The six week Oculus Rift sale has made tangible waves within the VR community with its ‘best-yet’ $400 price point. And while the new price is bringing more early adopters into the fold, mainstream adoption is still hindered in large part by the need for high-end computer hardware to power the headset.
ViveNchill, the intriguing new bolt-on dual-fan cooling solution for the HTC Vive, has begun its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.
WaveOptics, a UK-based firm involved in designing and engineering optics for augmented reality, has today announced a successful series B funding round amounting to £12.0m ($15.7m). Investors include Touchstone Innovations, Robert Bosch Venture Capital GMBH, Octopus Investments, and Gobi Ventures.
Lenovo and Disney have partnered to bring a new Star Wars-themed app to life using a never before seen AR headset developed by Lenovo.
Apple’s ARKit has been out for developers since it was announced last month. Because of the mind-boggling number of iPhones and iPads capable of running ARKit, the new tool is already spreading its augmented reality wings across the Internet thanks to a diverse set of developers. Here we take a look at some of the coolest publicly-shared AR projects being built right now using ARKit.
Oculus Medium lets you sculpt virtual models in VR, but until now you’ve had to do it all alone. A new update to the program brings multiplayer functionality, allowing you and a friend to create and collaborate together.
Announced at Disney fan expo D23 today, Oculus are teaming up with Marvel to bring a new Rift exclusive title which lets you play as one of “more than a dozen” characters from their comic book universe, with a little help from the Oculus Touch controllers.
Oculus slashed the original price tag in half to $400 on the Rift +Touch bundle last week, but the company’s ‘Summer of Rift’ sale only lasts for six weeks, leaving the question on the table as to exactly how much the VR headset + motion controller bundle would return to once the sale is up. Oculus says: $500
Marc ten Bosch’s side project 4D Toys is a unique physics-based toy box using the game engine he created for Miegakure, a groundbreaking 4D puzzle-platformer. Launched on June 2nd for SteamVR and iOS, the app simulates an environment with a fourth spatial dimension, where players can freely manipulate four-dimensional objects with dynamic physics.
First demonstrated to theme park executives at the Asian Attractions Expo in Singapore last month, Holovis’ R3ex (Rideable Realtime Robot Experiences) project combines virtual reality with four/six-axis robot arm amusement rides. The technology claims to offer the rider genuine interactivity and ‘complete agency’ over the experience, including real-time control of the motion profile.
Nexus Interactive Arts, an immersive media division of VFX production studio Nexus Studios, have used Apple’s ARKit working on an iPhone 7 in an experiment that creates basic inside-out positional tracking and pass-through AR for a Google Cardboard headset.
VR Presence researcher Mel Slater is fascinated by what makes the medium of virtual reality unique and different from other communications mediums. He says that VR activates our sensorimotor contingencies in a way that fools our brain that we’re transported into another world, and that what is happening is real. He breaks this into two primary illusions where the Place Illusion answers the question “Am I there?” and the Plausibility Illusion answers the question “Is this happening?” These two illusions happen inside of your mind and are very difficult to study, but Slater has develop an experimental research protocol that draws inspiration from color theory research the combination of the objective spectral distribution as well as an individual’s subjective perception of color.
The 69th Emmy Awards nominations are out, and while it’s true the Emmys were created to recognize excellence in the television industry, virtual reality as a medium has been lauded with six total nominations this year, three of which are thanks to content created by Oculus.
nDreams, creators of The Assembly and publishers of the upcoming brawler Bloody Zombies, have completed an additional £2 million investment with Mercia Technologies, and £700,000 from private investors to create more VR games. In addition, nDreams has signed a deal to bring exclusive new content to a “leading VR arcade company.” According to a nDreams blog post, the VR arcade content partnership is just one of many recent deals with third-party companies.
As part of this week’s EVE: Valkyrie update, which includes AI improvements, balance tweaks, and stability fixes, the game has also received some visual optimisations courtesy of Nvidia VRWorks. Suitable for higher-spec Nvidia cards (GTX 1070 and above), the new ‘Ultra Settings’ option enables ‘God rays’, improved cockpit lighting and projectile effects.
