Friday, 31 May 2019
VR Pioneers Steam Bundle Offers Big Discounts On Groundbreaking Games
Some of VR’s groundbreaking developers blazing a new trail with early VR releases are providing a lower-priced bundle on Steam.
The “VR Pioneers” bundle costs around $123.95, or 20 percent off, for a set of incredible games. Normally it would cost more than $150 to get all the games included in this bundle. I-Illusions’ Space Pirate Trainer, Cloudhead’s The Gallery Episodes 1 & 2, Survios’ Raw Data and Sprint Vector and, of course, Owlchemy Lab’s Job Simulator can be purchased together in the VR Pioneers bundle on Steam starting today. If you’ve already got some of these games the 20 percent discount should still apply to the remaining titles. This should allow VR headset owners to more inexpensively complete their libraries if they’ve missed buying a couple of these games over the years.
For those unfamiliar, Space Pirate Trainer is perhaps the definitive wave shooter of VR’s first generation and a fantastic introductory arcade VR experience alongside Owlchemy’s Job Simulator. Survios Raw Data and Sprint Vector explore the range of single player and multiplayer game modes with an assortment of weapons and ways to navigate through virtual worlds explored. Cloudhead’s The Gallery, finally, is a wonderfully inventive adventure with deep world-building and engaging puzzles.
If you’re new to VR in 2019 or just looking to catch up on a few missed games, this new bundle looks like a great way to catch up on quality VR software you might’ve missed.
Facebook just released the Oculus Rift S, HP is launching the Reverb and Valve’s Index headset is due to arrive in the coming weeks to early buyers — all brand new VR headsets on which these games can be played.
Tagged with: cloudhead, owlchemy, space pirate trainer, Survios, VR Pioneers
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The DeanBeat: The building blocks of better AR/VR at Augmented World Expo
Bring Trover Saves The Universe Into AR With This New Snapchat Lens
Trover Saves the Universe is out today, and we were impressed with Squanch Games’ unique brand of humor – developed alongside Rick and Morty’s Justin Roiland. If you can’t get enough of the VR experience, you’ll also be able to take Trover Saves the Universe into AR, thanks to a partnership with Snapchat.
In order to access the AR lens in Snapchat, you’ll need to get a copy of the game. Next, just open up the Snapchat app on your phone and flip to your rear-facing camera, then point it at the game case or game’s key art image. The face on the front will begin teasing you, voiced by Justin Roiland himself.
You should then instantly gain access to the Trover Saves the Universe AR lens, turning your own face into a fever dream. Your eyes will be replaced by red and blue power baby faces like the ones in the game, and the game’s title will appear above your head. You can also scan the first scene in the VR game itself for more information. That sounds a whole lot better than turning your face into a dog or making yourself look slightly older, and it’s more likely to confuse your friends and loved ones – it’s a win-win situation.
Trover Saves the Universe is out today on PlayStation VR and will be coming to PC June 4. It also has non-VR support, both on PlayStation 4 and PC. It’s best for a slightly older audience due to some vulgar jokes, but fans of Roiland’s work on Rick and Morty will undoubtedly enjoy themselves.
Tagged with: Snapchat, Trover Saves the Universe
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Pixel Ripped 1995 Is A Full Sequel To Last Year’s Nostalgia Hit
Ready for more VR-fuelled gaming nostalgia? A sequel to Pixel Ripped 1989 is on the way, and it’s jumping six years into the future.
Pixel Ripped 1995 will continue the series’ theme of revisiting beloved gaming eras of the past in VR. In the original game, you played through a fictional game series on virtual recreations of classic consoles. Indie developer ARVORE this time tackles the time in which the original PlayStation was just coming to market and Nintendo transitioned to the N64. It was the dawn of the era of 3D gaming.
The team is promising “innovative use of classic mechanics, gaming references, secrets and of course, the challenging gameplay of the 90s classics.” There’s no gameplay footage or images to speak of right now but you can expect to grab a virtual gamepad and play along to the latest iteration of the virtual series. We’ll be interested to see what ‘real’ world situations we’re put in, too.
“Thanks to the success of the first game we are able to dedicate more resources and have a lot more experience to create a game that is an even crazier nostalgic adventure. The setting of 1995 also gives us a lot of great classics to reference and a whole new world to explore,” says Ricardo Justus, Co-Founder of ARVORE said in a prepared statement.
Pixel Ripped 1995 is due on all major VR platforms. No specifics, but the original arrived on Rift, Vive and PSVR. We’d really love to see a Quest version, just saying.
Tagged with: Pixel Ripped 1995
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Super Smash Bros Ultimate Just Got Switch VR Support
Nintendo just added VR support to another one of its tent pole Switch games – Super Smash Bros Ultimate. Yup, really.
