It seems that Oculus are acknowledging the troublesome Rift launch and associated delivery delays by covering shipping costs for affected customers. According to emails sent out by Oculus to customers still waiting for the consumer Rift VR headsets, the delays are due to “Component Shortages”.
At Sundance earlier this year, Oculus Story Studio revealed Quill, an in-house production tool that uses the company’s Touch controllers to create VR illustrations. At GTC 2016 next week the studio will explore the technical challenges faced while creating the program.
The HTC Vive is due to land on people’s doorsteps from April 5th, and our in depth review is on its way then too. In the mean time, here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect to get in the box to help tide you over.
Timoni West is principal designer at Unity Labs, and she’s been working on creating tools within Unity to be able to create VR from within VR. I first talked with Timoni in October about these content creation tools which were revealed to the VR community for the first time at Unity’s VR/AR Vision Summit in February. I had a chance to catch up with her to talk about creating VR in VR for both developers and non-developers.
While the first high end consumer virtual reality headsets are just beginning to launch, virtual worlds have been around for years. Although they may not be immersive in the sense of VR, they are undeniably complex and engaging, as illustrated in the record-breaking Battle of M-OEE8 which took place in EVE: Online on the same day the Oculus Rift launched.
It’s been known since early 2016 that HTC planned to integrate bluetooth into the Vive headset to allow your phone to talk to the headset while you’re in VR, but we didn’t know what platforms or specific functionality would be supported. Now with the launch of the HTC Vive app on iOS, the answer is becoming clearer.
Although Valve has buddied up with HTC to create the Vive as SteamVR’s flagship headset, the company has made it clear that they want SteamVR to be headset agnostic. Now Steam is identifying Rift users and prompting them to install SteamVR.
I got the first glimpse of what advertising within a VR experience might look like when I saw a demo of some ads playing on the Immersv platform. I was within an movie theater similar to Oculus Cinema watching a 2D video screen where there was a 30-second video of a VR game being advertised. It’s still early days for advertising in VR, but Immersv co-founder & CEO Mihir Shah expects that VR has the potential to become a content marketing platform on steroids once it becomes easier to produce 3D spherical videos of VR gameplay, movies, and tourist destinations.
Felix & Paul are among the most respected in the as yet young field of immersive filmmaking and now, the studio has been nominated for 2 daytime Emmy awards for their VR films “Inside Impact: East Africa” and “Inside the Box of Kurios.”
After 3 years in development, Cloudhead Games are finally set to bring the first instalment of their made-for-VR series The Gallery to the HTC Vive, with release set for April 5th. To celebrate, they’ve released a trailer which reveals more of the title.
Part of the challenge of creating a first-person perspective game in VR is that there are limited locomotion options for moving around in VR in a way that’s comfortable for most people. Damaged Core is a Oculus Rift launch title that uses a unique and very effective locomotion method where you move between different first-person robots as well as third-person security cameras. This ends up being a very comfortable way to provide a lot more agency in movement than most other survival wave VR shooters, and it also has a lot of elegance in that it’d actually be possible to do in a world of AI-driven robot assassins. You can’t hack into every robot enemy, and so you have to strategically move around a battlefield in the right order.
When most people think about the types of things that want to do in virtual reality, then they almost always think of experiences that are from the first-person perspective. But Lucky’s Tale proved to me that there are going to be a whole range of experiences that people don’t know that they want to have until they actually have them in VR. It also proved to a lot of VR developers that not only could a third-person perspective work, but that it could work so well as to be able to cause a fit of VR giggles for how surprisingly compelling and delightful it could be.
There’s plenty of reasons to be excited for the Oculus Rift to arrive at your doorstep in the next few days (or months), but don’t throw out that DK2 just yet, because there’s still some life in the old face-box yet. Free games, experiences, and apps for the taking!
We asked some developers who were early to join the VR bandwagon to share memories of their first experiences with the new wave of VR technology represented by the Oculus Rift DK1, what it meant to them and where their it eventually led them.
The Oculus Rift is arriving at people’s doors today, and Oculus kept a couple of surprises back for launch day. One of these, Oculus Dreamdeck, is a bundling of a series of ‘vignettes’ used originally to demo a standing VR experience with the Crescent Bay Rift prototype.
