Announced at Disney fan expo D23 today, Oculus are teaming up with Marvel to bring a new Rift exclusive title which lets you play as one of “more than a dozen” characters from their comic book universe, with a little help from the Oculus Touch controllers.
Oculus slashed the original price tag in half to $400 on the Rift +Touch bundle last week, but the company’s ‘Summer of Rift’ sale only lasts for six weeks, leaving the question on the table as to exactly how much the VR headset + motion controller bundle would return to once the sale is up. Oculus says: $500
Marc ten Bosch’s side project 4D Toys is a unique physics-based toy box using the game engine he created for Miegakure, a groundbreaking 4D puzzle-platformer. Launched on June 2nd for SteamVR and iOS, the app simulates an environment with a fourth spatial dimension, where players can freely manipulate four-dimensional objects with dynamic physics.
First demonstrated to theme park executives at the Asian Attractions Expo in Singapore last month, Holovis’ R3ex (Rideable Realtime Robot Experiences) project combines virtual reality with four/six-axis robot arm amusement rides. The technology claims to offer the rider genuine interactivity and ‘complete agency’ over the experience, including real-time control of the motion profile.
Nexus Interactive Arts, an immersive media division of VFX production studio Nexus Studios, have used Apple’s ARKit working on an iPhone 7 in an experiment that creates basic inside-out positional tracking and pass-through AR for a Google Cardboard headset.
VR Presence researcher Mel Slater is fascinated by what makes the medium of virtual reality unique and different from other communications mediums. He says that VR activates our sensorimotor contingencies in a way that fools our brain that we’re transported into another world, and that what is happening is real. He breaks this into two primary illusions where the Place Illusion answers the question “Am I there?” and the Plausibility Illusion answers the question “Is this happening?” These two illusions happen inside of your mind and are very difficult to study, but Slater has develop an experimental research protocol that draws inspiration from color theory research the combination of the objective spectral distribution as well as an individual’s subjective perception of color.
The 69th Emmy Awards nominations are out, and while it’s true the Emmys were created to recognize excellence in the television industry, virtual reality as a medium has been lauded with six total nominations this year, three of which are thanks to content created by Oculus.
nDreams, creators of The Assembly and publishers of the upcoming brawler Bloody Zombies, have completed an additional £2 million investment with Mercia Technologies, and £700,000 from private investors to create more VR games. In addition, nDreams has signed a deal to bring exclusive new content to a “leading VR arcade company.” According to a nDreams blog post, the VR arcade content partnership is just one of many recent deals with third-party companies.
As part of this week’s EVE: Valkyrie update, which includes AI improvements, balance tweaks, and stability fixes, the game has also received some visual optimisations courtesy of Nvidia VRWorks. Suitable for higher-spec Nvidia cards (GTX 1070 and above), the new ‘Ultra Settings’ option enables ‘God rays’, improved cockpit lighting and projectile effects.
Uber Entertainment’s ‘second generation’ made-for-VR game Dino Frontier launches on August 1st for PSVR. Detailed in a new post on the PlayStation Blog, the game will be available digitally for $29.99, with a 20% pre-order discount for PlayStation Plus members.
Bandai Namco announced last month that the company would be opening its first VR ZONE arcade in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Promising branded VR content playing on HTC Vive, the now publicly open arcade features some big names like Nintendo’s Mario Kart Arcade GP VR, Dragon Ball VR, and Gundam VR—most of which uses special motion platforms and other ‘4D’ sense-fooling gadgetry to beguile would-be VR first-timers. Here, we take a look at all 12 demos available—including trailers—in the company’s 2-story facility.
The latest release of Unity, version 2017.1 now officially supports NVIDIA’s VRWorks rendering tech. VRWorks contains a number of rendering features unique to the company’s GPUs which are designed to improve performance in VR applications.
inXile Entertainment, the studio behind The Bard’s Tale franchise including VR dungeon crawler The Mage’s Tale (2017), today announced they’ve raised a combined investment of $4.5M intended for equity in the company and as funds to develop an unannounced open world survival RPG VR game.
