Last week there has been the CES, maybe the biggest technology show of the year. As it is a tradition of this blog, I have read everything I could about the AR and VR technologies showcased there, and I’ve condensed all the news in a single article, that you can skim fast until you find a topic you are interested in.

Before starting, let me just tell you that if you like this kind of posts, please subscribe to my newsletter and donate to my Patreon to support me writing them. If instead, you need a consultancy about AR/VR for your business, feel free to contact me. That said, let’s start!

AR and VR at CES

This CES has been very good for augmented and virtual reality, but it has not been exciting.

From what I’ve been able to read, AR and VR were everywhere on the showfloor: there were not only the XR companies showcasing their devices (e.g. Pico, nReal, etc…), but also other companies using AR and VR as a cool way to show their products, and other companies teasing AR as a future feature for their solutions. For instance, many automotive producers were teasing the use of AR windshields in the future. Some time ago, someone talked about the fact that “VR is dead”, but after this CES, I can confirm that VR is alive and kicking. XR maybe will take some time to become mainstream, but it is here to stay: the interest is growing.

Notwithstanding this great enthusiasm, though, there has been no disruptive XR news from this CES. Last year we had nReal showing us that AR can be trendy, and HTC making us dream with the Vive Cosmos. This year on the show floor have been presented mostly linear evolutions of existing devices, clones of other headsets or prototypical solutions. Nothing that will shake the ecosystem.

Yes, the biggest companies were not there with a booth (Oculus will probably target the OC6, HTC the VEC, etc…), but it is the first time that I read the XR news from CES and I dont’ remain surprised.

I think that this CES is the emblem of the whole 2020, that probably won’t show big disruptions in the XR field, but will make AR and VR grow linearly, exploiting the successes of VR in 2019 (when Quest and Valve Index went sold-out). This year, I expect incremental innovations, interesting accessories and compelling content (like Half-Life: Alyx), that will make AR and VR grow, but I don’t expect any earthquake.

One of the funniest moments of Abrash’s talk at OC6… when he told us that VR will take more than expected to reach second gen

That will probably happen later on. Michael Abrash at OC6 stated that truly next-gen VR will happen in some years, and consumer AR will take even more, and until that time we will just enjoy incremental evolutions (more framerate, more resolution, etc…). This means that probably we’ll need to wait at least for CES 2021 or 2022 to see again something that will truly amaze us. We’ll wait.

nReal

Me trying the nReal Light glasses in Beijing

The symbol of this incremental growth is nReal, that has been chosen by the epic journalist Charlie Fink as the most interesting XR gadget of 2019, the one that everyone wanted to try… even if it featured very little innovations over last year’s version. (But I’ve put it at the first place of this roundup because I don’t want to contradict the mighty Charlie Fink!) The lightweight fashionable AR glasses have attracted the interest of many people and journalists, and the company is preparing for a great launch of its consumer-oriented HMD for $500 in Q2-Q3 2020.

A little cute kitten seen through nReal lenses. As you can see, its colors make it pretty believable

nReal at CES has announced some strategic partnerships and some content.

As for the partnerships, the most intriguing one is the one with my friends at 7Invensun, one of the worldwide leading companies in eye-tracking technologies. I guess nReal will experiment with eye-tracking for a new version of the headset, maybe targeted at the enterprise market. The partnership with 6d.ai, instead, will help the Chinese manufacturer in having a less shaky positional tracking and also in offering virtual elements that get occluded by real ones.

nReal has just a 3DOF controller (that can also just be your smartphone), but it has just announced that you can pair it with Finch controllers or Black Shark gaming kit to play 6DOF games all around your home.

It has also partnered with various Chinese phone carriers, so that the device will be used to perform 5G demos.

These partnerships make nReal glasses more complete and efficient, and also give a vision of how will be the future iterations of the device (that will have eye tracking and 6DOF controllers for sure).

Regarding content, nReal has showcased some nice demos like an AR application that shows you how we will buy clothes in the future and a clone of Fruit Ninja in AR. But the most important innovation is for sure Nebula, the UI of the glasses.

