Monthly Archives: August 2016

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As computing and display technology continues to relentlessly advance, it seems inevitable that the virtual-reality and augmented-reality industries will benefit. In fact, research firm Digi-Capital estimates that the combined augmented and virtual reality space will grow to represent a $120 billion market by 2020, up from less than $5 billion this year.

But finding the best virtual-reality stocks to profit along the way is easier said than done, especially as the price of many of those stocks already reflects much of that growth potential. Tohelp get you started, then, here are three beaten-up virtual-reality stocks to consider adding to your portfolio.

First, GoPro (NASDAQ:GPRO)is striving to expand the scope of its business to play a key role enabling the rise of virtual reality through media capture and software services.

GoPro's OMNI VR rig. Image source: GoPro,

More specifically, GoPro offers compelling virtual-reality hardware rigs such as Omni, a synchronized six-camera spherical array that allows each camera to act as one. And to help optimize those spherical videos, last year GoPro acquired Kolor, a leader in virtual reality and spherical media software solutions. Under GoPro's umbrella, Kolor's software enables users to combine multiple images or videos to produce high-res panoramic or spherical content, which can then be displayed on mobile devices, on web browsers, or in virtual-reality environments.

As it stands, however, GoPro still derives the bulk of its revenue from sales of its core action-camera devices. And shares of GoPro are down nearly 70% over the past year as of this writing, as demand for those cameras has waned.

It doesn't help that GoPro's highest-end HERO4 Black and Silver cameras were introduced nearly two years ago. And the company botched last year's release of its (now) more affordable HERO4 Session model by introducing the compact camera at too nhigh a price point, only to subsequently drop its priceby $100two times in five months to its current MSRP of $199.

But as of GoPro's second-quarter 2016 report last month, the company was still on track to launch both its new HERO5 series cameras and its new Karma quadcopter in time for the lucrative holiday season, which will mark what GoPro's founding CEO, Nick Woodman, describes as the "largest introduction of products in our history." If GoPro is able to follow through on that launch, it could be exactly what the company needs to once again start delivering sustained, profitable growth.

Next, no virtual- or augmented-reality platform would be complete without a decent motion-sensing chip to enable the experience. That's whereInvenSense (NYSE:INVN)comes into play.

Image source: InvenSense

As it stands,shares of InvenSense are down around 30% year to date on softness in the mobile market. Butthat decline would have been even worse if an analyst upgrade hadn't sent shares of InvenSense soaring a few weeks ago. Incidentally, that analyst -- Pacific Crest's John Vinh -- singled out the "significant opportunity" InvenSense's chips have to further penetrate the market for entry-level and mid-tier devices, many of which don't include high-quality gyroscope chips required for their users to enjoy augmented-reality platforms and games. One prominent recent example Vinh mentioned is the unprecedented popularity of augmented-reality game Pokemon Go.

That sentiment also echoed the thoughts of InvenSense CEO Behrooz Abdi two weeks earlier, when he stated, "Given strong consumer demand, we expect to see the emergence of many more augmented reality applications and games beyond Pokmon Go, and we believe that their proliferation in mobile devices will expand our TAMs to be mid-tier and low-tier smartphone markets for high-performance gyro."

Indeed, as virtual and augmented reality continue to become more ubiquitous, InvenSense should be better off for it.

Finally, consider organic LED (OLED) technologistUniversal Display (NASDAQ:OLED), shares of which are technicallyupmore than 60% over the past year but also trade more than 20% below their 52-week-high as of this writing, thanks to the company's weaker-than-expected second-quarter 2016 report earlier this month.

Image source: Universal Display

But as Iwroteshortly after that report, our market was recoiling after Universal Display management told investors there would be a roughly six-month delay in UDC's expected ramp in revenue growth -- which isn't entirely surprising, given the number of variables underlying that growth in these early stages of the OLED industry. To blame, UDC says, were delays in the adoption of new higher-margin OLED emitter materials and customers' more efficient use of OLED materials ahead of their own impending ramps in OLED manufacturing capacity. But over the longer term, Univeral Display should still realize that growth, even if it takes more time than expected.

More pertinent to our topic, Universal Display is poised to benefit from virtual reality as its flagship phosphorescent OLED materials enable displays that are more compact, can be made flexible and even semi-transparent, and sport richer colors and deeper blacks than any competing display technology can offer. All of these features make OLED displays ideally suited to creating more immersive virtual- and augmented-reality solutions.

For patient investors willing to watch Universal Display's long-term story continue to unfold, I think the pullback represents a perfect opportunity to open or add to a position.