Update 3.1.0 for the game brings limited support for the Switch’s Labo VR headset. You won’t embody a fighter in first-person, but you will watch and play from the sidelines as if you were really there. When using Labo you can either face off against one other computer player or watch four other CPU players duke it out. Sadly, there’s no support for bigger battles or online play.
You do get to choose from ‘dozens’ of the game’s stages. You can look around and see areas of each scene you wouldn’t on a traditional display, which is pretty cool. This also technically marks a VR debut for a heck of a lot of game franchises; the chance to see Samus, Solid Snake, Mega Man, Sonic and more in VR is enticing.
We haven’t tried the support for ourselves but we wouldn’t get too excited. Labo VR is a novel piece of kit, mainly intended for kids to use. But the Switch’s 720p display and limited horsepower hold it back from really bringing lots of content to life. We’ve played Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in the headset, for example, and neither really held up.
Still, it’s better than nothing. Nintendo seems to be quite willing to throw VR support into its biggest games, which makes us think this won’t be the last we hear from the headset.
Tagged with: Labo VR, Nintendo Labo VR, Super Smash Bros Ultimate
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‘Super Smash Bros’ Gets Limited Support for Switch VR Labo Goggles
Nintendo today announced that the latest update to Super Smash Bros Ultimate has added a special mode which allows the game to be played with the Switch VR Labo Goggles.
Nintendo launched the Switch Labo VR Kit back in April—part of the company’s ‘Labo’ product line which offers built-it-yourself cardboard accessories for Switch. The Labo VR Kit includes a heap of interesting accessories and specially made VR content, but we were quite surprised when the company also added VR modes to Super Mario Odyssey and Zelda Breath of the Wild.
Nintendo has surprised us once again, today announcing that an update to Super Smash Bros Ultimate has added a VR mode to the game.
The game’s VR support is limited to a specific single player mode found in the ‘games and More menu. The mode allows players to watch AI characters battle it out from a close vantage point where they can look around at the battles and levels as they unfold. “Dozens” of the game’s levels are supported, though some aren’t (likely because some stages would be too large to be seen from a single vantage point). Players can also join the battle against the AI, though it looks like it may be limited to 1v1—local and online multiplayer isn’t supported in VR. All of the matches in the VR mode appear to be timed to just a few minutes, likely because Nintendo wants people to take breaks to avoid nausea.
With the addition of Super Smash Bros to Mario Odyssey and Zelda Breath of the Wild, Switch’s top three games (according to Metacritic) now have some form of VR support.
And while the VR modes in these games aren’t something players are likely to come back to over and over, it seems like Nintendo could be gauging interest for a more serious VR offering, possibly figuring out if a future Nintendo console should be more oriented toward VR (with things like a smaller, higher resolution screen and more advanced tracking capabilities).
So far, consumers appear to be responding well to the Labo VR Kit. On Amazon, the full Labo VR kit is rated nearly as well (4.5 out of 5) as Oculus Quest (4.6 out of 5), which is right on par with the Switch itself (4.5 out of 5).
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Thursday, 30 May 2019
Once poised to kill the mouse and keyboard, Leap Motion plays its final hand
The company sought to completely change how we interacted with computers, but now Leap Motion is selling itself off.
Apple reportedly tried to get their hands on the hand-tracking tech which Leap Motion rebuffed, but now the hyped nine-year-old consumer startup is being absorbed into the younger, enterprise-focused UltraHaptics. The Wall Street Journal first reported the deal this morning, we’ve heard the same from a source familiar with the deal.
The report further detailed that the purchase price was a paltry $30 million, nearly one-tenth of the company’s most recent valuation. CEO Michael Buckwald will also not be staying on with the company post-acquisition, we’ve learned.
Leap Motion raised nearly $94 million off of their mind-bending demos of their hand-tracking technology, but they were ultimately unable to ever zero in a customer base that could sustain them. Even as the company pivoted into the niche VR industry, the startup remained a problem in search of a solution.
In 2011 when we first covered the startup, then called OcuSpec, it had raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Andreesen Horowitz and Founders Fund. At the time, Buckwald told us that he was building motion-sensing tech that was “radically more powerful and affordable than anything currently available” though he kept many details under wraps.
As the company first began to showcase its tech publicly, an unsustainable amount of hype began to build for the pre-launch module device that promised to replace the keyboard and mouse for a PC. The device was just a hub of infrared cameras, the magic was in the software which could build skeletal models of a user’s hands and fingers with precision. Leap Motion’s demos continued to impress, the team landed a $12.8 million Series A in 2012 and went on to raise a $30 million Series B the next year.
In 2013, we talked with an ambitious Buckwald as the company geared up to ship their consumer product the next year.
