Wearable watchers, CCS Insight, had good news and bad news for the virtual and augmented reality industry today. Sales are tanking but look! New hardware!
The report underlines just how much the industry has been driven by users of smartphone-based VR, which peaked at 8 million units in 2017 before plummeting to just 3 million in 2018. The net result is the total VR shipments in 2018 will actually end up less than 2017.
[...] But all is not doom and gloom. Stand-alone VR is tipped to hit the big time in 2019, with 29 million of the wireless beauties expected to ship in 2022.
VR vendors, not least the Facebook-backed Oculus, hope so. The Oculus Quest is due to ship in 2019, free of the pesky wires and PC gear needed with the Rift. A cheaper tetherless variant, the Go, has already shipped.
Meanwhile, virtual reality cafes are empty.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Wednesday December 05 2018, @03:32PM (1 child)
> Who needs multiple 4K screens when virtually you are free to put data wherever you want in the virtual space.
They're trying, but it's going to be a while based on early prototypes: https://youtu.be/L2sCJpR3x8o?t=495 [youtu.be]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday December 05 2018, @04:04PM
For the virtual desktop manager and some games, it would be nice for the headset to have some presence awareness so that it finds a desktop/laptop keyboard and any external mouse using its front-facing camera and sensors, and overlays a faint, accurate representation of their location. Use simple machine learning so it finds these things no matter what brand/model they are, without picking up clutter on the desk, and labels the keys correctly. Maybe make them disappear if you withdraw your hands. Then I would use it to sit in a chair and play a stealth game.
Just throwing some ideas out based on the laptop and wireless mouse already in front of me.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]