Halloween is nearly here, and there’s no better way to scare your friends and family (and you poor cat or dog) than a disturbingly immersive VR horror game. From now until 11:59 pm PDT on October 31st (local time here), selected Rift and Gear VR titles will be available from 25% to 50% off.
Brian Blau is the vice president of research for personal technologies at Gartner Research where he’s in the business of making predictions about the consumer adoption of virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. I last interviewed Blau in 2015 when he was saying that his predictions were a lot more conservative than other analysts who were predicting more explosive growth for VR, and Blau tells me that his more conservative estimates have more closely matched with reality where he slightly overestimated PC VR market and underestimated how fast the mobile VR HMD market would take off.
Announced at the Samsung Developer conference last week, the 360 Round is the company’s new camera for creating and streaming 4K 3D content. The camera appears to be a reboot of the ‘Project Beyond’ camera that the company introduced back in 2014 but never brought to market.
Following a two-part blog series in partnership with Crytek, where the studio shared some of its research into VR locomotion comfort, Oculus has now added eight new experimental locomotion methods to the SDK. A recent entry on the official Oculus blog provides an introduction to the techniques.
Waltz of the Wizard, an uncommonly high-quality VR wizard experience from Reykjavik-based Aldin Dynamics, just got an update today introducing a new locomotion system and a “significant” expansion to the potion-mixing magical experience including an entirely new area full of traps and supernatural guardians.
Pimax, the company aiming to deliver three flavors of its high field of view (FOV) headset via their Kickstarter, have recently blasted past the $2 million funding mark. With only a week left in the crowdfunding campaign and now more than $2.45 million to their name, the company has reached arguably a more important milestone: they’ve surpassed the original Oculus Rift Kickstarter, becoming the top funded VR headset campaign in existence.
Ramez Naam is the author of The Nexus Trilogy sci-fi novels, which explores the moral and sociological implications of technology that can directly interface with the brain. He gave the keynote at the Experiential Technology Conference in March exploring the latest research into how these interfaces could change the way that we sleep, learn, eat, find motivation to exercise, create new habits of change, and broadcast and receive technologically-mediated telepathic messages.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I had a chance to catch up with him after his talk where we do a survey of existing technologies, where the invasive technologies are headed, the philosophical and moral implications of directly transferring data into the brains, and whether or not it’ll be possible to download our consciousness onto a computer.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Looking to get scared in VR this Halloween season? Steam’s Halloween sale runs through November 1st, bringing discounts to fright-themed VR titles.
One of our favorite VR titles, SUPERHOT VR, won’t be getting that additional DLC we reported on in a previous version of this article announcing the supposed update. Despite this, if the game has been on your list, now might be a good time to snag it thanks to a 25% discount via Steam through November 1st.
Today HTC Creative Labs is debuting a beautiful new SteamVR Home environment—the hub space for when players aren’t inside any VR apps—called Driftwood. The environment takes players virtually outside on a beachfront wilderness inspired by the United State’s Pacific Northwest.
Space Pirates and Zombies 2, a single player, space-based survival-exploration game from indie studio MinMax Games, is officially heading out of its year and a half-long stint in Steam Early Access on November 7th, including its fully featured VR port that supports the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
Epic Game’s Unreal Engine is making it easier to create for augmented reality in the newest 4.18 update, now including official support for Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore software dev kits, and support for SteamVR on Mac.
Augmented Empire (2017), Coatsink’s cyberpunk RPG, launched earlier this summer exclusively on Samsung Gear VR. Now the studio, which is also known for the Esper puzzle game series, has released a mini-documentary featuring its cast of high-caliber voice actors, including Kate Mulgrew, Nick Frost, and Doug Cockle.
When games insufficiently deliver on critical features, modders tend to fill in the gaps with their own solutions—part and parcel of the gaming world. Doing exactly that, but for the Oculus Store, a third-party website finally lets you filter the store’s content by every Rift and Gear VR game currently on sale and even see every free experience neatly listed from A to Z.
