“We make games, Steam, and hardware. Join us,” says the first line of Valve’s newly redesigned website—in big bold red letters—bringing its look more in line with 2010’s design language than the previous version that screamed ‘late 2000’s’. Along with the new look is a clear emphasis on hardware as a central part of Valve’s future, with VR positioned as the cutting edge of the company’s work.
AntVR, the Beijing-based headset company, has something worth celebrating within only a few hours of launching their AR headset MIX Kickstarter yesterday. After only eight hours on the crowdfunding site, the company has already reached their goal of $50,000, and it doesn’t show signs of stopping.
Amazon today announced that Sumerian, a tool that aims to make creating web-based applications for VR/AR and traditional monitors an easy process, is now available to the general public. First announced at last year’s AWS re:Invent, Amazon Sumerian touts the ability to easy publish 3D content to any browser that supports WebGL or WebVR graphics rendering, including Daydream, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and iOS mobile devices.
Konami’s 4K/VR remastering of Zone of the Enders 2 (2003), called Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner MARS, now has an official street date: September 4th in the US and September 6th in the EU and Japan.
COMPOUND is a rogue-lite VR shooter from indie developer NotDead Games that looks to bring back some of the classic feel of early FPSs like Doom (1993) and Wolfenstein 3d (1992). After a lengthy wait, the game finally launched today on Steam Early Access.
AntVR, the Beijing-based company known for their 2014 VR headset Kickstarter, launched a new crowdfunding campaign today for an augmented reality headset dubbed ‘Mix’. AntVR says the PC-tethered AR headset, which starts at $500 without positional tracking, will have a 96-degree field of view (FOV), and the ability to use the SteamVR platform so users can play games originally intended for VR headsets—provided the game has a dark, or entirely black background.
SteamVR includes de facto support for several VR devices, although sometimes games just don’t support a particular controller—or if they do, it may not be configured properly. To remedy this, Valve has introduced a new SteamVR Input system, now in beta, that will let users create their own controller bindings and share them, so any game can hypothetically add support for any SteamVR-compatible controller, past, present or future.
Ahead of its launch later this month, we got a chance to dive into the beginning of Red Matter, an upcoming VR adventure puzzle exclusively for Oculus Rift that puts you in a wonderfully weird Soviet-style retrofuturistic world.
It’s hard to believe it’s already been five years since the first Oculus Rift dev kits shipped to Kickstarter backers, many of them developers looking to create for the future of VR consumer hardware. As the medium inevitably marches on though, many of the earliest VR demos have fallen to the wayside. In a bid to revive some of these fan favorites, WEARVR, an independent virtual reality app store, started its $10,000 ‘Remastered Competition’ back in January—a challenge to see if the earliest VR developers could update their demos for today’s generation of hardware. Now the winners are in.
According to recent testing by the Virtual Reality Institute of Health and Exercise, Beat Saber (2018) may be more than just a fun way to spend an evening in. With all that block slicing, dodging and leaning, you could burn as many calories as playing tennis.
VR headset users now have a chance to walk into an interactive version of HBO’s Silicon Valley house. The Palo Alto home, which is owned by the series’ eccentric startup guru Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller), was lovingly recreated in VR, replete with ‘always blue’ ball, foosball, and yes, even a bong.
Onward (2017) is a military-style VR shooter with some of the most ardent players who regularly engage in a sort of amped-up version of paintball. It plays host to fierce competition, and with it comes a certain camaraderie that has bound players together in one of the most hardcore userships. An avid player passed away recently, and in an outpouring of support, many members of the Onward community responded by donating to his fiancé and young child via a GoFundMe fundraiser.
Beat Saber is a rhythm game that plays like an embodied puzzle game which creates a visceral connection to 10 custom music tracks. It’s similar to Soundboxing and Audio Shield, but you use extended lightsabers rather than your fists, which makes you feel like a ninja. I had a chance to talk with the chief programmer Jan Ilavsky and music composer Jaroslav Beck at GDC about the development of Beat Saber, some more details about their scoring algorithm, and where they’re taking it in the future.
When we saw the news that JDI, the Japanese display conglomerate founded by Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi, were developing a 1001ppi LCD display for VR headsets, it was clear that the race for ever-higher pixel densities was still alive and well. Now, we learn INT, a Taiwan-based display design firm, is developing a 2228 ppi AMOLED specifically designed for VR headsets.
Sadly, demos aren’t really the norm for VR games, making it tough to know if that tantalizingly polished-looking game really works as well as it looks in trailers. Now, Apex Construct (2018) developers Fast Travel Games have released a demo on the PSN store, which ought to tip the balances a bit.
