With the Oculus Rift and Sony’s new Project Morpheus both making big waves in the virtual reality industry, it’s no surprise that various other companies want to give the new technology their own spin. Sulon Technologies is doing just that with their new virtual reality platform, the Cortex, which they’re unveiling at the Games Developer Conference in San Francisco this week. With virtual reality becoming the newest trend in technology, it’s a race to see which company can perfect the technique and take the helm of the next generation of gaming, bringing players into worlds that are more immersive and involved than anything we’ve ever seen before.
According to chief executive, Dhanushan Balachandreswaran, the headset for the Cortex is just a little different from what Oculus Rift has already shown us, in that the headset itself can detect the borders of the room, using magnetic technology that can use your preexisting surroundings to create a whole new world based on where you are.
“We’re going to change the way the world perceives entertainment,” Balachandreswaran claimed. With options to either toy with this ‘augmented reality’ or a brand new fully immersive world, the Cortex sets out to accomplish things where the Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus might fall short. Sulon even boasts that the headset can be used indoors and outdoors, processing the environment around you and creating a fantasy world to fit that environment’s layout and size. The executive went on to say, “You could walk around in circles, but visually it may feel like you’re walking for miles.”
What the company had in mind when creating the Cortex was something reminiscent of what’s known as a Holodeck, a room, or deck, used for the primary purpose of simulated reality which originated in the popular TV and film series, Star Trek. With a spatial scanner to map the environment around you, the Cortex can be aware of your entire body at all times, opening up a world of possibilities for possible future programs and games that one might be able to play on the headset and heating up the race to perfect virtual reality technology.
The consumer version of the Cortex isn’t set to release until 2015, but buyers can preorder the development kit now for $499 which will begin shipping in Q4 of 2014. The kit itself comes with the visor, the Cortex SPU (Spatial Processing Unit), the Cortex Spacial Scanner, and the software development kit. Both iOS and Android are supported. With the options increasing by the weeks, we hope to see more and more people entering the race, bringing us brand new opportunities to experience the world of virtual reality like we’ve never seen it before.
Source: VentureBeat