The first version of Varjo’s ‘bionic display’ enterprise VR headset is due out later this year (see our latest hands-on), and the company has announced plans to offer an add-on upgrade in 2019 which brings high-quality pass-through AR capabilities to the headset. Varjo showed off a tech demo of the headset’s add-on capabilities this week at AWE 2018.
We had a chance to go hands-on with Gumi and Yomuneco’s Sword of Gargantua at GDC back in March, and while an official write-up never materialized out of the hectic game-filled dev conference, a demo for the studio’s upcoming online action RPG is finally here for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
Oculus previously announced earlier this year that Oculus Go, the company’s 3DOF standalone headset, would officially launch in 23 consumer markets, although China would be receiving its own version with Xiaomi branding. Now, at a conference in Shenzhen, the Chinese tech giant announced that Mi VR has officially launched in China.
Today’s VR headsets may have relatively high resolutions on paper, but when the pixels are stretched across a wide field of view, the effective angular resolution is far lower than what you might expect from a typical 1080p TV or monitor. Unfortunately, a suitable VR display capable of achieving both a wide field of view and retina resolution isn’t readily available yet. Until then, Finland-based VR startup Varjo is using a combination of macrodisplays and microdisplays to put high density resolution to the center of your view without giving up the wide field of view.
Oculus Venues, the social app that allows ‘thousands of users’ to watch live events en masse in VR, is now available on Oculus Go and Gear VR starting today. The company has also published a full list of upcoming live events (below).
Downward Spiral: Horus Station is a sci-fi adventure that puts you aboard a vast, abandoned space station that was cleared out of all life after military-grade robots turned on the station’s human inhabitants. There’s a lot to admire about the full release of Downward Spiral—an expanded universe first seen in Downward Spiral: Prologue (2017), a 20-minute taster that released on Steam in fall of last year—although after playing through the campaign, which features first-person shooter elements and can be played in single player or co-op mode, I left feeling unclear about what Downward Spiral really wanted to be, making it a jack of all trades, but master of none.
7invensun, one of the latest companies accepted into HTC’s Vive X accelerator program, is launching an eye-tracking add-on made specially for the Vive headset. The device, which went on sale last year, uses a series of IR LEDs and a near-eye camera to track the user’s eyes in real-time, enabling a range of potential benefits for VR.
When it comes to mobile VR and AR headsets, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips are dominating the space, with every major mobile headset launched so far this year built on the company’s Snapdragon 821 or 835 chips. And while those existing chips are also found in smartphones, Qualcomm today is announcing XR1, a new chip specifically built for AR and VR devices, which the company is calling its “first dedicated XR platform.”
Sony is getting ready to offer big discounts in their 11-day ‘Days of Play’ sale, which will see price reductions on PSVR bundles, controllers, games, and the introduction of a limited edition PS4.
South Korean tech giant LG Display and a team from Sogang University in Seoul have collaborated on a new AI-based content creation technology that’s designed to address the issue of latency and motion blur in VR headsets – well ahead of the mounting race for higher and higher display resolutions.
HTC has been making inroads into the education system in China with its startup VIVEDU, which centers around both University-level and K-12 education programs using HTC Vive and now HTC Vive Focus, the company’s 6DOF standalone VR headset. In a bid to go even further, the HTC-founded startup recently launched a new turn-key solution that packs in an impressive number of Vive Focus headsets into a storage locker.
In its first month, Beat Saber has sold 100,000 copies across Steam and Oculus, generating $2 million in revenue—another big milestone of success for a game still in early access and made by a three-person indie studio.
With shooters like PUBG (2017) and Epic’s Fortnite (2018) taking the traditional gaming world by storm as of late, many VR developers have seen the success of the battle royale games and attempted to replicate the winner-take-all game mode in virtual reality. While far from the first to do so, Against Gravity’s social VR game Rec Room (2016) is diving head-first into the battle royale genre with its newest activity, something they dub Rec Royale. It’s currently in open beta until the end of today for PSVR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR, and is slated for full release on June 7th.
Budget Cuts (2018) is a room-scale VR stealth game from indie studio Neat Corporation. Launching on May 31st on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, we took the time to show you just what this objectively fantastic game looks like from the very beginning.
