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.
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.
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.
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 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 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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
Envelop VR, a company working on a productivity focused virtual reality environment, today announced they’d closed their Series A funding at $5.5 million with additional investment from Google Ventures.
Large tracking volumes, like the type afforded by Steam VR’s Lighthouse system, are a godsend for fans of virtual reality. But what about when you reach the edge of the wall? Where do you go then? Neat Corporation, an indie game and tool development studio, are using portals to address just that, and the results look like a blast.
Mike Alger just finished up his master’s degree focusing on VR interaction design methods, and he’s released a couple of popular videos summarizing his insights into immersive usr interfaces. I caught up with Mike at the Seattle VR expo talking about how he’s been using his film background and motion graphics skills in order to transition into VR experience design.
After continually dipping its corporate toe in the waters of immersive entertainment over the last couple of years, Google is finally committing to VR (and by turns AR) by appointing former VP of Product Clay Bavor to head up Google’s virtual reality push.
