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The idea of immersing ourselves deeper into an augmented and or virtual reality has captivated many of us thanks to sci-fi books like Snow Crash and Rainbows End. It has also created an explosion in growth the past few years of Head Mounted Displays (HMD) and augmented reality glasses projects. AR glasses and HMDs have been around for some time but people really started to get excited about augmented reality headwear when Google announced Glass back in 2012. So let’s start the review here.

Google Glass:

Before the recent announcement of it being discontinued but now “graduating” from the Google X experimental projects incubator to become its own independent division (that will report to Nest’s Tony Fadell), Google Glass was a $1,500 type of wearable technology with an optical head-mounted display (OHMD). It was developed by Google with the mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer. Tailored mainly to work with Google products, Google Glass displays information in a smartphone-like hands-free format.

The Promise:

The Reality:

Despite the public backlash to Google Glass as seen in the Daily Show clip, there is an increasing number of HMD and AR glasses coming onto the market. Sony debuting Morpheus and Facebook buying Oculus Rift for a couple billion certainly got folks serious and interested in the subject and it seems lately everywhere I look some company is releasing or someone is Kickstarting a HMD unit or AR glasses. Let’s take a look at the head gear currently available, coming soon, and in the future.

Oculus Rift:

The poster child for VR headsets, the Oculus Rift is a VR success story and by far the most popular HMD not yet on the commercial market. With an original goal of raising $250,000 on Kickstarter back in 2012, the Oculus team raised over $2.4 million with that campaign and then were acquired by Facebook back in March 2014.

Dev Kit 1

Dev Kit 2

I was a backer of their Kickstarter campaign and that got me a DevKit1. The DevKit2 is now available to developers but it has been reported the commercial unit will not ship until February 2016. Facebook has not said what they plan to do with Oculus yet, but recent VR related acquisitions and these comments by Mark Zuckerberg keep the excitement strong for what is coming next regarding immersive technologies and the world’s largest social network.

CastAR:

Technical Illusions’ castAR is another Kickstarter success story I have reviewed before. According to the Technical Illusions team, castAR is mixed reality mode glasses, allowing for social Projected Reality and fully immersive Virtual Reality.

The castAR system is available to developers for pre-order starting at $345. This package includes the castAR glasses with its built in tracking system, a magic wand, and the 1 meter by 1 meter surface. No date has been set for when a commercial product will ship.

Samsung GearVR:

In collaboration with Oculus, Samsung developed their own HMD called GearVR, which they released to developers late last year. GearVR is a $199 cordless head mount that turns any Samsung Galaxy Note 4 into a virtual reality headset. I personally rate this one as the best mobile VR unit to date.

Atheer One

Atheer Labs is the creator of Atheer One, a pair of AR glasses that are supported by their platform called Augmented Interactive Reality (AiR). Their SDK is built upon the Android APIs and supports 3rd party toolkits such as Qualcomm’s Vuforia SDK and the Unity3D engine. Claiming to be the only portable and immersive smart glasses supporting natural interaction, the One and AiR platform combines immersive 3D augmented reality with natural gesture-based interaction for AR that you can touch.

Vuzix

Formed in 1997, Vuzix has been in the HMD and AR glasses space for a while and has a variety of glasses products. Currently, Vuzix is under contract with DARPA to design and build a next generation heads up display for military ground personnel.

OSVR:

With primary focus on the gaming industry, OSVR (Open Source Virtual Reality) is an initiative to bring open source VR to the masses. Comprised mainly of hardware vendors, it is an ecosystem that strives to be fully open-source with their OSVR Hacker Developer Kit schematics and drawings for the headset available for download so one can quickly build their own or improve on existing VR-Glass designs. OSVR software supports multiple operating systems, plugs into leading game engines and is freely available under a Apache 2.0 license.

MoverioSmart Glasses:

Japanese electronics company Epson (Seiko Epson Corporation) has had a pair of Augmented Reality glasses on the market for a few years now. According to Epson, “The next-generation Moverio BT-200 smart glasses are designed to change how you experience the world around you. With new and improved features and a more compact size, these innovative smart glasses are setting the new standard in Augmented Reality.”

