Shan-Yuan Teng (https://tengshanyuan.info/) presenting his body of work on challenges in #haptics for #VR and #AR and asking the question how to move them into everyday life! (Photo by Bryan Wang, at U Toronto)
A quick box model this morning in #blender3d! Anyone recognise the shape?
It needs to be as low poly as possible (for #VR), and the circles do look a bit blocky. I was thinking of creating a high resolution version, baking the normals, and using these for the blocky version.
Meta has announced that Batman: Arkham Shadow will be the first big exclusive game for its Quest 3 VR headset.
It’s an important step forward for the device. As @engadget reports: “One of the main reasons it has been difficult to recommend the $500 Quest 3 VR headset over the $200 Quest 2 is a lack of exclusive titles, as most games have to support both models. This means we haven’t really seen the power of the Quest 3 yet, but the tides are turning.”
Had a great afternoon in New Taipei recently with Susan Wang and Kuan-Yuan Lai! The two are collaborating on an ambitious and fascinating VR production spotlighting Taiwan’s rich cinematic history. Ms Wang, director and script writer, brings a professional background in urban planning to the project. Mr Lai of Poké Poké production studio is producer. Both bring fertile imagination to their creation along with a great sense of fun!
It was my pleasure to provide some voice acting, and a little bit of translation, for an earlier edition of this project. Now it is blossoming into something truly special. I can’t wait for you to experience the finished production. I will share more news as it breaks!
Congratulations to @laurasouth_, Amy Pavel, Caglar Yildrim, and @michelle_borkin
for earning an Honorable Mention from @chi for "Barriers to Photosensitive Accessibility in Virtual Reality" 🎉
Pleeeease keep us posted about the final product, the path to get there and the user experience during the meeting.
We have a paper coming out tomorrow (in PNAS Nexus) on the CO2 emissions of all astronomy conferences in 2019. They're immense and not sustainable in the future and as a depedency for communication of the field.
Spent most of the day creating a highly pretty railing in #Blender3D that... is probably too poly-heavy for #VR!
May have to either intersperse the Solar System railings with plain ones (which might look quite good...) or perhaps try using an alpha texture, if I can create a normal map from the actual 3D model 🤔 (i.e. fake it with a picture)
#Apple#VisionPro#AR#VR#BigTech: "The concept of the Vision Pro might have excited some developers in an Apple lab in Cupertino, but most people are never going to use computers in the way those engineers and their managers imagined. Before the 14-day return window closed, there were plenty of reports of people heading back to the Apple store or popping their headsets back in the post to get their money back. They bought into the hype, they tried the new thing, and they ultimately realized it wasn’t worth it. That’s now being reflected in the sales numbers.
Apple initially had a sales target of 3 million Vision Pro units in its first year, but slowly revised that number down to 900,000. When the product was released, estimates pegged initial sales at around 200,000 units, though it’s not clear how many of those were returned. Even people who kept their devices have recently been sharing on social media that they rarely use them anymore. It was no surprise on Tuesday when Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported Apple had slashed Vision Pro production even before its international launch, expecting to sell as little as 400,000 units this year. Kuo also suggested a cheaper version had been pushed beyond 2025, if the company makes one at all.
For some companies, selling 400,000 units would be a major achievement. But for a company like Apple that sells well over 200 million iPhones every year, along with tens of millions of Macs and iPads, it’s nowhere near the success they need it to be to justify the resources that went into it. And it’s looking ever more likely it will never get there."
I haven’t had enough energy this week to distribute my time among the various fitness games I have installed, so I’ve just been allowing myself to gravitate to what I enjoy most. Every day, that’s been Supernatural; I’m glad I have a bunch, but if I had to pick just one, it’d be the clear winner.
Apple’s Vision Pro is a bad product with an even worse vision for the future of computation.
New sales numbers prove it’s a failure, but more than that it shows the idea of tech’s inevitability is a myth. We have the collective power to stop tech that doesn’t serve us.
Building on what I was saying in this piece, Bloomberg reports:
“One [Apple Store] employee says they haven’t seen one Vision Pro purchase in weeks and that the number of returns equaled the device’s sales in the first month that it was available.”
I completely agree with David here — viewing panoramic photos in the Vision Pro is fantastic. I’m so glad that over the past years I’ve taken a lot of them without any good reason at the time. The Vision Pro was the reason.