Google Cardboard Overview: VR On The Cheap

Imagine if you will, standing on the surface of the moon, overlooking a crater from your lunar rover, listening to mission control chatter. Or don’t. Instead of imagining it, just order a cheap Google Cardboard VR set instead, stick your phone in it, and start exploring the solar system, museums, tourist spots, coral reefs and much more. Let the Imagination Technologies GPU in your phone live up to its name and do your imagining for you.

Google Cardboard is hardly a new concept. It was unleashed on the unsuspecting geekosphere at Google I/O 2014, roughly 18 months ago. Since then, Google has tweaked the Cardboard reference design, but the concept hasn’t changed; Google Cardboard was envisioned as the cheapest Virtual Reality (VR) solution on the planet, and at this point, nothing else comes close in terms of pricing.

Google Cardboard is significantly cheaper than competing VR platforms, so why is adoption so slow?

If you keep track of tech news, you are probably aware that Oculus Rift started shipping a few days ago. The news even made it to mainstream media, and CNN interviewed a few Oculus execs, who discussed the future of Oculus and VR in general. Demand for the Rift appears to be high because the pre-order website crashed hours into the launch, which coincided with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas. The Oculus Rift is priced at $599, and you also need a $1,000-plus computer to use it properly, but the high price obviously didn’t faze the loads of consumers who pre-ordered one.

I could try to explain what makes Oculus different and why it costs so much, but that’s beside the point. It’s a product for enthusiasts and connoisseurs, people who don’t mind spending a lot of money for a great gaming user experience or for some niche professional applications. Compared to Google’s VR platform, Oculus Rift is a technological tour de force, but for the price of a single Oculus headset, you can get more than 50 prefabricated Google Cardboard headsets. Mind you, I am not talking about cardboard DIY sets, but proper headsets made out of plastic, with soft padding and a few straps to keep the contraption on your head.

Considering that you can get a Google Cardboard compatible set for $10 to $20, you’d expect that loads of people are buying them, but that’s not the case. Let’s take a closer look at Google’s platform and try to figure out what’s going on.

2016: The Year Of VR? Not Really

71,000.

In addition to being the ZIP code for Sarajevo, that’s the number of users that have rated the officialGoogle Cardboard app so far. The number of downloads is in the one to five million range. That’s low by anyone’s standards, and for a Google product 18 months after launch, it’s a shockingly poor result. Granted, there are VR apps with more downloads, but even they are stuck in the 100,000 to 500,000 range.

Does this mean we should dismiss Cardboard as a hyped up geek fad? Does the user experience suck? What the hell is wrong with it?

This may sound a bit harsh and opinionated, but I believe Google simply can’t do hardware. Regardless of how good they are, Google sucks at marketing its own hardware solutions. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a Nexus veteran and I tend to like Google hardware, but most consumers don’t (many don’t even know it exists). The fact that people aren’t buying a dirt cheap product like Cardboard, and that more companies aren’t using it to build their own products and services, despite the fact that it’s free, might vindicate my position on Google hardware.

There is just one problem: Google Cardboard is a good idea and it works.

While Google may not excel at hardware, Cardboard VR is a sound concept and it works.

Rather than dismiss Cardboard outright, I decided to try it out. I quickly realised the concept is sound and there’s nothing terribly wrong with the user experience, but once again, Google failed to market it properly and make it appeal to non-geeks. As a result, adoption is pathetic, at least for now.

What about VR adoption and popularity in general? Weren’t we told that 2015 was going to be “The Year of VR?” Or was it supposed to be 2016? I am sure CNN said it was going to be this year.

It all depends on whose marketing pitches you were listening to, but in reality, 2016 will not go down in tech history as the year of VR. Sure, it sounds good and investors like the idea, but it’s not going to happen. This is not my personal opinion. A few industry sources believe things will start moving in 2017, but it will take a while.

When I say “industry sources,” I am talking about GPU industry execs, people who know this stuff better than anyone. They’re pointing to 2017 and beyond, but they’re doing so off the record. This applies to cheap VR solutions like Google Cardboard and expensive sets like Oculus Rift: VR won’t get a lot of traction this year, don’t fall for the hype!

Google Cardboard: VR For The Masses

How does Google Cardboard work? What makes it different?

The really fascinating thing about Google Cardboard is its simplicity and low price. The concept relies on off-the-shelf hardware, you just need to stick a smartphone into a Cardboard headset and you’re ready to go, more or less.

As the low price suggests, Google Cardboard doesn’t contain any magic or expensive components. All you need is a couple of lenses, a plastic or cardboard body, and a couple of magnets which double as a physical button. When you push the button, the phone’s magnetic sensor, or e-compass, detects the changes in the magnetic field and that’s all there is to it.

The recipe for Google’s Cardboard VR special sauce: simple, widely available, cheap, open-source, based on prolific hardware.

There are a few caveats: Google Cardboard won’t work on any phone because it relies on sensor input that might not be available on many devices (gyroscopic sensors aren’t very common on cheap phones). The phone also needs to have a high resolution display, but thanks to the pixel density marketing craze, this shouldn’t be much of a problem moving forward. Having a bigger display with more pixels simply makes everything look better. While 1080p on a 5-inch phone sounds like a lot, once you start using Cardboard, you’ll see individual pixels. I didn’t try it on a 720p display, but I am convinced it wouldn’t be enough. There are a few other problems, such as battery consumption and overheating, and let’s not forget that you could get a call or message while you’re in the middle of your VR experience.

In spite of these foibles, Google Cardboard has a lot going for it. For starters, it does not require consumers to spend a small fortune just to get a taste of VR. It relies on one of the most prolific software/hardware platforms on the market, so it’s within easy reach for hundreds of millions of smartphone users and developers alike.

Unfortunately, this vast potential has not translated into market success. With a few dozen thousand users in the wild, I could hardly blame anyone for dismissing Cardboard as a geeky curiosity, but I’d stop short of calling it a flop.

What Went Wrong?

Nothing, apart from the fact that Google can’t do hardware.

To be fair, Google Cardboard wasn’t envisioned as a product with mass market appeal and I personally view it as a tech testbed rather than a proper product. It’s not the only VR concept to rely on a phone for display and processing: Samsung’s Gear VR is similar.