Steve Symingtonowns shares of Universal Display.The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends InvenSense and GoPro.The Motley Fool recommends Universal Display.Try any of our Foolish newsletter servicesfree for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe thatconsidering a diverse range of insightsmakes us better investors. The Motley Fool has adisclosure policy.

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3 Beaten-Up Virtual-Reality Stocks: Are They Bargains? -- The ...

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VR, Virtual Reality | Virtalis

Virtual reality is getting the presidential treatment.

In honor of the centennial celebration of the National Park Service, President Obama is set to make his virtual-reality debut in a video filmed on his family's visit to Yosemite Valley in June.

In a partnership between National Geographic and the virtual-reality company Oculus, viewers get an up-close 3-D, 360-degree experience to bask in some of the country's most scenic views with its most powerful occupant. The piece was directed and produced by Felix & Paul Studios, which was the creative lead behind the experience and used its own technology to shoot and edit the piece.

In a Facebook post Thursday, Obama called Yosemite "one of the most stunning places I've ever been."

"I get to share that experience with you -- in a 360 degree view," he noted. "Thanks to some high-tech virtual reality cameras, you can stand amid Yosemite's giant sequoia groves or float on Mirror Lake in a canoe. I checked this out for the first time yesterday. It was pretty surreal, like being transported back into the park."

Obama narrates portions of the video, describing the importance of national parks to generations of Americans. He is also shown talking with a park ranger, joking with a group of children and standing on a bridge with the first daughters and the first lady.

But the Secret Service is notably absent from the videos. Thats because the agents were instructed to hide behind trees in the park, a White House official told ABC News.

The video, available to download for Oculus users, is also up for viewing in 2-D format on National Geographic's Facebook page. Watch here on your mobile device.

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President Obama Makes Virtual-Reality Debut in Tour of ...

The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit franchise honors tradition of innovation by introducing a series of first-of-their-kind virtual reality experiences to go along with the print issue and digital extensions, including an all new SI Swimsuit App and fully responsive digital destination on SI.com/swimsuit. The VR content will feature behind the scenes immersive experiences at the famed SI Swimsuit shoots with some of the world's most beautiful models at some of the most exotic locations on the planet, beginning today with former Swimsuit cover models Nina Agdal, Hannah Davis and Irina Shayk.

SI Swimsuit partnered with the award-winning VR firm Wevr to produce this exclusive content utilizing the most cutting edge VR technology on the market.

The VR content was all shot over a series of days in the Dominican Republic at the same time as photo and video shoots were taking place. The suite of content offers a mix of experiences, form one-on-one, intimate access with the models and the beautiful surroundings to transporting the viewer to actually being on set of a cover-style shoot where you can look over your shoulder and see the full crew behind you. These experiences were designed to offer something different every time and to have some fun with different types of interaction.

"Sports Illustrated Swimsuit has a long tradition of innovation, from the first ever Swimsuit photo shoot on Antarctica to a sub-orbital swimsuit photo shoot in zero gravity," explained Creative Director Christoper Hercik. "This years virtual reality shoot answers the question we get every day: 'What is it like to be on a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit photo shoot?'.

"Partnering with WEVR for our first-ever VR shoot allowed us to utilize both of our collective resources, including their best in-market technology and creative network, to help direct, produce and post produce this one-of-a-kind experience. Our partnership was phenomenal from start to finish and allowed us to create the highest-quality, fully-immersive experience. We want our fans to experience swimsuit on every level."

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Virtual Reality - SI.com

Virtual Reality is finally here after years of anticipation, and it's been well worth the wait. At NVIDIA we've been working from the beginning of VR's resurgence to create technologies, tools and best practices that enhance the VR experience.

Now, with the new GeForce GTX 1080 and the new Pascal Architecture, we're enabling a new level of presence in VR by introducing new technologies that will make your VR experiences more immersive and realistic.

With VR performance is key - Virtual Reality headsets render games and applications at a resolution equivalent to 3024x1680, and need to do so at a sustained 90 FPS. Failure to maintain a constant 90 FPS results in stuttering and hitching that ruin the experience.

With the new GeForce GTX 1080, Virtual Reality performance is up to 2X faster than with the GeForce GTX TITAN X. This remarkable improvement comes courtesy of the amazing graphics horsepower of Pascal, combined with our new Simultaneous Multi-Projection technology, which enables new VRWorks Lens Matched Shading and Single Pass Stereo rendering techniques.

