Future Timeline

It’s easy to lose track of time when you allow yourself to get carried away while playing video games — but intriguingly, that effect appears to be far more noticeable when gaming in virtual reality.

A team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, found that time flies by when playing while wearing a VR headset as compared to playing the same game on a two-dimensional screen.

In an experiment, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Timing & Time Perception, research assistant Grayson Mullen and psychology professor Nicolas Davidenko found that participants had a much harder time gauging how fast time passed when playing a game in VR.

Participants playing the same game — a simplified maze puzzle — on a screen in front of them were good at estimating when they believed five minutes had passed without access to a clock.

Virtual travel through immersive technologies is allowing those stuck at home to experience the world despite a global pandemic. Correspondent Mo Rocca and his avatar explore the world of VR, passport not required.

Snapchat is releasing augmented-reality (AR) glasses to let some content creators put digital creations into the world around them.

AR in this case is a mix of computer graphics, such as 3D models, overlaid on the real world.

But the new version of the "Spectacles" product will not be available to just anyone.

Instead, the company is offering them to a "select group of global creators" in the AR field.

Snapchat is known for its AR "lenses" on phones, which overlay art on a user taking a selfie, or distort the live image in many different ways.

The new spectacles are an evolution from that idea, letting lens creators project their creations onto the world around them. Previous versions of Spectacles were focused on cameras for capturing content - the AR display is new to this latest release.

Examples which the company showcased included a digital projection of neon sea creatures on a real-world beach, an art gallery projected onto the street, and a guided tour with enhanced visuals of a landscape.

Facebook will soon begin testing ads inside its Oculus Quest virtual reality system. In the coming weeks, ads will start appearing inside the Resolution Games title Blaston as well as two other unnamed apps. Facebook will later expand the system based on user feedback, saying it aims to create a “self-sustaining platform” for VR development.

Facebook introduced ads on the Oculus mobile app last month, and it’s used limited Oculus data to target Facebook advertising since 2019, but this is its first major foray into putting ads inside the Oculus VR platform itself. “Once we see how this test goes and incorporate feedback from developers and the community, we’ll provide more details on when ads may become more broadly available across the Oculus platform and in the Oculus mobile app,” the company said in a blog post.

“Image” is everything in the $20 billion market for AR/VR glasses. Consumers are looking for glasses that are compact and easy to wear, delivering high-quality imagery with socially acceptable optics that don’t look like “bug eyes.”

University of Rochester researchers at the Institute of Optics have come up with a novel technology to deliver those attributes with maximum effect. In a paper in Science Advances, they describe imprinting freeform optics with a nanophotonic optical element called “a metasurface.”

The metasurface is a veritable forest of tiny, silver, nanoscale structures on a thin metallic film that conforms, in this advance, to the freeform shape of the optics—realizing a new optical component the researchers call a metaform.

The metaform is able to defy the conventional laws of reflection, gathering the visible light rays entering an AR/VR eyepiece from all directions, and redirecting them directly into the human eye.

Nick Vamivakas, a professor of quantum optics and quantum physics, likened the nanoscale structures to small-scale radio antennas. “When we actuate the device and illuminate it with the right wavelength, all of these antennas start oscillating, radiating a new light that delivers the image we want downstream.”

As the rats ran down a short balance beam, stopping occasionally to poke their noses at a water fountain, their brains knew something was off.
Inside the hippocampus, a brain region that documents the stories of your life, neurons sparked a strange type of electrical wave that washed over the region, altering its normal rhythm.
You see, the rats were running in virtual reality (VR), one so rich and lifelike that the rats “love to jump in and happily play games,” said Dr. Mayank R. Mehta at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior author on a new paper in Nature Neuroscience. And shockingly, their brains responded to VR with unique activity that could impact how we learn, remember, and even treat memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s.
“This is a new technology that has tremendous potential,” said Mehta. “We have entered a new territory.”

Virtual reality arcades looked like they were doomed with the onset of the pandemic. People had to social distance, and coming together at places like Sandbox VR‘s location-based virtual reality experiences just wasn’t going to happen. But the company has reemerged from bankruptcy proceedings and it is reopening all of its locations, including a high-profile place in Las Vegas.

Hong Kong-based Sandbox VR expects to open a new entertainment center in the Grand Canal Shoppes in the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas by the early summer. It’s the first time Sandbox has targeted Vegas, and it is taking over the spot that was formerly occupied by The Void, another pioneer in social VR entertainment at retail locations, said Steve Zhao, CEO of Sandbox VR, in an interview with me.

I went through Sandbox VR’s location in San Francisco before the pandemic. It was a socially immersive experience that provided players with a unique combination of full-body motion capture that make you feel like you’re in another world. It contained more than home VR headsets, as we strapped sensors onto our wrists and shoes for better tracking, and we wore backpacks with powerful laptops connected to the VR headset. And then our team of five people battled Klingons in the Star Trek: Discovery — Away Mission experience.

After raising over US$2.5 million on Kickstarter last year for a personal holographic display called Portrait, and recently commencing shipping to backers, the Looking Glass Factory has now announced the launch of the second generation of its 4K UHD and 8K models.

"Our goal with this new generation of holographic interfaces was to create systems that were more accessible to anyone interested in communicating ideas with lifelike realism," said company CEO, Shawn Frayne. "From Looking Glass Portrait to our Looking Glass 8K Gen2 interface, we are offering a lineup that meets the needs of individuals and enterprises alike."

The company's original 4K workstation, the Looking Glass Pro, launched in 2019 and rocked a lightfield display to the front with a 15.6-inch touchscreen on top. The input resolution was reported to be 3,840 x 2,160 pixels, and there was a smaller fold-out secondary screen included in the package, along with a Leap Motion controller.