Oculus released screencasting in beta late last year, and while it’s been a great way of letting someone outside of VR see what’s happening during a VR session, the company just made this a lot easier in a recent update to the Oculus Mobile app.
Last year Leap Motion, makers of hand-tracking technology, revealed Project North Star, an open-source AR headset prototype design meant to be a test bed for the kind of specs and features that more compact AR headsets will hopefully one day provide. This week the company revealed ‘Release 3’ of the headset which further refines the open-source design with the goal of making it “more inviting, less hacked together, and more reliable.”
China-based Viva Games today announced that their upcoming action-adventure horror title Kill X has now been renamed Immortal Legacy: The Jade Cypher. The shooter, which is exclusive to the PSVR platform, is slated to arrive March 20th.
Fable, founded by former Oculus Story Studio alumni, today announced a distinct pivot in their focus, moving from an immersive storytelling studio to a “virtual beings” company which plans to build persistent, AI-powered, characters which can interact naturally with viewers.
Earlier this month NVIDIA announced that slew of hardware partners will be launching GeForce RTX gaming laptops which will include the company’s newest Turing-based RTX graphics. While the company has confirmed that all models with RTX 2060, 2070, and 2080 GPUs will technically have the GPU horsepower to run VR headsets, port confusion could trip up consumers who aren’t diligent about their purchase.
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.
