The rumours and titbits from the last seven days in wearable tech
And finally is the home for those wearable tech stories we didn’t find a place for in our news, features and reviews sections during the week.
It’s a one-stop-shop for rumours, murmurs and blips, allowing you to keep up to date with everything that’s happening in the wide world of wearables.
And this week’s a cracker, with some explosive comments…
Oculus Rift merks Mac
Palmer Luckey has just pulled down Tim Cook’s pants in public. Not literally, of course, that’d be front page news. But the Oculus Rift boss didn’t hold back when slamming Apple’s Mac credentials.
“That is up to Apple. If they ever release a good computer, we will do it,” Luckey explained, when asked if Rift would ever play nicely with Macs. Ouch.
“It boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritise high-end GPUs,” added Luckey. “You can a buy $6,000 Mac Pro with the top of the line AMD FirePro D700 and it still doesn’t meet our recommended spec.”
The Oculus Rift starts shipping this month. But it faces big competition from the HTC Vive, which opened up pre-orders this week.
Intel wants in on the AR action
Another headset that opened up for pre-orders this week was Microsoft’s HoloLens, at least for developers. And it seems that Redmond could have some big name company in the augmented arena: Intel wants in, according to the WSJ.
Sources claim that Intel is working on an augmented reality headset based on RealSense – a technology that uses multiple cameras to judge the distance and scale of objects in the real world.
Sony’s Powerglove incoming
We don’t know yet exactly when PlayStation VR will arrive but, when it does, it looks as if Sony may have a few tricks up its sleeve to enhance the platform.
A patent was discovered this week that details a “glove interface object”.
“The video game industry has seen many changes over the years,” explains the patent. “As computing power has expanded, developers of video games have likewise created game software that takes advantage of these increases in computing power. To this end, video game developers have been coding games that incorporate sophisticated operations and mathematics to produce a very realistic game experience.”
Big Blue plans ResearchKit platform
IBM’s Health Cloud has spat out its first app – SleepHealth is designed for both the iPhone and Apple Watch. It’s a big deal because it’s the first ResearchKit study to run on the data-rich Watson Health Cloud.
“We’ve made life the laboratory for this study by crowd-sourcing data and input to achieve an unprecedented understanding of sleep in a non-invasive manner,” said Carl Stepnowsky, PhD, the principal investigator for the study, associate professor at University of California at San Diego and ASAA’s chief science officer. “This study also marks the Association’s commitment to patient-led research and data-driven discovery. With ResearchKit and Watson Health Cloud, this new app will help us build the world’s largest longitudinal study to collect data on both healthy and unhealthy sleepers that can be published as an open study and shared with other researchers.”
