Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality Network

"As captivating as it is well designed, this unique website provides an interactive and cinematic experience that details the stages of invention, popularity, public disenchantment, and the eventual rebirth of the chemistry set. We love that users are kept engaged throughout the entire experience, progressing through the timeline by completing brief games and activities. Brimming with interesting facts, images, and quotations, this resource can be considered among the best examples of digital humanities for its use of digital tools and technologies to highlight the historical, cultural, and scientific facets behind this now iconic artifact.

"Have you ever wondered about the origins of the chemistry set or its evolution from the Young Chemists Pocket Companion of 1797 to the modern kits we know today? Stinks, Bangs and Booms answers those questions and more as it traces the rise and fall of the American chemistry set through four interactive chapters: Inception (1791), Heyday (1920-1960), The Decline (1960-1979), and The Resurgence (1980-Today). The engaging online interface was created by Bluecadet and draws upon the plentiful research and archival material of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Interactive elements and mini-games keep readers interested and users have the opportunity to delve a little deeper or move on to the next section. One particularly interesting activity, featured in the Heyday chapter, includes listening to the short oral histories of professors, business leaders, and others as they remember their first chemistry sets. While most site visitors will be intrigued by the American chemistry set's colorful history, educators and librarians are sure to find many exciting uses for this amazing website."

Sketchfab now has native apps for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Gear VR, and Google Cardboard on iOS and Android, as well as preliminary WebVR support - see our VR page. This is the place for all related product updates and questions!

Communication today is faster and more ephemeral than ever. We fire off emails, skip the punctuation in our texts, and watch our photos and messages vanish in seconds on Snapchat.

Digital tools have made communicating with others easier but not necessarily more thoughtful, and this bothered Sonny Caberwal, an entrepreneur. “We’re in a rush to make everything disappear,” he said.

Receiving a physical, handwritten thank-you note or letter these days feels special, but it also requires some work. “You have to assemble all the pieces,” Mr. Caberwal said — including paper, a pen, the recipient’s address, an envelope and a stamp — and then the note has to be written and mailed, all of which is time-consuming. He wanted to enable people to do that more easily, by harnessing technology to create a product that still felt very personal and worth keeping.

His company, Bond, harks back to a time of fountain pens, creamy sheets of writing paper and wax-sealed envelopes. Mr. Caberwal, founder and chief executive of the New York City start-up, describes it as “the opposite of Snapchat.” Bond was started in 2013, and has about 50 full-time employees and several high-profile backers, like Gary D. Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, and the rapper Nasir Jones (known as Nas).

Storyboards are commonly used in film, web and game design as a quick, effective way to communicate spatial position, sequence, motion and interaction when you’re trying to pre-visualize a scene. They’ve also been used to frame a scene, but what do you do when there’s no frame?

Storyboard used in an early concept for Cardboard Crash, before understanding that there is no frame in VR.
For VR we can still storyboard a scene, but instead of objects being defined relative to the frame, we define them relative to the audience. This approach should come naturally to practitioners of user-centered design, but may feel foreign to those used to directing audience attention.
Instead of controlling what the audience sees in VR, we work with probabilistic areas of user attention based on ergonomic data.

"After a stroke, the earlier the better when it comes to rehab: research has shown the sooner a patient is able to begin the recovery process, their chances improve for regaining lost function. But could virtual-reality rehabilitation promote better success in the real world?

At this past week’s World Congress for Neurorehabilitation at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, we’re zooming along a railway in a mine cart, leaning out one side and then the other to collect gold coins.

“She increases her speed by using this rowing motion,” says Dr. Karen Kerman, a pediatric neurologist at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, RI.

It’s a game with a serious purpose.

“We’re working on her balance and ability to control her trunk while engaging in upper limb activities,” Kerman explains. “This is important for a patient who is having problems with balance or control after a stroke or with Parkinson’s so they can correct their posture so as to avoid a fall or other injury.”

The patient’s motion is translated to the computer screen with a Kinect sensor — the same thing the Xbox uses. But MindMaze, the Swiss company where Kerman is medical director, aims to use the games on this system — called IOMI — to help patients transition from the hospital to a clinic and back home, using the virtual-reality rehab every step of the way."

Yesterday, Google announced Daydream, a platform that represents its most serious push yet into VR.

What we're seeing here is a very real attempt to democratize virtual reality in a way we have not seen before. It all started with Cardboard, of course, but Daydream is so much more. Google is essentially doing for VR what Android did for smartphones: It's offering a basic set of specifications that other companies can use. There's no need for them to come up with their own software or spend precious resources to come up with the right hardware design; all of that is already taken care of. Hell, Google's even making its own Daydream headset just like it did with its Nexus devices.

In contrast to Cardboard, which is just a low-cost viewer, the Daydream platform encompasses designs for an actual headset, with the build quality of a Samsung Gear VR or Oculus Rift. It has headstraps and looks like it's made to be worn hands-free. There are even designs for a Wiimote-like motion controller. While Samsung's Gear VR works only with Samsung's own phones, a Daydream headset would be compatible with many more handsets. The potential here is huge.

Watch the entire Google I/O Keynote here. Some highlights include the new messaging app Allo, the Video conferencing app Duo, the latest in Develope

How to 3D Sculpt in your Browser (no expensive or complicated software to be downloaded), and then optimise and texture the model using free/opensource software.

Welcome to Sculptfab. The sculpting software that runs in your browser!

Discovered this last night… Sketchfab has an experimental browser based sculpting tool! More info on how they got around to it can be seen here. In brief, it started as a project called SculptGL by Stéphane Genier. As the project is under MIT license, the Sketchfab team decided to put together a quick hack to improve the user interface.

For something that runs in your browser its pretty robust! and runs fairly smooth. I played with it a lot! Did a bunch of models right away.

By now, you're probably tired of hearing about how virtual reality is the next big thing for movies and games. But here's one you may not have heard yet: that virtual reality could be the next big thing for culinary experiences.

Potentially, the technology could help us consume our favorite tastes while avoiding unwanted side effects – whether food allergens or just extra calories. As someone who has long had a fraught relationship with the rotation of wonders at my local doughnut shop (think seasonal confections like Pumpkin Fool), the idea holds an undeniable appeal.

Rita J. King's lifelong passion for science started in childhood when she first learned about quarks. Today she's Executive Vice President for Busines

IMAX is getting into the virtual reality business.

On Thursday, the company announced that it is teaming up with Google to build cinema-quality virtual reality video cameras.

It is also planning to launch virtual reality "locations," The Wall Street Journal reports.

The cinemas — if you can call them that — will be opened in shopping malls, much like traditional movie theatres. There are six reportedly planned for this year, including in Los Angeles and China.

By partnering with manufacturers to build Android phones to a common baseline that can support high fidelity VR, Google was able to design a minimal headset and controller that could serve as a standard to deliver quality VR—without all the cords or gaming PCs.