New Gear VR Games and Apps – February Week #1
‘DCS World’ Flight Simulator Gets Improved Oculus Rift Support
DCS World is one of the few remaining hardcore PC flight simulators with a major emphasis on attention to detail. I remember when a friend of mine announced excitedly that he had mastered the aircraft start-up procedure for the A10 Warthog—it took him about a week! DCS World recently received some big improvements for Rift support.
AI and the Future of Interactive Drama
Andrew Stern doesn’t enjoy most AAA video games because he wants to be able to say anything at any moment within a social simulation and be a participant in an interesting story. About once week, he’d like to engage within a high agency, interactive drama with artificially intelligent NPCs. Rather than long and extended play sessions, he’d prefer a short 20-30 minute experience that he play over and over again trying different strategies with characters who feel real and plausible.
This isn’t just a pipe dream because in 2005 Andrew was a co-creator of Façade, which is one of the only interactive drama games that has natural language input and offers both local and global agency to the player. For the past couple of years, Andrew has been working with his Façade collaborator Michael Mateas as well as with Larry LeBron on a DARPA-funded AI program. IMMERSE is a gestural-based, virtual training simulation for soldiers to learn deescalation social skills in non-English speaking environments. I had a chance to catch up with Andrew and Larry to learn more about using AI to create plausible characters, IMMERSE, as well as their new company called Playabl where they’re continuing to develop their Unity AI toolkit for creating fully interactive dramas.
VRLO 3.0 Event Wrap-Up Features Autodesk, Bossa Studios, HammerheadVR and More
VRLO is a London based VR event which celebrated its third outing in December, bigger and better than ever before. Road to VR‘s Jonathan Tustain was there to report from the show. Here’s a nifty wrap-up tour featuring a collection exhibitors at the event.
WEVR Unveils ‘Transport’ VR Content Network, Announces Over $25M Investment
Wevr today unveiled Transport, a new VR content distribution platform that they hope will allow developers easier access to a broader market. To that, Wevr announced the results of an investment made by some big names in VR, amounting to the tune of $25M.
The HTC Vive Pre is Now Shipping to Developers
The second generation SteamVR development kit, the HTC Vive Pre, was unveiled at CES in January and included numerous enhancements. Valve have now announced that the new Pre systems are on their way to developers.
FOVE Shows Glimpse of Foveated Rendering Progress
The team behind FOVE, the premier eye-tracking VR headset launched on Kickstarter, recently released a showing some pretty spectacular applications for the device, namely foveated rendering and real-time depth-of-field.
Apple is Selling the ViewMaster Virtual Reality Viewer
Buying a new toy to go with your iPhone on Apple’s online store? Now you can toss in a View-Master Virtual Reality Starter Pack with your purchase.
More Tracks and New Area for ‘VR Karts: Sprint’
VR Karts: Sprint, the multiplayer cart racing game for Gear VR, has just pushed an update that adds a number of new tracks to the game’s online multiplayer.
Kite and Lightning’s ‘Bebylon’ to Debut at VR World Congress in April
VR World congress (VRWC) is a new, UK based virtual reality event aiming to highlight the latest and greatest from the rapidly growing VR scene. For the inaugural event, virtual reality ‘Auteurs’ Kite & Lightning will be present to debut their latest project ‘Bebylon: Battle Royale‘.
New Project Sansar Image Shows Beautiful Mars VR World Created in “a Few Hours”
Project Sansar from Second Life creator Linden Lab is a new virtual world, built for virtual reality which promises world building tools capable of generating scenes like the one featured here which was created in “just a few hours”.
Valve’s Gabe Newell to Address Vision VR/AR Summit Alongside Oculus, Sony and Google
The 2016 Vision VR/AR Summit focuses on immersive technologies and in its inaugural year is boasting quite a long list of luminaries as part its line up. This year, alongside addresses from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, Clay Bavor, Vice President of Virtual Reality at Google and Dr. Richard Marks, Director of the PlayStation Magic Lab, there’ll also be a rare appearance from Valve’s Gabe Newell, giving a special address via video.
First Look: Unreal Engine Will Soon Let You Build VR inside VR
Epic Games has unveiled a new feature of its VR-native development platform Unreal Engine 4, the ability for VR developers to build their applications and games from within virtual reality. Here’s what it looks like.
The Four Different Types of Stories in VR
For the past year, Devon Dolan has been trying to make sense of the interactive storytelling landscape that’s possible within virtual reality. He comes from a world of story where he’s currently an associate at Cinetic Media, which is a well-known and very respected strategic advisory company within the world of independent film. Cinetic has brokered distribution deals for Sundance hits ranging from Little Miss Sunshine to Napoleon Dynamite. Devon recently collaborated with Michael Parets on an essay that proposes a framework to categorize VR stories into four distinct categories. Their original Medium piece was recently expanded upon in Techcrunch, and I had a chance to catch up with Devon at Sundance where we further elucidated and simplified their 4-quadrant framework for VR storytelling.
