VR News for 2024

Cool omni directional treadmill from Disney.

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Hmm… So by the look of it, it seems to have slightly slanted (from vertical) rollers, where you walk on the top rim edge on one side, without touching the opposite one, simply because of the height difference, and then every roller assembly can revolve (in addition to the roller’s spinning), to change direction…

Having the roller end caps protrude this way (instead of other proposed options, like balls, or upright wheels) does solve the issue with a lot of deep and hard-to-seal crevices, which collect dirt.

There is still rather a lot of distance between each load-bearing touchpoint, though, so I imagine it does require wearing hard sole shoes…

( EDIT: You know… If that is indeed basically the functioning principle, then the mere act of eliminating the fancy per-element control, would probably enable you to halve, or more, the radius of each roller… If each was a quite thin “cut-cone-cap disc”, on bearings, and driven by a vertical mitre gear coming up from below, at its centre, mating with one cut directly into the inside rim of the disc, then you could gear them all together, and drive them all from a single motor, and have free room on a middle layer, for equivalent gearing for the turning of all roller assemblies together, using one single motor for that, and end up with a quite thin device.

The problem (other than the friction and noise (EDIT2: …and cumulative “play” from gear to gear) of that many gears and bearings), is that the smaller the radius of each roller, the greater the needed RPM to get any velocity at the rims. :stuck_out_tongue: )

Didn’t see this coming so shortly after CES2024.

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Yeah saw that. I guess that’s both good and bad news. Obviously bad cause Panasonic is huge, they have super deep pockets, too bad they’re dropping the ball. But also good because Panasonic had no plans to release their headset in USA/Europe, now with a different company there’s hope they’ll release it worldwide.

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Yeah, could go either way. But this reminds me of StarVR. We all had high hopes and then nothing.

I think BSB already has the market tied up in that $1k micro OLED segment. By the time Shiftall had units rolling off the production line a BSB 2 could be announced totally scuppering any Visor pre orders.

VR is getting ruthless and the small dogs are going to get chewed up and spat out leaving the usual TV and Phone manufacturers to rule the market.

Meta and Pico - AIO gaming
Valve and BSB - PCVR gaming
Sony and Sony - Console VR gaming
Meta and Apple - Spacial Computing/Casual VR nonsense. Lol

Those that will get swallowed up.

Somnium - Too slow too expensive
Pimax - Failures in design and execution
Varjo - Too expensive and limited markets

HTC - Lack of innovation in optics but could surprise us with FOV if the go ultra wide. Jury’s still out.

I took the Varjo Aero deal for $900. The headset runs stable but there are visual problems like distortion and CA ( chromatic aberration ). Was not satisfied with the deal.
Then one day I found out that I could play any 3D games with Varjo’s built-in virtual desktop and has all the 3D effects without using VD from steam or any shaders or configure any complicated 3D depth settings. Now I am a happy camper !
So I am a little sad to see them discontinue the Aero. It is actually quite a good headset for video / picture viewing and great for 3D gaming.

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Oh wow, I did not know that!

So you just play in Varjo Home on a big a$$ virtual screen?

Have to give that a go on my XR-4!

Too bad. After I examined the scenes carefully, I found out that the games on virtual screen are not 3D. It just looks like 3D because the virtual desktop is a curve screen, but it’s still 2D. It’s really hard to tell, because those mountains far away do seem like far away.

Nevertheless, the virtual desktop is still quite good to play 3D games on, because it’s a huge curve screen, and you can set how big or how “curvy” it will be.

The frame rate was low, but once I enable DLSS, the gaming experience is quite nice.

It’s good to see Zuckerborg coming out fighting. It means we’ll see a betting high end headset from meta in 12 months.

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Wow. Sony PSVR 2 to officially be supported on PC. Never saw that coming but it’s great news.

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Ouch.

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Lol that was funny. And another big fat “TOLD YOU SO” to pimax. It’s sad such a waste of money time and resources. But oh well can’t wait to see what stupid decision they are going to make next

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Pimax is not alone.

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Pimax compares Crystals FOV to the Varjo XR-4 using the new Pimax wide FOV lenses. Very similar is both H 112 and V 96.

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The gloves are off. Meta to release a LG Quest Pro2 next year for $2000.

Now I’m no Meta fan by any means but after Zuckerborgs last interview you could see he was confident AVP was easy to beat.

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I just can’t get over the Zuck’s: “we’re the open platform” – the whole collective body of satirists across the globe has their work cut out for them, doing one better on that joke before the end of the year. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Its funny I see Apple want to sell millions to make billions while Meta want to sell billions to make millions and own your soul at the same time lol.

Well it depends what ‘open’ means to you and your frame of reference. Compared to Apple, Meta definitely is open

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Welcome back….

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Well even with the Q3 they are already on different avenues beating AVP. Which imho not that hard considering it’s price point and issues reported so far from end users.

Hopefully partnering with LG works out for Meta as it didn’t work out with Valve with the ”Ultra Gear" SteamVR hmd.

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