Welcome to the 1st in our 3 part series of developer diaries from Rebellion covering the making of the forthcoming PlayStation VR title Battlezone, a reboot of the 1980 Atari arcade classic in virtual reality. In this entry, Senior Designer on Battlezone PSVR Tom Rigby discusses the critical need for human feedback when developing for a brand new entertainment medium.
The annual Proto Awards, set up to highlight and honour the best and brightest the VR industry has to offer, is over for another year, with Google’s Tilt Brush walking away as the overall winner. But who else made the grade? Here’s a breakdown of all the nominees and winners across all categories.
The long rumoured sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult sci-fi classic Blade Runner is coming soon and it’s to be joined by virtual reality experiences via Oculus.
Among the swath of announcements made at Oculus Connect 3, one of the fleeting but important pieces of content-related news is that Walt Disney Studios is working with Oculus to create a series of VR experiences based on iconic characters and franchises.
Oculus covered a lot of ground during their opening keynote at Oculus Connect 3 this week; among many exciting announcements, one of interest for Unreal Engine developers might be how Oculus says that they’ll cover the royalty fees for any Unreal Engine applications on their store, up to the first $5 million in gross revenue.
Jules Urbach, CEO of OTOY, believes lightfields are the endgame of virtual reality. Essentially a way to digitally record all light reflected from a real or virtual object, lightfields seemingly enable feats of technological magic, from being able to view near-photoreal quality scenes from any angle within the capture volume to actually being able to dynamically relight actors in real time. OTOY believes that lightfields solve many of VR’s rendering challenges and has been investing itself in them heavily. Road to VR guest reporter Nate Kozak spoke with Urbach about the company’s new lightfield streaming.
Frank He gets his hands into Ready at Dawn’s first VR title and finds Lone Echo to deliver one of the best zero g experiences yet seen in VR, all thanks to clever design and of course the Oculus Touch motion controllers.
At Oculus Connect’s opening keynote today, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to drive home the company’s commitment to the virtual reality space. How much commitment? Some $500M worth.
Up until now, multiplayer games on Oculus Home have relied on their own individual avatar selectors, meaning you couldn’t have the exact same avatar in two different apps. In an effort to socialize the entire platform, Oculus is introducing an avatar editor that will let you style a single avatar and use it across multiple apps.
At a session breaking down the design of Touch during Oculus Connect, designers of the controller explored the choices that drove the form and functionality of the device.
At today’s Oculus Connect keynote, a number of new hardware announcements were made, including the reveal of a new pair of Oculus ‘Earphones’ that replace the removable headphones that come with the Rift.
Oculus Touch is almost with us, but as launch day now approaches, how exactly did the unique half-moon VR controllers come to be? This talk from Oculus’ Industrial Designer Peter Bristol looks to explore the challenges and decisions that went into making the devices.
Keeping games chugging along at 90 frames per second (fps) while rendering modern graphics is a tall order, which is why building a VR-ready computer is pretty much impossible with less than $600. Well, now the minimum spec—at least for Oculus—seems to be a little more affordable, more so than their previously stated GTX 970 – Core i5 4590 ‘recommend spec’ that is.
