Imagine if a virtual reality headset could track your hands as well as obstacles in the room. An Intel employee designed a peripheral for the HTC Vive that does just that.
Dimitri Diakopoulos, a product scientist and prototyping engineer at Intel’s Perceptual Computing Lab, tweeted a picture of his creation yesterday. It’s a peripheral that sticks out of the front face of the virtual reality headset, somewhat like a unicorn’s horn. The peripheral, which will be revealed at Intel’s Developer Forum in two weeks, includes six cameras for accurately sensing hand motions and obstacles.
“I felt that VR needed a solid unicorn peripheral with 6 additional cameras,” Diakopoulos tweeted.
https://twitter.com/ddiakopoulos/status/760683354828091392
There aren’t many details at this point, other than what Diakopoulos has tweeted. We don’t even know what the peripheral will weigh overall, though Diakopoulos says each of the six cameras weighs around 10 grams, and that the unicorn design was necessary to maintain balance.
Those cameras add all sorts of possibilities for VR design, though. They could track hand movements, allowing users to interactive with VR without a controller. They could also constantly scan the environment, making it possible for the headset to detect and warn you when you’re about to bump into something.
The new accessory also might make it possible to quickly switch to a view of the real world, without taking off the headset. If you’ve put on a VR headset before, you know it can be tricky to get a quick drink of water.
Diakopoulos, for his part, thinks sensors like these will become commonplace on headsets. “I predict it’ll be rare to buy any HMD (head mounted display) in 2018 without additional vision sensors integrated,” he separately tweeted.
Virtual reality, it seems, will be a big part of the 2016 Intel Developer Forum, which takes place from August 15 to 18 in San Francisco. According to the Intel website, ” top executives from Intel and the technology industry will share their vision of the future in key growth areas, including virtual reality, autonomous driving, machine learning, and 5G.”
Mozilla is giving Firefox’s Smart Window two new tricks. If you haven’t tried it yet, Smart Window is an optional AI mode in Firefox with a built-in chat that helps you get things done while you browse. With this update, it can fill out online forms using details from your tabs and keep an eye on websites for you.
Tired of typing the same details into every form?
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.