Google launched the Daydream View headset late last year, the company’s first virtual reality hardware product. As a smartphone clip-in headset, the View is a relatively simple device which leaves the bulk of the work up to the host smartphone. A slew of recent job postings however suggest significant new AR/VR hardware in the works from Google.
The eye tracking company Tobii had some VR demos that they were showing on the GDC Expo Hall floor as well as within Valve’s booth. They were primarily focusing on the new user interaction paradigms that are made available by using eye gazing to select specific objects, direct action, but also locomotion determined by eye gaze. I had a chance to catch up with Johan Hellqvist, VP products and integrations at Tobii, where we discussed some of the eye tracking applications being demoed. We also had a deeper discussion about what type of eye tracking data should be recorded and the consent that application developers should secure before capturing and storing it.
Cyan’s spiritual successor to Myst is launching with all-new motion control support on March 22nd for HTC Vive and Oculus Touch. The game originally released on Steam in August 2016, receiving initial VR support for the Rift in October.
Qualcomm has debuted an updated version of their VR Headset Reference Design now with Leap Motion’s new 180-degree hand-tracking to bring gesture control to mobile VR headsets. The new headset and Leap Motion tracking module was shown off during last week’s GDC 2017.
At GDC this year, SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) showed a couple of new eye tracking demos at Valve’s booth. They added eye tracking to avatars in the social VR experiences of Pluto VR and Rec Room, which provided an amazing boost to the social presence within these experience.
Aldin Dynamics has released a detailed breakdown of user data gathered during over 300,000 sessions of Waltz of the Wizard gameplay. Launched in May 2016, the motion-controlled VR game was developed with the insights gained from using Aldin’s own data visualisation tool Ghostline.
VR motion control comes to AirMech: Command, and the game has been released on Steam with support for multiple VR headsets and controllers through OpenVR. The game originally appeared as a launch title for the Oculus Rift in March 2016.
Bigscreen VR announced that they raised $3 million dollars for their “social utility” VR application. Bigscreen gives you access to your computer screen in VR, which is a deceptively simple idea but one that is unlocking new ways of working on your computer and enabling collaborative social environments that range from virtual 2D video game LAN parties to productive work meetings.
The beta channels for the Steam client and SteamVR now support Linux. As a development build, the selection of Linux-supported SteamVR games is very limited, but Valve says the build aims to let developers begin making VR content that supports the open source operating system.
In a reverse engineering exercise, two students at Utah State University have hacked positional tracking onto a Gear VR headset using SteamVR Tracking technology. Mobile VR solutions like Samsung’s Gear VR currently employ rotational tracking only.
Hyphen Labs is a immersive design collective made up of women of color, and they were showing a sci-fi VR experience at Sundance this year called Neurospeculative Afrofeminism. Their VR experience features black women as some of the pioneers of brain optimization, and you get to experience a futuristic neurocosmotology lab where you can receive transcranial stimulation. As you get this neuroplasticity treatment, you’re transported into a magical world that features speculative products that feature women of color as the center of the design narrative.
Ripstone Games, makers of Pure Chess (2012), are bringing their upcoming sequel Chess Ultra to PlayStationVR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. The classic chess game features a number of beautifully rendered environments that will finally make you feel like the rich and magnanimous Grandmaster you always knew you’d become—or a streetwise criminal who’s broken into a closed museum to host underground chess games to the death. That last one sounds way more fun actually, but sadly not a part of the game.
Using language to translate an experience into words is one of the highest levels of abstraction that we know as humans. Using the power of visual metaphor through poetry is able to get to deeper levels of emotion, and virtual reality is able to remove nearly all levels of abstraction by tricking your senses into having a direct sensory experience within your body. Indie VR artist Isaac “Cabbibo” Cohen has started to create a sort of ‘Experiential Poem’ using virtual reality to explore how to invoke complicated emotions that transcend words.
At NVIDIA’s upcoming GTC 2017 conference on May 8-11, the company plans to award $30,000 in cash and prizes to the winners of the VR Content Showcase which is seeking companies focusing on content other than gaming which is using or plans to use Nvidia GPU technology like GameWorks, DesignWorks or VRWorks. Submissions close on March 15th.
