Before the holiday season, Pimax announced a new VR headset called Artisan that looks to fill the low-price gap in the company’s product offerings. Although the headset is able to use Valve’s SteamVR tracking standard, a model is set to arrive with a NOLO VR tracking and controller kit, a move that’s meant to appeal to entry-level users without SteamVR base stations or controllers.
VR gamers running NVIDIA’s newest RTX graphics cards will be able to take advantage of a new ‘Variable Rate Supersampling’ (VRSS) feature designed to increase the sharpness of VR games without reducing performance. The feature uses a foveated rendering approach which focuses sharpness toward the center of the lens without wasting extra processing power toward the edges where the image will be blurred by the lens anyway.
After a slow start, 2019 rounded out to be an undeniably strong year for consumer VR, setting up a springboard into a big 2020. Here’s an overview of the major happenings in VR over the last year, and a glimpse of what will come in 2020.
MasterpieceVR recently released its latest set of VR creation tools which aim to get artists quickly sculpting and animating characters by hand from the comfort of their VR headsets.
Oculus quietly released Quill Theater on Quest last month as a way to bring immersive art and animations made in VR to more of its VR userbase. The free app offers up a curated selection of content, including the incredible short film ‘The Remedy’, which shows the incredible potential of VR as a content authoring tool.
Like all Oculus Studios titles, Stormland officially only supports the Oculus platform. Thanks to an update to Revive, a free unofficial mod, Stormland is now compatible with Valve Index, HTC Vive, Cosmos, Windows VR, and other SteamVR headsets.
Back at Microsoft’s annual SharePoint Virtual Summit in May 2018, the company announced it was getting ready to ship a new VR maker tool set called Spaces for SharePoint, the web-based collaborative platform for enterprise customers. Now, Microsoft says Spaces is nearly ready for a general release to all SharePoint users, which is slated to happen at some point in the first half of 2020.
Although the Feelreal scent mask for virtual reality isn’t a nicotine vaping system or e-cigarette, it does vaporize aromatic liquids for user inhalation, which according to the company puts it in same FDA certification bracket as those devices. While the company was confident back in November of its chances to pass FDA approval, it’s looming near a final roadblock that could make or break the product.
Action-physics adventure game Boneworks released earlier this month to a strong reception despite little formal marketing. The title surpassed 100,000 players in its first week, reeling in an estimated $3 million in revenue despite being available on just one of several key VR platforms.
We knew Superhot VR (2016) was doing extremely well when Superhot Team announced the VR adaptation had generated more revenue than the original PC game back in April. Now the studio has set one of the most impressive benchmarks of success for the medium, as over the past week Superhot VR garnered a cool $2 million in gross revenue across all VR platforms.
Beat Saber had an awesome year in 2019, launching out of Early Access on the platform in May with multiple music packs following behind it, which featured bands such as Green Day, Imagine Dragons, and Panic at the Disco. It seems the Prague-based studio has done well to bring the flair of name brand music to the game, as it officially ranked as a Steam top seller this year.
We loved 2019 for its bounty of VR games and emphasis on new hardware, but 2020 is looking to bring a host of big budget titles and polished indies alike that should not only keep us all happily strapped into the headset, but attract a steady flow of new users to VR in the process too.
Every year is the biggest year for virtual reality. It seems more developers are delving into VR to explore the medium, hone their techniques and find out what works and what doesn’t. Virtual reality fans walk a similar path; every achievement in this burgeoning medium sets a new bar, and a new expectation of something greater as a result.