The launch didn’t go well as planned for Leap Motion, which sold 500,000 of the modules to consumers. The device was hampered by poor developer support and a poorly unified control system, in the aftermath the company laid off a chunk of employees and began to more seriously focus its efforts on becoming the main input for virtual reality and augmented reality headsets.
Leap Motion nabbed $50 million in 2017 after having pivoted wholly to virtual reality.
The company began building its own AR headset all while it was continuing to hock tech to headset OEMs, but at that point the company was burning through cash and losing its lifelines.
The company’s sale to UltraHaptics, a startup that has long been utilizing Leap Motion’s tech to integrate its ultrasonic haptic feedback solution, really just represents what a poor job Leap Motion did isolating their customer base and its unwillingness to turn away from consumer markets.
Hand-tracking may still end up changing how we interact with our computers and devices, but Leap Motion and its later investors won’t benefit from blazing that trail.
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Game of Thrones comes to VR with Beyond the Wall on HTC Vive
Grab Obduction On PC Via GOG For Free Until June 1
Cyan, the developers behind classic adventure series Myst and upcoming Kickstarter-funded adventure game Firmament, released their spiritual follow-up Obduction back in 2016. The game builds on the puzzle-solving and atmospheric gameplay of their iconic series and you can get it for free until June 1 on GOG.
To claim Obduction for free, all you have to do is click on the above link and hit the green “Go to Giveaway” button you see under the trailer window. Scroll down on the next page until you spot the game and click “Get It Free,” and log in with your GOG account. Once this is done, the game should show up in your GOG game library.
Obduction is a science-fiction adventure game rather than a fantasy adventure like Myst. After an artifact descends from the sky, you are transported to various locations and time periods. The warmth and attention to detail seen in Myst is still alive and well in Obduction as it was designed by Cyan founder Rand Miller, who also portrayed the character Atrus in the Myst series.
GOG purchases don’t always support VR in the same way as Steam, but users have found some success enabling VR by altering the name of program files. You will also need to have SteamVR running when you launch the game. Your results may vary as VR support isn’t an explicit feature on the GOG version, but you will still be able to play it traditionally if you cannot get the VR mode to work, though it should. That being said, any chance to go inside a Cyan game’s virtual world is a chance worth taking.
Tagged with: cyan, Firmament, myst, obduction
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‘Beyond The Wall’ Is A Game Of Thrones VR Experience, Exclusive To Viveport Infinity
HBO is launching an official Game of Thrones VR experience tomorrow.
Called ‘Beyond The Wall’, the experience will be exclusive to HTC’s Viveport Infinity subscription service.
Viveport is HTC’s VR app store, similar to the Oculus Store. It isn’t exclusive to HTC hardware however, it also officially supports Oculus Rift headsets. In fact, next month it will even get support for Windows MR headsets.
While Viveport sells games like a regular store, it also offers a subscription service called Infinity. Infinity gives subscribers access to over 600 games and experiences on the store. Think of it as like a Netflix for VR. Beyond The Wall will be available exclusively on this subscription service.
Since Beyond The Wall is a Viveport exclusive, that rules out the possibility of a port to Oculus Quest. Quest only runs the Oculus Store. It could however come to HTC’s own Vive Focus Plus standalone some day in future, but there’s no word on that.
As the name suggests, the experience is set beyond the famous northern wall of Westeros. Players take on the role of a brother of the Night’s Watch. Armed with a sword, they will fight off hoards of wites and even an undead polar bear.
Viveport Infinity costs $12.99 per month, but if you wanted to just play this experience you could take advantage of the two week free trial period.
The experience will be available in English in the USA, UK, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. There’s no word yet on it expanding to further languages and territories. This may be a licensing issue with HBO.
Tagged with: game of thrones, Viveport
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Magnetized Oculus Touch Accessory Adds Two-Handed Lightsaber To Vader Immortal
A video from Derek Ham shows his latest iteration of a magnetized accessory for the Oculus Touch controllers which connect and align the controllers along a single axis.
After checking out the video (embedded below) showing a small accessory snapping onto the Oculus Touch controllers, I reached out to Ham with a few questions to get more details about the work he’s doing:
He wrote in an email it works exactly as shown — no physical modification to the Quest controllers or the game needed — and he “found the game play to be enhanced.” He wrote that he was at the F8 developer’s conference and ordered the Quest from his seat and that they’d already been working on the design for the older original Rift Touch controllers when the new standalone headset finally arrived. According to Ham, they went through 20 designs and 3D printed dozens of versions in the process. When used with the original Touch controllers “we have to use a small foam pad insert to compensate for the length (it’s slightly shorter than the new controllers) but overall our device works well with both.”
“Everyone wants to hold a lightsaber with two hands,” he wrote.
Ham wants to hold a Kickstarter campaign later this summer for the accessory which he’s calling the “AxeOne“. Ham has worked on a variety of other VR-related projects, including an early Cardboard app for The Bible.
