Sea of Thieves has finally arrived, and it’s the first game in four years from legendary developer Rare, the studio behind some of gaming’s greatest titles, like Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie, and GoldenEye 007. And while Sea of Thieves itself doesn’t support VR natively, it’s undeniably immersive, and there’s a lot that VR developers can learn from its rich game design.
Here’s a roundup of news from ‘day one’ of our GDC 2018 coverage. Vive Pro date and price, Magic Leap announcements, Nvidia’s real-time ray-tracing, and Budget Cuts resurfaces.
Now that Magic Leap has officially launched its Lumin SDK, a dev toolkit which allows developers to build AR experiences for Lumin OS, the operating system that powers the Magic Leap One headset, we expect to hear more specific insight in the company’s GDC talk entitled ‘Mixed Reality: Bringing Games and AI to the Real World’.
In partnership with Google, developers Squanch Games have revealed Dr. Splorchy Presents: Space Heroes, the first in a series of exclusive games for the Daydream VR platform. Announced today, the game is playable on the GDC show floor at Google’s booth.
During the Google Developer Day presentation at GDC 2018, Product Manager Clementine Jacoby and Engineering Lead Patrick Donelan at Google Maps presented the team’s progress in bringing their technology and data to game developers. Several ‘location-based’ AR games using Google Maps APIs and ARCore are coming to mobile devices this year.
ARCore, Google’s augmented reality software development kit for Android devices, was recently made available on 13 flagship smartphones – giving over 100 million devices, the company says, the ability to run AR apps. At GDC today, Google highlighted two upcoming apps arriving on the Play Store today, and two arriving in the second half of year.
It’s been over two years since Stockholm-based Neat Corporation released the initial prototype for Budget Cuts, an upcoming stealth-action game that throws you into a robot-filled office space and arms you with various throwing weapons and a novel portal-based teleporting device, letting you sneakily stalk the corridors like a knife-wielding Nightcrawler. Now that the game has an official release date and price, Neat Corp let us in for the first official taste of the game at this year’s GDC before it heads out to HTC Vive and Oculus Rift in May.
NVIDIA today announced RTX, a GPU accelerated technology capable of producing photo-realistic imagery through realtime ray-tracing, all accelerated on the company’s latest generation of Volta GPUs.
Today Magic Leap has launched the Lumin SDK, the toolkit which allows developers to build AR experiences for Lumin OS, the operating system that powers the Magic Leap One headset.
At GDC 2017 last year, LG made the surprise introduction of a SteamVR headset boasting high resolution displays and an interesting ergonomic design. After HTC’s Vive, It would be the first SteamVR headset introduced by a major company and also making use of SteamVR Tracking. Having heard almost nothing since that initial introduction, many hoped that GDC 2018 would see the first glimpse of an update on the status of the headset. Alas, the company has confirmed they aren’t present at GDC.
HTC today announced that the Vive Pro headset only (without controllers or base stations) will cost $800 and launch on April 5th; the headset is now available for pre-order. Meanwhile, the original Vive is getting a price cut of $100, down to $500.
Magic Leap One, the upcoming AR headset from one of the most well-funded startups in history, is said to arrive sometime this year. While no real specs are known about the headset outside of a few choice bits revealed during its unveiling back in December, one important factor that’s been largely unresolved is starting to slowly materialize despite the company’s insistence on complete secrecy: content. Talking to Rolling Stone, Weta Gameshop designer and artist Greg Broadmore revealed that an upcoming first-person shooter called Dr. Grordbort’s Invaders, which is slated to launch alongside Magic Leap One, has been the headset’s longest-developed game.
Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s best-selling novel Ready Player One is hitting the big screen later this month. As a story based in a world where virtual reality headsets are omnipresent and everyone is connected to the massive multiplayer online universe dubbed ‘The Oasis’, many are wondering what role the film will play in VR’s continued push towards mainstream adoption. While basically none of the technology portrayed in Ready Player One reflects the current state of VR devices or software, leaving a clear gap in its ‘advertised’ benefits and the reality of the experience available to VR users today, it still has the potential to be a significant factor in VR adoption. To what extent? Well, that comes down to how many eyeballs see it and if it sucks or not.
