Every year, the Las Vegas CES unveils the most cutting-edge technologies, and the 2024 edition did not disappoint, especially in the field of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Here is an overview of the most notable AR/VR and IAG announcements.
Sony has introduced a new XR headset that stands out for its focus on spatial content creation. This headset, designed for professional applications, targets engineers, developers, and product designers involved in exploring and modeling 3D environments, as well as for testing and prototyping product designs.
The headset is equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset and features two 4K OLED micro-displays, providing a high-quality visual experience. It also includes a transparency video feature and has a total of six cameras and sensors for spatial recognition and enhanced mixed reality experiences. The device is designed to support creators in crafting sophisticated 3D content, with collaborations planned by Sony with various 3D production software developers in both entertainment and industrial design domains.
Unique features of the Sony headset: its physical control options.
It includes a wearable ring accessory for intuitive object manipulation in the virtual space, and a hybrid stylus and controller for precise interaction and pointing. Another notable feature is the headset’s flip-up visor, allowing for an easy transition between virtual and physical environments without the need to completely remove the headset. This folding mechanism is particularly useful for professionals who may need to switch frequently between virtual and real tasks.
Overall, Sony’s XR headset represents a significant step towards integrating virtual and physical workflows in professional environments, providing an immersive and intuitive tool for spatial content creation.
Welcome to the technological world of the Pimax Crystal, a virtual reality (VR) headset that redefines the standards of the visual experience. This detailed analysis highlights the essential technical aspects that make the Pimax Crystal a future pioneer in the field of VR.
The exceptional clarity of the Pimax Crystal
The Pimax Crystal stands out with its revolutionary Pixels-Per-Degree (PPD) measurement, achieving an unparalleled visual clarity of 35 PPD. The visual experience is then significantly enhanced (on average below 20 for other headsets). Its QLED+Mini LED panels, with a resolution of 5760 horizontal pixels and 2880 vertical pixels, create an unparalleled visual experience.
QLED+Mini LED Panels
Featuring QLED+Mini LED panels, the Pimax Crystal provides a wider color gamut, deeper blacks, and local dimming mini-LED backlighting. This unique design ensures enhanced contrasts and vibrant colors, creating an exceptional visual immersion with vivid colors and deep blacks, providing a rich and vibrant visual palette.
Ergonomic Design, Balance, and Comfort
Beyond its visual performance, the Pimax Crystal offers a balanced weight distribution for optimal comfort. With a weight of 960g, this headset remains among the lightest on the market, ensuring a secure and pleasant fit. Its angular design redefines comfort standards for VR headset users. The interchangeable glass lenses ensure consistent visual clarity and sharp vision, providing an uncompromised visual experience.
High-Precision Eye Tracking
Featuring high-quality eye tracking operating at 120 Hz, the Pimax Crystal offers immersive visual control. The eye tracking system enables optimal visual rendering, with a Foveated Rendering system that dynamically adjusts image quality in the peripheral vision (outside the user’s gaze) for exceptional performance.
Two Powerful Modes: PCVR and Standalone XR2
Explore the two exceptional modes of the Pimax Crystal. In PCVR mode, immerse yourself in the virtual reality world with the power of a robust computer. Discover how the standalone XR2 mode provides a lightweight and mobile experience, with support for Wi-Fi 6E and planned wireless streaming features via WiGig (WiGig is an ultra-fast wireless technology for short-distance connections, ideal for high-definition streaming and wireless devices).
External Cameras for Station-Free Experience
With 4 external depth-sensing cameras, the Pimax Crystal eliminates the need for base stations. These cameras ensure precise tracking without requiring additional accessories, simplifying setup and enhancing user convenience. The external cameras also enable advanced features such as hand tracking and augmented reality, expanding the possibilities for interaction in the virtual world.
Despite some minor drawbacks, the Pimax Crystal provides an exceptional visual experience. This technical exploration reveals the convergence of clarity, technology, and comfort, positioning the Pimax Crystal (priced at 1999€) as a headset to watch in the world of virtual reality!
