It feels like yesterday when we were hearing about the prototype of the VR headset, and after an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign back in August, the Oculus Rift has made headlines all other the internet. The company even made an appearance at CES, where it showed off the VR technology to attendees.

The company says they shipped over 10,000 developer kits, so we should be seeing quite a surge in support for the VR headset before it officially ships out to Kickstarter backers and the general public. The first game, however, to receive official support for the VR headset is Valve’s Team Fortress 2.

Furthermore, with dev units shipping out, Oculus has opened up its developer portal on its website. There you’ll find everything you need to get started creating content for the VR headset. In the meantime, if you’re not a developer, you get the honor of waiting it out before the public will have the chance to receive their own units.

The DUO 3D sensor is open source, meaning that you can do anything with it that you please. It comes with open hardware plans, and you can get it in kit form where you assemble it or you can get fully assembled devices. The drivers and SDK are also open source, so there’s quite a bit that you can do with it right off the bat.

The company even claims that the sensor is practically plug-in-play, where you just plug it in, download the necessary software, and start playing around with it “within minutes.” From the video itself, the DUO looks to be extremely accurate, tracking fingers with every slight move. From the looks of it so far, it’ll definitely give the Leap Motion a run for its money.

The “DIY” portion comes into play with the open source hardware blueprints that you can purchase (or “back” in this case). The hardware plans will provide you with everything you need, but it’ll be up to you to get the parts and assemble it. However, you can modify the plans however you wish and truly make it your own.

Pledging $10 gets you the SDK, while $20 will get you the hardware plans, as well as the SDK. $40 will get you everything previously, as well as a custom-molded case for your 3D sensor. $140 will get you a fully-assembled kit, while $110 will score you all the parts you need to assemble it yourself.

According to the New York Times, the new phone will watch where your eyes are looking and will scroll down the page for you when your eyes reach the bottom. It’s said that Samsung has trademarked the term for this technology and are calling it either “Eye Scroll” or “Eye Pause.” Eye Scroll sounds a lot better, but we’ll see what Samsung does come March 14.

The anonymous source, who is a Samsung employee and was not authorized to speak to media (tisk tisk), didn’t say what technology was being used to track eye movement, and we probably won’t know exactly until the Samsung press conference. However, the source said that software features of the Galaxy S IV will outweigh the importance of the hardware overall.

However, Samsung’s chief product officer, Kevin Packingham, noted that he disagreed that the software would take attention away from the hardware, saying that the rumored device is “an amazing phone.” Of course, we’ll ultimately find out come March 14, but unless the Galaxy S IV comes with better hardware specs than the HTC One or other recent devices, hardware may not really be a huge deal.

[via New York Times]

Essentially, the Leap Motion is able to change the pitch of the guitar chords based on the position of the guitar’s headstock, meaning that there’s no need for players to use a tremolo bar or bend the strings while playing. The device can also track specially-made drum sticks that allow the Leap to track the end points of the sticks to play the beats.

However, that seemed to be Bersot’s most difficult challenge. He says “it wasn’t easy to play drums with it,” and it actually needs more work to make it more stable. Essentially, Bersot used the velocities and positions of the drum sticks on the X axis, and had it play the note at just the right time during the down motion.

We’re assuming Bersot’s project is just for fun, since it doesn’t seem like he plans to release something like it anytime soon, but it goes to show the potential of the Leap Motion device. While it can be used to track your hands to move objects on a screen, the implications of such a device go way beyond what one might think.

[via MAKE]

The glasses also have “6D” head tracking, along with the 3D eye tracking. The company partnered up with Volfoni to bring the 3D portion to the glasses, which feature active shutter technology that you see in a lot of advanced 3D glasses today. The 6D head tracking is there to detect gazes whenever the user turn their head to point toward an object.

The glasses offer real-time gaze streaming in world coordinates by measuring the position and orientation of the user’s head within a defined space. The glasses are simply worn like a normal pair of glasses, and the eye tracking is made possible by two small cameras on the outer rim of the glasses while another camera records the field of view from the user’s perspective. The three orbs on each side allow for the 6D head tracking, and they’re detachable for easy storage.

While the Oculus Rift was a big hit at CES a few weeks ago, it’s going to have some stiff competition sooner or later once virtual reality starts taking off. The eye tracking system from SMI supports Microsoft’s Kinect, so it can already be used with technology that people already have. However, there’s no word on availability or pricing for SMI’s 3D glasses.

In fact, Leap Motion’s technology can not only track ten fingers, but with an accuracy of up to 1/100th of a millimeter. There’s no visible delay in the tracking either, the company says, thanks to a 290fps capture rate, and the area of sensitivity covers 150-degrees.

Of course, hardware is only half of the equation, and so Leap Motion has been working on cultivating the developer scene so that there’s sufficient software to make owning the controller itself worthwhile. 12,000 free developer units have already been seeded, with applications in gaming, computer-aided design, augmented reality, and more.

Leap Motion walkthrough:

Earlier this month, Leap Motion announced a deal with ASUS to instill select future PCs from the company with integrated motion-control tracking. This new deal with Best Buy will mean even those without a new ASUS PC will be able to join in, though the retailer will only be the exclusive North American sales partner.

Those outside of the US and Canada can order direct from the manufacturer, with the controller varying in price depending on your country. In the US, it’s $69.99 before shipping; for a UK delivery, for instance, that rises to $83.99 before shipping. Deliveries are expected early this year.

ASUS will be bundling Leap’s motion control technology with select notebooks and desktops that will ship later this year, including the company’s all-in-one PCs and high-end notebooks. The Leap Motion app store will also come pre-installed on all of the qualified computers, and since ASUS will be shipping the products internationally, it will mark Leap’s international debut.

If you’re not sure what the heck Leap Motion does exactly, we’ll give you a quick refresher. The company’s motion-tracking technology has a 150-degree field of view that tracks individual hands and all 10 fingers at 290 frames per second in order to provide ultra precise motion controls. It also offers 200x more accuracy than Microsoft’s Kinect, which already has its many drawbacks anyway.

Obviously, this new tech will encourage users to ditch the traditional keyboard and mouse interface in favor of a Minority Report-esque interface, but depending on how well ASUS implements the technology, we can’t imagine that it’d be hard to pry keyboards and mice out of diehard fans. Prices for the motion-control-equipped computers haven’t yet been discussed, but ASUS promises the new PC’s will be available around the world later this year.

A wrist-worn device is interesting because it eliminates the need to be able to place an external sensor at a distance far enough from the user to be able to accurately track hand and body movements. For instance, the Kinect sensor needs a relatively large room for accurate tracking. The wrist-worn device that the researchers created attaches to the user’s wrist like a bracelet.

The device has a number of components, including an array of infrared sensors and more directly attached to the user’s wrist. The sensor is able to track precise hand motions. As the demonstration video below shows, the device allows users to move their hand through the air to control a computer or other system with precision.

The researchers say that their ultimate goal is to be able to reduce the systems size down to that of a wristwatch. The researchers hope when the device is sized like a watch, users will be able to wear it at all times allowing them to interact with computers and other systems without having to reach for controllers or keyboards. There’s no indication at this time of when this technology might come to market.

[via Geekwire]