Rebellion, makers of the made-for-VR reboot Battlezone, is a veteran games developer with over 20 years in the industry. Here, in footage taken from a recent Sky News interview with Joe Tidy, the company’s CEO Jason Kingsley shares his reasons for making the virtual reality gamble.
Samsung has today announced an ‘Unpacked’ event in a teaser that puts both Gear VR and “the Next Galaxy” phone in the spotlight. The event will take place on February 21st in Barcelona, one day ahead of this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC).
The Sundance New Frontier program had 37 different virtual reality experiences showing on two different floors on Main Street in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival. Bechir Sylvain is an independent filmmaker who got his first taste of VR at Sundance last year at the New Frontier program where there were only about a dozen different experiences. For Bechir, going through all of VR experiences at Sundance was like a kid getting to experience Disney World for the first time, and I had a chance to capture his reactions and enthusiasm as he got his second big exposure to VR.
Frank He continues his VRLA Winter Expo adventures as he goes hands on with Everest VR, a HTC Vive powered experience from Sólfar Studios and RVX, that blends beautiful visuals with informative narration to present a compelling, interactive VR documentary.
Budget Cuts is a stealth-action virtual reality game in development for the HTC Vive. The polished experience has the player avoiding humanoid robots and attacking from the shadows with throwing knives and crossbows. The game’s portaling locomotion system is a lesson for VR developers.
Thief in the Shadows, a VR experience based on The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), has been nominated for a Visual Effects Society award for ‘Outstanding Visual Effects in a Real-Time Project’.
Frank He goes hands on with Crytek’s Oculus Rift exclusive rock-climbing VR title ‘The Climb‘ at this year’s VRLA Winter Expo.
Gear VR users are still waiting for Oculus to officially open video capture for the masses, but according to a recent update in the documentation section for the Mobile SDK, app developers will now be able to capture “live, full resolution, undistorted, single-eye, full-layer-support VR video.” In layman’s terms: no more weird 3rd-party recording programs.
The latest news in the world of Apple is the latest acquisition of computer vision company Flyby, together with a recent comment from Apple’s CEO seems to be indicating some significant virtual reality commitments from the company.
The ever-famous TED conference kicks off on February 15th in Vancouver, Canada and this year will feature The VOID mixed reality VR experience, including the latest hardware from the company.
During Facebook’s Q4 2015 earnings call this week the company reiterated conservative expectations for Oculus Rift sales in 2016.
Samsung had a huge presence at Sundance this year as the mobile sponsor of the festival. They were evangelizing Gear VR to independent filmmakers with their Gear VR theater as well as collaborating with Sundance’s New Frontier program to provide Gear VR headsets for the mobile VR selection of cinematic VR experiences. I had a chance to catch up with Jim Wilson, who is the director of immersive products & VR for Samsung.
BUTTS: The VR Experience has today come to Gear VR, released by creator Tyler Hurd. We just can’t get enough of BUTTS.
