Insomniac Games, the studio known for series such as Ratchet & Clank and Spyro the Dragon, today announced an Oculus Touch exclusive that promises to have you throwing fire balls and wielding magic of all sorts. It’s called The Unspoken.
I was invited to cover the VR Intelligence Conference that debuted in San Francisco in November last year. It was a smaller but very focused gathering of decision-makers from a wide range of different industries where I had a chance to catch up with conference organizer Pete Carkeek to hear about some of the industry analysis highlights from the panel discussions, how the VR Intelligence conference came about, and where they’re going in the future.
Voice calling and messaging comes to the HTC Vive VR system with HTC’s Voice Services. We show you how to set it up and tell you if it’s any good or not.
It’s been clear for some time that Google’s virtual reality ambitions extend beyond Cardboard and now we’re seeing the first hints that the company will be integrating VR functionality into Android N, the next major release of the company’s mobile operating system.
Want to see your favorite classic arcade game realized in virtual reality? The makers of a VR prototype of Duck Hunt for HTC Vive are taking suggestions from the community to do just that.
Consistently a firm favourite here at Road to VR, Sightline: The Chair is an award winning ‘greatest hits’ of VR vignettes that happen to be one of the best introductions to virtual reality. The developer just released the latest version for the recently released HTC Vive and Oculus Rift consumer edition (CV1).
Today we’re pleased to announce a partnership with Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, which leverages Road to VR’s expertise to educate and inform those buying VR systems for the first time.
Milica Zec grew up in war-torn Serbia, but this was a part of her life that she preferred to just forget about and leave behind. After telling screenwriter Lizzie Donahue her story, she was encouraged to tell her story in a short film. Milica initially resisted and was eventually compelled enough to consider it, but she wasn’t convinced that film was the right medium.
She realized that the immersion that’s possible with virtual reality would be so much more effective in telling her story, and so she created Giant, which puts you in a basement with a family as there are bombs dropping outside. I had a chance to talk to Milica at Sundance about her personal story of growing up with war, the power of empathy in VR, how Giant went from an idea to having over 40 people collaborate on it, and finally how they blended live action 2D footage within Unreal Engine to immerse you within the scene.
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Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Intone is an interactive audio-visual experience built by indie dev Dan Scott (aka ‘wheatgrinder‘), and while the experiment may seem fairly simple in concept—control the blocks with the sound of your voice—the effects are everything but. Beware: everyone in your vicinity will think you’ve gone crazy.
One of my favorite VR games is the Kokoromi Collective’s SUPERHYPERCUBE, which is a very stylized 3D Tetris game with amazing sound design. It’s a VR experience that really gives your brain a stimulating spatial memory workout. I first had a chance to play SUPERHYPERCUBE at the XOXO Festival, and I learned more about the process of designing the game from Kokoromi Collective members Heather Kelley & Phil Fish. I had a chance to do an interview with Heather at Sony’s GDC event this year where she described to me a bit of their game design process and long history of developing this game going all the way back to 2008.
Today we publish the 2016 Virtual Reality Industry Report. Co-authored with VR business intelligence firm Greenlight VR, the report is a distillation of years of experience, research, and analysis into an accessible and comprehensive foundation of the virtual reality landscape, with the goal of informing forward-looking strategies.
I was finally able to record this podcast episode without getting enraged at the topic. Lines are being drawn in the sand with talks of “Rift vs. Vive”, and I wanted to address this rationally and give my thoughts.
Lucid VR, the makers of the stereoscopic 3D camera LucidCam, today announced a seed funding round to the tune of $2.1M, bringing a significant raise in funds to the team’s successful Indiegogo campaign which attracted over $100,000 in funds over the course of November and December of last year.
The HTC Vive opened for pre-orders back at the end of February and officially launched just last week on April 5th. The headset’s backorder date is now into June for new orders.
