VRLO, the UK’s leading meetup for virtual reality practitioners and enthusiasts, had its seventh edition on March 20th. Hosted by Rewind, in association with Advertising Week Europe, VRLO 7 attracted 350 attendees who glimpsed the present and future of VR and AR from Epic Games, HTC, BBC Studios, and more. Road to VR’s Jon Tustain brings us interviews and coverage from the event.
It’s the joke everyone in the VR space has made at least once: ‘virtual virtual reality—how meta!’ But developer Tender Claws has taken the idea and applied it to a new Daydream experience which explores common themes of “VR, AI and our collective sci-fi hallucinations.”
The live-action Ghost in the Shell (2017) film starring Scarlett Johansson is already in theaters worldwide, but Oculus has today published the VR experience so you can get a slice of the android-kicking action direct on your Gear VR or Oculus Rift.
Founded in 1993, Immersion Corp. designs and licenses haptic technology that’s come to be used in gamepads you’re well familiar with. Now the company is developing a new haptic programming system which aims to help game developers make better haptics effects for their games, faster.
Downward Spiral: Prologue (2017) is a sci-fi adventure game that takes you into a lovingly recreated ’70s retro future of CRT monitors and space stations abound. Featuring a single-player and coop mission, and multiplayer deathmatch mode Downward Spiral: Prologue feels like the creators have torn out the first few pages of an Arthur C. Clarke novel and realized it in virtual reality.
At SVVR 2017 this week in Silicon Valley, Chinese VR developer organization VRCore brought a range of content to the show representing some of the VR work happening in the West. Among that content was Audio Beats by developer Famiku, a SteamVR game for Vive and Rift with surprising polish and compelling gameplay.
Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift, is stepping down from his position at the company.
Blueprint Reality, developers of VR puzzle game Awaken, have launched the MixCast VR Studio on Steam. Developers can quickly add the free SDK to their Unity-based VR games, which allows users to easily set up, broadcast, or record mixed reality gameplay footage with the help of the utility.
Continuing to push its established mobile VR business—recently revealing its flagship Galaxy S8 smartphones support and an updated Gear VR with controller—Samsung has again confirmed it has more powerful VR hardware up its sleeve. High-end, standalone VR headsets from Samsung are still in development, according to a report by CNET.
“Don’t even think about it” is Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger’s message to theme park development team regarding virtual reality, according to a report from the LA Times. Instead, Iger sees augmented reality headsets to be the more likely fit for future attractions.
HTC Vive Senior Engineer James Xiong has provided a Vive IK Demo on GitHub, which includes a reference source code and Unity demo. Using the HTC Vive headset and controllers combined with three Vive Trackers, the program uses hardware tracking and inverse kinematics to pose a virtual model that closely matches the human player.
Sometimes, the simplest solutions are also the smartest. Go Touch VR’s approach to VR haptics achieves surprising effectiveness out of small, simple haptic devices that provide stimulation to the end of your fingers.
On stage today at Samsung’s Unpacked Event in New York, the new Gear VR with motion controller finally got a launch date and price. The new 2017 Gear VR and Controller combo, announced alongside the Galaxy S8, will be available starting April 21st for $129. The motion controller, which can be purchased separately for people that already own an older Gear VR headset, will set you back $39.
Valve’s SteamVR Tracking system is great for VR but certainly not limited to it. For developers, hackers, researchers, and more who might have use for an inexpensive high accuracy, low latency, 6 DOF positional tracking system, it’s possible to use the new Vive Trackers or controllers (even with a single base station) without needing to shell out for the full $800 Vive system.
Held from May 8-11th in Silicon Valley at the San Jose Convention Center, NVIDIA’s GTC 2017 session schedule is chock full of deep tech talks that we’re looking forward to. Among them, Senior NVIDIA Research Scientist Anjul Patney will overview the company’s latest learnings from their study of the ‘perceptually-based’ approach to foveated rendering.
