Virtual Game Nut

You might know motion capture as the tech that transformed Andy Serkis into Gollum, but now it can transform everyday people into animated avatars in virtual worlds, and all in real-time. Motion capture—which uses body sensors, ultra-precise cameras, and modeling software to create 3D animations from real-life human movement—is now taking on location-based virtual reality, or LBVR.

PCWorld visited a leading motion capture company called Vicon in Oxford, England to learn how mocap has evolved to take on this new frontier in entertainment.

If you’ve watched behind-the-scenes footage of how motion capture (or mocap) works, you’ve probably seen actors in skintight lycra suits covered with golf ball-sized sensors. Normally, dozens of infrared cameras track these sensors to model an actor’s movements. But now Vicon has a new system called Origin that requires only one sensor on each limb, plus one for a VR headset.    

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The world of Harry Potter meets the world of computer coding in a new children’s coding kit by Kano (for ages 6 and up) that will hit store shelves on October 1. With the Harry Potter Kano Coding Kit ($100, available for preorder) kids are tasked with building a wand, which in turn teaches them about computer programming through the wand’s “magic.” By pairing the wand with a tablet or computer via Bluetooth, children can learn the coding behind cause and effect—as they see how the actions of the wand are reflected on the screen. 

“Today, there is a form of magic in the world and it’s the technological projection—virtual reality, prediction, augmented reality—that so few of us understand,” says Alex Klein, co-founder and CEO of Kano. “That’s what makes it magic in a way, is that nobody understands it really except this small fraction of society.”

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Last week we told you about a killer deal on the original Pixel (which is still going on), but if you’d rather get some of Google’s newest products for less, now’s the time to act. Pixels, Chromecasts, and Google Home speakers are all on steep sales through July 17.

The Pixel 2 XL, Google’s premier smartphone, is $100 off both the 64GB and 128GB models, bringing them down to $749 and $849 respectively. The phone easily earned our Editors’ Choice award for its great all-around performance, but the Pixel 2 XL’s blending of a top-of-the-line mobile camera with Google’s A.I. magic results in one of the most fun, elegant camera experiences you’ll find in a camera today. And if you want to use the phone’s power to wander worlds in virtual reality, the 2nd-gen Daydream View headset is on sale for $49, 50 percent off its $99 list price.

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Remember when those gigantic VR treadmills were all the rage a few years back? Cybershoes are like kind of like that, but without the treadmill.

Cybershoes straps ski-like sleds onto your feet, with rollers on the bottom that track where you’re moving, and in what direction. That lets you physically shuffle around while you’re sitting in a chair to digitally run around in games like Doom VFR without needing to devote a massive amount of floor space to a VR treadmill. It’s a cool concept that works as advertised, and the shoes slip on very easily.

Unfortunately, using Cybershoes made Hayden feel queasy, and he’s a VR veteran of many years and even more headsets. Watch him scoot through the hordes of Hell in the video above—our last of E3 2018—and look for Cybershoes to launch on Kickstarter in September.

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Hardware doesn’t really have an “Early Access” period per se, the way games often do nowadays, but I’ve put off writing about Microsoft’s Mixed Reality headsets for essentially that reason. A half-dozen headsets emerged last October with few games and even less fanfare. To make matters worse, they were locked to the Windows 10 Store at launch, making it particularly unattractive to those who’d already amassed a sizable amount of VR content on Steam.

That sin wasn’t rectified until December when Microsoft added rudimentary SteamVR support—in beta. And it wasn’t officially rectified until about a week ago, when Windows 10’s April 2018 Update coincided with SteamVR-on-Mixed-Reality getting the 1.0 seal of approval.

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Anyone concerned that Microsoft is evolving into a more accessible version of IBM, rather than the consumer company many would like it to be, isn’t going to feel any better after the company’s Build developer conference starting May 8 in Seattle. Two expected moves will reinforce that enterprise direction: a Kinect sensor for Azure, and two HoloLens apps that are being adapted for businesses using mixed reality.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella is expected to open Build on Monday by describing the “intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge,” which has been Microsoft’s unofficial mantra for about a year. Microsoft plans to define what it means by intelligent edge: By 2020, there will be about 30 billion connected devices, each generating about 1.5GB of data per day. Smart buildings and connected factories will add to that. Expect to hear quite a bit about the Internet of Things on Monday—“the world is a computer,” Nadella is expected to say.

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