The State of VR: CES 2018
Maybe I’m a week late. Or two. 20/20 in hindsight, right? But what happens in Vegas dictates the next twelve months of hype. Or so it seems. So what happened in Vegas this year in VR? A helluva lot.
The Global Stage of Innovation introduced plenty anew for 2018, with the main servings on the menu focused primarily on robotics (seriously: robots everywhere), smart-homes and IoT, the all saving technology known as 5G, voice command technology, driver-less technology with ADAS and of course, AR/MR/VR.
Sitting slightly behind the main events were ‘sleep-tech’, data security and smart city devices. Some of the demos I saw for the latter were extremely impressive and with enough interest and early adoption the society and advertising of tomorrow could well represent something from a Philip K. Dick’s wet-dream. Furthermore, pet technology seems to be a budding vertical given the amount of booths displaying smart leashes and automatic feeders, as does elderly care solutions, but perhaps the most bizarre demonstration I fell victim to was an inventive marketing scheme by none other than Netflix. Well played, you clever bastards.
But, for the second year in a row, the focus on VR was apparent everywhere. I sometimes couldn’t tell if headsets at booths were just cheap tricks for retention or if the companies were actually working in the field, but the most apparent factor was that the focus was not on the software or content side, there were some, but mainly on the hardware end.
Headsets. Headsets everywhere.
I still have marks on my face from the countless ‘demos’ I subjected myself to. HTC, Lenovo, Pico, Huawei and Pimax all reeled in attendees with their new releases. The new wireless Vive Pro headset perhaps stole the headlines, especially with its wireless adapter, and it’s clear the focus is on direct competition with the upcoming Oculus Go. I wonder if the price will be comparable?
Pico entered the fold as potential disruptors on the wireless front with both the Goblin and Neo headsets. The Goblin is the standard all-in-one affordable VR headset that is a completely self-contained and easy to use solution to rival more mobile headsets such as the Daydream or the Gear, but you don’t need to strap a phone inside. The Neo, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast. More robust, heavy and industrially designed, it allows for 6DOF, again without wires, using leading head-tracking technology and new ultrasonic controllers to allow the user to look around objects and grant the freedom of movement that has been desperately lacking thus far. I was very impressed, even if I did tweak my neck testing the limitations.
Lenovo, building on their status as quiet leaders in the Virtual Reality market on the back of their Star Wars AR headset and Explorer MR headset, revealed their new showpiece — the Mirage Solo with Daydream. The headset is another addition to the tether-less new HMD outlook. Building off of the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 835 VR platform, it allows the headset to support top-of-the-range VR experiences whilst granting mobility for its user. Again, another impressive edition to their current offering in the industry.
Cameras. Cameras everywhere.
Another day, another VR camera. It seemed as if all the major players had some sort of announcement in terms of cameras, even if it was just updates.
Perhaps the most obvious booth in the VR/AR section of the LVCC South Hall, literally right as you entered, was none other than Insta360, fitting considering the CES innovation awards they gathered for pretty much everything they have. For the past year their announcements and cameras have taken the lead in affordable but high-end performance capture and the results are consistently excellent. The Insta360 Pro is finally starting to be recognized as one of the go-to’s for stereoscopic 360 production capture, at first the price point seemed to scare people away (I heard ‘it’s too cheap!’ so many times), but that’s the point. Remember the Ozo? Their booth had a number of different demonstrations, from the latency of their live streaming (approx. 2.5 seconds) and the quality of their stereoscopic capture to the two new camera announcements: The upcoming Insta360 Titan 10K camera and the as-of-yet-unnamed 6DOF light-field lens array. The price point for the Titan is approximately $12,000, a large jump from the $3499 tag on the Pro.
Vuze, boasting a monumental booth space, unveiled the Vuze+, an upgraded version of their stalwart consumer 3D 360° camera, adding live-streaming preview and broadcast capabilities, 3D audio, and boasting improved resolution. Camera cosmetics were also announced including new rubber protective cases and a waterproof housing, which remarkably costs three times more than the camera itself. However the quality of their live streaming was demonstrated through Facebook on each day of the show and garnered high view-counts. Their price point remains their secret weapon: $1,195 for a live-streaming 3D 360° camera is commendable.
Intel is doing VR. A lot of it. Since their acquisition of Voke VR in late 2016, the focus has been on immersive sports coverage and broadcasting that has all been preparation for the upcoming Olympics: A True Immersive VR Experience. There was just not enough time to slap my face into every headset they had lying around but I managed to try out the broadcast experience. Using gaze-click functions to switch between 180° VR camera angles was an interesting way to allow the user to explore the game on show. It will certainly be a new experience for watching sports and will be launched alongside next month’s winter Olympics. From what I got to try out it was very much a step forward for how sports can become even more interactive through the medium. The camera itself was also shown, a heavy-duty array of lenses, that will be positioned in every angle in South Korea this winter and in Tokyo in two years time.
