‘Rick and Morty’ VR Game is Releasing on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive April 20th

6
Image courtesy Adult Swim Games

Rick and Morty are finally making their way to VR in Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. Coming to HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets on Steam and Oculus Home, you can take part in the dimension-hopping adventure starting Thursday, April 20th for for $29.99.

‘HoloLems’ Makes Your Room into a ‘Lemmings’ Level with HoloLens

22

Canadian technology company Globacore have created an AR homage to video game classic Lemmings (1991), now for Microsoft HoloLens. HoloLems, which is free on the Microsoft Store, uses HoloLens’ spatial mapping technology to generate an obstacle course from the player’s real environment.

This Interactive & Immersive Graphic Novel is Built From the Ground Up for VR

4

The Spiraloid Workshop Company (headed by Bay Raitt, former Valve employee, and known as the creator of the facial animation system for the character Gollum in Lord of the Rings) has created the VR comic Nanite Fulcrum, which the company calls a ‘3D Holographic Novel’ that is part comic, part mini game, and designed for Oculus Rift and Touch.

‘Elite Dangerous: Commanders’ Update Now Lets You and 3 Friends Co-pilot Interstellar Spacecraft

75

Elite Dangerous, the interstellar space trading, fighting, and exploration simulator, has been teasing support for co-piloted ships for some time. Today the Commanders 2.3 update launches with the Multi-Crew feature, allowing up to four friends to fly together in VR.

Lytro’s Latest VR Light-field Camera is Huge, and Hugely Improved

47
Photo by Road to VR

In the last few years, Lytro has made a major pivot away from consumer-facing digital camera products now to high-end production cameras and tools, with a major part of the company’s focus on the ‘Immerge’ light-field camera for VR. In February, Lytro announced it had raised another $60 million to continue developing the tech. I recently stopped by the company’s offices to see the latest version of the camera and the major improvements in capture quality that come with it.

‘Tornuffalo’ Shows What Full-body VR Gaming Could Look Like with Vive Trackers

5

Using HTC’s Vive Trackers, Tornuffalo—named after a combination of ‘tornado’ and ‘buffalo’—has been given a ‘Full-Body Action’ mode, an early example of full body tracking in a VR gameplay scenario. This simple action game involves dodging flying debris (which occasionally includes buffalos) heading towards your body, while trying to smash crystals for points.

‘#Archery’ Takes VR’s Bow & Arrow Mechanics to the Logical Extreme

6

vr-unicornsShooting a bow and arrow in VR is a satisfying game mechanic. It uses both hands in a 6-DoF interaction that couldn’t work with a traditional game controller. VR Unicorns’ new game #Archery takes this bow and arrow shooting mechanic to the logical extreme in a quirky fashion that’s similar to their game #SelfieTennis. Now available on early access, I had a chance to talk with #Archery developers Jakob Johansson and Max Nilsson at GDC where they talked about their game jamming and rapid prototyping process that’s motivated driven by novelty and getting bored easily.

AMD Acquires Valve-invested Wireless VR Company Nitero

5
Photo courtesy Gizmodo

AMD has announced that it’s acquired Nitero, a company lately focused on creating technology to eliminate the tether from VR and AR headsets. In a rare move, Valve—co-creator of the Vive and creator of Steam—invested a “significant amount” in the company prior to the acquisition.

​Viveport President on HTC’s New VR Subscription Service

2

Rikard-SteiberApril 4th was the one-year anniversary of the HTC Vive, and HTC released the subscription service for Viveport for $7/month to try out five new VR applications per month. I had a chance to catch up with Viveport president Rikard Steiber at GDC to talk about the genre differences between Viveport and Steam, future support of VR headsets beyond the Vive, their support for delivering content to China, as well as some of their arcade licensing options.

Understanding Pixel Density & Retinal Resolution, and Why It’s Important for AR/VR Headsets

47
PSVR 1 display and housing | Photo courtesy iFixit (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

While most of us are used to dealing with resolution figures that describe pixel count (ie: a 1920×1080 monitor), pixel density stated as pixels per degree is a much more useful figure, especially when dealing with AR and VR headsets. Achieving ‘Retinal resolution’ is the ultimate goal for headsets, where at a certain pixel density, even people with perfect vision can’t discern any additional detail. This article explores those concepts, and takes a look at how far today’s headsets are from retinal resolution.

Inexpensive GTX 1050 Ti Gets Official Thumbs-Up for Oculus Minimum Spec

43

Following the launch of the more powerful GTX 1060, 1070, and 1080, NVIDIA revealed the latest in their low-end GeForce GPUs, the GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti in October 2016. While not the first in line for a premium VR experience, the more powerful 1050 Ti now officially meets the Oculus Minimum Specification.

Apple Points to VR as One Reason Why Next Mac Pro Needs to be More Powerful

40

At present, modern VR headsets are for the most part unsupported on Apple computers, largely because many of the company’s computers do not meet the recommended hardware specifications. Apple may rarely hint at it, but the company is thinking about VR… and so are its customers. Recently Apple has admitted that the current Mac Pro isn’t standing up to the needs of some of its customers, and VR is one reason why.

‘Forestry’s’ Procedural Mesh System Offers Unique VR Crafting & Destruction

10

Procedural mesh destruction and construction underpins Decoder VR’s first title, Forestry, which just launched on Steam. Built for Vive, Rift and PSVR, the game’s fully destructible world presents a vast forest for the player to cut to pieces, which can then be used to create new objects.

Steam VR Anniversary Sale: ‘Raw Data’ & ‘Tilt Brush’ Free-play, Deep Discounts on 224 VR Titles

9
Photo courtesy Valve

With the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive shipping one year ago this month, Valve is getting in on the ‘VR Anniversary’ action with deep discounts on more than 200 VR titles and free-play access to Raw Data (2016) and Tilt Brush (2016).

Preview: Visually Dazzling VR RPG ‘The SoulKeeper VR’ Plans For a Full Story With Deep Lore

8

VR gamers have longed heavily for deeper titles that go beyond the surface-level experiences that make up a large portion of today’s VR content. They’ve longed for games with depth and complexity; developer HELM Systems plan to offer exactly that with The SoulKeeper VR, a forthcoming action adventure VR RPG for Vive and Rift with spell casting. The developers have shared new details with Road to VR leading up to the game’s release in Early Access on SteamVR this Spring.

39,929FansLike
13,574FollowersFollow
66,541FollowersFollow
27,800SubscribersSubscribe

Latest Headlines

Features & Reviews