Google announced Seurat at last year’s I/O developer conference, showing a brief glimpse into the new rendering technology designed to reduce the complexity of ultra high-quality CGI assets so they can run in real-time on mobile processors. Now, the company is open sourcing Seurat so developers can customize the tool and use it for their own mobile VR projects.
I AM A MAN is an interactive VR experience that lets you participate in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike and the events leading up to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Created by Dr. Derek Ham, an assistant professor of Graphic Design at NC State University, I AM A MAN was a winner of Oculus’ 2017 Launch Pad, a program designed to help fund VR content from diverse backgrounds.
Vive Focus dev kits are headed outside of China today to international developers looking to create for the company’s standalone VR headset, which first arrived to Chinese consumers back in January. Apparently HTC is lowering the price for some devs, although the total price sans discount appears to be approximately the same premium price tag the headset carries in its home country.
Vive Focus, HTC’s standalone VR headset which first launched in China back in January, is gearing up for its Western release it seems. HTC today announced that it’s making Vive Focus developer units available to devs outside of China.
Tis the season of standalones, it seems. Right on the heels of the Oculus Go launch, the Lenovo Mirage Solo is here. The headset promises to bring one of the top features of high-end VR headsets—positional tracking—to Google’s casual Daydream VR ecosystem. Does it succeed? Read on to find out.
After only three days since launch, Beat Saber (2018), the VR rhythm game that puts two lightsabers in your hands, is now the highest rated game on Steam—not just the highest rated VR game, but the highest rated game out of all titles, flatscreen games included.
Facebook’s VP of AR/VR Andrew “Boz” Bosworth showed a quick glimpse of a “mixed reality” game of soccer using Oculus Santa Cruz, the company’s 6 DOF standalone VR headset prototype.
Funktronic Labs, the studio behind Cosmic Trip (2017), today launched their latest title, an arcade remote-controlled taxi game dubbed Starbear: Taxi (2018). Starbear: Taxi launched today on Rift, Vive, and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
At Facebook’s F8 developer conference Oculus revealed a glimpse at an intriguing new headset prototype dubbed ‘Half Dome’. Including a 140 degree field of view, varifocal displays, and what appears to be eye-tracking, the prototype is a tantalizing peek at the company’s research and what may lay ahead of us—just don’t expect it everything we saw “anytime soon,” says Oculus co-founder and Head of Rift Nate Mitchell.
Google is celebrating the life and artistry of French film pioneer Georges Méliès today with a charming VR short that commemorates his iconic silent films including the groundbreaking A Trip to the Moon (1902).
TSA Frisky is an upcoming room-scale game that turns the tables on travelers and their would-be airport security officers. The game, which appears to be a cheeky cross between Papers, Please (2013) and Job Simulator (2016), is slated to arrive on Steam for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows VR Headsets on May 17th.
One of Facebook’s underlying goals for VR is to use it as a means of connecting distant people. While today friends can talk and play in a range of social VR applications, including Facebook Spaces, the representation of users in VR is still a caricature at best. At F8 this week, Oculus showed work being done on hand-tracking to bring more intuitive control and accurate avatars into VR.
Oculus today at F8 overviewed some of the latest VR technology that they’d been working on internally. Among the projects mentioned is the ‘Half Dome’ prototype, a Rift-like headset with a 140 degree field of view, varifocal displays, and what appears to be eye-tracking.
