Crytek announced last year that The Climb (2016) would be getting its long-awaited sequel sometime during the holiday season 2020. Although that launch window has come and gone, The Climb 2 is now finally set for a March 4th release date.
Sony today announced that its next-generation VR headset is coming—not in 2021, but it’s definitely a thing. In an interview with GQ, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan says dev kit headsets are close to landing in the hands of developers.
Sony has been awfully quiet about the follow-up to its PSVR headset, which was initially released back in October 2016. Today the company publicly announced it is indeed working on its next-generation VR headset for PS5 consoles. There’s only a few scraps of info for now, but there should be plenty of time to tease out the specifics. In short: it’s looking to be a vastly improved piece of kit.
If you’re developing a VR game, you may be able to strike a deal with one of the most senior VR studios out there. nDreams, a developer and publisher of VR games, announced the creation of a $2 million fund which it will use to co-fund and publish externally developed VR titles.
Qualcomm, maker of chips and technologies for mobile devices, today announced a reference design for a tethered AR headset which is tethered to a phone or PC but also contains its own chips to handle some onboard processing. The company calls the split-processing approach an AR ‘smart viewer’ headset.
If you know your VR history you might recall CRASHLAND, an early VR prototype where players would defend themselves after crash landing on a hostile planet with little more than a radar scanner and a weapon. After the project went dormant for years as the developer focused on Ocean Rift (2016), today we learn that Crashland is about to blast onto Quest after being revived and revamped.
The Shore (2021) is a first-person horror adventure that recently launched on PC, however now developer Ares Dragonis says the game will soon get a VR version too.
Leaked concept video featuring two Samsung AR devices has come to light. Although just concepts and not functioning products as such, it’s clear the Korean tech giant is gearing up to compete with companies like Facebook and Apple as they inch ever closer to releasing consumer AR headsets.
It seems the launch of Oculus Quest 2 has been a boon for both Facebook and Quest developers alike, as the company’s latest standalone VR headset has brought the number of apps earning over the $1 million milestone to over 60 games now.
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual apps are performing across its VR storefronts, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the top 20 Oculus Quest games and apps as of February 2021, now including the ‘most popular’ apps based on the number of reviews received in the last month.
Google stopped active development on Tilt Brush late last month, but also made the VR creation suite open source so anyone could get under the hood. We’ve seen a number of clones already, but this is the first port we’ve seen that lets you access directly from a WebXR browser.
Adam Savage’s Tested VR (2019) takes you to the heart of the maker scene, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at the workshops of industry pros. Now the app’s second season is live, which brings eight new episodes to the table where you’ll get to explore workshops from studios such as Animax Designs and Weta Workshop.
In the decade that I’ve spent studying and reporting on VR I’ve had the fortune of experiencing a wide range of VR game design—a craft which is still far from ‘figured out’. And while I have no intention of becoming a game designer by profession, I thought it might be a good learning exercise to try my hand at designing something in VR to better understand the challenges and opportunities therein. And here I’d like to share a bit about what I learned through that process.
Manus, the Netherlands-based startup behind a number of VR gloves, today announced pre-order availability for the company’s first professional-level SteamVR tracker.