However, this seems to be part of the problem, because it does not appear Google is taking Cardboard very seriously. Although Google Cardboard was released 18 months ago, a lot of building blocks weren’t ready for launch. Google is still dragging its feet, but there’s some progress: As of May 2015, Cardboard can be used on iOS devices, it has better OpenGL and WebGL support, and Google launched a few new VR initiatives, including Jump and Expeditions. YouTube also got a dedicated VR/360 degree video channel, and it could become the go to place for people searching for VR video.

Cardboard’s biggest problem is not technological.

The platform is too small to attract a lot of third-party development, and who could blame app makers for refusing to waste man-hours on projects that don’t guarantee a return. That’s one of the reasons I decided to try it out; I kept looking at Google Play stats, the terrible reviews and I started wondering whether or not Google Cardboard has a bright future, or any future for that matter.

I don’t intend to turn this post into a Google Cardboard review, but I think it’s important to review a few things, just to give you a clear idea of what to expect (in case you haven’t tried it, yet).

Let’s start with Cardboard requirements. I should note that these are not official Google Cardboard requirements:

• Android 4.1 or iOS 8 device required
• Gyro sensor
• NFC or magnetic sensor
• High definition display (1080p is sufficient, the more the better)
• High capacity battery can’t hurt
• Loads of storage
• Fast network/broadband access

The good news is that there aren’t any software hoops to jump through. Since Google Cardboard relies on standard smartphones, designers and developers are unlikely to encounter many hardware-related issues. The biggest hardware compatibility issue is on the sensor side. A lot of inexpensive Android phones don’t feature some of the sensors that may be employed by Cardboard apps (namely gyro and magnetic sensors).

Google Cardboard can accommodate a range of different phone sizes, so it should work on standard 5-inch phones, as well as oversized 5.5- or 6-inch phablets. Display density isn’t much of a problem on 1080p, although it could be better. Resolution will eventually go up, as hardware-makers shift to 1600p and 4K/UHD displays on plus-size phones. Sony already has a flagship Android phone with a 4K display.

I’ve already discussed the more or less pointless trend of moving to higher definition phone displays in one of my Toptal blog posts, but VR is an exception. There’s no way you’ll see individual pixels on modern, high-definition phone displays, unless you use them in a Cardboard headset.

However, higher resolution displays don’t mean a thing unless you’ve got high-res content for them. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of 1080p VR content out there, let alone 4K/UHD content.

VR Video Resolution Conundrum

Bear in mind that increasing the resolution comes with trade-offs. This brings us to the next problem: Even if we had loads of 4K VR videos, how would we get them on our devices? The problem I encountered was simple: I quickly started running out of bandwidth and storage, in some cases even on 1080p. Sure, you can stream 1080p video on even a slow internet connection, but you’ll often need to slow down and give your device time to buffer, which is always annoying, but it’s really annoying when you have a VR headset strapped to your cranium.

Some of you may be thinking that I live in a part of the world with terrible Internet infrastructure, and I’ll be the first to admit that Bosnia isn’t exactly Silicon Valley, but bear with me; my broadband is still faster than the average speed in the US, UK, Sweden, Japan, and a bunch of other highly developed economies. In other words, a lot of users in California and Tokyo still rely on even slower Internet access. Recent surveys indicate that just one fifth of US homes have enough bandwidth to stream 4K content.

I know. I’ll just download the videos and enjoy them off local storage, but it’s not an ideal solution. First of all, a lot of content isn’t available for download at all, it’s just streamed. Worse, you’ll need a lot of storageto pull it off. For the past couple of years, mobile services have been shifting to streaming in lieu of local content, allowing people to make good use of fast mobile broadband. Why keep gigabytes of music and video on your phone when you can enjoy Netflix or Spotify on the go? Resorting to local storage for high definition VR feels like a step back, but if you’ve got good 4G coverage or fast broadband in your home, it won’t be much of a problem.

Limited bandwidth and resolution are the biggest problems facing virtual reality video at the moment.

In addition to requiring more bandwidth, high resolution content also requires more processing power. At 1080p, this isn’t a problem because this industry-standard resolution has been around for ages and even cheap hardware handles it with ease. However, at 4K you simply need more bandwidth and CPU/GPU muscle to handle the data and decode the stream. This means more milliamps, more heat, more charging. Smartphones aren’t designed with this application in mind, they’re simply not supposed to be used for this stuff. With cranked-up screen brightness, high CPU and GPU loads, and a lot of data streaming in to ensure smooth playback, a standard phone will run out of steam in a couple of hours or less. On top of that, it will heat up in minutes. Bear in mind that there’s no airflow inside the headset, so the device will have a hard time dissipating the heat.

I tried it out on a Snapdragon 808 device. For those who don’t pay close attention to the silicon space, this is a one of the latest Qualcomm smartphone chips. It’s a 20nm planar part with a couple of ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores and powerful Qualcomm Adreno 418 graphics. The same chip is used in Google’s new Nexus 5X. It’s fast enough, but it heats up in no time despite the fact that it’s one of few mobile chips to be produced in a node superior to 28nm.

However, video is not the only type of VR content out there. Let’s take a look at some alternatives.

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Different Types Of Google Cardboard Content

I focused on video in the first section of the article because I feel it will be the most attractive form of VR content, at least at this early stage. However, I think people who choose to use their VR headsets solely for video will be missing out.

VR video is usually limited in terms of terms of field of view, and what you see is what you get: You can’t walk around a VR video scene, you’re just stuck in a single virtual location, either a front row seat at a Paul McCartney gig, or a cockpit of a Swiss Air Force F-5 jet performing an acrobatic routine. My problem with video and photos is that the user can truly enjoy this sort of content only once, and there’s not a whole lot of it out there.

Don’t get me wrong, these experiences can be good, but what about getting my glorious behind off the sofa and navigating a real VR world? What about generating a different environment every single time, and interacting with it?

The only way of doing this is on Google Cardboard by rendering the content locally and putting the user smack in the middle of a digital environment. We’ve been doing this since the early nineties, when games like Wolfenstein took the world by storm (and games like Descent made a lot of geeks experience motion sickness without moving, just by staring at their screen).

It’s possible to render 3D VR content locally on most smartphones, but quality is limited due to a range of technical challenges.

This is what makes Oculus Rift fundamentally different: It relies on desktop hardware to render 3D content and display it on the VR headset. This is obviously a huge difference, and the official Oculus Rift requirements look like a gamer’s shopping wishlist: a powerful Haswell generation Core i5 processor backed by 8GB of RAM. More importantly, the list includes Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 and AMD Radeon R9 290 discrete graphics cards, based on Maxwell and Hawaii GPU architectures respectively. High-end PC processors, like the one listed by Oculus, usually have about 1.5 billion transistors. Big GPUs, like Maxwell and Hawaii designs used in the GTX 970 and R9 290, have five to seven billion, and they’re getting bigger. The combined power draw of a PC with such specs is a few hundred Watts, roughly 100 times more than the power consumption of an average smartphone chip. In other words, even if you still believe in Moore’s Law, it’s obvious that we won’t get the same level of performance on mobile devices for years.

