It wasn’t long after Oculus opened pre-orders for the Rift in January that the unit became backordered by four months. Having held steady since that time, the backorder has now been pushed back yet another month.
Katie Goode is the Creative Director of Triangular Pixels, which has developed Smash Hit Plunder for the Gear VR and Unseen Diplomacy for the Vive. Unseen Diplomacy is a room-scale experience that has people crawling through tunnels as a spy, but Katie wanted to ensure that she wasn’t excluding people with disabilities in being able to enjoy and participate in their experience. I had a chance to talk with Katie at GDC for how they’re taking into account accessibility for VR by designing experiences that still work for users who are deaf, colorblind, or have a disability that restricts their movement.
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There’s a menu option at the beginning of Unseen Diplomacy if your movement is restricted, which then alters the experience to make it more accessible to people who can’t crawl around on the floor whether due to age, an injury, or a disability. There are some sections that are completely removed, but there are other adaptations to the game that move the buttons and objects around so that they’re accessible to people in a wheelchair.
In the end, designing with people with a range of disabilities in mind usually ends up with stronger game design for everyone. For example, the visual cues in Unseen Diplomacy were more explicit and didn’t solely upon color or audio to give the user feedback in their game. This not only makes is so that deaf and colorblind people can still fully enjoy the experience, but it also in the end provided a more clear design for everyone.
For more information on VR accessibility, be sure to check out this article on designing VR for people with physical limitations by Tomorrow Today Labs’ Adrienne Hunter.
Here’s a gameplay video of Unseen Diplomacy, which is available on Steam for $2.99. The game does require a minimum of 4m x 3m space, and so I wasn’t able to fully play it in my 2.9m x 2.3m room.
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Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
VR Unicorns is a Copenhagen-based development collective that developed #SelfieTennis. They were working on Julie Heyde’s RagnarökVR until they stated experimenting with room-scale sports experiences.
Playing tennis against yourself in VR was the first mechanic that found was really compelling and fun, and so they started doing rapid iterations on maximizing the sense of fun and play in the game. Rather than trying to create an accurate tennis simulation, they started adding in the ability to kill the audience members by hitting with balls, putting in selfie sticks, and adding other mini-games that were more about exploration of an interactive environment than making an accurate tennis simulation.
I had a chance to catch up with VR Unicorn developers Horatiu Roman & Milan Grajetzki at the Unity VR/AR Vision Summit to learn more about their game jam-inspired design process and intention behind the game.
The makers of VR Cover and Gauss Eyewear today announced their newest crowdfunding project which aims to deliver specially-made prescription lens holders for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Budget Cuts, a first-person stealth assassin game from Neat Corporation, isn’t out just yet, but HTC Vive owners can now dive into the formerly press-only demo.
Steven Schkolne tells us why he’s returning to his immersive creativity roots with his latest VR “passion project” 3dSunshine – a tool he says will let gamers edit and enhance their favourite games in virtual reality.
VR has the capability to take us into completely new realms, and experimental artist Isaac “Cabbibo” Cohen has been creating some of the most surreal and transportive experiences that I’ve seen. I had a chance to try out a number of Cabbibo’s Vive art experiments and then talk to him about his design intentions and process at the VR Mixer party, which ended up being one of my favorite conversations at GDC.
VideoStitch, the company behind the eponymous 360 post-production software suite, today announced their first 360 camera, the Orah 4i. The all-in-one solution aims to take the hassle out of creating 360 videos by automatically stitching and transmitting them live to VR headsets and video streaming platforms.
At GTC 2016 this week, NVIDIA’s Vice President of Graphics Research demonstrated a novel prototype display running at an incredibly high refresh rate, all but eliminating perceptible latency.
Valve is pushing the HTC Vive in full force today—no surprise considering it’s the official launch day of the SteamVR-compatible headset. Adding to proclamation that “VR is here,” which is smack dab on Steam’s front page that nearly tens of millions of users will see, comes a new promo that’s putting special focus on group VR play.
NVIDIA at GTC 2016 today has announced Iray VR, a virtual reality adaptation of their Iray ray-tracing engine. The company says it enables “breakthrough photoreal”. On stage CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed a quick demo of the rendering technology in action.
Valve’s Chet Faliszek has been a key virtual reality evangelist & developer relations liaison over the past couple of years for the HTC Vive, and I had a chance to sit down with him at GDC as they were showing off many of their launch titles. Chet talks about what convinced him to move his desk to start working on VR, some of the emerging new genres of VR games, some launch title highlights and some of his personal favorite VR experiences, as well as some stories of people discovering room-scale VR for the first time. There’s been a lot of growth and maturity in developing room-scale VR experiences over the past year, and Chet is continually humbled and surprised by what developers come up with. And with over 50 launch titles for the HTC Vive today, then there’s a wide range of different types of experiences to choose from.
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Here’s some of the launch titles that Chet mentions:
And you can look at some other mixed reality trailers that are located here on this SteamVR launch page.
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Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
It seems that the game people most associate with and indeed shipped alongside the Oculus Rift, is coming to the HTC Vive this year.
It’s GTC 2016 week and NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang takes to the stage at 9:00AM for an opening keynote that will discuss how the GPU intersects artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and virtual reality. Join us here for the livestream.
