Back at WWDC 2017 Apple finally embraced VR, announcing that it had been working with Valve to bring SteamVR and the HTC Vive to MacOS, along with a number of other announcements about how the company would support VR as part of its ecosystem. With the anticipated iMac Pro due to launch on Thursday, the company is positioning its most powerful computer yet as an ideal machine for VR development.
CCP may have shuttered their VR game-producing branches, but EVE: Valkyrie (2016), the studio’s multiplayer arcade dogfighter set in the EVE universe, lives on with the addition of support for traditional monitors. Launched today across all platforms including PSVR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive comes the Winter Update which includes custom matches, spectator mode, a new map, and support for TrackIR and Tobii for non-VR players.
SIE London Studio’s upcoming PSVR title Blood and Truth was playable on the showfloor at PSX 2017. The footage captured during an interview with PlayStation Blog’s Sid Shuman at the show is the clearest look at the gameplay sequence we enjoyed during our hands-on in October.
According to a recent entry on the official Oculus blog, the team has plans to allow sculptures from Oculus Medium (2016) to be placed into Home spaces. Customisation is already the central feature of the new Home, which makes up a key component of Rift Core 2.0, the underlying platform for Rift and Touch currently in beta.
Curiscope, the makers of the mixed reality Virtuali-tee educational app, just launched Operation Apex (2017), an underwater exploration and adventure game developed in partnership with HTC Vive Studios.
TPCast, the wireless transmitter first launched for Vive, is going to be arriving in few different regions soon including US, Canada, and much of the European Union. Pre-orders, which are available now, are slated to arrive as early as next week.
Amazon’s US store is either the first, or the only retailer currently to offer the Oculus Rift for its Black Friday-reduced price of $350, a $50 discount off the now normal MSRP of $400. The deal is also eligible for fast & free shipping via Prime.
Fallout 4 (2015), Bethesda’s beloved post-apocalyptic open world RPG, is now in VR, letting you stalk the Wasteland as the sole survivor of Vault 111 from the immersive point of view of the HTC Vive headset. This comes with most of the important trimmings and trappings of the original; a seemingly endless number of interesting and varied quests, multiple causes to join, base building, and plenty of guns and armor to scrounge. Fallout 4 VR successfully provides all these things along with the promise of holding a gun in your own hand, but fractures somewhat as it mutates from its native 16:9 aspect ratio to the new land of VR.
Earlier this year, Clay Bavor, VP of VR/AR at Google, revealed a “secret project” to develop a VR-optimised OLED panel capable of 20 megapixels per eye. The project was mentioned during SID Display Week 2017 but has gone largely under the radar as little information has surfaced since.
If the HTC’s Black Friday deal wasn’t attractive enough to convince you into finally grabbing that Vive headset you’ve been eyeing, Amazon US is ‘reviving’ the $600 Black Friday deal today and throwing in a $100 Amazon gift card.
After announcing the company sold over 2 million PSVR headsets to date, Sony is now temporarily lowering the price of one of its latest bundles to just $200, which includes PlayStation VR, PS Camera, and a copy of Gran Turismo Sport (2017). To top it off, the other bundles are also seeing the return of Black Friday price cuts, but just not as dramatic as the GTS bundle.
Ready Player One, the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, is getting turned into a movie by none other than Steven Spielberg. As the movie’s March 2018 release date approaches, the first full trailer debuted today. Cline has also confirmed work on a sequel to the novel.
Firewall Zero Hour is an upcoming team-based, tactical multiplayer FPS for PlayStation VR from First Contact Entertainment, the makers of Rom: Extraction (2016). The game, which pits two teams of mercenaries against each other in objective-based attack/defend missions, is coming exclusively to PlayStation VR in 2018.
The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Mozilla Firefox web browser, just made their experimental WebXR Viewer app available for download on iOS devices, letting developers quickly experiment with web-based AR built with web technologies and ARKit.
