With the Oculus Rift anniversary sale soon coming to an end, it’s now time for the HTC Vive—which launched just a week after the Rift—to get in on the celebration. The April 5th anniversary of the Vive launch, which HTC is calling “Vive Day,” has brought a $100 discount on the Vive headset, a free piece of content, and the launch of the company’s Viveport Subscription service.
Oculus’ Asynchronous Spacewarp rendering technology is designed to smooth out the VR experience by making dropped frames a thing of the past. The tech rolled out several months ago, but some of AMD’s older Radeon GPUs didn’t get support initially. Now thanks to a new driver, those older cards get official support for the feature, and newer cards can finally make use of Asynchronous Reprojection through SteamVR.
We all saw this one coming, and yet it still looks like a blast. Robo Recall now has an unofficial Star Wars mod that dresses up the game with a fresh coat of paint and new weapons.
As promised at its December launch, Facebook has now enabled Live 360 video streaming globally on all Profiles and Pages, allowing anyone with a 360 camera to broadcast live. The global roll-out introduces a wider range of camera compatibility, and spatial audio has been added.
Shari Frilot started the New Frontier program at Sundance in 2007, and produced the festival’s first VR experience in 2012 with Nonny de la Peña’s Hunger in LA using an early Rift prototype made by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey. Frilot has since programmed around 75 VR experiences since 2014 that explore storytelling, empathy, and emotional presence, but she sees that it’s going beyond empathy. She says that being in VR gives us “the ability to see ourselves in a way that we could never do alone,” and that VR embodiment may allow us to overcome our unconscious biases. In speaking about embodying a number of different creatures in The Life of Us she says, “you can watch yourself tap these primitive instinctual responses and you watch yourself go into another place of being able to socially engage with somebody” beyond the normal labels of white dude or a black lesbian.
Shipping of the first TPCAST Wireless Adaptors for HTC Vive has been delayed for a few weeks and is now expected by the end of April. In a statement posted on Weixin, TPCAST apologised to pre-order customers, explaining that production and testing processes took longer than originally planned.
A new video produced by IKinema showcases Orion, their new full-body animation system that uses HTC Vive tracking hardware. Their expertise in inverse kinematics results in convincing, affordable motion capture using a small number of tracking points.
Popular VR title Arizona Sunshine and two others are soon to get native support for the Virtuix Omni VR treadmill. Virtuix has also announced that the company has become a “formal hardware partner of HTC.”
For immersive technologies like AR and VR to be effective, they need to understand not only about our world, but also about us. But we don’t even understand us all that well yet; as we capture more biometric information on our quest to lose ourselves in augmented and virtual realities, we’re learning more about ourselves too.
Swiss / LA based developers apelab have announced their latest project for Gear VR. It’s called ‘Break a Leg’ and it puts you in the top hat of an “improvised magician” as he strives to entertain his audience. Here’s the game running with the soon to be released Gear VR motion controller.
With the Galaxy S8 and S8+ coming later this month, Samsung is hoping to sweeten the deal with a free Gear VR headset and Controller for US and Canadian pre-orders before April 20th. And while there are plenty of free games on the Oculus app store, Samsung is also giving away a free Oculus content pack to get you started (US purchases only).
I had the chance to give the keynote at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference where I provide some historical context for virtual reality tracing the evolution of communications mediums in order to contextualize my elemental theory of presence. It traces the history of the science and philosophy, and shows how VR is providing a direct experience of how much of our reality is subjectively constructed with our entire bodies. Hopefully this talk will help contextualize where we’ve been and where we’re going with VR, as well as a holistic framework to doing experiential design.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Audio PlayerHere’s the video of the talk:
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
In an update rolling out to Gear VR users over the next few weeks, Oculus Home on Gear VR will see a 2x boost in pixel resolution, according to Oculus, and load times improved as much as 3x. Oculus CTO John Carmack details the techniques that have resulted in the visual improvements.
VRLO, the UK’s leading meetup for virtual reality practitioners and enthusiasts, had its seventh edition on March 20th. Hosted by Rewind, in association with Advertising Week Europe, VRLO 7 attracted 350 attendees who glimpsed the present and future of VR and AR from Epic Games, HTC, BBC Studios, and more. Road to VR’s Jon Tustain brings us interviews and coverage from the event.
It’s the joke everyone in the VR space has made at least once: ‘virtual virtual reality—how meta!’ But developer Tender Claws has taken the idea and applied it to a new Daydream experience which explores common themes of “VR, AI and our collective sci-fi hallucinations.”
