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.
Developer Jimmy Gray recently posted a short video (see above), showing the latest version of a DIY motion-tracked VR stylus prototype. Using an HTC Vive Tracker mounted above a stylus-shaped unit, a VR stylus can be tracked and rendered, usable in Photoshop and capable of pressure sensitivity.
Japan is an exceedingly normal place when it comes down to daily life, but for some reason the culture’s social norms are—how should we put it—famously elastic. As reported by Vocativ, virtual reality played a big part in a recent marketing campaign for an upcoming sequel to the dating sim series Niizuma Lovely x Cation that saw the non-legal marriage between a number of men and their virtual girlfriends interacting through an HTC Vive headset.
The BBC’s newest VR documentary, Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel, today launched on Gear VR and Oculus Rift. The 13-minute documentary takes you through one man’s memories on a journey back to a defining moment in Irish history, the armed insurrection against British rule during Easter Week, April 1916 that saw the execution of fifteen Irish leaders and internment of more than a thousand people—kindling for the nascent Irish sentiment of self-rule which later manifested in 1922 with the founding of the Irish Free State.
Dead Secret (2015), Robot Invader’s first-person mystery thriller for PC, Gear VR and SteamVR-capable headsets, is getting a sequel called Dead Secret Circle. The second installment in the series is slated to come to VR and traditional platforms in 2017.
Nick Ochoa curated some of the top artists producing work entirely in VR for the Magik Gallery show that happened in San Francisco, CA on May 20th. It was an ambitious effort to introduce VR creation tools for artists within a fine arts context in the Terra Gallery space. There were physical posters of scenes showed around 15-20 VR stations featuring an individual piece of art, as well as opportunities to try some of the VR art tools like TiltBrush. Most of the VR art pieces featured some dimension of scale or vastness that showcased some of the unique affordances of art within VR, and the intention was to inspire the art scene within San Francisco for how VR could be used as a medium for expression and storytelling. I had a chance to catch up with Magik Gallery founder Ochoa the day before the showing to talk about his efforts to get art within VR to be taken more seriously within the larger art world.
