Niantic Acquires 3D Spatial Mapping Company 6D.ai

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Niantic, the company behind the world-scale mobile AR games Pokemon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, is acquiring 3D spatial mapping company 6D.ai.

According to Niantic CEO and Founder John Hanke, the acquisition will allow Niantic to “leverage 6D.ai’s deep expertise and significant breakthroughs in AR research and engineering” and see them build a “dynamic, 3D map of the world so we can enable new kinds of planet-scale AR experiences.”

6d.ai was founded in 2017, with the intention to solve current fundamental problems with AR technology. According to 6d.ai’s site, its platform offers a few features. The technology can offer ‘world-scale content persistence’ which allows digital AR content to stay in the same place between sessions, while also allowing others to access that content from a different device. 

One of my main criticisms of the world-scale AR game Minecraft Earth was that AR creations could not be placed in a real world location by one user and found in the same location by another user on a different device, at a later point in time. There was no real world persistence with AR creations. 6d.ai’s technology offers a platform that would allow for this kind of content synchronization between users across different times and sessions.

6d.ai also offers real-time meshing of environments, which “allows digital objects to be occluded by and interact with the complexity of the world.” The platform also offers real-time spatial awareness using built-in phone cameras to “build a real-time, three-dimensional semantic, crowd sourced map of the world, all in the background.”

If all of these features work well and are easy to integrate, then 6d.ai could offer a wealth of expansion and depth to Niantic’s current and future mobile AR offerings. Hanke offered some potent examples. “Imagine everyone, at the same time, being able to experience Pokémon habitats in the real world or watch dragons fly through the sky and land on buildings in real-time. Imagine our favorite characters taking us on a walking tour of hidden city gems, or friends leaving personal notes for others to find later.”

You can read more about 6d.ai’s platform and technology here.

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Coronavirus Ended the Screen-Time Debate. Screens Won.

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9 ‘Half-Life: Alyx’ Mods We’d Love to See

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Half-Life: Alyx has only been out for a week now, but many who have finished the game are already itching for more. While we don’t expect to see any major post-release changes to the game from Valve itself, the company has committed to releasing tools so that the community can tweak the game with mods for Half-Life: Alyx. Though the modding tools aren’t available yet, here’s list of Alyx mods that we’d love to see.

Valve hasn’t made clear when they intend to release Half-Life: Alyx mod tools just yet, but considering the popularity of the game we expect to see a lot of action when it does.

From my own take on the game, and some suggestions from Twitter, below I’ve listed a handful of mods I’d love to see for Half-Life: Alyx. I’m splitting things up into ‘Practical’ and ‘Less Practical’ sections based on how complex they’d likely be to build.

Practical Mods for Half-Life Alyx

Detached Weapons and Holsters

This was one of the things that struck me right away in Half-Life: Alyx; instead of acting like independent objects, weapons are stuck to your selected ‘Weapon Hand’. And rather than grabbing your weapons from a holster and returning them when done, you use a menu to equip and unequip your weapons into your hand. I find this approach wholly unimmersive compared to being able to grab my weapons with whichever hand I see fit, or even set them down.

Though I’m quite certain Valve did this to avoid the clunk that can come from an iffy holster system, and to prevent users from dropping their weapons, we’ve seen several games that manage to do holsters and detached weapon interactions well. Stormland (2019) showed several smart solutions to these issues (like floating weapons in front of the player for a few seconds if they drop them) which modders could use as a basis for a holster mod in Half-Life: Alyx.

Foot Tracking

This one might seem silly but it could be a major immersion booster. I’m not the only one who became so immersed in Alyx that at one point I tried to kick something with my foot, only to remember that the game doesn’t know where my feet are!

Some games already support the use of Vive Trackers for tracking more parts of the player’s body, and a mod for Half-Life: Alyx which would allow for foot tracking would be quite compelling even if it meant I could kick objects in the world for added embodiment. Bonus if I can Spartan-kick a Combine soldier out a window.

Iconic Half-Life Weapons

The Half-Life series is home to as many iconic weapons as it is enemies to shoot them with. Unfortunately Half-Life: Alyx’s weapon roster left much to be desired both in terms of number and diversity of weapons.

A mod to bring some of Half-Life’s iconic weapons—like the crossbow, revolver, RPG, and pulse rifle secondary fire—to Half-Life: Alyx would spice up the combat for your next playthrough. It would also be nice to wield the heavy weapons used by the large Combine soldiers (which normally disappear when they die).

