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.
Schell Games’ latest VR title, Until You Fall, launched in Early Access on Steam last week to strong reviews, but currently the game only officially supports the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Come October, the developers expect to add support for Index & Windows VR as well.
Facebook Reality Labs, the company’s AR/VR R&D group, published detailed research on a method for hyper-realistic real-time virtual avatars, expanding on prior work which the company calls ‘Codec Avatars’.
Japan-based studio SpicyTails announced that Spice & Wolf VR will land on PSVR and Nintendo Labo VR this week. Furthermore, the studio says that the experience’s sequel is already in the making.
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Sony is taking down a few beloved games from the PlayStation Store tomorrow, including Driveclub, Driveclub Bikes, and Driveclub VR.
Google has released to researchers and developers its own mobile device-based hand tracking method using machine learning, something Google R call a “new approach to hand perception.”
The second-generation HoloLens, first unveiled at Mobile World Congress earlier this year in Barcelona, still doesn’t have a firm release date yet, although it appears that’s about to change pretty soon.
Digital game storefront Humble Bundle is offering DiRT Rally for free, now through September 1st. The version of the game being given away is via Steam with official support for the Oculus Rift, though unofficial support for other SteamVR headsets should work via the Revive mod.
Valve’s collection of VR-minigames, The Lab, is one of the highest rated SteamVR titles and it’s free. With support for Index, Vive, Rift, and Windows VR, there’s no reason not to try it if you own a PC VR headset. Beyond some very polished mini-games, Valve has included quite a few easter eggs to uncover.
