New Gear VR Games and Apps – January Week #2
‘Spellbound’ Lets You Cast Virtual Magic with your Real Hands
Spellbound is a new made-for-VR game which uses Leap Motion and the Oculus Rift DK2 to allow your actual hands to perform some nifty spell-casting in the virtual world, amongst other things.
Hands On: The Martian VR Experience is a Triumph in Motion
We went hands on with the new, real-time, VR experience inspired by the Ridley Scott movie ‘The Martian’ and found its mix of high production values, motion controllers combined with motion chairs seriously compelling.
Room-scale to Warehouse-scale: Full-Motion VR Gaming with VRCade
Jamie Kelly is a co-founder and president of VR Studios & VRCade. They’re creating a series of out-of-home VR gaming experiences that can be played in spaces as small as 15’x15′ and as large as 150’x75′.
Leap Motion Gesture Tech to Ship in Hardware from “Major” OEMs This Year
Catching up with Leap Motion at CES 2016 last week, CEO Michael Buckwald tells us about the company’s latest work like the Interaction Engine and newly reprojected hands. Buckwald also says that Leap Motion tech will ship in hardware from “major” OEMs this year.
On Expectations: What Our Audience Thinks About Rift, Vive, and PlayStation VR Prices
After a negative outcry about the $600 price of the Oculus Rift, founder Palmer Luckey admits that he “handled the messaging poorly” on setting the price expectation. The loudest voices may not be the majority however, so we set out to see what people thought about pricing for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR.
The Oculus Rift is Now 4 Months Backordered
Oculus Rift pre-orders opened on January 6th and were met with both excitement and resentment over the $600 price tag. That doesn’t seem to have stopped excited early-adopters from getting in line.
Using Your Body as an Input Controller with OBE Immersive
Linda Lobato is the CEO and co-founder of OBE Immersive, which is a wearable tech start-up that is part of the current Rothenberg River Program. She previously raised $77,000 to kickstart a MIDI Controller Jacket, and after seeing an early Oculus prototype in Korea she decided that VR was the next frontier for wearable technology. I caught up with Linda at a Rothenberg demo day where she talks their progress for creating a jacket that turns your body into an immersive input controller within a first-person shooter. It’s still within the early stages of development, but they hope to launch a Kickstarter later this year.
This Co-op HTC Vive Game Uses Kinect to Project Players into VR
This experimental game not only allows two players, both immersed in VR via an HTC Vive headset, to share the same virtual space, it also projects their real world image into the application. And, it’s all possible over an Internet connection.
Chandana Ekanayake on Unlearning Game Design for VR
Chandana Ekanayake is a game director & art director at Uber Entertainment where he’s working on a VR adventure game for the PlayStation VR titled Wayward Sky. I caught up with Chandana at the Seattle VR Expo where he shared with me some of the highlights from his presentation about “Unlearning Game Design for VR.” He talks about his lessons learned from creating a third-person, single player adventure game focusing on atmosphere and storytelling and why they decided to focus on the PlayStation VR as their initial platform.
AltspaceVR on Tour in Major Cities in US and Canada, Enter to Win an Oculus Rift
AltspaceVR, the social VR platform, is touring major cities in the US and Canada on a new ‘VR Hype Tour’ starting today. The team will be demoing their platform and letting attendees enter to win VR headsets.
2016 VR Industry Report: Everything You Need to Know in One Place
Greenlight VR’s second industry report is co-authored with leading VR news site, Road to VR, and provides industry forecasts, analysis, and best practices.
Oculus ‘Rift Compatibility Check’ Tool Tells You if Your PC is “Ready For Rift”
Not sure if you’re computer is going to be ready in time for March when your pre-ordered Rift ships? Oculus has just published a handy tool that assesses your system and simultaneously confronts you with the stark reality that you’re already dangerously close to the poverty line.
Evangelizing VR Within an Indie Game Studio
Kayla Kinnunen is a game director at Roadhouse Interactive, which is an independent game development studio based out of Vancouver, BC. She talks about her process of evangelizing VR at her studio and slowly ramping up a VR team. She made a goal to put every one of Roadhouse’s 150 employees through a Vive demo loop, and she talks about what discovered in doing this as process well as how a indie game studio is thinking about VR.
