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.
Oval is an upcoming VR shooter that lets you create, edit and share your own levels. The game, which is slated to hit Steam Early Access June 8th, will support HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
If you’re waiting on positionally-tracked controllers for Google’s latest entry into the Daydream platform, the standalone 6DOF VR headset Lenovo Mirage Solo, you probably won’t ever see it, at least not from Google.
For new computing technologies to realize their full potential they need new user interfaces. The most essential interactions in virtual spaces are grounded in direct physical manipulations like pinching and grabbing, as these are universally accessible. However, the team at Leap Motion has also investigated more exotic and exciting interface paradigms from arm HUDs and digital wearables, to deployable widgets containing buttons, sliders, and even 3D trackballs and color pickers.
Japan Display Inc. (JDI), a display conglomerate created by Sony, Toshiba, and Hitachi, today announced the development of a high pixel density, 3.25-inch 1001ppi LCD created specifically for VR headsets.
Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017) seems to have done well enough to rate it the number one most downloaded game this past month on PSVR, beating out the VR stalwarts Job Simulator (2016) and Superhot VR (2017).
When we saw Red Matter at a Oculus Connect 4 last year, we were immediately taken in by the adventure puzzle’s wonderfully weird, retrofuturistic vibe. Now, Madrid-based studio Vertical Robot tells us pre-orders are open today for Red Matter, with launch coming later this month on Rift.
Visospace, a Sydney, Australia-based team of engineers, recently launched their standing VR motion controller platform Alto100 crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo in effort to tempt developers, beta testers, and early adopters to a unique style of locomoting through VR games and experiences.
