Oculus Purchases Nimble VR For 3D Hand Tracker

Read original story on: Gizmodo

Oculus has announced its acquisition of Nimble VR, a two-year-old startup that began with gloves, evolved to Kinect, and finally developed its own mounted 3D camera to track hand motions in real time. This acquisition points to Oculus’ ambition in creating a gesture-motion game controller for its headset, which would open up great possibilities for a deeper, VR-powered immersive engagement.

Samsung Launches New Wearable, 360-Degree VR Camera, And More

Read original story on: CNET

After announcing their own beacon platform earlier this week, Samsung continued to launch shiny new products at its second annual developer conference this Wednesday. From digital health to smart home, and from virtual reality to wearables, every area that Samsung has been dabbling in resulted in a new development:

  • Simband: First introduced in May, the updated tracker is loaded with numerous sensors that gather users’ biometric data, including blood flow, EKG levels and skin temperature, which will all be stored on SAMI, the company’s newly-introduced open and cloud-based database.
  • Project Beyond: This 3D-capturing 360-degree camera is designed to capture videos and stream them on the Gear VR. The company is also setting a Gear VR “Innovator Edition” for an early December launch.
  • SmartThings: Every new connected Samsung device will now be incorporated into the company’s smart home platform, which is now opening up to developers with a beta SDK. In addition, Samsung introduced software development kits for various sectors, including the Samsung Digital Health SDK, a Gear S SDK, and an S Pen SDK.

It’s clear that Samsung is doing all it can to support and motivate developers to build up an ecosystem that is rich and diverse so as to compete with Apple, but only time will tell if all these efforts pay off.

 

 

Google Cardboard Mobile Virtual Reality

With a plethora of smart devices, we often ignore the power of our phones. Google proved this point, releasing Cardboard, an easily assembled Virtual Reality headset constructed from…cardboard and an Android device. The result is an immersive VR experience through a number of different applications like Earth and YouTube within the Cardboard app.