This week I felt like a kid in a candy store. No wait, I felt like a kid in a mall full of candy stores. I saw so many cool technologies that sparked innovation! This is why I came to Vegas. Forget the loud music and gambling and revelry, I want new tech! Let me tell you about a few things I saw of note to me, starting with the coolest thing I saw today: Crescentbay.

Crescent Bay

Crescent bay is OculusVR’s latest developmental prototype for their Virtual Reality head mounted display (HMD). I’ll be the first to say I was blown away by it. The graphics were by far the best I’ve seen on a HMD and there was no latency or motion sickness I could detect. They put a body tracking camera on the wall and my whole body could control the user in the applications I was demonstrated. I ducked, I kneeled, I looked around a corner, I zigged, I zagged, you get the point. I was there.

They had me stand on a pad, which I was told had no function other than to keep you from hitting the walls. The experiences I was shown were centered around you staying on a pad and not moving so it worked perfectly. 360 degree immersion was amazing. The most staggering experience was that of being on top of a skyscraper, complete with cars down below and towers all around. The “Brand Ambassador” (Not an OculusVR employee) told me she had one woman get on her knees and look down very cautiously to avoid falling off the building. It was amazing.

I can’t see any pixels. I can see pixels on the DK2 (not bad), the GearVR (better), but none on CrescentBay (best). Coupled with the body tracking, I need one. The last demo I saw used the Unreal Engine and was amazing. SWAT team guys were fighting a huge robot shooting missiles at me. I moved forward in slow motion and the graphics were better than any AAA game I’ve played. It had a feeling like Call of Duty or something like that, but it rocked. Sign me up!

Virtuix

Virtuix was a show stopper. They had a persistent crowd and were next door to the Oculus VR booth, so the two had some synergy there. They showed their commercially available product and had a couple guys running around shooting targets in the Virtuix Omni. It looked tight, but I bet the guys who did the sims for 10+ hours today were a bit out of it when they got done!

A thought I had after I saw Crescent Bay is that it could change up where Virtuix is going, but it has to be hard to build a technology with such a flux in development, both on the hardware and software sides of things.

4K

I saw so many TVs today that had 4K resolutions from major manufacturers. They looked amazing. My only worry is that there isn’t enough 4K content, but I’m sure Hollywood will fix that.

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