The Spiraloid Workshop Company (headed by Bay Raitt, former Valve employee, and known as the creator of the facial animation system for the character Gollum in Lord of the Rings) has created the VR comic Nanite Fulcrum, which the company calls a ‘3D Holographic Novel’ that is part comic, part mini game, and designed for Oculus Rift and Touch.
Elite Dangerous, the interstellar space trading, fighting, and exploration simulator, has been teasing support for co-piloted ships for some time. Today the Commanders 2.3 update launches with the Multi-Crew feature, allowing up to four friends to fly together in VR.
In the last few years, Lytro has made a major pivot away from consumer-facing digital camera products now to high-end production cameras and tools, with a major part of the company’s focus on the ‘Immerge’ light-field camera for VR. In February, Lytro announced it had raised another $60 million to continue developing the tech. I recently stopped by the company’s offices to see the latest version of the camera and the major improvements in capture quality that come with it.
Using HTC’s Vive Trackers, Tornuffalo—named after a combination of ‘tornado’ and ‘buffalo’—has been given a ‘Full-Body Action’ mode, an early example of full body tracking in a VR gameplay scenario. This simple action game involves dodging flying debris (which occasionally includes buffalos) heading towards your body, while trying to smash crystals for points.
Shooting a bow and arrow in VR is a satisfying game mechanic. It uses both hands in a 6-DoF interaction that couldn’t work with a traditional game controller. VR Unicorns’ new game #Archery takes this bow and arrow shooting mechanic to the logical extreme in a quirky fashion that’s similar to their game #SelfieTennis. Now available on early access, I had a chance to talk with #Archery developers Jakob Johansson and Max Nilsson at GDC where they talked about their game jamming and rapid prototyping process that’s motivated driven by novelty and getting bored easily.
April 4th was the one-year anniversary of the HTC Vive, and HTC released the subscription service for Viveport for $7/month to try out five new VR applications per month. I had a chance to catch up with Viveport president Rikard Steiber at GDC to talk about the genre differences between Viveport and Steam, future support of VR headsets beyond the Vive, their support for delivering content to China, as well as some of their arcade licensing options.
While most of us are used to dealing with resolution figures that describe pixel count (ie: a 1920×1080 monitor), pixel density stated as pixels per degree is a much more useful figure, especially when dealing with AR and VR headsets. Achieving ‘Retinal resolution’ is the ultimate goal for headsets, where at a certain pixel density, even people with perfect vision can’t discern any additional detail. This article explores those concepts, and takes a look at how far today’s headsets are from retinal resolution.
Following the launch of the more powerful GTX 1060, 1070, and 1080, NVIDIA revealed the latest in their low-end GeForce GPUs, the GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti in October 2016. While not the first in line for a premium VR experience, the more powerful 1050 Ti now officially meets the Oculus Minimum Specification.
At present, modern VR headsets are for the most part unsupported on Apple computers, largely because many of the company’s computers do not meet the recommended hardware specifications. Apple may rarely hint at it, but the company is thinking about VR… and so are its customers. Recently Apple has admitted that the current Mac Pro isn’t standing up to the needs of some of its customers, and VR is one reason why.
Procedural mesh destruction and construction underpins Decoder VR’s first title, Forestry, which just launched on Steam. Built for Vive, Rift and PSVR, the game’s fully destructible world presents a vast forest for the player to cut to pieces, which can then be used to create new objects.
With the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive shipping one year ago this month, Valve is getting in on the ‘VR Anniversary’ action with deep discounts on more than 200 VR titles and free-play access to Raw Data (2016) and Tilt Brush (2016).
VR gamers have longed heavily for deeper titles that go beyond the surface-level experiences that make up a large portion of today’s VR content. They’ve longed for games with depth and complexity; developer HELM Systems plan to offer exactly that with The SoulKeeper VR, a forthcoming action adventure VR RPG for Vive and Rift with spell casting. The developers have shared new details with Road to VR leading up to the game’s release in Early Access on SteamVR this Spring.
COMPOUND is a VR hobby project from developer ‘NotDead’ which aims to immerse you in a world of lovingly crafted pixel art, retro-styled first person shooter.
One of the slickest titles on the Rift right now, Epic Games’ arcade shooter Robo Recall has received an update which addresses one of the bigger criticisms the title received at launch, 360 degree tracking for the Oculus Touch.
