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.
We go hands on with Valve and HTC’s new room-scale virtual reality system the Vive and discover that with incredible VR experiences come great real estate requirements.
The HTC Vive is here, and we’re finally allowed to show you The Lab, Valve’s Portal-themed playground of VR demos that gives you a beautifully cohesive tour of what’s possible with room-scale VR. To get a better look at just what it had to offer, we popped into four of our favorite (and also patently ridiculous) demos.
HoloLens development kits started shipping last week following Microsoft’s Build conference and there were also a number of NDAs that were lifted, which allowed some companies to start talking about their HoloLens projects for the first time. One of those companies was Portland’s Object Theory, which was founded in July 2015 after HoloLens engineer Michael Hoffman left Microsoft Studios to co-found Object Theory with serial entrepreneur Raven Zachary, who sold his previous iPhone app development company to Walmart Labs.
I had a chance to do 90 minutes worth of HoloLens demos on Friday, and then talk with Raven about their mixed reality collaboration service and early HoloLens client work with CDM Smith. We talked about AR vs VR, designing around HoloLens’ relatively small field of view, and why he decided to exclusively focus on developing enterprise applications for the HoloLens.
Fantastic Contraption, a building game from Northway Games, is launching tomorrow alongside the HTC Vive, and you’d be forgiven if you’re caught drooling over the newest peek into the studio’s mixed reality gameplay teaser. We know we are.
Lenovo revealed at the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) their new line of Nvidia certified VR Ready computers, the company’s next step in VR dedicated hardware. And if you’re thinking of getting your hands on the new line of ThinkStations—the P910, P710, and P510—you better have some serious cash on hand.
Realities is a collection of incredibly detailed virtual environments created with a technique called photogrammetry. It’s about the closest thing we’ve seen yet to teleportation, and you’ll be able to check it out for yourself come April 5th, when the experience launches alongside the HTC Vive on SteamVR.
Although Valve is now prompting Rift users to install SteamVR, there’s more steps to actually get the Oculus Rift working with Steam. In a few quick steps you can use your Oculus Rift to play Steam and SteamVR games. Our quick guide will show you how.
Virtual Reality has the power to transport you to anywhere in the world, and NextVR has been one of the leaders of giving you a front row seat to live sporting events including hockey, boxing, NASCAR, basketball, soccer, and golf. NextVR recently signed a five-year deal with FOX Sports, who have the rights to broadcast the NFL, Major League Baseball, and the U.S. Open Golf Championship.
I caught up with NextVR’s VR evangelist Helen Situ at GDC talk about the highlights of the past year of their livestream VR broadcasts, and where they’re going next. They’ve been experimenting with a lot of different camera positions, broadcasting real-time binaural audio, augmenting the experience with graphical overlays, and exploring how to give the viewer more agency in choosing the different perspectives that are available.
At GTC 2016 next week, NVIDIA Research will take to the stage to explore “computational display” prototypes for next-generation fidelity and form-factors in VR and AR headsets.
It seems HTC are experiencing technical issues with their payment processing systems and customers’ banks which are leading to some pre-orders for their forthcoming HTC Vive VR system being cancelled.