And of course there’s the Gravity Gun itself, a weapon/tool which was foundational to Half-Life 2. It would be especially fun to be able to use the gravity gun in Half-Life: Alyx because in VR you’d get to wield it much more directly than its original incarnation which relied on keyboard and mouse.

Gravity Glove Overdrive

Speaking of the Gravity Gun, one of the most thrilling moments of Half-Life 2 was when the Gravity Gun becomes extra powerful at the end of the game. While Valve may have avoided doing the same for Alyx to avoid turning the mechanic into a trope, I have to say that I would love a powered-up version of the Gravity Gloves which could be used to pull and (and maybe even crush) Combine soldiers and other enemies. It would be especially fun to be able to pick up the game’s larger physical items and use them as devastating projectiles.

In-game DSLR for Screenshots

Half-Life: Alyx is one of the most detailed VR games ever made; with all the time Valve spent making the game look so good, it would be awesome to have an in-game DSLR camera that the player could use to take screenshots like a real photographer with zoom, focus, aperture, and exposure settings.

As suggested by Andreas “Boll” Aronsson, this would pair nicely with a ‘stop time’ mode which would freeze everything else in the game so that the player could scout the perfect angle for their shot.

Gameplay Adjustments

Some extra gameplay options in Half-Life: Alyx would let players could tweak things to taste. Here’s a handful of suggestions from other players:

• Infinite ammo (@BOLL7708)
• More enemies
• Slow motion
• Load from any checkpoint
• Harder difficulty with perma-death (@NathieVR)
• Deactivation of hints (@IvanJamesVR)
• Manual flashlight activation
• Sprinting (@mastergamingvr)
• FOV slider for spectator view (@vr_oasis)

SEE ALSO

'Half-Life: Alyx' Now Among Steam's 10 Best Rated Games Ever, Surpassing All Other 'Half-Life' Titles

Less Practical Mods for Half-Life: Alyx

Melee

You might be wondering why I put melee in the ‘less practical’ section… after all plenty of VR games use melee. Indeed, though in order to get melee to work how most VR players would hope, I think it would take quite a bit of modding work. That’s mostly because enemy AI in the game isn’t really designed to handle physics-based melee, which means a modder attempting to add satisfying melee to the game would need to do a bunch of work to figure out how the physics system would interact with the animation and damage systems in the game to create convincing collisions and

I expect we’ll see some coarse melee mods early on that just do some damage and trigger a generic bullet-hit animation in enemies, but that likely won’t have the visceral feel of melee in VR games like Blade & Sorcery and Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. But hey, if someone can give us that precious crowbar, I’m all for it.

Co-op

This is, unfortunately, perhaps the least practical mod in this list, despite being one of the most requested and most obviously desirable. Yes, it would be awesome to have co-op in Half-Life: Alyx, but unfortunately adding such a feature is much more complex than most people realize.

Decisions made during a game’s development (especially the way in which the physics, AI, and resource management systems work) have major implications for how easy or hard it would be to add co-op to the game. Since Half-Life: Alyx was conceived as a single player game, Valve wouldn’t have architected any of its systems to be easily synchronized between players over the internet.

It likely isn’t impossible to bring co-op to Half-Life: Alyx (after all, there’s been a co-op mod for Half-Life 2 for a long time), but it would take substantial work to create such a mod that offers a good experience for both players.

Half-Life and Half-Life 2 Remade for VR

It’s actually already possible to play the original Half-Life games in VR, but such mods are of course missing lots of VR-specific interactions that would be expected from a native VR game. Rebuilding any of the Half-Life games to really work well in VR would take nearly as much time as rebuilding Alyx to work well in non-VR.

In fact, there’s been a long-running community project called HLVR which has shown some very impressive work on that front over the years but hasn’t reached a full release of the mod for the latest headsets.

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What mods would you like to see for Half-Life: Alyx?

The post 9 ‘Half-Life: Alyx’ Mods We’d Love to See appeared first on Road to VR.

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YUR Launches Fitness Tracking VR Smartwatch For PC VR & Quest

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Track your estimated hear rate, squats, and calories burned without taking off your headset.

