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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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 (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.
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.
HTC Creative Labs’s free native VR video player has received an upgrade with a new browser interface. The team has also partnered with Vimeo, offering a curated selection of streamable VR video content.
Frontier Developments today announced an open beta test for the upcoming update to the third season of Elite Dangerous (2014), the open-universe space simulator for VR and non-VR players. Called ‘Beyond – Chapter One‘, the update will officially arrive sometime in Q1 2018 following the open beta which starts January 25th.
Expectations are high for backers of Pimax’s very successful Kickstarter campaign which raised $4.2 million in crowdfunding last year for a VR headset promising an ultra-wide field of view and high resolution. Following a critical reception of the headset’s latest prototype at CES this week, the company has responded to backer’s concerns.
