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.
Chris Madsen steps into the beloved universes of Star Wars and Jurassic World via ILMxLab’s ingenious 3D C.A.V.E experience which uses positional tracking to create the illusion that you’re inside the film. It’s called ‘Holo-Cinema’.
Virtual reality has an amazing capacity to make you feel like you are somewhere else, and to step into new worlds. But as far as actually being an accurate stand-in for most real life activities, VR still has a long way to go. Cloudlands: VR Minigolf, however, is so darn close to the real thing that I would not advise investing in any minigolf business opportunities any time soon.
One of the best narrative VR experiences that I had at Sundance New Frontier was 6×9, an immersive experience of solitary confinement. You might ask, “Why would you ever want to do that?” Well, it was less about having a direct experience of solitary confinement, and more of a polished immersive journalism piece that explores the psychological damage of solitary confinement using a number of interesting VR storytelling techniques. I had a chance to unpack a lot of these techniques with Francesca Panetta, who has a strong background in audio production and audio narrative journalism.
While shooters and adventure games are a natural fit for VR, Owlchemy Labs’ Job Simulator is one of the most unique VR titles to date. It’s a genre-defying mix of puzzle, humor, and, in a way, exploration, in a form that could only work in VR. A new trailer for the game shows exactly what kind of whacky but awesome moments you can have inside.
