We’ve seen VR live broadcasting company NextVR cover a range of sports and events, but its latest gig livestreaming a Premier Boxing Champions event was one of the best use-cases we’ve seen yet for the nascent technology.
Magic Leap today announced the closure of a massive $793.5 million Series C investment led by Alibaba. The company has kept their supposedly revolutionary AR tech under wraps to the public, but seem to have no trouble convincing investors to pour cash into the company.
Jessica Brillhart is the principle VR filmmaker at Google working with the Cardboard team to field test the latest 360-degree Jump camera technology. She was working at Google’s Creative Lab as a filmmaker when she was invited to start doing test shoots in VR. She quickly saw the power of the VR medium, and has continued to do experiments to learn the language of VR storytelling. She’s been sharing her insights through a series of essays on Medium, and I had a chance to catch up with her at Sundance to talk more about the language of cinematic VR & her thoughts on storytelling in VR.
The latest out of home, live VR attraction to hit the UK, Virtually Dead mixes free-roaming virtual reality with live theatrical performances to bring Zombies to life in a secret East London location.
Eric Darnell got into animation in the 1980s and eventually landed at Dreamworks Animation where he co-directed Antz (1998), and then co-directed and co-wrote four Madagascar movies. He’s a storyteller at heart, and now he’s diving deep into writing and creating short VR animated experiences in a start-up venture that he co-founded with Maureen Fan called Baobab Studios. I had a chance to catch up with Eric at Sundance to talk about his process of crafting a story, and why he’s so excited about the narrative potential of the medium of virtual reality.
The VOID, the virtual reality theme park experience, has caused quite a stir in the industry over the last 12 months. Now, the company are taking their free-roaming brand of mixed reality entertainment to TED2016 and Road to VR‘s Chris Madsen got a sneak peek at the new customer hardware attendees to the show will experience.
Adventure Time: Magic Man’s Head Games is a whimsical Gear VR 3D platformer featuring all of your favorite characters from the show. Fans of Adventure Time better keep their eyes peeled in the coming months though, as the game is ‘coming soon’ to Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR.
As with the HTC Vive in late December, the Oculus Rift VR system has now made its rounds through the FCC, the U.S. regulatory body that certifies devices for electromagnetic spectrum compatibility for consumer usage.
Rebellion, makers of the made-for-VR reboot Battlezone, is a veteran games developer with over 20 years in the industry. Here, in footage taken from a recent Sky News interview with Joe Tidy, the company’s CEO Jason Kingsley shares his reasons for making the virtual reality gamble.
Samsung has today announced an ‘Unpacked’ event in a teaser that puts both Gear VR and “the Next Galaxy” phone in the spotlight. The event will take place on February 21st in Barcelona, one day ahead of this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC).
The Sundance New Frontier program had 37 different virtual reality experiences showing on two different floors on Main Street in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival. Bechir Sylvain is an independent filmmaker who got his first taste of VR at Sundance last year at the New Frontier program where there were only about a dozen different experiences. For Bechir, going through all of VR experiences at Sundance was like a kid getting to experience Disney World for the first time, and I had a chance to capture his reactions and enthusiasm as he got his second big exposure to VR.
Frank He continues his VRLA Winter Expo adventures as he goes hands on with Everest VR, a HTC Vive powered experience from Sólfar Studios and RVX, that blends beautiful visuals with informative narration to present a compelling, interactive VR documentary.
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.
