It’s been a year since Japanese studio MyDearest and LA-based studio Sekai Project successfully concluded their Kickstarter for Tokyo Chronos (2019), the VR mystery game told through the lens of a visual novel. Now, the studios are getting ready to launch the game on PSVR.
Google Lens is great for when you want to quickly translate a menu written in a foreign language, or visually explore the world around you simply using your Android smartphone. In effort to bring some of those machine learning functions into a VR environment, Twitter user ‘Phasedragon’ recently showed off a new workaround that lets him use Google Lens in VR.
MRTV, the YouTube channel led by Germany-based VR enthusiast Sebastian Ang, launched a Kickstarter recently to create what he calls the MRTV Experience, which will invite the paying public to step in to try out a variety of the most recent VR headsets on offer. The location is set to open in Dortmund, Germany where Ang will also be moving his dedicated studio as well.
Light Field Lab, known for its advancements in light-field display technology, successfully completed a Series A funding round, scoring the firm over $28 million in venture capital to manufacture and distribute working products. The investment round was led by Bosch Venture Capital and Taiwania Capital. Light Field Lab hopes to build large scale light-field displays capable of offering a ‘holodeck’-like experience.
Cortopia Studios, the Stockholm-based team behind the spellcasting combat game Wands (2016), showed off their next entry into the realm of VR at Gamescom 2019 this week. Called Down the Rabbit Hole, I got a chance to go hands-on with the third-person adventure game, which tasks you with solving a variety of puzzles while leading a lost girl through a miniature world inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865).
Carbon Studio, the Poland-based team behind The Wizards (2018), is bringing a standalone expansion to the series to PC VR headsets early next year called The Wizards – Dark Times. We got a chance to go hands-on with a 10-minute slice of Dark Times here at Gamescom 2019.
Seminal VR film trilogy, The Matrix, is returning to the big screen once again. The series famous for introducing ‘bullet time’ and expanding the world’s collective imagination regarding the ‘what-ifs’ of virtual reality and AI is coming back to life for a fourth iteration.
Nearly three and a half years after its launch, indie VR gem Vanishing Realms (2016) has received a major expansion which is now available on Steam with a 20% launch discount. Vanishing Realms: The Sundered Rift, as it’s called, is said to be even larger than the original game, bringing new environments, enemies, and weapons, while concluding the game’s story.
Gamescom 2019 is still in full swing, and while the massive halls at the Cologne-based gaming expo are predictably filled to the brim with non-VR games, there’s been a number of interesting VR titles to pop up here, including Neat Corporation and Fast Travel Games’ upcoming sequel to the humor-filled stealth assassin adventure Budget Cuts (2018), Budget Cuts 2: Mission Insolvency.
Fast Travel Games, the studio behind bowshooting adventure Apex Construct (2018), showed off their upcoming title The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets at Gamescom this year. Getting a chance to pop in for a single level, the admittedly short game offers up casual diorama-based puzzles and a heartwarming story cast in the golden hue of a childhood memories past.
Initially arriving last August as VR’s premiere live-remixing rhythm game, Survios’ Electronauts lets players fiddle with the individual tracks and pieces of popular songs, mixing loose effects and loops together with vocal and instrumental stems at their own leisure [our review]. The free ‘Heatwave’ update nearly doubles the total track count to more than 80 songs.
I didn’t know what to make of Paper Beasts when I heard about back at its reveal in April. Billed as an exploration game inspired by big data, or the unfathomably large data sets that can reveal unseen trends, the game promises to toss you head first into an abstract living world that has emerged from “the vast memory of a data server.” It sounded wild and mysterious at the time, but after playing the 20-minute demo at this year’s Gamescom, I got a much better grasp on what lays ahead.
Sony Interactive Entertainment announced Monday that the company is acquiring Insomniac Games, a storied game studio and one of the most experienced in VR development anywhere in the world. The studio has developed three Oculus exclusive titles, with its fourth and largest yet, Stormland, still due to launch in 2019.
HBO, Warner Bros., and Survios today released a new VR game set in the wild (and often terrifying) android-filled universe of Westworld.
Oculus announced that it’ll be showing Stormland’s co-op multiplayer feature at the PAX West event next week.
