There’s some weird and wild things showcasing at Bandai Namco’s VR Arcade VR Zone in Shinjuku, Tokyo. To get a better look, Japan-based YouTube channel VJump goes hands-on with Dragon Ball Z VR, giving us a peek into the 40,000 square feet, 2-floor VR arcade and showing just how awesome going Super Saiyan in VR can be.
GoPro’s first batch of Fusion 360 cameras is now headed to some big brands, agencies and content creators as part of a pilot program to help source initial content partners.
The Walt Disney Company has announced participants in its 2017 incubator Disney Accelerator, a program intended for early and venture-backed tech startups working in media and entertainment. Among the 11 picked for the company’s 2017 Accelerator is location-based VR arcade The Void and Unreal Engine creator Epic Games.
FX TV series Legion (2017) is getting an immersive, mixed reality experience powered by Microsoft’s HoloLens, and it’s coming to this year’s San Diego Comic-Con on July 20-23.
Echo Arena, the VR sports game from Ready at Dawn and Oculus Studios, went back into open beta last week. Although it was supposed to end yesterday, the developers are extending the access window so Oculus Rift owners can rocket around in the game’s micro-gravity environment mere days before its official July 20th launch.
This Wednesday, you can fill up your brain with knowledge in a unique opportunity to meet Bill Nye ‘the Science Guy’ in the digital flesh, and then melt your brain immediately afterwards at a VR concert, where crowds can interact with mind-expanding 3D objects while experiencing music from digital musician GRIMECRAFT like never before.
Mel Slater’s Theory of Presence includes two major components including the Place Illusion (the degree to which you’re transported to another world), and the Plausibility Illusion (the degree to which you believe what’s happening in that world is believable). Presence researcher Richard Skarbez thinks of these two components as “immersion” and “coherence,” and we previously discussed his presence research where he found that both illusions are vital for a deep sense of presence. The place illusion is largely enabled by the objective details of the VR technology with features such as 1:1 head tracking, low latency, and large field of view. But all of the different dimensions of what makes an experience plausible are still widely unknown, not very well researched, and also difficult to isolate and determine.
Looking to get into virtual reality but need to beef up your gaming PC to handle it? Here’s a quick cheat sheet on our current top picks for NVIDIA and AMD Radeon graphics cards suited for virtual reality.
Veteran horror director Alexandre Aja, known for his work on The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Pirahana 3D (2010), and Horns (2013), is teaming up with Oculus and VR production studio Future Lighthouse to create a 360 live-action horror series entitled Campfire Creepers that takes you into long-forgotten childhood fears.
While Oculus had a robust day-one launch lineup of more than 50 titles back when Touch initially dropped in December of last year, owning an Oculus Rift + Touch grants you more titles than ever with unfettered access to at least seventeen pieces of spectacular free content.
Lone Echo, the upcoming zero-G, sci-fi adventure from Ready at Dawn, has a brand new trailer proceeding its July 20th launch date.
Games that are specifically developed for VR are always going to look and play the best in a VR headset, but let’s face it, most of us probably have huge libraries of traditional games, and you may be wondering “Can I play regular games on the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive?”—the answer is yes (with a few caveats), and here’s two ways you can do it.
Oculus had talked much about ‘Hand Presence’ with the launch of their Touch VR controllers last year, but few games have implemented the controllers in such a way that truly deliver on that promise. Combined with Touch, Lone Echo’s impressive procedural virtual hands take Hand Presence to the next level.
The Vive Deluxe Audio Strap is a more ergonomic strap with integrated headphones for the HTC Vive, and when it launched last month, it was only on sale for less than 48 hours until stocks ran dry in the EU and US. Now the company says not only will it be back in stock for US/UK/EU customers on July 10th, but that a special adapter for the Vive Pre will also be available for free with purchase.
