WaveOptics, a designer and manufacturer of waveguide optics for AR displays, announced it’s raised a total of $39 million (£30m) in Series C funding, something the company says will help scale its business operations in the UK, US and Asia, and build a high volume manufacturing capability.
In development by NetEase Games, NOSTOS is an online RPG due to launch later this year on PC with optional VR support. The game recently had a closed-beta period which gives a good look at how things are shaping up with less than four months before launch. While Zelda: Breath of the Wild inspiration is clear from the outset, the bolted-on VR gameplay speaks to a broader issue of ‘VR-optional’ game design.
Virtual reality drumming app Paradiddle recently accepted submissions for VR drummers to show off their skills. One drummer, who says they’ve never played drums in the real world, submitted a killer cover of ‘Assassin’ by MUSE.
When it comes to game development, Valve is probably one of the most notorious of black boxes; there’s still no telling what the studio has in store for its promised three ‘full-length’ VR titles, let alone the one planned to launch later this year. Developer Kerry Davis however will be holding a guest lecture soon at his alma mater, DigiPen, to talk about his 15 years’ experience shipping games at Valve as well as his most recent work on the studio’s upcoming VR title.
Lenovo first released its smartphone-powered Mirage AR headset last year alongside its sole title, Star Wars: Jedi Challenges (2018), a collection of short AR games that let you do things like fight Darth Vader & Co. with a lightsaber-shaped controller, play HoloChess, and challenge the Empire in a tabletop RTS. Now, Lenovo is returning with a new AR game, MARVEL Dimension of Heroes, and a pair of 6DOF controllers too.
The perennially avant-garde singer-songwriter Björk has brought her entire 2015 album, Vulnicura, to virtual reality. Available today, headset owners can finally get to dive into a collection of immersive music videos that only previously graced museums worldwide via the Björk Digital Exhibition since late 2016, Pitchfork reports.
VRChat announced today that it has closed a $10 million Series C investment to continue expanding its immersive social platform which is steeped in user-generated content.
Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland loves VR, and his latest VR game, Trover Saves the Universe (2019), is getting its first DLC drop next month.
Bristol, UK-based designer Joe Ryan launched his first Kickstarter back in 2015, the VRGO chair locomotion device, which saw a modest £22,100 (~$27,000) in crowdfunds. Now, a smaller form factor version of the device is being launched through a new Kickstarter campaign, the VRGO Mini.
Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555 (2003) is an hour-long film that expertly blends the electronic music duo’s album Discovery with some pretty striking visuals, courtesy of Japanese anime studio Toei Animation. Now, thanks to a group of fans led by Sydney-based VR developer Jake Donaldson, you can finally jump into the crowd as the interstellar pop band jams away at Daft Punk’s One More Time.
Ubisoft, which has released five VR titles to date, confirmed that it’s building a large, 50 person team to develop an “unannounced AAA project” using one of the company’s well known IPs.
For those with both an Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest, ‘cross-buy’ games mean that you can buy a game once and play it on both headsets. Because the Oculus store doesn’t explicitly label which games are cross-buy and which games aren’t, finding them can be challenging. Luckily there’s a place you can go to get an updated list all in one place.
Although The Lion King (2019) might have garnered a tepid reception from film critics, there’s no debating that Jon Favreau’s photorealistic remake of the 1994 original film roars in the visual department. It’s in part thanks to a production pipeline that uniquely relies on virtual reality to better incorporate traditional live-action story telling techniques to the computer generated world.
Space Junkies (2019), the multiplayer sci-fi arena shooter from Ubisoft Montpellier, has reached a pretty significant impasse; the studio is pulling its previously planned support for the flatscreen version of the game, and issuing its final update on PSVR and PC VR headsets.
Whenever I used to think about brain-computer interfaces (BCI), I typically imagined a world where the Internet was served up directly to my mind through cyborg-style neural implants—or basically how it’s portrayed in Ghost in the Shell. In that world, you can read, write, and speak to others without needing to lift a finger or open your mouth. It sounds fantastical, but the more I learn about BCI, the more I’ve come to realize that this wish list of functions is really only the tip of the iceberg. And when AR and VR converge with the consumer-ready BCI of the future, the world will be much stranger than fiction.
