At GDC last week Oculus announced they were bringing a VR rendering function called Asynchronous Timewarp to Windows with version 1.3 of the Oculus PC SDK. The feature (abbreviated ‘ATW’) smoothes over otherwise uncomfortable stuttering which can happen when the PC doesn’t render frames quite fast enough. Valve calls ATW an “ideal safety net,” but suggests a system to avoid relying on it too heavily.
Lucasfilm’s experimental division ILMxLAB, set up to explore the use of immersive technology in storytelling, are heading to NVIDIA’s GTC 2016 conference to share their experiences in bringing realistic virtual reality imagery to life for experiences
Slightly Mad Studios been making racing games for the past 10 years, and they raised over $3 million dollars in crowd-funding to produce their own racing game called Project CARS. It’s a AAA racing simulation game that was first released in May 2015, and they recently added VR support to be one of the 30 Oculus Rift launch titles. I had a chance to catch up with creative director Andy Tudor and game director Stephen Viljoen at the Oculus Game Days to learn more about the extent that they’ve modeled the cars, tracks, physics, and dynamic weather systems in their goal towards creating the most authentic racing simulation.
Are you the sort of person that lugs around your Gear VR and Google Cardboard on your mission to evangelize the ever-living-hell out of virtual reality? Well, the Cardboard Enabler for Gear VR wants to free up some space in your book bag by letting you use Google Cardboard apps on your Gear VR.
If you didn’t know you could catch bullets, Epic Games wants you to reconsider in their physics-bending VR first-person shooter Bullet Train. The game gives you a few well-placed commands in the beginning, and thankfully no lengthy tutorializing as such.
It’s been a long time coming, but the very first Oculus Rift consumer headset is due to arrive to customers starting this Monday the 28th.
The advent of consumer virtual reality seems to have reignited the fire in independent developers. But, although many are rushing headlong into VR content creation, just how sustainable is the ecosystem they’re about to enter? In a preview of a full industry report due to be published next month, Greenlight VR take a closer look.
At GDC 2016 we got to take a look at the latest STEM VR controllers from Sixense. With units purportedly on track to begin shipping next month, the company is also committing resources to create a promising cross-platform multiplayer experience called Siege VR which could turn into something much bigger than a mere demo.
James Green is the creative director at Carbon Games, and he was inspired to create AirMech: Command from playing a 1989 game called Herzog Zwei, which was one of the first real-time strategy games that also used a gamepad as the primary control scheme. It’s usually recommended to design a game from the ground-up with VR in mind, but the VR port of AirMech’s tabletop aesthetic works really well in VR and gives you the feeling of being able to watch your childhood war toy battles come to life. I had a chance to catch up with James at the Oculus Game Days event at GDC where he talked about his inspirations and VR design process.
Now in its third year, the SVVR Conference & Expo represents one of the premier events on the virtual reality calendar. Tickets are now on sale with the conference to be held at the San Jose Convention Center between April 27-29, and early birds can save $100 by registering now.
Amazon have announced that launch bundles for the forthcoming PlayStation VR headset that include both the PlayStation Camera and Move controllers will be back ‘in stock’ and available to buy from 2pm PST today.
FOVE today announced a Series A investment of $11 million led by the Colopl VR Fund with participation by Hon Hai VC fund 2020, and Samsung Ventures.
Jeep Barnett is a programmer at Valve Corporation who has been on the VR team for the last couple year. He was at GDC showing off The Lab, which is a series of mini-games demonstrating different design principles within VR. I had a chance to catch up with Jeep after trying out four of their Lab experiments in order to learn more about how these came about as well as some of the VR principles that each one was trying to demonstrate. There are a lot more experiments left to be discovered when the Vive launches in the next couple of weeks, and these mini games and experiences definitely have a lot of replayable qualities and will make quite the impression as a lot of people’s first-time VR experience.
At a special event at GDC this morning, Unity’s Principal Designer Timoni West showed off the latest prototype of Unity’s new Virtual Reality editor that lets you build VR applications and games as if you were a god.
Those hoping to board the early train to VR town were likely dismayed today when Amazon’s PlayStation VR Launch Bundle pre-order sold out within minutes of going live. Luckily it may not be too late. In the US, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart, all appear to be still taking pre-orders for the bundle.
