VR Pen by Wacom

Wacom VR Pen is a pressure sensitive stylus controller. This, the company says in its developer-focused webpage, allows users to not only draw in VR, but also with the company’s fleet of professional pen tablets for traditional 2D drawing. One of the major obstacles in creating a VR stylus is the lack of force feedback, which makes drawing in open spaces difficult and inherently less precise.

Wacom says however its pressure-sensitive button near the pen’s tip lets users naturally alter stroke thickness depending on the amount of force used when gripping the pen, which it says recreates a similar experience to drawing with a pen on paper. Wacom VR Pen also features a few other buttons, including a trigger-style grip, a rotator knob for digital tool selection, and a selector toggle on the knob itself.

More information:

https://www.roadtovr.com/wacom-unveils-vr-pen-built-next-creative-future/

BCI Helps Paralyzed Person to Handwrite

By harnessing the power of imagination, researchers have nearly doubled the speed at which completely paralyzed patients may be able to communicate with the outside world. Electrodes implanted in a part of the brain involved in motion have allowed some paralyzed patients to move a cursor and select onscreen letters with their thoughts. Users have typed up to 39 characters per minute, but that’s still about three times slower than natural handwriting. In the new experiments, a volunteer paralyzed from the neck down instead imagined moving his arm to write each letter of the alphabet.

That brain activity helped train a computer model known as a neural network to interpret the commands, tracing the intended trajectory of his imagined pen tip to create letters. Eventually, the computer could read out the volunteer’s imagined sentences with roughly 95% accuracy at a speed of about 66 characters per minute, the team reported here this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The researchers expect the speed to increase with more practice and to use their neural recordings to better understand how the brain plans and orchestrates fine motor movements.

More information:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/ai-allows-paralyzed-person-handwrite-his-mind

AR Light-Field Display by CREAL

Switzerland-based CREAL is developing a light-field display which it hopes to bring to VR headsets and eventually AR glasses. In November the company raised CHF 6.5 million (~$7.2 million) in a Series A+ investment round to bring on new hires and continue miniaturizing the company’s light-field tech. Creal says it closed its Series A+ investment round in mid-November, raising CHF 6.5 million (~$7.2 million) led by Swisscom Ventures with participation by existing investors Investiere, DAA Capital Partners, and Ariel Luedi. The new funding marks ~$15.5 million raised by the company thus far. Over the last few years, we’ve seen Creal make progress in shrinking its novel light-field display with the hopes of fitting it into AR glasses. Compared to the displays used in VR and AR headsets today, light-field displays generate an image that accurately represents how we see the real world.

Specifically, light-field displays support both vergence and accommodation, the two focus mechanisms of the human visual system. Creal and others say the advantage of such displays is more realistic and more comfortable visuals for VR and AR headsets. For more on light-fields, see our explainer below. Having demonstrated the fundamentals of its light-field tech, Creal’s biggest challenging is miniaturizing it to fit comfortably into AR glasses while maintaining a wide enough field of view to remain useful. CREAL doesn’t expect to bring its own headset to market but is instead positioning itself to work with partners and eventually license its technology for use in their headsets. The company aims to build a complete technology package for the next-generation AR glasses, which will likely take the form of a reference design for commercialization.

More information:

https://www.roadtovr.com/creal-light-field-display-series-a-plus-investment/