Daydream View Users Can Now Browse The Internet In VR

Well they finally did it. Today Google announce that owners of Daydream capable phones who also own a Google VR headset can use Chrome to surf the web in VR.

The new feature just release from Google has been expected for a while now. And undoubtedly it’ll be released to mixed reviews. While I personally love VR and AR, I’m not quite sure how much VR is going to enhance my internet experience. I could certainly be wrong, and would love to be proved so.

There’s no doubt that some websites will work better in a VR environment than others. If you pop over to a website that’s heavy on text, it’s not going to look to sexy in VR, nor do I think it’s going to be too easy to scan the page as quickly as you can with your desktop or mobile devices.

Google has said that you’ll need to be running Chrome 61 to use the new feature, but don’t forget, you’re also going to need a Daydream View headset.

“So far this allows users to view and interact with any website in VR, follow links between pages, and move between 2D and immersive viewing for sites that support WebVR,” noted Chromium’s evangelist François Beaufort.

“Users can give this a try today by navigating to any site in Chrome and then simply putting the phone into their Daydream View headset.

“This is just the beginning for web browsing in VR so stay tuned, there’s more to come!”

Until Chrome 61 is delivered, you can try out the new feature in Chrome Canary, an unstable and experimental version of the browser.

For those folks like me who’ve been around for a while, this makes we wonder if we’re going to see a resurgence of VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language).

 

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You Can Now Play Commodore 64 Games In VR Thanks To This Awesome Hack

No doubt that by now you’ve seen the gamut of VR headsets. Everything from the rather large offerings like the Oculus Rift and the HTC vive, to the much smaller and lighter, and not to mention cheaper, headsets like the Samsung Gear VR or the ROK7 VR Box 2.0 headset.

These great new pieces of tech let you play in some of the most immersive environments imaginable – riding along with Apollo astronauts on their way to the Moon, riding incredible new roller coasters and even feeling a bit sick to your stomach as you peer over that first drop.

But what are you to do if you love old school games? No, I’m not talking about games from just a few years ago like Skyrim. I mean REALLY old school games – Atari and C64 old school.

Well, if you’re 64jim64, you build your own VR headset display. A true hacker, maybe madman, who decided to set his mind to the task of connecting up his Commodore 64 to an off the shelf $10 VR headset. If you watched the video above, you’ll quickly learn that his VR64 is very capable of playing VR games from his antiquated system.

Right now there’s only a single game that can run on this mod – Streets Defender. For anyone that had a C64, C128 in my case, you’ll know that the games came on 5.25″ floppy disks. Considering that there was never a thought of using the C64 for VR, 64jim64 had to write the game himself. Given that he’s only written a few games, this being the third, what he’s come up with doesn’t look too bad.

What’s most impressive is that when you’re playing with the VR64, the in game characters actually appear to be coming out towards you. According to info over at 64jim64’s blog, it’s able to create the illusion of depth as it presents the beautiful 8-bit pixels in a true stereo 3D environment.

If you’d like your own VR64 to play with, definitely have a go at it. What 64jim64 has created is a fairly simple, albiet tedious, DIY project. The hardest part of this would likely be not only finding a working C64, but rather a working 1541 floppy drive!

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Make Your Own VR Headset to Play Commodore64 Games

Watch on YouTube here: Make Your Own VR Headset to Play Commodore64 Games
Via Roving Reality Channel

Sony Running Behind Samsung In VR Race

I’ll be the first to tell you that I love my VR headsets. Yep, I used the plural, I have more than one. But all the sales data we have so far shows that they’re not reaching wide market penetration – people just are buying them.

Back in 2014 Facebook shelled out $2 billion for VR maker Oculus at which time Mark Zuckerberg stated, “we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become part of daily life for billions of people.” Unfortunately, 3 years after the purchase, that’s just not the case. The better headsets are still expensive and take a pretty beefy computer system to run them. And to make matters worse, consumers just haven’t found the experience interesting enough to warrant plopping down hundreds of dollars on one. I do know from personal experience that the mobile based VR headsets that allow you to have use a VR headset for your iPhone, have done quite well.

Over the course of the past year or so, Augmented Reality has become the darling of the industry. Since the first of the year, both Apple and Google have released AR development kits for their mobile platforms. But even with all this new found excitement, shipments of VR based headsets account for 98% of all shipments in the AR/VR marketplace.

