Already on Steam Early access, the very pretty online PvP space explorer / dueller Detached from developers Anshar gets a new, official release on May 18th with a sprinkle of new features and a new multiplayer map.
Eric Metzner identifies as a Techno-Optimistic Futurist who sometimes works an entire second workday within VR exploring different ways to expand his mind. He’s pushing the limits of mental presence by using nootropic supplements for cognitive enhancement from his company Nootroo, experimenting with psychedelics and VR with the psychonauts from /r/RiftIntoTheMind, exploring sensory addition & biohacking with the Northpaw device, using EEG sensors and VR to have an embodied experience of neurofeedback, teaching himself how to type with one hand with a chorded Twiddler3 Keyboard, and Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to read up to 1000 words a minute using Virtual Desktop.
I had a chance to catch up with Metzner at an UploadVR party during GDC where he shared his explorations into the extremes of mental presence. For me, I’m interested in the balance between mental & social presence with embodied presence, emotional presence, and active presence. But Metzner wants to push the limits of what types of experiences are possible as well as use VR to help him focus on his learning practices.
Right now, Amazon and Best Buy are running a promotional bundle which includes the core PSVR package with a PlayStation Camera thrown in for free, saving you a respectable $59.
The 360 film industry is still young and it’s maturing rapidly. With his name on more than 20 360 film projects to date, Armando Kirwin has had an inside view as to where things started, where they’re going, and why.
Yesterday five US congressional representatives announced the formation of a ‘Congressional Caucus on Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality’.
Oculus just officially announced that they’d be winding down Story Studio, the company’s internal VR film studio which produced first-party VR shorts like Lost, Henry, and Dear Angelica. Along with the closure, the company also says they’re earmarking $50 million to invest in non-gaming experiential VR content, and in doing so reveals a major reason why the company opted to shutter the studio.
By now it’s trite to call any CG VR film studio “the Pixar of VR,” but one reason for that pervasive comparison is that Pixar’s waxy-textured, brightly-colored, hard-edged geometry has become a dominant style for big-budget CG films. But we hear over and over about how ‘VR is a completely new medium’; doesn’t it deserve a new look? Baobab Studios‘ latest work, Rainbow Crow, is starting to branch out from that style with a unique new look that taps into VR’s strengths.
IMR is one of several companies creating technology to enable a future where high-end VR headsets can break free of the tether that keeps them connected to the host PC. The company’s secret sauce is their proprietary compression algorithm which they say is made-for-VR, allowing for huge compression at much faster speeds than traditional video compression technology. I recently got to check out the company’s system first-hand during a visit to their Silicon Valley office.
HTC announced a serious looking upgrade for its Vive headset earlier this year at CES 2017. The ‘Deluxe Audio Strap’ replaces the original device’s harness and upgrades it with integrated headphones and a new, more robust adjustable head assembly.
The keynote from Unity’s Vision VR/AR Summit yesterday showcased just how far Unity is reaching into non-gaming content when it comes to augmented and virtual reality. The person who is in charge of Unity’s xR strategy is Tony Parisi, who is a co-founder of VRML and a long-time open web advocate. Tony has long been interested in using VR for artistic expression and storytelling, and the keynote speakers highlighted the range of diversity of immersive technologies ranging from NASA JPL to car companies to the NFL to graphic novel comic books to immersive storytelling to construction to the big tech players including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.
Though there’s surely many talents folks at Valve responsible for the company’s VR initiatives, over the last several years Chet Faliszek has become a front-facing evangelist and go-to spokesperson for VR at Valve. Now after 12 years with the company, Faliszek has departed.
It’s been a long time coming for a racing simulator originally released in 2013, but rFactor 2 has just taken an exciting new step for VR fans as the game’s latest beta not only adds DX11 support for enhanced visuals, but OpenVR support, enabling the game to be played on the Rift, Vive, and other headsets supporting OpenVR.
During the opening presentation at today’s Unity Vision Summit, Nathan Martz, Developer Platforms Product Manager at Google, took to the stage to talk about new tools that the company is releasing to help developers create high-performance apps for Daydream, Google’s high-end Android VR platform.