“We have to balance the pull-strength of the magnets while not interfering with the magnetometer found inside the Oculus Controllers,” he wrote. “The AxeOne has so many VR applications beyond swords and lightsabers: shovels, axes, rowing a boat, and sweeping with a broom to name a few. And let’s not forget about the Darth Maul Saber hold.”
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Get ‘Obduction’ for Free on PC VR from Now Until June 1st
GOG is giving away Obduction (2016), the latest VR puzzler from Cyan, the studio behind iconic ’90s adventure puzzlers Myst (1993) and Riven (1997).
To get it, simply log into (or sign up for) your GOG account, and add the game by clicking this link.
The game is free to keep, but you have to make sure to add it to your account before June 1st at 10 PM UTC (local time here).
We wouldn’t go as far to spoil the game (even slightly) for newcomers, but it’s safe to say Obduction is a both mentally taxing and hardware-intensive; we felt confident enough to give the game a very solid [8.5/10] in our review even its ‘experimental VR mode’ state, which it has since been shed with its official launch a few weeks after our initial review.
It definitely reflects the studio’s brand of visually stunning environments mixed with cerebral puzzles, although it did suffer from somewhat of a rocky launch—in part due to high hardware requirements at the time.
It seems to have rebounded somewhat with successive optimizations as well as new content, which has garnered the game a ‘Mostly Positive’ overall user rating on Steam, a 78% positive rate out of a total of 1,635 reviews.
Obduction supports SteamVR headsets including HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The game, when launched through the GOG Galaxy downloader, is initially in non-VR mode however.
To get into the VR version, simply go into the settings and click More -> Other -> Obduction VR and SteamVR will automatically launch.
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nReal Light Is A $499 Consumer AR Headset, Shipping This Year
Today AR headset company nReal have announced the debut of the nReal Light, a consumer-focused AR headset with a small sunglasses form factor for just $499. It begins shipping later this year. nReal is also launching the developer edition for $1,199. To help teams get started building experiences for nReal, the SDK will launch in August.
Out of all the AR companies we’ve seen in recent memory, nReal is one of the more promising ones. The nReal Light model has a 1080p display and is focused on ease-of-use. During demos we watched AR concerts on tabletops, streamed video on virtual floating screens, played simple games, and checked tasks with pop-up calendar displays.
For $499 you get the glasses themselves that must be connected to a smartphone running Snapdragon 855 or better. This keeps the cost down so they don’t need to ship the device with its own processing unit.
“nreal light provides a light-weight XR Viewer that allows consumers to take advantage of 5G including high bandwidth and low latency to deliver immersive experiences virtually anywhere,” said Hugo Swart, head of XR, Qualcomm Technologies in a prepared statement. “We worked closely with nreal to ensure Snapdragon smartphone compatibility and ecosystem integration to transform the way people connect and consume entertainment, and to further advance XR to make it the next generation of mobile computing.”
This sort of lightweight and frankly pretty stylish design is likely the future of AR headsets as opposed to bulky visors. nReal’s field of view reportedly falls right around 52 degrees, which is a step up from the original HoloLens and just barely wider than the Magic Leap One’s 50 degrees.
The consumer edition of nReal Light will start shipping in limited quantities later this year but will be mass produced in 2020. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Tagged with: Nreal, Nreal Light
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Ultrahaptics Buys Finger Tracking Company Leap Motion
Ultrahaptics announced a “strategic deal” with hand tracking company Leap Motion to combine their startups and technologies.
The Wall Street Journal reports Ultrahaptics bought the company for around $10 million.
The combination of the two means Ultrahaptics will have tracking and haptic technologies to provide a sense of touch in certain types of products. Ultrahaptics “projects ultrasound-drive tactile sensations onto users’ hands” while Leap Motion tracks the movements of the fingers. Some location-based VR experiences, like The VOID, use this kind of hand tracking for impactful immersive effects. We’ll be curious to see if, Leap Motion combined with Ultrahaptics, we might see more ambient immersive effects integrated into various entertainment or education initiatives.
Leap Motion made an early impact in the developer and early adopter community with its USB-connected sensor which could provide hand tracking without the need for a handheld controller. Though it received many software upgrades over the years which improved performance and interaction quality, Leap Motion’s input approach never saw widespread adoption. Some head-mounted displays include USB ports which can connect to Leap Motion sensors for integrated hand tracking. The consolidation of the two companies makes some strategic sense as the first VR and AR headsets haven’t integrated either technology yet into the core of their platforms.
We’re also curious what this might mean for Project North Star. The open source AR headset effort backed by Leap Motion includes instructions on how to build a wide field of view AR device with integrated hand tracking. We’ll provide updates as we learn more.
