Oculus Acquires A Hand-Tracking Company And An Augmented Reality Company

Will the Oculus Rift someday bring your hands into virtual reality?

That seems to be a direction they’re moving in, based on some acquisitions they just made.

This morning, Oculus quietly disclosed a pair of acquisitions: Nimble VR, and 13th Lab.

Nimble VR is a hand-tracking, skeletal detection camera built almost entirely with the Rift in mind. You’d strap their camera to your Rift, and boom: your in-game hands and your real-life hands are moving in sync.

If that company sounds familiar, you might’ve seen their Kickstarter campaign. They set out to raise $62,500 back at the end of October, and had more than doubled that by the time they canceled the campaign this morning (in light of this acquisition) . Given that Oculus itself all began with a Kickstarter campaign, there’s something particularly sweet about that detail.

13th Lab, meanwhile, is a computer vision/augmented reality company. While their main project focuses on creating 3D maps from image data, they’ve also done work in image detection and augmented reality. One of their coolest tricks: detecting a room, then replacing it with a 1:1 3d environment they’ve turned into a video game. Sounds like a good fit for VR, right?

Financial details weren’t disclosed for either deal.

Check out the examples of what each company did down below.

Nimble VR:

13th Lab:

Take an augmented reality tour of the 2015 Land Rover Discovery Sport before it’s released

Land Rover has embraced the wonderful world of augmented reality to offer anyone a chance to virtually tour its new Discovery Sport before it physically arrives.

Anyone wishing to take a close look at the 2015 Land Rover Discovery Sport before it’s in the country can do so at 117 Land Rover retailers in the UK. Pop in before 22 January, when the car goes on sale, and you can strap into the Durovis Dive headset to take a virtual tour.

There will be a platform in store where the car will eventually go, looking at this activates the experience. The car should appear in augmented reality as a photo realistic 3D model that you can walk around and examine. Different animations will kick in at certain points to show off features like the driver’s door opening to let you look inside the car.

The Durovis Dive is essentially a headset housing with lenses that holds an iPhone 5S which displays the experience via an app.

Laura Schwab, Jaguar Land Rover UK marketing director said: “We wanted to bring the new Discovery Sport to life between the global announcement and vehicles arriving in show rooms. We have received a huge amount of interest from customers through our retailers across the country, and this will give an exciting immersive experience, beyond that of a traditional online configurator or sales brochure.”

The Land Rover Discovery Sport will go on sale in the UK on 22 January from £32,395.

Can It Be Real? Augmented Reality Melds Work, Play

Mark Skwarek is surrounded by infiltrating militants in New York’s Central Park. He shoots one, then hearing a noise from behind, spins to take down another. All of a sudden, everything flashes red. He realizes he’s been hit. The words “Game Over” appear before his eyes.

Skwarek is indeed in Central Park. But he’s wearing a new set of Epson Moverio B200 glasses that allow an entire world of virtual characters, objects and structures to overlay and interact with his real environment through so-called “augmented reality.” Skwarek has raised over $30,000 on the group fundraising site Kickstarter to launch Semblance Augmented Reality (AR). His company aims to liberate video games from the TV and turn them into physical experiences. He’s poised to release Semblance AR’s first app for iOS and Android phones.

Augmented reality isn’t new. But it’s hitting the mainstream thanks to the rising popularity of wearable technology like fitness trackers, smart watches and glasses. GPS tracking, sensors and camera technology on mobile devices are finally strong enough and widely available. Video gamers are an obvious target group for use, but businesses too are finding that combining wearables with augmented reality could solve practical problems. For example, crews needing to repair a complex mud pump on an oil rig could simply activate step-by-step visual instructions right in front of their eyes, hands-free, and in real time.

Wearables will empower the deskless worker the same way computers and mobile devices have done for the office worker, says Brian Ballard, CEO and founder of augmented-reality software company APX Labs in Herndon, Virginia. Wearables like smart glasses can make employees a kind of “instant expert” by giving them access to information wherever they are in real time and save time and money that is usually spent on separate training.

“You’re giving an entire new class of workforce — that could be five or 10 times of (the number of people) you have people sitting at a desk — access to information,” says Ballard, who previously worked on augmented-reality product development for the military. “That’s fundamentally revolutionary.”

“The technology is here right now. It’s just implementing them in a product, showing consumers that it has a value and can do things better than they were doing before,” says consumer tech analyst Benjamin Arnold at the NPD Group. “That’s where I see the tipping point coming.”

Samsung plans to sell a $200 Gear VR headset as an attachable companion to its upcoming Galaxy Note 4 smartphone. The headset, which can give people an immersive experience with concerts, aerial footage and games, has sensors to gauge the head’s position and to tell the phone which part of a 360-degree image to display. The VR was developed with Oculus, which Facebook Inc. bought for $2 billion this year. Gamers have been using motion detection systems such as Microsoft’s Kinect for the Xbox. And Apple Watch is coming out early next year, introducing even more consumers to wearables.

Battery life and Internet connectivity will need to be continually improved to make business use most efficient. But it won’t be long before augmented reality becomes fully integrated into our lives and blurs the line between what’s real and digital, says Ballard. – abc news