‘VRChat’ Reaches 2 Million Installs, Doubling in the Last Ten Days
WePlayVR is a Modular VR Attraction in-a-box Made for Family Venues
AI Solve is creating a modular VR attraction that’s designed as a low-cost pathway for family entertainment centers to bring VR experiences to their customers. With everything in the box, including a VR headset, backpack PC, bespoke experiences, and software that ties it all together, WePlayVR’s modular design affords interesting flexibility that can allow the platform to grow to fit the needs of the venue. I got to step inside one of the WePlayVR pods to experience it for myself.
Oculus Story Studio Alumni Form New Studio to Push Boundaries of VR Storytelling & Affordability
Oculus Story Studio, the company’s internal production studio tasked with creating ridiculously polished cinematic experiences, first announced they’d be winding down production last summer. Now officially defunct, studio alumni are heading off on their own to form a new firm dubbed Fable Studio, which is furthering development on Story Studio’s last remaining project, Wolves in the Walls. Fable is also introducing a new pricing model for its upcoming character-driven VR experiences.
Update: Official ‘Jumanji’ VR Experience Appears on Steam
Jumanji: The VR Adventure is an official VR experience created by Sony Pictures Virtual Reality and MWM Immersive (formerly Reality One). Initially shown at VRX Networks kiosks across the US and UK in tandem with the release of the 2017 franchise reboot film starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, the app actually went live on Steam yesterday for a few hours before being pulled.
WEARVR Launches $10,000 Competition to Bring New Life to Dev Kit-era Apps
As Oculus has pushed out iterative runtimes to support its consumer hardware, many of the beloved early VR experiments have fallen to the wayside, languishing without support and lost in the annals of defunct software. To remedy this, WEARVR, an independent virtual reality app store, announced a new competition challenging seasoned VR devs to update their original Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2 demos, games and experiences, and bring them back to support the latest VR hardware.
Inside ‘Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire’, the Latest VR Attraction from The VOID
I have always been a huge star wars fan. Watching Luke skywalker and Han Solo fight off the Empire in the original trilogy would work me into a frenzy. I would aim my plastic yellow gun at the TV and make blaster noises anytime there were Stormtroopers on the screen and run around my living room ducking behind pillows and sofa cushions. If someone would have told that little kid that he would one day be able to step into the shoes of a rebel soldier and help the Rebellion steal Empire secrets, he probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep for around 4-6 days. I recently had the opportunity to do just that.
‘Primordian’ is a Sci-fi Melee Brawler With Serious Style, Early Access Coming This Week
Boasting a smashing, shooting, alien skull-splitting adventure, Stonepunk Studios aims to transport you billions of years into the past to the very first planet near the center of the universe in their upcoming single-player adventure brawler Primordian.
‘Snatch’ VR Experience Comes to PSVR, Featuring Rupert Grint of ‘Harry Potter’ Fame
Hands-on: Lenovo Mirage Solo – Strong Fundamentals, Questionable Pricing
At CES 2018 last week, Lenovo revealed the Mirage Solo, the company’s standalone Daydream headset. The new device has everything on-board, including inside-out positional tracking, which means it doesn’t rely on a smartphone or external computer to drive the VR experience. There’s many benefits of standalone headsets compared to smartphone shell headsets, but the Mirage Solo’s price point seems to position it in an awkward in-between segment.
Kite & Lightning’s ‘Bebylon Battle Royale’ Nabs Unreal Dev Grant
Kite & Lightning, the studio behind some of VR’s earliest experiences, is one of 13 developers receiving a portion of over $200,000 in ‘Unreal Dev Grants’, a program set up by Epic Games to showcase and provide financial support to projects using Unreal Engine 4. Bebylon Battle Royale is the team’s first major VR game, described as a “vehicular melee party brawler,” and is due to release in 2018 on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
Oculus Now Sells Single Replacement Touch Controllers
So you got a little out of control last night playing Robo Recall (2017), and you smashed one of your Touch controllers to smithereens. It used to be that you’d have to buy a brand new pair of controllers at full price to get back into the game, but now Oculus is selling single controllers so you can replace whichever one you smashed last.
Mind-bending Adventure ‘Anamorphine’ Delayed Until Late Q1
Virtual reality is unique in its ability to allow you to immersively explore the interior of the imagination, including the darker sides of the psyche, the parts that we fear to confront, but inevitably wish to excise from the mind. That’s what Anamorphine is trying to accomplish with its deep, mind-bending dive into love, loss, and the mental anguish of seeing a loved one fall into depression.
4 Most Important Stories From CES and What They Mean for VR in 2018
CES 2018 has come and gone, and with it, a pace has been set for what we can expect to see in VR in the next six months or so. If you weren’t following the day-to-day news, here’s a look at the top stories and what they mean going forward.
‘Lone Echo’ Gets Final Update as Studio Turns Focus Toward ‘Echo Combat’
Lone Echo (2017), one of the Rift’s most critically acclaimed titles (including one of our 2017 Game of the Year winners), has received a new update today which improves visuals for those playing on high-end hardware and offers up dubbing and menu conversion for three additional languages: French, German, and Spanish.
‘Brass Tactics’ Gets Pre-order Discount, Free-to-Play Version to Launch in February
Tabletop real-time strategy game Brass Tactics, which launches on February 22nd, is now available for preorder on the Oculus Store at a promotional price of $24.99. A free-to-play version of the game called Brass Tactics Arena is also open for Early Access registration, and is slated for a February release.
