HTC today announced a new variant of its Vive standalone VR headset which is aimed specifically at the Chinese VR market and will tap the company’s Viveport content platform as the official app store for the headset. Meanwhile, in the US & EU markets, the standalone Vive headset is backed by Google’s Daydream ecosystem.
TheWaveVR, a social music platform for VR performances, debuts its third major show, this time bringing EDM duo HEAVYGRINDER into VR for a live and interactive virtual reality concert. You can join the fun for free tonight, July 26th, at 7PM PT (find your timezone here).
The Wizards is a single-player spellcasting combat game from Carbon Studio, the makers of Alice VR. The game is set to launch in Early Access on Steam for the Vive and Rift this Friday, July 28th. A new Early Access launch trailer shows what’s in store for aspiring spellcasters.
Sony today announced four new titles for PlayStation VR at the annual ChinaJoy Expo in Shanghai—all of which have been confirmed to make it over to Western audiences. The games come as a result of a partnership between Sony Interactive Entertainment and what they call “some of Asia’s most exciting developers.”
Until recently, Oculus Rift owners have had to maintain two separate repositories for games; Steam and Oculus Home. And depending on where you bought a game, that’s usually where you’d launch it from. Revealed in a forum post, Oculus will be pushing a general update soon that will allow you to launch SteamVR apps (provided they have Rift support) directly from Home. A public pre-release build is already available however if you want to start creating your ‘one library to rule them all’.
Magic Leap, the mysterious AR startup with a multiple-billion dollar valuation, still doesn’t have a headset to show the world, but in a recent paper published by Magic Leap researchers entitled Toward Geometric Deep SLAM, we get a peek into a novel machine vision technique that aims to bring the company closer to their goal of creating a robust standalone AR headset.
New York City’s Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development, Alicia Glen, recently announced the selection of NYU Tandon School of Engineering to “develop and operate” the “first government-funded” VR/AR hub for education, training, research, investment and business creation at a 15,000 square foot space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In the Bronx, CUNY (City University of New York) Lehman College’s VR/AR Training Academy and Development Lab will prepare students for careers in the virtual and augmented reality sectors.
In a few years’ time Google expects to operate Daydream on “Android scale,” one day opening the VR door to “hundreds of millions of users.” But in order to get there, the company needs a much wider selection of Daydream ready Android smartphones. This week Google said they expect 11 Daydream ready phones on the market by the end of 2017.
Announced back in May, an update bringing Google Daydream support to the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus has begun rolling out, making those phones the only two to support both Daydream VR and Gear VR.
Smashbox Arena, one of SteamVR’s best rated titles, today launches on Playstation VR. The game plays like a mashup of a first person shooter and a game of dodgeball.
Motorola today unveiled their latest phone, the Moto Z2 Force Edition, and alongside it will come a 360-degree camera that the company says snaps onto any phone in the Moto Z lineup.
Tiny Trax (2017), the tiny slot car racing game, is now out for PlayStation VR. Created by Brighton-based studio FuturLab, Tiny Trax gives you the tiny HotWheels-sized cars from your childhood and lets you tear around and the room, do incredible jumps and drift around bends on a slot track otherwise impossible outside of VR.
Facebook today announced new updates coming to their 360 streaming service including live 4k streaming support to VR headsets, image stabilization and a number of features that puts VR-ready 360 video more in line with the company’s standard streaming video service. Facebook also released a list of vetted 360 cameras and software suites so prospective content creators can jump straight into the 360 deep end with full knowledge that what they’re doing conforms to the company’s 360 streaming standards.
One of the unique affordances of virtual reality is its power to convey the vastness of scale, which can invoke feelings of awe. Denise Quesnel is a graduate student at Simon Frasier University’s iSpace Lab, and she has been studying the process of invoking awe using Google Earth VR. She was inspired by Frank White’s work on The Overview Effect, which documented the worldview transformations of many astronauts after they observed the vastness of the Earth from the perspective of space.
