Virtual reality market research firm Greenlight VR will share their latest data-driven insights into the consumer VR industry in a special presentation at VR Launchpad on October 20th.
Gunter S. Thompson has been hosting talk shows in virtual reality since April of 2014, and been participating in many of the early social VR experiences ranging from Minecrift, VRChat, and Riftmax Theater. He talks about some of the unique social experiences that are happening with user generated content including hover bus tours and various social games, as well as some of the regular events ranging from karaoke, meet-ups, and talk shows like Gunter’s Universe. Gunter is the events manager for VR Chat, and he talks about some of his visions for the types of events he’s looking forward to having as well as reflecting on the connections and friendships that he’s been able to cultivate over the past year and a half through social VR. There are people from all over the world that are able to connect through these Social VR experiences, and Gunter’s experience that social VR experiences have been some of the most compelling ones that he’s had and he looks forward to exploring the metaverse with his virtual friends.
You might have already seen the video of the proposal where a man bends his knee, VR headset and all, to his future fiance in the Salt Lake City-based VR theme park, The VOID. If you’re doubting the veracity or sincerity of the gesture, wonder no further. It was real (and I might have teared up a little bit too).
Mindfield Games‘ immersive and eerie first person adventure POLLEN has been Steam ‘greenlit’ in just 36 hours described as “record breaking” time by the studio. So, to celebrate, they’ve launched a brand new gameplay trailer.
With the huge success of Minecraft, a generation of gamers have grown up expecting to build and create in, as well as ‘merely’ play their games. Voxelus aims to tap into that creative spark with it’s new Voxelus Creator platform, which is supposedly designed to allow ‘everyone’ to build their own virtual reality, one block at a time.
Geoff Skow is a co-founder of Fish Bowl VR, which has over 200 early adopter, VR enthusiasts available to do user testing for VR experiences. VR developers can get a monthly subscription to get on-demand, user testing with let’s play videos as well as quantative and qualitative feedback on their experience. Fish Bowl VR provides feedback ranging from the framerate and performance across a spectrum of different hardware, ratings on the GUI and game play, as well as open-ended survey questions talking about what types of things could be improved or added to the experience. Some of the biggest open problems that Geoff sees VR developers face is how to train users how to play their game, and he talks about some different tutorial approaches that are embedded within the VR environment. Fish Bowl VR has over 250 VR enthusiasts on-hand who are paid to play and record their playtest sessions, and are always looking for more users to get paid to play VR experiences and offer their feedback. Getting objectively detailed feedback from people experienced and familiar with VR is certainly filling a market need, and Geoff says that VR developers can use their service in order to track their development progress over time.
Oculus Touch tech demonstration ‘Toybox’ made its public video debut a couple of days ago and highlighted the sheer fun that can be had in VR with intuitive motion controllers. The videos used a side-by-side in-game and real-world POV technique to illustrate how Touch can be used and in this latest video, those views are overlaid on top of eachother. It illustrates quite elegently the accuracy with which Oculus’ Touch controllers respond to real-world input.
Thanks to Scott McGregor for creating the video.
See Also: Hands-on: Oculus Touch is an Elegant Extension of your Hand for Touching Virtual Worlds
An unlikely combination of one of the most iconic interpretations of the superhero comic and cutting edge rendering tech come together to create one of the highest fidelity mobile VR experiences to date. But it doesn’t stop at Batman. Otoy’s new VR-focused content tools open the door to creating your own navigable VR worlds in stunning detail.
Road to VR guest reporter Nate Kozak fills us in.
The first Democratic presidential debate of this election cycle is over, and while the 24-hour news organizations decide who won (you can win? are there prizes?), it’s a middling victory for immersive video, and only just.
Landmark Entertainment Group are one of the leading organisations in the out of home entertainment industry, having been instrumental in devising over 100 ‘major’ attractions worldwide since 1980. Now, they’re leveraging that experience to create a new virtual reality theme park people can enjoy from the comfort of their homes, the new project is to debut as the ‘Virtual World’s Fair’.
VorpX is an application that lets you play your favourite games in virtual reality and is about to release its most “feature packed update ever”. The new release will drop on October 23rd and brings with it a host of tech updates including Oculus Runtime 0.7 support, Async Timewarp, ‘Crystal Image’ mode and a mode that allows you to browse the web, all inside your Oculus Rift VR headset.
The Oculus Touch Toybox demo was shown to the most number of people in one day at Oculus Connect 2 on September 23rd. This was the first time that a lot of developers were able to get their hands on the ‘Half Moon Prototype VR input controllers. But more importantly, it was a watershed moment for so many developers to be able to experience social and emotional presence with another person within virtual reality. It became less about the technology and tech specs, and more about the experience of playing, having fun, and connecting to another human in ways that were never possible before. This Toybox demo felt like a real turning point and “Aha!” moment for a lot of VR developers to see how compelling social experiences in VR are going to be. I had a chance to capture some of the candid reactions from Ken Nichols and Ela Darling moments after experiencing Toybox for the first time.
Oculus described Toybox as their internal test bed for the company’s ‘Touch’ motion input controllers. The company is polishing up the experience to give players a sandbox environment that shows off both multiplayer VR and the capability of the Touch controllers. A new video from Oculus gives us a glimpse inside of Toybox.
Tom Beardsmore is CEO of Coatsink Software, the studio responsible for the Gear VR puzzle game Esper. With the not-too-distant release of the consumer version of the Oculus Rift on the rise, I wanted to know more about how Coatsink was handling the port to the new Rift, and what it had in store for the game studio.
