You may not have realised, but as people anxiously await delivery of the consumer Oculus Rift, today marks almost exactly 3 years since the original Kickstarter-backed Oculus Rift DK1 shipped to developers. Here’s the original unboxing video from Oculus and a quick look back over events that sparked the VR revolution.
In scenes strongly reminiscent of the Oculus Rift DK2 delivery fevers in 2014, community excitement and speculation in the absence of precise delivery information consumer Oculus Rift deliveries has mounted. Palmer Luckey took to Twitter to share new information that helps to clarify the situation.
In a move entirely in keeping with the Oculus founders attitude to his company’s supporters, he’s travelled from sunny California to beautiful but chilly Alaska to hand deliver the first Oculus Rift pre-order.
As Audi look to introduce virtual reality showrooms to their flagship stores this year, at GTC 2016 the company is presenting their philosophy behind “The Audi VR Experience” and sharing the challenges behind driving high visual fidelity VR experiences.
Electronic music and dystopian worlds seem to go hand-in-hand these days, and with German electronic group Moderat releasing their third album in April, what better way to hype the release than with a VR experience of the record’s first single, ‘Reminder’?
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.
