Area of Darkness: Sentinel is an upcoming VR psychological thriller adventure that just emerged from the shadows, arriving with a pretty slick trailer that’s promising quite a stack of features.
Live Planet today announced the launch of the Live Planet VR System, an end-to-end pipeline for 360 stereoscopic livestreaming and distribution, including a custom camera & content management tools. The company claims that creators can go “from box to livestreaming within minutes.”
Fans of the block-slashing rhythm game Beat Saber (2018) want to know: when are more songs coming? Well, the developers Beat Games say that they still need more time to work on it, but that users can at least look forward to more guaranteed free songs at some point too.
Meta, the company behind the Meta 2 tethered AR headset, has suffered its fair share of growing pains since its founding in 2012, although a lack of outside investment and a recent patent infringement lawsuit seem to have proven fatal. Now, Meta founder Meron Gribetz confirms he’s stepped down as owner of the company after its assets were auctioned off to a new, unnamed buyer, presumably stripping the company down to its bare assets.
A Fisherman’s Tale puts you in the boots of a curios puppet-man named Bob who lives in a strange, recursive world centered around a dollhouse-sized lighthouse. Looking above, you see infinitely Big Bob. Looking below, infinitely Small Bob. It sounds like a trip, and it is: a quick trip into a super French storybook that’s begging to be fleshed out into something more substantial.
Intel’s Brent Insko has taken over as the Chair of the OpenXR working group after Epic’s Nick Whiting passed the torch. The pair say the OpenXR effort is still going strong, and a progress update is planned for March.
Headset manufacturers are notoriously secretive about sales numbers, so finding out how well one specific VR headset is doing in the marketplace at any given time can be a bit of a guessing game. Now, Fast Travel Games, the studio behind the multi-platform bow-shooter Apex Construct (2018), maintains their VR game saw a marked increase in sales on PlayStation Store as a result of strong PSVR headset adoption in 2018.
A series of Early Access updates to Compound have brought a handful of fun new weapons to the game’s 8-bit rougelike gameplay, culminating in a “massive overhaul” which introduces new enemies and offers SteamVR Input for custom input binding between controllers.
Scape Technologies announced last week that it has raised an $8 million seed investment for a visual positioning system that it says can provide centimeter-accurate location data at city-scale. Such a system could be a key component in enabling a shared, persistent AR metaverse simultaneously accessible by all users.
While the Oculus Rift could be occasionally found on sale at $350 over the last 12 months, the actual MSRP of the headset has been steady at $400 for a little over a year. Last week the company opted to drop the MSRP to a new low of $350. Those unfortunate souls that bought a Rift in that short window where the price was still $400 may be bummed at not waiting just a bit longer for the savings. However there may still be time to get a $50 refund.
Beat Saber (2018), the block-slicing VR rhythm game, has been given top honors once again, this time by PlayStation’s own 2018 Game of the Year Awards.
PlayStation VR Demo Disc 3 is now available on the PlayStation Store, including demos for nine hit VR titles.
It looks like Magic Leap could be gearing up to jump into the world of mobile AR, as the company recently published a job listing for a senior software engineer who will be tasked with building “a cross-platform framework that enables large scale shared AR experiences between mobile devices (iOS, Android) and Magic Leap devices.”
According to a report from The Verge, an upcoming Microsoft press event is likely to offer the first glimpse of HoloLens 2.
Keeping an eye on your phone when you’re in a VR headset is an absolute chore: place it in on vibrate in your pocket, glance at the screen through the gap between your nose and facial interface when it buzzes, and prop the headset on your forehead to respond to calls and text messages. To address this excruciating first-world malady, Dell is including a new VR function in its Mobile Connect software that lets you bring your entire Android phone—and some of your iPhone—into any VR app running on SteamVR.
