Best three:
- Virtual reality: could it be the next big tool for education?
- I think VR is the perfect tool for education. It provides an immersive environment for the users to learn which can boost their understanding of the working process as a whole and their interest to the subject if used properly. Apart from being more visually impressive from the standard way of teaching, it has a bigger room of freedom for both the educator and the student (second thought, that’s provided that the educator has very good technique in designing VR experiences) and can be shared with a wider audience. It can be especially useful in areas of the world where resources for clean, safe space and professional instructors are limited.
- Facebook Oculus Wins an Oscar (not really)
- Although the final production of this documentary doesn’t seem to be VR, I think it will be very exciting to apply VR technology to films and television shows. I remember there was once an attempt made by BlackMirror which was really popular, although I haven’t got the chance of trying it myself. This is also good for the producer, as very often in movies and tv series there are a lot of amazing details gone unnoticed in scene sets, but these can be fully exploited in a VR environment. The characters and story will be a lot realer if the viewer is able to be in the story, and there is a lot to play with where the character should be set that can be part of the creative process. Almost like a fourth dimension of the camera movement!
- Tony Stark-wannabe creates haptic VR gloves for only $22 in parts
- I wrote the first entry of the Worst three first so when I see this news I got pretty excited. The amazing part about this news is not only that there are such gloves easily made with cheap materials in the world now, but that it comes from a non-profitable individual. I find it especially worth celebrating in such a world where companies are competing for investment with loads of big talk and ridiculous schemes just for more profit. With better education and accessibly to various tools and resources, I believe the future of VR provides a lot of great opportunities for the talented individuals besides very big and ambitious firms (although they may still be the ones buying those techniques—at least at first).
Worst three:
- Grabbing The Bull By The Horns: The Importance Of VR Hands And Presence
- The trend of developing more believable VR hands is surly not a bad one, but I’m having a lot of doubts of the current methodology of using machine learning to make the hand looks like it grabs on something when moving close to a object. As strong as the power of our imagination, I think there is a strict barrier between the feeling of muscle movements and visual stimulation. One possible way may still be to detect the movements of hands using camera or infrared sensor and having haptic feedback to replace the normal sense of touch. Following down this path may give us a product not unlike the glove in Ready Player One, which is an interesting future to envision.
- Oculus is finally getting rid of its hideously ugly avatars
- Honestly, although the title grabbed my eye for it’s very sharp comment on Oculus’s avatars, I was hugely disappointed in two ways: first, Oculus’s original avatars aren’t that bad. It is at most plain and uninteresting, and all characters look the same with a dull look and shorter than average height. But it’s alright. Secondly, the new avatars aren’t that much of a difference from the old ones, only with more attires and hairstyles. The style of the character is still cartoon and we’ve already seen a lot of apps with such avatars that come with even more clothes and faces and skins and hairstyles and objects they can carry. It is the most basic thing in many games nowadays, so I don’ t see where the thrill is for a boarder audience (except, perhaps, for the oculus users).
- OCULUS FOUNDER SUGGESTS VIDEO GAMES THAT KILL YOU IN REAL LIFE
- This sounds very off and nonessential to me. Imagine this person going to heaven. The receiver asks him: “So, what is your cause of death? ” The man could only answer: “I lost in a game.” “But life is supposed to be your game.” The receiver replies. “Why did you give up the grand and colorful game of the souls for some rough sketchy game made by the humans? It was in low resolution, only has gauche sensation effects and may kill you because of a system bug. ” Aren’t there more enjoyable ways to die, be it sadder, lengthier, faster, grander, funnier? And how exactly are they going to kill the person if he loses? What if he is very resilient? What if there was a malfunction in the system? What if it gets hacked? If I had 100000 lives, I wouldn’t use one on this silly way of dying.