PORTAL with Nrealの体験イメージ pic.twitter.com/HXkmJmSh5u — KAJI / MESON CEO 😎 (@kajikent) January 7, 2020

Nebula has a great vision, the one of giving you infinite screens all over your room, an interface that is natural and beautiful to be seen, and the possibility of using your 2D applications of the smartphone on a big virtual screen that you can pin everywhere (imagine watching Netflix on it!). Unluckily, the reality is still a bit different, and the UI at the moment looks like a standard big menu with circular icons. Furthermore, the FOV of only 52° makes it difficult enjoying movies on a big screen.

On the left you can see the concept graphics of Nebula UI, while on the right a screenshot taken by Android Central that shows how it is now (Image from Android Central)

Next year, Nreal Light will launch to consumers. It will be the first AR glass truly for consumers, and I’m curious to see how it will perform: the price is right, the phone connection is cool as well… but will the average consumer find the applications on it compelling enough? We’ll discover it in some months…

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nReal clones

Am Glass glasses. Do they look like another AR glass that you know? (Image by Pacific Future)

As it is a tradition in the Far East, if a product proves to be successful, many clones start popping up like mushrooms proposing more or less the same thing. And since nReal is the AR device of the moment, many Chinese companies are trying to emulate it. I’ve seen many photos of journalists at CES wearing colored AR glasses that are similar to nReal, but that are not the nReal Light.

Two examples are 0Glasses and Am Glasses: they try offering a similar product at a cheaper price (e.g. Am Glasses devkit cost $100 less than nReal), hoping to get a share of the market. These companies have already been able to get some partnerships with Chinese carriers to perform 5G demos, and it will be interesting to see how (and if) they’ll grow from now on. They also make promotional videos that are a mix of futurism and a healthy dose of WTF, like this one:

nReal has still a big strategic advantage, though. It is more or less the only glass of this kind known in the west, it has the best product among them (according to the reviews), and it has the best partnerships. Anyway, the Chinese startup landscape is very fast and competitive, so it is possible that a company that looks weird now will be successful in the future. Let’s see.

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Panasonic

The most photographed headset after nReal Light has been the Panasonic VR headset.

The Panasonic VR headset is very cool! Great pixel density and ingenious IPD/focus personalization. pic.twitter.com/cFS7LwvRa8 — Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) January 8, 2020

Panasonic has just showcased at CES this prototypical 3DOF VR headset, that has gone viral for its cool-looking steampunk design. Wearing it, you immediately look like an evil character from a steampunk novel.

We know very little about it. The glasses feature very high resolution (no mention of the actual pixels) and a very limited field of view (around 70° diagonal). They mount two Kopin OLED microdisplays, that are able to keep the glasses little while giving a very big pixel density. Trying it, many people have praised the fact that the screen-door-effect was almost inexistent. Thanks to the OLED displays and the fact that this is the first headset ever supporting HDR, everyone also loved the quality of the imagery.

They also feature integrated audio via earphones (a pretty original solution) and mechanical IPD adjustment, also this offered with an ingenious mechanism:

Panasonic has used many technologies it has developed while producing other devices (e.g. Blue-Ray players) to create this high-quality product. And it has also some ideas to improve the limited FOV and to offer 6DOF tracking. Regarding the last point, I’m a bit skeptical because this would mean adding additional cameras, and so weight and complexity to the current design (that weights only 150 grams).

These glasses are very similar to the Huawei VR glasses. When I tried Huawei VR glasses, I predicted they would have disrupted the market of VR viewers, and it seems that I was right. All companies producing 3DOF headsets are now going towards that form factor, which makes the headsets look like big sunglasses and not like shoeboxes. And these headsets all work by being connected to the PC or an Android phone.

Rear view of the Panasonic glasses (Image by Upload VR)

Someone may argue that 3DOF is not VR, but actually, from my experience as a consultant, I can tell you that there is still room for 3DOF viewers as media consumption devices (e.g. to watch movies when you are on a plane in full privacy) in both the consumers and enterprise spaces and this form factor helps a lot in making media viewers usable also in public places.

Panasonic is looking for partners and customers to fully develop this concept into a VR product. I’m very curious to discover what will be the reception of the market if they will ever be released.