The Chinese startup Xreal (formerly Nreal) unveiled its augmented reality glasses, the Xreal Air 2 Ultra, at CES 2024. These revolutionary glasses, set to be available in March, stand out with two front-facing sensors enabling 6DOF tracking (the ability to detect movements in three dimensions, adding a dimension to the classic freedom of movement – up/down, left/right, forward/backward), providing an unparalleled immersive experience. Compatible with the Galaxy S22 and S23 smartphones, the Xreal Air 2 Ultra is equipped with Sony micro-OLED displays, offering a resolution of 1080p per eye with a refresh rate of 120 Hz in 2D and 90 Hz in 3D.
Featuring a sleek design and lightweight build
The glasses, with an elegant sunglasses-style design, weigh only 80 grams thanks to their titanium frames. Equipped with small directional speakers and two microphones, they provide an immersive sound experience. The glasses’ lenses can be darkened for increased immersion, with three levels of adjustment available.
Features.
The Xreal Air 2 Ultra requires a connection to a smartphone or computer via a USB-C cable. The Nebula software overlay allows the display of Android or Windows applications in the form of virtual windows within the environment. The glasses can map the environment in 3D, with a semantic analysis of surfaces. Hand gestures are tracked for intuitive interaction.
Compatibility and Price
Compatible with Samsung Galaxy S22 and S23, as well as computers running Windows or MacOS, the Xreal Air 2 Ultra is available for pre-order at 799 euros. Primarily aimed at developers, they promise to create the next generation of mixed reality experiences. The software development kit (NRSDK 2.2) will be available in March. This will allow our developers at Audace Digital Learning to explore advanced uses for these glasses in the development of innovative training programs in the future!
Comparison and Battery Life, the Drawback of These Glasses
While Xreal positions the Air 2 Ultra as competitors to the Apple Vision Pro, they stand out for a narrower field of view and less advanced technology. Their autonomy, dependent on the host device’s battery, provides approximately three hours of movie viewing on a smartphone. However, it’s important to keep in mind the price of these two devices, which adds to this difference: 799€ against approximately 3200€!
Growth of the Augmented Reality Market
The augmented reality glasses, booming in 2023, are evolving with the Xreal Air 2 Ultra. Despite some limitations, these glasses anticipate a new era of visual comfort and spatial features, driving the expansion of the augmented reality market.
The announcement of the Xreal Air 2 Ultra represents a significant advancement in the field of augmented reality, providing developers and users with an unprecedented immersive experience. Although presenting some differences compared to the Apple Vision Pro, these glasses pave the way for a new era of visual innovations. With promising features and an elegant design, they demonstrate the ongoing growth potential of the augmented reality market. Note: BMW has highlighted the integration of augmented reality into cars with the Xreal Air 2 glasses. AR indications guide the driver, overlaying navigation instructions in their field of vision, providing hazard warnings, offering a convincing demonstration of the future of AR-assisted driving.
Revolutionize Your Experiences with NVIDIA ACE: Intelligent Avatars for a Playful and Instructive Future.
NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a technological breakthrough enabling developers to create innovative digital avatars through generative AI. ACE offers easy customization, secure outcomes, and deployment flexibility, paving the way for realistic and engaging avatars. This could be a significant advantage for your future training programs. This project revolutionizes players’ immersion. Non-player characters (NPCs) become interactive, reacting realistically to players’ words, offering natural dialogues with the ability to speak to them through a microphone. The interactions are multilingual with a one-second latency.
Key Features of ACE:
– Easy to Build – Highly Customizable: Customize ACE models without deep expertise, seamlessly integrate them into your applications for realistic avatars.
– Secure and Consistent Results: ACE offers secure AI models (Audio2Face, Live Portrait, Voice Font, Riva, and NeMo) ensuring accurate and appropriate avatars in various contexts, addressing future demands, such as in training.
