One of the biggest virtual reality expos of the year wrapped up this past weekend where industry leaders such as NVIDIA and Noitom took the stage to speak about the new platform and the advances they’ve made. The Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Expo is a community focused organization dedicated to advancing the virtual reality ecosystem that started in May of 2014. The following year attendance tripled and it has now become an annual event.
The lone platinum sponsor of the conference, NVIDIA, brought their Vice President of professional visualization to the stage to speak about their Iray rendering technology. This demo can support virtual reality experiences and lets users explore its photorealistic settings with the use of a headset. For example, the Iray VR lightfields give the user the capability to venture into a car, apartment, or their unfinished Silicon Valley campus with unbelievable accuracy. While this technology offers an amusing side for the casual user, the capabilities that allow professionals such as architects and lighting designers to model how light interacts with a design at any point of the day is pivotal to the convenience of the profession. Now that Iray is coming to Virtual Reality, users can view a lightfield from anywhere and see a photorealistic render in real time. This is just one of the few ways NVIDIA plans to bring their rendering capabilities to Virtual Reality and they plan to come out with more demos exemplifying this throughout the year.
Noitom was also one of the featured sponsors at this year’s SVVR where they presented their Virtual Reality program, Project Alice. Dr. Tristan Dai, CTO at Noitom explained, “We are allowing people to demo our multi-person large-dimension VR experience. What we want to share with the world is the difference between the commercial Virtual Reality solutions and those that are for consumers. For the commercial products we need to provide much better quality as compared to what can be experienced at home”. The multi-faceted platform offers clients working in a wide variety of industries complete simulation and virtual training solutions that deliver quality environments at low costs. Noitom is working with multiple global partners to develop project Alice including Lenovo and NVIDIA.
The A-list Virtual Reality companies may have had the big sponsorships and lengthy amount of stage time this weekend, but that didn’t take away from startup SpaceVR and VR expansion item Virzoom.
Founder of SpaceVR, Ryan Holmes, spoke about the product on Thursday at SVVR. After raising $110,000 in initial funding, they were able to launch their first Virtual Reality camera satellite, the Overview 1. The company was founded with the intention of offering satellites that show panoramic views of the Earth that allow consumers to view 360-degree video content from low earth orbit. The exact product released at SVVR will have 4k fisheye cameras and a lifespan of six months. Holmes was quoted saying, “Opening up space tourism for everyone will provide a new perspective in how we view our world and how we process information. We believe that this is the highest priority for humanity right now”.
VirZoom announced their June release of their stationary bike with integrated wireless sensors that track all of your movements and measure pedaling speed. The bike ships with five games that were developed by the company and is set at a pre-order price of $399. These games include a racing, horseback, combat, and crowd favorite Pegasus simulator. In addition to their own games offered, Virzoom offers a PC controller emulator that allow the user to play existing VR games with their own controller. Online support for the product will launch when the product is released in June.
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