VR World Report

I spent the last couple of days at VR World down in London. The event was busy pretty much the whole time and the 3 open lecture areas had a good mix of talks and discussions. There were also a good number of exhibitors showing  a range of AR/VR apps and kit, although nothing that really blew me away.

Photo report below, but main takeaways were:

• Almost more AR/MR (Hololens) than VR
• Far more Vive than Oculus (can understand that from a developer's perspective)
• A few Cardboard based apps
• Nobody showing Gear VR - whereas previous events I've been to have been full of them
• A few haptic input devices, but no-one showing gloves
• Still a lot of 360 video/photosphere stuff
• Does stringing together a set of other peoples VR videos count as a presentation?
• Some people had really been drinking the VR Kool-Aid with the "this will change the world by 2020" type speeches and stats - it won't, it's just another tool
• Very few people showing analysis frameworks of how this all fits together
• A few people showing some good evaluation stats, even more calling out for everyone to share them - been calling for that for ages
• Nobody really doing data visualisation
• Just one company doing authoring - and more a Unity-light approach for simple photosphere menus
• More doing training then education

Now the photos:

How VR can fill the gap in medical training

Some nice promo type work from JauntVR

And some nice stats about impact

Nice guidelines on MR (and VR) development from Viscopic

Some great data from Touch Surgery - and this was 3D not VR surgery training - surgeons did better than trainees - so valid

The learning effect - with repetition people got better

Proper control group testing

More improvement in the group using the 3D trainer

A touch interface - but one interface too many on the demo rig?

A physical labyrinth explored with Vive and backpack PC

Fracture showing some nice Hololens demos of city data - see below

Affordable and easily integratable slippery feet walk controller - may well integrate with Fieldscapes 

Hollywood production values in Rolls Royce robot ship control demo

Very neat though - and no-one wearing any headsets!

Better view of Fracture in the TfL demo - see next blog post