Ready Player One, the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, is getting turned into a movie by none other than Steven Spielberg, who is directing the film. As the movie’s March 2018 release date approaches, a new trailer, ‘Dreamer’ debuted this week.
Lone Echo nabbed our 2017 Oculus Rift Game of the Year Award for many reasons—amazing visuals, intuitive locomotion, and a strong story, to name a few—but one of the game’s unsung innovations is its virtual touchscreen interfaces. While many VR games are still using less than ideal laser pointer interfaces, developer Ready at Dawn created a framework for surprisingly functional virtual interfaces which are both intuitive and immersive. The studio’s lead systems designer, Robert Duncan, joins us to explain the design approach behind the end result.
RPG dungeon crawler The Mage’s Tale, a former Oculus exclusive, is set to launch on Steam for the HTC Vive on March 23rd. Developer inXile Entertainment has also confirmed that the title is in development for PSVR.
Payday 2 (2013), Overkill’s 4-player bank heist co-op shooter, has offered a VR mode in beta for the past few months, but now it’s off the beta branch and pushed out as a free DLC to the main game.
Project Santa Cruz, Oculus’ in-development standalone VR headset first teased back at Oculus Connect 2016, doesn’t even really have a proper name yet, but at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) the company will be dedicating an hour-long talk to the fundamentals of developing for the new platform. Giving developers more insight into the headset’s limitations could mean launch might be right around the corner.
Japan-based startuped Exiii is developing a pair of haptic gloves with force feedback, aimed at making VR more immersive. The company’s ‘EXOS Wrist’ device can rotate your hand about two axes, while the ‘EXOS Gripper’ providers finger stoppage to simulate the grabbing of virtual objects.
After years of teasing, Magic Leap late last year finally offered a glimpse of the AR headset it’s been developing, the Magic Leap One. Details on what the headset can actually do are still light, but come next week, four of the company’s top creatives are promising to offer a “deep dive on developing for spatial computing,” in a session at GDC, which could reveal more about how the device’s capabilities apply to game design.
Hot on the tail of Survios’ latest release, Sprint Vector (2018), the studio today announced their next VR project, Creed: Rise to Glory, a VR boxing game being developed in partnership with MGM as a complement to the upcoming Creed II movie. While there’s a handful of VR boxing games already available, Survios is promising something called ‘Phantom Melee Technology’, which the company says will offer “an authentic immersive experience that truly makes you feel like a boxing world champion.”
Bigscreen is a unique social VR application which lets users bring their desktop screens and all the capabilities of their PC into VR with them. That means friends can come together virtually for LAN parties, streaming sessions, and much more. In Q2, Bigscreen will come to mobile VR headsets for the first time, allowing the mobile VR crowd to join their desktop brethren and get in on the fun. Starting today, Gear VR users can sign up for Bigscreen’s mobile alpha test.
Between HTC’s Vive X accelerator and the VRVCA investor consortium that it heads, the company is already very active in the VR investment space. But today the company announced a brand new investment fund of some $160 million in a joint venture between HTC and the Shenzhen Municipal People’s Government.
Google has released a free app for PC VR headsets called Welcome to Light Fields. The company says the app serves as a showcase of “the emerging technology Google is using to power its next generation of VR content.”
Formerly a PSVR exclusive, Skyrim VR is coming to PC via SteamVR, with officially listed support for the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows VR headsets.
Sixense, the company behind the much-belated positionally tracked STEM controller system, just released an update stating the company is “getting close to be able to start production,” which should follow an estimated 4-week retooling and finalization of production samples.
Valve today released an update to SteamVR Beta that introduces a new system that automatically adjusts the VR game’s resolution in accordance with your GPU’s rendering ability. Presented by Valve Graphics Programmer Alex Vlachos in an official announcement, the auto-resolution tuner is, according to Vlachos, designed to squeeze the best possible visual experience out your GPU, lower the cost of VR, and also make developers’ lives a little bit easier.
