This week we had several global technology events with news, product releases and tech trends. Our Electromagnetic Motion Tracking Sensors web went online this week and presented to our shortlist of VR Immersive Technology global experts.
What’s new in VR / AR / Mixed Reality Immersive technology?
Five years in technology is a long time and only in August of 2012, Palmer Luckey’s Oculus Virtual Reality launched with a crowd funding campaign for his VR technology venture: the first prototype of desktop grade VR Headset.
Five years later we are at the forefront of the next big step : Immersive experience in VR. The era of motion tracking and haptics for VR.
Last week we had a full package of information coming from Google I/O 2017 #GoogleIO2017, a blow of fresh air into the future of VR. They take VR very seriously and, after having sold millions of cardboard goggles, they announced they are now betting on the fully immersive experience by boosting Daydream with new hardware. They also announced a collaboration with HTC Vibe for new stand-alone headsets. Every component of VR, the CPU and the GPU is built directly in the headset. These innovations give the user several grades of freedom:
- No need for High End expensive PC’s
- Wireless → You can move
- No need for a mobile phone → No dependency on the manufacturers or mobile devices.
- Standardization in VR apps may boom. Now it is painful for so many players
- Inside out tracking -> No need for cameras or sensors for hand tracking
- True to scale positional tracking
- Precise 6DoF
- Sensors integrated into standalone VR thus reducing the floating point imprecision and increase precise tracking.
Another boost to 3D Tracking and immersive VR technology was announced this week , this time by Oculus Rift that has confirmed that they officially support the HTC Vive’s Touch Motion controllers. HTC’s Touch Motion Controllers went on sale in December of 2016 but some users could not get guaranteed performance when they added additional sensors for greater immersion. The company announced their latest software release and assured users that “tracking with 3 sensors is now fully supported”.
South Korea & World IT show 2017 Seoul this week.
Let´s start with the Seoul World IT Show. South Korea is leading in several technologies and it has been made public that they also lead in robotics with the highest concentration of robots in the world according the International Federation of Robotics. This “miracle country” is second to none in many technologies and innovation. The figure of robots concentration followed by Singapore, Japan and Germany shows how technology and productivity join forces in South Korea.
Image Source: International Federation o 1
The World Robotics Report also have good news for the European Union that, as a trading block, is leading in the global automation race. Our Korean colleagues exhibited our motion tracking sensors at the Seoul World IT Show and reported that the VR/AR related technologies are gaining momentum in Korea and that is seriously competing but still not leading in the VR Ecosystem where US companies like Facebook/Oculus, Microsoft and Google and top technology suppliers like QUALCOMM are taking the technology lead , especially in Immersive technologies where motion tracking is a key technology. According to Goldman Sachs, VR Ecosystem has a significant presence of US players but HTC is also very actively leading and growing in the Immersive Virtual Reality experience with their Vibe product and its motion tracking solutions. The extraordinary boom in the VR/AR and Mixed reality markets is a boost for the extraordinarily performing Korean Ecosystem of large Chaebol Industrial conglomerates and thousands of extremely good startups that are already delivering results beyond Samsung and LG and that made the World IT Show the place to be this year in Korea. Good luck to our Premo Korea team and our Alwox joint venture.
Madrid Digital Business World Congress #DES2017
Our headquarters home country,Spain, organized this show that we attended. The Tech series, Digital Demos and Industry programs were the more interesting for an Innovative Technology Global Company like Premo. While Industry 4.0 is in everybody’s mouth, we still believe that there is no clear common understanding and that messages we received in Hanover Messe a few weeks ago is different here and that GE has a completely different vision than Microsoft or than Airbus.
Meanwhile we continue equipping our plants with our self-designed machinery fully automatic, robotized, with multi IP access with mass data recording to manage later in our data warehouse in our cloud and with the possibility to manage, supervise and control from the cloud or in remote all our robots, lines and test equipment in Vietnam, Tangiers and Wuxi. Flexibility, productivity, co-working human–bots and AI applied to lessons learned to build faster, with more flexibility and lower Capex is our Industry 4.0 goal inPremo. For this our Fablab Innovation center in Málaga has a complete different mission than our competitors.
We do not develop Electromagnetic Motion Trackers for VR but processes and production lines that can produce them massively , quickly and inexpensively with reliability. The output of our Innovation center is a machine or a line and not a product. Again in DES2017, we heard about the rise of bots and the need to make them cognitive and again, Watson from IBM everywhere. Is it real? Yes. Is it so good and ready as presented this week and by IBM? We still believe that there is some hype to this but also that IBM is investing and taking a good position in the race but Watson will need to evolve to be easily accessible to technology SME’s .
We missed in the congress more specific applications for VR /AR and Mixed reality. Being that eHealth is a challenge in the world and a priority targeted in Europe and Edtech is a clear way to educate better and more efficiently our doctors and surgeons and the extraordinary role that Augmented Reality plays in the surgery room with the latest generations of precision position and motion trackers for AR, this field of the Digital Transformation is going to change the way we are treated in hospitals and the ways our doctors learn, experience and act was quite missing. Nevertheless the congress left some clear lessons:
- There is no scaling up without a great product.
- Rosa Garcia (CEO of Siemens) :
- “ La empresa que no se digitalice tendrá serios problemas para competir”
- “ Customers want fully customised products”
- Dioni Nespral ( Everys) “The most important asset in Digital Transformation is Talent”
That is all this week. Enjoy the VR/AR Immersive technologies News!
