These VR apps are designed to replace your office and daily commute — from uploadvr.com by David Matthews

Excerpt:

Eric Florenzano is a VR consultant and game designer who lives in the San Francisco Bay area. He is currently working on new game ideas with a small team spread out across the US.

So far, so normal, right?. But what you don’t know is that Florenzano is one of a handful of advocates pioneering something they claim could transform work, end commuting, and even lead to a mass exodus from large cities: the virtual office.

“There’s no physical office [for us.] It’s all virtual. That’s the crazy thing,” explains Florenzano. Rather than meeting in person or arranging a conference call, his team jumps into Bigscreen, which allows users, who are represented by floating heads and controllers, to share their monitors in virtual rooms.

 

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Also see:

 

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How to train thousands of surgeons at the same time in virtual reality — from singularity.com by Sveta McShane

Excerpt:

Recently, I wrote about how the future of surgery is going to be robotic, data-driven and artificially intelligent.

Although it’s approaching fast, that future is still in the works. In the meantime, there is a real need to train surgeons in a more scalable way, according to Dr. Shafi Ahmed, a surgeon at the Royal London and St. Bartholomew’s hospitals and cofounder of Medical Realities, a company developing a new virtual reality platform for surgical training.

In April of 2016, he live-streamed a cancer surgery in virtual reality. The procedure, a low-risk removal of a colon tumor in a man in his 70s, was filmed in 360 video and streamed live across the world. The high-def 4K camera captured the doctors’ every movement, and those watching could see everything that was happening in immersive detail.

 

 

Duke neurosurgeons test Hololens as an AR assist on tricky procedures — from techcrunch.com by Devin Coldewey,

Excerpt:

“Since we can manipulate a hologram without actually touching anything, we have access to everything we need without breaking a sterile field. In the end, this is actually an improvement over the current OR system because the image is directly overlaid on the patient, without having to look to computer screens for aid,” said Cutler in a Duke news release.

 

 

OTOY Enables Groundbreaking VR Social Features — from uploadvr.com

Excerpt:

Oculus and OTOY may have achieved a breakthrough in social VR functionality.

VR headset owners should soon be able to share a variety of environments and Web-based content with one another in virtual reality. For example, friends can feel like they are together on the bridge of the Enterprise, and on the viewscreen of the ship they see a list of Star Trek episodes to watch with one another.

We have yet to test all of this functionality first-hand, but we’ve seen some of it live in the Gear VR — accessing, for example, a Star Trek environment inside OTOY’s ORBX Media Player app from within the Oculus Social Beta.

 

 

 

 

VR just got a lot more stylish with the Dlodlo V1 Glasses — from seriouswonder.com by B.J. Murphy

 

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Microsoft CEO says mixed reality is the ‘ultimate computer’ — from engadget.com by Nicole Lee
The company’s goal is to “invent new computers and new computing.”

Excerpt:

“Whether it be HoloLens, mixed reality, or Surface, our goal is to invent new computers and new computing,” he added. This also includes investing in artificial intelligence, which is now its own group within the company.

Nadella admitted that for a long time, Microsoft was complacent. “Early success is probably the worst thing that can happen in life,” he said. But now, he wants Microsoft to be more of a “learn-it-all” culture rather than a “know-it-all” culture.

 

 

A Chinese Lens on Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality — from adage.com by David Berkowitz

Excerpt:

These networks keep growing. One of the hosts of the conference, ARinChina, brought me over along with a group of about a half-dozen Westerners. This media company connects a community of 60,000 developers, all of whom are invested in staying ahead of breakthrough technologies like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and the hybrid known as mixed reality (MR). The AR track where I presented was hosted by RAVV, a new technology think tank that is pulling together subject matter experts across robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, VR and AR. RAVV is building an international ecosystem that includes its own approaches for startup incubation, knowledge sharing and other collaborative endeavors.

To get a sense of how global the emerging mixed reality field is, consider that, in February, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba led the $800 million Series C round for Florida-based Magic Leap, an MR startup. As our daily reality becomes more virtual and augmented, it doesn’t matter where someone is on the map. This field is connecting far-flung practitioners, hinting at a time, soon, when AR, VR and MR will connect people in ways never before possible.

 

 


Addendum 10/25/16: