Earlier this month we saw a slew of new Oculus Touch game announcements. Many of these new VR titles, which benefit from funding or publishing (or both) by Oculus, will launch exclusively for the Rift and Touch. And while the company has come under fire for that practice in the past, Oculus’ Head of Content defends the decision as the right approach to get the VR market moving.
There’s been a couple of key developments in the evolution of WebVR during the month of October. First, Nate Mitchell announced during his Oculus Connect 3 keynote that Oculus will be supporting the WebVR ecosystem with the React VR framework and a VR-enabled browser called Carmel. And then on October 19th and 20th, there was a historic W3C Workshop on Web & Virtual Reality where all of the major VR players gathered in San Jose to hash out the WebVR web standards for delivering VR and AR applications over the web. Some the participating companies included Mozilla, Google, Samsung, Oculus, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Valve, Sony, Yahoo, Unity, Intel, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, HP, Dolby, High Fidelity, JanusVR, and Sketchfab. With Oculus’ public support and the gathering momentum around delivering VR over the web, WebVR hit an inflection point of buy-in and momentum such that the future of the metaverse will more likely be based upon the principles of the open web rather than driven by a more closed, walled garden application ecosystem.
In our final developer diary from the team behind Rebellion’s PlayStation VR launch title Battlezone, Lead Artist on Sun He reflects on how they developed and executed on the artistic ethos behind the game.
It’s been a long time coming, but PlayStation VR is finally here. As the least expensive option among the top three contenders, not to mention a 40+ million install base of PS4 owners, many think that PSVR could be the best selling VR headset of 2016. As far as search trends are concerned, consumers seem highly interested amid the headset’s launch.
With industries outside of entertainment expected to account for the majority of virtual reality industry revenues, the question of utility seems ever-pressing. How can virtual reality transcend novelty into utility and become truly useful?
If Playstation VR is Sony’s maiden voyage into virtual reality gaming, Batman: Arkham VR is a strong wind to cast off with. Developed by Rocksteady Studios, the game immerses you the moment you lock on your headset, or rather don the cowl. At face value Batman: Arkham VR offers the Arkham universe’s defined aesthetic and cast of quality voice actors from a very different perspective.
Stephanie Hurlburt is a low-level graphics engineer who has previously worked on the Unity Game Engine, Oculus Medium, and Intel’s Project Alloy, and now she’s creating on a texture compression product called Basis at her company Binomial. I had a chance to catch up with her at PAX West, and we take a bit of a deep dive into the graphics pipeline and some of her VR optimization tools and processes. We also talk about how to determine whether an experience is CPU-bound or GPU-bound, an open source game engine being built by Intel, the future of real-time ray tracing in games like Tomorrow Children & Dreams, and why she sees texture compression as a bottleneck in the graphics pipeline worth persuing for the future of wireless streaming in VR.
Google started its virtual reality initiatives early but slowly, announcing the now widely known Cardboard program way back in 2014. As the company nears the launch of Daydream, the next stage in their VR plans, they’re adding significantly to their VR talent pool.
Microsoft Research has devised two novel methods for more realistic haptic feedback on virtual reality controllers. They call it NormalTouch and TextureTouch.
A new trailer for Ghostbusters: Dimension, a location-based VR attraction produced by The VOID, shows what it’s like to step inside a VR experience that mixes a physical environment with virtual visuals.
Squanchtendo Games has released, Accounting, their first game as a new studio. While the game was originally scheduled for release in September, Squanchetendo decided to take a couple of extra weeks to squeeze in a bit more polish, and the game is now available on Steam.
There isn’t a studio that can claim to be ‘The Pixar of VR’ just yet, but many heavy hitters in traditional media and tech are taking notice of the growth potential of animated films in VR, and specifically in Baobab Studios, the VR film studio known for animated shorts INVASION! and sequel ASTEROIDS!. Baobab today announced the close of $25 Million in Series B funding, bringing total funding to date to $31 Million.
After years of previews and teasers, Ubisoft make their long anticipated VR debut on Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR. Eagle Flight has all the hallmarks of being a toe in the water for Ubisoft, but the VR world may feel the ripples for some time to come.
Joel Breton is the Vice President VR Content at HTC, and I had a chance to catch up with him at the Casual Connect conference in July to talk about the different industry verticals that they’ve identified. These include commerce, games, healthcare, education, live video/events/sports, design/engineering/tools, media, military/simulation, theme parks, and social. Some of the biggest areas of adoption with the Vive have been in engineering and design companies where they’ve been able to essentially replace million-dollar CAVE systems with the Vive. And we also talk about how each of the existing video game genres have been able to be translated into VR to varying degrees of success, and whether or not he sees any new genres unique to VR emerge yet. It’s an interesting discussion about the overall VR ecosystem, and how HTC has started to break it up into these different VR business verticals.
With a virtual reality camera, you can capture the whole world around you in a 360 degree videosphere. VR filmmaking is seeing rapid innovation, meaning that there are more 360-degree cameras on the market now than ever before, geared at everyone from intrigued consumers to high-end professionals. This overview is designed to give you solid starting points across a range of options.
