SINGAPORE – Organizers of the Open Source Virtual Reality, a software platform designed to set an open standard for virtual reality input devices, announced more than 20 research institutions are joining the OSVR development community as part of the OSVR™ Academia program. The OSVR Academia program provides hardware development kits (HDKs) and related support to partnering universities and their research labs. “The technologies that drive virtual reality are changing quickly, and a standardized platform like OSVR enables technology to adapt to that shift more quickly than ever before,” says Aaron Westre from the Virtual Reality Design Lab at the University of Minnesota. “We need to integrate new hardware devices and software techniques as soon as they’re available. The modular architecture of OSVR offers us an efficient platform to increase our agility and invent new VR experiences for users.” OSVR includes an open-source hardware design and software framework. The HDK provides a high-fidelity, wide visual field and onboard video processing in an expandable, hackable form factor. The software provides a standardized way to discover, configure and operate a multitude of VR devices, as well as to add smart processing functions such as gesture engines, SLAM algorithms and more. Both the hardware designs and software are now available to be downloaded at no-charge. “The inability to alter software to serve the research objectives of higher education is a roadblock that we’re now able to overcome,” says Nir Keren, Associate Professor at the Virtual Reality Application Center at Iowa State University. “OSVR empowers researchers, game designers and software developers to chart the landscape of virtual reality, gaming, and visualization in the most effective manner.” OSVR is also currently being exhibited at the IEEE VR conference in Arles, France. OSVR HDKs are on display at the Sensics/Razer booth there. OSVR is also being showcased in the “VR middleware” technical session and will be discussed in “The Resurgence of Open-Source Frameworks for VR” panel. “OSVR is an important piece of the emerging consumer VR ecosystem,” says Eric Hodgson, Director, Smale Interactive Visualization Center at Miami University. “The ability to make so many devices and software interfaces standardized, interoperable, compatible, and interchangeable has the potential to change the way people interact with their hardware and software.” Additional universities are still being added to the OSVR Academia program. List of Universities Cracow University of Technology, Poland Desert Research Institute, USA Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany Iowa State University, USA Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Italy Johns Hopkins University, USA Nara Institute of Science and Technology, USA North Dakota State University, USA Ohio University, USA Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA Ryerson University, Canada The Art Institute of Vancouver, Canada Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy Universitat de Barcelona, Spain University College London, UK University of California, Berkeley, USA University of California, Riverside, USA University of California, San Diego, USA University of Central Florida, USA University of Minnesota, USA University of New Mexico, USA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA University of Portsmouth, UK University of Texas at Dallas, USA Vienna University of Technology, Austria Virginia Tech, USA Wichita State University, USA York University, Canada, USA
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