Meta’s SpaceGlasses:

Meta claims its initial product, called SpaceGlasses, is meant more as a tool for app developers than as a gadget you’d want to actually wear. Like other AR glasses, it needs to be physically tethered to a computer in order to work. It includes a see-through projectable LCD for each eye, an infrared depth camera, and a standard color camera, as well as an accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass. The Meta 1
Developer Kit is available for $667.00.

Cardboard HMDs:

By far the cheapest option for a HMD on this list, cardboard VR units turn any supported smartphone device into a virtual reality headset. It was with the debut of Google Cardboard at Google’s I/O conference that got others looking at this low cost alternative and it didn’t take long for other cardboard clones to hit the market. Based in San Francisco, DODOcase has entered the VR space by manufacturing a line of their own cardboard units and with a successful Kickstarter campaign for DIYVR (Do It Yourself Virtual Reality).

Sulon Cortex: (Not yet released)

Sulon Technologies released at CES 2015 its Cortex AR/VR headset. Though it’s still early days for the company’s standalone Cortex AR/VR headset, it’s managed to merge immersion and augmentation in some pretty fascinating ways. When it releases to developers, it plans to cost $500 a unit.

Microsoft HoloLens:  (Not yet released)

Microsoft recently debuted their entry into the AR glasses and HMD space with a device they have named HoloLens. It is great to see them get excited about immersive technology and I highly recommend a visit to this article on the Verge about their first hand demo with the unit.

 

 

Magic Leap: (Not yet released)

Saving the most mysterious for last, Magic Leap is making waves in the augmented reality space with their recent raising of $542 million dollars and hiring of Sci-Fi author Neal Stephenson as their ‘Chief Futurist’. Magic Leap has been secretive about how their system works technically, but a plethora of disclosures in their filings provide the broad outline. A lightweight head-mounted device will house a tiny projector comprised of bespoke prisms and lenses that will beam images onto the user’s retinas creating a “dynamic digitized light field signal.” Infrared positioning cameras, GPS modules, and multi-axis accelerometers will assist in blending images and video with the real world. Let’s hope it lives up to the promise.

Quite the list and this is by no means all the headgear devices and HMDs coming soon or available to developers now. While it is still too early to say which devices will reign supreme, it can be said that with this many HMDs and AR glasses coming to the market that our digital and real lives are about to become a lot more immersive and much faster than most anticipate.

As you already know, SimCity is full 3D, you can navigate ‘mostly’ in and around your city.  But there is no way to export the model into any other software.  This is a shame because it would be sweet to actually see this through a 3D VR headset. Technically, there is no reason why we could not get this to work.  Using all the standard tricks for realtime 3D rendering it could be done, just look at ARMA or Call of Duty or even GTA.  Unfortunately this seems to be a case of a locked box that EA does not want anyone in, and they do not seem to be interested in making SimCity available for VR.   But dont lose hope.

Its only a matter of time before a SimCity like game gets ported to a platform that supports the Rift or other VR display system. How cool would it be to have Civ 5 in VR?  That will be my next bit of research and post here for my dear readers.  Remember how SimCity said it could not work in offline mode.  Then in March 14 we got it? Put enough pressure on and I think they will do something to make it work on the Rift or Samsung VR.  But my fear is that the interest and market for Simcity VR is too small for EA to react and thus we will have to wait for someone, someday to reverse engineer Simcity so that we can at least get a single point in time model.  That would be great just there.  I do not need to edit in VR, just explore and perhaps have simple interactions, again locked at that moment in time.

Ahh…  One day.

Heh, no I’m joking when I say Facebook is going to recreate Second Life, but I think they are thinking along those lines although primarily I think Zuck is looking for away to get Facebook into more games, and this could be one way of doing it.  However he did say that there is a social element for this buy.  And remember, this is 2 BILLION we are talking about.  I think he really believes that there will be a run on virtual space for shopping, interacting and non game entertainment just like they thought on Second Life.  Here are a few quotes from the Zuck…

“After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences,” said Zuckerberg in a post announcing the purchase. “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.

“This is really a new communication platform. By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life. Imagine sharing not just moments with your friends online, but entire experiences and adventures.”