As we can see from the chart above from Statistica, Samsung, Sony, and Facebook at leading the way. The top 3 account for a combined 60% of AR and VR headset shipped globally in Q2 of 2017, with Samsung edging out Sony for the top spot.

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New VR Company Using The Psychology of Gaming to Fight Cancer

New advancements in Virtual Reality have long been looked upon as technologies that just haven’t quite found a practical application. Quite often the term VR evokes an image of someone wearing a bulky headset and frolicking within their virtual environment.

But one startup is changing all that and bringing the virtual, into the real world. OnComfort has set its sights one what is arguably the most daunting foe – real or imagined – out there… Cancer!

OnComfort’s founder, Diane Jooris, has a background of experience in using mind/body therapies, such as hypnosis, to help overcome the challenges of patients with their battle against cancer while working at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX. While surrounded by a group of innovators, Jooris was diligently working away to discover new approaches to help patients deal with the pain and stress associated with cancer treatments.

As a result of her work, OnComfort now has five VR based applications undergoing trials to improve patient care and efficacy of treatments for their cancer patients.

The new applications from OnComfort include:

• Aqua: An immersive undersea environment designed to reduce both pain and and anxiety through relaxation.
• AMO: An application designed to ease patient pain and anxiety while they undergo short invasive procedures through the use of clinical hypnosis techniques.
• KIMO: An application designed for pediatric patients, KIMO is designed to distract the patient by allowing them to fight off cancer cells in a VR environment both before and during their chemotherapy treatments.
• Spacio: Another application designed for pediatric use, it induces a relaxed state in the patient prior to an MRI or other radiotherapy. This allows the patient to get used to the sounds and confined space that’s associated with this type of treatment.
• Stella: This is another application design specifically for pediatric patients. It is designed to distract the patient during short highly agitating procedures such as an IV start, a blood draw, or a port flush.

Joorvis provides an example of the read world situations where OnComfort is used. In this example, the parent of a child receiving pediatric cancer care arrives at the hospital while a hurried frenzy exists around them. All the nurses are scrambling, parents are in a high stress state, children are crying, in short, a bit of a mad house. By placing the child into the VR environment of Stella, they are taken out of the highly emotional chaos and are provided a game to play where they can travel through a blood vessel and shoot up the cancer cells they find there instead of being terrified as their IV is placed.

While looking at the technology that has been created by Jooris and the team at OnComfort, it’s easy to see how their tech can be used to distract a patient. But advances in medicine, especially those that require a significant investment to get started, must demonstrate real outcomes in a clinical setting.

When asked about the preliminary data collected so far, Jooris provided some amazing, albiet early, results. In the cases of pre-op breast cancer patients who used the OnComfort system 15 minute prior to their procedure, they observed:

• post-op reduction of patient anxiety by 50%
• pain reduction reported at 40%
• the use of pain medications was reduced by 80%
• recovery time was reduced by 50%

Results like this show clear wins for not only the patients undergoing treatment, but also for the healthcare providers that are now assessed on improvement in patient care along with reductions in the length of the patient’s stay.

The possibilities of technology like that developed by OnComfort are already astounding and as more companies enter this new virtual world, it will only get better.

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The Best VR Headsets For Your iPhone

We’re kicking off a new series where we look at the many different VR headsets that are available for Apple’s iPhones series of phones. As we begin digging into these headset, we want to make sure they work with the different sized phones such as:

• iPhone 6/6 Plus
• iPhone SE

To kick off our review cycle, we have created a video unboxing and review of the ROK7 VR Box 2. While the initial video shows us using an Android phone, we’ve since looked at it with the iPhone and the results are very impressive.

BTW, the video showing the VR Box 2 with an iPhone will be up in a few days, so hang tight.

As we delve into these headsets. we’re going to be looking at several key items.

• What’s in the box (aka pack ins)
• Headset quality
• Ease of use
• Headset features
• Headset functionality with the iPhone

For anyone that’s interested in VR, now is a great time to be in the market for a headset. there are a lot of great options out there for you and we’re going go to help you navigate the myriad of options and chose the one that will work best for you.

Be sure to checkout our unboxing video above, and come back later to check our video review of the ROK7 VR Box 2.0 headset for the iPhone.

 

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Google Shows Off New Tech – Makes VR Headsets Invisible