Valve’s annual Steam Dev Days event is underway and news about how the company is investing in VR’s future is seeping out. One interesting development is that they’re reportedly investing in 60Ghz wireless video streaming specialists Nitero, with a view to bringing wireless VR to their virtual reality offerings.
At GTC Europe in Amsterdam last month, NVIDIA’s ‘VR Village’ was host to a number of cutting-edge virtual reality demos, many of which we’ve had our hands on before. But there was something new being shown behind closed doors.
Valve have revealed that their room-scale tracking technology SteamVR has now been licensed to over 300 companies, many of which plan to release products integrating the tech in 2017.
Epic Games has had a long history of releasing new demo content at big gaming and developer conferences to showcase the latest Oculus hardware, and this year was no different. Oculus Studios provided funding to further develop the Bullet Train demo from last year into a fully-fledged FPS game called Robo Recall. This demo had one of the most polished and mature game mechanics expanding upon the Bullet Train bullet capture-and-throw mechanic into new weapons and upclose hand-to-hand combat with stylized arcade AI robots gone rouge.
I had a chance to talk with Epic Games VR lead Nick Whiting and artist Jerome Platteaux about their design process, deeper intentions, and overall art style and direction of the game. They debuted a new locomotion technique that was designed to help subtly guide players to facing the true north of the front-facing cameras, and Nick admitted that there are some design constraints to creating a game with the Oculus’ recommended front-facing camera arrangement. Jerome also said that there are new gameplay options that open up with a potential third tracking camera, but they didn’t give any more specifics as to whether Robo Recall intends on supporting the optional room-scale type of gameplay.
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In the 2nd of our 3 part developer diary series from Battlezone developers Rebellion, Game Designer Grant Stewart writes on making levels that don’t just use VR, but also welcome you into the game world.
One of the flagship announcements at last week’s Oculus Connect developer conference, Epic Games’ Robo Recall is a slick, polished first person shooter built for Oculus’ forthcoming VR motion controllers Touch. Here’s 12 minutes of raw gameplay from the Connect 3 demo to give you some idea of what to expect when the game lands early next year (see embedded video at the top of this article).
A new annual conference from Greenlight Insights is angling itself to sate the growing desire for “actionable insights” from the rapidly expanding VR industry. The 2016 Virtual Reality Strategy Conference aims to layout the “new rules” of the VR economy.
In this episode of the Voices of VR podcast, I recap some of my highlights from Oculus Connect 3, but also dive into some of my biggest concerns and questions coming out of this year’s big developer conference. My two biggest concerns were the lowering of the minimum specification for an Oculus-ready machine, as well as some new announcements from Oculus about their support for room-scale VR.
Oculus Rift owners take note: pre-orders for Touch begin today at 12pm PT (your local time), including VR Sports Challenge, The Unspoken as well as an extra sensor and adapter for Rock Band VR. The pre-order bundle will cost $199.
Welcome to the 1st in our 3 part series of developer diaries from Rebellion covering the making of the forthcoming PlayStation VR title Battlezone, a reboot of the 1980 Atari arcade classic in virtual reality. In this entry, Senior Designer on Battlezone PSVR Tom Rigby discusses the critical need for human feedback when developing for a brand new entertainment medium.
The annual Proto Awards, set up to highlight and honour the best and brightest the VR industry has to offer, is over for another year, with Google’s Tilt Brush walking away as the overall winner. But who else made the grade? Here’s a breakdown of all the nominees and winners across all categories.
The long rumoured sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult sci-fi classic Blade Runner is coming soon and it’s to be joined by virtual reality experiences via Oculus.
Among the swath of announcements made at Oculus Connect 3, one of the fleeting but important pieces of content-related news is that Walt Disney Studios is working with Oculus to create a series of VR experiences based on iconic characters and franchises.
Oculus covered a lot of ground during their opening keynote at Oculus Connect 3 this week; among many exciting announcements, one of interest for Unreal Engine developers might be how Oculus says that they’ll cover the royalty fees for any Unreal Engine applications on their store, up to the first $5 million in gross revenue.
Jules Urbach, CEO of OTOY, believes lightfields are the endgame of virtual reality. Essentially a way to digitally record all light reflected from a real or virtual object, lightfields seemingly enable feats of technological magic, from being able to view near-photoreal quality scenes from any angle within the capture volume to actually being able to dynamically relight actors in real time. OTOY believes that lightfields solve many of VR’s rendering challenges and has been investing itself in them heavily. Road to VR guest reporter Nate Kozak spoke with Urbach about the company’s new lightfield streaming.
