Two years in the making, Budget Cuts has remained almost completely off the radar after briefly surfacing back in 2016, but this week at GDC 2018 the game has reemerged with fresh details, including a May 31st release date, which, for this promising title, still manages to feel like an eternity away.
Google today launched Tour Creator, a web-based tool that lets you easily build a VR ‘tour’ using imagery from Google Street View and even your own 360 photos. The company released the tool as a part of Teacher Appreciation Week, showcasing it in rural communities in across the US.
Since indie developers Hyperbolic Magnetism endorsed a few community-made level editors for their hit VR rhythm game Beat Saber (2018), people have been adding their own tracks to the lightsaber-wielding slicefest; it’s not only let creators up the difficulty, but also made it possible to make the game’s overall flow even more frenetic.
Later this year, Microsoft is increasing the cut developers earn when publishing on the Microsoft Store. The raise in revenue share is slated to affect developers of non-gaming apps, amounting to between 85-95 % of revenue going to the creator of the application depending on how customers find the content.
Samsung appears to be making a strategic partnership with Microsoft as it produces what Korean Times reports is a “powerful cordless headset that supports both augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR).” The headset is said to make use of Microsoft’s “Mixed Reality” platform, and to make its debut at Berlin’s IFA technology fair in late August.
Today at Google I/O 2018, Google announced upgrades to its ARCore augmented reality technology, including a new feature called Cloud Anchors which will let developers create multi-user applications where devices can share an augmented environment.
Aparna Chennapragada, VP of Product for AR/VR at Google, took to the stage at Google’s I/O developer conference today to tease some of the work the company is doing to integrate augmented reality into Google Maps.
Matt Miesnieks is creating an AR cloud with 6D.AI, which aims to “synchronize 3D computer vision data across devices, time and space” in order to enable “persistent content, occlusion, and real-time shared experiences.” Miesnieks has founded a number of AR startups including Dekko, and he’s also a partner with the early-stage AR fund Super Ventures. I had a chance to catch up with Miesnieks back in October 2017 after the Google Pixel 2 announcement to get an update on the state of the AR industry.
X-Plane 11 (2017), the highly-touted and expansive flight simulator for PC, now has a few new badges under its Steam listing, which includes support for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
The PlayStation VR platform is understandably heavy on games, but PSVR owners now have a paint program all their own that appears to be very similar to Google’s Tilt Brush (2016), the art program that supports Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Cave Digger is an upcoming room-scale mining game for SteamVR-compatible headsets that places you deep into the Earth using your handy mining elevator and a number of mining tools and devices to extract valuable resources.
Oculus today announced it’s rebranding Oculus Research, the company’s R&D lab, to the newly created Facebook Reality Labs (FRL). The shift, the company says, better addresses the increasingly important role of research and development in AR/VR while emphasizing collaboration with Facebook’s other skunkworks, something Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash says is allowing for “further and faster” development of leading-edge AR/VR tech.
Beat Saber, the VR rhythm game in Early Access that made its way to the top spot on Steam this past weekend, is getting a level editor soon that will let anyone build and slice away to whatever music they like.
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.
