Oculus Connect, the company’s annual developer conference, goes down this week in San Jose, California on the 11th and 12th at the McEnery Convention Center. If you aren’t attending in person you can catch the keynote livestream on several platforms, including in VR, officially on Rift and Gear VR for the first time.
Cloudborn is an indie first-person VR exploration game, currently available on Steam Early Access, where the player is tasked with ‘cleansing the corruption’ by traversing the world to reach ‘cores’ using an intuitive climbing mechanic. Unfortunately, the “melancholic journey of discovery and serenity” is sometimes rudely interrupted by the temperamental movement system.
At today’s GTC Europe conference in Munich, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced an Early Access program for Holodeck, their photorealistic, collaborative VR viewer. Described as the “design lab of the future”, Nvidia Holodeck aims to provide a highly immersive platform for industrial design and development.
HTC may have more than one new headset in sight than we initially thought when it registered the name ‘Vive Focus’ in the EU and US. It came to light via the Dutch publication Lets Go Digital that HTC has also applied for a trademark for the name ‘Vive Eclipse’ in New Zealand.
The team behind Bigscreen, the app that lets you view and share your desktop in social VR, today announced they’ve raised $11 million in Series A financing. The funding round, which comes only a year after their initial $3 million seed round, was led by True Ventures with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.
Following the open-sourcing of the Rift DK1 plans back in 2014, Oculus today released the recipe for the Rift DK2, the company’s second development kit headset released in 2014. Under an open-source license, anyone can now freely download the blueprints of the company’s second VR headset and even manufacture their own.
Arktika.1 is a first-person VR shooter that makes more than a few smart choices in its design, something that may have you thinking twice before dismissing its admittedly limited node-based teleportation style lock, stock, and barrel (holographic sight and flashlight too). It’s not to say Arktika.1 isn’t without its clear flaws, but the end result is decidedly a net positive that gives you exactly what you came for in the first place: a ridiculously good looking game that goes pew pew pew.
Scorn – Part 1 of 2: Dasein, the crowdfunded first-person horror game, just passed the €175,000 mark with only a few remaining hours in its Kickstarter campaign, meaning the developers will be including “an immersive VR level for the ultimate experience of the world and atmosphere of Scorn.”
As one of the first game genres to embrace VR, sim racing has successfully transitioned from the ‘very early adopter’ stage (using Oculus development kits) to the ‘early adopter’ stage (the first-generation consumer headsets). Now that the majority of PC racing sims support VR, there are several compelling options to try.
Now that iOS 11 has officially rolled out and anyone with a recent Apple device has access to augmented reality applications, the massive install base means developers can start appealing to all sorts of people, including those miniature ones that make a fuss about putting on their shoes and jackets, and even the fully-grown variety who also happen to enjoy cartoons too. In a new AR prototype that places characters from Cartoon Network’s The Amazing World of Gumball into your living room, we see a brief look into what could be our cartoon-filled AR future.
From now until the end of 2017, Google is offering a game bundle worth $40 with every Daydream View purchase, which includes some of the platform’s best titles. Google’s updated VR headset was announced this week alongside their Pixel 2 smartphones, and begins to ship on October 17th.
LA-based DJ and producer TOKiMONSTA and social VR music platform TheWaveVR have partnered to create an interactive psychedelic version of TOKi’s new album that drops today, Lune Rouge.
Hailstone Games, a Toronto-based VR studio, just launched their new goalie simulator, Goalie VR, a game that lets a single player defend a hockey goal in VR while up to five players using mobile devices try to score.
Acting takes time, courage and a lifelong dedication that very few possess, and even less can do well. But as VR styles itself as an ‘experience machine’, it was inevitable that a program like Theatre VR would come along, a multi-player acting app that’s been seemingly ripped from the pages of Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age (1995).
