Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Ubisoft’s upcoming collaborative space adventure, sadly won’t be here for the November 29th launch date as promised, so if you wanted to give that special someone a Trek-themed Christmas present, you may need to rethink your options. The game is now slated to release on March 14th, 2017.
Valve opened up their SteamVR tracking technology for third-party development in August, and since then, 50 developers have completed the mandatory training course provided by Synapse, the first company to enter the field.
Obduction, the highly rated first-person adventure game from Cyan, the makers of Riven (1997) and Myst (1993), has been available on traditional monitors for quite some time now, but what virtual reality enthusiasts have been salivating over is the pre-release VR version we got our hands on back in late August. Now you can rest easy, because Cyan has just announced on their Kickstarter page that the Oculus Rift version of the game is coming on the 31st of October, the 19th anniversary of the release of Riven.
Xiaomi today unveiled a low-cost VR headset alongside their Mi Note 2 smartphone at the company’s Mi Product Launch Event in Beijing. Much like Samsung Gear VR, Mi VR features a built-in dedicated motion sensor for low latency head-tracking and only works with a select number of the company’s phones.
Just what Google has brewing in their skunkworks, we can’t say for sure, but with their most recent acquisition of Eyefluence, a company that builds eye-tracking technology for VR headsets, it seems Google is getting ever deeper into what’s largely considered ‘the next generation’ of dedicated VR hardware.
Cognitive VR is an VR analytics platform that has an impressive system for visualizing a player’s movements and gaze within a 3D representation of a VR experience. Their SceneExplorer tool translates the 3D geometry from a Unity or Unreal experience into a WebGL mesh that can be shared within a web browser. It allows VR developers to quickly and intuitively visualize how players are moving around and what they’re looking at, but also helps to identify performance bottlenecks based upon a wide range of different hardware configurations.
Hammerhead VR, the creators of the splendidly creepy ABE VR, a short VR film that puts you at the mercy of a robot gone awry, today revealed a first-person horror game called Syren.
Getting into a live show with your favorite celebrity isn’t that tough if you live in the entertainment epicenters of L.A. or New York, but this week AltspaceVR, the social VR platform, is bringing the entertainers to you. Like all AltspaceVR performances and meetups, you’ll be able to join with Gear VR, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and traditional monitors using PC or Mac.
Earlier this month we saw a slew of new Oculus Touch game announcements. Many of these new VR titles, which benefit from funding or publishing (or both) by Oculus, will launch exclusively for the Rift and Touch. And while the company has come under fire for that practice in the past, Oculus’ Head of Content defends the decision as the right approach to get the VR market moving.
There’s been a couple of key developments in the evolution of WebVR during the month of October. First, Nate Mitchell announced during his Oculus Connect 3 keynote that Oculus will be supporting the WebVR ecosystem with the React VR framework and a VR-enabled browser called Carmel. And then on October 19th and 20th, there was a historic W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality where all of the major VR players gathered in San Jose to hash out the WebVR web standards for delivering VR and AR applications over the web. Some the participating companies included Mozilla, Google, Samsung, Oculus, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Valve, Sony, Yahoo, Unity, Intel, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, HP, Dolby, High Fidelity, JanusVR, and Sketchfab. With Oculus’ public support and the gathering momentum around delivering VR over the web, WebVR hit an inflection point of buy-in and momentum such that the future of the metaverse will more likely be based upon the principles of the open web rather than driven by a more closed, walled garden application ecosystem.
In our final developer diary from the team behind Rebellion’s PlayStation VR launch title Battlezone, Lead Artist on Sun He reflects on how they developed and executed on the artistic ethos behind the game.
It’s been a long time coming, but PlayStation VR is finally here. As the least expensive option among the top three contenders, not to mention a 40+ million install base of PS4 owners, many think that PSVR could be the best selling VR headset of 2016. As far as search trends are concerned, consumers seem highly interested amid the headset’s launch.
With industries outside of entertainment expected to account for the majority of virtual reality industry revenues, the question of utility seems ever-pressing. How can virtual reality transcend novelty into utility and become truly useful?
If Playstation VR is Sony’s maiden voyage into virtual reality gaming, Batman: Arkham VR is a strong wind to cast off with. Developed by Rocksteady Studios, the game immerses you the moment you lock on your headset, or rather don the cowl. At face value Batman: Arkham VR offers the Arkham universe’s defined aesthetic and cast of quality voice actors from a very different perspective.
Stephanie Hurlburt is a low-level graphics engineer who has previously worked on the Unity Game Engine, Oculus Medium, and Intel’s Project Alloy, and now she’s creating on a texture compression product called Basis at her company Binomial. I had a chance to catch up with her at PAX West, and we take a bit of a deep dive into the graphics pipeline and some of her VR optimization tools and processes. We also talk about how to determine whether an experience is CPU-bound or GPU-bound, an open source game engine being built by Intel, the future of real-time ray tracing in games like Tomorrow Children & Dreams, and why she sees texture compression as a bottleneck in the graphics pipeline worth persuing for the future of wireless streaming in VR.
