At GDC 2016 I saw an early version of VRScore, a virtual reality benchmarking program created in collaboration with Crytek and Basemark. To test PC hardware performance to ensure enough power for running VR experiences, Crytek created a real-time cinematic VR short called Sky Harbor which quite unexpectedly blew me away.
Survios is one of the few studios that’s been working on VR game design and motion controls since even before Oculus was shipping their initial Rift DK1 headset. Now the company is opening its doors with an internship program for aspiring VR game designers.
Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang and writer Scott Hayden join me in our third and final GDC round table discussion talking about our demo highlights including Valve’s The Lab and a series of different shooters. There is a theme that’s emerging in VR game play where you have to survive waves of enemies coming at you, or you might be able to teleport to different areas giving you some feeling of agency around locomotion. These demos include: Arizona Sunshine, Raw Data, John Wick: The Impossible Task, Bullet Train, Damaged Core, & Space Pirate Trainer. We also talk about the Basemark Cinematic VR benchmark demo from Crytek that blew his mind, The Climb, Manus VR gloves, the Optitrak demo, and the beautiful La Peri from Innerspace VR. We also give a sneak peak to the Unreal Engine VR Editor, Vanishing Realms, Budget Cuts, Audio Shield, & Unseen Diplomacy.
We’re just a few weeks out from the consumer arrival of two major VR systems, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. The biggest problem with VR however, is that in order to understand it’s potential, you need to try it for yourself. Now, UK retailer Currys is the first in the UK to offer its customers high-end, in-store virtual reality demo with the HTC Vive.
World renowned motion capture specialists OptiTrack were at GDC this year demonstrating their mo-cap systems integrated with VR simulations. They chose to highlight their wide-area, camera based optical tracking solution using a basketball demo which let players handle, bounce and dribble a real life ball with complete accuracy whilst immersed in VR. Road to VR‘s Ben Lang went hands on with the system.
Serious Simulations, a virtual reality, military training solutions provider, say they may have a solution to the tethered desktop virtual reality conundrum. Serious claim that their wireless streaming solution is capable of delivering wireless streaming video at a latency low enough to be suitable for VR.
Epic senior designer Nick Donaldson schooled us on some of the intricacies of Unreal’s new VR Editor, modifying a pre-built demo scene using the Oculus Rift and Touch controller in the Epic booth at GDC.
For VR developers, keeping a high (90FPS+) and consistent frame rate is probably one of the biggest challenges they’ll face bringing games to market. In this session, Valve’s Alex Vlachos, Graphics Programmer, discusses techniques to adaptively alter your game’s fidelity in order to hit that FPS mark. Ben Lang is live-blogging this session, due to start @4PM PST.
I’m joined again by Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang & writer Scott Hayden to do a wrap-up of Wednesday’s GDC news including all of Sony’s PlayStation VR Announcements, the Star Wars Trials on Tatooine experience by ILMxLAB, and Scott’s in-depth reaction to Minecraft on Gear VR. We also cover some GDC demo highlights including Sony’s Social VR, the 3D Tetris-like game Super HyperCube, block stacking game Tumble VR, Ubisoft’s social deduction game Werewolves Within, and Sony’s series of social mini-games with Playroom VR.
John Wick – The Impossible Task is an upcoming shooter from Starbreeze Studios working in collaboration with WEVR, Grab Games and Lionsgate that throws you into the John Wick universe for dual pistol-wielding action. We went hands on with the demo shown at this year’s GDC at Valve’s booth running on the HTC Vive.
The Oculus Rift will land in people’s homes from March 28th and there’ll soon be 1000s of people hunting for new content to play in virtual reality. Oculus is of course keenly aware of this, and Jason Rubin, Head of Oculus Studios, is leading the company’s assault on content. At Oculus’ pre GDC ‘Game Days’ event, he spoke to Road to VR‘s Ben Lang on the 30 strong launch line up, title exclusivity and Oculus Touch content timelines.
With the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive just weeks away, you’re going to need a PC capable of meeting the extreme levels of performance that high-end virtual reality demands. Road to VR‘s Exemplar PC gives you that performance and, for the duration of GDC, you can claim $100 off with this code.
Helsinki based Basemark has created a simple device called the Trek which works with their forthcoming VRScore benchmark to measure the latency of VR headsets in both left and right eyes.
Chronos from Gunfire Games is one of the 30 titles you’ll be able to play at Oculus Rift’s launch on March 28th and it represents a revisiting of the traditional adventure game mechanics of yesteryear, brought up to date in virtual reality. Ben Lang spoke with Gunfire’s President David Adams to find out why the studio decided to step into the past with their venture into the future of games.
