It’ll be a while before all-in-one virtual reality headsets hit the shelves — the Oculus Rift system and HTC’s Vive won’t arrive until next year — but in the meantime, you can have a more DIY experience with Samsung’s latest Gear VR and a recent Galaxy S smartphone.
Any recent Samsung flagship phone (Galaxy S6, Edge, Edge+, or Note5) serves as the screen in the headset, which appeared in a more expensive, limited fashion earlier this year. Lenses inside separate the on-screen images so they go to the correct eye and produce the 3-D effect.
Head tracking and other functions are also handled by the phone, making the headset somewhat less of a dedicated solution than the complex systems used by HTC and Oculus. You’ll need to provide your own headphones as well. But with a price tag of $99 and expected to ship this November, Gear VR, unveiled Thursday, will be one of the easiest ways to access virtual reality content out there.
I have said it once, and I’ll say it again. 3D printing and robots will continue their inevitable convergence, leading to completely custom robots which can perform virtually any human-like task, and feature an appearance tailored to our individual preferences. We aren’t all the way there yet, but with 3D printing, we are getting ever so close.
One company, called RoboSavvy, is probably as close as any other company out there though, with their latest creation of a 3D printed humanoid robot. This robot is unlike any other robot you have seen before, and it is built mostly of 3D printed parts.
“The hands, fingers, forearms, head, chest shell, and several internal supports as well as the custom handle on the Segway are 3D printed,” Samantha Mehditash of RoboSavvy tells 3DPrint.com. “[The parts were printed on a] Makerbot Replicator 2X 3D Printer and our custom made large size 3D printer.”
Facebook’s stepping into the world of virtual reality.
The company announced on Tuesday afternoon it has reached a deal to acquire Oculus VR, a company paving new roads in the field, for $2 billion. The deal is comprised of $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook stock.
Oculus VR’s flagship product is the virtual reality goggles known as the Oculus Rift, which was first funded through a massively successful Kickstarter campaign. It has already received more than 75,000 orders for development kits.
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Samsung
RoboSavvy’s Robot
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