The Sundance Film Festival just kicked off in Park City, Utah, and Oculus announced in a blogpost they’re debuting five experiences at the New Frontier section of Sundance—all of which they helped bring to life.
Dell and AR headset manufacturer Meta announced a new partnership, allowing Dell to be the first third-party seller of the Meta 2 Augmented Reality Development Kit. Dell says that through the partnership, they’ll also be able to provide both the Meta 2 Dev Kit and the tools necessary to create immersive experiences to businesses involved in sectors such as healthcare, manufacturing and construction.
In 2017, venture funding of VR/AR companies reached at least $1.9B, ending slightly above 2016. The total number of companies raising venture capital during 2017 outpaced 2016, but the average deal size declined sharply by 35%, according to Greenlight Insights’ annual year-end analysis of individual venture capital deals dating back to 2011.
Providing “access, support, and savings” to qualifying indie developers, the new Oculus Start program hopes to encourage and enable the development of great apps from those just getting started in VR. The program, which was introduced in a brief post on the Oculus developer blog, has begun to accept applications via this form.
Gunfire Games’ most recent release, the space adventure game From Other Suns (2017), is playable for free this weekend. The game is exclusive to the Oculus platform and designed “from the ground up” for the Touch controllers, coming from the studio behind Chronos (2016) and Dead & Buried (2017).
Already in the wild for over a month now, Rift Core 2.0 Beta has seen its first substantial update since launch. The January update addresses performance and general ease-of-use of Home and Dash, but more importantly provides solutions to some rather niggling issues.
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, 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.
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.