Most smartphones have enough GPU muscle to render good looking 3D scenes in 1080p, although they don’t come close to the sort of overkill graphics you get on a high-end PC. You can forget about fancy shaders, advanced antialiasing techniques and many post processing features, but let’s not forget that phones have come a long way and that this sort of technology would have been next to impossible just five years ago.

This is not the only bit of good news; Google has two SDKs for Cardboard developers: an Android SDK using Java and a Unity SDK, using C#. Both rely on OpenGL, and Unity support was added to the iOS SDK earlier this year. Once you are no longer bound to video, VR starts to make a lot more sense. Done right, artificial environment can immerse users into a dynamic and interactive 3D environment, so even simple demos look and feel good.

Even if you plan to rely on video content or photos, you’ll still need a UI that works, and chances are it will use some form of 3D, or at least 2D objects placed in a 3D environment, per Google Cardboard guidelines. Most apps that focus on digitally generated imagery instead rely on Unity. There’s nothing wrong with that, Unity is a popular engine and it’s quite capable.

As I’ve already pointed out, Google Cardboard relies on standard hardware, hence there aren’t that many technical challenges to overcome. Make sure you follow Google’s Cardboard guidelines and best practices, and you should be in the clear.

3D Is The Way To Go, Sort Of

So what’s the problem with using Unity and 3D graphics in general? It sounds straightforward and offers people a chance to experience a true VR experience on a budget.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Here are a few issues that come to mind:

• Battery life
• Heat dissipation
• Limited GPU power
• Need for high resolution assets (mainly textures for 3D models)
• Different level of detail (LOD) approach
• Motion sickness
• Limited ability to control movement and interact with environment

I’ve already addressed the problem of heat and power consumption. Placing a smartphone in a small environment with no airflow and maxing out the GPU is more or less the worst thing you can do in terms of thermals and efficiency. This issue cannot and will not be resolved. Phones simply aren’t designed to be used this way.

This brings us to the next problem: GPU performance. While smartphone application processors have evolved at a staggering pace, they are not developed for sustained performance. A discrete graphics card or integrated GPU on your desktop can run at high loads for hours, even days, but your mobile GPU cannot. Once the device starts overheating, it will throttle the processor to stay within the thermal envelope, protecting the hardware and saving battery power. Sure, you can get good graphics out of smartphone chips, but running a VR app with a virtual UI in 3D, along with loads of core 3D content, will drain the battery and overheat any phone.

Mobile game developers already know a thing or two about optimising their creations for this sort of hardware. Unity has been around for years, so generating good looking 3D content should not be a problem, right? It depends on the type of environment being designed. If it’s supposed to be a photorealistic 3D environment with advanced lighting and post processing, designing for VR could prove a bit more challenging. This is the problem: Although we’re still using the same resolution, the field of view is much bigger. As a result, the VR experience on a 5-inch 1080p display looks a bit pixelated, and you certainly get to see a lot more details than you usually would. While these devices boast high pixel density displays, the real metric to have in mind is PPD rather than PPI.

This basically means the user gets to see more than you’d expect given the resolution, which means 3D models and textures need to be optimised for a wider field of view. For example, a few low resolution textures won’t ruin the appearance of 3D model on a 5-inch phone. It can still look good because of the small size of the display, but once you put the same phone in a VR headset, you’ll get to see all sorts of compression artefacts and other nasty stuff. If an object looks good on a phone with even with a low LOD, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will look good in VR; it might need more complex geometry and textures. It’s not solely the resolution, please keep that in mind.

Lastly, motion sickness and nausea remain a concern. One of main causes is lag. It takes a tiny amount of time for the phone’s gyro sensor to figure out the user is moving, and then it takes a bit more time for the phone to crunch the numbers and render the subsequent frame while taking the motion into account. If, for any reason, something goes wrong and you drop a few frames or experience stuttering, the VR illusion will break down right before your eyes. This process should be fast and automated to such an extent that the user has no idea what’s going on behind the scenes.

However, this is easier said than done in complex, heavily subdivided 3D scenes with huge textures. A standard phone will struggle with photorealistic graphics even when it’s not overheating, so trying to get a phone to render smooth, photorealistic 3D graphics is not a viable option at this time. In addition, a number of effects and features that could help improve the visual experience are not available. Sure, motion blur, depth of field effects, high-quality antialiasing and other techniques would help, but they’re still not an option on mobile devices.

Google Cardboard For Developers: Opportunity Or Waste Of Time?

So, Google Cardboard is not perfect, it suffers from a few teething problems, lack of content, lack of users, and lack of developer interest. By now, a lot of you must be wondering why I am convinced Google Cardboard has potential. After all, I listed a number of real and potential problems hampering mass adoption.

Why bother with Google Cardboard?

It’s a legitimate question, and considering the size of the user base, coming up with a good answer is not simple. This is still a very tight niche, and even if you manage to come up with a great idea and execute it flawlessly, you won’t make much of a difference (or much money, for that matter). The limited number of people interested in VR is a huge problem.

This lack of interest becomes obvious as soon as you start browsing the Play Store for VR content. There aren’t that many Google Cardboard apps around, and I can confidently report that most of them suck. If you don’t believe me, just check out the user reviews. In fact, many of these apps aren’t real apps; they’re tech demos.

Did Android developers drop the ball? Not really. A lot of these subpar apps are clearly a work in progress, or they are pet projects that allowed individual developers to play around with VR. Very few apps come from big publishers and this is understandable; with such a small user base, nobody can afford to burn thousands of man-hours to create an app that won’t turn a profit. Oddly enough, this could be good news. If you are confident you can do a better job, go for it. There’s not a lot of competition, and if you create something good, your product will definitely stand out.

