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.
The blocky architecture of Korix may look simple, but in this real time strategy-meets-tower defense, appearances can be deceiving. Warning: you may be overwhelmed with the sudden urge to flip over the virtual game board.
The AuraVisor is an untethered ‘all in one’ VR headset which strive to address issues with both mobile and desktop VR. The Kickstarter has just passed its £100,000 goal, and we went hands-on with an early prototype to see how it’s shaping up.
The stunning Gear VR adventure title from the creators of Monument Valley is now released and it remains one of the most stunning and intriguing VR titles to date. UK based developers Ustwo Games have celebrated the title’s arrival with a new trailer, and it reminds us why this game has generated so much attention and excitement.
Icelandic developer Sólfar Studios have announced that their quest to bring one of the world’s greatest natural wonders, Mount Everest, to virtual reality just got a significant boost. They’ve announced received over $2M in seed funding to bring their mountaineering expedition VR experience.
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.
