Arktika.1 is the VR debut for 4A Games, the developers bind the Metro series of first person shooters. The title is built from the ground up for Oculus Touch, here’s 17 minutes of the Oculus Connect 3 demo where the title made it’s debut.
Facebook, parent company of Oculus, is beginning to flex its virtual reality arm. The company wants to use the technology revolutionize how social interactions happen across the web, and we may see the first stages of that plan earlier than expected.
360 video is coming to Steam and it looks as if Valve are aiming high in terms of the quality they’re aiming to deliver to consumer VR headsets.
Loading Human is a first-person sci-fi adventure that, much like the pulp fiction space operas of years gone past, puts you in the shoes of a charming 22nd century astronaut straight out of space academy. Instead of launching into the far reaches of the known galaxy though, you’re ordered to report to your father’s polar base to help him recover the Quintessence, a powerful energy source that can reverse his rapidly declining health.
Sony is setting high near term sales figure expectations for PlayStation VR’s rollout.
Valve premiered a prototype of a new type of VR input controller at Steam Dev Days in order to get some preliminary feedback from developers. They’ve created a capacitive-touch controller that is attached to your hand so that you can open and close your hands to mimic the feeling of grabbing a tangible object. They used a modified scene from The Gallery, Episode 1 demo to show off this new controller, and I had a chance to Cloudhead Games President & Creative Director Denny Unger about it at the VR on the Lot conference. We talked about the Valve’s new input controller prototype, the growing ecosystem of lighthouse-tracked peripherals, his thoughts on the future of non-linear narrative, and an update about The Gallery, which recently won best narrative VR experience at the Proto Awards and has surpassed $1 million in sales.
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More photos of the new Vive controllers! #SteamDevDays #Vive #VR pic.twitter.com/o99QHPZvvD
— Shawn Whiting (@shawncwhiting) October 12, 2016
Nice hands-on demo video of the capacitive touch features the new SteamVR controllers by Valve's Jeremy Selan. https://t.co/6Wd2Jc6unk
— Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) October 13, 2016
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Long a point of contention, Oculus last week announced a welcome new stance: the Rift will be officially supporting 360 degree tracking and room-scale as part of the forthcoming Touch launch.
Until Dawn: Rush of Blood is a horror rail shooter launch title for PlayStation VR. It begins with a creepy carny warning you about the horrors that lie ahead. Once you ignore his warnings and accept the challenge of going on the ride, the cart you’re sitting on begins to move. As you’re maneuvered through the haunted house shooting ducks and targets with your two BB gun pistols something begins to change. With the flip of a switch the simple carnival ride turns into a fight for your life, putting you on a course through a maze of crazed clowns, demons and possessed hotel guests.
Penrose Studios’ Allumette launches on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR today. This real-time animated VR tale is beautifully crafted and aims for your heart strings, but does it hit its mark?
RollerForce attempts to blend gunplay with a rollercoaster. Following on from the atmospheric iOmoon, Headtrip Games’ latest wants to take you on a very different ride on the HTC Vive, with support “coming soon” for Oculus Rift with Touch.
The first chapter of Angels and Demigods, 7 Keys Studios’ lightly gamified, anime-style “VR visual novel,” is out, and four more chapters are waiting on funding from a Kickstarter launched September 28. Available for Vive via Steam, Cardboard via Android and iOS, and desktop via Mac OS and Windows, chapter one aims to expand to Samsung Gear soon.
Today at the Steam Dev Days conference in Seattle, Valve is showing off brand new prototypes of its Steam VR controllers.
Steam Dev Days, Valve’s annual developer conference, just started and from the tweets we’ve seen (no press allowed!) VR is getting the star treatment this year already.
Oculus Medium may be the first professional 3D modeling creation tool for the Oculus Touch controllers. It was created with the goal to democratize the process of creating 3D art and prototyping 3D-printed objects. The Medium developers didn’t set out to build a high-end industrial art tool, but early beta testers have been starting to integrate Medium within their professional 3D graphics pipelines.
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There have been a TON of improvements and UI developments to Medium over the last year, and it’s in the process of final improvements before being released with the Oculus Touch Controllers on December 6th. I had a chance to talk with Oculus Medium lead Brian Sharp about some of the design intentions behind Medium as well as some of the surprising ways that it’s already being used by professional artist like Goro Fujita. We talk about the evolution of the 3DUI, and how they wanted to stick to physical metaphors that anyone could understand rather than abstract concepts that only graphics professionals can grok. Medium is a great example of a VR program that demonstrates the power of immersive computing and how it can be much more intuitive and easy learn than previous 2D methods.
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
