After launching the VR ‘VR Challenge League’ last year, Oculus and ESL are partnering once again for what they’re calling “Season 2” of their VR eSports initiative. Rebranded as ‘VR League’, the new season is offering $220,000 in prizes for competitors and an expanded game roster which will include the highly anticipated Echo Combat when it launches later this year.
Moscow-based indie developer Odd Meter isn’t a household name in VR development yet, but with their latest game Sacralith: The Archer’s Tale (2018), that may change somewhat. It’s a surprisingly clever bow shooting game draped in impressively polished visuals – making clear strides into ‘AAA’ territory.
iFLY, a leading provider of indoor skydiving facilities, today launched their iFLY VR initiative which combines the company’s indoor skydiving experience with immersive visuals powered by a Gear VR headset. I got to try to experience for myself at the company’s SF Bay location.
Today is the five-year anniversary for Silicon Valley Virtual Reality meetup, and founder Karl Krantz is announcing a couple of new initiatives as SVVR reorganizes itself as a public-benefit corporation. They’re going to be formally announcing their MULTIVERSE initiative that is going to be bringing Reality Portals to VR events, which will allow people virtually attend VR events put on by SVVR and others through social VR experiences like High Fidelity. They’ve created a screen that can be placed at VR events that provides a low-latency window into a VR world (and vice versa), allowing for serendipitous interactions between co-located events and the virtual attendees.
SUPERHOT (2016), the massively successful slow-mo shooter for PC and console, already has a built-for-VR version for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PSVR—SUPERHOT VR (2017)—but now that the team has licensed the IP to Japanese developers GameTomo, you may be curious if the next installment of red dude-shattering fun is getting another VR counterpart as well. According to the developers, it isn’t likely to arrive at launch, although there’s still hope.
“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.