– Flexible Deployment Options: Deploy avatars via the cloud, PC, public or private, in real-time or offline, offering total adaptability to developers.
Key Components of ACE :
– AI Animation: Uses Audio2Face for realistic 3D animations, also facilitating the animation of 2D portraits with Live Portrait.
– AI Speech and Translation: Provides accurate transcription (ASR), text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), and up to 31 bidirectional translations with NeMo. (More info : https://www.nvidia.com/fr-fr/ai-data-science/generative-ai/nemo-framework/)
– Generative AI: NVIDIA NeMo provides language models for advanced responses, ensuring accuracy and security for avatars.
Exploration of Possibilities: :
NVIDIA ACE offers an innovative solution to developers, enabling them to create customized avatars or adopt processes specific to their application domain, such as customer interaction and intelligent services. In the gaming industry, development with NVIDIA Kairos introduces intelligent non-player characters (NPCs), ensuring natural interactions through ACE via NeMo, Riva, and Audio2Face. Finally, real-time communication is optimized by NVIDIA Maxine, which integrates real-time translation and speech synthesis, with the addition of Riva for immersive global-scale communication.
In summary, NVIDIA ACE propels avatars to new horizons, offering seamless integration into digital experiences. From gaming to real-time communications, ACE paves the way for a future where avatars become a significant addition to interactive experiences, particularly in future training scenarios. Imagine being able to interact in real-time with an avatar that provides you with more information about your training; that could be a significant advantage!
Already last year, generative artificial intelligence (GAI) was the star of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, just two months after the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI. This year, the trend is confirmed at this new edition of the trade show: AI will be increasingly used in sectors such as health, finance, logistics, and education, thereby transforming the way these industries operate.
The Industry Giants highlight the GAI:
Nvidia, renowned for its contributions to large language models (LLMs), has unveiled a hybrid solution combining the power of its graphics processing units (GPUs) with cloud computing. This approach meets the growing demand for GAI and extends to sectors such as 3D modeling and video game. Intel, its direct competitor, announces a new generation of processors focused on GAI and expresses its commitment to integrating GAI into future automotive fleets.
At the event, Volkswagen announced the integration of ChatGPT into its vehicles. LG, on the other hand, plans to infuse its household appliances with GAI to enable them to provide verbal guidance.
Industrial Metaverse: How Siemens Aims to Shape the Future
Among the major industry players present, Siemens unveiled significant advancements aimed at creating an industrial metaverse, merging the physical and digital worlds for innovative collaboration through artificial intelligence (AI). Siemens CEO, Roland Busch, emphasized the opportunities presented by this metaverse, allowing individuals to collaborate in real-time to address challenges in the physical world.
One of the key partnerships announced is with Sony, focusing on the development of immersive engineering. Siemens and Sony are collaborating on a solution called ‘NX Immersive Designer,’ scheduled for release in 2024. This innovative solution combines Siemens’ NX software with Sony’s new spatial content creation system, including an extended reality (XR) headset. This XR technology provides a virtual and augmented experience with high-quality 4K OLED micro-displays and controllers for intuitive interaction with 3D objects. The demonstration shows how engineers at Red Bull Racing can overcome traditional constraints by immersing themselves in the industrial metaverse.
At the same time, Siemens is strengthening its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to facilitate the creation and deployment of generative AI applications. By integrating Amazon Bedrock into Mendix (Siemens Xcelerator’s low-code platform), customers can easily select and integrate generative AI models without requiring specialized programming skills. This collaboration streamlines the development of intelligent applications, enhancing productivity by simplifying tasks such as machine documentation search and suggesting equipment adjustments. Generative AI provides a user-friendly interface for interacting with information, thereby accelerating the development process while ensuring security and confidentiality in data handling.
In summary, Siemens is actively committed to shaping the future through key partnerships and technological advancements, aiming to realize the concept of the industrial metaverse through immersive engineering and generative AI solutions. The CES 2024 highlighted the growing appetite for GAI, suggesting that this technology is on track to become the standard for all economic players. This wave of innovation recalls the advent of the web in the late 1990s, marking a major turning point in the global technological landscape. Stay tuned for these exciting developments, as the future of learning has never been more promising.
