Somnium Space, the studio behind the titular social VR platform, announced they’ve successfully completed a $1 million seed round, something the company says will help them “further strengthen its development of a huge-scale Persistent, Open and Social Virtual Reality world.”
Echo Games have released an update to Echo Combat (2018), the studio’s zero-g, team shooter for Oculus Rift, that brings a new payload map to the game. Dubbed ‘Surge’, the map is said to include a payload track that’s 15% longer than Fission’s.
Sony today released the monthly download rankings for PSVR. Coming as no surprise to anyone, the hit block-slashing rhythm game Beat Saber (2018) has again placed at the number one spot this past month, putting it now six months in a row as the top downloaded game on the platform.
It looks like Facebook is shaking up Oculus and reassigning some of its top executives to new positions within the parent company, notably affecting head of content Jason Rubin and Oculus leader Hugo Barra.
HTC is now on its fourth batch in its $100 million accelerator program, which offers education, investment and mentorship to startups doing unique and and interesting things around VR and AR.
Though Oculus Quest still doesn’t launch until the 21st, Oculus has seen fit to give us full access to one of its biggest launch titles: Star Wars Vader Immortal – Episode 1. This “narrative virtual reality adventure” does a good job of immersing you in the Star Wars universe, but it feels all too brief. Thankfully there’s a surprisingly fun ‘Lightsaber Dojo’ that offers hours of engaging challenge.
If you’ve felt that Google has been quiet about their Daydream VR initiative for a worrying amount of time, you aren’t alone. Their annual developer conference, Google I/O, this week is the latest opportunity for the company update the world on their VR ecosystem, but there’s little more than silence.
If you were wondering what Sony’s next big hardware bundles were going to be, wonder no more. Sony today announced two PSVR bundles, one of which features the cinematic shooter Blood & Truth and beloved golfing franchise game Everybody’s Golf VR, and another packing in Justin Roiland’s comedic platformer Trover Saves the Universe and the cult classic-turned VR horror game Five Night at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted.
High Fidelity, the VR platform from Second Life creator Philip Rosedale, announced that the company has laid off 25 percent of its staff in a new shift that will put a much heavier emphasis on enterprise usecases.
Hologate, a Munich-based startup, today announced that their eponymous world-wide VR attraction has taken in two million visitors since it was first launched in 2017.
Virtual Desktop has been a fixture in VR since the early days of the Oculus developer kits, first releasing as a tech demo back in 2014. The single-user app, which lets you stream your desktop monitor in VR, is now making its next big leap to Oculus Quest.
Reverb is HP’s second VR headset, and this time around the company is aiming mainly at the enterprise market, but not shying away from selling individual units at a consumer price point. As the highest resolution headset presently available at that consumer price point, it has a unique selling point among all others, though the usual compromises of Windows Mixed Reality still apply.
HP today announced Reverb (formerly codenamed ‘Copper’) in March, the successor to the company’s first Windows VR headset. Reverb’s high-res displays raise the bar on pixel density among consumer VR headsets. Sporting a design that’s a significant departure from its first Windows VR headset, HP says that Reverb will launch on May 6th starting at $600.
Microsoft today announced they’re releasing a developer-focused HoloLens 2 bundle that aims to make the AR headset and software tools more accessible to developers and businesses.
