Today marks the launch of Exemplar 2, the second generation of our high-end VR gaming PC designed for those who want to push the limits of immersion. Exemplar 2 Ultimate is Road to VR’s internal test bench for VR reviews and benchmarking.
When Derek Belch was a kicker on Stanford’s football team in 2007, he took a class with the Virtual Human Interaction Lab’s Jeremy Bailenson where he was exposed to virtual reality technologies for the first time. Belch asked Bailenson if it was possible to use VR to train football players, but the technology wasn’t ready yet back in 2004. Fast-forward six years, with Oculus Rift VR development kits readily available, Belch started a master’s thesis project with Bailenson to study how to use VR to train quarterbacks.
Seattle’s annual PAX West 2016 gaming convention starts tomorrow with VR once again expected to have a significant presence. So, here’s a reference guide on where to find VR on the show floor along with some handy expo floor maps to ease your itinerary planning.
While Oculus has been drumming up its soon to launch Touch VR controller for many months now, the company doesn’t expect motion input to supersede the gamepad gameplay that Rift users are using today.
For a while now we’ve been waiting for the industry to coalesce around a standard VR hardware platform. Now Qualcomm, a leading semiconductor company which regularly releases smartphone ‘reference’ platforms from which companies build their products, aims to fill that gap in the mobile VR space.
HypeVR is working to bring live-action volumetric 360 video to VR. The company’s crazy camera rig, built to capture the necessary data, is a mashup of high-end cameras and laser scanning tech.
Leap Motion has announced it’s to early access to the beta of its Interaction Engine, a set of systems designed to help developers implement compelling, realistic and hopefully frustration-free input with just their hands.
Good news for NVIDIA GPU owners today as Pool Nation VR was updated to include support for Multi Res Shading alongside other feature additions and improvements.
Steel Wool Studios has picked up a $5 million investment from HTC. The studio was formed in 2011 by Pixar and LucasArts alumni.
Google, who has now has several major VR initiatives underway, notes major gains in interest in virtual reality and 360 degree video capture and sharing. The company is now prompting brands to consider what role VR will play in their marketing strategies.
Sensomotoric Instruments (SMI) is a German-based eye tracking company who has released an eye tracking kit for the Oculus DK2 & Gear VR, and most recently for the HTC Vive. At SIGGRAPH this year, Nvidia was showing a foveated rendering demo where it only renders high resolution to the sections of the scene that you are actually looking at. It’s really an imperceptible difference that would allow mobile technologies to render higher resolution scenes, or potentially help make it more feasible to wirelessly transfer data to a desktop VR HMD.
Damaged Core is a first-person shooter set in the dingy near-future of a robot uprising. The Core, an artificial intelligence recently gone rogue, is destroying the Earth, and you, an AI program fighting on behalf of the humans, must hack your way closer to the Core by jumping from robot to robot.
Back toward the end of 2015, light field camera company Lytro announced a major turn toward the VR market with the introduction of ‘Immerge’, a light field camera made for capturing data which can be played back as VR video with positional tracking. Now the company is showing the first footage shot with the camera.
TheWave VR coordinated two days worth of DJs playing musical sets in the world’s first VR Rave at VRLA. It was TheWave’s first event since announcing that they raised a round of $2.5 million to build out an interactive, VR music concert platform. I previously had a conversation with TheWave co-founder Aaron Lemke at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference where they were showing off their musical content creation tools, but they’ve since shifted their focus on building out the social experience for watching live performances of electronic DJs.
