The appetite for virtual reality industry gatherings seem to be insatiable at the moment. UK based SouthWest VR just announced that it’s last sell-out event was so successful, they’re re-branding it with a view to expand its global appeal. What’s more, they’ve just opened submissions for talks for those interested in speaking at the conference.
Oculus launched the latest beta version of their dedicated Audio SDK on the 5th November, bringing a selection of new features and the version up to 1.0. Check inside for the release notes.
Layla Mah is the lead architect of virtual reality and advanced rendering at AMD. She talks about AMD’s LiquidVR technology built to help bring comfort, compatibility and content to virtual reality. VR requires a lot of graphics processing resources, and Layla has been looking at different architectures, scaling strategies, and display technologies that can meet the growing graphic processing demands. AMD is not only making sure that VR can work out of the box today, but also continuing to innovate in order to meet the growing graphics demands of VR over the next 5-10 years. She talks about some of the GPU hardware innovations, multi-GPU strategies, overcoming the limits of LCD displays with virtual retina displays and digital lightfield technologies, as well as how the game engine will need to evolve in order to handle up to 16 GPUs.
NextVR, the company known for live-broadcasting immersive video such as last month’s Gear VR-accessible Democratic debate, announced recently a $30.5 million Series A funding round with investments by some big names in traditional media.
Land’s End, the much lauded Gear VR adventure game from Ustwo Games for its stunning scenery, is no longer available on Note 4-compatible Gear VR headsets.
The latest in a series of regular articles exploring virtual reality, Noah Nelson today ponders how the rise of VR film-making may be scuppered by traditionalist attitudes towards the medium and how VR’s power to promote human empathy might just not work for some or even many viewers.
CCP Games, the company behind the hugely successful ‘EVE’ franchise and early VR adopters with VR space combat shooter EVE:Valkyrie, have announced they’re to expand their efforts in VR development with the help of $30M in funding.
Motion sensing peripheral specialists Leap Motion’s second development event ‘3D Jam’ has had over 180 submissions for projects that fuse the Leap’s input capabilities with virtual reality. This entry ‘VRez’, inspired by classic Dreamcast shooter Rez, caught our eye as a nicely intuitive application of modern input techniques to a traditional gameplay mechanic.
Daniel “SvenViking” Fearon is a developer behind the Scorched Battalion turn-based artillery game, which won the Silver prize for the Oculus Mobile Game Jam. Daniel talks about some of the design principles between alternating between first and third-person perspectives, and the evolution of that project.
So, you’ve got the right Samsung phone and you’re sitting patiently for your new Gear VR—currently available for pre-order from Best Buy—which is bound to come any day now, right? There’s loads of fun virtual reality apps to download once you get it, but how are you going share your virtual experiences with the world?
VorpX, the drivers that lets you play your favourite games in virtual reality on the Oculus Rift, has just received an update that brings with it official preliminary support for the newly released Fallout 4.
In a world all too full of crowdfunding campaigns built on an idea and some rendered mockups, I was impressed to see LucidCam CEO Han Jin pull a polished and functional VR camera out of his pocket—even more so when I saw the quality of the imagery it could capture.
Specular Theory CMO Ryan Pulliam and founder Morris May talk about some of the 360-degree video experiences that they’ve produced over the last year including an edgy Sundance film called Perspective: The Party, which tells the story of a sexual assault from the point of view of the victim and perpetrator.
OTOY, one of the leading pioneers of digital light field rendering, has tweeted an intriguing snippet claiming they’ve managed to leverage Valve’s Lighthouse tracking to add positional tracking to Samsung’s mobile phone powered Gear VR headset.
