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
Matthew Magee ponders virtual reality’s potential impact on game development culture and how immersive technology may encourage a renaissance in independent, disruptive bedroom coders a.k.a the Pyjama People.
Social media company Snapchat have just appointed a Hollywood effects artist Raffael Dickreuter who joined in June as a “Concept and Augmented Reality Designer.”
DiRT Rally, one of the finest driving games out there, has finally arrived with official Oculus Rift CV1 support and it’s elevated our opinions of the Codemasters developed game even higher. Here’s 4 minutes of direct feed gameplay captured from the new release to give you an idea what it’s like to be at the wheel.
See Also: ‘DiRT Rally’ VR Review
Available on the Oculus Store today (and via an update for the existing Steam version), DiRT Rally is the latest driving game to receive a VR makeover with Oculus Rift support. Originally drifting its way onto PC in April 2015, developer Codemasters took the plunge into rally simulation for the first time. The Early Access beta, which itself was unusual for the studio, resulted in plenty of community engagement and saw some experimentation, including early VR support for the Rift DK2, hence the huge anticipation for the official release supporting the consumer Rift ‘CV1’ headset. Launching into what looks like a giant grey sphere with a tyre tread pattern, it’s a promisingly polished start.
Josh Farkas has given over 6000 VR demos over the last couple of years, and he’s been in the position of having had to try to explain the potential of VR to many skeptical businesses. That’s in part because his Cubicle Ninjas was primarily a web development and creative agency before becoming an early adopter of VR. They’ve released two virtual reality applications so far including Guided Meditation VR and the augmented reality filter app Spectacle. I had a chance to catch up with Josh at SXSW in March where we talked about using the Gear VR to detect heart rate and provide biometric feedback, releasing the first augmented reality application for Gear VR called, and some stories from the frontlines of evangelizing virtual reality.
The virtual pet craze that started with the Tamagotchi is entering a new era with virtual reality, and leading the charge is a new project that aims to give you very own virtual cat, it’s called Konrad the Kitten and it uses SteamVR’s lighthouse technology to track a plush toy for a fairly unique, if somewhat amusing, VR experience.
The immensely fun virtual reality wizarding simulator Waltz of the Wizard for HTC Vive has been updated with a new two player feature that lets a second non VR player join you in your spell-casting shenanigans.
Another Nintendo classic title from the past makes it into virtual reality courtesy of Gamecube emulator Dolphin VR. This time it’s the turn of Super Mario Sunshine, returning here complete with high resolution texture hacks and running at 60 FPS.
