Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland today revealed a teaser for an upcoming VR game called Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality based on the cartoon’s lovably weird universe. The HTC Vive demo of the game will make its debut at this year’s Comic-Con in San Diego.
Pokémon Go, the latest “AR” infused sequel to the classic Nintendo franchise is sweeping the world on mobile phone platforms. But what would it look like running on a dedicated augmented reality headset? Developer CapitolaVR decided to find out by building a Pokemon Go inspired test game for their brand new Microsoft HoloLens.
Sony is gearing up for the PlayStation VR’s launch this October, but you shouldn’t be boxing up your DualShock 4 gamepad in favor of the Move motion controller just yet. According to a statement from Sony issued to Eurogamer, you’ll be able use the DS4 in all PSVR games to come.
Pete Moss is known as the “VR Dude” within Unity, and has long seen the potential of virtual reality. He’s really been on the frontlines of this virtual reality revolution over the past 3-4 years creating a bridge between the hardware manufacturers and content creators. I had a chance to sit down with Pete at the Intel Buzz Workshop a few weeks back to let him reflect on the consumer launch of virtual reality, and some of the emerging trends that he sees. VR locomotion is still a big open problem that he’s actively researching, and he encourages people to reach to him if you have innovative ideas. He also shares his perspective of the future of audio in VR, and the vital role that VR artists will play in expanding our minds.
Codemasters have responded officially to Road to VR on why DiRT Rally, which recently received Oculus Rift VR support, lacks support for the rival SteamVR based HTC Vive system.
Nvidia’s VR Funhouse is a virtual sandbox chasing reality, one designed to demonstrate how GPU accelerated physics can enhance presence in immersive environments. It’s released for free today on Steam, but is it any fun?
Unity Technologies has announced a $181 million Series C investment led by DFJ Growth, a venture capital firm with the likes of Twitter and Tesla in their portfolio, in order to continue their dominance of the game engine market. Unity claims to have 45% of the “full feature game engine market” and even more in the mobile 3D gaming space (yes, Pokémon Go is running on Unity).
VRLA Summer Expo is back and aims to be bigger and better than ever. Coming to the LA Convention Center August 5th and 6th, the event we be host to keynote speaker Reggie Watts, a ‘VR Rave’, and more than 100 VR and AR exhibitors. Tickets are on sale now and 50 Road to VR readers can save 15% on Pro Passes to the event.
Two years ago, not very many people were thinking about how important audio was going to be for consumer VR. Jason Riggs was pitching what would eventually become OSSIC by claiming that it was going to be the Oculus for audio headphones. Two years later, his prophecy came true when his OSSIC X Headphones raised over $2.7 million dollars on Kickstarter, surpassing Oculus as the largest virtual reality crowdfunding campaign ever.
There’s clearly a lot of demand for high-end, immersive audio for VR, and Jason’s vision for where he wants to see the future of spatialized audio go has started to be realized. Beyond the VR applications of OSSIC X headphones, part of their success was that it could also have an immediate impact on existing 2D games with spatialized sound as well as recreating the sound of a home theater sound system.
I had a chance to catch up with OSSIC founder and CEO Jason Riggs at SVVR Conference where we talked about the technology behind OSSIC, dynamic HRTF measurements, how to quantitatively and qualitatively measure the accuracy of their 3D audio solution, and the challenges facing a potential open standard for 3D audio and that contain audio objects.
Less than 24 hours after release, DiRT Rally VR has received support from Revive, allowing HTC Vive owners to enjoy Codemasters’ excellent racing title on their VR headsets.
Oculus Touch isn’t here for consumers just yet, as the company just narrowed their launch window down to Q4 of this year. But if you’re a developer, you might just get your hands on a Touch dev kit in the very near future.
Looking to put the Rift launch behind them, a fiasco that had many pre-order customers waiting several months for their headsets to arrive at their doorstep, Oculus today revealed that they’ve finally caught up to demand, and will be shipping new orders as soon as they receive them.
If you’re panning on attending this year’s Oculus Connect developer conference in San Jose, CA, you can now officially mark your calendars for October 5-7 for what Oculus is billing as their “largest developer conference yet.”
Sound is probably the second most important part of creating a compelling immersive VR experience, but it’s also usually put off to the end as an afterthought. The visual system is so dominant that this is not a huge surprise, but I thought that it’d be worth focusing on trends of immersive sound on the next four episodes of the Voices of VR podcast starting with Dolby Atmos’ solution for creating spatialized sound with audio objects.
Just as Unity and Unreal are able to create 3D sound environments for interactive games, Dolby Atmos has an ProTools plug-in with a 3D interface that allows you to mix 3D audio objects for narrative, 360-video content. I had a chance to catch up with Dolby Lab’s Director of Virtual and Augmented Reality Joel Susal to talk about their audio spatialization solution, how it’s being used in both Hollywood Blockbusters and cutting-edge narrative VR experiences, and why it’s important to have granular control over individual audio object files rather than just relying upon 4-channel, ambisonic sound fields for 360 video productions.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I’ve explored audio in VR in previous episodes including in episode #222 with Jaunt’s Arthur van Hoff, episode #80 with AJ Campbell, and in episode #232 with Two Big Ears & their Spatial Workstation, which has since been bought by Facebook.
Here’s a trailer with a demo of a Dolby Atmos sound mix
Here’s the highlights from the Sundance panel on Immersive Sound for Virtual Reality
Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
