Next version of Oculus Rift will leave motion sickness at the virtual door

Oculus is talking about its latest Oculus Rift prototype, and thanks to a number of improvements users will reportedly no longer experience any motion sickness or nausea.

That's what the company and some high profile testers are saying, though the press won't get the chance to check it out until CES 2014 next month.

Oculus announced on December 12 that it had received $75 million (about £46m, AU$83m) in funding from the investment firm of web browser co-inventor Marc Andreessen, who also joined the company's board of directors with his colleague Chris Dixon.

According to The Verge, it was the latest and most advanced version of the Oculus Rift that convinced them to join the VR party.

Closer and closer

In the new Oculus Rift headset, the resolution is higher, the latency is lower and the motion blur is gone. The company said those factors were causing some users to walk away feeling ill, a problem that has supposedly been eliminated.

The latest version of the Oculus Rift also has full positional motion tracking for the first time, so it knows where your head is in 3D space in addition to where you're looking.

That means it can detect when you lean forward and backward and make other motions with your head, bringing your virtual movement that much closer to your real-life actions.

• Iribe talked about similar Oculus Rift features in November

What about Valve?

It's not just Oculus attesting to all this - the company showed it to big names in games like Epic Games co-founder Mark Rein, Interplay founder Brian Fargo and Cliff "Cliffy B" Bleszinski, who all tweeted their praise.

Oculus also clarified its relationship with Valve; rumor in November was that Valve was developing its own Oculus Rift competitor, but it turns out the two companies are collaborating on R&D thanks to Oculus CTO and Doom creator John Carmack and Valve's Michael Abrash having worked together on the game Quake in the 1990s.

That doesn't mean Valve still won't release its own version, but at least we know it will be a friendly competition if they do.

More than a game

With every barrier - from funding to the plaguing motion sickness now (hopefully) a thing of the past - Oculus has high hopes for the future.

Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey shared some of those hopes, and they include uses ranging from live concert viewing to immersive field trips where students are engaged despite never leaving the classroom.

He also revealed that Carmack is working on porting the Rift dev kit to Android so that the virtual reality headset isn't dependent on computers, but can stream experiences from phones and tablets as well, something which Carmack has previously has previously teased.

Luckey even hinted that the Oculus Rift might some day have an Android brain of its own, without needing to be tethered to another device, though that sounds a long way off.

Oculus hopes to get the Oculus Rift onto shelves and into stockings by the holidays in 2014. Look out for more on the new Oculus Rift as CES approaches.

• TechRadar went hands-on with the Oculus Rift - here's what we thought.

WeMo Switch + Motion Review

There was a time when home automation was a toy only for the wealthy (for whom it worked because they could afford the incredibly expensive hardware) or the extremely geeky (for whom it sometimes worked because the hardware they could afford was reasonably priced but buggy— we’re talking about you, X10). Belkin hopes to change that with its WeMo line.

iOS and Android 4.0 are currently the only smartphone options.

Instead of relying on a central controller and an independent wireless network, as more elaborate systems do, WeMo devices operate on your Wi-Fi network and you control them using an iOS or Android 4.0 smartphone or tablet (the Android software was in early beta as of this review, so we used an iPod Touch for our evaluation).

The WeMo line isn’t elaborate: It consists of a switch to control lamps and small appliances, a motion detector, and a baby monitor. The motion detector and the switch, reviewed here, work together. The WeMo Baby, which we didn’t check out, monitors sounds in your baby’s room and relays them to your mobile device.

Belkin’s WeMo is an inexpensive entrée to home automation, but its capabilities are somewhat limited.

The WeMo switch is a bulky plugin module with ground: Insert it into an electrical socket and then connect the device you want to control—a lamp or a small appliance, for instance—to the module. Install the WeMo software on your mobile device and you can turn the switch on and off and create simple rules to do the same. Add the WeMo Motion to the mix and it can turn the switch on and off when it detects movement (rules can apply here, too).

The rules are extremely basic: Turn the switch on and off at given times on given days of the week. The motion sensor can activate the switch in response to movement, to turn on the lamp in your foyer when you open your front door, for example. You can create a rule to ensure that this happens only when it’s dark.

WeMo gets more fun when you link it into your IFTTT (If This Then That) account. Now, you can create more rules based on WeMo events: If the motion sensor is triggered, send me a text message, for instance. Unfortunately, IFTTT currently supports only one WeMo device per channel, so if you use the motion sensor to trigger an SMS, you can’t use the switch to do the same thing (but you could have the switch send you an email).

The WeMo is certainly not the most sophisticated home-automation system we’ve tried, but it’s relatively inexpensive and it’s free from subscription fees. It’s also early in its life cycle and Belkin seems committed to expanding its capabilities.

$100, www.belkin.com

Inexpensive; very easy to set up and manage; fun.

Unsophisticated; bulky plugin modules; limited to controlling lamps and small appliances.

View the original article here