Ripcoil is a two-player duelling game from Oculus Studios and Sanzaru Games, and as one of 30 titles coming to Touch later this year, it’s poised to help fill the growing VR eSports genre. I got a crack at the demo at this year’s Gamescom, and proved that I am much better at tossing things in VR than I am in real life.
Drive Club VR from Reflections is due to land on PlayStation 4 within the launch window beginning October 13, and this new hands-on gameplay footage demonstrate why it’s becoming one of the most hotly anticipated titles for any VR platform.
An HTC Vive customer has posted images of a replacement headset cable which looks to significantly reduce the size and weight of the original.
The Wolfe is a new project about to hit Kickstarter that claims to offer a hardware solution to Macbook owners wanting to run virtual reality applications, an external Thunderbolt connected GPU.
The artful and delightful virtual reality ballet La Peri has has been re-launched with a new name, adding Lord of the Rings voice actor John Rhys-Davies alongside numerous other enhancements in this unique ‘must own’ VR experience, now known as Firebird: La Péri.
At the company’s annual I/O conference, Google announced the Daydream VR platform and mobile headset that will be coming to the latest Android phones later this year. There’s a DIY dev kit that you can start using today to start developing Daydream-ready apps, and Google has also released a Google VR Unity SDK that includes a number of DaydreamLabs Controller Playground examples to demonstrate different user interactions with the 3DOF controller.
Stunlock Studio’s PvP brawler Battlerite has just received a state-of-the-art feature update that puts it toe to toe with DOTA 2. A new VR spectator and camera system that seems to trump even Valve’s own.
AMD has announced TrueAudio Next a “scalable” physics-based audio rendering engine for generating environmentally accurate, GPU accelerated audio for virtual reality.
Guns are cool. Magic is cool. Motion controls are cool. Combine all three with virtual reality and you have a prototype experience that looks, well, really cool!
As the launch of Oculus Touch approaches later this year, the company is sticking firm to its plan to focus on standing, front-facing VR experiences for motion input. Though it’s claimed that Touch can match the ‘roomscale’ tracking of the HTC Vive, Oculus is skeptical that such a large tracking space will appeal widely to customers.
Following the unfortunate closure of developer Evolution Studios earlier this year, the fate of the VR version of their 2014 PS4 exclusive Driveclub was unclear, but thankfully work has continued by an internal Sony team, and the game is expected to arrive by the end of the year.
The artist Zenka has been documenting the evolution of virtual reality by making raku sculptures of VR headsets. She’s also created an interactive timeline of some of the major VR and AR headsets. Technology has been progressing so quickly that looking back at cell phones from 10-20 years ago starts to feel like ancient history. Zenka feels the same way about VR and AR headsets as we start to see more patents like Sony’s smart eye contacts or Google’s cyborg eye implants.
With a couple of weeks remaining in the current season, sim racing enthusiasts are beginning to anticipate iRacing’s next quarterly update, and Road to VR has received confirmation that it will include expanded VR support. Having rolled out its initial consumer VR update in June for the Oculus Rift, iRacing will add support for the HTC Vive headset in the next build, tentatively scheduled for September 6th.
Crossout, the upcoming free-to-play vehicle combat game from the makers of War Thunder (2012), is coming to VR, and while there isn’t a verifiable timeline for public release on the table just yet, we got a first look at an early version of the game’s VR mode, which incorporates Oculus Touch, at this year’s Gamescom in Cologne, Germany.
Bigscreen, the social VR app which brings you and your computer’s desktop into VR with your friends, is launching on Oculus Home today and getting an update with new features and better performance.
