CasinoVR, a free online casino, has today announced the general availability of its Gear VR app. Now cross-compatible with Oculus Rift dev kits, the social casino is making its inaugural launch into mobile VR with the help of SideloadVR, an app that allows you to download and share Gear VR content without going through the Oculus Store.
Tracking is the foundation of great virtual reality. Knowing the position and orientation of the user’s head is essential to being able to move the virtual world convincingly around them as they move through it. Oculus and Valve/HTC have the leading tracking systems (dubbed ‘Constellation’ and ‘Lighthouse’, respectively), but soon a new entrant could join the VR tracking arena.
Triangular Pixel’s Unseen Diplomacy is an ambitious virtual reality obstacle course set in a world of spies and subterfuge. The new title for the HTC Vive really invests in the concept of room-scale VR by having you walking and crawling around environments cleverly designed to sit snugly within your play space and uses clever tricks to make you think you’re moving beyond it.
Valve today announced a “compilation of new VR experiments” which will be set in Portal’s Aperture Science universe. The company will show the new experiences at next week’s GDC 2016.
Sylvio Drouin is the Executive Vice President of Unity Labs, which for the past year has been doing advanced research into VR authoring tools both for developers and consumers as well as graphic research. I caught up with Sylvio at Unity’s VR/AR Vision Summit where we talked about their some of their research projects including: VR authoring tools within VR, Project Carte Blanche to bring authoring tools to consumers, integrating motion capture and facial capture technology into Unity, and the future of smart assets that use AI and machine learning.
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A big theme that Unity Labs is working on is to make the assets smarter to eventually have more intent-based development that’s controlled with voice input. The smarter that the assets become, then the more streamlined and user-friendly the VR authoring tools can be. So the 3D assets are going to have more metadata integrated as well as eventually have more sophisticated integration of AI, deep learning and machine learning that enables intent-based content creation with a very simple and minimal UI.
Unity announced at the Vision Summit that they have 5 million registered developers, and they’re hoping to expand their content creation tools into the wider consumer market in 2017 with their Carte Blanche project. They’re planning on leveraging the Unity Asset store to allow an even larger demographic of VR users to create content without having to write any code.
Sylvio also talked about some of the new storytelling tools that they’re integrating that will allow people to create timeline sequences that are similar to film editing software. Enabling people to tell their stories with VR technology is something that has been motivating Sylvio for a long time, and so you can expect to see a lot more tools for capturing human performances in VR using webcams, Kinects, VR input devices, and other hardware input solutions yet to be announced.
It’s still an open question as to whether the metaverse will develop starting with a closed, walled garden with by apps or be more open and interconnected like the Internet. Sylvio’s suspicion is that it’ll likely eventually be an open and interconnected world that is more similar to the Internet than the fragmented game console market, but that either way Unity will have a key role to play. Based on the fact that around 90% of the consumer VR experiences that have been released so far use Unity, then they’re in a really great position to continue to expand their reach from the existing developers into the wider consumer market starting sometime in 2017.
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The HTC Vive Pre is now in the hands of press and developers around the world and although hands-on impressions with Vive games are now fairly common, what’s the SteamVR interface, where you spend your time between games, like to use and what can it do?
Frank He caught up with Tactical Haptics at VRLA’s Winter Expo earlier in the year to get a personally much anticipated hands-on demo of their Reactive Grip technology and finds himself at first disappointed and then astounded at its potential.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Chip giant Intel are poised to join the immersive technology race with a new Augmented Reality device using the company’s RealSense computer imaging systems.
As part of a recent software update, the PlayStation 4’s new Healthy and Safety disclaimers now include a message regarding Sony’s forthcoming PS4 based VR system PlayStation VR (PSVR). Specifically that it’s not to be used by anyone under the age of 12.
IGN has gone hands on with the new PlaySyation VR exclusive project from Highwire Games, a studio started by a gaggle of Ex-Halo and Infamous developers, and here’s some footage from the session.
Michel Reilhac is a French filmmaker who wanted to explore intimacy and polyamory within an immersive 360 video called Viens! (Come!). His Sundance New Frontier piece featured 3 women and four men exploring sensual touch and sexual intimacy with each other. Michel wanted to explore representations of the naked body and the tantric philosophy of using sexual energies for spiritual transformation.
Filmed as part of the recent SteamVR developer showcase in Seattle, Valve have released the first in what appears to be a series of discussions with developers working on titles for the SteamVR platform and the HTC Vive.
Sequenced is an upcoming animated series by Apelab for VR headsets that’s pioneering a new method of delivering episodic content, one that tailors itself to the individual viewer in the slightest way imaginable. And all that Sequenced wants from you, the passive observer, is your attention.
New instructional videos, supposedly leaked from a HoloLens development program, give us a glimpse at what every day interaction with Windows running in Augmented Reality looks like.
