Google announced at last year’s Society for Information Display (SID) Display Week that the company was actively working on a VR-optimized OLED panel capable of packing in pixels at a density heretofore never seen outside of microdisplays – all at a supposedly ‘wide’ field of view (FOV). Now, it appears that the company is going to talk in detail about that high-resolution OLED at this year’s SID.
Nickelodeon and IMAX Corporation have partnered to bring SlimeZone, a new multiplayer social VR experience, to IMAX VR centers globally. Allowing up to six players to step inside a cartoon-filled virtual world, SlimeZone features games, the ability to ‘slime’ friends, and what else – plenty of recognizable cartoons such as Sponge Bob Squarepants.
Quill, Oculus’ VR painting and drawing tool, recently saw a major update which added animation tools to the software, allowing users to create animated sequences directly in VR. A resident artist at Oculus has taken to the tool to show the incredible potential of drawing and animating in VR.
GDC, hosted later this month in San Francisco, has long been an important event for Oculus. This year the company says they’re bringing brand new VR demos to the show and will host a session exploring the company’s plans for 2018.
Atari has confirmed that the forthcoming Rollercoaster Tycoon Joyride, its first VR title, will make its debut at GDC 2018 later this month. The game is slated to launch in the first half of 2018 on PS4 with support for PSVR.
Moss (2018), a puzzle platformer for PSVR that follows the ridiculously cute mouse Quill, has broken through to the top 10 most-downloaded PSVR games last month.
The Tribeca Film Festival starts next month, an annual screening of everything from indie documentaries to family-friendly films. Coming to the festival’s Immersive program, which showcases works by artists who are pushing boundaries and using cutting-edge technology, are six Oculus-funded projects.
If you haven’t heard, Oculus screwed up pretty badly yesterday when they let a software certification expire, leaving Rift owners without access to any of their games for a full day. Thankfully, there’s a fix now, but the company is still trying to smooth things over by throwing $15 Oculus Store credit (or local equivalent) to Rifters.
HTC today announced it’s bringing 8 VR experiences inspired by Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film Ready Player One to its official South by Southwest (SXSW) event. If you’re not going to be able to make it to Austin this week, you’ll be able to download all of these experiences at home for free before the film’s March 29th release.
Widespread reports of an error preventing users from launching the Oculus software that powers the headset began appearing earlier yesterday. The company has today released a repair tool that patches the error in lieu of an automatic update.
This Spring, Microsoft is planning to roll out an update to Windows which will bring a number of improvements to Windows VR headsets, including better performance when used to play SteamVR content and during typical use, and a new environment for users to choose as their home space.
Magic Leap, the augmented reality headset manufacturer, has added another couple hundred million dollars to its Series D investment round, this time $461 million led by The Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment arm, Tech Crunch reports.
Starting this month, Bandai Namco is lowering its age restriction for its VR Zone Arcade in Shinjuku to 7 years old on many of its VR games. The information was released late last month in a press blurb on Bandai Namco’s website (Japanese). Before the change, all activities using a VR headset were restricted to 13 years or older.
