Pre-orders for the Gear VR, the mobile VR headset made in collaboration between Samsung and Oculus, opened up on November 10th. With the headset due to be released on the 20th, it looks like Best Buy has sold out of its initial stock, but other stores remain stocked.
Matt McIlwain is a managing director at the Madrona Venture Group, which recently announced their first investment in the virtual reality space with a $4 million Series A round of funding for Envelop VR. Matt talks about why Seattle is one of the top hotbeds for augmented and virtual reality because there’s a wide variety of hardware, software, gaming, and cloud computing companies including HTC, Valve, Oculus, Facebook, Amazon AWS & Twitch, Microsoft Xbox & Hololens, and Nintendo of America. Matt talks about Madrona’s investment in Envelop VR as well as their strategy finding companies building horizontal software for AR and VR as well as other vertical commercial opportunities of new models of distribution that AR and VR enables.
EVE: Gunjack, The mobile counterpart of the hugely anticipated VR multiplayer space shooter EVE:Valkyrie, is released tomorrow on Samsung Gear VR. We go hands-on with the consumer release and find out that CCP Games have succeeded in setting a new benchmark for visual fidelity in mobile virtual reality.
Nokia has sent out invites for a forthcoming event in Los Angeles on November 30th asking guests to “join us for the exclusive unveiling” of Ozo, the company’s professional VR camera.
As developers continue to experiment with a range of VR navigation techniques, Virtuix’s Omni treadmill gives gamers a way to physically walk and run around virtual worlds in an otherwise limited space. The company’s latest developments bring compatibility with the HTC Vive and its Lighthouse tracking tech, enabling ‘decoupled’ manipulation of walking, looking, and aiming.
Crytek has today released the Back to Dinosaur Island tech demo for download. The five minute demo showing a perturbed T-Rex is compatible with Oculus Rift DK2 headset and built on CryEngine.
Felix & Paul, the studio that recently signed the “largest live-action VR deal to date” with Oculus, has released three episodes of Lebron James’ new mini-series, Striving for Greatness, via Facebook 360° video.
As time goes on and as more and more people have a chance to experience good, cutting edge virtual reality, advocates for the technology are springing up in the most unlikely of places. Now, actor and all round patron of the arts Kevin Spacey has gone on record saying he believes immersive technology holds the future of entertainment, so much so he’s invested in a VR company.
Oculus CTO John Carmack confirmed that an official screen capture solution is on the way to Samsung’s Gear VR headset, pending a future update, in response to a question on Twitter.
For ‘causal’ virtual reality to take off—the kind that you and I can create and share as easily as we do with photos today—it needs to be accessible. Google Cardboard has made important strides in introducing people to the low end of the immersive spectrum, but there’s still a lot of friction in the user experience, on both the software and hardware ends. Figment VR aims to fix the latter.
Blackout is a narrative virtual reality experience from creative studio Specular which merges a real-time game environment with depth-captured subjects, set in New York City’s subway. Having completed principal photography, the studio’s Kickstarter campaign aims to finish production for deployment on desktop and mobile VR platforms.
Tom Furness has been pioneering virtual and augmented reality for the past 50 years, longer than almost anyone else in the world. He has an amazing history that started back in 1966 while he was in the Air Force building some of the first helmet-mounted displays, visually-coupled systems, and eventually the Super Cockpit. Furness eventually left the military to “beat his swords into plowshares” and bring these virtual reality technologies to the larger public by starting the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington, which has been doing original research to validate the efficacy of VR for everything ranging from medicine, education, and training. He also helped invent the virtual retinal display technology in the early 90s, which is being used as some of the basis of Magic Leap’s lightfield display technologies. Tom has continued to be a virtual reality visionary, and has some pretty inspiring ideas the future of the metaverse and education through the Virtual World Society.
Oculus CTO John Carmack has been working on a VR scripting environment called—simply enough—VrScript. After getting a glimpse of the environment at Oculus Connect, Tony Parisi had some thoughts to share.
Convrge, the virtual reality social platform known for hosting one of the largest gatherings in social VR history—a shared viewing of the Oculus’ pre-E3 event—is now taking the online space in a new direction, one that is decidedly much more intimate in size. The team is calling it Convrge Cinemas.
The latest in a semi-regular series of features where Kevin Williams covers the wider aspects of the re-emergence of virtual reality development in consumer and commercial entertainment. In this special feature Kevin gets a chance to try one of the most anticipated VR applications in the entertainment sphere, the virtual reality theme park called The VOID.
