Bandai Namco has teased One Piece fans for some time now with images and trailers of the PSVR exclusive experience One Piece: Grand Cruise. The company has now given a firm release date in North America and Europe: May 22nd.
Infinadeck is an active omni-directional VR treadmill that lets you walk in any direction. Compared to others, which generally rely on low friction surfaces to emulate the act of walking, Infinadeck’s design actually has a tread that moves beneath you, leading to a much more natural gait. Having stepped on the latest Infinadeck prototype, the VR treadmill is making strides toward a truly compelling solution for artificial locomotion in VR.
Studios Frame Interactive and Robot Invader today announced Dead Secret (2015), the Gear VR title that later landed on PC VR headsets, is finally making its way to PSVR.
Last month Killing Floor: Incursion (2017), the co-op zombie shooter from Tripwire Interactive, made its transition from Oculus exclusive to multi-platform title when it launched via Steam with support for HTC Vive and Rift. Now, the zombie-splattering sci-fi horror game is headed to PSVR too.
Trebuchet, the Montreal-based studio behind Prison Boss VR (2017), just launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new game that places you on the back of a trusty steed and puts a lance in your free hand. The multiplayer VR jousting game, appropriately dubbed Jousting Time, is targeting SteamVR-compatible headsets including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows VR headsets.
Blind is an upcoming psychological thriller that puts you in a world of darkness. Given a special cane, you use echolocation to find your way through the game’s mysterious narrative.
Interested in jumping into the VR racing scene? This weekend you can snag discounts up to 80% on some of the best VR sim racing games out there.
The future of VR storytelling will be immersive and interactive. Yelena Rachitsky is an executive producer of experiences at Oculus, and she’s been inspired by how interactive narratives have allowed her to feel like a participant who is more engaged, more present, and more alive. The fundamental challenge of interactive narratives is how to balance the giving and receiving of making choices and taking action vs. receiving a narrative and being emotionally engaged and having an embodied experience of immersion and presence. Balancing the active and passive dimensions is the underlying tension of the yang and yin of any experience.
Ready Player One was released on March 29th, and the current VR experience that comes the closest to realizing the vision of the OASIS depicted in the movie is the social VR experience of VRChat. By 2045, I predict that we’ll have a decentralized open metaverse that’s built on WebXR, and that it’ll be the open web that realizes the educational potential of OASIS that’s depicted within the novel version of Ready Player One. But I think we’ll continue to have open and closed systems just as we do today, and it’s likely that there will a closed, walled garden metaverse of interconnected worlds that is more akin to the vision of the OASIS that’s built by Gregarious Simulation Systems. But if you want to experience the OASIS today, then VRChat is the experience to check out.
Ahead of its launch last month, PSVR exclusive Bravo Team looked like a promising VR FPS, bringing PS Aim support and a fully cooperative campaign to the table. But critic and player reactions turned out to be overwhelmingly negative. Speaking with Eurogamer, anonymous sources from the studio behind the game explained how the ambitious title turned into a flop.
After getting our hands on VR rhythm lightsaber game Beat Saber at GDC 2018 last month, we’ve been looking forward to more information on the game’s release date, which is now confirmed for May 1st. Last week developer Hyperbolic Magnetism revealed a new track, which will launch with the game’s Early Access version.
Plex, the media server software that lets you stream your own video, music, and photos to a bevy of devices, has landed on Gear VR with its latest app Plex VR. The app, which includes support for 360180-degree and 3D videos, first made its way to the Daydream platform earlier this year.
Sprint Vector (2018), the VR racing game that uses a unique locomotion system to send you speeding through the world’s Mario Kart-style tracks on your own two feet, is finally getting a free access weekend on Rift. Oh, and you might have the chance to win big at Oculus’ ongoing two-year Rift anniversary giveaway too.
For developers, it’s not easy grabbing a player’s attention when their game is getting a big update, or an important in-game event is about to happen. In effort to remedy this, Oculus is opening up Notifications on Gear VR to developers looking to draw wayward eyeballs back to their apps.
In the wake of Steven Spielberg’s latest film Ready Player One (2018) comes a new Netflix series set in the backdrop of a virtual universe. Called Kiss Me First, the psychological thriller takes place in a dark, ominous world where fully-immersive virtual reality is the norm.