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Pico Neo 2

Pico Neo 2 and Pico Neo 2 Eye (Image by Pico Interactive)

Chinese producer Pico Interactive has released at CES the Neo 2, its latest standalone VR headset. And it is a pretty interesting device, that has some specifications that are better than the top devices on the market, that is the Oculus Quest and Vive Focus Plus. It features:

Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 reference design

4K (3,840 × 2,160) total resolution

101° FOV

75Hz refresh rate

128 GB of storage

Integrated audio + 3.5mm jack

Wi-fi + Bluetooth connectivity

Software IPD Adjustment

Two 6DOF controllers (tracked with electromagnetic technology)

Optional eye tracking (offered by Tobii)

Weight balancing by putting the battery on the back of the head

As you can see, it is a pretty interesting headset, and also the price is very good: $700 for the standard Neo 2 and $900 for the Neo 2 Eye (the one with integrated eye tracking).

By putting the battery on the back of the head, the Neo 2 solves the weight balancing problem of the Oculus Quest (Image by Road To VR)

Someone wonders if this may be the Quest killer, and my answer is no. This is a device that targets the enterprise market, because Pico knows that it can’t compete on the consumers’ side with the Quest that costs only $399, has a huge library of compelling content (including Beat Saber and other cool games) and is also more polished. In fact, also its controllers don’t look very sexy, but they are really ok for enterprise use.

Pico Neo 2 controllers. They are not beautiful, but functional. They are based on the Atraxa reference design (Image by Road To VR)

And I think that for the enterprise this may be a solid device. Pico has a great expertise in handling enterprise users, this device costs $300 less than the enterprise version of the Oculus Quest, and it is more powerful. It may also feature eye tracking, that can be very important for some training applications. The reviews highlight that Pico has also solved many of the issues haunting the Neo 1, which had a terrible tracking, and now both the controllers and the headset have a good tracking. It is not as perfect as Oculus Insight, it still features movements that are not completely fluid, but for standard enterprise usage (mainly in training applications), it is more than ok.

So yes, this could become the Quest killer, but in the enterprise sector. The card that Oculus can still play is offering a better service (assistance, device management, etc…), but we will discover if this will be the case when Oculus will finally launch its Oculus for Business program, that is having continuous delays.

Pico has also shown the prototype of a new device, the Pico G3 Light, that is the evolution of the Pico Goblin, slimming down the form factor to a pair of big sunglasses. Yes, this is another device inspired by the Huawei sunglasses, very good for media consumption.

The specifications look pretty cool as well:

1,600 × 1,600 LCD display per eye

90Hz refresh rate

Software IPD adjustment

0-800 diopter adjustment for each eye

3DOF motion controller

Phone connectivity

Ben Lang wearing the Pico G3 (Image by Road To VR)

It is also interesting to note that this viewer can feature such a small form factor thanks to the use of pancake lenses developed by Pico itself. As Ben Lang of Road To VR explains very well, pancake lenses are very important:

The pancake lens approach condenses the length of the optical path by ‘folding’ it back on itself through the use of polarized light and multiple lens elements. This approach has various tradeoffs, but allows the display to be much closer to the lens compared to the simple, single lenses found in most consumer headsets today. Benjamin Lang, Road To VR

Differences between Fresnel and Pancake lenses (Image by Oculus, from Road To VR)

The icing on the cake is that Mozilla has just announced that Firefox Reality is coming to Pico devices very soon.

Pico is one of the companies to follow in the enterprise sector for 2020.

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Pimax

The banner advertising the Pimax Artisan in December (Image by Pimax)

Pimax could have been the big news of this CES, but it has been not. Some days before the beginning of the CES, I got the insider info that the Pimax Artisan, the new low-cost headset of the company would have cost $449 while offering 1700×1440 resolution per eye, 170° FOV and up to 120 Hz of refreshrate. I was excited because with that low price it could have disrupted the whole VR market, costing more or less like a Rift S, but having much superior specifications.

