The premise of Phantom: Covert Ops almost sounds ridiculous at first blush: you’re a special forces dude in a tactical kayak who is slinking around the waterways of an old Russian base. But don’t let the silinees of a tactical kayak fool you, this is actually a fundamentally compelling and immersive approach to a VR stealth game, but with one unfortunate conceit.
Resolution Games, the Stockholm-based studio behind Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs (2019), Bait! (2016) and Acron: Attack of the Squirrels! (2019), today unveiled a short slice of gameplay for its next multiplayer VR game, Cook-Out: A Sandwich Tale.
The Unreal Engine 5 tech demo on PS5 wasn’t the only news Epic Games revealed today. The company also announced a change to the pricing structure of Unreal Engine which waives royalties on the first $1 million of project revenue, as well as the launch of Epic Online Services, a free suite of tools to enable in-game friends lists, matchmaking, lobbies, and more.
Epic Games today revealed a PS5 tech demo built with Unreal Engine 5, the next-gen version of the company’s game engine. With new features for advanced lighting and unprecedented geometric detail, Unreal Engine 5 hopes to enable a generational leap in real-time graphics.
Camouflaj, the studio behind PlayStation VR exclusive Marvel’s Iron Man VR, had initially intended for its high-flying super hero adventure to arrive on PSVR back in February. After a subsequent delay, which pushed the launch back to May 15th, it was later announced that the game would be delayed until further notice due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Now Sony has fixed the official launch date for July 3rd.
There’s no better moment than now to find a reason to get up and moving, which is probably why acclaimed AR/VR studio Within launched its at-home VR fitness app Supernatural (2020). The gameified fitness app will get your heart pumping to the beat of a list of songs from popular artists, all while you have a digital personal trainer piped into your ears for encouragement. Is it worth the monthly $19 subscription price though? The short answer: not for me, but it could be for you.
Oculus released optical hand-tracking on Quest as an experimental feature late last year, and ever since developers have been showing off their own unique and creative ways of integrating users hands into VR. Yet again we look at developer Daniel Beauchamp for inspiration on the future of XR design, as he’s put together a literal mini-version of Beat Saber (2018).
The Under Presents is a genre-defying VR experience with a curious secret: from time to time some of its characters are puppeteered by real people, and if you’re lucky, you could be part of the show.
London-based hardware startup TG0 launched a Kickstarter campaign earlier last month for the Etee dev kit, a VR controller with integrated SteamVR Tracking. TG0 positions the controller’s button-less design and finger tracking as its main attractions.
It looks like HTC is making a final push to relieve itself of Vive Pro stock in Europe, as the company is including a copy of Valve’s critically-acclaimed VR title Half-Life: Alyx (2020) with purchase of the full kit.
Manually creating beat maps for your favorite songs in Beat Saber (2018) requires a bit of know-how and time. If you’re looking for a quick and surprisingly effective solution to automatically creating beat maps for any song, look no further than the fan-built service called ‘Beat Sage’.
High PC hardware requirements are one reason why VR is often touted as being highly expensive, but as GPUs have gotten more powerful and cheaper over time, more people than ever have ‘VR Ready’ hardware, even if they didn’t buy it specifically for that purpose. Today an estimated 58 million Steam users already have one of the most expensive parts of the VR Ready equation: a powerful GPU that meets the VR industry’s recommended specifications.
As businesses begin to reopen, it’s becoming more and more clear that the out-of-home entertainment industry needs to adapt in a major way if it wants to move forward. Inspiring confidence in the cleanliness of VR equipment donned by the paying public is, without understating it, the biggest obstacle to clawing back the much-needed repeat business that many VR arcades have become accustomed to. To that effect, VR arcade company Hologate recently released a new set of guidelines that it hopes will set a standard for not only its own 300+ global network of locations, but also the VR arcade industry at large. But will it be enough?
Researchers from the National Taiwan University, National Chengchi University, and Texas A&M University say that haptic feedback delivered to the head right from a VR headset can significantly reduce discomfort related to smooth locomotion in VR.
