First off, wow what an amazing summit featuring such an amazing VR and AR community in Vancouver last week. The CADmechXR team had a great turn out at the exhibition booth where we got to meet tons of industry professionals across all sectors and we look forward to servicing each one of them. For more inquires about our Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality solutions, please reach out to our Lead VR/AR Developer, Victor Truong at victor@cadmech.com.
In addition to our booths great turn out, we also got a chance to explore some of the other booths at the summit. First up was Dreamcrafts booth, which focuses on Virtual Reality development for theme parks. They had a demo that featured their ability in creating a realistic virtual avatar and incorporating a tic tac toe game with Leap Motion’s hand tracking and Ultrahaptic’s haptic feedback technology.
Overall, very cool demo and the avatar had features incorporated that made it look very realistic, but the cool part of this demo was the Ultrahaptics module known as the Stratos Inspire.
Ultrahaptics Stratos Inspire
This was my first time trying a Stratos demo and what it did was give vibration pulses to your hands using ultrasonic waves to provide some form of haptic feedback in VR whenever I interacted with the Tic tac toe board. Interesting to see how this technology will be further developed with the new merge between Ultrahaptics and Leap Motion known as Ultraleap. The addition of haptic feedback in VR will be a huge breakthrough and brings us one step closer to merging our real world with the virtual one.
I then headed over to the Lenovo booth which featured their new Mixed Reality head mounted display (HMD) known as the ThinkReality. This HMD is very similar to the Microsoft Hololens and is still currently in development but features a 40° diagonal field of view along with some other neat features like Head and Gaze Tracking, RFID or NFC reader, and object recognition. Most of these features wasn’t shown in the demos but they had one that showcased a manufacturing assembly demo. It was a very simplistic demo which had the ThinkReality point to several bins which I then had to collect the correct number of pieces and place them into their respective bins. Wasn’t a great showcase of what the technology can offer and seemed more like a solution looking for a problem rather than a solution to a problem. That being said, it seems like they will be doing a limited released starting in Spring 2020 along with an SDK for Unity but overall, cool headset and I look forward to seeing what really applications it holds in the enterprise market.
Lastly, I finally got to try the Varjo’s VR-2 headset. By far one of the best VR experiences I ever had! They had one demo that allowed me to walk around in a 3D scanned room that just looked stunning. The field of view was definitely on the small side in comparison to other VR headsets on the market but with their foveated rendering technique the areas my eyes were focused on just looked stunning. Even the finest details like text was very clear on the display and really made it seem like I was in the real world.
Varjo VR-2 Headset
The second demo showcased their eye tracking capabilities and I have to say that it was quite responsive. The demo allowed me to have a cursor on my screen that I could move using my eyes to interact with the scene. There is a slight delay whenever I moved my eyes but overall it had a relatively quick and accurate response to my eye movements.
Overall, the summit gave us not only great exposure to our new extended reality service offerings but also gave us a glimpse of what other companies are working towards in the VR and AR community. It’s exciting to be at the forefront of this technology and seeing it develop and change throughout the years. Who knows what new developments lie next and what the future of VR and AR may be.
