Microsoft announced at their at Future Decoded conference in London that HoloLens, the company’s augmented reality headset, will be expanding its international availability to include all of the European Union in December. HoloLens is currently only officially available in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
‘Try it before you buy it’, the old adage goes. Well, an AR preview might not exactly be ‘trying it’, but Amazon’s new ‘AR View’ function aims to help you figure out if a crock-pot clashes with your marble counters, or if that chair can really fit in that corner, adding a little more depth to the online shopping experience than you’re used to.
Logitech is creating a new system called BRIDGE which aims to make it possible to bring a properly tracked keyboard into VR while showing the user’s hands for accurate typing. Though retail plans haven’t yet been announced, the company is offering a development kit to select developers.
Described as an “action-puzzle adventure game”, Overturn’s puzzle elements play a secondary role; the game weighs heavily on fast, first-person action, combining projectile weapons and frantic melee combat with fists, shields, and blades. Overturn is available now on Steam for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift; it is also in development for PSVR.
Launched on November 2nd, the crowdfunding campaign for ZephVR, a VR fan accessory that “adds realistic wind at the right moments” achieved its $30,000 goal on Kickstarter in just a few hours, with 30 days remaining in the campaign. VR hardware startup Weasel Labs aims to deliver the first ZephVR units to customers in May 2018.
After November 1st, zero-gravity multiplayer sports game Echo Arena was supposed to change from its low-low introductory price tag of exactly $0 and bump up to $20—a deal made possible by a temporary sponsorship by Intel. The standalone multiplayer spin-off from Ready at Dawn’s hit VR title Lone Echo (2017) has been available for free to all Oculus accounts since its launch in July, and in a surprise move by the studio, is now permanently free on Oculus Home with no limit in sight.
IMAX and Ubisoft today announced that a special edition of Star Trek: Bridge Crew (2017), Ubisoft’s co-op multiplayer set aboard a Federation vessel, is launching for an exclusive run in IMAX VR centers worldwide.
Khronos Group, the consortium behind the OpenXR project which aims to standardize the way applications communicate with AR and VR headsets, just added Microsoft to its ranks. Among its count of members, the OpenXR working group consisted of nearly every major player in the industry except Microsoft until now.
According to the just-released October figures from Steam’s Hardware & Software Survey, the Oculus Rift has picked up an additional 0.71%, totalling 47.61% of the market share of VR headsets on Steam. With the price of the Rift dropping permanently to $400 last month, the headset has set its new record high for the fourth month in a row. The HTC Vive maintains a razor thin lead with 48.76% share of headsets in use on Steam.
Face Your Fears (2016) is a collection of horrifying experiences ripped straight from your nightmares; creepy clowns, monsters in the closet, dangerous heights, and now the world of Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things.
HTC could be showing off its standalone VR headset at the company’s November 14th Vive Developer Conference (VDC) in Beijing. As reported by YiVian, the conference has recently published promotional material featuring a veiled image of the company’s upcoming headset. To wit, HTC says it will have ‘some important announcements’ to make.
Paris Games Week is here and Sony has revealed a slew of new trailers showing off their lineup of PSVR games coming in 2017 and 2018. Grab some popcorn, because here’s 21 minutes of fresh footage.
While the game’s main campaign won’t be playable on PSVR, a new trailer gives us a fresh glimpse of what Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown’s Playstation VR mode will look like.
Sony’s London Studio—who built the well received VR Worlds experiences for PSVR—is back. This time around the studio isn’t building a slew of PSVR samples, but rather a AAA scope action shooter in the same vein as the acclaimed ‘London Heist’ vignette from VR Worlds. This isn’t just more of the same though; what we’ve seen of Blood & Truth so far clearly moves the needle of agency and immersion on PSVR with a slew of smart locomotion mechanics and world interactivity.
Doom VFR, Id Software’s made-for-VR Doom franchise game, is launching soon on PSVR and HTC Vive via Steam. PSVR users better dust off their PS Aim controllers from the last time they played Farpoint (2017) though, because Doom VFR is putting its iconic guns in your own two hands.
