According to the latest figures from Valve’s Hardware & Software Survey, the Oculus Rift has set a new record for its highest historical market share on Steam, almost certainly driven by a major sale which has also brought the headset its largest ever share increase from one month to the next. While the HTC Vive continues to hold the majority share, the Rift is approaching striking distance.
TPCast, the wireless streaming device that lets HTC Vive owners play VR games cable-free, is now available for pre-order in most of continental Europe starting at €349 (or the regional equivalent) and the United States at $299.
Iconic multiplayer board game The Settlers of Catan is making the leap to VR. Coming this holiday season to Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR, the game is aptly named Catan VR.
Duck Season is a first-person adventure game created by Stress Level Zero, developers of multiplayer shooter Hover Junkers (2016). While it’s hard to pin down exactly what sort of game it is with its unique, nostalgia-inducing narrative style and horror elements, we’ll be finding out soon enough, because Duck Season is slated to release on Steam and the Oculus Store on September 14th.
The ‘Summer of Rift’ is coming to a close, with Oculus announcing today that September 4th is the last day to nab the $400 Summer Rift sale price. The cap off the eight week headset sale, Oculus is running an ‘End of Summer Weekend Sale’ featuring two bundle deals and 30 individual titles on sale.
Lenovo Mirage AR headset is now available for pre-order at BestBuy.com and Lenovo.com for $200, which includes a Lightsaber controller, base station, and the star of the show: a collection of games called Star Wars: Jedi Challenges. But will it be enough to attract would-be Jedi to the augmented reality side of the Force and keep them there?
Microsoft announced a bunch of new info related to the Windows VR headsets earlier this week, including a mention that they’d launch this “holiday.” Well it seems the holidays are getting started a little early this year, as the first Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets are due to launch as early as October. And we’ll finally be able to stop calling (most of) them, the ‘Dell headset’ and ‘the Lenovo headset’, etc. as the companies are finally revealing the product names.
HypeVR is developing volumetric video tech which we called “a glimpse at the future of VR video,” when we got to see it back in January. Now the company has adapted their system for Apple’s ARKit, showing how phone-based augmented reality can be used to view volumetric footage, and allow users to step through a portal into the footage.
The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) will be back in its hometown of Seattle this September 1st through 4th and Road to VR has again done the heavy lifting of sorting out all the VR things to see at this year’s convention:
Currently available on Steam in Early Access, VTOL VR is a very promising combat flight simulator with a focus on ‘near-future’ vertical take-off and landing aircraft, developed from the ground up for VR and motion controllers. Not only does it demonstrate that motion control is viable for this genre, but it also enables a greater sense of immersion when interacting with secondary cockpit controls.
Based on the Voltron: Legendary Defender series from Netflix, DreamWorks is launching a single-player game coming to PSVR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift on September 26th. Called Voltron VR Chronices, the game promises to deliver an immersive Voltron narrative alongside the chance to pilot the Blue Lion, stand on the bridge of the Castle Ship, and solve interactive puzzles and challenges.
Otoy has announced the Render Token, a blockchain-based currency that underpins a distributed GPU rendering network. The company hopes to allow idle GPUs on consumer PCs to be tapped for rendering work, earning money for the owner in exchange for their computer’s work. The goal, Otoy says, is to make massive GPU rendering power available at low cost for rendering light-fields and more.
Earlier this week we shared our first hands-on with Microsoft’s VR controllers, but at the time the company didn’t allow us to document the session with photos or videos. Now, a developer with the controllers has produced a handy overview that shows how they work and gives a glimpse of them in action.
Google released a preview version of ARCore for Android yesterday, the company’s answer to Apple’s ARKit. Since ARKit was released a few months ago, we’ve seen a bevy of really cool experiments and potential apps to come from developers from all over the world, but now it’s ARCore’s turn to shine.
Ubisoft’s latest and greatest entry into VR, Star Trek: Bridge Crew (2017), is currently on sale for $25, exactly half the price since its launch back in late May.
