VirZOOM, makers of VR arcade exercise games and the VirZOOM Bike Controller, announced the successful closure of a $5.5 million seed funding round which the company says will help expand its commercial business worldwide with a second generation of its VZ Module and VZ Sensor, a retrofitting kit for stationary bikes that turns them into VR controllers.
Jeremy Bailenson founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, and his latest book Experience on Demand traces his academic journey through virtual reality. It’s an intellectual memoir that focuses on his personal work in VR, and the insights that VR provides into human communication dynamics, as well as the impact of VR on our identity, empathy, education, medicine, and our ability to understand complex issues such as global warming and our impact on the environment.
If you were alive in the ’90s, chances are you’ve heard about Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, the American domestic terrorist that between 1978 and 1995 killed 3 people, and injured 23 others in a nationwide bombing campaign. Now, HTC Vive Studios and The Newseum, an interactive news museum in Washington, D.C., have come together to produce a VR experience detailing the Unabomber case, which features an interactive inside look at Kaczynski’s infamous Montana cabin where he planned his bombings.
Having just celebrated a successful closed beta, which showed off some of the game’s new mechanics and solo challenge mode, Survios now says its infectious footracer Sprint Vector is set to launch on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift on February 8th. PlayStation VR players will have to wait until February 13th to join in the fun.
Google Blocks, the 3D object creation tool for VR/AR app developers, just got a big update that includes new environments, improved object snapping, and a number of experimental features that the company says makes Blocks “more powerful and even easier to use.”
Back at CES, Oculus announced that Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi would exclusively bring its own branded version of the standalone Oculus Go headset to China. The headset will support the Oculus Mobile SDK, meaning existing Gear VR and future Oculus Go apps can be packaged up for sale to the Chinese VR market through Xiaomi’s Mi VR store.
Starting toward the end of 2017, the number of listed job openings at Oculus has nearly tripled, with the current number of openings floating around an all time high.
Sprint Vector, the upcoming VR footracing game from Raw Data (2017) studio Survios, went into closed beta last week. Now with a few multiplayer matches under my belt and a number of solo challenges (and possibly some overextended elbows), it’s clear the studio’s so-called “adrenaline platformer” is aiming to impress with a number of new modes, some new mechanics and a thick coat of polish.
OrbusVR, the indie VR MMORPG, is now on Oculus Home, allowing for crossplay between it and the Steam version which launched last month.
If you haven’t touched your Lenovo Mirage AR headset since Christmas, now may be the time to jump back in for the latest content expansion to the lightsaber-intensive Star Wars: Jedi Challenges.
One of the current barriers to immersion for high-end VR headsets is being tethered to a powerful PC. For now, there are two options if you want to eliminate that pesky cable: a special wireless adapter, or a backpack PC to let the rendering happen directly on your person. Here we take a look at a range of VR backpack computers and what they offer.
After talking to a lot of independent VR storytellers, Kaleidoscope VR’s René Pinnell identified that funding was one of the biggest blockers for continued experimentation. Cinematic VR pieces do not have many established distribution channels yet, and so a lot of the funding has come from larger headset manufacturers like Oculus and select brands like Intel.
While HTC is planning to launch the Vive Pro headset itself starting in Q1, the full package including the headset, controllers, and new SteamVR Tracking 2.0 base stations won’t come until later in the year. Until then, here’s a glimpse that comes to us from Alvin Wang Graylin, HTC’s Vive China president, who recently took the kit to a Vive developer meetup in the region.
Oculus Research, the company’s R&D division, recently published a paper that goes deeper into their eye tracking-assisted, multi-focal display tech, detailing the creation of something they dub a “perceptual” testbed.
