HTC could be showing off its standalone VR headset at the company’s November 14th Vive Developer Conference (VDC) in Beijing. As reported by YiVian, the conference has recently published promotional material featuring a veiled image of the company’s upcoming headset. To wit, HTC says it will have ‘some important announcements’ to make.
Paris Games Week is here and Sony has revealed a slew of new trailers showing off their lineup of PSVR games coming in 2017 and 2018. Grab some popcorn, because here’s 21 minutes of fresh footage.
While the game’s main campaign won’t be playable on PSVR, a new trailer gives us a fresh glimpse of what Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown’s Playstation VR mode will look like.
Sony’s London Studio—who built the well received VR Worlds experiences for PSVR—is back. This time around the studio isn’t building a slew of PSVR samples, but rather a AAA scope action shooter in the same vein as the acclaimed ‘London Heist’ vignette from VR Worlds. This isn’t just more of the same though; what we’ve seen of Blood & Truth so far clearly moves the needle of agency and immersion on PSVR with a slew of smart locomotion mechanics and world interactivity.
Doom VFR, Id Software’s made-for-VR Doom franchise game, is launching soon on PSVR and HTC Vive via Steam. PSVR users better dust off their PS Aim controllers from the last time they played Farpoint (2017) though, because Doom VFR is putting its iconic guns in your own two hands.
According to a report by Icelandic publication MBL, CCP is shelving virtual reality as it closes its Atlanta location and sells its Newcastle office, two important VR branches that produced Sparc (2017) and EVE: Valkyrie (2016). The report contends CCP will be shifting its focus from VR onto PC and mobile games for the foreseeable future.
Paris Games Week hasn’t officially started yet, but Sony’s pre-PGW keynote saw a number of announcements including Sony London Studio’s spiritual continuation of the highly popular (and all too short) The London Heist, a demo in the VR Worlds demo disc that came along with many PSVR headsets.
Paris Games Week saw the announcement of two newly revealed games for PSVR, and among the rash of PS4 trailers comes the news that Ultrawings, Sprint Vector, and Dead Hungry are all making their way across the aisle to PSVR.
Paris Games Week is starting on November 1st, but Sony’s pre-PGW keynote has seen the announcement of two all new PSVR titles today heading to headsets in 2018: Megalith, a hero shooter, and Bow to Blood an airship battle game.
Pimax’s Kickstarter has passed the $3 million mark over the weekend, bringing them to $3.2 million and unlocking free eye-tracking module for every one of their backers who chose a VR headset funding tier.
Blink and you might have missed it—a lot has happened in the VR landscape in the last few months. At Oculus Connect, the company’s annual developer conference, we got fresh insight into where Oculus is heading, and a new look at how Facebook’s money is funding battles on all fronts of the industry’s increasingly competitive landscape.
You have a minor infestation of tiny people in your house. They don’t pay rent, they don’t like to brush their teeth, and they always want to use your stuff—the most important of which is your VR headset (even if they technically aren’t supposed to).
Paris Games Week (PGW) is just about to kick off, starting officially November 1st and lasting until November 5th. Sony is announcing a few new games ahead of time at their annual pre-PGW keynote though, which they say will include 7 titles spanning PS4 and PSVR. Watch the keynote here starting today at 8AM PDT (your local time here).
Best Buy’s consumer electronics brand, Insignia, has released a charging station for the Oculus Touch controllers.
At Google’s big October 4th press conference, the company announced a new Pixel 2 phone and a range of new ambient computing devices powered by AI-enabled conversational interfaces including new Google Mini and Max speakers, Google Clips camera, and wireless Pixel Buds. The Daydream View mobile VR headset received a major upgrade with vastly improved comfort and weight distribution, reduced light leakage, better heat management, cutting-edge aspherical fresnel lenses with larger acuity and sweet spot, as well as an increased field of view of 10-15 degrees more than the previous version. It’s actually a huge upgrade and improvement, but VR itself only received a few brief moments during the 2-hour long keynote where Google was explaining their AI-first design philosophy for their latest ambient computing hardware releases.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I had a chance to sit down with Clay Bavor, Google’s Vice President for Augmented and Virtual Reality to talk about their latest AR & VR announcements as well as how Google’s ambient computing and AI-driven conversational interfaces fit into their larger immersive computing strategy.
YouTube VR is on the bleeding edge of Google’s VR strategy, and their VR180 livestream camera can broadcast a 2D version that translates well to watching on a flat screen, but also provides a more immersive stereoscopic 3D VR version for mobile VR headsets.
Google retired the Tango brand with the announcement of ARCore on August 29th, and Bavor explains that they had to come up with a number of algorithmic and technological innovations in order to standardize the AR calibration process across all of their OEM manufacturers.
Finally, Bavor reiterates that WebVR and WebAR are a crucial part of the Google’s immersive computing strategy. Google showed their dedication to the open web by releasing experimental WebAR browsers for ARCore and ARKit so that web developers can develop cross-compatible AR apps. Bavor sees a future that evolves beyond the existing self-contained app model, but this requires a number of technological innovations including contextually-aware ambient computing powered by AI as well as their Virtual Positioning System announced at Google I/O. There are also a number of other productivity applications that Google is continuing to experiment with, but the screen resolution still needs to improve from having a visual acuity measurement of 20/100 to being something closer to 20/40.
After our interview, Bavor was excited to tell me how Google created a cloud-based, distributed computing, physics simulator that could model 4 quadrillion photons in order to design the hybrid aspherical fresnel lenses within the Daydream View. This will allow them to create machine-learning optimized approaches to designing VR optics in the future, but it will also likely have other implications for VR physics simulations and potentially delivering volumetric digital lightfields down the road.
Google’s vision of contextually-aware AI and ambient computing has a ton of privacy implications that are similar to my many open questions about privacy in VR, but I hope to open up a more formal dialog with Google to discuss these concerns and potentially new concepts of self-sovereign identity and new cryptocurrency-powered business models that go beyond their existing surveillance capitalism business model. There wasn’t a huge emphasis on Google’s latest AR and VR announcements during the press conference as AI conversational interfaces and ambient computing received the majority of attention, but Google remains dedicated to the long-term vision of the power and potential of immersive computing.
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
