There is a new wave of hype for VR, and there seems to be hope as well. Word of mouth is that Valve's [Vive headset] for VR for is the most convincing one, even more so than the Occulus. Those are devices that allows you to be completely in another world so to speak, letting you see another three dimensional world than the one that surrounds you. On the expo floor a saw a device: Virtuix Omni, that make it possible to move around and walk and do actions in such a world, putting the user on a walking platform wearing special shoes.
AR, Augmented reality is when one augments the actual existing reality in different ways, by for example adding a layer of information to it such as the Google Glasses do. It will be very interesting to follow what comes out of [MagicLeap] in Florida, they are creating a type of glasses too, but having a sort of light projected into the eye of the user with what they call a Digital Lightfield. I had lunch with my friend Brian S who just moved there to work with the games and AI parts of it, and he seemed happy enough. ...no honestly, it will be awesome. I look forward to see what will come out of that in the coming few years.
On the first day of GDC i ran into Noah Fahlstien in the speaker lounge and he showed me a tablet running Googles new [Project Tango]. This is possible to play with now, no need to wait for five years. It is possible to fix a 3D environment to a specific point in real space and navigate around it. At least this is what I think happened, because Noah first pointed the device onto the carpet, and then we could move around a 3D architectural structure that we could see in the device as we moved around the room. The Tango can also scan an a room, adding a 3D environment on the fly to the device. Imagine to be able to create games using that, procedurally adding items into peoples actual environment where they live. The design affordances opening up are to me, mind boggling. I signed up for the development kit. I really hope they will be able to ship it to Malta (the google glasses weren't available outside the US).
