Backed with support from NASA, the development of Mars 2030 is underscored by a singular mission: do everything possible to make the player feel like they’re actually on Mars. And that, apparently, means starting with a massive, detailed recreation of an actual part of the planet’s surface.
The latest release of VorpX, the VR injection driver that lets you play your favourite non VR games in VR, is here and it brings support for the consumer edition (CV1) Oculus Rift.
The folks over at iFixit have taken the shiny new Oculus Rift consumer VR headset and pulled it apart to find out exactly what’s inside. Among a look at the headset’s IR LED placement and circuit boards, we get a glimpse of unique lenses.
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.
Looking for something fun to play in VR? We’ve got the top 10 downloads from the last week on the WEARVR app marketplace, a cross-platform repository of virtual reality experiences.
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.
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.
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.
Rob Morgan is the writer of The Assembly, and he spoke last year at GDC about narrative design in VR and the importance of accurate body language in NPCs to maintain a sense of presence. He returned to GDC this year to talk about some of his lessons that VR can learn from writing stories in AR. He has a lot of interesting insights about how to use ambiguity and implication to drive narratives within a first-person story to allow a user to have a more immersive and personalized experience.
VR has the capability to take us into completely new realms, and experimental artist Isaac “