Not all Google Cardboard apps are bad, so you could try out a few quality designs to get a sense of what makes them tick. I usually don’t list products and services in my blog posts, but I will go ahead with a few examples of promising Google Cardboard apps:

• Jaunt VR is a highly acclaimed VR platform with one of the best user review scores of any VR app on the Play Store. Jaunt is a relatively big player in the small VR ecosystem and has a number of good products. I’d direct your attention to the UI layout and the quality of the content itself.
• YouTube and Google Maps are an obvious choice, and happen to be the only Google core apps with Cardboard functionality. They will give you a chance to check out how Google does stuff, although I was not too impressed. Don’t underestimate the power of YouTube. If a lot of VR content is uploaded, it could tip the scales in Google’s favour.
• Fulldive is an ambitious app with loads of features. You can use it to view panoramic photos, watch local and YouTube videos, take VR photos and more. There are a number of similar apps out there, but I feel the Fulldive team did a better job in the UI department. The UI is clean, fast and intuitive.
• Sites in VR is a different sort of app and I think it’s a good showcase of what might be achieved by an individual developer. The app allows users to experience a number of different VR sites, ranging from the lunar surface to the Eiffel Tower, plus some good-looking examples of Islamic architecture. I appreciated the ability to tweak settings that aren’t available in most VR apps.
• VR Roller Coaster is a good example of 3D VR, and the name is self-explanatory; roller coasters are a popular theme in VR apps. In addition, the same concept is used to create a VR tour of the Solar System. Titans Of Space and VR Cosmic Roller Coaster are good examples of this approach.
• Shadowgun VR and Sisters are nice examples of VR games; the latter is spooky, if you’re into that sort of thing.

We intend to publish more content dealing with the finer points of VR design and development, so if you are interested in this emerging field, be sure to tune in from time to time.

The Elephant In The Living Room

It’s bad for SEO, talking about it is bad for tech publications in general, and it might not go down well with some of our team members or redears, but I have to get it out of the way. So what is it?

Pornography.

The adult entertainment industry played a pivotal role in the adoption of legacy video standards. Can it boost VR adoption as well?

There, I said it. And no, I wasn’t joking.

The adult entertainment industry was instrumental in the adoption of multiple video standards, from VHS over Beta, to Blu-Ray over HD DVD. Granted, these were physical storage standards, but they were around when physical storage mattered a lot more than today. Nowadays, content distribution is digital, on-demand and fast. Best of all, the same content can be distributed across multiple platforms with relative ease.

The adult industry played a pivotal role in the mass adoption of major content standards for decades. It can do it again, albeit not through physical standards. It can obviously make a big difference by generating demand for all sorts of VR devices. Google Cardboard looks like an obvious candidate for VR content distribution on the cheap, and it will undoubtedly be the first glimpse of VR for millions of users.

Does anyone doubt the adult entertainment industry will attract millions upon millions more? For many people, that first glimpse of VR could be described as NSFW.

Virtual World Of Potential

Google Cardboard is a good step toward mass adoption of VR. It’s not without its problems, but we can’t expect miracles this early on, especially not from the cheapest VR platform on the market.

But that’s sort of the beauty of it: It’s cheap and disposable, yet it’s upgradeable. You can get a better headset if you feel like you need one, and the occasional phone upgrade should take care of the actual hardware behind it. One could potentially repurpose old phones as well, provided they sport the necessary sensors and hardware.

Despite my optimism, Google Cardboard isn’t a very popular platform and I don’t think anyone expects it to become one in the immediate future. However, in the long run, I am confident it will attract a lot more users, and not just geeks. As always, mainstream users are the Holy Grail, and I can report that non-geeks are even more impressed by the Google Cardboard experience than tech savvy people.

It all boils down to content. There’s not enough VR content out there, use-cases are limited, and there’s not a lot of urgency to get involved. However, moving forward we are bound to see a lot more VR video, along with other types of content. As soon as we see more VR content being churned out, we will see more adoption. I suspect many people will choose to try out VR over the next couple of years, and once VR starts gaining mainstream traction, price will become even more relevant.

In a mass adoption context, the fact that people can enjoy Cardboard VR for the price of a decent lunch could make Google’s “no frills” VR concept a lot more attractive in no time.

The article was written by NERMIN HAJDARBEGOVIC, a Toptal developer.

Nvidia Shield - A Different Take On Android Gaming Consoles

Nvidia surprised many industry observers with the launch of the Shield Android gaming console at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, but describing it as a mere Android console might not be the right thing to do.

Shield is a powerful piece of hardware, with Nvidia’s custom 64-bit Denver CPU cores and 256 GPU cores, based on the company’s latest Maxwell infrastructure. While Nvidia describes the Tegra X1 System-on-Chip (SoC) as a “mobile superchip with the soul of a console,” it still can’t go up against the latest consoles from Sony and Microsoft. However, the Tegra X1 is roughly on a par with previous generation PlayStation and Xbox hardware.

So, will this give Android game developers more headroom to develop better looking games and bring them to the living room in 4K/UHD resolutions? Yes, that is one possibility, but Shield is not about bringing expensive AAA titles to Android.

In fact, Nvidia’s first few Shield products were all about streaming PC games onto Android devices. They can be viewed as test beds at this point, with streaming capabilities as a differentiator in the oversaturated Android hardware market.

Android Gaming Consoles Dead On Arrival

First we need to take a look at the history of Android’s gaming console successes and failures, then examine the cost of developing Android games that could benefit from more powerful hardware. Nvidia Shield could end up boosting, or killing, some aspects of Android game development, and chances are it will do both.

Speaking of kickstarting, a few years ago a group of entrepreneurs launched a Kickstarter project to create the OUYA Android gaming console, which was, coincidentally, based on Nvidia hardware. A lot of people like the idea of a $99 Android console, investments poured in, but the end result was a flop. Last year Forbesproclaimed the OUYA dead – the console never had a big enough user base, so developers didn’t bother with it. There was no money to be made.

Nvidia Shield gaming tablet costs twice as much ($199 MSRP), but as an Nvidia product, it should be more appealing to Android developers. So this should help, right?

Wrong.

Very few Android developers focus on graphically intensive titles. They require a lot more resources, they don’t look as good as proper console or PC games, they’re not great for touch input, and, with a lot of eye candy, they can drain a smartphone or tablet battery in no time. The biggest games on Android and, indeed, all mobile platforms, are casual games, not so-called “AAA” titles. Rovio and King did not make a fortune developing elaborate games with photorealistic graphics, they focused on casual games that could be played on practically any smartphone. These games didn’t put much strain on the SoC and the battery, so you could kill some time without killing your mobile phone.

Throttling is another problem. Mobile phones and tablets don’t dissipate heat well, so while they can deliver great performance on paper, if they’re forced to run under a load for extended periods of time, the SoC will throttle back and operate on lower clocks to stay within its thermal envelope, thus degrading performance.

