The Game Awards 2016 is building towards its third year, scheduled for December 1st at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. Spiritual successor to the ten-year run of the Spike Video Game Awards, The Game Awards is considered the biggest annual award event for the video game industry, and 2016 promises to be bigger than ever.
Google announced at the W3C WebVR workshop in October that they would be shipping a WebVR-enabled Chromium browser in Q1 of 2017. I had a chance to catch up with Google’s Josh Carpenter last week to talk about some of the work that Google is doing to enable innovation on the open web, and more about his W3C talk on HTML, CSS & VR and some of Google’s early experiments with hybrid apps that combine OpenGL with web technologies.
Ubisoft today rolled out free VR support for Trackmania Turbo, the latest installment in the online multiplayer arcade racer series. The update is now available for owners of the game on PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Pokémon GO isn’t exactly what we’d call augmented reality—based on the game’s (and smartphone’s) lack of computer vision and environmental mapping—but fans of the megalithic pocket monster franchise aren’t sitting on their hands waiting for Nintendo or Niantic to build a real augmented reality version of Pokémon. Case in point: KennyWdev and Joshua Liew’s imagined AR battle system for Microsoft HoloLens, aptly named PokéLens.
Announced just last week, Microsoft’s Surface Studio all-in-one computer has been met with excitement and touted as an example of the company’s new approach to innovation. With a mobile GPU on board, you shouldn’t expect to be able to run the most demanding VR titles, but Microsoft says Surface Studio will be able to manage some VR experiences.
WebVR is gaining significant momentum; last month the biggest players in the browse space came together to discuss the future of VR on the web at the W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality. There, Google said that the company soon plans to ship a public version of Chrome on Android with support for WebVR 1.1.
Adobe have down off their solution for editing immersive 360 VR videos within VR itself as they took to the stage at their annual ‘MAX’ event last week to demonstrate their prototype in-VR editor for Premiere, ‘CloverVR’.
Hot on the heels of Sony’s recent PlayStation 4 powered PSVR VR headset Launch, the next, more powerful iteration of the PS4 console will launch on November 10th and Sony have announced the games set to feature ‘Pro’ enhancements, including 13 for PlayStation VR.
Valve has announced a new ‘Site Licensing’ model which allows businesses interested in providing VR experiences to customers as an out of home experience. It seems the company have their sights on SteamVR powering a renaissance in VR-enabled Cybercafés.
The annual presentation at Oculus Connect by Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist at Oculus, is always a highlight of the company’s annual developer event, projecting a forward-thinking and ever inspirational look at the future of virtual reality. This time, at Oculus Connect 3, he made some bold, specific predictions about the state of VR in five years.
A hardware launch wouldn’t be complete without an iFixit teardown, and the most recent VR device on their operating table is Sony’s PlayStation VR.
Some of the earliest experiments of making VR a first-class citizen on the web originated at Mozilla in 2014. Then the WebVR spec was drafted in a collaboration between Mozilla and Google’s implementations. There’s been a lot of excitement and momentum building around WebVR over the last couple of months first with the WebVR announcements by Oculus at Oculus Connect 3, and then with over 140 WebVR developers meeting for a W3C workshop on WebVR that happened on October 19th & 20th.
There’s been a lot of talk lately (including from yours truly), about the impressive comfort of Sony’s PlayStation VR headset, but Idealens K2, a mobile all-in-one VR headset out of China, features a promising new ergonomic approach that might be the most comfortable I’ve ever worn.
Got an idea for how virtual reality could revolutionize education? The White House suggests six ways you could get funding to make it a reality.