See Everything. That’s the tagline for Yi, another emerging player in VR capture. Perhaps a direct competitor to GoPro, their 4K/60fps action camera is how I first learnt about them, and got to play around with. At a good price point ($399) it’s capture is just as good as any other action cameras out there (and this is spoken from a GoPro fanboy) and its picture quality is fantastic. They also make smart home, outdoor and mirror-less cameras. They have two separate VR cameras of mention: The Yi 360, a monoscopic 5.7K small device that could be thought of as a sister camera to the GoPro Fusion, and more importantly, the gigantic 8K x 8K Yi HALO. A joint venture with Google Jump, it claims to be the most advanced 3D-360° camera, featuring 17 unit cameras and supports 6K at 60fps and 8K at 30fps. From what’s shown online already, the footage and stereoscopic capture looks excellent.
In terms of CES Innovation Awards in VR, Detu, another Chinese VR player, announced two different cameras. The first, the F4 plus, was honored for its ability to shoot 8K using a four lens monoscopic array, and the Detu Max, another 8K 3D 360° camera was announced as being the first VR camera equipped with an AI chip. No footage was available for the Max, but the 8K resolution from the F4 was very neat, albeit 2D.
By now the trend of certain 3D 360° cameras not having footage on site for demos is extremely worrying. Especially because there are headsets everywhere.
LooxidVR, another honoree, presents a mobile VR headset with built in eye-tracking and brain sensors. By attempting to present an emotion recognition system optimized for Virtual Reality, the startup is combining two major points of human interaction with 360 spaces in an effort to provide content creators, yes those imaginary VR people, with analytics and data to optimize future experiences. By knowing how people feel and respond this headset may be the first of its kind to function as a multi-faceted VR tool. Impressive stuff.
Another main point of interest was VR wearable’s and among the honoree’s were some extremely intriguing startups. Orbi, a company making VR glasses for POV capture, announced their long awaited product since the success of their late 2016 kick-starter campaign. By positioning four wide angle lenses at four points of the glasses (front two corners, back two corners) they are able to capture 360° video as well as their own internal stitching and editing software for quick delivery to social media networks. The design of the glasses themselves are sporty and durable and the message is clear: hands free recording on the go.
Fitt360 is another intriguing prospect and honoree in the wearable vertical, allowing you to ‘wear and share your world in 360°’ by creating a new way of storytelling. Their product is a collar that sits around your neck, again equipped with three cameras, two in the back and one in the front, and allows live view mode and real-time sharing. Videos are automatically stitched and once again aimed at the mobile device and social media use case. Its innovative and the quality of the videos is actually rather good.
The world of AR was a huge hit. But it wasn’t easy to actually find an ‘AR’ section so to speak. Mixed in alongside the VR floor space were smaller AR demo booths filled with cool MR headsets demonstrating interesting use cases but the major AR showcases at the show were deeply ingrained in many other technologies already.
Driver-less and automated vehicles were one of the main attractions, and all featured AR reliant applications. From dashboard and windscreen projections, such as WayRay, to ADAS centered machine recognition (NVIDIA and Nissan both had huge ADAS centered demos), the implementation of depth mapping, planar tracking and 3D object insertion is opening the doors for many applications, not limited to automotive. AR, as a framework, could potentially be the secret to unlocking that killer app — be it advertising, enterprise, screen-less interaction — we already saw it on show this year. For instance, HoloLamp, another startup exhibiting in Eureka Park, are already on their way to realizing the screen-less capabilities of AR.
So what’s the conclusion? VR is not dead.
It’s everywhere. Any article reviewing CES will probably feature someone inside a headset, but it’s important to see where the issues still lie. At Suometry, we continually work to improve and perfect our stereoscopic capture capabilities and as such this is what we show as our main demo. Sure, it would be easy to go out and record something beautiful and put it on display but it doesn’t demonstrate our two main strengths: speed and 3D. And for the other VR companies offering high-end stereoscopic capture the lack of real-time demonstration is frustrating. I would argue that full stereoscopic capture, aside from a few, is still very much fighting its way through the house of smoke and mirrors. But live-streaming is finally getting more of an emphasis, and aside from cameras and headsets hatching like tadpoles, the killer app is still not known. Content is still finding its way and until it does, gaming will still be the winner.
All in all, it should be an intriguing twelve months ahead.
