In case you still have any doubts: virtual reality is hot. News from the Digits blog (The Wall Street Journal) by Timothy Hay: Oculus/Facebook bought two start-ups: Nimble VR, which was formerly known as 3Gear Systems (San Francisco), they are specialized in skeletal hand-tracking using tiny cameras, and Swedish start-up 13th Lab which uses cameras making 3-D recreations of various physical environments.
Here you see some magic from Nimble VR (video from the Kickstarter Campaign). Notice the Minecraft game and the school examples but of course there is much more in this:
13th Lab shows some nice videos about SLAM or Simultaneous localization and mapping. This is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent’s location within it. This is one example where the technology is used for the recreation of a stairway:
This is a game application by 13th Lab:
The post on Digits mentions also various companies in the VR industry getting venture investment such as Survios (resulting from Project Holodeck at the University of Southern California), Jaunt (toolset for cinematic VR) and Virtuix (a company founded by the Belgian Jan Goetgeluk and specializing in a VR treadmill, Omni).
I’m pretty sure that the way we interact with the digital world and how we integrate the digital into the physical is about to change dramatically.
This work by rolandlegrand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International