Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 HMD

Qualcomm has revealed a reference design for its new virtual and augmented reality platform. The headset offers a rough guide for building with the Snapdragon XR2, a 5G-enabled chipset designed for VR/AR hardware. The design is a prototype from electronics company Goertek, which has worked with Qualcomm before. It looks a lot like Qualcomm’s earlier XR1 reference design, but it can show off the XR2’s new capabilities, including support for 5G networks and up to seven cameras, although it still uses 2K display panels for each eye instead of the maximum 3K resolution for XR2.

Qualcomm’s VR and AR chipset lineup has become a little complicated. It’s going to keep selling the XR1, which it announced in 2018. And some headsets, like the Microsoft HoloLens 2, don’t need a specialized platform, they use normal Snapdragon chips. The XR2 includes features like the support for cameras that track eyes, lips, and external space. Virtual and augmented reality is often used to sell 5G, since super-fast internet could let headsets offload some computing power, making them thinner and lighter. Qualcomm specifically promotes VR and AR for business.

More information:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21147912/qualcomm-snapdragon-xr2-vr-ar-xr-platform-reference-design-announcement

Applied Sciences 2020 Article

Recently, HCI Lab at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic published a scientific paper at the Special Issue Virtual Reality and Its Application in Cultural Heritage, Applied Sciences, sponsored by MDPI. The paper is entitled “Investigating the Learning Process of Folk Dances Using Mobile Augmented Reality”. It presents a prototype mobile augmented reality application for assisting the process of learning folk dances. At the first stage, one folk dance was digitized using motion tracking technology based on recordings from professional dancers. 

Avatar representations are synchronized with the digital representation of the dance. To assess the effectiveness of mobile augmented reality, it was comparatively evaluated with a large back-projection system in laboratory conditions. Twenty healthy participants took part in the study, and their movements were captured using motion capture system and then compared with the recordings from the professional dancers. Experimental results indicate that augmented reality (AR) has the potential to be used for learning process.

More information:

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/2/599

Sony Patents VR Controller With Finger Tracking

A recently-published patent from Sony Interactive Entertainment suggests that the company is working on a new VR motion controller, similar to those for the Valve Index. The patent for a Controller Device outlines an input mechanism for a home-use game machine that detects movement of a user’s hand. Not only that, but the kit features a plurality of sensor units that detect the fingers of the user. These can detect the proximity or contact of a finger and outputs a finger detection signal indicating the state of proximity or contact of the finger.

The sensor units mentioned above are placed where the fingers would rest just like the sensors on the Index controllers or those embedded in an Oculus Touch controller. When the fingers are wrapped around the sensor, the controllers can relay that information to a given VR game and reflect the user’s in-game hands as making a fist or grabbing object. When the sensors can’t find a finger, they’ll assume its extended outwards and reflect that in-app. This could indicate that Sony is looking to implement this type of finger tracking into new motion controllers.

More information:

https://uploadvr.com/sony-psvr-2-controller-patent/

Sandbox VR SDK

Sandbox VR, the location-based VR attraction, will be opening up to third-party developers soon, as the company will be releasing an SDK for its Sandbox ‘holodeck’ VR attraction platform. Sandbox operates a number of VR locations in major cities across North America as well as Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau, and Jakarta. Combining both branded content such as its Star Trek: Discovery experience and in-house developed games, Sandbox offers its experiences in 20-minute gameplay chunks for around $40 per person, accommodating up to six people per session. The company says in a blog post that anyone with the know-how will soon be able to develop new VR experiences for its location-based attractions using its upcoming SDK.

Sandbox’s locations make use of a few technologies that developers likely don’t have, such as the company’s haptic guns and its multi-camera motion capture system. Sandbox says however that developers can create using more modest setups such as an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Since professional motion capture can cost thousands of dollars, Beck says the company’s framework is going to abstract away that component and put in placeholders so you can still build for VR without these expensive systems, with full confidence that things will translate correctly when deployed to our full-body motion-captured holodeck. Furthermore, the upcoming networking framework will make it possible to create a mocked-up, multi-user development environment for testing and building experiences.

More information:

https://www.roadtovr.com/sandbox-sdk-vr-attraction-platform/

EEG Determines if Antidepressants Work

People getting treated for depression often have to suffer through months of trial-and-error testing of different drugs to see which of them—if any—will help. For a long time, scientists and clinicians have hoped for a biological means of diagnosing depression or predicting which patients will do better on a given treatment. A new study takes a step toward the latter kind of prediction by finding a distinctive signature with the noninvasive technique of electroencephalography (EEG) to test who will benefit from one common antidepressant. The study followed more than 300 people with depression as they began taking the drug sertraline (Zoloft) or a placebo. A computer algorithm could discern the EEGs of those who fared well on the drug from those who did not. Trained on one group, the algorithm also effectively predicted results in several others. 

The work is preliminary and needs to be confirmed with further studies and expanded to include other treatments, such as different antidepressants, transcranial magnetic stimulation and psychotherapy. Right now doctors give patients whichever antidepressant they like best, and then—for all choices in this class of drugs—they have to wait six to eight weeks to know whether it is working or not. If the drug does not work well, it might be another six weeks before they know whether a different dose or a new drug is more effective. Meanwhile many of the people who seek medication are at risk for suicide or too depressed to function normally. Today about 40 percent of patients will respond to the first drug they are given. In the study, about 65 percent of patients’ whose EEG signature suggested they would respond well to sertraline did so.

More information:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-an-antidepressant-right-for-you-ask-your-brain-waves/