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.
Striker VR’s ARENA Infinity is a haptic VR gun which can simulate various weapon fire modes and other haptic effects. After revealing the design of the accessory back in April, the company is now showing off a working prototype.
Visionary VR today revealed Mindshow at VRLA Summer Expo 2016. The application aims to give anyone access to simple tools to tell stories in virtual reality.
During the Enlightenment, René Descartes declared that the mind and body were split and that we should think about them as separate dualistic entities. But more and more evidence is pointing to the fact that our bodies are much more involved in cognitive processes than we ever thought before. One of the most interesting theories along these lines is called “embodied cognition,” which asserts that we learn about the world by manipulating and interacting with it through our body and all of our senses and that the context turns out to be an extremely important part of learning as well.
OSVR has launched a display upgrade kit for the HDK headset which allows users to swap a new, higher performance panel into their existing HDK headsets.
Valve today announced that it will provide royalty-free licensing to third parties interested in using the SteamVR ‘Lighthouse’ tracking technology to create new tracked objects like VR controllers and other peripherals.
When the recession hit in 2008, book publisher Charlie Melcher looked to reinvent how Melcher Media told stories using the latest smart phone technologies. They developed an iOS app for Al Gore’s Our Choice, and started having a lot of conversations with other media producers from many different disciplines to see how they were using code as a canvas for storytelling. So in 2012, Charlie founded The Future of Storytelling Summit to gather together the most cutting-edge innovators of telling immersive and interactive stories. For the past four years, they’ve been featuring more and more virtual reality technologies at their yearly summit, which is happening again this year on October 5th and 6th.
You can now register to attend Oculus’ 3rd ‘Connect’ conference, an event dedicated to all things Oculus from Rift to Touch and is focused primarily on developers and VR development.
Some things in life really need to be experienced first hand, and the ascent of Mount Everest is probably pretty high up on that list. Photos and videos can’t compare to the real thing, but VR just might. Step forward Sólfar Studios whose debut title Everest VR, built in collaboration with Reykjavik-based visual effects and animation studio RVX, launched yesterday for HTC’s Vive headset. Everest VR intends to bring the mountain to you, with a journey to the most iconic summit on the planet.
Digital lightfields are a cutting-edge technology that can render photorealistic VR scenes, and 
