While we first saw the HTC Vive iOS app appear at the end of March, it had vanished by the Vive’s April 5th launch day. Now the app has returned to the App Store to keep you connected to your iPhone while inside the Vive.
Liv Erikson was able to to live out one of her dreams when she stepped into the Star Wars universe to battle against a lightsaber training Remote within Sixense’s VR demo. This helped her discover that she has a passion for immersive technologies, and so she started teaching herself Unity and documenting her learning process on her blog called “The Matrix is My Office.” This caught the attention of Microsoft’s developer evangelism team, and they offered her a full-time job where she could explore, learn, and teach about virtual and augmented reality development on her Channel 9 videoblog called “Just A/VR Show.” Liv’s show and blog are some great resources for people who are looking for beginner content for how to get into VR development. I had a chance to catch up with Liv at Microsoft’s Reactor space during the VR Hackathon just before GDC this year to talk about all of her different VR & AR evangelism efforts.
This week at Fanfest 2016, CCP Games has announced that EVE: Valkyrie will not only find its way to all three major VR headsets, but will also allow cross-platform play between them. We went hands-on with PC and console versions of the game to see how the experiences will compare.
Tom Furness has been working in virtual reality longer than anyone else on the planet, and he’s starting a new phase of his legendary career: building a coalition of content creators and financial backers through the Virtual World Society to be able to transform living rooms into classrooms. With the support of a network of subscribers, he wants to build the infrastructure to support the production of educational VR experiences that activate our conscience, enrich our minds, and connect hearts together in order to solve real world problems.
It’s 1995. The world looks a little different after the failed assassination of JFK. In a bid to open-source all US and Soviet space patents, the Space Race booms into a new era of long-haul interplanetary travel—spearheaded of course by a friendly mega corporation; RAMA Industries. Something’s happened to one of RAMA’s experimental bases on Titan, and it’s your job to find out.
Project Arena is a competitive ‘full-body’ VR experience from CCP. Using the Oculus Touch controllers, this eSports experiment is far removed from the space simulation themes normally associated with the company, although it retains much of the style and slick presentation.
Google have been floating at the periphery of serious commitment to virtual reality since the launch of their ultra low-cost Android Cardboard VR platform in 2014. But this year’s Google I/O session schedule indicates it’s about to throw some real weight behind the technology in 2016 and beyond.
A new objective-based game mode was today announced for EVE: Valkyrie at Fanfest 2016, CCP’s annual gathering in Reykjavik, Iceland. Called ‘Carrier Assault’, it promises to offers what lead designer Andrew Willans calls an “influence from a certain ’70s sci-fi classic moment.” That’s Star Wars (1977). We’re allowed to say it.
Project Arena, a prototype game now in development from CCP, was teased today by CCP Games at Fanfest 2016, the company’s annual gathering in Reykjavik, Iceland.
What if you could take the magical sense of creativity evoked by Tilt Brush and share that with someone else, online, simultaneously, using nothing but your hands for input? That’s the ethos behind developer Mike Harris’ latest project, StrangersVR.
Once upon a time if you were a filmmaker who wanted an aerial shot, you paid a hefty fee to charter a helicopter and brought a camera along for the ride. Today, filmmakers can use virtual reality to pre-plan and deploy an autonomous drone which will fly off and automatically capture the desired footage, thanks to Skywand. Sometimes it really does feel like we’re living in the future.
Mixed reality videos, demonstrating the power of virtual reality without a headset, are all the rage it seems. Marcel Pfister, the racing enthusiast behind a recent, astoundingly effective example, shares how he pulled it off in his latest video.
It’s not every day that someone gains an entirely new sense, but James Blaha did just that. He created a virtual reality vision therapy experience that essentially cured his lazy eye and enabled him to see in 3D for the first time in his life. When I first interviewed James in May 2014, he was hesitant to make any claims that this was an effective treatment beyond his own personal experience, but nearly two years later James’ Vivid Vision system has shown success in other people with amblyopia and strabismus and is now located in over 20 optometrist clinics around the country.
Technolust, like many others in the cyberpunk genre, stands on the shoulders of giants. Taking cues from neo-noir staples like Blade Runner (1982) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the adventure game makes good on its promise to deliver the lovably gritty ‘high-tech, low-life’ atmosphere that cyberpunk fans are after, but in a package that you can digest in a single sitting. The only problem: I need more. A lot more.
Let’s face it, if there is one VR category that has the most potential, the most controversy, and admittedly the most goofiness, it’s social VR.
