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.
SyncThink, a Berkeley-based eye-tracking and brain firm, announced the closing of a $3.5 million Series A-1 funding round led by Quadrant Management. The company expects to use the funds to continue development on their EYE-SYNC technology, a VR-based eye-tracking technology to help diagnose concussions on the playing field.
Welcome to our third day of CES 2018 coverage: Viveport gets VR previews, we go hands-on with Tactical Haptics’ latest prototype, Vive Pro to come with ‘refreshed’ controllers but not ‘Knuckles’, and TPCast brings wireless tech to Windows Mixed Reality.
Following reveals of TPCast Plus and TPCast for Windows Mixed Reality, the wireless VR specialists TPCast have also announced their “next-generation” technologies, called TPCast 2.0. The company claims their improved system can ‘easily adapt’ to VR headsets as high as 8K resolution, while reducing the latency to 1ms.
Revealed this week at CES 2018, HTC has announced their own Vive Wireless Adapter which promises to break the tether on the Vive and Vive Pro. We went hands-on to see how it handles.
Oculus Rift users playing games on SteamVR will soon be able to more fluidly access Oculus Dash, part of the Rift Core 2.0 update which gives users an overlay menu allowing them to access social features, browse their desktop, and more.
