With the reveal of today’s pre-order for the first consumer Gear VR, Oculus has launched the beta version of Arcade, the company’s first-party title currently featuring 21 classic arcade games from Sega, Midway, and Bandai Namco. Oculus Arcade beta is available on all Gear VR units old and new.
Jason Storey (aka apieceoffruit) is a VR developer, Left-Handed VR podcast co-host, and all-around VR enthusiast who has worked on number of different VR experiences. He talks about working on the gaze-control mechanism in the cinematic VR experience of Colosse, which was a Silver experience award winner in the Oculus Mobile Game Jam. He’s also working on Echo Red with Nick Pittom, which is an experience that uses the Oculus Touch and Vive motion controllers in order to make you feel like a super hero. Jason has been able to work on projects ranging the full spectrum from passive cinematic VR experiences to the other end of the interactivity spectrum with full motion controls, and so he’s got a lot of interesting perspectives and ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of VR as a medium for expression.
As we reported a few days ago, it’s expected that the consumer version of Samsung’s Oculus and mobile phone powered virtual reality headset, the Gear VR, will go up for pre-order today. It seems things are moving in that direction as the product page for Gear VR on the main Samsung website is now up and running, and Best Buy has just opened its pre-order page for those wishing to grab a unit.
Virtual Reality already does a pretty good job of fooling our eyes and ears, but we need to remember that we have other senses as well. Peter Sassaman is trying to add smell to our VR experiences with his device, Cilia, which just launched on Kickstarter.
Today at the VRX conference in San Francisco, Epic Games, developers of Unreal Engine, announced that they’re partnering with NVIDIA to integrate their Gameworks VR featureset into UE4. VR SLI and Multi-res shading will be availabl in forthcoming updates.
Tony Parisi has been working towards creating an open ecosystem of virtual reality helping to co-create the Virtual Reality Modelling Language in the early 90s. He recently took a position at WEVR, and while he’s not revealing too much about the details of what he’s going to be working on at WEVR, it’s likely to do with building out components of the VR ecosystem using open web technologies like WebVR. In this interview, Tony talks about some of the disadvantages of the VR experiences solely being created within walled-garden and proprietary context, and the advantages of moving towards making VR a first-class citizen on the open web.
VRTGO 2015 is almost here! A leading UK virtual reality conference, the event is to be held at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts in Gateshead on November 12th and the event’s organisers have just announced the latest sponsor, ARM Holdings will be on hand to demonstrate how their technology is powering the latest mobile VR headsets.
A result of the AEC Hackathon, Helsinki – this neat prototype application lets you don the HTC Vive virtual reality headset, pick up the SteamVR controllers and sculpt your own designer kitchen. A simple but neat user interface lets you select materials for walls, cupboards and even lighting and furniture. Yet another example of non-gaming applications that we can genuinely see being a boon to retail in the not too distant future. This is the work of Finnish developers Samuli Jääskeläinen, Taru Muhonen and Paavo Happonen.
Samsung’s mobile phone (and Oculus) powered Gear VR vr headset us to become available for pre-order in its first consumer form on November 10th according to a user who attended a recent Best Buy tech demo. The new $99, lighter model will replace the two previous ‘Innovator’ editions first launched at the end of last year
Dora Cheng is one of the co-founders of uForis VR, which is a VR company that is focused on creating pragmatic applications of virtual reality. One of their first big VR projects was to create virtual tours for the Domus Student Housing. They had to figure out a production pipeline that could operate at scale in order to capture thousands of photo spheres of apartment units within a 3-month period. Dora talks about all the production and post-production challenges that they had to solve that included processing, stitching, color correcting, and creating a VR application wrapper that’s viewable within the Gear VR.
Guest writer Sebastian Bos takes a historical look at virtual reality’s affinity and maturity has been symbiotic with the growth in popularity of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. Although, as Sebastian explores, it hasn’t always been plain sailing.
Relying on jumpscares in VR to make a game frightening is fundamentally lazy. There’s no finesse, no building terror that creeps inside you, just the looming possibility that a ghoul can flash in front of your face, thereby activating whatever squishy evolutionary mechanism that regulates fight or flight. Thankfully, the devs over at Robot Invader understand this in their new first-person mystery thriller Dead Secret, which seeps in much deeper than any garden variety jumpscare could.
Michael Glombicki shares his thoughts on the recent SEA-VR virtual reality community event, held in Seattle last month, and ponders the future of the community scene as VR becomes a mainstream technology.