Actually, it has not happened. Pimax has yes announced the Artisan, and yes its price starts at $449, but for THE HEADSET ONLY. If you add the controllers, base stations, etc… more or less you obtain the same price of the Valve Index. This is not much exciting. Pimax thinks that to lower the cost you can use the Artisan together with NOLO Positional tracking, but honestly, I think that NOLO is a solution that is mostly suitable for cardboards, but it is no good if you want to play very active VR games.

Pimax has also announced a new headset: the 5K Super, a device with 5K resolution plus the astonishing refreshrate of 180Hz, the highest on the market. We have no price info on this device, but we can expect it to be around $700-$800 (for the headset only, of course).

The Pimax 8K X in all its majesty (Image by Tom’s Hardware)

Interested users have also been able to try the Pimax 8K X, the super-powerful headset that Pimax teased during its Kickstarter campaign (a bit late, so). The headset’s resolution and field of view are impressive (4K per eye, up to 200° diagonal FOV), and the headset feels quite comfortable. The company is also working on reducing the distortions of the lenses and the other problems that always affect this kind of high-FOV headsets. The good news is that finally, it should be close to ready and it should ship in March-April 2020.

I think that Pimax has to completely rework its strategy. At CES, it has announced two new headsets, while still having delays in offering the devices and accessories it had already promised. I love how Pimax wants to innovate the VR market, but I think that it should realize that it is just a little startup and so it has not infinite money: it should focus in offering very well 1 or 2 models, instead of proposing 6 headsets. This strategy creates problems in the manufacturing line (and so many delays) and also confuses a lot the customers. For instance, does someone know the differences between the 5K Super, 5K Plus and 5K XR?

Thanks God, Road To VR has made a great table to compare all the devices:

Vision 8KX Vision 8K Plus 5K Super Resolution (per lens) 3,840 x 2,160 3,840 x 2,160 2,560 x 1,440 Display type LCD, RGB stripe LCD, RGB stripe LCD, RGB stripe Rendering Native 4K per eye Upscale 1440p to 4K Native 2,560 x 1,440 FOV 200° (D), 170° (H), 115° (V) 200° (D), 170° (H), 115° (V) 200° (D), 170° (H), 115° (V) Refresh rate 75/120 Hz 110/90 Hz 180/160 Hz Included headstrap Modular Audio Strap (MAS) Modular Audio Strap (MAS) Modular Audio Strap (MAS) Price $1,299 $999 ???

5K Plus 5K XR Artisan Resolution (per lens) 2,560 x 1,440 2,560 x 1,440 1,700 x 1,440 Display type LCD, RGB stripe OLED LCD, RGB stripe Rendering Native 2,560 x 1,440 Native 2,560 x 1,440 Native 1,700 x 1,440 FOV 200° (D), 170° (H), 115° (V) 200° (D), 170° (H), 115° (V) 170° (D), 140° (H), 115° (V) Refresh rate 120/90 Hz 85 Hz 120/90 Hz Included headstrap Flexible (MAS optional) Flexible (MAS optional) Flexible (MAS optional) Price $699 $899 $449 (basic), $??? (Nolo VR version)

Doing this way, it has hurt its reputation. I really hope it will manage to recover from the errors of the past, because it is offering very interesting devices.

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NOLO VR

A guy playing with NOLO N2 + NOLO CV1 Pro (Image by NOLO)

Nolo wasn’t at CES just to propose itself as the tracking system of the Pimax headsets and the Huawei glasses. It has also launched what it claims to be “The first 6DOF Cloud VR solution”: the NOLO N2 VR headset + NOLO CV1 Pro-Motion tracking kit, for less than $200.

My hat is down for Nolo, that has managed to add in only one sentence many fluffy marketing tech words. What is defined as “The first 6DOF Cloud VR solution” is basically a cardboard with attached Nolo positional tracking system. The idea is that if the phone is 5G, it could be used to play games from the Cloud. It could be nice for Chinese phone operators to showcase their 5G technology, but I don’t envision it being much relevant for consumers, at first because Cardboard viewers are dead, and then because 5G will need a lot of time to be rolled out around the world… and there isn’t an infrastructure to stream VR content via 5G yet.

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VRSS

VRSS, or Variable Rate Super Sampling, is one of the most important news announced at CES 2020. It is a new technology by NVIDIA that lets you super-sample only a certain part of the frame rendering on your screen, and render normally all the rest.

