Start United States USA — software At CES 2019, VR and AR took small but meaningful steps forward

At CES 2019, VR and AR took small but meaningful steps forward

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Check out some of the most interesting VR and AR devices we saw at this year’s CES, including new headsets and tracking technologies.
Ahead of 2019’s Consumer Electronics Show, I hoped to see several key developments with next-generation VR and AR headsets — dramatically higher-resolution PC VR headsets, compelling standalone VR headsets, and less conspicuous AR headsets with wider fields of view. I won’t tell you that these predictions turned out to be fully correct, but they weren’t completely wrong, either.
Although industry heavyweight Oculus took a back seat at CES, its chief rival HTC stepped up to the plate with two major hardware announcements: the high-end Vive Pro Eye, and mysterious Vive Cosmos, promising the company’s highest resolution screens yet. Oculus press released a relatively quiet price drop on the Rift, and offered private suite Quest demos that affirmed its upcoming standalone headset is the one to watch in 2019. And many small companies showed up with new VR and AR headsets, including models that are much lighter and wider-angled than their predecessors.
The real question is whether anyone’s going to be willing to pay for the innovations that were on display. Most of the new AR headsets are targeting $1000 price tags, still above what consumers will pay for the technology. The new Vive Pro Eye is likely to be in a similar price range, sitting above even the original Vive Pro rather than replacing it. And with Facebook’s recent privacy scandals, it’s unclear whether the masses will be willing to trust its Oculus unit with their location and VR viewing data.
Here are some of the most interesting things I saw at CES in VR and AR.
I’ve already covered the Pro Eye and Cosmos announcement, but I had a lot of hands-on time with the former and an extra chance to inspect the latter since writing that story. My impressions are generally positive, though caveated by one consistent issue: I’ve never seen as many tech demo crashes for a single product as I did for Vive Pro Eye. It seemed like half of the demos required rebooting and/or engineer support to get features working as they were supposed to, a problem that might be laid squarely at HTC’s feet if it wasn’t also happening with VR demos at other companies’ booths as well.
When eye tracking worked properly, as it did at the booth of Tobii, HTC’s Vive Pro Eye technology partner for the feature, it was impressive. The company had a series of its own demos that clearly showed how one area of the screen could be rendered at full fidelity while another area — the part your pupils aren’t focused on — could be rendered at 25 percent fidelity to save GPU processing power. Regardless of whether they were running on Vive Pro Eye or a Qualcomm standalone VR reference design, Tobii’s demos worked properly.
HTC confused the hell out of its audience of journalists with the announcement of Vive Cosmos, an upcoming headset that initially appeared to be a standalone device but turned out to be tethered — but to what, the company isn’t saying.

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