Fitness-focused VR developer YUR today announced the release of YUR.watch, a virtual smartwatch device compatible with a massive selection of existing PC VR titles, as well as several Oculus Quest releases. The VR extension sits conveniently on your virtual wrist, offering pain-free access to your workout progress.

A simple swipe of your wrist activates the sleeve extension, opening up access to a host of useful information:

• Heart Rate Estimate
• Local Time
• Squat Counter
• Daily Calorie Goal
• YUR Leveling (1-60) Unlock Watches
• PIN Login
• Mobile Apps (iOS, Android)
• Integration for any Unity game

(Image Credit: YUR)

This early access build features compatibility with nearly all PC VR titles as well as a select lineup of Oculus Quest titles, including Sairento, RacketNX, OhShape, and Synth Riders. Burning calories gains you XP. As you level up you’ll unlock different skins for your VR smartwatch, such as Common, Uncommon, and Rare. According to YUR there are a total of 60 levels in which to progress.

Due to the ongoing outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19), YUR is offering the sleeve free for a limited time. There’s also a companion app you can download free on iOS and Android.

(Image Credit: YUR)

“Over the course of the last quarter we’ve seen an incredible shift in the world due to COVID-19, people are looking for new avenues to stay active while at-home,” said Dilan Shah of YUR. “Now, over 5.1+ million workouts have been logged by over 60,000 users; and with so much time spent at home now is the time to join them.”

Feature Image Credit: YUR

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How To Attend Zoom, Skype, Hangouts Meetings In VR With SPACES

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Spice up your next video meeting with this free PC VR app.

With more people than ever working from home as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, many of us find ourselves relying upon various video messaging apps and teleconferencing solutions to effectively communicate with team members and coordinate on projects remotely.

Whereas some apps, such as Immersed, Glue, and Spatial, offer those with VR headsets the chance to coordinate within virtual co-working environments, SPACES allows VR users to connect with those out-of-headset using a handful of popular video messaging apps.

SPACES works by creating a virtual camera showing the user in their virtual environment which can then be connected to existing platforms like Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype, and Facebook Messenger. Those on the other end of the call see the user in their virtual environment; meanwhile, VR users are offered both a mirror of their desktop as well as a smaller floating one they can move around. They can then set the video messaging app of their choice to full screen and chat with those on the call like they would in real life. VR users can even move the virtual camera around their environment.

“We had our VR LBE business punched in the gut pretty hard by this virus and the team is at home wondering what is going to come next for us,” stated SPACES Brad Herman in a post to Reddit.

“I found myself in Zoom a LOT in the last 3 weeks as we try and work through this question. I noticed that I really missed my whiteboard and it’s only so much fun to look at co-workers’ houses and their talking heads so I wanted to make something better. I tried a few existing things and mashing up tools but all of them had some issues for this use-case. So I wrote a better tool.”

(Image Credit: SPACES)

“SPACES creates a virtual webcam that most software can see and use. We tested Zoom, Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, and Skype. In VR you can move that camera around and point it where you want. You get a large mirror of your desktop in front of you and a smaller one you can drag around. Fullscreen your video chat app and your good to go.”

Along with the two reference screens, VR users also have access to a virtual whiteboard they can use to jot down notes they can share with those on the other end of the call.

“The real magic is when you walk over to the whiteboard and brainstorm with a half dozen of your co-workers and it’s a lot more like things used to be,” continued Herman. “For me, it just feels a little more like the old reality before the virus.”

(Image Credit: SPACES)

The team claims that SPACES is not meant to be a substitute for existing VR coworking apps, but rather an entirely new remote communication solution centered around bridging the real world with the virtual.

“There are a bunch of great tools to have meetings if everyone has VR already. This isn’t that. This is for those of us who already have VR, who have believed and are now talking on video calls all day from phones or webcams instead of from the metaverse like we all expected to be.”

Feature Image Credit: SPACES

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Community Download: Is Half-Life: Alyx The Best VR Game Ever Made?

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Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today’s Community Download, we want to know if you think Half-Life: Alyx is the best VR game ever made. Why or why not?

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Half-Life: Alyx [read our review] is out and it’s real. After many, many long years Valve has finally released a new Half-Life game. Even though you don’t play as Gordon Freeman and instead take on the role of Alyx Vance, it’s as crucial to the franchise’s overall storyline as any other entry and is packed full of amazing moments.

