I sit down with Valve Writer, Game Developer and seemingly omnipotent VR Evangelist Chet Faliszek to discuss the new Vive Pre, Valve’s focus on a safe VR experience, expectations for the upcoming VR content showcase and his startlingly sneaky cat.
UK theme park Thorpe Park has revealed that a virtual reality ghost train experience in development for some 3 years will finally open to the public this year, powered by the HTC Vive VR headset.
Jim Geduldick is the Professional Marketing Manager at GoPro, which includes all of the ways GoPro cameras are used within cinema, virtual reality, broadcast television & photography. Jim talks about how the history of spherical video at GoPro goes back to 2011, and how virtual reality provided a platform to actually watch these immersive videos. He also talks about GoPro’s Odyssey camera, which is created in collaboration with Google’s Jump camera platform. He alludes that Google is doing some highly advanced post-processing with the information from the 16 cameras, but wasn’t able to provide many more official details yet.
HTC Chairwoman Cher Wang may be considering spinning off the VR side of the business into a separate entity, causing stock prices in the Taiwanese company to rise sharply today.
It’s nothing short of amazing when you can take a tour of a town that doesn’t exist anymore, and Arnswalde VR takes you back to the once-West Pomeranian city to see just what it was like before the turbidity of WW2.
Michael Lenzi is the CEO & co-founder of Atomic VR, and they’ve spent the last couple of years experimenting with untethered VR experiences. They’ve created a backpack with custom hardware that can run a desktop GPU for up to an hour, and they’ve also created a Star Wars-inspired Lightsword Experience that can be played in a space up to 20 feet by 20 feet with a Vive. They’re currently not interested in mass producing their hardware solution, but are interested in enabling and developing eSports VR experiences that give you a more active workout.
Spellbound is a new made-for-VR game which uses Leap Motion and the Oculus Rift DK2 to allow your actual hands to perform some nifty spell-casting in the virtual world, amongst other things.
We went hands on with the new, real-time, VR experience inspired by the Ridley Scott movie ‘The Martian’ and found its mix of high production values, motion controllers combined with motion chairs seriously compelling.
Jamie Kelly is a co-founder and president of VR Studios & VRCade. They’re creating a series of out-of-home VR gaming experiences that can be played in spaces as small as 15’x15′ and as large as 150’x75′.
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.
