In a recent interview with Glixel, Dr. Richard Marks, head of Sony’s Magic Lab R&D team, talked about PSVR’s development history, social VR, and a possible holodeck-style future. He thinks voice input has unrealised potential, and could become the way users launch into different VR experiences in the future, customising them in real-time thanks to procedural generation.
Having founded Oculus in 2012 and been an important face for the company throughout its growth from fledgling startup to $2 billion acquisition by Facebook and beyond, it was a shock to see Palmer Luckey leave the company just two months ago. Having shied away from the public eye since September 2016 after the ousting of a polarizing political position, Luckey has gone on record in an interview for the first time since leaving the company.
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, and so they’ve been long-time advocates for the open web. At Google I/O last week, the company announced that they’ll soon be shipping Google Chrome for Android with WebVR, and that they’re going to start experimental builds for WebAR. During the WebVR talk at I/O, Google showed how to write a progressive web application with three.js that could be viewed on a desktop computer, mobile phone or tablet, or Google Cardboard or Daydream virtual reality headset. Google is pushing the hardest for platform-agnostic WebVR applications on the web as mental presence is their core strength.
Oculus recently published the first installment of their ‘Developer Perspectives’ video playlists, detailed on the developer blog. Crytek’s VR movement research is presented by Julius Carter, Game Designer at the studio behind award-winning VR games
SUPERHOT VR is surely one of the best pieces of VR content available today, but has remained exclusive to Oculus since launch. The developers have teased that the game is coming to the HTC Vive this Thursday, May 25th, but you can already play it today thanks to a free and easy to install hack.
Google has released a Daydream VR app called Audio Factory, a polished and even entertaining demonstrating their Spatial Audio Engine for VR. Described as “VR’s second sense”, spatial audio is a key aspect of maintaining a high level of immersion, and all major VR platform providers offer their own solutions as part of their SDKs, including Google.
Fidget spinners—little spinning hand toys—are one of the latest fads to see explosive growth, rising rapidly in popularity faster than the most hopeful startup. With a seemingly endless number of spinners available to purchase, developer Vladimir Storm decided to make a virtual reality fidget spinner because… you know… why not?
20th Century Fox’s Interactive Entertainment and theme park arm FoxNext is building a 2000 sq. ft free-roaming multiplayer VR experience set in the world of the Alien movie franchise.
Said to be the world’s first VR sim racing helmet, the HelmetVR is perhaps the ultimate in VR sim racing excess, combining a real Arai racing helmet with an Oculus Rift headset. The custom headset comes from FormulaVR, a Netherlands-based, high-end sim rig manufacturer.
Valve’s new SteamVR Home Beta just launched and it represents a vast improvement on what has gone before with fully 3D, customisable environments, a glut of new social features and a fully featured Steam interface. Will you ever want to leave VR?
Electric Hat Games’ TO THE TOP is a vibrant, rapid-paced climbing game that demonstrates a brilliantly innovative locomotion technique that the development team claims results in “zero motion sickness”.
Action shooter / slasher title Sairento VR just received a big update from developers Mixed Realms including new locations, a new enemy, AI tweaks and a much-requested feature – brutal, bloody enemy dismemberment.
Google’s newly announced Seurat rendering tech purportedly makes use of ‘surface light-fields’ to turn high-quality CGI film assets into detailed virtual environments that can run on mobile VR hardware. The company gave Seurat to ILMxLab, the immersive entertainment division of Industrial Light and Magic, to see what they could do with it using assets directly from Star Wars.
During an interview at the Game Developers Conference at the end of March, head of Oculus’ PC VR division Brendan Iribe stated that the Rift will remain the company’s flagship VR headset for “at least the next two years”. The report by The Verge also discussed the company’s future direction for inside-out tracking and glove-free hand tracking.
Amidst a lot of exciting AR/VR news from Google this week during I/O 2017, a bit of sad news comes for any fans of the company’s ‘Project Glass’. The team within Google that worked on Glass is not collaborating with the Daydream/Tango VR/AR teams, a strong indication that there’s no plans to bring Glass forward into the fledgling era of immersive computing.
