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.
Read Further:
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.
Just in time for the spookiest time of year is a new VR fan remake of Five Nights at Freddy’s (2014) that brings some of the horror of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza to room-scale VR. Although it only gives you two nights (and an “extra special” Halloween night), there’s no better price than ‘free’ for a quick pre-Halloween thrill.
Microsoft today announced the opening of its Mixed Reality Capture Studios and a ‘Mixed Reality Academy’ in the company’s San Francisco Reactor dev space.
Starbreeze and Acer announced a new capitalization plan for StarVR, the upcoming high field of view (FOV) VR headset, that will see Acer inject $5 million into the project and take a 66 percent majority control of the joint venture.
Kevin Mack is an Oscar-winning visual effects artist and abstract artist who creates digital spaces with fluidly moving textures that are awe-inspiring in their ability to create a novel experience unique to VR. In Blortasia you float weightlessly exploring the ins and outs of a series of tunnels that have a consistent topological sculpture, but with an ever-changing shader of patterned frequencies of rainbow colors that cultivate a sort of visual neural entrainment. It aspires to recreate a psychedelically transcendent or transpersonal experience that goes beyond what your verbal mind can easily understand as there’s no content, message, story, game or objective beyond providing an experience that’s only possible in these virtual worlds. It’s this unique balance between seeing an exciting and novel visual experience that’s also simultaneously relaxing and has the power to induce powerful trance states that may have unique healing properties that are being discovered in medical applications for distraction therapy.
