Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been ordered to give a deposition in the long-running dispute between virtual reality company Oculus and games publisher Zenimax media after the latter claimed its intellectual property was used to improve the former’s Oculus Rift VR headset.
HTC recently announced that it the expected arrival date for its SteamVR powered headset the Vive had slipped from ‘holidays 2015’ to April 2016. HTC’s CEO Cher Wang claims however that “…we could have started to ship Vive this month”.
Developers Alientrap have revealed details and a new trailer for their riotously fun looking physics playground title, Modbox, coming to SteamVR and HTC Vive next year.
Oculus’ Audio SDK is now officially out of beta, giving developers a range of audio spatialization plugins for Unity, Unreal Engine, and audio middleware along with a free library of over 500 high-quality sound effects designed by Oculus specifically for use in VR.
Getting your hands on the new Samsung Gear VR hasn’t been easy task due to spotty availability. But if you’re in Western Europe or the United States, you still may be able to grab one in time for the holidays.
Convrge, the social VR platform known for hosting some of the first large-scale social meetups in virtual reality, has announced signups for a Gear VR beta, which will allow Samsung Gear VR users to mingle and also watch YouTube videos with Oculus Rift DK2 owners.
Presence Capital today announced they’ve raised a $10 million fund to invest in VR/AR companies through the new VC firm. Among other heads of the fund is HTC’s Phil Chen, the purported “founder” of the HTC Vive project at HTC.
Presence Capital is a new early-stage venture capital firm that’s focused on funding virtual reality and augmented reality startups. I had the chance to interview one of the co-founders Amitt Mahajan at the VRX Conference about this new fund and how he plans on applying the lessons he learned from the causal, social & mobile gaming market to VR.
Following the HTC Vive delay which pushed the headset just into Q2 2016, eyes turn to Oculus to see if they can deliver on the Rift’s Q1 2016 release date window.
We now know that EVE:Valkyrie will be packed-in with every retail Oculus Rift once that VR headset launches in Q1 2016. So what can you expect from the game? We’ve got some new gameplay of the latest pre-alpha in action to help answer that question.
CCP Games have announced that their made-for-VR online, multi-player space shooter EVE: Valkyrie, will ship free with every consumer Oculus Rift VR headset at launch, some time in Q1 2016.
Shauna Heller worked as a developer relations specialist focusing on non-gaming and non-entertainment experiences at Oculus for a year and a half before leaving to start her consultancy Clay Park VR. She’s had a lot of exposure to the leading non-gaming VR experiences and understands what the how the full landscape of VR is shaping up and what the early adopters of VR are doing. I had a chance to catch up with Shauna at the VRX conference to get more insights for how VR is going to go beyond this initial push of gaming and entertainment.
Flickr has today released their Gear VR app that lets you browse through some its best user-generated 360 photos—all at an impressively high quality and delivered at a speed that’s quicker than you can say ‘Revontulikaari’ (that’s ‘Northern Lights Arc’ in Finnish).
