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:
Charged up from the multi-million dollar success of Job Simulator (2016) and its more recent game Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017), Owlchemy Labs recently revealed they’re teasing their next VR game at this year’s Game Awards.
HTC today announced more specifics around Vive Focus, the company’s standalone mobile VR headset for China-based customers.
Quanta, a Fortune 500 company and one of the world’s largest original design manufacturers, has signed an agreement to mass produce AR display modules from Lumus, a company specializing in AR displays based on ‘waveguide’ optical technology. Lumus says the move “marks a significant step toward mainstream adoption of AR eyewear,” and expects consumer-priced AR headsets with Lumus tech to hit the market in 12 to 18 months.
VR represents a shift from telling stories to building story worlds that people experience and interact with. There is a process of world building and experiential design that first creates the conditions of the environment, and then the full context of that world helps to drive the narrative design of the stories that can be told within it. This process of building futuristic, sci-fi worlds requires a holistic understanding the co-evolution of technology and culture that takes a lot of imagination to visualize solutions to intractable problems embedded within the fabric of this new world, and then to imagine what new and even more complicated problems will have been created in that future. Monika Bielskyte of All Future Everything is a digital nomad who travels the world searching for the latest technological and cultural innovations so that she can build these sci-fi worlds imagining the cultural and technological context of the near-future for the entertainment industry, technology companies, and even urban planners and politicians from governments and cities.
The Disability Visibility Project recently published a report that highlights the accessibility issues relating to VR users with disabilities. This follows a survey created by Disability Visibility Project founder Alice Wong in partnership with Lucasfilm’s ILMxLab, which covered user experiences, accessibility issues, and ideas about VR for people with disabilities.
Announced back in October, Oculus is launching the Rift Core 2.0 update today in beta, a major overhaul to the platform’s underlying experience. The update not only rebuilds the default ‘Home’ environment with huge customization potential, it also introduces ‘Dash’, a new take on the former Universal Menu, which also allows you to use desktop PC applications from within any VR app.
High Fidelity, the social VR app founded by Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, recently launched Avatar Island – the first of many future in-world stores stocked with digital assets for its users to buy. While purchasing digital items like hats and t-shirts may not be anything out of the ordinary for fans of its spiritual predecessor Second Life, the store is showcasing High Fidelity‘s more recent development: its own cryptocurrency and a blockchain-based ledger system, both of which aim to pave the way for a functioning in-world economy.
It’s been exactly one year since Oculus launched Touch, the motion controller that made Rift a truly competitive room-scale headset. To celebrate, the company is hosting a dedicated flash sale of up to 75% on 80+ major Touch titles. The sale expires today (December 6th) at 11:59 pm PT (your local time).
Farpoint (2017), PSVR’s bug-shooting showcase for the mightily impressive PS Aim, has had one free expansion so far, the ‘Cryo Pack’, which added additional co-op levels and challenge mode. Now the game has just received its next free DLC in the form of ‘Versus’, an update that greatly expands the game with two different 1v1 multiplayer modes while bumping the game’s weapon roster up from 5 to 20.
With so many choices for graphics cards out there, it’s hard to know exactly what you should buy to outfit your next VR-ready PC. To make things a little easier, Oculus recently published a list of GPUs that meets its Minimum and Recommended specs. The list helps clear up confusion regarding which older and less popular GPUs the company considers ‘equivalent’ to the company’s prior recommendations which often consisted of just one GPU from NVIDIA and one GPU from AMD.
The Dark Corner app is creating a new distribution channel for immersive horror experiences and 360-degree videos. Guy Shelmerdine and Teal Greyhavens are hoping that fans of the horror genre will be enthusiastic enough about the potential of VR to achieve new depths of terror that audiences will be willing to pay for 360 video experiences. Shelmerdine is featuring Dark Corner’s own creations including Catatonic and their latest nightmare-inspired Night Night, but also opening up a new marketplace for creators of horror content to sell and distribute their content.
There was a time not long ago when just buying the PC required to power a high-end desktop VR headset cost at least $1,000. The last eight months in VR land has seen aggressive drops in pricing, culminating in this excellent deal from Microsoft which will net you a VR Ready PC and an HP VR headset together for just $750.
