Today Microsoft announced that developers in the US and Canada can now pre-order the Acer ($299) and HP ($329) Mixed Reality headsets from the Microsoft Store. Delivery of the headsets is scheduled for August 2017.
The HoloLens is the most impressive augmented reality headset on the market today, and their developer kit is already being deployed into industries ranging from architecture, engineering, design, sales, medicine, and education. Microsoft is taking a holistic approach with Windows Mixed Reality being baked into Windows 10, meaning that developers can create a single application that can run on the HoloLens, on one of their partner VR headsets, on a Surface tablet, or as a desktop app. At Microsoft’s Build conference today, the company is announcing a new OEM VR partner with HP as well as inside-out, six degree-of-freedom input controllers for VR headsets made by Microsoft partners like Acer.
Praised as one of the greatest games ever made, the 13 year old Half-Life 2 is a lauded piece of gaming history. But soon you’ll be able to revisit the perils of City 17 using the latest and greatest VR hardware around. A reborn mod project is bringing compatibility for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive with full motion input support, remastered visuals, a made-for-VR UI, realistic weapon interactions, and more.
In an interesting move, Google has acquired Owlchemy Labs, makers of the multi-platform hits Job Simulator (2016) and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017).
Pixvana, makers of the cloud-based 360 video creation studio SPIN, today announced that their software services—integrated at the core of Valve’s own Steam 360 Video Player—will be launching today into beta. This effectively lets SPIN users publish their VR videos directly to the Steam Store, but more importantly means VR headset owners will be able to browse and watch high-quality streaming content (up to 12K) directly in Steam using their Steam VR-supported headset.
While virtual reality surely has high performance requirements to maintain a comfortable experience, immersive AR may ultimately require a greater level of performance if we’re to achieve the theoretical ideal.
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.
Omnipulse is a new haptic technology out of Cornell’s Organic Robotics Lab which uses an array of embedded pneumatic actuators to create haptic feedback which feels quite ‘organic’ compared to the more ‘mechanical’ of many other haptic technologies out there. With the ability to form the flexible Omnipulse skin into arbitrary shapes, the technology could be integrated into VR controllers, gloves, or potentially even haptic VR suits.
The Microsoft Build conference starts this week, and I expect that we’ll be learning more about the HoloLens as well as Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality operating system. Microsoft has been evangelizing about virtual reality the past couple of years now, and I had a chance to catch up with Microsoft Technical Evangelist Kat Harris at PAX West last Fall. She’s been teaching VR 101 development courses at different conferences, and we talk about what she’s been telling game designers about maintaining presence, building immersive experiences, and how to deal with some of the biggest breakers of presence including VR locomotion and the uncanny valley. We also discuss the limits of virtual reality when it comes to haptics, uncanny narrative, the future of artificial intelligence in enabling collaborative role-playing, and the power of world building & storytelling in games like Minecraft.
Penrose Studios’ latest VR film work, Arden’s Wake: The Prologue, has debuted at TriBeCa Film Festival’s Virtual Arcade. As “Prologue” implies, Arden’s Wake will be released in episodic form, though the final number of ‘episodes’ in the series, as well as whether or not Penrose might have other stories to tell in the world of Arden’s Wake, has yet to be decided, according to the project’s director and Penrose founder and CEO Eugene Chung.
Pedaling a stationary bike is kind of a sad metaphor for life: try as you may, you’re never going anywhere. But thanks to virtual reality, there might be an exercise machine coming to your local gym or arcade that promises to gamify what many people not only find to be an existential commentary on their personal failings, but also a painfully boring experience. VirZOOM, makers of VR arcade exercise games and the VirZOOM Bike Controller, recently announced a partnership with AMD that promises to provide the graphical horsepower to drive VirZOOM experiences in gyms and arcades, bringing their collection of VR games to gym-quality upright and recumbent bikes around the world.
Positional audio for VR experiences—where noises sound as if they are coming from the correct direction—has long been understood as an important part of making VR immersive. But knowing which direction sounds are coming from is only one part of the immersive audio equation. Getting that directional audio to interact in realistic ways with the virtual environment itself is the next challenge, and getting it right came make VR spaces feel far more real.
Philip Rosedale has been thinking deeply about how to architect large-scale, distributed virtual worlds after experiencing many bottlenecks as the founder of Second Life. His new metaverse venture, High Fidelity, is taking a much more distributed approach with how it’s being developed openly in open source using Worklist.net contractors, how it plans on distributing hosting and compute resources to user’s computers, as well as using a decentralized identity based upon blockchain technology. Rather than having a centralized authority for tracking and data mining an individual’s identity, they’re planning on using what’s called “Self-sovereign Identity”, which Christopher Allen explains in great detail in his comprehensive essay titled A Path to Self-Sovereign Identity.
The 360 film industry is still young and it’s maturing rapidly. With his name on more than 20 360 film projects to date, Armando Kirwin has had an inside view as to where things started, where they’re going, and why.
Broadcast during all four days of The Players Championship starting May 11th, 360 video will be livestreamed from the famous 17th hole at the TPC Sawgrass golf course. The collaboration with Intel, Twitter, and the PGA Tour will be viewable on Gear VR headsets or via Twitter and Periscope.
