Beginning on November 24th, HTC will give $100 off purchases of the Vive system, while stocks last. Software deals during the Black Friday weekend will also be available through HTC’s own VR app store, Viveport.
Launching later this year on Rift, Gear VR, and Vive, music VR platform MelodyVR is previewing a light version of its app across some 600 O2 stores in Germany in partnership with Telefónica. 42 of those stores will allow visitors to try the app on Samsung Gear VR headsets, where they can enjoy vantage points on concerts from the likes of Kygo, The Who, and the London Symphony Orchestra. In the remaining stores, the light version of the app will be shown by O2 Gurus.
As the launch of Oculus Touch nears, the company is lifting embargos on a number of Touch titles, including the hotly anticipated Oculus Medium.
BlazeRush, the 3rd person VR vehicle combat racer, has been a big hit with VR gamers for some time and now developers Targem Games want to take add a new, distinctly Rocket League dimension to the title with their latest add-on BlazeBowl.
Classic 80s Atari arcade game Paperboy is to get a spiritual (albeit commercially unrelated) successor in the form of a new Oculus Touch and HTC Vive title Special Delivery from developers Meerkat Gaming. Here’s what it looks like in action.
Ironbelly Studios and TectonicVR are bringing a new built-for-VR open world title to the HTC Vive, set within the medieval era, and it’s looking mighty promising too.
Out now on Steam Early Access, Overkill VR is a First-Person Shooter available for the HTC Vive. Developed by Starloop Studios and published by Game Troopers, it offers a large arsenal of upgradeable weapons, plenty of levels and varied boss battles.
Google Earth VR was launched this week to great excitement, except to Rift users who found out that the game wouldn’t work with their headset. Little more than a day later, a hack surfaced that adds compatibility for the Rift, Touch, and even Razer Hydra to Google Earth VR.
Oculus in a blog post has announced that Quill, their VR illustration software used for Dear Angelica, is going to launch as a free beta with the launch of their Touch controllers next month. This adds yet another free application to the lineup Oculus has prepared. Among those, there is also Oculus Medium, which, rather than painting or drawing in 3D, lets users sculpt and model. Both of these free programs look to enable a wide variety of artistic styles.
Late night talk show host Conan O’Brien visits YouTube Space New York to check out their mixed reality VR lab. Although he can’t avoid the low hanging fruit of VR porn jokes (NSFW), he does seem to have a good time.
Researchers at Stanford think that having a third arm in VR could make you a more efficient (virtual) human. So they’ve set out to learn what they can about the most effective means of controlling an extra limb in VR.
Tactical Haptics, a company pioneering a novel form of haptic feedback which can create compelling sensations that go far beyond rumble, announced today it has raised $2.2 million to create a development kit of a haptic VR controller as a stepping stone to an eventual consumer product.
V is a universal dashboard for virtual reality experiences which lets you load websites and webapps like Slack, Spotify, and Soundcloud inside of your favorite VR games. Today the software launches as a free open beta for the Rift.
NThe latest update to SteamVR adds asynchronous reprojection for Nvidia GPUs. Similar to Oculus’ asynchronous timewarp, it mitigates unwanted ‘judder’ when the hardware fails to maintain 90fps.
Google Earth VR has been one of the most mind-blowing experiences that I’ve had so far in VR, for so many different reasons. It’s felt like it’s been rewiring my brain to accommodate the new perspectives of the Earth in a way similar to what returning astronauts report as “The Overview Effect.” It’s also enabled me to navigate the Earth based upon natural landmarks and without seeing borders, and therefore start to cultivate a new type relationship with the Earth. It’s also allowed to find common ground with friends and strangers by sharing stories that are based upon geographic locations, and it’s one of the most intimate and powerful social VR experiences that I’ve had so far.
I had a chance to do an interview with Mike Podwal, Product Manager for Earth VR as well as Dominik Kaeser, Engineering Lead on Earth VR to ask them about their design process. They focused primarily on performance, comfortable navigation, and an overall immersive experience of the earth. They weighed the tradeoffs between simplicity vs. usefulness in looking at what features to implement, and very few of their beta testers requested an explicit search functionality. They instead preferred to do organic exploration and navigate based upon landmarks in a way that provides a new perspective and relationship with the Earth. In the future, they will be looking at the 2D version Google Earth for inspiration for new features such as annotation, but they also are open to feedback for the types of features that people are requesting. You can hear a lot more insights and stories behind the process of creating Google Earth VR in the interview below.
