Futuremark have now released the full version of their long awaited, dedicated virtual reality benchmark, VRMark. And, after months of research and development, the company has found itself having to redefine its own views on how the difficult subject of VR performance testing should be tackled.
The first ever Develop:VR conference debuts in London tomorrow, December 1st. We preview the event by speaking with five speakers presenting at the show.
I had a chance to talk about storytelling in VR with three of the co-founders of Oculus Story Studio during Oculus Connect 3. Saschka Unseld, Maxwell Planck, and Edward Saatchi were showing off a preview of their third VR experience Dear Angelica as well as their immersive storytelling tool of Quill, which enabled them to create a VR narrative experience entirely within VR.
Valve is continuing to improve upon the design of the ‘Lighthouse’ Base Stations, the laser-beacons that form a crucial part of the SteamVR Tracking system. Future iterations are expected to become dramatically simplified, reducing size, noise, and perhaps most importantly, cost.
Pinball FX2 VR arrives tomorrow on Vive and PlayStation VR along with a popular new The Walking Dead themed machine. Originally a launch title for the Oculus Rift, the game will now be available on all three major VR platforms. We take a look at Pinball FX2 VR on the HTC Vive.
The Steam Autumn sale is once again upon us, and this time around this time Valve have flagged close to a whopping 300 VR titles for discounts, including games that support both the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and OSVR.
JDI, a display conglomerate consisting of the display businesses of Sony, Toshiba, and Hitachi, announced this week the development of ultra high resolution panels that are made specifically for virtual reality headsets.
Oculus has officially confirmed that Toybox, the highly anticipated multiplayer sandbox application built from the ground up to show off the Oculus Touch motion controllers, will be made available to every touch owner for free after launch.
Oculus dropped prices on several VR titles on their store for Thanksgiving with those prices likely to persist through the weekend until Cyber Monday. Here’s what’s on offer.
The Moto Z and Moto Z Force smartphones are the first devices after the Pixel and Pixel XL to be recognised by Google as ‘Daydream-ready’. Daydream VR is Google’s new mobile VR platform built into the latest version of Android.
In perhaps the best Rift bundle we’ve seen yet, you can pick up a VR Ready PC and Oculus Rift headset for $999 today only, plus $160 in games and store credit.
In a compatibility test application from recent Windows 10 test builds, Microsoft has revealed some minimum specs for Windows Holographic, the Windows 10 interface and platform for VR and AR devices which will include inexpensive headsets from big manufacturers.
The language and terminology around virtual reality is still evolving, but the VR community has been settling into using the phrase ‘VR experience’ in order to describe the process of a going through a piece of virtual reality content. I had a friend/business partner over who got her Ph.D. in German literature, and she had a lot of really interesting insights about how the German language actually has two separate words for experience with “Erfahrung” and “Erlebnis.”
In the company’s most recent earnings call, HTC confirmed it’s making a profit on each Vive headset sold, and that the company has sold “much more” than a widely reported 140,000 units.
The long anticipated Oculus Touch controllers launch on December 6th. If you’re just putting in your pre-order with Oculus today, you may not have your hands on the device until later in the month. Other retailers may still have unordered stock.
