Minecraft developer Mojang has confirmed that the popular sandbox game is finally coming to the Oculus Rift next week, and further that the game would get support for Oculus’ Touch VR controllers later this year.
When Ben Throop went to the Boston VR hackathon in June 2014, he didn’t know that Valve was going to be showing off some prototype VR hardware that had positional tracking. At this point the Oculus DK2 had not shipped yet, and so he was able to build a VR game using his soccer experience to head soccer balls into a goal. He wanted to see how it felt, and was surprised that it was actually a lot of fun. He decided to continue working on it, and last year the game, Headmaster, was first announced at E3 as a PlayStation VR launch title. Frame Interactive was back again this year at E3 showing off the game at PlayStation VR’s booth.
The venerable iFixit has done it again: taken a brand new, perfectly good VR headset and ripped it apart for our pleasure.
Envelop, the virtual reality desktop platform for Windows, has launched as a public beta for anyone with a Vive or Rift to enjoy.
Wake Up from Austrian developers Black Cell is a new, surreal subversion of the traditional puzzle and exploration genres sporting some beautiful art direction and some arresting sound design.
Aerofly from developers IPACS is a flight simulator which aims to bring realistic visuals to the VR-enabled civilian flight-sim genre, and it looks stunning.
VR Arcades are beginning to make their spread across the US, offering users timed access to consumer VR systems and an array of games.
One of the gold standards of a VR experience is being able to achieve Presence, but Presence is an elusive concept to precisely define. Mel Slater is one of the leading researchers into Presence and says that it’s a combination of the ‘Place Illusion’ and ‘Presence Illusion’, which Richard Skarbez elaborates by saying that the Place Illusion represents the degree of immersion that you feel by being transported to another place, and the Plausibility Illusion is the degree to which you feel that that the overall scene matches your expectations for coherence.
Frank He goes hands on with Wands, a new PvP Gear VR title from NUX Studios which pitches you against your opponent in a magical duel to the death.
At the opening ceremony of Valve’s DOTA 2 tournament, Valve head Gabe Newell explained that he’s been focusing much of his attention on the company’s VR initiatives.
I had a chance to catch up with AMD’s Roy Taylor, VP of Alliances, Content, and VR, at VRLA to hear more about AMD’s recent announcements, their open source philosophy, their support for VR storytellers, and the upcoming VR on the Lot event on October 13 & 14th that will be helping to educate the film industry about VR.
NextVR, a firm specializing in live VR streaming, has today announced an $80 million Series B investment with which the company aims to expand international operations.
People were waiting in lines for over an hour to see Pearl both at SIGGRAPH and VRLA, which is one of the best narrative VR experiences that I’ve seen so far. The central character in the story is a car named Pearl who gives selfless service to her father and daughter musician owners. The experience traces Pearl’s selfless service spanning a wide range of emotional memories doing mundane chores, road trip adventures, and key turning points in their lives. It takes inspiration from Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, and it proved to be a powerful, moving, and emotional experience for many people watching it was SIGGRAPH and VRLA.
OSVR is an open source software platform and VR headset. Sensics and Razer launched OSVR 18 months ago with the intent of democratizing VR. Our goal is to provide an open alternative to walled-garden, single-device approaches.
