As much as I want to get swept away into a VR MMO based on Sword Art Online with the rest of you, the recently announced Sword Art Online: The Beginning (involving IBM’s Watson) is not going to be the game to do it. In fact, it isn’t a game at all.
In preparation for the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, Valve has enhanced the categorization of VR games listed on Steam.
Space Bullet have been quiet for a while, busy polishing their virtual reality mech combat game Vox Machinae. The studio have now released a trailer showing the world what they’ve been up to, featuring multi-player mechs blasting the hell out of of each other. What’s not to like?
Jesse Schell wrote the book “The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses,” and his company Schell Games produced I Expect You to Die. It’s one of the top-ranked VR games on Oculus Share, and it also won the Vision Inspire Award at Unity’s Vision Summit. Jesse says designing VR games in the 90s really informed a lot of what’s already in his game design book, and so the only additional design lens that he might add is the Lens of Presence. I caught up with Jesse at the Unity AR/VR Summit to hear more about the specific game design lenses that Schell Games used in the design of their three VR games including the escape room puzzler I Expect You to Die, room-scale 3D water pipes puzzler Water bears, and the comedy, choose-your-own-space adventure Orion Trail. I also talk to Jesse about storytelling in VR, maintaining presence, and predicting the future of VR.
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Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
In this episode of the Rev VR Podcast, I am joined by actor, YouTuber, and VR enthusiast, Sam Macaroni. We discuss his experiences in producing and directing films using 360 rigs. Sam is aiming to solve some of the common challenges of this new filming method with clever rigging, and strategic post-production.
Developer Niklas Persson is working on bringing the visceral, gore-soaked carnage of the Doom series to virtual reality with HordeZ, a multi-player coop shooter for the HTC Vive.
SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) is a Berlin based company involved in creating eye tracking solutions across several industries, and has been doing so for the past 25 years. At MWC I sat down with Christian Villwock, director of OEM sales, to learn more about the company’s eye tracking technology and to see for myself how it works with mobile VR.
Kittypocalypse is a tower defense game from Bolvërk Games that gives you a single mission: stop the kitties at all costs.
Sony have sent out invites to an “exclusive PlayStation VR press event”, due to take place during the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco on March 15th.
After reading into the offer terms of Samsung’s Gear VR giveaway for S7 pre-orders, which appeared to limit the number of free units to 300,000 in the US, Samsung has reached out to clarify that they’re actually giving away a much greater number.
Tomáš ‘Frooxius’ Mariančík, the man behind the Sightline series has reached what he calls a “major milestone” with his continuing creation and education platform Neos. Today he unveiled a breakthrough framework which allows multiple users to gaze into and collaborate in the virtual world through VR headsets and portable devices.
This weekend Samsung announced they would be giving a free Gear VR headset to anyone pre-ordering the new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, with a “while supplies last” caveat. With pre-orders opening today, we’ve learned that Samsung will be giving out more than 300,000 units in the US alone.
For the past year, Tony Davidson and his 17-year old son Kai have been tucked away in the hills of Oregon collaborating on a VR experience that was inspired from one of Kai’s dreams. Thunderbird is a puzzle adventure game that surprised everyone at Unity’s Vision Summit awards in walking away with the best VR experience award. Even Tony thought that either crowd favorite Fantastic Contraption or Job Simulator would be rewarded, and so there was a collective gasp of surprise when they got the award. I had a chance to catch up with Kai and Tony to get their reactions to winning, what’s it like to be a father/son team, and how their Thunderbird puzzle adventure takes inspiration from dreams, myths, and Eastern religions.
