Minecraft VR was released on the Gear VR this week, and it completes the long journey of making one of John Carmack’s dreams come true. If you haven’t watched John’s Oculus Connect 2 keynote yet, then now is a good time to go back and check it out because his passion, drive, and vision is crystal clear. John believes that bringing Minecraft to VR will be a significant milestone and inflection point in the overall consumer launch and mass adoption of virtual reality.
Minecraft has already played an important role in social VR within the consumer virtual reality community. The Minecrift mod was the first modern social VR experience for a lot of DK1 early adopters including Cymatic Bruce, D from eVRydayVR, Aaron Davies, Gunter S. Thompson, Cris Miranda, OlivierJT, and many others.
I had a chance to catch up with Jesse Merriam at GDC, who is the lead producer for the Redmond Minecraft Team at Microsoft to talk more about bringing Minecraft to VR.
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John Carmack has never been as excited to give a keynote as he was at Oculus Connect 2, where he was able to share his enthusiasm and passion about Minecraft VR to the world for the first time publicly. After hearing John’s story, it’s really quite an amazing that this even happened.
I think this tweet perfectly captures some of the new types of experiences that family and friends will be sharing with each other in Minecraft VR:
Me in @Minecraft @Oculus VR with my son, filming him building because even in VR, I'm still a dad. pic.twitter.com/jXNHKlCoin
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 28, 2016
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This week AltspaceVR launched a Slack integration which makes it easy to quickly pull team members into a virtual reality meeting space for some real-time communication.
One of the most immersive and memorable experiences that I tried at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference yesterday was TheWave. Just as TiltBrush is able to unlock your creative expression through 3D drawing, TheWave has the potential to lower the barrier to composing music with their 3D sequencer tools. TheWave development team is made up of a collection of VR developers who are also musicians wanting to use VR to unlock their musical creativity, but also eventually help to revitalize the music industry by providing working musicians another outlet for doing live virtual performances.
One of the developers is Unello Design’s Aaron Lemke, who originally got into VR with because he wanted to have an outlet for his ambient music with experiences like Eden River. I had a chance to catch up with Aaron at SVVR where he talks about TheWave’s musical composition create mode as well as a DJ performance mode, their cross-platform networked experience that they premiered at the VR Mixer at GDC, and how he sees VR playing into the future of music composition and performance.
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Here’s a video demo of the DJ performance mode for TheWave
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Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
I try not to let my emotions get the better of me, but in Fated: The Silent Oath, a first-person action-adventure game recently released for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, there’s really nothing I could do to ward off the strange feeling that I, the least dad-like person on the planet, had to protect a human child. And you know what? I kind of liked it.
The Climb is a first-person rock climbing game from Crytek that offers charmingly realistic scenery alongside an interesting set of game mechanics that you may or may not fully appreciate. And as one person’s experience may vastly differ from another’s—a necessary preface to what I’ll say next—sufferers of vertigo and/or chronic neck pain will undoubtedly want to pass on Oculus’ newest exclusive.
Every time I’ve ever been shown a piece of 360 video content with an improperly aligned horizon, I’ve wondered to myself why it seems like no one is using hardware-stabilization. Then I saw Spherica’s custom-built 360 camera rig which is designed to do exactly that.
DJs looking to hone their musical craft in front of a live audience – or perhaps those looking for a more stimulating way to mix music – can rejoice. TheWave from developer WaveVR is looking to provide DJs with a psychedelic immersive interface to allow them to express themselves creatively and show it off to a virtual audience. Here’s a look at it in action.
Oculus’ long fought partnership with Microsoft, to bring the enormously successful social, creative Minecraft franchise to VR, begins with a release to Samsung Gear VR today as the title hits the Oculus Store.
Redirected walking is a concept within VR that tricks a user into walking into circles, but gives them visual feedback that they’re walking in a straight line. We tend to trust our visual input over our other senses, and so redirected touch using that same principle of visual dominance in order to trick our minds into thinking it’s touching different objects while only using a single passive haptic object. It can also fool us into thinking that straight surfaces feel like curved surfaces.
Luv Kohli is one of the pioneers of redirected touch, and he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the topic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013. I had a chance to catch up with Luv at the IEEE VR conference to learn more about the extent that we can warp VR spaces without our minds being able to consciously perceive it beyond having it temporarily feel weird.
Today VREAL is taking the shroud off of their VR livestreaming platform that puts viewers inside the game, right next to their favorite streamers. The unique mashup of virtual reality, game streaming, and social interaction feels like something we’ve simply not seen before.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and in commemoration a group of Ukrainian documentary filmmakers have set out to capture the wreckage that was once the city of Pripyat and its surrounding countryside. The 360 film aims to take you deep into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, through spaces only accessible by employees.
Looking to get your VR project off the ground? HTC might be able to help. The company has just announced a $100 million fund attached to the ‘Vive X’ accelerator program.
Is VR on the open web going to provide a good enough experience as to be a viable distribution platform for certain VR content? That’s the big question that people have been asking for the past couple of years, and there’s been a lot of big steps towards that within the WebVR community. Before GDC this year Mozilla and Google proposed the 1.0 version of the WebVR specification.
I had a chance to catch up with Josh Carpenter at the VR Hackathon before GDC, and he also had some exciting news about moving frame rendering from the browsers to the Oculus and Vive runtimes. He talks about going from 10 fps to 500 fps with the Servo Webrender, the LA Times Mars experience using WebVR, AFrame, and the future of the open web and WebVR.
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Here’s Patrick Walton talking about the Servo Webrender at a meetup hosted by Mozilla in February:
Here’s a demo of the Servo Webrender getting 60fps compared to other browsers running this demo scene.
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BigScreen is a social VR app currently in beta for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive that lets you livestream your monitor to friends in an online environment, essentially letting you throw a virtual LAN party or movie night with your best VR buddies. While the new app focuses on connecting people in a virtual space so they can mirror their monitors to friends, it can also be used solo as a virtual desktop solution.
