Metaverse One

The recent boom in popularity for virtual reality headsets has brought about a variety of both professionally designed and DIY (Do It Yourself) Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). I personally have seen casings of all different shapes and sizes that turn the standard smartphone into a virtual reality HMD and these made from a variety of materials like wood, plastic, and even cardboard. While I give credit to engineers and makers from the SVVR and SFVR meet ups for doing it before it was cool, it was Google that really pushed the cardboard HMD into the blogosphere during their Google I/O 2014 Keynote. Google Cardboard , as it is appropriately named, is the firm's attempt at a do-it-yourself VR headset. Literally made of cardboard, the remarkably low-cost virtual reality goggles combine a split-screen image from a smartphone, delivering impressive graphics for the low price of almost free. Combined with positional sensor data from the phone, it's possible to look aroun...

So a few days ago I posted the following about an online hands free home configurator developed from a partnership between IDEAbuilder Homes and SpiralConcepts. Here is the original post  and the repost  by sci-fi author Bruce Sterling on the Wired Blog. When out in the San Francisco/Silicon Valley tech scene it is not the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) industry I hear about leading the charge in technical innovation. It is the chatter of the millions given and insane evaluations of those either in the cloud, selling user data, social, gaming, or insert buzz word here. Yet more and more construction companies are incorporating technology to improve various areas of the building process. I observe all around SOMA how construction companies like Swinerton  and  Webcor  are using data from the BIM (Building Information Modeling) process to build better. I applaud Skanska 's  use of tablets  and  experiments with augmen...

Last night during a WWDC party I got a first hand look at Sphero  and one of its augmented reality applications. Sphero, made by Colorado based Orbotix, is a little plastic LED-lit orb that can be controlled using a number of smart phone applications. Users can control this $129 dollar 'smart toy' either via a phone's touchscreen or with gestures, using the handset's accelerometer. Although there are not many applications for Sphero yet, a little less than a dozen, more will be released over the next month  (thanks Chuck) . I can quickly imagine a variety of fun uses for such a toy. It is currently only available on iOS with Android coming soon. Seems I now have a new thing I need to hack on.

I just received in the mail my Sony Ericsson Xperia Play smartphone. This is the first PlayStation certified Android smartphone, hence it is also known as the PlayStation phone. The phone has a slide-out game pad, sports the Qualcomm Scorpion processor clocked at 1GHz (which runs alongside the on-board Adreno GPU and 380MB RAM), has a 4 inch backlit LCD screen with a resolution of 480x854, a 5.1-megapixel camera with auto focus and flash, and runs the Android OS Gingerbread. I won the phone from a party Qualcomm had during the Game Developers Conference 2011 for their new Snapdragon platform . I haven't won anything like this before so I decided to make my first unboxing video. Yeah unboxing videos are silly, so I decided to spruce mine up with a little bit of augmented reality. I need a couple days to test drive this thing for a proper review. Stay tuned and thanks Qualcomm!

So I just got back State-side from a seven week tour through western Europe that included a series of events and video interviews with leading players in augmented and virtual reality technologies. One of my destinations was Amsterdam, Nederlands and besides enjoying the madness of the World Cup finals, I had the opportunity to stop by mobile augmented reality company Layar's office for a chat. Now this was super exciting for me as although familiar with Layar as a mobile AR platform, I had not had a chance to really grok with the guys, despite being at several events together, to discover what exciting things were going on with this company that is just over one year old and seeing explosive growth. Now anyone familiar with mobile augmented reality or the AR industry has heard of Layar, but for those that have not, see the video below. After a short walk on a very warm day from the city's centrum to their office, I met with co-founder Maarten Lens-FitzGerald for a great conver...