Yesterday marked the start of the 2016 Youth Olympic winter games held in Norway. VR video company NextVR was on the scene to stream the opening ceremony and will be capturing highlights throughout the event.
Dimensional from UK developers is a built-for-VR puzzle platformer for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift which leverage’s experimental locomotion ideas to tackle nausea and enhance presence. The project has just hit Kickstarter, so we thought we’d take a quick look at it.
Polydome from developer Plan8, is a VR music experience that encourages you to “create endless musical combinations and permutations by connecting sequences of floating gems”, and it’s just arrived for free via Oculus Share’s ‘Concepts’ category.
NBCUniveral’s Syfy channel have announced its new, futuristic crime drama ‘Halycon’ will include the production of 5 special episodes, designed to be viewed through the Oculus Rift VR headset.
Developer Block Interval is due to treat show goers to 5-7 minutes of gameplay for its brand new “story-centric” VR adventure puzzler Life of Lon at UK based VR event VR World Congress in April.
Chris Milk’s TED talk last year popularized the idea that virtual reality has the potential to be the ultimate ’empathy machine.’ Emblematic Group‘s Nonny de la Peña has been one of the original pioneers of exploring empathy in VR through a series of immersive journalism pieces ranging from torture in Guantanamo Bay, homelessness in LA, the Syrian refugee crisis, and most recently domestic violence with Kiya and what it’s like to walk through an abortion clinic protest with Across the Line. I had a chance to catch up with Nonny at Sundance to get more insight into how she cultivates empathy within VR, but also why she’s so motivated to always stand up for the underdog within her work.
The Secretary of Defense—second only to the President in control of the US military—recently stopped by the Navy’s BEMR lab to see the latest work being done with VR, AR, and mixed reality technology.
Oculus have released a dedicated Unity plugin which aims to automatically detect and transform an audio stream from speech into virtual character lip movements automatically.
Valve has just announced that the latest release of SteamVR beta, its virtual reality platform SteamVR just upgraded its rendering pipeline to support Direct Mode, a way to bypass unnecessary operating system clutter to render directly to a VR headset. In this case, the HTC Vive Pre.
Kevin Williams continues his look at the wider VR landscape, and this time turns his attention to another, potentially enormous component of the virtual reality industry, VR gambling.
Dr. Jeff Norris works on Mission Operations Innovation at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Ops Lab. They’ve been partnering with all of the major virtual reality & augmented reality companies to accelerate the progress in space exploration, designing spacecraft, and assisting astronauts with augmented expert assistants. Jeff was at the Unity AR/VR Vision Summit where he provided an inspiring speech about how NASA is using all of the latest immersive technologies to explore and discover more about our Universe.
The judges at Vision Summit 2016 sorted through nearly 250 applicants to find the top three VR/AR creations spanning a number of categories. The award ceremony represents the best out of these three competing games, experiences, or 360 videos.
Tonight’s 21 finalists at the Vision AR/VR Awards are in, and the AR/VR cross-industry event in Hollywood, California will be honoring a diverse range of AR/VR content spanning 8 categories. The winners will be announced this evening ceremony starting at 8PM Pacific Time (click here for local time).
