Facebook’s annual developer conference F8 starts today. While the company launched the long-awaited $200 Oculus Go standalone headset there this morning, it wasn’t certain if the rumors were true, that F8 attendees would be receiving a headset for free. Spoiler alert: they did.
Oculus Go, the company’s upcoming standalone VR headset, may already be waiting in the wings at Amazon distribution centers—they’re certainly already on Best Buy shelves, as both retailers are gearing up for what appears to be an imminent launch.
A giant robot looms over the outskirts of Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province in China. The new VR park, named simply ‘Oriental Science Fiction Valley‘, has now opened its doors; within them reside a bevy of VR attractions and rides that hope to capitalize on China’s steadily growing VR industry.
Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby VR will let you step into the box and swing for the bleachers. The game, first trialed at All-Star FanFest back in June, is now heading to a total of 10 ballparks for the 2018 season, and also to consumers on PSVR and SteamVR-compatible headsets including HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
Standalone VR headsets represent a new headset segment that sits somewhere between smartphone-based VR devices, and tethered, high-end VR systems, while offering some notable advantages over both. In this article we compare three standalone VR devices which will be available worldwide this year: the Oculus Go, Lenovo Mirage Solo, and HTC Vive Focus.
Lytro, the company that pivoted to enterprise-focused applications of its light-field technology after leaving its commercial camera business, is shutting down after a reported $40M acquisition by Google. Now the company is apparently winding down its business by reducing its site to a support page covering its consumer hardware and software solutions.
Odd Raven Studios’ first major title is the VR puzzle-platformer Carly & the Reaperman – Escape from the Underworld. While there is a single player option, it has been designed as an asymmetrical co-op experience, with one player in VR acting as the helpful ‘Reaperman’ in VR, and the other moving Carly in third-person using a standard display. The game is set to launch on June 19th, with support for the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows VR headsets via SteamVR.
A number of standalone VR headsets will be hitting the market in 2018, but so far none of them offer positional (AKA 6DOF) controller input, one of the defining features of high-end tethered headsets. But we could see that change in the near future, thanks to research from Google which details a system for low-cost, mobile inside out VR controller tracking.
In the Echo Arena update this week a blocked off section of the new lobby says ‘Echo Combat – Under Construction’, suggesting that the upcoming zero-G VR FPS would remain an expansion of Echo Arena rather than a separate game. Oculus has indeed affirmed this is the case, and says to expect more details at E3 in June.
Researches from Stony Brook University, NVIDIA, and Adobe have devised a system which hides so-called ‘redirected walking’ techniques using saccades, natural eye movements which act like a momentary blindspot. Redirected walking changes the direction that a user is walking to create the illusion of moving through a larger virtual space than the physical space would allow.
According to a report by CNET, citing an anonymous “person familiar with Apple’s plans,” the company is working on an AR/VR headset targeting 8K resolution per-eye, scheduled for launch in 2020.
Beat Saber, the hotly anticipated VR rhythm game launching May 1st, relies heavily upon colors to guide players in striking the correct notes. For those with color blindness, this could make the game more challenging. Fortunately the developer has confirmed plans for a color blind mode. Furthermore, the Beat Saber soundtrack will be released alongside the game itself.
As part of Mozilla’s ongoing efforts to make VR a first-class citizen on the web, the company today announced Hubs, a WebVR-based social experience which makes for effortless, one-click creation of virtual spaces which anyone can join—from smartphones desktop browsers to VR headsets—directly from the browser. The approach removes a heap of barriers that traditionally stand between two people and a face-to-face conversation in VR.
John Root co-founded VRLA with Cosmo Scharf in 2014, and it has organically grown into a thriving VR event with over 10,000 attendees at the Los Angeles Convention Center. VRLA is a non-profit where funding from sponsors helps to support about half of their exhibitors within the event’s Indie Zone, which helps them feature a lot of innovative independent VR experiments and start-ups. VRLA is happening this year on May 4th and 5th. I had a chance to walk the showroom floor of VRLA 2017 with Root where he took me on a guided tour through the history of VRLA, his thoughts on AR, using VR for film production, the future of privacy in AR/VR, as well as why he is interested in seeing where eSports in VR is headed.
