Spherical YouTube videos with over 1,000 views now include ‘360° Heatmaps’ within the Analytics section of the Creator Studio. The new feature provides a visual representation of low to high attention areas of the video, helping to inform content creators of what aspects of a 360-degree scene are engaging viewers the most.
HBO’s show Silicon Valley entertains with tales of the pervasive startup culture of California’s San Francisco Bay Area. While virtual reality has graced the show previously, season four is bringing it closer to the fore, with the show’s main characters becoming intertwined with the eccentric Keenan Feldspar, a fictional Silicon Valley wunderkind developing a pair of virtual reality goggles. A wild looking prototype version of the fictional headset seen in the eighth episode of this season turns out to be not a prop, but an actual prototype of a product that’s on the market today.
Valve has added the first wave of SteamVR Collectibles to SteamVR Home, unlockable rewards which can be used to decorate your virtual Home space or modify your avatar. This new feature further expands the rich customisation and interactivity found in the SteamVR Home Beta, the recent major advancement to the SteamVR launch interface, and is a vision of what ‘achievements’ might look like in the future.
Oculus premiered about a dozen games ahead of GDC this year, and one that stood out to me was Mage’s Tale for its distinct art style and passion in using VR to fulfill childhood fantasies of becoming a spell-casting magician. Mage’s Tale is an action RPG dungeon crawler where you search for dozens of different potion ingredients to create over 100 different spells, and then battle enemies with variations of your fire, ice, wind, and lightning spells.
My favorite narrative VR piece that I’ve seen so far this year is Rose Colored by Adam Cosco that premiered at VRLA. It’s a science fiction morality tale that is asking us to look at a potential future of immersive technology. I’m cautious to say much more without spoiling his experience, and so I’d highly recommend checking out Rose Colored either on Vimeo, Facebook, or Samsung VR before listening to this interview.
Stepping into The Mage’s Tale, a first-person dungeon crawler RPG that puts you in the enchanted boots of an apprentice mage, is a bit like jumping into your own personal ’80s sword and sorcery flick. With elemental magic at the ready, you get to experience classic dungeon crawler stuff like exploration, spell crafting, puzzles, and battle against a number of monster types—and all of it in the immersive realm of VR. While at times a little rough around the edges, The Mage’s Tale is a charming throwback that vaults you head-first into a dank and mysterious universe of inXile’s other series, The Bard’s Tale.
One of the biggest VR stories at E3 2017 was that Bethesda’s Fallout 4 (2015), Doom (2016), and Skyrim (2011) are all coming to VR this year. VR gamers have been hungry for AAA content and it while Bethesda’s announcement is a great step in that direction, HTC says you can expect more on the way.
Despite its primary competitor, Oculus, making a major price cut to the Rift & Touch earlier this year, HTC’s Vive headset still sits at a hearty $800. The company’s GM of VR, Daniel O’Brien, tells us why HTC hasn’t cut the cost of their headset in response.
Oculus have announced they will be offering up to 60% price reductions on over 30 titles across the Oculus Store for the Rift and Gear VR from June 16th until July 5th. In addition, between now and June 24th, customers purchasing a Rift and Touch bundle [Amazon] will receive $100 in Store credit.
Sprint Vector is an “adrenaline platformer” racing game that relies upon a unique locomotion technique of swinging your arms in order to run through an obstacle course. It’s the latest game from Raw Data developer Survios, but with a much more light-hearted stylized art aesthetic that has a unique mash-up of a game show, extreme sports, and a competitive racing game with an Sonic-inspired obstacle course. It’s also a unique combination of active exercise with a combination of embodied and abstracted gameplay mechanics.
I had a chance to catch up with Sprint Vector game designer Andrew Abedian at GDC where we talked about the mechanics of racing, the internal habits that are being formed by Survios developers, the intensity of exercise and stamina required to play the game, achieving flow states, and it’s potential to evolve into a competitive eSport. It’s a super fun experience to watch other people play either in a tournament competition in mixed reality or just as a quirky form of VR performance art (examples down below).
Version 1.16 of Oculus Rift software is beginning to roll out to all Rift users, adding support for Mixed Reality capture, a redesigned interface for future updates and issue reporting, a new Home environment and multilanguage support. The Store now supports 360°-only apps, and provides alerts before purchases if you don’t have an appropriate tracking setup.
As E3 2017 draws to a close, here’s our final roundup of news. Phil Spencer gives an enlightening interview with Giant Bomb, we go hands-on with Ubisoft’s new VR shooter Space Junkies, and try out the latest standalone VR headset from GameFace Labs.
GameFace Labs, one of the earliest companies to begin development of a standalone VR headset, is back with the latest version of their prototype device now featuring SteamVR (AKA Lighthouse) tracking running on the Android-based system.
Microsoft’s E3 2017 presentation concentrated on the new Xbox One X console, but made no mention of VR. After dodging questions for the first few days following the presentation, Phil Spencer, Head of Xbox, gave his thoughts on the games industry, the Xbox One X reveal, and Microsoft’s position in the VR space in a refreshingly candid interview with Giant Bomb’s Jeff Gerstmann last night.