Tagged with: leap motion, Ultrahaptics
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‘Superhot VR’ Studio: Quest Launch Saw 300% Increase in Revenue Over Rift Launch
The studio behind the infectiously cool action game SUPERHOT VR (2017) say the Oculus Quest launch last week has brought them another big helping of success.
Superhot Team says in a press statement that on May 21st, Oculus Quest’s launch day, that the studio saw “300% higher sales than their launch on Oculus Rift.”
Superhot VR initially came to Rift on December 5th, 2016 as an Oculus Touch launch title. It later landed on Steam with support for HTC Vive, which ostensibly helped the game further build its profile as a ‘must play’ VR title.
Considering the game had already greatly benefited from name brand appeal thanks to its highly successful flatscreen version released in 2016, the revelation that Superhot VR has vastly outsold its initial PC VR launch in the first day could point to a much higher adoption rate of Oculus Quest.
“We’ve been amazed by the outstanding player reception on the Quest. It’s an outstanding piece of hardware that feels excitingly close to magic,” said Tom Kaczmarczyk, cofounder & director at SUPERHOT. “It represents a totally new quality in VR. It’s a watershed moment for the industry and the sales numbers suggests that players believe so too.”
It’s important to note that Superhot VR was not among the handful of games and apps to allow cross-buy with Rift, meaning anyone who owned it previously from the Oculus Store (and consequently also Steam) would have to purchase it again. Whatever the case may be, it’s clear Quest users were looking to spend money on sure-fire wins, and it seems that Superhot VR easily fills that role as an already low-poly game with plenty of style to boot.
If you haven’t played Superhot VR yet, check out our in-depth review to see why we gave it a well deserved [9.1/10].
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'Game of Thrones' VR experience lets you join the Night's Watch
If you haven't quite come to terms with Game of Thrones ending, you might be pleased to learn there's a VR title based on the series arriving this week called Beyond The Wall. You'll join the Night's Watch and defend The Wall against an army of the d...from Engadget RSS Feed https://engt.co/2EK4m9B
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Superhot Quest Launch Sales ‘300% Higher’ Than Rift Without Cross-Buy
Superhot VR was one of around 50 titles available when Oculus’ new Quest headset arrived last week. Despite stiff competition, the development team says sales were 300% higher than when it first launched on Rift.
The developer didn’t provide any specifics, as to how long that launch window is or, indeed, how many units it sold on Quest. What we do know is that, before Quest launch, Superhot had sold 800,000 units across Rift, Vive, Windows VR and PSVR.
In a prepared statement, Tom Kaczmarczyk, Cofounder & Director at Superhot, said the team was “amazed” by the game’s reception. “[Quest is] a watershed moment for the industry and the sales numbers suggests that players believe so too,” he said.
Notably, Superhot is one of several VR games that launched on Quest without cross-buy support on Rift. Cross-buy is an optional feature for developers, allowing them to provide players with both a Rift and Quest copy of the same game through Oculus Home. Many games, including Oculus’ own Studios-produced titles, have adopted the scheme. But some of VR’s biggest games, including Superhot, Beat Saber and Moss, confirmed to UploadVR that they wouldn’t support it.
Superhot VR first launched on Rift in December 2016, on the same day as the Oculus Touch controllers. Given the various factors and unknowns at play there, we couldn’t use this info to estimate how Quest is performing in relation to Rift. Still, it paints a positive picture.
Of course, it helps that Superhot VR is one of Quest’s best ports. It brings the entire original game to the standalone headset, which feels even better without the wire.
Tagged with: Oculus Quest, superhot
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Looks like 'Super Smash Bros. Ultimate' is getting a VR mode
It looks like you'll soon be able to beat up your friends in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate from an entirely different perspective. It seems the hit Switch fighting game is getting a virtual reality mode via the Nintendo Labo Toy-Con VR Goggles.from Engadget RSS Feed https://engt.co/2YYTtbL
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Mare Is A Mythical VR Game With A Stunning Art Style
We don’t tend to highlight trailers that are a few months old here at UploadVR. But we’ll make an exception for Mare, a game that seems to have flown under our radar.
We were recently alerted to this upcoming game from Visiontrick Media and had to share its latest trailer. In Mare, you follow a lost girl and a mechanical bird she has a strange connection to. Using gaze-based controls, you guide both through a mythical world, solving puzzles and avoiding what looks like a race of evil crow-people.
But let’s just stop a minute and talk about that trailer, huh? I’d imagine Visiontrick is sick of hearing comparisons to ICO and Shadow of the Colossus right now but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that looks so tonally close to those masterpieces. Misty vistas, labyrinthine architecture, tranquil nature, this seems to have the lot. In fact the game’s website has a few more GIFs to share and, well, yeah…
Yeah, safe to say we’ll be keeping a keen eye on this one going forward. Mare’s actually been in development since 2016, but Visiontrick says it’s still on the way to ‘Oculus platforms’. As this point that could mean anything from Rift to Go and/or Quest. It’s due to release later this year.
