The Oculus Rift is Now 4 Months Backordered
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.
Using Your Body as an Input Controller with OBE Immersive
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 Co-op HTC Vive Game Uses Kinect to Project Players into VR
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 on Unlearning Game Design for VR
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 on Tour in Major Cities in US and Canada, Enter to Win an Oculus Rift
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.
2016 VR Industry Report: Everything You Need to Know in One Place
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.
Oculus ‘Rift Compatibility Check’ Tool Tells You if Your PC is “Ready For Rift”
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.
Evangelizing VR Within an Indie Game Studio
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 Closes Series A Funding With Google Ventures to Deploy VR Productivity Environment
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.
‘Budget Cuts’ Uses Portals to Solve Room-Scale Locomotion Problem
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.
VR Interface Design Insights from Mike Alger
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.
Google’s VR Head Now Focusing Full Attention on Virtual Reality Efforts
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.
Oculus Rift: What You Really Get for Your Money
There’s been some commotion about the price of the new Oculus Rift pre-order bundle, and although nearly doubling the infamous ‘$350 ballpark’ estimate given out by company founder Palmer Luckey (for which he apologized), we thought this quick high-level breakdown might help clarify what you’re getting for hard earned cash.
‘Hover Junkers’ Pre-order Now Available on Indiegogo
Hover Junkers is a multi-player first-person shooter set aboard customizable hovercrafts, and if you’ve followed any of Stress Level Zero‘s recent video updates, you’ve seen just how cool it looks. Hover Junker superfans can now pre-order through the studio’s Indiegogo campaign, which is set up so community can show their support at multiple funding levels.