Android gaming consoles and set-top boxes don’t suffer from these shortcomings since they don’t rely on battery power and can be designed to dissipate a lot more heat due to their bigger form.

However, that does not mean Android developers will flock to create games for them; the user base is so small that developers could not make their money back since developing good-looking shooters and action games requires more resources than creating casual games like Flappy Bird. On the other hand, recent research indicates that more than 200 Android games are published each day. Most of these titles never gain any significant traction, as the market is overcrowded. With that in mind, trying to move into Android TV or Android consoles could make sense for some developers.

So What’s Nvidia’s Endgame?

Nvidia is fully aware of this problem, as are other hardware makers. That is why we don’t have a lot of Android gaming consoles and why most big brands have steered clear of them. The business model does not make much sense, either. Sony and Microsoft don’t make a lot of money on hardware, in fact at launch they tend to sell new consoles below cost, since they control the ecosystem and make money on games rather than consoles. This obviously does not, and cannot, apply to Android.

However, Nvidia thinks it has cracked this problem. Why bother developing AAA games for Android when you can use PC titles instead? Why render the content locally on the device if you can stream it? Why try to make money on hardware if you can make it on services? It may sounds like a bit of a moon-shot, but Nvidia is confident that it will work and likens GRID Game Streaming to Netflix for games.

What does this mean for Nvidia Shield’s gaming tablet, Android developers and consumers?

Nvidia Shield could allow the company to mimic Sony’s and Microsoft’s approach, by making money on games rather than hardware, but with a twist: by offering Gaming as a Service (GaaS).

Let’s see how this approach helps the company:

• Ecosystem — Nvidia would be able to control the ecosystem by supporting select games, creating a walled garden.
• Hardware — The games would be rendered solely on Nvidia GRID servers, so the company could eventually become its own biggest hardware customer.
• Longevity — As long as the consumer has hardware capable of streaming GRID content, there will be no need to upgrade it – Nvidia would do it on the server side, using more of its own hardware.
• Efficiency — Instead of marketing expensive graphics cards, Nvidia could sell processing power and utilize installed hardware more efficiently than individual consumers.
• Piracy — There is no risk of piracy, which should appeal to publishers.

Consumers also stand to benefit from GRID streaming, but there are some drawbacks as well:

• Convenience — Consumers would no longer have to bother with upgrades, patches, updates and drivers.
• Value — instead of buying an expensive gaming PC and upgrading it on a regular basis, consumers would be able to pay as they go.
• Choice — Lack of choice might be a problem, as Nvidia will only stream select titles, so consumers interested in niche games and genres probably would not be catered to, at least, not initially.
• Geography — GRID services would not be available globally, and servers need to be in close proximity to the client in order to keep latency down.

As for Android developers, Nvidia Shield is a mixed bag to say the least. There are some potential benefits, but it’s not all good news:

• Power — If the concept takes off, Android developers would finally have some more powerful hardware to play with, on a bigger install base.
• TV — Shield is all about bringing Android to the living room in 4K, so developers could also create applications specifically designed for this purpose (just in time for next generation smart TVs).
• Exposure — Focusing on console and TV could give developers more exposure than the oversaturated mobile Android segment.
• AAA — If successful, Nvidia’s initiative could make high-budget Android games even less viable, and they’re already not profitable for most publishers.
• Enterprise — Nvidia has already partnered with VMware, so in the long run Android could be employed for enterprise as well, but this is a hypothetical scenario and would take some time to become viable.

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How Nvidia Shield Works

I won’t waste much time explaining the finer points of Nvidia’s GRID technology, but in case you are not familiar with the concept, a brief summary should come in handy. If you are interested in the finer point of GRID and GRID SDKs, Nvidia’s official documentation is extensive and available online.

A GRID server essentially operates like a remote vGPU, or a virtual gaming machine. The client side provides the input via graphic commands, which are then handled by the host interface and rendered on low-latency hardware. The frame buffer is then encoded on a low latency hardware decoder and sent back to the client in the form of a compressed video stream.

The original spec called for H.264 video, but the latest iteration of Nvidia’s SoCs, the Tegra X1, supports 4K H.265 (HEVC) at 60fps. This means the stream can be stutter-free and allow fluent framerates.

What about latency?

This is, perhaps, the biggest problem facing Nvidia GRID, and cloud gaming in general. Streaming video from the cloud is one thing, but rendering original audio and video content, based on user input, is something else. High latencies are not something gamers can live with; online multiplayer gaming has been around for years and Nvidia put a lot of time and effort into resolving the problem.

Nvidia estimates server-side latency at 30ms, network latency at 30ms and client-side latency at less than 16ms. The client decode API is designed for low latency of about 1 frame. Nvidia’s plan is to deploy dedicated GRID servers in telecom data centres and “flood the map” with servers to cut down latency. The company also designed partner middleware solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Nvidia has done a lot to create an infrastructure, but it may be a while before all corners of the globe gain access to low-latency GRID services.

Where Does Nvidia Shield Leave Android Developers?

Nvidia’s gaming tablet approach offers a few opportunities, and downsides, for Android developers. Big developers focused on creating the Android equivalent of big-budget AAA games could face more competitive pressure from Nvidia GRID, which can offer vastly superior quality at a premium.

However, small or independent developers focused on casual games and other apps have nothing to worry about. To the contrary, Nvidia is opening another door, in this case the door to the living room and big high-def screens. Coupled with H.265 and VP9 capabilities, Shield offers a range of opportunities, but ultimately it is up to developers to create a new generation of killer apps for 4K TVs, be it on Shield or Android TV.

Coincidentally, Taiwan-based chipmaker, MediaTek, will provide SoCs for the first generation of Android TVs, and the first chip was announced at CES 2015, just like the Tegra X1. MediaTek’s MT5595 SoC is based on 32-bit Cortex-A17 and Cortex-A7 cores, but its GPU can still handle HEVC and VP9 and 60fps, just like the Tegra X1. Android TV is a different topic, and I do not wish to discuss it in depth, but there is clearly a lot of overlap as far as developers are concerned.

Developing Android applications for big 4K/UHD displays is the next big thing, while Android Wear is, literally, the next small thing.

