The latest in a semi-regular series of features where Kevin Williams covers the wider aspects of the re-emergence of virtual reality development in consumer and commercial entertainment. In this special feature Kevin gets a chance to try one of the most anticipated VR applications in the entertainment sphere, the virtual reality theme park called The VOID.
Social virtual reality platform AltspaceVR have today announced they’re partnering with Wizards of the Coast, publisher of Dungeons and Dragons, to bring the brand into virtual reality, retaining the social aspects that makes the table-top incarnations so popular.
Google’s interest in VR has been steadily growing, reaching a recent climax back in May during the company’s annual ‘I/O 2015’ conference where they announced a slew of new VR initiatives including ‘Jump’ for VR video.
Fabric Engine is an authoring tool-set for easing the visualisation and building of content in virtual spaces. The team behind the project have built what they claim is a suite of software which helps quickly iterate on designs for interactive applications and stories by presenting the creation inside virtual reality.
One of the most expensive and time-consuming parts of demoing at a VR event is outfitting enough demo stations. Too few and you’ll have a long line of unhappy people, but at $700+ for a GearVR/Galaxy S6 combo, it’s expensive to have more than a couple at most. And this assumes you’re a VR professional. What if you simply want to show off VR demos as part of your corporate event or birthday party without the hassle?
The appetite for virtual reality industry gatherings seem to be insatiable at the moment. UK based SouthWest VR just announced that it’s last sell-out event was so successful, they’re re-branding it with a view to expand its global appeal. What’s more, they’ve just opened submissions for talks for those interested in speaking at the conference.
Oculus launched the latest beta version of their dedicated Audio SDK on the 5th November, bringing a selection of new features and the version up to 1.0. Check inside for the release notes.
Layla Mah is the lead architect of virtual reality and advanced rendering at AMD. She talks about AMD’s LiquidVR technology built to help bring comfort, compatibility and content to virtual reality. VR requires a lot of graphics processing resources, and Layla has been looking at different architectures, scaling strategies, and display technologies that can meet the growing graphic processing demands. AMD is not only making sure that VR can work out of the box today, but also continuing to innovate in order to meet the growing graphics demands of VR over the next 5-10 years. She talks about some of the GPU hardware innovations, multi-GPU strategies, overcoming the limits of LCD displays with virtual retina displays and digital lightfield technologies, as well as how the game engine will need to evolve in order to handle up to 16 GPUs.
NextVR, the company known for live-broadcasting immersive video such as last month’s Gear VR-accessible Democratic debate, announced recently a $30.5 million Series A funding round with investments by some big names in traditional media.
Land’s End, the much lauded Gear VR adventure game from Ustwo Games for its stunning scenery, is no longer available on Note 4-compatible Gear VR headsets.
The latest in a series of regular articles exploring virtual reality, Noah Nelson today ponders how the rise of VR film-making may be scuppered by traditionalist attitudes towards the medium and how VR’s power to promote human empathy might just not work for some or even many viewers.
CCP Games, the company behind the hugely successful ‘EVE’ franchise and early VR adopters with VR space combat shooter EVE:Valkyrie, have announced they’re to expand their efforts in VR development with the help of $30M in funding.
Motion sensing peripheral specialists Leap Motion’s second development event ‘3D Jam’ has had over 180 submissions for projects that fuse the Leap’s input capabilities with virtual reality. This entry ‘VRez’, inspired by classic Dreamcast shooter Rez, caught our eye as a nicely intuitive application of modern input techniques to a traditional gameplay mechanic.
Daniel “SvenViking” Fearon is a developer behind the Scorched Battalion turn-based artillery game, which won the Silver prize for the Oculus Mobile Game Jam. Daniel talks about some of the design principles between alternating between first and third-person perspectives, and the evolution of that project.
