If you own either Rez Infinite (2016) or Thumper (2016), it might just be music to your ears this Valentine’s Day. From now until February 20th, you can get either (or both) VR games for 50% off on Steam. Here’s how:
Otoy is a rendering company that pushing the limits of digital light fields and physically-based rendering. Now that Otoy’s Octane Renderer has shipped in Unity, they’re pivoting from focusing on licensing their rendering engine to selling cloud computing resources for rendering light fields and physically-correct photon paths. Otoy has also completed an ICO for their Render Token (RNDR), and will continue to build out a centralized cloud-computing infrastructure to bootstrap a more robust distributed rendering ecosystem driven by a Etherium-based ERC20 cryptocurrency market.
TNT and Intel have teamed up to bring NBA All-Star coverage to VR on Gear VR and Daydream.
With PSVR adventure game Moss set to launch this month, Sony is ramping up the hype for Quill, the game’s adorable little mouse buddy, with 14 minutes of new gameplay.
Even with a wide selection of gameplay videos and written reviews, it’s hard to know if you should buy a VR game without ever having tried it yourself. Oculus’ solution: extended all-access free weekends on select titles. To that effect, Oculus is putting out two free weekends this month for magic dueling game Wands (2017) and space dogfighter EVE: Valkyrie (2016).
German media company Axel Springer today announced that it has taken part in a new round of financing of Magic Leap. The company hasn’t disclosed the amount of the investment, or mentioned whether other companies have also taken part in the new round.
Virtual Virtual Reality by studio Tender Claws is a Daydream-exclusive interactive story that won the best VR experience at the 2017 Google Play Awards VR, and it’s one of my personal favorite interactive narratives within VR. Virtual Virtual Reality (aka VVR) does a great job of balancing your control as a player with the authorial control of the story. You have the ability to openly explore the worlds, but it’s all within the context of a narrative that subtly guides you through a futuristic world where AI has taken over and is providing you an immersive hero’s journey experience.
Sony has finally released word on when PSVR owners will be able to get their hands on the popular VR boxing title Knockout League; it’s officially coming to PlayStation VR February 13th. The game has been in Early Access on SteamVR, Viveport, and the Oculus Store for almost a year. It’s uncertain if the PSVR release will mark the game’s exit from Early Access on the platforms listed above.
Tender Claws, the creators of the award-winning interactive VR narrative Virtual Virtual Reality, premiered a new, site-specific, interactive AR narrative experience at the Sundance New Frontier called TendAR. It was a social augmented reality experience that paired two people holding a cell phone and sharing two channels of an audio stream featuring an fish guiding the participants through a number of interactions with each other and exploring the surrounding environment. The participants were to instructed to express different emotions in order to “feed” and “train” the AI fish. Google’s ARCore technology was used for the augmented reality overlays, the Google Cloud Vision AI API for object detection, as well as early access to some of Google’s cutting-edge Human Sensing Technology that could detect emotional expressions of the participants.
The HaptX Glove that was shown at Sundance was one of the most convincing haptics experiences that I’ve had in VR. While it was still primitive, I was able to grab a virtual object in VR, and for the first time have enough haptic feedback to convince my brain that I was actually grabbing something. Their glove uses a combination of exoskeletal force feedback with their patented microfluidic technology, and they’ve significantly reduced the size of their external box driving the experience from the demo that I saw at GDC (back when they were named AxonVR) thanks to a number of technological upgrades and ditching the temperature feedback.
The Humble Store is having a big VR sale currently, putting some of the best-rated games for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift on deep discount. There’s not much chaff in the list below, so we hope you still have some cash left over from buying that Valentine’s Day gift.
The 2018 Winter Olympics is about to kick off in PyeongChang, South Korea today, and this year you’ll be able to watch a total of 30 events in VR, shared across live and on-demand 360/180 recordings.
Viacom Next, the company’s technology group tasked with producing immersive experiences, is no longer. David Liu, former Creative Director at Next, announced the news via twitter.
In a patent filed in 2017 and issued today by the United States Patent Office, Apple describes a VR headset designed to be compact and comfortable.