Like what you see? Well good news – we’ll have another look at Mare in our E3 VR Showcase on June 10. In fact, we’re going to have a heck of a lot to talk about there. Make sure not to miss it!
Tagged with: Mare
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Using augmented reality, Altoida is identifying the likely onset of neurodegenerative diseases
For the past nineteen years, Ioannis Tarnanas, the founder and chief scientific officer at Altoida, has been developing virtual and augmented reality tools to offer predictions about the onset of mental illness in older patients.
The company, whose tools have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for predicting Alzheimer’s, claims that it can determine whether someone will present with the disease six-to-ten years before the onset of mild cognitive impairment symptoms with a 94% accuracy.
In 2019, Alzheimer’s and other dementias will cost the U.S. nearly $290 billion and that figure could rise as high as $1.1 trillion by 2050, according to Altoida.
The number of people living with Alzheimer’s disease is rapidly growing. In 2019 alone, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias will cost the nation $290 billion. By 2050, these costs could rise as high as $1.1 trillion, but Altoida says that these costs can be prevented if the disease is caught early enough.
Altoida uses an iPad or a tablet accelerometer, a gyroscope, and touch screen sensors to detect what the company calls “micro-errors” as patients complete a series of AR and VR challenges. It’s basically a game of hide-and-seek where patients put virtual objects in different physical spaces in a clinical environment and then try to collect them.
Right now, the company’s technology is only available as a clinically supervised test in a doctor’s office, but the company is beginning to look at bringing its diagnostic tools into the home.
“In this field there are two major waves. Passive digital biomarkers and active digital biomarkers. With passive biomarkers you collect data from sensors,” says Tarnanas. “To give you an example of what this means in real life. [With passive digital biomarkers] you wind up collecting huge amounts of data and you see spikes and associate that with more everyday function or not… you are never sure whether this is due to day to day activity.”
Tarnanas started conducting longitudinal clinical trials around cognitive testing in the early 2000s while he was working on his Masters at the University of Sussex. He then moved to San Diego and worked in the Virtual Reality Medical Center before moving on to Bern Switzerland to conduct additional research. Tarnanas finally settled in Houston, where Altoida is now based.
“Developing enhanced methods to objectively evaluate cognitive function is a critical component of the next generation digital medicine — a component that is required to not only advance the basic research in neurodegenerative disease, but also one that is required for the development of improved clinical interventions,” said Dr. Walter Greenleaf, PhD, a neuroscientist and Distinguished Visiting Scholar working at the Stanford University Virtual Human Interaction Lab, in a statement. “Understanding neurodegenerative biotypes will dramatically improve our ability to conduct a differential diagnosis at the primary care level. Improved diagnostics will provide healthcare professionals with the key information necessary to precisely adapt clinical interventions to personalize the patient’s cognitive care. This will ultimately lead to improved outcomes of care and to reduced healthcare costs.”
Some influential healthcare investors are already on board. Altoida has raised $6.3 million in a new round of financing from investors led by M Ventures, the corporate investment arm of the pharmaceutical company Merck, with additional participation from Grey Sky Venture Partners, VI Partners AG, Alpana Ventures, and FYRFLY Venture Partners.
“The beauty of active digital biomarkers is that they can actually expand to more conditions,” says Tarnanas. The company is looking at expanding its prognostic toolkits to determining lasting impacts from traumatic brain injuries, and post-operative cognitive disorder, he says.
“As the world’s effort to introduce meaningful therapies for Alzheimer’s disease inches closer and closer to success, it is clear that the greatest benefit will come to those whose disease is detected at a very early stage,” said Jonathan L. Liss, MD, Director at Columbus Memory Center and Founder of Columbus Memory Project, who has been using Altoida’s technology since September 2018. “The Altoida Neuro-Motor Index (NMI) device offers an ingenious way in which to detect early disease and track progression without prolonged cognitive testing, tissue sampling, or radiologic intervention. The Altoida NMI device is a welcome advancement to the field of cognitive health.”
Altoida isn’t alone in trying to find a way to diagnose Alzheimer’s earlier. Recently, MyndYou, a New York-based company announced a partnership with Mizuho to bring its passive prognostic toolkit to Japan. That company recently secured roughly $2 million to build out its own solution.
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Custom Level Editor Coming to ‘Beat Saber’ on Quest
Beat Saber (2018) players on PC have a certain luxury of choice that their PSVR and Quest-owning counterparts simply don’t: easy access to user-created mods that indefinitely expand the game’s number of playable tracks, and now, an official level editor so you can easily make your own maps with your own music. Now, Beat Games says their new custom beatmap builder will also support Quest moving forward.