For decades PC gamers enthusiastically enjoyed their games on flat 4:3, 16:9 and 16:10 monitors. Thankfully technology has advanced, and we can now play with three monitors in NVIDIA Surround, on curved monitors, and even in Virtual Reality.

With the new Pascal-architecture Simultaneous Multi-Projection technology we can implement several new techniques that improve your experience on these displays. And in Virtual Reality, improve performance, too.

The first of these new Virtual Reality techniques is Lens Matched Shading, which builds upon the Multi-Res Shading technology introduced alongside our previous-generation Maxwell architecture. Lens Matched Shading increases pixel shading performance by rendering more natively to the unique dimensions of VR display output. This avoids rendering many pixels that would otherwise be discarded before the image is output to the VR headset.

Single Pass Stereo turbocharges geometry performance by allowing the head-mounted display's left and right displays to share a single geometry pass. We're effectively halving the workload of traditional VR rendering, which requires the GPU to draw geometry twice once for the left eye and once for the right eye.

This improvement is especially important for geometry-heavy scenes, and those featuring significant levels of tessellation, which remains the most effective way of adding real detail to objects and surfaces in VR.

With tessellation, affected game elements can be accurately lit, shadowed and shaded, and can be examined up close in Virtual Reality. With other solutions, such as Bump Mapping or Parallax Occlusion Mapping, the simulation of geometric detail breaks down when the player approaches or examines affected objects from any angle, which harms immersion. By increasing geometry performance and tessellation by up to 2x, developers are able to add more detail that players can examine up close, significantly improving the look of the game and the player's level of presence.

Together, Pascal's improved performance, and new Single Pass Stereo and Lens Matched Shading significantly improve the Virtual Reality experience for GeForce GTX users.

NVIDIA has spent decades working to perfect 3D graphics, but with VR great graphics demand great audio to create a sense of presence. To this end, NVIDIA has created a game-changing advancement called VRWorks Audio.

Today's VR applications provide positional audio, telling users where a sound comes from within an environment. However, sound in the real world reflects more than just location of the audio source -- sound is a function of the physical environment. For example, a voice in a small room will sound different than the same voice outdoors because of the reflections and reverb caused by the sound bouncing off the walls of the room. Using NVIDIA's OptiX ray tracing engine, VRWorks Audio is able to trace the path of sound in an environment in real-time, delivering physical audio that fully reflects the size, shape, and material properties of the virtual world.

Simply put, we're able to simulate physically-accurate, super realistic real-time audio using the power of your graphics card.

If you've been a gamer for some time you've almost certainly played a game with CPU or GPU PhysX, or our new FleX effects. These technologies add more realistic physics effects, and enable interactions between the player's character and the world they're inhabiting. In Virtual Reality, more often than not you are the player in the center of the action, directly interacting with objects and the world itself. As such, the world needs to react realistically to maintain the user's sense of presence in the virtual world.

Realistically modelling touch interactions and environmental behavior is critical for delivering full presence in VR. And by adding touch interactivity with haptics we can amplify the degree of immersion.

Existing VR experiences deliver these effects through a combination of positional tracking, hand controllers, and haptics. With NVIDIA's new VR Touch PhysX Constraint Solver, we can instead detect when a hand controller interacts with a virtual object and enable the game engine to provide a physically-accurate visual and haptic response.

By providing this improved, ready-made, all-in-one solution to game developers we can save them time, effort and money, and improve the experiences of gamers.

As you might expect, we're also bringing our PhysX and FleX visual effects to VR, so that interactions, events and actions involving the player or occurring around the player are realistic, physically accurate, and representative of what players would expect to see in the real world.

Over the years PhysX and FleX have created visual effects for just about anything you can imagine - explosions, cloth, water, snow, gore, volumetric weather effects, and on and on, and on. PhysX has done them all, and more, and now your own actions in the virtual world can influence the actions, reactions, and interactions of these effects.

The great news is that you won't have to wait long to experience VRWorks Graphics, VRWorks Audio, and VR PhysX - all three are fully utilized in "NVIDIA VR Funhouse", a NVIDIA-developed VR experience that's coming soon. Learn more about this highly immersive, extremely entertaining experience here.

Combined, the technologies discussed in this story form VRWorks, a comprehensive suite of features that allow developers to create more detailed, more immersive, and faster-performing VR experiences that you won't want to miss.

To benefit from these features, and those released previously, register your interest now to be notified when the GeForce GTX 1080 pre-order program begins.

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Virtual Reality | Technology | GeForce