What does it mean? Imagine it as a special case of foveated rendering, but working in the opposite way. So instead of rendering with a lower quality the parts of the images that your eyes can’t see properly, you render with a higher quality the parts that fall in your fovea and that you can see very well. This region gets “supersampled”, that is it gets rendered at a higher resolution and then shrunk to the required size. The result is an image where you can appreciate better the details and the quality of the visuals is generally higher. Since most famous headsets lack eye tracking, this region rendered with higher quality is always at the center of your vision (for now).

Spiderman frame rendered without super-sampling (left) and with super-sampling (right). Notice the difference in quality (Image by Babel Tech Reviews)

NVIDIA has made this mechanism adaptive, that is you can let the runtime decide how big should be this “high-resolution area”: if the system is rendering the frames pretty fast, then this area will be bigger, if it is struggling to keep the pace with the game engine, this area will be little or non-existent.

VRSS already works with the latest drivers of NVIDIA RTX graphics cards and it is supported in 24 VR games, among which popular titles like Boneworks and Lone Echo. Since it must not be implemented by the developer, actually you can try activating it also for games that are not officially supported. Keep in mind that the game must support MSAA and forward rendering for this to work.

VRSS with eye tracking (Image by NVIDIA)

People that own a NVIDIA RTX card will be very happy of the added performances that VRSS can add to their VR games!

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Samsung AR glasses

Probably the true surprise of the whole show has been Samsung, that during its press conference has teased some AR glasses. On the stage, it showed an exoskeleton called GEMS (Gait Enhancing & Motivating System), that could be used together with a pair of AR glasses connected to a Galaxy Phone to perform a workout together with a virtual trainer.

Yeah, the 3D model of the trainer seems taken from the Unity Asset Store…

Samsung has not talked about the glasses, not even revealing the name, or the specifications. They look like the nReal Light (another clone?) but we know zero about it. I guess they just wanted us to know they are working on this technology. Ok Samsung, you have our attention. Especially mine, since I have developed an MR fitness game…

NEON

Neon is a project about realistic avatars by Samsung subsidiary STAR Labs. Imagine Neon as “artificial humans”, as the company loves calling them. They are virtual avatars that look very realistic, and that can interact with you in a natural way. That is, you can talk with a Neon avatar, you can see him/her smile, you can perform some activities with him/her, you can become his/her friend. What is important is that these interactions will never be scripted. For instance, the avatar can smile, and exactly like humans, he will never smile in the same way again. Thanks to machine learning, the software has analyzed millions of smiles, and so can perform a smile that is every time different, because it knows what a smile is.

Neon avatars can work independently, or they can be commanded by a control panel: during the demos, an operator was able to control for instance the eye and the lips of every avatar, letting him/her do what he wished, or he could just let the avatar behave as he preferred.

NEON’s CEO Pranav Mistry introducing the project at CES (Image by Sam Byford, The Verge)

Don’t call Neon Avatars “smart assistants” though: Neon’s CEO Pranav Mistry could get angry 🙂 . He says that these avatars are not assistant, they are not there to fulfill your orders. They are like people that are in the same room of you, with which you can talk and spend your time. In fact, Neon avatars are programmed to behave like humans and for instance, they can get tired or bored and not care about you that much.

At this time, you may ask yourself: why should I need a companion that can get bored of me? Aren’t true humans enough for this? Well, I don’t know.

On one side, I’m truly excited by Neon, and the realistic movements of its avatars. I found this demo about it astonishing, actually. A very pleasant surprise, also imagining that in the future these avatars can be in the same room with you in augmented reality. The virtual people seem real in this video by Cathy Hackl:

On the other side, the more I learnt about it, the more I felt confused. First of all, the project is in very early stages, and the virtual avatars that you see from the videos have actually been recorded from real humans. The applied animations are all created by the system (the always different smiles), but the videos are just videos of people. As Engadget says “The early Neon videos which wowed everyone last week were fluid and realistic. But that was because they were really just videos of humans. At the booth, Neon caveated their lifesize avatars with little disclaimers at the bottom of each screen. These were just visions of how Neons could look and behave in the future.”

