Ready Player One, the 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, is getting turned into a movie by none other than Steven Spielberg. As the movie’s March 2018 release date approaches, the first full trailer debuted today. Cline has also confirmed work on a sequel to the novel.
Firewall Zero Hour is an upcoming team-based, tactical multiplayer FPS for PlayStation VR from First Contact Entertainment, the makers of Rom: Extraction (2016). The game, which pits two teams of mercenaries against each other in objective-based attack/defend missions, is coming exclusively to PlayStation VR in 2018.
The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Mozilla Firefox web browser, just made their experimental WebXR Viewer app available for download on iOS devices, letting developers quickly experiment with web-based AR built with web technologies and ARKit.
The Last Guardian (2016) is getting a standalone PSVR experience to let players interact with the majestic Trico face to face.
Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017) from developer Owlchemy Labs is headed to PlayStation VR next year.
There’s an intuitive appeal to using controller-free hand-tracking input like Leap Motion’s; there’s nothing quite like seeing your virtual hands and fingers move just like your own hands and fingers without the need to pick up and learn how to use a controller. But reaching out to touch and interact in this way can be jarring because there’s no physical feedback from the virtual world. When your expectation of feedback isn’t met, it can be unclear how to best interact with this new non-physical world. In a series of experiments, Leap Motion has been exploring how they can apply visual design to make controller-free input hand input more intuitive and immersive. Leap Motion’s Barrett Fox and Martin Schubert explain:
Front Defense: Heroes (2017), Fantahorn’s next installment of its WWII-themed shooter, is available in Early Access today for HTC Vive, now serving up multiplayer action in classic 5v5 shooter fashion. We don’t score reviews in Early Access, which is probably a good thing, because several game-breaking bugs are simply too prominent to make this anything other than a quick diversion at the moment.
Qualcomm introduced it’s new Snapdragon 845 mobile processor at the company’s tech summit in Hawaii this week, which Qualcomm says improves mobile AR/VR headset (branded to as ‘XR’, or ‘eXtended reality’) performance up to 30 percent in comparison to its predecessor, Snapdragon 835.
Archangel (2017), the single-player mech shooter from Skydance Interactive, is hosting a free-access weekend starting today, going until Monday at 3:00 AM ET (local time here).
In preparation for Fallout 4 VR’s upcoming December 12th launch on HTC Vive, Bethesda takes us through our paces with an intro to the game’s control scheme, base building mechanic, and V.A.T.S. focused combat, giving us a quick preview of what to expect next week.
The yearly fanfare of the Game Awards has come and gone, leaving Capcom with the award for Best VR/AR Game for their massively successful horror-adventure Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017), a game that equally supports both PSVR and traditional monitors.
Striker VR is developing a haptic gun peripheral for out-of-home VR attractions, which has the most powerful and responsive recoil that I’ve ever tested. The company’s latest prototype, a verification model as the company nears its first manufacturing run, brings a host of improvements.
As a testament to the strength of high-quality VR with a relatively low entry price, Sony today announced they’ve sold more than 2 million units to consumers worldwide as of December 3rd, 2017.
California-based VR developer Survios has revealed their upcoming action game Sprint Vector will launch in closed beta in January 2018. The game will feature in eSports tournaments before its official launch, including the Intel-sponsored Alienware VR Cup.
Display resolutions are growing, but the graphical processing power to serve these displays with content isn’t growing at the same rate. Enter foveated rendering, a technique commonly held as one of the next logical steps in making VR headsets more immersive. While the idea itself is well understood; track the user’s eye movements and only render the most central area to the eye in high-definition, leaving the rest to fuzz in the peripheral unnoticed, it isn’t a fully solved problem at this stage. To that effect, Google Software Engineer Manager Behnam Bastani and Daydream Software Engineer Eric Turner recently posted a quick overview of a few techniques in the company’s nascent foveated rendering pipeline for AR/VR. Here’s a slightly less technical version:
