The VOID, a company specializing in bespoke VR experiences that go beyond what you can achieve with in-home VR hardware, previously announced the development of the Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire VR experience in collaboration with Disney, Lucasfilm, and ILM’s xLab. The Disney Springs location opened December 16th, while the Downtown Disney at Disneyland Resort location opens today.
Vuzix today announced they’ll be unveiling their latest smartglasses at this year’s CES in Las Vegas. Called Vuzix Blade, the smartglasses are more of a heads-up display akin to Google Glass than a positionally-tracked AR headset like Microsoft Hololens or the upcoming Magic Leap One, although the Blade’s styling certainly comes closer to ‘normal’ than many we’ve seen before.
Virtual reality is a great medium for shooters. The problem is, because it’s so natural to virtually transform motion controllers into pistols, the genre is pretty crowded with low-effort wave shooters at the moment. Enter Cold Iron, a western-themed shooter from indie studio Catch & Release that hopes to make a name for itself in the newly coined ‘puzzle shooter’ subgenre.
3dRudder, the company behind the eponymous foot controller for VR, announced its next product; 3dRudder Blackhawk, a newly redesigned device that aims to make input more responsive and intuitive. The company is also reducing their last generation model by $40, bringing it to $100 when the new model goes on sale this spring.
VorpX is a 3D driver which allows users to play their non-VR game library immersively through an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headset. Version 17.3.0 brings a new ‘Direct VR Settings Optimizer’ feature which automatically tweaks many titles for optimal VR performance.
The Perfect Sniper is an upcoming tactical shooter from Toronto-based indie studio Sinn Studio that aims to soften the blow of shooting someone in the face with its charming low-poly visuals. First revealed in October via the cinematic trailer above, The Perfect Sniper is now slated to release on January 15th on Steam.
Partnering with DJ Kyroman and music school Pyramind, Tribe VR’s DJ School aims to teach the art of live mixing with real DJ equipment modelled in VR, with the goal of allowing your virtually acquired skills and knowledge to transfer to real life mixing equipment. The app launched in Early Access on the Oculus Store in December.
A mysterious handheld device showed up in an FCC test report recently that may just be the 3DoF controller coming alongside Oculus Go, the company’s upcoming $200 standalone VR headset.
It’s that time of year again, when you gather all the cash you should have spent buying other people gifts and blow it all on discount games on Steam. This year’s haul is pretty great too, with up to 80% off on gaming bundles and the top names in VR gaming.
Sumo Digital, an independent game studio based in Sheffield, UK, announced they’ve taken on CCP Games’ Newcastle studio, the branch primarily involved in the production of EVE: Valkyrie (2016).
While it’s all too easy to lose ourselves in the countless VR worlds at our fingertips, sometimes we just need to access the desktop and get things done in Windows. Thanks to a few innovative apps, this is possible without removing your headset.
Linda Jacobson got into VR when she helped organize the 1990 CyberArts International gathering of artists and technologists who were using virtual reality technologies. She edited a compilation of CyberArts essays from that first gathering, and she also documented the Garage Virtual Reality DIY VR maker movement of the early 90s. In 1995, she became a VR evangelist at Silicon Graphics where she helped to sell VR into enterprise VR applications including engineering, architecture, construction, medicine, military training, automotive, aerospace, heavy equipment manufacturers, and oil and gas companies. The enterprise companies and applications of VR during this time period were pretty secretive and proprietary, but Jacobson was on the front lines traveling around the world seeing a huge range of different virtual worlds and use cases for VR.
Today’s most immersive virtual reality systems, like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, rely on a bothersome tether to send power and high fidelity imagery to the headset at low latency. But everyone agrees a dangling cable is not only annoying, it’s an immersion detractor. The demand for a solution to this issue has spurred the creation of no less than seven solutions (and counting) hoping to make a wireless link between the high-end host PC and the headset.
It’s no secret that both Deadmau5 and Rick and Morty show creator Justin Roiland both love VR, but we certainly weren’t expecting to see the VRChat logo front and center at Deadmau5’s New Years Eve concert.
Without any major VR hardware releases on the radar for this year, 2018 is shaping up to be a time for content to shine. We’ve rounded up a list of 20-something VR games launching in 2018 that we’re excited about, covering all three major VR systems: PSVR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