The studio released word yesterday via a tweet, stating that the ability to add custom levels would come in “one of the future updates.” There’s still no launch date, although Beat Games says they’re just now working on it.
Additionally, the studio says Quest users will make custom levels using a PC-based level editor, presumably the very same the studio just added to their PC VR client, a 2D software that allows you to build maps outside of the headset using your own music.
Late last week we reported on a modder that managed to port in custom beatmaps to the Quest version, which at the time seemed like the genesis of a singular home-grown solution. Now it appears Beat Games is taking a proactive approach by owning that process themselves on Quest.
This largely makes sense from a platform perspective, as Oculus hasn’t been as cagey as Sony when it comes to allowing players to bring their own music, something that has prevented Beat Games from pursuing a similar level editor on PSVR.
We’re hoping to learn more about both unofficial mods and the official level editor coming to Beat Saber on Quest in the near future. As always, we’ll keep you updated, so check back soon.
The post Custom Level Editor Coming to ‘Beat Saber’ on Quest appeared first on Road to VR.
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Mojo Vision reveals the world’s smallest and densest micro display
VR Visual Novel Tokyo Chronos Coming To PSVR In August
Looking for something a little different to play on PSVR? there’s a chance you might be interested in MyDearest’s Tokyo Chronos.
The VR visual novel, which started life under a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign, is coming to Sony’s headset on August 22. At least, that’s in Japan. We don’t know if the game’s planned for release in the west around the same time. That said, it’s already available on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive with full support for the English language, so we’d expect the localized PSVR release to be around the same time too.
Tokyo Chronos adapts the niche visual novel genre to VR for the first time. In the game, you join a group of school friends in a deserted version of Tokyo. Exploring the abandoned city together, you have to figure out how you got here and where everyone else has gone.
The PSVR version of the game will be getting a full disc-based release in Japan. In a follow-up tweet the team said a physical version of the game had been a “long-felt wish”.
＼PSVR版パッケージディスク発売決定／
PSVR版パッケージが、新ビジュアルにて8/22に発売決定！
日本全国のゲームショップや家電量販店などで「#東京クロノス のソフト」が並びます！！予約受付は明日5/30〜開始予定！
現在、各店舗様ごとの特典もご用意しておりますので、情報今暫くお待ちを…！ pic.twitter.com/aslrmfsQC2— 「東京クロノス」公式 (@tokyo_chronos) May 29, 2019
It’s definitely a game for a specific audience. Personally, I found the slow pacing and reliance on text to be far too tedious. However the game’s got a positive overall rating on Steam and certainly seems to have found a home with existing fans of the genre. If you think it might be to your liking then, by all means, give it a try.
Tagged with: Tokyo Chronos, VR visual novel
The post VR Visual Novel Tokyo Chronos Coming To PSVR In August appeared first on UploadVR.
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Medivis gets FDA approval for its augmented reality surgical planning toolkit
Augmented reality is coming to the operating room theater sooner than anyone may have predicted.
Medivis, which launched its product suite earlier this year, has now received approvals from the Food and Drug Administration and will begin rolling out its service in hospitals around the country.
The SurgicalAR platform is a visualization tool that guides surgical navigation, which the company claims can decrease complications and improve patient outcomes, while lowering surgical costs.
The New York-based company, which was founded by Osamah Choudhry and Christopher Morley who met as senior residents at NYU Medical Center, raised $2.3 million in financing led by Initialized Capital and has secured partnerships with Dell and Microsoft to supply its hardware.
“Holographic visualization is the final frontier of surgical imaging and navigation,” said Osamah Choudhry, a trained neurosurgeon who serves as the chief executive at Medivis, in a statement. “The surgical world continues to primarily rely on two-dimensional imaging technology to understand and operate on incredibly complex patient pathology. Medivis introduces advancements in holographic visualization and navigation to fundamentally advance surgical intervention, and revolutionize how surgeons safely operate on their patients.”
In addition to its hardware partnership with Microsoft, Medivis has also lined up Verizon (whose media group owns TechCrunch) as a partner for its much ballyhooed 5G network.
The company has also launched a toolkit for educational training in augmented reality. The AnatomyX platform for medical training is available on Hololens and Magic Leap’s devices and is already in use at West Coast University.
Medivis is one of a number of companies that are looking to bring new technologies like AR and VR into the OR.
Vicarious Surgical is another upstart that’s got a vision for medicine’s future that includes augmented or extended reality. That company is combining visualization tools with robotics to enable remote surgeries that could, one day, happen across the country or across globe.
What these technologies have in common, and the reason why Verizon is likely very happy to partner with a company like Medivis, is the huge amounts of bandwidth that are going to be required to make their visions of the future come true.
