Announced ahead of tomorrow’s Playstation Experience event in San Francisco, it seems sci-fi adventure title Eclipse from developer White Elk is now headed to Sony’s virtual reality platform PlayStation VR, and it looks stunning.
Maureen Fan is the former vice president of gaming at Zynga, but she’s always had a passion for animation. Maureen’s mind was blown open the first time she experienced VR because she saw that the future of animation was going to be within Virtual Reality. She left Zynga about six months ago, and within a couple of weeks met her Baobab Studios co-founder Eric Darnell who directed Antz as well as wrote and directed four Madagascar films. They quickly assembled a team of other animated film veterans and put together a 2-minute trailer that helped them to secure $6 million dollars led by Comcast Ventures with participation from HTC and Samsung Ventures as well as others.
PlayStation Experience is coming back to the Moscone Center in San Francisco this year, and the company’s PSVR headset is stepping out into the spotlight with at least 16 confirmed PSVR titles up for demos. Can’t make it to SF for the weekend? You can still catch the VR panel talk streamed online on Dec. 5.
Pete Moss is Unity’s “VR Dude” in that he’s been a long-time believer and advocate in the cross section between VR and gaming and how the Unity game engine could play a significant part. He talks to me about his dual role of content creator and dogfooding the Unity engine as well as evangelizing VR to different communities and collecting experience prototypes from different game jams and developers from around the world. Pete’s passion for the potential of virtual reality is clear, and he’s the most excited to see how artists use VR to express themselves given that VR provides completely new pathways into the brain.
Well, the big announcement we were waiting for at last night’s 2015 Game Awards has dropped and it’s Rockband VR from Harmonix, a virtual reality re-imagining of the successful rhythm action franchise. One thing was unclear from the launch trailer though, and that was if indeed the Oculus Touch controllers pictured atop the featured guitars would translate to the retail game. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe has now confirmed that yes, this is indeed the case.
Kevin Williams reports from IAAPA 2015, an Amusement Park expo featuring upcoming rides and attractions coming to theme parks. He takes a closer look at the ever growing presence of VR at the show and its importance to the out of home entertainment sector.
Here’s a novel twist on the same old commercial imagery this Christmas as Coca Cola rolls out a new VR promotion in Poland. Developers Lemon & Orange have taken the now familiar Christmas truck convoy and built a VR roller coaster experience where you adopt the role of Santa, soaring through the skies on his sleigh pulled by (just the two) Reindeer.
With the announcement of Rock Band VR comes an interesting question: how will the guitar be tracked? One method—as seen in the announcement promo video—may be to stick an Oculus Touch controller to the end.
At The Game Awards 2015, Oculus has announced Rock Band VR, a new title in partnership with Rock Band creator Harmonix.
Earlier this week it was announced that Oculus founder Palmer Luckey would take to the stage at The Game Awards 2015 to make a “special announcement.” If you’d like to tune in to the show live, you can catch the stream right here starting at 9PM ET.
Google today released Cardboard Camera, a Google Cardboard-compatible app that let’s take 3D panoramic photos with your smartphone and then view them in a VR smartphone adapter.
Ushering in the era of immersive entertainment, The VR Report introduces a unique new talk show format featuring an immersive stereographic 360-degree virtual reality experience. Viewers get to sit down face-to-face in a virtual reality environment with a variety of luminaries and pioneers in the rapidly growing VR industry. Hosted by David Gene Oh who works in VR leading developer relations at Leap Motion. The show is an open forum catered towards the VR community, both enthusiast and the uninitiated.
On the hunt for ‘the Pixar of VR’ a cast of big names have joined for a $6 million series A investment in virtual reality animation studio Baobab.
Sophia Dominguez is going all in with virtual reality, and she talks her journey of making virtual reality a career. She’s the author of the weekly AllThingsVR newsletter, and she has been working as the entrepreneur in residence at the Rothenberg Ventures River Program. She was inspired by M. T. Anderson’s Feed inspired her to get into technology in order prevent a sci-fi dystopian future, and eventually traveled to a number of countries showing people Google Glass for the first time in order to counter the negative press it had been receiving. Sophia is really interested in social VR and she shares her experience of the Toybox demo from Oculus Connect 2 as well as her vision for her own social video viewing experiences using WebVR. Sophia has a lot of passion for the potentials of these immersive technologies, and is making a lot of strategic moves to be involved with VR for a very long time.
