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.
After reaching more than 15 million installs of Cardboard apps from Google Play, Google is now making the official Google Cardboard app available in +100 countries for iOS and Android devices.
For the past three years, Will Smith and Norman Chan have been playing the latest virtual reality demos and tracking the evolution of VR with their Tested.com reviews. Will was able to see Oculus’ Toybox demo at E3 this year, a multiplayer sandbox experience which showed off the company’s ‘Touch’ motion controllers. The Presence he felt with the controllers, combined with dynamic social interactions, convinced him to quit Tested to start his own VR company. Will isn’t talking about the specifics of his new venture just yet, but he alludes that it has something to do with telepresence communication as inspired by the interactions in Toybox.
Google naturally rolled out their initial virtual reality experiments on Android, but now that the company has gotten serious about Cardboard, we’re seeing more of the VR initiative make its way to Apple’s iOS. And now, Street View VR functionality has finally arrived on the iPhone.
Timoni West is a principle designer for Unity Labs, and she’s working on creating professional tools for creating VR scenes in Unity while being in VR. These tools are still in the prototype phase of development, but it’s something that Unity is actively working on implementing. There will be an API for developers to extend the VR creation process within Unity, as well as a new Director Sequencer tool that could be used for Cinematic VR that’s on Unity’s public roadmap for the Unity 5.4 release. Timoni and I talk about these new VR features as well as design inspiration from the VR creation tools of Tiltbrush and Oculus Medium.
Getting into the newest VR theme park has proven to be a difficult task, as The VOID opened a number of beta testing slots for their Salt Lake City location on Friday and were immediately snapped up within hours.
In all the talk over presence and immersion associated with virtual reality games, we mustn’t lose sight of why we play games in the first place, for fun! When games come along that manage to fuse both, we get quite excited. This new virtual reality city destruction prototype has you as a sort of VR Godzilla, albeit with a handy physics-friendly wrecking ball and sets you loose as you wreak satisfying havoc upon your domain. It looks supremely satisfying and fun, even if it’s not quite at the point where you could call it a fully fledged game, frankly we could probably lose a few hours on it in its present state.
Epic’s series of short films exploring the rise and maturation of the virtual reality industry reaches part 3. In this installment, the directors look to explore what virtual reality means to game developers in delivering compelling narrative experiences that move beyond what is capable now in traditional gaming platforms.
Softkinetic are a 3D vision company specialising in depth-sensing technologies, specifically ToF (Time of Flight) laser-based systems. Now, Sony have announced it has acquired the Belgian company, provoking speculation that we might see the company’s tech used for hand-tracking alongside Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation VR system for PlayStation 4.
Oculus Video received an update today for Gear VR, which delivers the much awaited integration of streaming content from Twitch, Vimeo, and purchasable movies.
