We reported recently on the official Windows 10 version of the social gaming phenomenon Minecraft receiving Oculus Rift headset support. Microsoft have just announced that the game will also receive support for Oculus’ VR motion controllers ‘Touch’ on October 18th which may be further evidence of an October release for the devices.
Alien: Isolation is one of the best VR games never released. We look back at why the title was so revered by VR enthusiasts and that there’s now finally hope we’ll see an official VR release after all.
MNGOVR’s new title for HTC Vive is a wildly colourful and fantastically fun PVP title which seemingly draws inspiration from the Hudson Soft classic Bomberman and is at once wonderfully simple and frantically addictive.
Eyes have been on Palmer Luckey, the founder of Facebook-owned Oculus, following an article linking him to ‘Nimble America’, a polarizing political group that’s been described as part of the fringe ‘alt-right’. Following developer and community backlash, Luckey has issued an apology and a denial of some of the claims made against him.
SEA VR, the largest VR conference in the Pacific Northwest, has renamed itself as the “Immerse Technology Summit,” and will be held this year on October 11th in Bellevue, Washington. The summit organizers say they dropped the “VR” moniker in order to broaden the scope of the event to include augmented and mixed reality as well.
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart gave “The Mother of All Demos” where he gave the first public demonstration of a mouse as a computer control device. For the last 48 years, the mouse and keyboard have remained the primary input devices for human-computer interaction. Virtual and augmented reality represent a new immersive computing paradigm where the equivalent 3D user interfaces are being continually refined as there is a burst of innovation with new input devices.
Capcom brought its Resident Evil VII “Kitchen” demo to PAX West this year, and Road to VR went hands on to try it out. The demo takes place before the events of Resident Evil VII’s main storyline, and is very much intended for mature audiences only.
I had a chance to do a demo of Eyefluence, which has created a new model for eye interactions within virtual and augmented reality apps. Rather than using the normal eye interaction paradigm of dwelling focus or explicitly winking to select, Eyefluence has developed a more comfortable way to trigger discrete actions with a selection system that’s triggered through natural eye movements. At times it felt magical to feel like the technology was almost reading my mind, while other times it was clear that this is still an early iteration of an emerging visual language that’s is still being developed and defined.
I had a chance to talk with Jim Marggraff, the CEO and founder of Eyefluence, at TechCrunch Disrupt last week where we talked about the strengths and weaknesses of their eye interaction model, as well as some of the applications that were prototyped within the demo.
Taipei based virtual reality company Futuretown is planning to build a out of home destination where you can experience custom built VR game experiences built for and enhanced by 3 different motion platforms.
Ambitious Sci-fi adventure game Loading Human from developers Untold Games is one of the first made-for-VR titles we covered and it’s now been confirmed to be one of the day-one launch titles for the forthcoming PlayStation VR headset on October 13th.
When I was at SIGGRAPH this year, one of the hottest topics was figuring out the workflows for how to deal with the complexity of capturing, processing, and distributing volumetric digital light fields. Otoy’s Jules Urbach had a lot of insights, and a number of different high profile VR agencies like Framestore VR appear to be secretly working on their own processes for how to best capture and display live action volumetric capture.
Augmented reality, while growing in buzz, has been around in some form or another for more than two decades. But immersive head-mounted AR for consumers has had one major hurdle that Microsoft may have just solved.
Thalmic Labs, makers of the gesture control armband MYO may be working on a new VR controller, a wristband device which senses the position of your fingers. The company is teasing new products after closing a whopping $120 million Series B investment.
