Lifeboat Foundation

VR, robots, chatbots and holograms could allow us to exist forever in some way.

Women describe their experiences but what can firms behind virtual-reality platforms do about it?

A report by Business Insider says Microsoft has scrapped plans for its own HoloLens 3 and has instead partnered with Samsung—but that no one really knows what’s going on.

Microsoft has reportedly scrapped its third-generation HoloLens, leaving the company’s “metaverse” plans in disarray.

According to a report from Business Insider, Microsoft killed off the HoloLens 3 in 2021, shifting to a planned device with Samsung instead. The problem? According to the publication, the company’s mixed-reality/augmented reality/virtual-reality division isn’t sure what it plans to do. That’s resulted in employees leaving for Meta and other companies instead.

Continue reading “Report: Microsoft HoloLens 3 is dead as its mixed-reality vision implodes” »

Seattle-based software company Pluto VR has brought its virtual reality streaming platform PlutoSphere into Early Access.

Initially announced in February 2021, PlutoSphere allows its users to stream VR applications to a headset without the need for a local computer, in order to dramatically reduce the cost of entry for virtual reality. Instead of building a new rig around VR compatibility, you can theoretically just get a headset, then run everything from every library you own via data streaming.

Continue reading “Pluto VR debuts tech that lets you stream virtual reality to a headset without a computer” »

At Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference today, the company made a major shift in their embrace of virtual reality with several new VR announcements during the event’s opening keynote.

Though well loved, Apple’s computer lineup got somewhat left in the dust at the launch of the Rift and Vive, both of which had hardware requirements that exceeded what Apple had on offer. To that end, the company largely steered clear of talking about VR publicly.

Today marks a major shift in Apple’s public support for virtual reality. VR was a recurrent theme throughout the keynote today, highlighting their belief in the importance of the medium. Here’s an overview of everything they announced:

Parents Use AI To See One Last Message From Their Deceased Son ‘…what’s to keep me from showing face, Man?’

Feel Virtual Reality In Mid-Air! ‘…a pressure on the lips — warm and soft, moist and sweet.’ — Frederick Pohl, 1965.

Continue reading “Wearable Synthetic Skin for Virtual Reality” »

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Diver-X announced that it’s pulling the plug on HalfDive, announcing that all backers would not be charged for funds collected.

Continue reading “Sword Art Online-inspired VR Headset Cancelled Due to Niche Appeal, Manufacturing Issues” »

The talk about metaverse really went ballistic after Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at the Facebook Connect event touted the metaverse as the social networking future. But most of the talk is not really about the true metaverse as envisioned in science fiction and first described in in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk science fiction novel Snow Crash. A true metaverse needs to be an interconnected “Internet” of virtual spaces that are open to many different companies, not a walled garden. It will take an open platform offering access to a shared virtual space to create the true metaverse. And it will also require a level of standardization and interoperability that doesn’t exist today.

In Snow Crash, the Metaverse was a phrase coined by as a successor to the Internet. It was a vision of how a virtual-reality-based Internet might evolve and was heavily influenced by early video games. This version of the metaverse resembles a persistent massive multiplayer online game (MMO). Players would have user-controlled avatars, and there were a social hierarchy, but there was pervasive access and a global scale.

The closest we came to open 3D interoperability was VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) back in the 1990s. The HTML approach to creating a metaverse using the VRML standard attempted to create a virtual 3D markup language that could be used to create and link 3D spaces together into one that you could access through a VRML browser. It failed.

Ekto VR’s new ‘moon boots’ could solve the ‘infinite walking’ problem of Virtual Reality via an array of motorized wheels.