Ubisoft’s long-awaited Star Trek: Bridge Crew, the co-op space sim that puts you at the bridge of your very own Federation vessel, is nearly here (coming out May 30th), but we’ve had our mitts all over a pre-release copy for a few days now. Wherever you may fall on the spectrum of Trek fandom, Bridge Crew promises more than just a genuine Trek experience with its exciting gameplay and social component that is sure to immerse.
Early in development, Throttle Powah is a promising looking multiplayer racer with a VR locomotion mechanic which seems entirely unique and more than a little insane.
For a company that’s showed almost no one what they’re building, Magic Leap has been phenomenally successful at fundraising. The company has previously raised a staggering $1.4 billion, and if a recent report turns out to be true, they’re about to raise even more, reportedly pushing the company’s valuation to $6–8 billion.
Google’s overarching mission is to organize all of the world’s information, and so it’s a natural fit for the company to be one of the leading innovators for using VR for immersive education. Google Expeditions was born out of a hackathon soon after the Google Carboard launched back at Google I/O 2014, and it’s since been shared with over 2 million students who have gone on virtual field trips. At I/O last week, the company had Tango demos that showed me just how compelling augmented reality is going to be in the future of collaborative & embodied educational experiences.
Last week at Google’s I/O 2017 developer conference the company made a number of new announcements which are very exciting for VR consumers. Within the industry though, the announcements represent somewhat of a repositioning of industry players, one that puts Oculus’ mobile strategy in a rough spot.
Videogame publisher and developer Square Enix, famous for its Final Fantasy franchise, among others, has launched its first game for the HTC Vive, Kai-ri-Sei Million Arthur VR in Japan.
In a curious move, HTC has revealed a new mobile VR headset called Link that is not part of the company’s Vive brand. The move comes just a week after the company announced a mobile standalone Vive headset in partnership with Google.
Haptic feedback is one of the toughest challenges for general-purpose VR input, but for the driving simulation genre, dedicated controllers have been addressing the problem for over two decades. Now that ‘cockpit view’ makes so much sense for VR racing, many newcomers feel the pull to ditch their gamepads and invest in more realistic input devices for driving. Here’s where to start.
Mozilla’s mission statement is to ensure that the Internet remains a global public resource, open and accessible to all, and they’ve been helping to bring VR to the web for the past three years. A-Frame is an open source framework for creating WebVR content that has gained a lot of momentum over the last year with more participants on the A-Frame Slack channel than the official WebVR Slack.
Valve’s The Lab is home to a number of fun mini-games, all of which feel like great blueprints for a full VR game. Developer Clear Ink Studios has stepped up to the plate to flesh out Valve’s unique VR ‘bullet-hell’ mini-game, Xortex, into a standalone experience dubbed Galaxis Wars.
Announced at Samsung’s Unpacked event earlier this year was a new version of the Gear 360, the company’s 360 camera. The event, which saw official announcement of the Galaxy S8/S8 plus and pricing info of the new Gear VR headset, revealed that the new Gear 360 is capable of capturing 360 video in 4K (4096 x 2160) at 24 fps, and livestreaming 2K to Facebook and YouTube. The camera is now due to launch in the US tomorrow (Thursday, May 25th) with an attractive new price of $229.
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
