At Unreal Engine Build: Detroit 2019, Magic Leap today announced that the company will be giving away 500 Magic Leap One Creator Edition AR headsets as part of the recently unveiled Epic MegaGrants.
Phaser Lock Interactive, the studio behind VR titles Final Approach (2016) and Twisted Arrow (2017), are bringing their WWII-themed real-time strategy game Final Assault out of Early Access with their full launch next month.
Archiact, the studio behind VR games Evasion (2018) and Waddle Home (2016), are diving into new territory soon with an upcoming VR experience that promises to give claustrophobics and thalassophobics (people afraid of open bodies of water) a shared reason to never put on a VR headset ever again.
Apple has been continuously iterating on ARKit, its augmented reality development tool that lets creators make smartphone-based AR experiences. The company unveiled ARKit at its World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in 2017, and the 2.0 version at the dev conference a year later. Now, a report from 9to5Mac holds that this year’s WWDC could see yet more new additions, including OS support for stereo AR headsets.
OrbusVR has been in Early Access for a little over a year now, and with the entrance of its first expansion, Reborn, the VRMMORPG is finally launching as a full game. This was my first opportunity to scratch the surface of the new world that lay before me, and I don’t think it will be my last.
Virtual pets have seen quite the revival since consumer VR took off nearly three years ago. As an early entrant back in 2016, Konrad the Kitten took some of the much beloved game mechanics from the classic hand-held digital pet Tamagotchi and imbued them into a friendly little kitty named Konrad.
If you’ve been paying attention to the VR space at all in 2019, you’ve likely noticed the increasing buzz, no doubt thanks to four major VR headsets set to launch over the course of the next few months. Here’s the quick breakdown of what we know.
With last month’s announcement of the Rift S, it became clear that Oculus was not ready to deliver a ‘Rift 2’, and instead opted to focus on making the existing Rift experience easier to use, rather than pleasing enthusiasts looking for a next generation experience. It was suggested that the company could have opted to offer a ‘Rift Pro’ for that latter group at the same time as the Rift S, but Facebook’s Jason Rubin explained in a recent interview why they didn’t think that was the right call.
Linden Lab’s website maintains Sansar is their platform for creating social VR experiences, and that “Sansar will democratize VR as a creative medium, making it easy for people to create, share, and sell their own social VR experiences.” It seems however the company is less bullish on VR now that hype has died down—at least as far as the company’s messaging goes.
3DSen VR (formerly known as 3DNesVR) is an emulator tool that runs Nintendo Entertainment System games in VR, letting you play the ’80s and ’90s classic titles that made the console a world-wide phenomenon.
Beat Saber developer Beat Games confirmed to Road to VR that the game will include all official features, modes, and music when it launches with Quest this Spring. Additionally, the studio says it didn’t have to make any concessions on tracking input logic to account for Quest’s inside-out tracked controllers.
PSVR users have been waiting for an app that essentially lets them watch all of their favorite content with their other VR headset-owning buddies, or something akin to how Bigscreen Beta works on headsets like Rift, Vive, and Go. Sony actually created its own social VR viewing app for PSVR users in Japan, but it’s certainly no Bigscreen.
With Nintendo’s latest ‘Labo’ kit for Switch, the company made its first real strides into VR (not counting Virtual Boy). Within only a week of its release, the cardboard VR headset maker-kit is already sold out all over the web in the US and in parts of Europe.
