Google’s team at Daydream Labs have been prototyping ways of animating objects and characters in Blocks, the company’s recently released VR modelling tool. In a recent entry on the Google Blog, senior UX engineer Logan Olson describes how it could give users the power to “create expressive animations without needing to learn complex animation software.”
Now that the latest release of Firefox supports WebVR on the Vive and Rift by default, you may be wondering what you can do with it. Here’s three examples worth checking out.
Batman: Arkham VR (2016) is both the first VR Batman game, and the first VR title from developer Rocksteady Studios’—you wouldn’t know it though, given the game’s excellent visuals and well crafted VR design. If you haven’t had a chance to become the Batman just yet, you can pick up the game at a big discount through August 22nd.
Oasis Games have announced a September release for whimsical VR puzzle-platformer Light Tracer, in a recent post on the PlayStation Blog. The game involves guiding the Princess up a giant tower from the perspective of a ‘godlike entity’, solving puzzles and defeating bosses using an interesting motion control system.
The education-focused Mars 2030 launches today on SteamVR for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, soon to come to PSVR. With 40 square kilometers of explorable terrain, the experience successfully achieves its main objective: to make the user feel like they are on Mars. However, while its stunning canvas has great potential, its execution currently suffers from a lack of features, and a number of technical problems.
Anyland is a social VR experience focusing on worldbuilding and avatar creation tools that allow you to create interactive experiences while in VR. They’ve also implemented an open sharing feature that makes it easy to collect objects from the world and share them with other people. Stephanie Mendoza is a VR developer and artist who has spent a lot of time creating worlds and exploring the gift economy dynamics within Anyland, and I had a chance to capture some of her stories and social experiments.
Beginning today through the 12th of August is one of the biggest E-sports events of the year, the 2017 International Dota 2 Championships. With a prize pool of more than $23 million, there’s a lot on the line. You can get an inside-the-game front row seat through the Dota 2 VR Hub.
Oculus is calling its latest rendering tech ‘Stereo Shading Reprojection’, and says that for scenes which are heavy in pixel shading, the approach can save upwards of 20% on GPU performance. The company says the new VR rendering technique can be easily added to Unity-based projects, and that it “shouldn’t be hard to integrate with Unreal and other engines.”
Looking to pick up one of Steam’s most polished VR titles? Battlezone (2016) is on sale for 50% of the usual asking price through August 7th.
AltspaceVR held its final official Good Bye gathering on Thursday, August 3rd after announcing last week that they had run out of money and their investors decided to not invest any more. News of the social VR platform’s closing rippled throughout the VR community over the past week, and some are wondering if it’s any type of bellwether about the overall health of the VR ecosystem. There have been a number of discussion threads on Oculus subreddit, Vive subreddit, and Twitter that had employees chiming in on imminent plans and the challenges of dealing with trolls and harassment in VR.
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
