Gadgetory

excellent what's up guys I'm an idea let's let's do some IDF stuff so guys I'm reporting from my hotel room and I apologize if this doesn't look her sound that great but I'm going to press on because I got a chance to have some hands-on time with project alloy that Intel just announced yesterday it's an all-in-one VR platform basically they're making it for mixed reality or merged reality which is combining a virtual 3d world with the actual physical world around you now this is a unique even if you compare it to something like HTC vive or an oculus rift because it is completely untethered they've made it self-contained it includes a head mounted display a VR capable skylake based PC that's wedged in there somewhere and wireless connectivity as well as a battery that's positioned on the back for completely untethered VR experience until leveraging their real Sense technology which we've seen used in drones before for example to provide collision detection and they have six goals with alloy one is six degrees of mobility so forward backward left right up down so of course you're not going to want a tether if you want full movement and even the ability to move from room to room for example integrated tracking of course so no light boxes or external sensors are needed all you need is the unit itself you want natural manipulation so that's the ability to see and use your own hands or other parts of your body or other things that might actually be physical in the virtual environment or the mixed reality environments they also want mobility but not just mobility as far as not being tethered but also what Intel calls slam which is just a badass acronym that means simultaneous location and mapping which tracks your position where you are as well as tracking the position of things around you they also wanted to have real-world content so they want to be able to bring the real world into the virtual world which is of course kind of the definition of mixed reality or merged reality so if your friend walks up to you while you're wearing this and you're in a VR environment your friend should appear there and also be in the environment with you so I was able to get some hands-on time with the unit's I wasn't able to turn it on and use it unfortunately but I was able to check it out at least physically it is fairly large it's a little bulky especially right up in front but bear in mind this is a very early demo units and there's probably lots of different iterations and refinements to come I did find it to be heavier than the oculus but it is a little bit more balanced since the battery is in the back there's three sets of sensors up on the front there's two infrared sensors two fisheye cameras and then multiple realsense sensors that can track distance and depths of objects around you the demo unit held all of its sensors in a little aluminum frame which seems to be kind of a key element to this design it keeps all the sensors in a fixed location and you can kind of see how you could use this little sensor array as well as the PC guts that are in there somewhere as well as a battery pack in a third party design unit that might look completely different but have the basic same function and that is definitely Intel's plan they're planning to open-source to a low a hardware as well as the realsense API next year to let third parties develop their own headsets there's kind of a ridge across the front of the unit and the cameras are positioned on that and kind of pointed out to provide a little bit wider field of view and then on the right side there are two buttons labeled c1 and c2 which are probably meant to interact with the operating system since if you haven't noticed there are no actual controls there's individual screens per eye I was able to confirm that although I didn't get any details on them and that definitely appears to be specialized glass lenses as well that you're looking through when you're actually having the unit on I was able to try it on with my glasses in place and it did go on and it fit okay but I pulled the lioness right after that night when I was taking it off and I broke the strap on top and I felt bad but they said it wasn't a big deal and they didn't kick me out so that's cool now they did a live demo on stage at IDF and have some pretty shaky camera footage to share with you guys of that but they were able to show how you can for example put your hands out in front of you and actually see them and use them to interact with things you don't even need controllers or gloves of course you can pick up and use objects from the real world and alloyed will detect them so now on stage demo they actually had a dollar bill and who is using it to reach out in front of him and shave the gold off of a virtual lathe in front of him and then they made a funny joke about that that's pretty much all it's been revealed as far as specs and everything goes but I do have some questions that remain and I'll have a I have a couple answers for those one of course is release date second half of 2017 is what they're shooting for with this early units for developers might go out by the end of this year but again it's still not entirely clear whether Intel's planning to even bring this to market themselves or whether they're just planning on feeding this to third-party developers to make their own units of I had questions about the graphics quality of course what we saw on screen looked actually pretty clean it didn't seem like there was any tearing or study stuttering or anything like that but granted it was a pretty limited environment that they were in so I can imagine that higher end games might be limited by the graphics quality of this since they're using what has to be fairly low-power skylake based hardware in there with the book we can assume as an AI GPU that's powering everything and the granite you enough to sustain 90 frames per second for a virtual reality world to not make you throw up or anything like that so I'm kind of skeptical as far as what we're going to see out of this as far as actual GPU performance but trade-off is of course that's completely untethered battery life of course is going to be a question how long you're going to be able to put it on and where it's how long is it better going to take the recharge will they be swappable can you buy a new one or something like that I'll probably leave that up to third-party manufacturers and their own designs it's a weight and the ease of movement was a little bit of a concern for me I was considering especially games that require a lot of ducking or moving around like hover Junkers for example it is a little bit bulkier on your head than the typical VR head mounted units that we have right now so if you did have a lot of movement around I could see it getting a little wobbly perhaps or even falling off after actual interaction with this device they brought Microsoft out on stage and they announced a partnership for Microsoft Windows holographic platform which is actually an update that's coming to Windows 10 sometime next year we're told which will provide holographic interfaces within Windows 10 giving you that full-on Minority Report experience I can imagine so there's a ton of potential as well with that collaboration for industry-wide be our standards which I think will help everyone as long as they're open again and everyone can access them standardization is usually really helpful for something like this I guess the last thing is that there is a lot of potential for it to get much smaller since again this is a very early unit that we're working with and there's still a lot of development to be done but guys that is Intel's project alloy I hope you have enjoyed this first time hands-on look at it if you enjoyed this video hit the thumbs up button and we'll see you next time