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VRcade Sets Its Sights on the Next Leap in Immersive Gaming

Using the Oculus Rift, VRcade’s engineers are designing what they believe will become the future of virtual entertainment.

May 8, 2013
By Peter Brown, Editor

The Oculus Rift has single-handedly revived public interest in virtual reality and it represents a tremendous leap forward from the immature head-mounted display tech that was touted so passionately in the ’90s. For developers interested in advancing the field of immersive gaming, it has already proven to be a catalyst of sorts, inspiring unexpected and offbeat experiences after a few weeks of experimentation (guillotine simulator, anyone?). It’s opening up previously unexplored avenues of expression for some creators, since it’s likely the first reason they’ve seriously considered designing software for virtual reality.

But there are some people and teams who live and breathe the hunt for immersion. They’ve waited years for the realization of virtual reality (wrap your head around that) to occur, and the Rift’s arrival is finally opening doors for projects that were previously roadblocked due to the lack of a viable headset. The team at VRcade in Seattle, which started tinkering with concepts for a large-scale virtual reality system back in 2010, saw the Rift’s wide field-of-view as the solution to their problem. They wasted no time in applying the display to their existing system designs, even going so far as to develop their own Rift-equivalent HMD in the interim between ordering and receiving their dev kit.

For their version of a holodeck brought to life, they’ve coordinated a system with full body and prop motion tracking working in conjunction with the Rift, designed to deliver a range of experiences like virtual laser tag and haunted house tours, to name a few. Promisingly, there’s already a working scale model of their system, with a handful of concept demos that showcase its unique capabilities. GameSpot recently had the chance to take a crack at a trio of early VRcade demos, and despite their unfinished state, each provided an excellent case for the team’s proposed version of advanced virtual reality. Read more on VRcade sets its sights on the next leap in immersive gaming…

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Mind-controlled prostheses offer hope for disabled

By Devin Powell, Published: May 6

The first kick of the 2014 FIFA World Cup may be delivered in Sao Paulo next June by a Brazilian who is paralyzed from the waist down. If all goes according to plan, the teenager will walk onto the field, cock back a foot and swing at the soccer ball, using a mechanical exoskeleton controlled by the teen’s brain.

Motorized metal braces tested on monkeys will support and bend the kicker’s legs. The braces will be stabilized by gyroscopes and powered by a battery carried by the kicker in a backpack. German-made sensors will relay a feeling of pressure when each foot touches the ground. And months of training on a virtual-reality simulator will have prepared the teenager — selected from a pool of 10 candidates — to do all this using a device that translates thoughts into actions.

“We want to galvanize people’s imaginations,” says Miguel Nicolelis, the Brazilian neuroscientist at Duke University who is leading the Walk Again Project’s efforts to create the robotic suit. “With enough political will and investment, we could make wheelchairs obsolete.”

Mind-controlled leg armor may sound more like the movie “Iron Man” than modern medicine. But after decades of testing on rats and monkeys, neuroprosthetics are finally beginning to show promise for people. Devices plugged directly into the brain seem capable of restoring some self-reliance to stroke victims, car crash survivors, injured soldiers and others hampered by incapacitated or missing limbs. Read more on Mind-controlled prostheses offer hope for disabled…

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An elastic touchscreen into which you can literally sink your fingers

By James Plafke on April 19, 2013

When touchscreens first became widespread on our mobile devices, the main complaint from touchscreen detractors was that it felt weird to poke at a flat surface rather than tactile buttons. Eventually, most of the mobile phone audience grew to either love or live with the flat touchscreen. Now, with an elastic touchscreen you can pull and poke, a project out of MIT’s Media Lab aims to put tactile sensation back into using your devices. Read more on An elastic touchscreen you can literally sink your fingers into…

[From

[Image: ARMAR IIIa, designed by the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT), unloads a dishwasher in a recent demonstration in Germany]

Dawn of the bot? New era nears, experts say

Nidhi Subbaraman NBC News
May 13, 2013

Science fiction is quickly taking a back seat to science fact. Just look at a new report by the country’s leading roboticists. By 2030, it says, robots will be everywhere.

At the gym, they’ll help you train. In operating rooms, flea-sized robots will zip through your blood vessels to repair tissues. Using voice commands and hand gestures, humans will control robots in the cold vacuum of space, while bots deep underwater and high in the air will collaborate to protect the U.S. from natural disasters and military threats.

That’s the robot future envisioned by researchers at top U.S. universities including Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. In the collaborative report, they predict that robots will become “as ubiquitous over the next decades as computer technology is today.” Read more on Dawn of the bot? New era nears, experts say…

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How Google is melding our real and virtual worlds with games, apps … and Glass

May 1, 2013
John Koetsier

“The world around you is not what it seems,” says Ingress, the virtual game that uses the real world as its gamespace. And, perhaps, when Google’s semi-independent division Niantic Labs is finished with its mission, we humans won’t be, either.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and usable. Note carefully that Google says nothing about the Internet in that statement.

