Thee One Zero’s made-for-VR ‘astronaut in peril’ game ADR1FT is one of the most anticipated releases for VR headsets, and now it looks to be launching, on March 28th – in close proximity to the consumer Oculus Rift ship date at the end of March.
Many following the resurgence of VR starting with Oculus’ 2012 Kickstarter have bet their careers that VR and AR will be a disruptive technology, but sometimes it takes buy-in from one of the world’s largest and most influential investment banks to prove to the rest of the world that you aren’t crazy.
Being far away from the people you love the most is the pits, and it’s often times the little things you miss that really wear on your special friendships. This year is different though, as social VR apps are beginning to bridge the gap between us with their immersive virtual environments.
Duck Hunt (1984) inspires frustration in anyone who plays it, and for good reason. After a while the ducks are just too fast, the ammo supplies too low, and that dog. That smug little dog. It’s enough to make you want to retire your NES Zapper and never touch it again. That is, until we found the perfect recreation in virtual reality.
HTC’s second iteration of their SteamVR hardware, the Vive Pre, was unveiled last month at CES with a number of ergonomic and technical enhancements. Well it looks like developers worldwide are taking to twitter to rejoice the receipt of the last Vive, and here are some of the lucky developers who took to Twitter to celebrate.
It seems as if those VR pioneers that were part of the revolution prior to Oculus forming and starting their successful campaign to bring the Rift to life, may also now receive a consumer Oculus Rift.
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.
