Consistently a firm favourite here at Road to VR, Sightline: The Chair is an award winning ‘greatest hits’ of VR vignettes that happen to be one of the best introductions to virtual reality. The developer just released the latest version for the recently released HTC Vive and Oculus Rift consumer edition (CV1).
Today we’re pleased to announce a partnership with Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, which leverages Road to VR’s expertise to educate and inform those buying VR systems for the first time.
Milica Zec grew up in war-torn Serbia, but this was a part of her life that she preferred to just forget about and leave behind. After telling screenwriter Lizzie Donahue her story, she was encouraged to tell her story in a short film. Milica initially resisted and was eventually compelled enough to consider it, but she wasn’t convinced that film was the right medium.
She realized that the immersion that’s possible with virtual reality would be so much more effective in telling her story, and so she created Giant, which puts you in a basement with a family as there are bombs dropping outside. I had a chance to talk to Milica at Sundance about her personal story of growing up with war, the power of empathy in VR, how Giant went from an idea to having over 40 people collaborate on it, and finally how they blended live action 2D footage within Unreal Engine to immerse you within the scene.
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Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Intone is an interactive audio-visual experience built by indie dev Dan Scott (aka ‘wheatgrinder‘), and while the experiment may seem fairly simple in concept—control the blocks with the sound of your voice—the effects are everything but. Beware: everyone in your vicinity will think you’ve gone crazy.
One of my favorite VR games is the Kokoromi Collective’s SUPERHYPERCUBE, which is a very stylized 3D Tetris game with amazing sound design. It’s a VR experience that really gives your brain a stimulating spatial memory workout. I first had a chance to play SUPERHYPERCUBE at the XOXO Festival, and I learned more about the process of designing the game from Kokoromi Collective members Heather Kelley & Phil Fish. I had a chance to do an interview with Heather at Sony’s GDC event this year where she described to me a bit of their game design process and long history of developing this game going all the way back to 2008.
Today we publish the 2016 Virtual Reality Industry Report. Co-authored with VR business intelligence firm Greenlight VR, the report is a distillation of years of experience, research, and analysis into an accessible and comprehensive foundation of the virtual reality landscape, with the goal of informing forward-looking strategies.
I was finally able to record this podcast episode without getting enraged at the topic. Lines are being drawn in the sand with talks of “Rift vs. Vive”, and I wanted to address this rationally and give my thoughts.
Lucid VR, the makers of the stereoscopic 3D camera LucidCam, today announced a seed funding round to the tune of $2.1M, bringing a significant raise in funds to the team’s successful Indiegogo campaign which attracted over $100,000 in funds over the course of November and December of last year.
The HTC Vive opened for pre-orders back at the end of February and officially launched just last week on April 5th. The headset’s backorder date is now into June for new orders.
Striker VR is moving ahead with their haptic gun technology that we’ve been anticipating for some time now. The company today has revealed their latest prototype design of the ‘ARENA Infinity’ which is headed first to out-of-home VR arcade installations.
At Facebook’s developer conference F8 in San Francisco today, the company have unveiled their latest push into the immersive, VR video arena – a rugged, production ready 360 3D camera and video stitching pipeline capable of 8k per eye spherical images.
This enthusiast video which uses green screen video capture to fuse virtual reality footage, demonstrates how impressively accurate VR racing games are becoming.
At GDC this year, I had a chance to talk with Valve developer Jeremy Selan and tracking engineer Ben Jackson about the evolution of room-scale tracking technologies, as well as some of the oral history stories that include some of their favorite memories and types of experiences within VR. They didn’t talk about any specific future plans for things that they’re not ready to talk about yet, but Jeremy did allude to the fact that there’s a lot of latent hardware functionality that’s shipping with the Vive that can be turned on with a software update. We also speculate a bit about the potentials of using the front-facing camera to track static objects with fiducial markers, the desire to go beyond room-scale in VR, and using controllers to prototype tracking other body parts until Valve presents a solution that makes it easier and more aesthetically pleasing.
Unfortunately some more bad news for early adopters who pre-ordered the Rift and expected it to arrive on or around the March 28th launch date. The delay has now pushed expected shipping dates of some day-one pre-orders into late May and even June.
