Tilt Brush, the virtual reality paint application from Google, saw an update today that brought with it a whole new ‘audio reactive mode’—now making your trippy creations pulse to the beat of your own music collection.
Samsung today announced a new version of their Gear VR headset with a wider field of view. The headset is compatible with both the Note 7’s new USB Type-C connector as well as micro-USB, offering support for all phones from the prior version of the headset.
Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward has been fascinated by the idea of virtual reality since he first read Snow Crash as a teenager. He backed the Oculus Kickstarter, and has been exploring many of the early VR prototypes over the last three years and started to create interactive stories. Little Pink Best Buds has some VR components and was created as a part of Double Fine’s 2-week Amnesia Fortnight game jam in 2014. Pen is currently exploring the bounds of identity in VR through a new adventure game and story that he’s working on, and he’s been taking inspiration from many different early VR prototypes but especially the out-of-body experiences he had in Robin Arnott’s Sound Self VR experience.
I had a chance to catch up with Pen at SIGGRAPH where he talked about Sound Self, contrasting his ability to express identity in real versus virtual spaces, how VR allows him to get out of his head, recreating a scene at the Black Sun virtual nightclub from Snow Crash, his explorations in social VR, and where he sees the metaverse is heading.
‘Wizard of Oz’ VR experiences use improv actors to drive either a single or multiple virtual characters. This technique is commonly used within VR training applications where it’s cheaper to have a single actor puppeting multiple virtual characters rather than hiring multiple actors in order to create a sense of social presence. The ‘interactors’ driving the content of the experience are able to use a set of keyboard commands in order to drive pre-rendered gestures and animations, or they can also do more sophisticated motion capture and virtual embodiment.
The much anticipated New Retro Arcade Neon, a totally revamped version of the lauded virtual reality arcade, finally lands on Steam today, built to take advantage of the HTC Vive.
Catherine Rehwinkel is working on creating a conceptual framework that enables storytellers to storyboard linear stories in VR. She’s a filmmaker who recently finished a master’s degree computational & systems thinking at NYU. She’s been inspired by Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” feminist theories that take into account how location and place impact our perspective on events, and she’s intrigued by VR stories that grow and evolve when you watch them from different locations.
This video showcases a new redirected walking implementation project that creates an “unlimited” virtual corridor in a space just 5 x 7 metres in size.
Samsung has a special event coming up on Tuesday August 2nd at which it’s widely it’ll launch not only the latest in its ‘Note’ line of phablets, but also a brand new Gear VR headset to match. This is (probably) what it looks like.
HTC has announced that in response to “recent currency valuation changed” the UK price of their HTC Vive VR system will see a significant £70 increase come August 1st to £759.
One of the biggest limitations of current VR technology is the inability to convey a realistic and complete sense of touch. So far, the most you would feel from a modern consumer VR system, like the HTC Vive, is vibration through a controller. From what we saw at SIGGRAPH 2016, it seems that the logical next step just is to produce more kinds of vibrations, at more points around the body, all synced with proper visuals and sound in VR.
Minecraft is finally on its way for the Oculus Rift as the Windows 10 version of the mega hit social world-building game is due to add VR support “in the coming weeks”.
Dota 2 released free DLC yesterday that lets you join a sort of multi-user VR spectator lounge where you can watch live and recorded matches from a movie theater-sized screen, or get down on the ground right in the midst of the action. Here we take a quick look to see Valve’s first public iteration of the Dota VR Hub.
We’ve been keeping an eye on Everspace, the new VR-enabled space combat shooter from Rockfish, for a while now and it looks as if the company are finally ready to unleash the title on the world as the beta begins today.
In a detailed component teardown, analysis of the components that comprise Oculus’ first consumer VR headset suggest a predictably complex design with the costs of individual parts totalling $200.