STAR Labs has not let journalists have private demos with the system, but only scripted shows were allowed, and this is another sign of things still not working very well. In fact, when CNET went talking with Neon AI, the result was an avatar talking like a stoned person:

Cringy moments…

Regarding the “always different facial animations”, Engadget’s Mat Smith claims having counted only two different types of smiles on the avatars.

And then the whole system to work at CES required a PC with 128 cores. Something that we all already have in our homes.

A final mention for the CEO Pranav Mistry. He speaks in a too visionary way, he says that “he has no business model” for Neon, and he’s just doing this to be remembered in the future like Michelangelo when he painted the Cappella Sistina (Sistine Chapel). This kind of talking remembers me too much the one of another person in the XR field: Rony Abovitz. And in fact, Neon reminds me a bit too much Magic Leap’s Mica project.

Seeing the troubles Magic Leap is in, I wonder how Neon will go…

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Sony Playstation

Sony was the only VR big player present at the show. But it has not said that much about VR, if not that Playstation VR has finally reached the 5 million sales mark (something that we all more or less expected). This confirms that PSVR is the most sold tethered headset on the market, but it is interesting to see that its sales are actually slowing down. I think it’s pretty normal, considering that the device is now a bit old, and that PS4 is at the end of its lifecycle.

(Image from Road To VR)

Sony has also unveiled the name of the new PlayStation. I don’t know if you were ever able to guess it, but its name will be PlayStation 5. Surprised? Well, I know… when these Japanese companies use all their fantasy they are always able to amaze us. And the logo is another touch of class. This is the exclusive footage of the graphic designer designing PS5’s logo:

Jokes apart, compliments to Sony for this great result. I hope to learn more about PSVR 2 very soon. I’m also curious because Sony has told that it has not announced the biggest difference of PS5 with regard to PS4 yet...

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HTC

HTC had not a booth at CES this year, after 3 years of consecutive interesting announcements. But it has said Upload that it will show “a new vision for Vive” soon.

I don’t know what this means, but I’m sure that HTC will have to do its move this year. With the Pico Neo 2 costing less than the Vive Focus Plus by offering more features and the Vive Pro starting looking a bit old, I think it will have to release at least a new device for enterprise and some new accessories. We will see.

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XTAL 8K

My friends at VRgineers have showcased an evolution of the XTAL headset (that confusingly still just calls XTAL) that features a dual 4K display, and for this reason, is called “8K”… because in the VR world no one knows how to properly count the pixels.

As you can expect, this headset offers crystal clear vision with also a big field of view of 180°. It also features eye tracking and hands tracking (via Ultraleap), and is so very compelling for the enterprise market. Eye tracking is also used to offer foveated rendering, so that this headset can run on PCs already available on the market notwithstanding its great resolution. The price, in case you want to adopt it into your business, is $8000.

I haven’t found significant reviews on the various magazines, especially because I wanted to know if the Czech company has managed to make the headset a bit lighter than the XTAL that I’ve tried one year ago and that was pretty heavy. But I’ve read they’re working on improving the distortions of the lenses and that’s positive.

A final mention for the fact that this is the first headset to my knowledge to implement the VirtualLink connector to attach to your graphics card.

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NextMind

You know that I’m a huge fan of BCI (Brain Computer Interfaces), because I think they’re the final form of man-machine interfaces (I’ve also written a long article on them some years ago). At CES, it has been unveiled a new device of this kind, called NextMind, that can integrate well with AR/VR headsets, and that has an affordable price of $399.

NextMind is another device working using EEG: it has some sensors that touching your head read your brainwaves and can so detect your mental state (e.g. if you are focused or not) and also somewhat what you’re thinking about. I say “somewhat” because EEG can just infer the output of a big numbers of neurons together, so they’re good to understand some high-level state of the brain, but they can’t fine read what little parts of the brains (or single neurons) are doing.

Nextmind device. In this photo you can see the electrodes that read your brain waves. You can put it in the rear of a VR headset, to use it in VR (Image by Road To VR)

The main innovation of NextMind is the material of the electrodes that touch your skin. They can read brainwaves even if you don’t apply any gel like you do in the hospital. And the mind-reading operation, thanks to this, works pretty well: the creator claims a Signal-to-noise ratio 4 times superior to the one of clinical EEGs.