While it may sound like another challenge and another hardware platform to master, don’t forget to consider the benefits of developing apps designed specifically for the living room, for Android TV and devices like Nvidia’s Shield:

• Fewer software and hardware platforms to take into account.
• More powerful hardware available.
• Power efficiency is a non-issue.
• You only have to deal with one aspect ratio.
• Apps will be designed to run in just two resolutions (UHD and FHD).
• UI layout will be more or less standardised.
• User experience should be nearly identical across a number of different products.

Alternative Applications

So far, I have talked about Nvidia’s foray into the living room, but what about other potential applications? With so much processing power available on demand via GRID, surely there has to be a way to use it for something other than games?

This is a tricky one and I can only speculate, but a few things are already clear. Gaming is just one aspect of Nvidia’s parallel computing efforts – enterprise virtualisation is another, although it does not have much to do with Android, or the living room.

Devices like Nvidia Shield, or upcoming Android TV sets, could serve as a hub for many other devices, expanding the abilities of our smartphones to double as smart remote controls, transforming cheap tablets with fast wireless into “second screens”, offering new ways to distribute and consume content.

Shield stands out by virtue of its streaming capabilities and impressive processing power, including powerful and programmable CUDA cores that can be put to use for things other than graphics. Nvidia has already demonstrated that even its mobile GPUs, used in the latest Tegra chips, can be utilized to create 3D maps of surroundings, do rudimentary motion tracking and more. This means that in the future, Android devices could offer Kinect-like capabilities, seamlessly integrated with other Android devices. How about interactive fitness routines in the living room, backed by motion tracking and fitness wearables? Or games designed solely for big screen TVs, smart home control hubs, or new Virtual Reality (VR) capabilities?

VR and Augmented Reality (AR) might also benefit from such devices, and especially from Nvidia’s GRID technology. Google is also said to be working on Android VR, which will join Android Wear, Android TV and Android Auto in the future, but details are still sketchy. (I discussed the potential applications of streaming on VR and AR headsets in a previous post.) In the meantime, a number of companies have announced new or updated VR products and technologies, and all this happened in a matter of weeks at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Valve, Samsung, and AMD are just some of the big names worth mentioning.

But if Nvidia Shield could use streaming on home consoles, either via GRID or locally, why not use it on mobile devices as well? It sounds like a match made in heaven, with most of the computing being done in the cloud, offloading mobile devices for other tasks and improving battery life in the process.

Unfortunately this is not practical at this point. Few people would need access to such processing power on their mobile devices, which are already good enough for casual gaming, and even for some titles with truly staggering graphics. Bandwidth and latency would be another problem, as 4G/LTE is still not widely available across the world and in some scenarios it would not be fast enough. In addition, modern integrated modems are relatively complex; they often take up more room on the SoC than the GPU, or all CPU cores combined. Besides, running the modem at full blast, and crunching all the numbers to decode and display high resolution content, is not good from an efficiency perspective and would inevitably take a big toll on battery life.

In theory, it would be possible to use the same approach for some enterprise applications built around the same infrastructure, or for niche devices that could be used in some industries; but all this is a long way off, and such proprietary technologies should not concern the average Android developer, anyway.

So what should Android developers interested in Nvidia Shield gaming tablets, streaming, and Android TV, focus on? It is hard to say at this point, but the potential market for a new generation living room apps is huge and should not be overlooked. Who knows, maybe our posts will motivate some of our readers to look into this emerging market and come up with the next killer app, in which case I just want you to know one thing: a bottle of Blue Label would be nice.

The original article is from Toptal. Find more gaming resources here.

Microsoft HoloLens Review - Bridging The Gap Between AR And VR

Microsoft has a long tradition of spicing up relatively dull product announcements with compelling tech demos, and the Windows 10 announcement was no exception. The software giant used the opportunity to create a fair amount of buzz about the HoloLens, a futuristic headset that offers a glimpse into the future of Augmented Reality (AR). However, Microsoft also has a tradition of spectacular hardware flops, which peaked under the Ballmer regime. Remember the Kin phone? Neither do I.

The introduction of HoloLens probably won’t be such a flop for a number of reasons. First of all, the HoloLens still has a long way to go before it becomes a commercially viable device - it could be about a few quarters, or a couple of years. Secondly, the concept behind it is sound, and builds on a few promising emerging industry trends, such as wearable tech and Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. The HoloLens is trying to be somewhat different by bundling a lot of functionality into a single device, but in this Microsoft HoloLens review we will take a look at what’s already out there and what is in the works.

Since this is an engineering blog designed for VR professionals and other engineers, I won’t spend much time answering the question “What is HoloLens?” and explaining the difference between AR and VR. Augmented reality technology has a range of potential applications in various industries, but limited applications in entertainment. Virtual reality is more geared towards entertainment, although it has some professional applications as well.

Both technologies still have a lot of limitations, and numerous technical challenges have to be overcome in order to gain mass market appeal. This is a gradual process that will take years rather than months. The technology needed to create such products without breaking the bank is simply not ready, but it’s slowly getting there.

Let’s take a look at what’s out there and what’s missing.

Hardware Limitations - Google Glass vs. Oculus Rift vs. Microsoft HoloLens

Google Glass was announced in early 2012 and started shipping a year later at a cost of $1,500. The high price tag meant it was reserved for a very small niche – early adopters described as “explorers” by Google’s PR and marketing machine. The device offered limited AR functionality, and contained a small prism projector with a resolution of 640x360 pixels, powered by an outdated processor.

While it managed to captivate the public for a while, Google Glass can hardly be described as a success. App developers who were keen to jump on the bandwagon started losing interest, along with “explorers” who appeared to get over the fad in a matter of months. The latest rumours point to a new version of Google Glass with Intel silicon inside, so it might be a bit too early for an obituary. Either way, Google Glass was not a big success no matter how you look at it.

Oculus Rift is perhaps the most talked about VR system at the moment, but unlike Google Glass, it has yet to launch. Oculus VR has been working on the device for years, and in the process the company went through two generations of development kits. The consumer version is expected to launch sometime in 2015, with a revised spec. In March 2014, Oculus VR was bought by Facebook for more than $2bn in cash and Facebook stock.

Samsung’s Gear VR offers a different approach, as it utilises the Galaxy Note 4 phablet in lieu of a built-in screen, but it relies on some technology developed by Oculus. I find the modular concept interesting, as a similar approach could be employed with a range of mobile devices from different vendors that would allow users to effectively upgrade hardware every time they got a new phone. Qualcomm’s Vuforia platform boasts some promising features for mobile devices and potential AR/VR applications.

So, what’s missing? The simple answer might be processing power, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.