In the last few eye-blinks of human history, we’ve created virtual worlds: cyberspace, virtual reality, the World Wide Web … places that exist in our devices, on our computers, in our servers, on the internet, and in our heads. But there’s also a space in which we live and walk and eat and breathe. Realspace. Meatspace. IRL. The real world, so we say, that we can touch and taste and smell.

Google’s trying to bring those worlds together, partly through the work of Niantic Labs.

Augmented reality is nothing new, of course, with marketing-focused companies like Layar building connections between physical and virtual reality and Ikea’s most-downloaded branded app of 2012 doing similar things. Other startups have explored AR capabilities as well, such as Caterina Fake’s Findery, which invites people to leave geo-tied notes that others can discover and read.

But when a company with the resources of a Google tackles the problem, and has a tool in Google Glass that seems destined for significant developer (and probably user) penetration that can actually create interconnections between the real and the virtual perhaps more efficiently than any other previous product, you’ve got something interesting. And potentially huge.

So a couple of weeks ago, I chatted with the man who’s leading that effort. Read more on How Google is melding our real and virtual worlds with games, apps… and Glass…

[From Neurogadget.com]

The Future of Gaming – It May All Be in Your Head

Written By: Aaron Frank
Posted: 05/12/13

Gaming as a hobby evokes images of lethargic teenagers huddled over their controllers, submerged in their couch surrounded by candy bar wrappers. This image should soon hit the reset button since a more exciting version of gaming is coming. It’s called neurogaming, and it’s riding on the heels of some exponential technologies that are converging on each other. Many of these were on display recently in San Francisco at the NeuroGaming Conference and Expo; a first-of-its-kind conference whose existence alone signals an inflection point in the industry.

Conference founder, Zack Lynch, summarized neurogaming to those of us in attendance as the interface, “where the mind and body meet to play games.”

Driven by explosive growth in computer processing, affordable sensors, and new haptic sensation technology, neurogame designers have entirely new toolkits to craft an immersive experience that simulates our waking life. Lucid journeys into the dreamscapes depicted in films like Inception may soon become possible. Read more on The future of gaming – It may all be in your head…

[From

[Image: The arrays use some 8,000 touch-sensitive transistors. Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology]

New ‘smart skin’ so sensitive it rivals the real thing

Researchers say their experimental arrays sense pressure in the same range as the human fingertip, which could result in better bots and prosthetics.

By Elizabeth Armstrong Moore
April 26, 2013

Using what they are calling “mechanical agitation,” researchers out of the Georgia Institute of Technology say they’ve developed arrays that can sense touch with the same level of sensitivity as the human fingertip, which could result in better bots and prosthetics. Read more on New ‘smart skin’ so sensitive it rivals the real thing…

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[Image: Game avatar with a backpack. Credit: S. Shyam Sundar, Penn State]

Bonding with your virtual self may alter your actual perceptions

By Matthew Swayne
May 2, 2013

PARIS — When people create and modify their virtual reality avatars, the hardships faced by their alter egos can influence how they perceive virtual environments, according to researchers.

A group of students who saw that a backpack was attached to an avatar that they had created overestimated the heights of virtual hills, just as people in real life tend to overestimate heights and distances while carrying extra weight, according to Sangseok You, a doctoral student in the school of information, University of Michigan. Read more on Customizing your avatar can influence your perceptions of virtual environment…

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Oculus Rift Used to Simulate Decapitation by Guillotine

By Stan Schroeder
May 7, 2013

We’ve seen the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift take a 90-year old grandmother on a charming tour through Tuscany, but the device can also be used for other, much less pleasant experiences.

In one very blatant example, users are going through the experience of being decapitated by a guillotine, a device used for executions, most famously in the 18th century during the French Revolution.

This Oculus Rift experience, created during the Exile Game Jam by Erkki Trummal, André Berlemont and Morten Brunbjerg, is dubbed “Disunion – The guillotine simulator”. It’s simple — users put their head into the virtual guillotine, looking up as the virtual blade drops down on their necks. Read more on Oculus Rift used to simulate decapitation by guillotine…

[From

[Image: Rolling Game Station, a 32-foot trailer loaded with video games, went to Zachary Jordan's house in Douglassville for his eighth-birthday party. It is one of at least five games on wheels operations in the area. (MICHAEL S. WIRTZ / Staff Photographer)]

Parties favoring video games

By Kristin E. Holmes, Inquirer Staff Writer
May 05, 2013

It was Zachary Jordan’s eighth-birthday party, but cake and ice cream couldn’t compete.

There was something much more delectable outside: Super Mario Bros. in the dark.

Parked in front of Zachary’s Douglassville home was a darkened mobile trailer equipped with cushiony vibrating seats for 16, speakers, four huge TV screens, flickering disco lights, and all the video games that a group of 8-year-olds could want.

“They suggest you do the food first because you won’t get them off of the games,” said Zachary’s dad, Terry.

In birthday-party chic, a visit from a mobile video-game truck may be one of the trendiest things going – a 21st-century pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey for a generation raised on all things digital. Read more on Mobile video-game truck brings presence to parties…