Today kicks off two days of the inaugural Vision Summit, an AR/VR conference hosted by Unity with many of the major players in the virtual reality space signed on as partners. The keynote, which will feature a rare address by Valve’s Gabe Newell, will be livestreamed right here.
There was a moment when Philipp Maas and Dominik Stockhausen realized that their sci-fi horror film would be a lot more intense and work better if was a virtual reality experience. So they took the opportunity to explore the language of virtual reality from the perspective of filmmakers who were trying to tell a story. In the end, Sonar makes a number of different innovations to the language of cinematic VR that I think are worth unpacking. I caught up with the two creators at Sundance New Frontier where Sonar featured within the mobile VR section.
Even if you’re an Android fanboy, there’s no denying that Apple knows how to market. Some Apple haters might go so far to say that marketing is the only thing Apple does well—otherwise how have they managed to turn ‘copied ideas’ into billions? No matter which side you fall on, it’s clear that Oculus is borrowing from the Apple marketing playbook.
There’s no doubt that what Oculus and Samsung managed to achieve with the mobile Gear VR headset is impressive, but one aspect, positional tracking, lags far behind desktop VR headsets. Oculus CTO John Carmack has affirmed his team’s focus on adding this missing piece to an otherwise excellent mobile VR package.
Oculus today revealed more information on their Oculus Ready PC lineup, and announced that PC and headset bundle pre-orders will begin February 16th.
Epic Games’ Nick Whiting paired up with Nick Donaldson again before Oculus Connect 2 to build the Bullet Train demo over the course of 10 weeks. They wanted to dogfood the Unreal Engine to optimize the rendering for VR, but also experiment with Oculus’ motion-tracked Touch controllers. They had the Toybox demo to use for inspiration, and so they set out to maximize the interaction fidelity for a game that had a lot of guns and explosions. I had a chance to catch up with Nick at the Seattle VR Expo where he told me about their design process as well as some of the technical limitations that drove some of their design decisions.
The more I think about virtual reality, the more I start to address the reasons that I’m attracted to it in the first place. Having full interaction with a virtual environment—including virtual people—has been my goal since childhood, and we’re inching closer to a day when immersive fiction will be a reality. But while we’re bridging the gap between now and the future, where a ‘perfect hardware solution’ supposedly exists, we need to find a way for the casual, non-gaming new comer to strap on a VR headset and immediately say ‘hey. I get that!’
The race to explore the wide open frontier of virtual reality attracts all types. Game designers, filmmakers, and theatre artists are all trying their hands at crafting entertainment of all sorts. We’ve also seen journalists develop new ways of immersing audiences in true-life tales, and UX designers start to solve the puzzles of computing in VR. What I want to talk to you about today, however, is a part of the tech sector that isn’t as ‘sexy’ as those, but in the long run it can prove to be as important, if not more so. The subject at hand: educational technology.
Universe Sandbox 2 is a physics-based space simulator from Giant Army that will soon be getting Oculus Rift and HTC Vive support, so you can build the Universe as you see fit in virtual reality—provided you adhere to the laws of classical mechanics.
After featuring their new experiment which used the HTC Vive and Microsoft Kinect to the physical image of 2 players into virtual worlds remotely, we wanted to know more about how developers Jasper Brekelmans and Jeroen de Mooij had pulled it off. So, in an interview conducted by themselves, the duo share their development tips, woes and joy working in VR with the HTC Vive and Microsoft’s Kinect camera.
John Gaeta first got into virtual reality when he was approached by the Wachowski siblings to be the visual effects supervisor on The Matrix. Now he’s Executive Creative Director of Industrial Light & Magic’s Experience LAB (ILMxLAB) where he’s designing and enabling platforms that will lead to the Matrix — “minus the machine dominance” of course. ILMxLAB has a decade of story to explore within the Star Wars Universe using the latest virtual and augmented reality technologies. I had a chance to catch up with John at Sundance where he talked about collaborating with a dream team of storytellers, technologists, and theme park designers to create immersive entertainment experiences. We talk about the evolution of passive and interactive storytelling, crafting tribal social VR experiences, and the importance of including humanity and emotion within a medium that can otherwise feel isolating.
Crytek has gone head-first into developing The Climb, the upcoming VR game featuring solo free rock climbing. The acrophobia – or fear of heights – from watching their first video developer diary is palpable to say the least.
Late last month we spotted Google job postings that heavily pointed toward the company developing its own high-end mobile VR headset. Now a new report from Financial Times indicates the company plans to launch the headset this year.
DCS World is one of the few remaining hardcore PC flight simulators with a major emphasis on attention to detail. I remember when a friend of mine announced excitedly that he had mastered the aircraft start-up procedure for the A10 Warthog—it took him about a week! DCS World recently received some big improvements for Rift support.