Here is the thing, I have played with HMD’s (Head Mounted Displays) for a number of years, studied them at U.C. Berkeley as part of my Masters and have played with the Oculus a few times myself.  Its a good headset, but its no game changer outside the gaming world.  The issues with the Oculus is still the same with the state of the Virtual World back in the late 90’s.  A person can only spend just so much time in a HMD VR environment without getting sick and/or tired. Second, content is everything.  Just because a VR headset is cool, does not matter if you do not have content that brings the masses, and brings them over and over again.  And I do not see anything compelling in the 90’s and do not see anything really changing for the daily life person of today.

Gaming is a logical use for the oculus, (and some research and engineering) and there will be a win there as more gamers, myself included, get HMD’s for gaming as the display quality goes up and the cost goes down, but that does not seem like a good ROI for 2B$.  And do I expect that non gamers will run out to get a HMD just in case they want to talk to their doctor and meet up with buddies a la Second Life?  Doubt it.

For Oculus this is a great deal.  2B$?  Hell yea I would jump at that.  And right now Facebook has not indicated they are going to do anything different with the HMD that they were not already planning.  I just have a feeling 2 or 3 years from now, Zuck is going to look back and think, hmm, even if Facebook starts to lose popularity and the stock value goes down, he could have bought better things for 2 billion.

So I just got back from the ESRI User Conference 2013 in San Diego and wow, what a trip.

Founded by Jack Dangermond, ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) is an industry leader and international supplier of Geographic Information System (GIS) software and geodatabase management applications. The company has an installed base of more than one million users in more than 350,000 organizations, including most US federal agencies and national mapping agencies, all 50 US state health departments, transportation agencies, forestry companies, utilities, state and local government, schools and universities, NGOs, and commercial business.

The user conference brought 15,000+ ESRI users from over 130 countries. Keynote presentations included Advisor to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information, Infrastructure, and Innovations Sam Pitroda and an inspiring discussion with pop culture icon Will.i.am. For the record I am a B.E.P. fan but this interview was something else.

This was my first time to attend the ESRI User Conference and I was amazed at the number of sessions, expo size (entire convention center floor), attendance, and diversity of the show. As an attendee pointed out, “GIS is everything” and it seems everything was represented at the event. Among what I saw on the trade show floor were a variety of mapping applications, LIDAR services (remote sensing technology that measures distance by illuminating a target with a laser and analyzing the reflected light) and drone data collection devices.

I am not a geo-specialist but I did recognize a few things I am familiar with. Among those was:

City Engine – a procedural modeling tool for rapidly creating large urban environments

Geoloqi – a platform for building location aware applications with geotriggers and realtime location capabilities.

Metaio – an Augmented Reality platform provider

One ESRI invited exhibitor was building company IDEAbuilder. IDEAbuilder uses geospatial data for a variety of uses in the building process and were showcasing a new application the company tech team has built that combines interactive 3D and digital fabrication with some ESRI tools and services. This was a great demonstration of how 2D/3D building data can connect with geospatial data to create highly intelligent interactive scenes.

The application that was shown was the virtual reality version of their Performance Shell Configurator or PSC. The PSC application is a green building tool for their builder partners that provides the builder the ability to go into an interactive 3D scene and snap together the shell of a structure from a library of digital fabrication ready components that can be robotically manufactured. These metadata rich components provide their partners with information useful to the building process. I posted several months back the web3D and Kinect version of this app that got covered on Wired.com (thanks Bruce Sterling!)

Some features of our Oculus Rift virtual reality version include Razer Hydra hand controller support, the ability to import a blueprint image to use as a guide to build on top of, a live top down map so you can see where you are on the blueprint, a total structure cost calculator, elevated cherry picker view, a virtual ‘AR’ view where staring at a panel piece displayed part information including cost, and free navigation of a City Engine city that acts as the 3D backdrop to the PSC building space. There will be an official post with more information about the PSC app on the IDEAbuilder site so stay tuned over there.

The application was a huge hit and really helped visitors experience new ways of interacting with data. While most people were unaware of the Oculus Rift or have never had a virtual reality experience before, there were those that were more than ready to get started like John Bormann. In addition to the PSC app, they also shared an Xbox 360 controller controlled architectural visualization Oculus Rift scene created by real life architect, web3D supporter, and IDEAbuilder friend Jon Brouchoud.

In closing, I would like to thank the IDEAbuilder team for this cool virtual reality experience, everyone I met at the event that helped me understand more about GIS, and the people at ESRI for the opportunity and everything they did to make it a super ‘geospecial’ time. See you next year!