Audace will meet you at the Learning Technologies 2024 show on January 24 and 25 at Paris Expo – Porte de Versailles.
Immersive learning is a learning method that uses virtual reality to simulate real environments and allow learners to immerse themselves in learning situations. This method is increasingly used in companies to train employees for specific tasks, as it helps reduce training costs while improving the quality of learning and the company’s operational experience.
Immersive learning is particularly effective for tasks that require hands-on training, such as industrial maintenance, security, health and medicine. Learners can immerse themselves in simulated environments and practice real-world tasks without risk of injury or property damage.
Additionally, immersive learning can be used to improve employee productivity. Learners can practice real-world tasks in a simulated environment, allowing them to become familiar with work processes and reducing the time required to complete tasks.
Last webinar of the year: Jérôme Poulain challenges preconceived ideas and demonstrates how virtual reality can significantly reduce training costs while improving the quality of learning and the operational excellence of the company. With concrete cases to illustrate the demonstration.
Well-managed onboarding has a decisive impact on the success of employees, and therefore of the company. It allows for better job placement, an increase in productivity, greater job satisfaction and, in fact, a reduction in turnover. This is how the Robert Schuman Hospitals Group (HRS), comprising 4 establishments in Luxembourg (2,300 employees and 310 doctors), is launching an innovative onboarding course for its new employees. Developed in collaboration with Audace, this program is part of the HRS Group’s CSR framework, aiming to facilitate the integration of new team members.
The training course consists of 15 modules, all available in French and German. It covers a variety of topics allowing employees to feel welcome, with a welcome video from the group director and the human resources director; to discover the values, the history of the group and its scope of action; to familiarize themselves with the center they will join; to have all the necessary logistical information but also to understand the context of the hospital environment, its challenges and to know the best practices to apply on a daily basis.
TV set as a setting, star presenter, sound jingle, specialists interviewed, special correspondent on site, discovery reports, news flashes, etc. the employee is immersed in a TV show (very inspired) and guided by the presenter Guillaume and his guests.
The storyline choice of the hand-held camera report allows you to immerse yourself in the heart of the HRS group, to get to know its different divisions in depth. Each video introduces interactive educational content.
The icing on the cake is that the learner sometimes takes the place of the guest expert on the set in order to give his opinion via a series of various questions asked throughout the module. After each decision is made, feedback is systematically offered according to the nature of the response for better anchoring in memory.
Preventing burnout is an essential component of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). In the current context where the mental health of healthcare professionals is under severe strain, the risks of burnout or Caregiver Professional Burnout Syndrome (SEPS) have increased considerably. To respond to this critical situation, the A.Qua.VieS association (Association for the Quality of Life of Caregivers) took the initiative of developing a serious game in collaboration with Audace Digital Learning. This serious game is designed to help caregivers and their supervisors recognize and anticipate the signs of SEPS.
Burnout manifests itself as intense fatigue, a feeling of loss of control and an inability to achieve concrete results at work. At the beginning of 2020, the National Public Health Agency (ANSP) entrusted A.Qua.VieS with the mission of assessing the risk of SEPS in hospitals. In response, the association chose to have Audace develop, under its scientific control, a serious game “Detect me if you can!” », aligned with the objectives of the Observatory of the quality of life at work for health professionals.
This online training program, combining theory and practice, aims to equip caregivers and their supervisors with the necessary knowledge about SEPS to better prevent it. Specific objectives include the ability to define the causes of SEPS, identify a person suffering from this syndrome, apply this knowledge in case studies, modify the organization to avoid cases of SEPS, and self -evaluate your knowledge and practices for operational implementation.
This initiative is fully in line with CSR efforts to promote a healthy and supportive work environment, particularly in sectors as sensitive as health.
