At yesterday’s keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2017, Apple revealed the new iMac Pro and updated 27” Retina iMac, both of which are VR-ready, along with a slew of other VR related product updates. John Knoll, chief creative officer at Industrial Light & Magic, presented a mixed reality Star Wars themed live demo of VR content created on Mac and played on the Vive.
Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is here, and today’s keynote saw a number of VR-specific announcements including Apple’s first VR-ready computers to go along with the launch of the company’s newest macOS High Sierra. While the company is finally going ‘VR-native’ for desktop, Apple is also zeroing in on augmented reality for iOS 11 with the entrance of their newly revealed app developer kit ‘ARKit’.
Apple has finally made a commitment to VR, announcing on stage today at Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2017 that not only will they offer an external GPU developer kit for MacBooks capable of meeting the graphical demands of VR, but that both the new 27-inch iMac and the iMac Pro will be VR-ready out of the box.
At Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference today, the company made a major shift in their embrace of virtual reality with several new VR announcements during the event’s opening keynote.
Live VR broadcasts from the world’s biggest sporting leagues are steadily becoming easier to find. A major new three year partnership between Intel and MLB, America’s leading baseball league, will bring weekly live baseball games streamed in VR for free to Gear VR via Intel’s ‘True VR’ tech.
Display specialists Kopin in partnership with Chinese company GoerTek have announced a new reference VR headset design that it claims is the smallest of its kind integrating the firm’s ‘Lightning’ OLED micro display panels sporting a substantial 2k x 2k resolution.
After a lull in PSVR quality titles, PlayStation VR owners can now look forward to a handful of genuinely promising titles appearing for the platform in over the next few months. We pick 3 of the most promising PSVR games to either recently surface or on their way imminently.
Having recently departed Oculus after founding the company in 2012, Palmer Luckey has assured the world that he’s still very interested in virtual reality and has hinted at some of the things he’s pursuing for future projects. Taking a cue from Sword Art Online, an anime where players get trapped in a virtual reality game, Luckey says he’s interested in the idea of a virtual game with serious real life consequences.
Virtual reality is a natural fit for the sim racing genre, bringing high visual immersion in line with detailed and realistic driving physics. But if you’re playing with a controller (or worse, a keyboard!) you’re missing out the depths of immersion that such games can provide. This article presents an introduction to sim racing hardware, with kit recommendations for any budget, including wheels, pedals, and accessories, combined with sim rigs.
Testimony is one of the most profound and powerful applications of virtual reality that I’ve seen so far. It’s an experimental documentary that captures the stories of sexual assault from five women broken up into five segments. You’re completely immersed within a virtual sphere with these five stories that are represented as sequences of circles on different lines. As you look at a specific circle, it comes into the full frame and plays a 2D video segments from that victim either sharing their story of sexual assault, the aftermath, their process of healing, or their ideas for how to reform the criminal justice system. The depth of immersion and intimacy that the virtual reality medium enables allows you have much more capacity to provide your full attention and to bear witness to these stories of deep emotional intensity. It’s a radical application of VR that represents a revolutionary approach to healing from trauma.
Evocat Games’ first title Nemesis Perspective is a two-player action game where one player uses a gamepad and traditional screen to operate a third-person hero character, while the other assumes the role of an ‘endgame boss’, towering over the hero in VR from a first person perspective.
On June 20th, action RPG The Mage’s Tale will launch on the Oculus Store. The dungeon crawler from developer inXile Entertainment is optimised for Rift and Touch, set between the events of The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate (1988) and the upcoming The Bard’s Tale IV.
The word ‘surreal’ invariably falls short when it comes to trying to lift the shroud surrounding the VR first-person puzzler FORM. Transporting you to a strange inner universe via an enigmatic black obelisk, you experience what it must feel like to make contact with a higher intelligence, with its intense interlocking geometric constructions and imposing, dream-like architecture—FORM is an unexpected delight for anyone looking for something truly out of the ordinary.
While Microsoft’s ‘Mixed Reality’ VR headsets are due to launch with some impressively low minimum hardware requirements that will be met by integrated graphics, the big players presently in the market have a much higher ‘VR Ready’ bar which involves a beefy GPU for high-end gaming applications. Intel says they expect their integrated CPU graphics will eventually achieve the performance required to meet that high-end bar, though even their new ultra high-end Core i9 isn’t there yet.
