rendered result on screen—but that can change with mixed reality headsets like the HoloLens.

When you want to leave someone a quick message, you often write it down on a sticky note and paste it to the relevant location. Alternatively, you call to leave a voicemail. Holo Voice Memo lets you do both at the same time by leaving an audio clip on a physical object in the room so anyone with a HoloLens and the app can play it back.

Graeme Devine, Chief Creative Officer at Magic Leap, spoke at the Games for Change festival about how mixed reality will change the world for the better. While we might need to take our own magic leap to believe in his utopian future, he hinted at a solution to the impending problem most of us fear: a cluttered, endless nightmare of ads.

Is There Software Available That Allows One to Recognize a Set of Unique Pictures. I Can Tell the Program What the Picture Is and After It Recognizes It, It Will Have to Let Me Know What It Is based on what is in its database.

If you've seen, heard, or even tried the latest virtual reality headsets, you've probably heard about something called "room scale." It's why the HTC Vive suddenly usurped the reign of the Oculus Rift while no one was looking, and it's exactly where Oculus hopes to catch up. Here's what it is and why it matters.

We started with a static page and evolved to dynamic screens, and making that 2D surface interactive was a relatively straightforward transition in design. But when you can put holographic objects literally anywhere in the room, the way you design apps, games, and experiences requires a different mode of thought entirely.

Our brains do a magnificent amount of work to process visual stimuli, but they aren't difficult to fool. Optical illusions can trick our minds into believing what we're seeing is real, even if it's not—and virtual and mixed reality technologies take advantage of this little loophole in our brain to help us accept the unreal.

The future of augmented and mixed reality offers many possibilities, mostly because we're still figuring out everything it can do. While Meta is open to exploration, they've spent a lot of time thinking about what the future of this technology will be.

People fear virtual reality will isolate us, but the right experience can prove it does the opposite.

Tricking your eyes into seeing 3D images isn't all that hard in movies or even in virtual reality, but when you start projecting holograms into the physical world, you run into some difficult problems. Microsoft obviously figured them out with their HoloLens, but how? The process is pretty amazing.

LARPing, or live action role-playing, can look a little silly because it requires a lot of imagination to suspend reality. But mixed reality technology like the Microsoft HoloLens can change all of that with voice commands and special effects.

Most augmented/mixed reality hardware still exists in the development stage, whether that's one of the more robust headsets or a high-powered smartphone. Most everything else isn't widely used or monetized. Snapchat, however, snuck in under the radar and created the foundation for the first social network to focus on augmented reality.

We've got Google Maps to help us out when we need to navigate outdoors, but Google can only map out so many indoor locations without getting creepy. And that's where Stimulant comes in. This "innovation studio" built a HoloLens app that lets you map out an area, define locations, and use the headset to get instant directions to any defined location.