As high speed networks begin cropping up, the attendant use cases haven’t kept pace. And new visualization tools that hoover up data are just the thing to keep money flowing into my corporate overlord’s pockets.
Not that it’s a bad thing. As Medivis’ chief operating officer, Dr. Christopher Morley said in a statement. “We are achieving this by rethinking core limitations in current medical visualization pipelines, and continuously pushing the limits of what’s possible.”
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Wednesday, 29 May 2019
Volvo wants to use augmented reality tech to help design future cars
Volvo and Finnish tech firm Varjo developed an augmented reality headset that can be used while driving a real car. Volvo claims this will help speed up the development process of future cars.
The post Volvo wants to use augmented reality tech to help design future cars appeared first on Digital Trends.
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Less than 1 year after launching its corporate card for startups, Brex eyes $2B valuation
Brex, the fintech business that’s taken the startup world by storm with its sought after corporate card tailored for entrepreneurs, is raising millions in Series D funding less than a year after it launched, TechCrunch has learned.
Bloomberg reports Brex is raising at a $2 billion valuation, though sources tell TechCrunch the company is still in negotiations with both new and existing investors. Brex didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Kleiner Perkins is leading the round via former general partner Mood Rowghani, who left the storied venture capital fund last year to form Bond alongside Mary Meeker and Noah Knauf. As we’ve previously reported, the Bond crew is still in the process of deploying capital from Kleiner’s billion-dollar Digital Growth Fund III, the pool of capital they were responsible for before leaving the firm.
Bond, which recently closed on $1.25 billion for its debut effort and made its first investment, is not participating in the round for Brex, sources confirm to TechCrunch. Bond declined to comment.
Brex, a graduate of Y Combinator’s winter 2017 cohort, has raised $182 million in VC funding, reaching a valuation of $1.1 billion in October 2018 three months after launching its corporate card for startups and less than a year after completing YC’s accelerator program.
Most recently, Brex attracted a $125 million Series C investment led by Greenoaks Capital, DST Global and IVP. The startup is also backed by PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, and VC firms such as Ribbit Capital, Oneway Ventures and Mindset Ventures, according to PitchBook.
The company’s pace of growth is unheard of, even in Silicon Valley where inflated valuations and outsized rounds are the norm. Why? Brex has tapped into a market dominated by legacy players in dire need of technological innovation and, of course, startup founders always need access to credit. That, coupled with the fact that it’s capitalized on YC’s network of hundreds of startup founders — i.e. Brex customers — has accelerated its path to a multi-billion-dollar price tag.
Brex doesn’t require any kind of personal guarantee or security deposit from its customers, allowing founders near-instant access to credit. More importantly, it gives entrepreneurs a credit limit that’s as much as 10 times higher than what they would receive elsewhere.
Investors may also be enticed by the fact the company doesn’t use third-party legacy technology, boasting a software platform that is built from scratch. On top of that, Brex simplifies a lot of the frustrating parts of the corporate expense process by providing companies with a consolidated look at their spending.
“We have a very similar effect of what Stripe had in the beginning, but much faster because Silicon Valley companies are very good at spending money but making money is harder,” Brex co-founder and chief executive officer Henrique Dubugras told me late last year.
Stripe, for context, was founded in 2010. Not until 2014 did the company raise its unicorn round, landing a valuation of $1.75 billion with an $80 million financing. Today, Stripe has raised a total of roughly $1 billion at a valuation north of $20 billion.
Dubugras and Brex co-founder Pedro Franceschi, 23-year-old entrepreneurs, relocated from Brazil to Stanford in the fall of 2016 to attend the university. They dropped out upon getting accepted into YC, which they applied to with a big dreams for a virtual reality startup called Beyond. Beyond quickly became Brex, a name in which Dubugras recently told TechCrunch was chosen because it was one of few four-letter word domains available.
Brex’s funding history
March 2017: Brex graduates Y Combinator
April 2017: $6.5M Series A | $25M valuation
April 2018: $50M Series B | $220M valuation
October 2018: $125M Series C | $1.1B valuation
May 2019: undisclosed Series D | ~$2B valuation
In April, Brex secured a $100 million debt financing from Barclays Investment Bank. At the time, Dubugras told TechCrunch the business would not seek out venture investment in the near future, though he did comment that the debt capital would allow for a significant premium when Brex did indeed decide to raise capital again.
In 2019, Brex has taken steps several steps toward maturation.Recently, it launched a rewards program for customers and closed its first notable acquisition of a blockchain startup called Elph. Shortly after, Brex released its second product, a credit card made specifically for ecommerce companies.
Its upcoming infusion of capital will likely be used to develop payment services tailored to Fortune 500 business, which Dubugras has said is part of Brex’s long term plan to disrupt the entire financial technology space.
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