Valve is one of the companies most involved with the early days of consumer VR that we find ourselves in right now. From influencing Palmer Luckey on his journey to co-found Oculus, establishing their own tracking system in the SteamVR lighthouse base stations, co-producing the HTC Vive, releasing The Lab, creating the Valve Index, and now launching Half-Life: Alyx, Valve is at the forefront of modern VR.

Just like the original Half-Life ushered in a new era of narrative first-person shooters and Half-Life 2 took PC gaming to new heights, Half-Life: Alyx is poised to have the same effect on the VR market. It may not be the first 5/5 review score we’ve given at UploadVR (that designation belongs to Asgard’s Wrath, followed by other games like Pistol Whip) but it may very well be the most important one.

From the looks of it, judging from the reception so far, Half-Life: Alyx is definitely a massive hit — even according to Steam user reviews. So, the question is: Do you think Half-Life: Alyx is the absolute best VR game ever made, to date? Why or why not?

Let us know down in the comments below!

For more on Half-Life: Alyx, check out our roundup of coverage right here.

The post Community Download: Is Half-Life: Alyx The Best VR Game Ever Made? appeared first on UploadVR.

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Report: Facebook Agrees To Buy Every AR Display From Key Supplier Apple Looked At Acquiring

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Facebook signed a deal to buy several years of the entire output of a key AR microLED display supplier Apple looked at acquiring, The Information reports.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company spends “billions” of dollars researching augmented and virtual reality technology. It has publicly stated its goal of releasing lightweight AR glasses this decade, with the eventual goal of replacing the smartphone as the primary computing device for regular people.

Reports indicate that both companies plan to first ship glasses in 2023. This could lead to fierce competition between the two giants throughout this decade. Microsoft is focusing first on the enterprise market and Google appears to be taking things slow after early efforts in “smart” eyewear failed to take off.

MicroLED: The Future of Displays

Almost all electronic displays today are either LCD (including its many variants) or OLED. LCD pixels provide color, while a separate backlight provides light and, overall, this approach limits contrast. OLED pixels are self-emissive, enabling true blacks and infinite contrast.

Just to be clear here, “miniLED”, “QLED”, and similar names are just marketing terms for variants of LCD, improving backlight technology and adding shutters for better contrast.

MicroLED is a relatively new display technology. It’s self-emissive like OLED, but should be orders of magnitude brighter than OLED, as well as significantly more power efficient. This makes them uniquely suitable for consumer AR glasses, which need to be usable even on sunny days yet powered by a small and light battery.

While all major electronics companies (including Samsung, Sony, and Apple) are actively researching microLED, no company has yet figured out how to affordably mass manufacture it for a consumer product.

Plessey Semiconductors Ltd

Plessey is a UK-based firm manufacturing microLED displays intended for AR headsets and HUDs (heads-up-displays). It was founded in 2010 to build high powered lighting, but in 2017 made a complete pivot to the microLED market.

So what makes Plessey special? Why has Facebook signed this deal, and why was Apple interested in acquisition?

The firm focused specifically on microdisplays, rather than competing for smartphone or TV sized panels.

In May 2019, the firm achieved the world’s first 1080p monolithic microdisplay with individually addressable microLEDs. Monolithic means the display is made on a single wafer.

The company claims that this monolithic approach enables displays to be manufactured faster and cheaper than trying to bond individual microLEDs to a substrate, which is the alternative approach.

At Display Week 2019, the firm showed a demonstration display to the world. Despite being just 0.7″ diagonal, it has a resolution of 1920×1080 and is capable of hundreds of thousands or even millions of nits- several orders of magnitude brighter than current AR headsets. The firm claims it can make microLEDs small enough for a 4K display of the same size.

Don’t get too excited just yet, however. Plessey’s display so far is monochrome, showing only blue- the native color of microLEDs. To display red or green, phosphors or “quantum dot conversion materials” have to be used, which currently have very low efficiency.

A Key Supplier?

According to the report, Plessey is “one of the few makers” of microLED displays suitable for AR glasses.

In March 2019, the company figured out how to manufacture native green microLEDs. In December, it cracked native red too.

Developing a native full color (RGB) microdisplay is on Plessey’s 2020 roadmap. If it can achieve this and figure out how to manufacture it at scale before other competitors, it could be a significant boost for Facebook’s AR plans with this deal.

Unless Apple can find a suitable alternative, Facebook might be able to launch viable consumer glasses earlier or cheaper.

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