At GDC 2017 this week we’ve gone hands-on with the latest prototype of StrikerVR’s ‘Arena Infinity’ haptic VR gun. Built (for now) for the out-of-home sector, the peripheral’s powerful haptics adapt from guns to chainsaws to grenade launchers and more.
Is Duck Season a game? Is a Hot Pocket a meal? Who needs labels anyway? Created by Stress Level Zero, developers of multiplayer shooter Hover Junkers (2016), Duck Season is something, that’s for sure. Part shooting game, part theater piece, part exploration experience, Duck Season defies the genre pigeonholing that would make this article easier to write.
“Adrenaline platformer” is the apt descriptor that Survios is using for their newly announced title, Sprint Vector. The core of the game is what the company is calling the Fluid Locomotion System, a synthesis of VR movement techniques seen elsewhere that together add up to a supremely satisfying way to move around VR worlds at high speed without getting dizzy.
According to UBS analyst Steven Milunovich, Apple could have over 1,000 engineers working on Augmented Reality technology in Israel, mostly at its major R&D centre in Herzliya. Milunovich maintains Apple might introduce AR features similar to Google’s Tango in the next iPhone.
Amazon announced VR support for Lumberyard, their free of cost CryEngine-based game engine, at last year’s GDC, but this year the company is pushing the feature specs of the engine, maintaining that Lumberyard is the first game engine to directly integrate temporal anti-aliasing, specular anti-aliasing and order-independent transparency.
ARK Park is a VR spin-off of ARK: Survival Evolved (2017) from Suzhou, China-based Snail Games. Letting you explore the habitats of the world’s wild mix of fictional and non-fictional pre-historic creatures, ARK Park is betting big on the pure wow-factor of coming face to face with dinos in what promises to be an experience brimming with possibilities for exploration.
Harmonix has revealed the music setlist you’ll be able to choose from and a new video which breaks down how to play the VR exclusive version of the game which the developer claims has been “designed from the ground up for VR.”
After hyping everyone up recently with a short teaser video, eye-tracking specialists Tobii have revealed more details and video examples their eye tracking in action at GDC, including integration with social VR application Rec Room.
As has been Epic Games’ style for many years, Robo Recall – built on the company’s Unreal Engine 4 – allows you to change the original game via the engine’s editor, giving you the tools you need to mod the title to your heart’s content.
At a PlayStation VR session today at GDC, Sony stated that first-party PSVR titles with support for the new Aim peripheral are in development.
At GDC 2017, developers Impulse Gear confirmed that their VR shooter Farpoint has Co-op, and will launch in a bundle with the PS VR Aim Controller on May 16th. An ‘unnerving space adventure set on a hostile alien world’, Farpoint is a free-movement FPS exclusive to PlayStation VR.
Oculus Rift exclusive title Robo Recall – which launched just yesterday – can already be played on the HTC Vive, using the infamous Revive mod. And, as you can see in this video, the game seems to work remarkably well.
The Google VR team shared some impressive figures at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week – more than 10 million Cardboard viewers have been shipped worldwide. Google’s low-cost smartphone enclosure for viewing VR content has been available since 2014.
LG is the first company after HTC to follow the path laid out by Valve for headset makers to bring their wares to SteamVR. That path involves using SteamVR Tracking technology and OpenVR API to create a headset which can tap into the same Steam-powered content ecosystem as the Vive. LG’s step into VR represents more than just a new headset though, it represents new choices for consumers and new competition for HTC.
The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone is coming this spring to Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, and for fans of the first episode, Call of the Starseed (2016), it can’t come a moment too soon. Stepping into the demo at Unity’s booth at this year’s GDC, I got a chance to experience something that not only features a heady mix of highly tuned visuals and clever puzzles, but a familiar feeling that Cloudhead Games says pays homage to ’80s sci-fi/fantasy movies like The Dark Crystal (1982) and the Indiana Jones series. From what I’ve seen, it would be silly for me not to be excited.
