Valve isn’t being shy about their support for Jules “LibreVR” Blok, the developer behind Revive, a hack which allows the Vive to play games from the Oculus store. Having patched SteamVR on more than one occasion to ensure Revive’s continued compatibility, the company has now sent Blok the Knuckles controller dev kit
Nearly two years ago, Wearality created a unique Fresnel lens for VR headsets offering a claimed 150 degree field of view. The company successfully funded a VR viewer featuring the lens called Wearality Sky through Kickstarter. The company recently revealed a new and improved lens, but this time around they intend to act as a supplier rather than directly selling a viewer to consumers.
VR-optimised 3D creation tool Gravity Sketch is now available on Steam Early Access. Developed by a group of design engineers at the Royal College of Art, the software is ‘for everyone’, but its feature set has particular relevance to creative professionals, and could become an invaluable tool for industrial design visualisation.
Odd Bug Studio’s debut title The Lost Bear arrives exclusively on PlayStation VR this month. Described as a “2D cinematic platformer”, the player controls Walnut, a young girl who sets out to save her teddy bear from the Toy Snatcher
Vivid Vision offers a virtual reality based treatment for lazy eye disorders. A new study published in the peer-reviewed BioMed Journal of Ophthalmology finds positive preliminary results which “indicate the potential for a new treatment for adulthood amblyopia.”
Oculus exclusive Killing Floor: Incursion is due to launch on August 16th. The game is now available for pre-order on the Oculus store for $36, 10% off the $40 launch price.
Shown as part of the Emerging Technologies installations at SIGGRAPH 2017 this week, the GVS RIDE experience demonstrates the effects of four-pole galvanic vestibular stimulation combined with a VR headset. The technology is pitched as a potential alternative to a motion platform, with its ability to “induce tri-directional acceleration” and “enhance virtual acceleration”.
Inception’s ambitions to become the ‘Netflix of VR’ have just received a major boost, with the Tel Aviv-based company closing a $15 million Series A funding round led by media and broadcast giant RTL Group. Launched in October 2016, the Inception app is accessible on leading mobile VR platforms, as well as the Rift and Vive, while PSVR support is ‘coming soon’.
Dance is all about bodies moving through space, and it’s something that shows the strength of the VR medium since there’s something that’s lost when it’s translated onto a 2D screen. Lily Baldwin observed how audience members heard the music differently through her expressions as a dancer touring with David Byrne, and she wanted to experiment with using dance a form of embodied communication within virtual reality.
VR painting app Quill, which began its life as an internal production tool for Oculus Story Studio and was eventually released to the public, will see continued development despite the shuttering of the studio back in May. Former Story Studio members continue Quill‘s development under the banner of Facebook’s Social VR team.
A broad team of graphics researchers, universities, and technology companies are showcasing the latest research into digital human representation in VR at SIGGRAPH 2017. Advanced capture, rigging, and rendering techniques have resulted in an impressive new bar for the art of recreating the human likeness inside of a computer in real-time.
According to the latest figures from Valve’s Hardware & Software survey, Rift has reached its highest historical market share on Steam thanks to modest gains amid an ongoing sale. Despite the new high point, the HTC Vive still holds the majority share.
Scheduled for release in September starting at $3,300, the HP Z VR Backpack G1 Workstation is aimed at the commercial market, with high-performance components including an Intel Core i7 CPU and Nvidia Quadro GPU. It features a smart docking design for use as a VR backpack computer as well as a VR desktop, and includes two hot-swappable batteries for continuous tether-free VR use.
Software developer Shachar “Vice” Weis has described his first impressions of Acer’s Windows Mixed Reality VR headset dev kit on his blog. His company, Packet39, makers of VR game Orbital Injection, recently received the Developer Edition headset made by Acer, which was due for an August delivery alongside a similar headset from HP.
Decentraland is a virtual world that is using the Ethereum Blockchain to sell plots of virtual reality real estate. They’re selling an initial offering of the currency they call ‘MANA’, from August 8 to August 16, 2017, and they’ll have up to 2 million plots of virtual land that will be sold for 1000 MANA. They hope to create a virtual city with different thematic districts that will help with content discovery.
