HTC launched its interesting Viveport Subscription service back in April; for $7/month, the program lets users choose five VR games from a pool of available apps, and grants them unlimited access. The company is sweetening the deal with 75 additional titles to choose from, including a number of notable games.
Sports in VR is squarely in the realm of low-hanging VR that you often hear rattled off on five fingers when broaching the topic of industries VR will revolutionize. And while it’s easy to imagine, actual execution is a completely different story. With VR sports broadcasting deals being signed with the world’s biggest sporting leagues, the space is clearly maturing, but there’s still some missing pieces needed to boost this use case out of novelty and into orbit.
The hotly anticipated Vive Deluxe Audio Strap launched just yesterday and the initial stock has already been nabbed, apparently putting the unit out of stock in both the US and EU regions. HTC has also confirmed that the upgraded headstrap isn’t compatible with the Vive pre, along with investigating some deterioration issues with the strap’s foam padding.
Oculus has announced a pilot program to place 100 Rifts and Oculus Ready PCs in 90 libraries throughout the state of California, from the Oregon border down to Mexico. Detailed on the Oculus Blog, the new partnership with the California State Library hopes to highlight the educational potential of VR, as well as provide easy access to VR hardware within the heart of local communities.
EVE: Valkyrie (2016), one of the first games to launch on the Oculus Rift (and eventually found its way to PSVR and the HTC Vive), is getting a big price cut.
Codemasters’ new entry into their long-running rally game series launches this week for Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Unlike its predecessor DiRT Rally, DiRT 4 currently features no VR support on PC or PSVR, but a future update is possible.
Funomena’s Woorld won the ‘Best AR Experience’ category at the recent 2017 Google Play awards. In the game you scan your room with a Google Tango-enabled phone, and then you’re encouraged to decorate your space with extremely cute art and characters designed by Katamari’s Keita Takahashi. Part of the gameplay in Woorld is to figure out how to combine different objects together in order to unlock new objects and portions of the story in your space.
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.
