Jason Rubin, Head of Content at Oculus, has recently teased ‘months of high-profile VR content’ for the hardware. In a recent tweet, he points towards the upcoming release of Rock Band VR, an exclusive title for Rift and Touch, as the starting point.
Ever since Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus in 2014, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has poised the move as a strategic bet on a technology that would eventually change the way we communicate. In the company’s most recent earnings call, Zuckerberg asked for “the patience of the investor community” as he reminded them about his belief in Oculus as a long term bet.
‘OpenVR Advanced Settings’ is a dashboard overlay that allows access to advanced functionality of any headset running SteamVR. The menu is accessible in VR, meaning you can easily adjust options such as supersampling without removing your headset.
Augmented reality is conceptually so broad, there’s almost no limit to what you could imagine doing with the technology. But rather than throwing out the playbook entirely, we’ll to our grand visions through useful incremental steps that begin with integration into existing content built around today’s paradigms. A concept video using HoloLens and Final Fantasy XIV, shows how AR could be incredibly useful as a ‘Second Screen’ companion for gaming and more.
Koei Tecmo, the Japan-based publisher that brought you Dynasty Warriors, Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden series, have today unveiled a VR arcade cabinet that is more than just an enclosure for a PlayStation VR headset. Called VR Sense, the cabinet is said to embody a few technologies including a motion-simulating seat, a scent function, a wind function, a thermal function, a touch function, and a mist function.
The Rift-exclusive Rock Band VR is due to launch on March 23rd, with a game + guitar bundle priced at $70. The game takes a wildly different approach to musical gameplay than its predecessors, but also has a classic mode that fans will instantly recognize.
Star Citizen‘s Senior Graphics Programmer Ben Parry has dropped a disappointing bombshell regarding the status of the crowdfunded title’s long awaited VR support, indicating that players may be waiting some time for it to emerge.
VR Bangers, an adult virtual reality content studio, has announced a new gadget they say will help fans “finally feel like they are getting kissed and caressed, while their favorite girls whisper right into their ears.” While it’s undoubtedly bizarre looking, the camera/microphone mannequin head aims to take the place of a traditional camera or a microphone so that the studio’s actors can act more naturally and therefore give the end user a more immersive experience. If only it didn’t have such lifeless eyes (black eyes, like a doll’s eyes).
Motion capture specialist IKinema has demonstrated its new in-development low-cost motion capture system which uses use 6 points of SteamVR tracking points to deliver a pretty accurate recreation of real world motion.
Oculus have released update 1.11 for the Rift VR headset and Touch motion controllers that bring promised enhancements for the system’s “experimental 360” degree roomscale support with multi-sensor setups and fixes for the guardian boundary system.
Insomniac Games’ Oculus Rift and Touch exclusive magic dueller just got a sizeable update which bringing welcome elements such as a new Chicago arena, misdirection oriented Dark Tag artifact and a brand new guardian by the name of Bridge Wraith.
A popular horror title on Gear VR, the latest instalment of the Affected franchise will be coming to Oculus Rift with Touch motion controller support in February, according to developers Fallen Planet.
After launching the consumer HTC Vive in early 2016, the company began offering a $1,200 ‘Business Edition’ version of the headset which is essentially the same system but with dedicated support, an enhanced warranty, and bulk buying options. Going forward, however, the consumer and Business Edition systems will become increasingly differentiated products.
Last year, Baobab Studios’ Eric Darnell was skeptical about adding interactivity to virtual reality stories because he felt like there was a tradeoff between empathy and interactivity. But after watching people experience their first VR short Invasion!, he saw that people were much more engaged with the story and wanted to get more involved. He came to that realization that it is possible to combine empathy and interactivity in the form of compassion acts, and so he started to construct Baobab’s next VR experience Asteroids! around the idea of allowing the user to participate in an act of compassion. I had a chance to catch up with Darnell at Sundance where we talked about his latest thoughts about storytelling in VR, and explored his insights from their first explorations of what he calls “emotional branching.”
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Darnell says that one of the key ingredients of a story is “character being revealed by the choices that they make under pressure.” Rather than make you the central protagonist as a video game might, in Asteroids! you’re more of a sidekick who can choose whether or not to help out the main characters. This allows an authored story to be told though the main characters that are ultimately independent of your actions, but your “local agency” choices still flavor your experience in the sense that there are different “emotional branches” of the story for how the main protagonists react to you based upon your decisions.
Unpacking the nuances of these emotional branches showed me that Asteroids! was doing some of the most interesting explorations of interactive narrative at Sundance this year, and I would’ve completely missed them had I not had this conversation with him. We explore some of the more subtle nuances of the story, and so I’d recommend holding off on this interview if you don’t want to get too many spoilers (it should be released sometime in the first half of 2017). But Darnell is a master storyteller, and he’s got a lot of really fascinating thoughts about how stories might work in VR that are worth sharing out to the storytellers in the wider VR community.
They’re also doing some interesting experiments of adding in body language mirroring behaviors into the other sidekick characters that are based upon social science research in order to create subtle cues of connecting to the characters and story. There is another dog-like robot the experience that is in the same sidekick class as you where you can play fetch with it and interact with in subtle ways.
Storytelling is a time-based art form that has a physical impact of releasing chemicals in our bodies including cortisol at moments of dramatic tension, oxytocin with character interactions, and dopamine at the resolution of that dramatic tension. Given these chemical reactions, Darnell believes that the classic three-act structure of a story is something that is encoded within our DNA. Storytelling is something that has helped humans evolve, and it’s part of what makes us human. He cites Kenneth Burke saying that “stories are equipment for living.” Stories help us learn about the world by watching other people making choices under pressure.
There’s still a long ways to go before we achieve the Holy Grail of completely plausible interactive stories that provide full global agency while preserving the integrity of a good dramatic arc. It’s likely that artificial intelligence will eventually have a much larger role in accomplishing this, but Asteroids! is making some small and important steps with Darnell’s sidekick insights and “emotional branching” concept. It was one of the more significant interactive narrative experiments at Sundance this year, and showed that it’s possible to combine empathy and interactivity to make a compassionate story.
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