Venture Beat’s Emil Protalinski has gone hands-on with it, and remained pretty impressed. He tried various test apps, where he was able to change the channel of the TV just by looking at a visual interface; he could choose the color of a lamp by just fixating a color; he was able to shoot at big-brained enemies in VR by just looking at them.

All of this is at the moment possible just thanks to some visual tricks that help the system in understanding what you are fixing your attention on: e.g. in the shooting demo of the video above, the brains of the aliens are pulsating to help the detection. NextMind’s CEO claims that this could be removed in the future, and that mixing eye tracking and BCI it will be possible to make amazing things, like creating UIs that don’t need the use of the hands.

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Kura

I wondered if Kura was at CES, and actually it was there, but not with a public booth. Kura CEO Kelly Peng contacted me on Twitter to propose me a demo, but I haven’t been able to do that because well, I wasn’t at CES.

The good news is so that Kura was there and was showcasing a prototype. This makes me think that this startup is not all fluff and has something interesting to show. The problem will be understanding if they will manage to arrive at the production of a commercial product, and according to Kelly, it is going to happen next year.

For people who wonder: we (Kura) are having initial batch of low quantity unit of optics system mainly for a few major strategic partners/clients in this Mar-Apr. Initial commercial units: Q3-Q4. Mass production version early 2021. People are interested feel free to pin. — Kelly Peng (@ZiqiPeng) January 9, 2020

Good luck to her and her team.

Vuzix M4000

Vuzix has announced M4000, the first enterprise smartglasses featuring optical waveguides. Waveguides will be important because they will let workers see transparent non-occluding overlays, something that is very important in maintenance scenarios (currently most industrial smartglasses just feature an opaque mini screen next to one of the eyes, that’s why this is so different).

Concept of the M4000 glasses (Image by Vuzix)

This comes at a big price: the glasses will cost $2499 and will be available in the second part of the year. Since they are based on the Snapdragon XR1 platform like the previous model M400, applications developed for the M400 should be compatible with the M4000.

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JBD

Jade Bird Display is a Chinese display manufacturer and it has showcased at CES two very interesting displays that could be amazing for AR and VR.

The brightest display you can imagine (Image by Road To VR)

One display is little as a penny and can emit up to 3 million nits. “Nits” measure the brightness of a display, and to put that number in context, the PC monitor I am looking to write this post is around 300 nit. This means that this microdisplay is 10,000 times brighter than my monitor. It could make people blind in no time at full power. But why should this be useful? As Road To VR points out, the more nits the better, so the optical system of the VR headset can be less light-efficient: for instance, you can manufacture an affordable device with cheaper lenses that disperse the light, because you have 3 million nits to waste.

So many pixels in a so tiny display (Image by Road To VR)

The other cool display has “just” 150,000 nits and features the amazing resolution of 2,560×1,440 pixels in just 0.31′ diagonal space (it is smaller than the coin of a penny). The PPI is 10,000, more than enough to remove the screen door effect from VR headsets.

These micro displays show us how the future of XR can be, with very tiny and very powerful displays, that can make XR more realistic and affordable. But they are not the present: JBD’s micro LED displays are monochromatic and only offer 256 color levels, so at the moment they may just be useful for notification smartglasses or research projects.

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CREAL

Scott Hayden looking through CREAL’s visor (Image by Road To VR)

In 2019, Road To VR’s Ben Lang tried CREAL light-field display and defined it as the most interesting device of CES. This year, he’s gone hands-on with it again, and confirmed his opinion.

Lightfields are a display technology that doesn’t feature a standard screen, but actually tries to generate the light rays that would hit your eyes if you were actually seeing in real life the scene that you’re seeing in VR. It is a very complicated technology, but if made real, it could make the virtual elements more believable and would also solve the vergence-accommodation problem. Basically VR vision would become like real vision.

