This week was VR madness with so many Oculus announcements it was incredibly hard to include them all without the newsletter overflowing! We’ve also got a higher than average amount of Raspberry Pi-themed links (totally unintentionally) and Alexa managed to leak previews of Lady Gaga’s upcoming album. What an age we live in.
Oculus headphones! Oculus standalone headset! Oh, and Lady Gaga and Alexa have some talking to do.
Virtual Reality
OC3 reveals: touch launch, Santa Cruz Prototype, min spec, 400+ mobile VR apps, and more
At Oculus Connect, Facebook announced a social app, a prototype standalone headset (codename: “Santa Cruz” which can do roomscale with just a standalone headset!), lower spec requirements for the Rift to work, $49 fancier earphones coming in December and that they’ve spent $250 million so far paying people to make content for VR. Their chief scientist also spoke at length about where the future of VR is headed. Exciting times!
Oculus to support WebVR through new VR browser codenamed “Carmel”
This is exciting news for WebVR! We’ve got yet another player in the space putting money towards moving WebVR forward. They are also developing a WebVR framework of sorts called React VR (web devs will know their web app framework “React”, it’ll be that… but working with WebVR). It’s still early days in the React VR news and we’ll have more info soon.
Oculus Touch pre-orders go live
If you’ve been waiting all this time to order the Oculus Touch controllers, now’s your chance!
Room scale VR will work soon with the Oculus Rift
Yep – yet another announcement at Oculus Connect! Room scale VR, just like the Vive, is coming for the Rift.
Oculus’ new update disables Gear VR for Galaxy Note 7 users
Seems like a rather good idea by this point after the whole exploding battery thing. Please, if you have a Galaxy Note 7, even an exchanged one, don’t keep it. Return it.
VR — Your Portal to the Real World
What will we do when virtual reality is a normal part of our daily lives? This is a fascinating opinion piece exploring that question!
What VR will do for psychologists
An exploration of how virtual reality will change psychological treatment methods. This is part one, but part two is also linked from here.
4 reasons to not use the touchpad on Samsung’s Gear VR.
Why you should avoid using the touchpad to navigate your Gear VR apps
A 4K VR headset that supports SteamVR for $300
Chinese company, Pimax, are selling what they call the first 4K VR headset for PC, which works with SteamVR. Here’s a review of it.
Oculus Pi
One man decided to see how well he could get an Oculus DK1 and DK2 to run on a Raspberry Pi 3. It sorta worked?
Are virtual reality headsets safe for kids?
The research isn’t completely done yet, so here’s what is known so far.
Augmented and Mixed Reality
Future-proof yourself: Develop for augmented reality and virtual reality
Meta suggests you future-proof yourself by developing for both disciplines. This piece details why!
What works better: 2D or 3D instructions?
Meta also looked into whether 3D instructions delivered via AR were more effective than 2D paper or screen instructions. Here’s what they found.
Google’s Tango phone, the Lenovo Phab2 Pro, is coming in November
Google confirmed the release date of the first phone with Google’s depth-sensing 3D camera system. Exciting times!
Quicker fixes, hands-free, when thyssenkrupp Elevator’s service technicians use Microsoft HoloLens
This company is looking into using HoloLens to allow workers to work hands-free and make remote calls to more experienced technicians.
Designing for Hololens
Keen to get into that sort of thing? Here’s a neat guide to designing for mixed reality and the Hololens.
Wearables
Does the Apple Watch really make you workout more?
After one-week with the Apple Watch, this guy looked at whether or not the watch actually made him more active.
Multiple Android Wear smartwatches are not pairing correctly with the iPhone 7
9to5Mac have a list of devices which don’t appear to work any more.
iURIS – Being Independent
This is the sort of innovation which makes me so happy to see! A potentially life-changing spectacle mountable device which helps under neck disabled people to control mobile and computers.
Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Vehicles and Robotics
Building AI for the first time – what you need to know
Here are some great tips from Luke Sleeman, one of the speakers at YOW! Connected, about getting into artificial intelligence and TensorFlow.
Announcing H-ROS: the Hardware Robot Operating System
A standardized software and hardware infrastructure to easily create reusable and reconfigurable robot hardware parts.
Introducing Recast.AI’s API V2
Recast.AI, a bot platform, has released version 2 of their API with a whole heap of updates!
Samsung acquires Viv, a next-gen AI assistant built by the creators of Apple’s Siri
These were the guys whose AI platform’s software can build itself over time to adapt to user queries. It looked brilliant and it will be interesting to see where Samsung lets it develop. Chances are, it’ll be powering their own version of Siri and Ok Google.
How do I become a roboticist?
One roboticist put together his thoughts on how others can (and should) join his industry.
How to build a robot that “sees” with $100 and TensorFlow
A pretty in depth look at how to create a robot with object recognition capabilities using a Raspberry Pi 3.
Google is looking to creative writers and comedians to help humanize Assistant
How do we make our AI more human? Teach it to understand human jokes!
Driverless cars tested on Melbourne’s roads
Pretty exciting to see action being taken in my home country! If only it was in Sydney… things are moving fast though.
Bad Alexa! Amazon Echo leaks upcoming Lady Gaga album
Alexa gave a sneak peek of Lady Gaga’s upcoming album if people asked the Echo to play it for them. She’s not great at keeping secrets huh?
Speak, Memory
When this woman’s best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence. Definitely an interesting tale.
Internet of Things
How to have fun using JavaScript with the IoT and robotics!
Suz Hinton dabbles in open source Node.js projects and Nodebots. Her keynote at YOW! Connected was brilliant. Here’s her story and why you can (and should!) get into the IoT and robotics using JavaScript too.
Europe to push new security rules amid IoT mess
I wonder if regulation from governments will truly help the situation?
Raspberry Pi Smart Mirror
A guide on how to make your very own Raspberry Pi smart mirror on Hackaday!
The new Raspberry Pi OS is here, and it looks great
Speaking of Raspberry Pi, it has had a massive makeover. I’ve gotta update my Pi to check it out!
Use a Raspberry Pi as a hub for all your Cconnected devices
The winner of Element 14’s “IoT Smarter Spaces” contest is a DIY IoT hub with wooden casing that runs on a Raspberry Pi! The best part is that it’s all documented for you to see how it was all built.
Enlightened Raspberry Pi Contest
Feeling the Pi inspiration but need one final push? Why not build and submit a Raspberry Pi-based project to Hackaday’s latest contest? You could win some pretty neat stuff!
Cayenne on Hackster
In issue #56, we mentioned how devs could build stuff with Cayenne and get $50! Sad that you missed out? Never fear! You can still submit a project for that! The link above is a list of the projects up on Hackster so far if you want to see what’s possible.
Got questions on emerging tech? Feel free to Snapchat me (devdiner), DM me on Twitter or just send me an email and ask!
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