TPCast, the wireless transmitter first launched for Vive, is going to be arriving in few different regions soon including US, Canada, and much of the European Union. Pre-orders, which are available now, are slated to arrive as early as next week.
Amazon’s US store is either the first, or the only retailer currently to offer the Oculus Rift for its Black Friday-reduced price of $350, a $50 discount off the now normal MSRP of $400. The deal is also eligible for fast & free shipping via Prime.
Fallout 4 (2015), Bethesda’s beloved post-apocalyptic open world RPG, is now in VR, letting you stalk the Wasteland as the sole survivor of Vault 111 from the immersive point of view of the HTC Vive headset. This comes with most of the important trimmings and trappings of the original; a seemingly endless number of interesting and varied quests, multiple causes to join, base building, and plenty of guns and armor to scrounge. Fallout 4 VR successfully provides all these things along with the promise of holding a gun in your own hand, but fractures somewhat as it mutates from its native 16:9 aspect ratio to the new land of VR.
Earlier this year, Clay Bavor, VP of VR/AR at Google, revealed a “secret project” to develop a VR-optimised OLED panel capable of 20 megapixels per eye. The project was mentioned during SID Display Week 2017 but has gone largely under the radar as little information has surfaced since.
If the HTC’s Black Friday deal wasn’t attractive enough to convince you into finally grabbing that Vive headset you’ve been eyeing, Amazon US is ‘reviving’ the $600 Black Friday deal today and throwing in a $100 Amazon gift card.
After announcing the company sold over 2 million PSVR headsets to date, Sony is now temporarily lowering the price of one of its latest bundles to just $200, which includes PlayStation VR, PS Camera, and a copy of Gran Turismo Sport (2017). To top it off, the other bundles are also seeing the return of Black Friday price cuts, but just not as dramatic as the GTS bundle.
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.