CREAL has managed to shrink its technology to fit this visor. But this still needs a big box to work properly (Image by Road To VR)

At CES 2020, CREAL showed that it managed to reduce the light field technology showcased last year, and now it just fits in a big box. But it is still very big and this kind of display is still years away from being able to fit commercial-grade devices. CREAL has just got more than $7M in funding to reach this goal, and it is already working on some interesting ideas, like reducing the electronics needed by rendering with lightfields only the part of the world that falls inside your fovea.

Good luck to it.

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Teslasuit

Teslasuit has launched at CES its haptics glove, the TeslaSuit glove, able to offer force-feedback, haptics sensations and also to gather biometric data about the user (like the heart rate). They are targeted at the enterprise market, and everything we have until now is a render, that reminds a lot the Dexmo Gloves.

The Teslasuit glove, that can be used with or without the suit from the same company (Image by Teslasuit)

No one has been able to try this glove, but some journalists have tried the Teslasuit suit. According to reviews, it can offer some interesting sensations, being able to deliver different kinds of sensations like pain (via electrical shocks), heat and cold, rumbling haptics and force feedback on the muscles. According to Road To VR, it can’t emulate all real life sensations yet, and for instance the force feedback on the muscles of the body to simulate the resistance of a virtual element is not realistic. But some other sensations, like being overwhelmed by a nearby explosion, are pretty cool.

This suit is very expensive (the price is not public, though) and can be useful in enterprise scenarios, especially for training: if the employee feels pain every time it makes a security procedure wrong, for sure the training is more efficient. It also sounds a bit like a torture, though 😀

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Thermoreal

Thermal haptics devices ThermoReal by TEGWay (Image by Road To VR)

Thermoreal is a cool device by Korean company TEGWay that lets you feel hot and cold in virtual reality. It is innovative because its main components are very light and flexible, and so they can be embedded everywhere: inside your VR suit, in your headset, etc… From my tests, it is able to deliver realistic sensations of hot and cold… even too much realistic: your skin seems to burn or to freeze, while actually the hot state is just 4°C more than your skin temperature.

Interior of the arm modules of the above picture. As you can see the components providing you thermal sensations are quite little (Image by Road To VR)

It’s cool to discover that TEGway plans to launch its first development kit in March. The kit includes the gloves, sleeves, and forehead module. The expected price is $1000.

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V.I.Pee

The most innovative concept of this CES is a toilet that lets you enjoy VR while you poop.

This is the solution we were all waiting for.

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Smart Potato

Someone has decided to troll completely the whole CES with this project of a smart potato. A fu**ing genius.

Misc

Some final interesting posts for you:

BMW has shown the concept of a windshield adding AR and VR features (Next Reality)

has shown the concept of a windshield adding AR and VR features (Next Reality) Sebastian Ang tests Yaw VR simulator (Youtube)

simulator (Youtube) Sebastian Ang interviews RealMax ‘s representative (Youtube)

‘s representative (Youtube) Hands-on with Varjo’s Workspace solution (Road To VR)

solution (Road To VR) VR Leo has shown an automatic arcade machine to let people play VR in public spaces without the need for a human assistant. Interesting concept, but I see many problems regarding hygiene, and the fact that people could easily vandalize it (Road To VR)

Interesting concept, but I see many problems regarding hygiene, and the fact that people could easily vandalize it (Road To VR) VR Power gives more battery time and more balance to the Oculus Quest (Upload VR)

gives more battery time and more balance to the Oculus Quest (Upload VR) Hands-on with HaptX gloves (Youtube). HaptX has also partnered with Shadow Robot company and Tangible Research to form the new consortium Converge Robotics Group (Converge Robotics Group)

gloves (Youtube). HaptX has also partnered with Shadow Robot company and Tangible Research to form the new consortium Converge Robotics Group (Converge Robotics Group) Looking Glass demo (Youtube)

demo (Youtube) ThirdEye X2 MR Glasses (ThirdEye)

Glasses (ThirdEye) VentureBeat’s CES Roundup (VentureBeat)

Charlie Fink’s CES Roundup (Forbes)

Sol Roger’s CES Roundup (Forbes)

I hope you enjoyed this long journey inside AR and VR at CES 2020. If it is the case, please share this post on your social media channels! Enjoy VR 😉

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