The problem with both concepts is that they are still ahead of their time, and the technology still needs to catch up. Microsoft’s HoloLens is bound to suffer from the same teething problems, but Microsoft’s concept is somewhat different, and therefore stands a chance of overcoming at least some of these issues.

Google Glass was designed as a lightweight wearable, which resulted in a number of compromises. The device featured a single display on a thick prism in front of the user’s right eye. The resolution was very limited given the field of view (FOV). For example, smartwatch displays tend to feature similar vertical resolutions for a device that takes up just a couple of degrees of the user’s field of view. Google Glass was based on an antiquated System on Chip (SoC) and had limited battery life.

Designing mobile devices is not easy, and always involves a number of trade-offs. Higher resolution displays require more GPU power, necessitating the use of bigger SoCs with more powerful GPUs working at a higher load, which then requires a larger battery and so on. It’s a fine balancing act, and an AR headset is simply too small to accommodate a large battery like those used in high-resolution tablets.

At first glance, Oculus Rift does not appear to suffer from similar shortcomings on the hardware front, since it does not have compromises for the sake of battery life and portability. It does not rely on an integrated SoC, and a 1080p display sounds desirable; but, in reality it’s not nearly enough for photorealism. The device has a very large FOV, and pixel density is still insufficient.

To overcome this problem, VR devices would have to use higher resolution 4K/UHD displays, or even 8K displays at some point in the future. The technology is almost there, but it does not come cheap, and is anything but portable.

If you want to run the latest AAA games on a 4K display with the highest possible detail settings, you need two high-end discrete graphics cards. For example, Nvidia and AMD cards based on flagship Maxwell and Hawaii generation GPUs. To eliminate frame tearing (using technologies similar to Nvidia’s G-Sync or AMD’s FreeSync) you need a bit more power, and to do proper 3D for both eyes you need even more GPU power.

The bottom line is: to power a 4K VR device using currently available technology, you would need at least two GPUs with a total of 12-14bn transistors in 28nm, consuming 350W to 500W of power, not counting the CPU and rest of the system. This is a conservative estimate, based on currently available GPU and CPUs - and let’s not even discuss the idea of powering two 4K screens, one per eye.

Nvidia’s latest mobile SoC, the Tegra K1 64-bit used in the Google Nexus 9, features 192 CUDA cores based on Kepler architecture, not the more efficient Maxwell. The company’s current flagship discrete graphics cards sport 2048 Maxwell CUDA cores running at higher clocks than Kepler cores in mobile Tegra SoCs.

Portable VR devices with photorealistic graphics are clearly unavailable for years to come, and even wired devices like Oculus Rift have a long way to go. The overall platform cost is another concern. Gaming PCs capable of pumping out playable frame rates at 1080p are relatively cheap, since mainstream GPUs are fast enough to do the job. But at 2160p you need four times the GPU muscle, backed by more memory and a faster CPU.

There is another way of tackling this problem, and I will go over it later.

So What Did Microsoft Get Right?

Remember Facebook’s Oculus Rift deal I mentioned earlier? Just a few days after it was announced, it emerged that Microsoft bought intellectual property (IP) assets related to augmented reality and wearable computers from the Osterhout Design Group (ODG). Some of the patents covered “see-through near-eye display glasses” with a partially transmitting optical element.

In other words, Microsoft bought the IP needed to create HoloLens; and the deal reportedly covered dozens of ODG patents, including a few dozen more patent applications in progress. Meanwhile, Oculus VR is said to have just a single patent, which vaguely describes “a virtual reality headset”.

Microsoft appears to be trying to get the best of both worlds – a wide FOV usually associated with VR devices, and a transparent display surface suitable for AR applications. The approach should allow HoloLens to utilize a lot less processing power than VR devices, while at the same time offering more functionality thanks to the wide FOV. Instead of trying to render photorealistic content, HoloLens could get away with a slightly lower resolution and image quality due to the limited opacity of displayed content. There is no need to create an illusion of reality, so there is a lot less hardware overhead involved. A lot of off-the-shelf technology could allow the HoloLens to reduce or eliminate aliasing and generate good looking composites, since the backdrop is already there.

This fact limits HoloLens’ appeal in the entertainment niche, as opposed to true VR headsets; but, it opens up a number of possibilities in other industries, ranging from engineering and healthcare to architecture and defense. HoloLens could be used to assist healthcare professionals, engineers, operators of industrial machinery, soldiers, and law enforcement.

However, HoloLens still has applications in the consumer space. Microsoft’s Phil Spencer said HoloLens needs to be a successful standalone product, adding that the company is already looking into ways of using it in unison with PCs and Xbox One consoles. The device could serve as a heads up display (HUD) for gamers, or even for fitness buffs in gyms.

HoloLens Hardware Conundrum

Microsoft has not revealed the exact hardware specifications, so we still don’t quite know what to expect. There is no word about display resolution, GPU GFLOPs, connectivity, or battery life. This leaves a lot of room for speculation, which the tech press is happy to fill with column inches and clickbait, but nothing is official yet.

Like I said, HoloLens should not require nearly as much GPU power as the Oculus Rift and similar VR products. However, this does not mean that Microsoft can get away with a cheap SoC, like the ones commonly used in mobile products. Microsoft currently uses a range of chips from different vendors – Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs with integrated 4G/LTE for mobile phones, Intel chips for Surface Pro tablets (along with Nvidia SoCs on defunct Surface RT products), along with custom AMD APUs in the Xbox One.

Due to power considerations, the most obvious choice would be a Snapdragon SoC, similar to those used in Lumia phones. This does not mean that HoloLens would be as underpowered as Google Glass. HoloLens is a much larger device, with room for a bigger battery; and, the latest Snapdragon SoCs are vastly more powerful than the chipset used in Google Glass (which is significantly slower than chips used in smartwatches). Early benchmarks indicate that the Adreno 430 GPU used in Qualcomm’s upcoming flagship SoCs, like the Snapdragon 810, is a powerhouse capable of handling 4K resolutions and rendering relatively complex 3D content in 1080p.

It’s not just about sheer rendering performance. GPUs offer a lot of computing potential, and can be used for much more than gaming. Google used the Tegra K1 for Project Tango, which also deals with a number of technologies that could be very useful for AR or VR devices - automation, driverless cars, and so on. I already mentioned Vuforia, and there are other players in the GPU industry, but Nvidia has the advantage of using CUDA cores – it’s been a market leader in professional graphics and GPGPU compute markets for years.

However, we should not be locked into the “what’s out there” mindset. It will take a while before HoloLens goes on sale, and subsequent generations are bound to feature even more powerful hardware. Intel’s new 14nm Atoms are coming soon, while ARM-based 14nm and 16nm SoCs should appear a couple of quarters later. The new non-planar nodes will allow even more performance per watt, drastically improving overall performance without taking a toll on battery life.

Streaming As An Alternative

There is also an alternative which I mentioned earlier – cloud computing and streaming could be used to display complex, resource-intensive 3D content. The latest SoCs feature 802.11ac wireless and fast LTE modems, sufficient for high-resolution streaming. The downside to this approach, especially LTE, is lag.

If additional content is rendered locally, on a PC workstation or possibly even an Xbox One, lag should be limited, but remote cloud rendering could prove problematic. For example, Nvidia is trying to tackle this problem by setting up GRID servers at strategic locations, in an attempt to cover the biggest markets with low-lag game streaming. Just a few milliseconds of additional lag could compromise the user experience in an AR application.

A mobile SoC should be sufficient for most everyday tasks, such as Skype and some limited augmented reality applications. However, if an architect wants to walk into a construction site and see how the finished building will look using augmented reality, the HoloLens will have to be backed by more hardware; rendering complex scenes with hundreds of thousands or millions of polygons, advanced lighting effects, and so on.

The upside is that HoloLens could offer a lot of functionality out of the box, with a relatively powerful integrated GPU capable of handling a lot of everyday tasks, such as high resolution video streaming, browsing, and even casual gaming. On the other hand, professionals could employ 802.11ac or LTE to stream more complex content, rendered remotely.

Microsoft could practically use the same hardware platform for home users and professionals, with the latter employing local or cloud streaming for more advanced, resource-intensive tasks.

Is There A Use Case And A Market For HoloLens?

Microsoft showed off the HoloLens in a number of different scenarios. While the demos were quite interesting, they did not exactly spell out a realistic and commercially viable use case for the new device.

What I like about HoloLens is the fact that it is halfway between true wearables, like Google Glass, and wired VR solutions, like Oculus Rift. HoloLens does not have to be light and portable enough to wear on the street, but at the same time it does not have to be tethered to a computer or external power source – the best of both worlds. I also like the fact that Microsoft is choosing to lead rather than follow. HoloLens differs from existing concepts and products; it’s innovative, futuristic, and original - a breath of fresh air from Redmond.

However, this approach also raises a number of important questions about the use case for HoloLens, and the size of the market. It can’t replace a display like VR solutions, yet it can’t be used in everyday situations due to its sheer bulk and appearance. While you may see some commuters and athletes using smart glasses, you probably won’t see skiers or joggers wearing a HoloLens headset.

What could mainstream users do with HoloLens? What sort of software platforms and operating systems will be supported? What about professional applications? What about HoloLens cross-platform functionality, hardware specifications, retail price, and Bill of Material (BOM)?

A lot of questions still have to be answered, and it will probably take a while before Microsoft releases all the information.

Microsoft will have to target mainstream and professional markets at the same time, with the same hardware. Depending on the price and BOM, Microsoft could leverage its Xbox user base, as well as a segment of the PC gaming market, to bring HoloLens products to mainstream users. Marketing such a product won’t be easy if the price is too high, but the user base is there - and it is willing to spend a lot of money on new gadgets. A mainstream market approach would also help get more developers on board, thus expanding the ecosystem and creating new use cases.

But if HoloLens products are bound to be priced for the mainstream market, how will Microsoft go after the professional market, and make some money in the process?

Years ago I used to make a living in offline 3D graphics, and I can see a lot of potential in HoloLens. There are a lot of 3D/CAD users out there and many of them would agree. Does this mean that every designer will be able to pick up a HoloLens device priced for the mainstream market and use it for work? Possibly, but probably not.

There are other ways of marketing products in this space. I’ve been covering the GPU space for years, and in that time I’ve learned a thing or two about how the industry operates. Although high-end graphics cards for gamers get all the headlines, the real cash cows for Nvidia and AMD are professional graphics and compute solutions. They are the unsung heroes in this duopoly. The BOM for a consumer card and a professional card based on the same GPU is roughly the same, but professional cards cost a lot more, an order of magnitude more. They deliver huge margins, and generate a lot of revenue and profit, in spite of low overall volumes – you can check any Nvidia quarterly earning report for more info.

Microsoft could resort to a similar approach. HoloLens could use the same hardware for both markets, limit functionality on consumer models, and expand it on professional products through different licensing tiers.

Of course, this is all just speculation at this point - but that’s how this market works. Microsoft does not have to reinvent the wheel.

This article was written by NERMIN HAJDARBEGOVIC - TECHNICAL EDITOR @ TOPTAL and can be read here.

Roto - The Chair That Spins

Here is something interesting in the name of gaming and VR:



https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rotovr/roto-taking-virtual-reality-to-the-next-level


Interesting idea for sure. As you need to move around in 360 using VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, this makes sense. However, you are still sitting down, and not really moving. Which is what I like about mine. Also, it's quite a pricey chair. Anyway, I wish them all the best with the campaign. :)

TreadGaming Dying Light Gameplay

New Gameplay video with TreadGaming hardware in action:



This time around I spend extra time adding images showing how I trigger things in the game. It's not exact, but will give you some idea.

Also, I'm now also using the neat functionality I just added where you can hold the top Nunchuck button (C) to trigger things with the stick. Here Nunchuck #1 (left hand) will trigger the D-Pad on a XBox 360 controller, and Nunchuck #2 (right hand) will trigger A, B, X and Y buttons using the stick. If I double click the C buttons, it will be triggering like a normal button. In this case LB and RB on a XBox 360 controller.

Exergaming Projects Out There

It's been a while since I posted about cool projects related to mine, so I though I collect a few and show them here:

This bike is sweet, but probably quite expensive. Still in concept stage as far as I know:



Golf:


Sport Simulator:




Oculus Rift + Kinect + KickR = Our Homage to Paperboy: PaperDude VR





This is nice work, but no so much "omni treadmill". He just hacked mini steppers to trigger movement. You do know that means "all" or "every" right?





Not sure how many would actually go through all this trouble, but hey, exploring limits - Draw real blood while getting hurt?



It's on Kickstarter, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1246820613/blood-sport-the-ultimate-in-immersive-gaming, but suspended for some reason...



CAREN ( Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment )

I would also like to highlight this wonderful site: http://www.fitness-gaming.com/