Steel Crate Games, an Ottawa based indie studio, has today announced that their bomb-defusing party game—Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes—is coming to Steam on October 8th with Oculus Rift support.
Swedish virtual reality company Moggles has launched a new, smartphone-based VR headset of the same name which apparently folds into a 40mm thick form factor, ready to slip into your pocket.
GoPro recently announced its ‘Odyssey’ VR camera as the first for Google’s ‘Jump’ video assembly platform. With the two companies working side-by-side on VR video, Google is going to be bringing the Odyssey camera to it’s ‘YouTube Space’ studios in major cities.
We’ve seen a few architectural companies exploring the VR space with recreations of realistic structures. Trek Industries now want to let you step into the fantastic fictional world of The Avengers with this stunning VR recreation of one Marvel‘s billionaire’s bachelor pad.
Rust developer Facepunch Studios, founded by developer Garry Newman, has confirmed that its founding game Garry’s Mod will receive virtual reality support – just don’t call it ‘Garry’s Mod 2’.
There are some open questions within the data visualization community as to what benefits the third dimension might add to visualizing information that doesn’t have an inherent spatial component. Ragaad Al Tarawneh was at the 3DUI conference presenting a paper called “Utilization of Variation in Stereoscopic Depth for Encoding Aspects of Non-spatial Data.”
The world’s largest gathering of professional game developers, GDC, launches a dedicated virtual reality sister conference VRDC this year – and the call for submissions to the VR industry and community to present at the inaugural event is now open.
The lab of Human Computer Interaction at Germany’s Hasso Plattner Institute has developed impacto, a wearable, wireless device designed “to render the haptic sensation of hitting and being hit in virtual reality.”
Led by Professor Patrick Baudisch, the lab has crafted the device to simulate impact via both a solenoid that physically hits the area of the body “hit” in virtual reality and electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) that “adds impulse to the hit by thrusting the user’s arm backwards,” according to a project summary written by Baudisch and two students in his lab, Alexandra Ion and Pedro Lopes. In the summary’s language, the impacto “decomposes the stimulus,” rendering the tactile and impulse sensations separately and allowing the compact device to simulate relatively strong hits.
The video embedded at the top of this page, posted by the lab, demonstrates the device being used in boxing, soccer and baseball simulations; the simulations themselves are running on a combination of “impacto for haptic feedback, an Oculus Rift for visuals and a Kinect for tracking.” In the boxing demo, the user feels an impact (via the solenoid) and reflexive impulse (via the EMS) on his arm when he blocks his virtual opponent’s attacks. The user’s attacks, meanwhile, register via a solenoid attached to his knuckles. The boxing demo also includes a kickboxing iteration, in which a third impacto registers impacts from kicks; the soccer demo depicts a similar scenario in which in impacto attached to the user’s foot simulates the physical sensations of kicking or juggling a ball.
The baseball demonstration is a bit different: it shows the user with a solenoid-attached prop (standing in for the bat) and an EMS device attached to his arm. The “bat” registers the impact of the virtual ball, while the EMS’s impulse causes his arm to flex in response to impact.
The video further sums how exactly a “hit” travels from the virtual to the physical world. When Unity3D detects an impact, it sends a signal wirelessly to the relevant impacto module. All said and done, impact detection to impacto response occurs in approximately 50ms.
As shown in the video and on the project summary page, the impacto’s solenoid component comes in a variety of sizes and shapes to accommodate feet, knuckles, arms and props. Users attach the EMS device to the muscle whose contraction accompanies a solenoid-produced impact, e.g., the bicep when boxing.
The tech represents a creative and fairly non-intrusive solution to registering impacts via a haptic wearable. With that in mind, it goes without saying that we look forward to seeing where the device, and the lab behind it, go from here.
In this technical deep-dive, D ‘eVRydayVR’ Coetzee explores in detail the technical challenges preventing us from sharing our favourite VR experiences with others and the solutions available to overcome them.
Quentin Parent is a sales engineer at Haption, and he talks about some of their force-feedback haptic devices that are used in different industry applications. These are haptic feedback systems are used to train astronauts, for nuclear training, as well as with other medical training applications. Some of these devices cost nearly $100k, and so they’re not really aiming for the consumer market. But it’s interesting to hear about how precisely these Haption devices can simulate rigid body interactions for industrial applications.
Oculus’ forthcoming Connect 2 conference is a resolutely developer focused event and these events, offering 1:1 face-time with experts in both Unity and Unreal engines, specifically on the mechanics of building a VR project, may just be the ticket for developers looking to get into the VR industry.
MatterVR, a VR content house founded by film industry vets, has announced a distribution deal with Eevo, a streaming platform for curated VR video.
GoPro’s ‘Odyssey’ VR camera camera is on its way with early access being given to selected directors soon. And, to whet the creative appetites of filmmakers everywhere, GoPro have released this beautiful time-lapse 360 degree film featuring the sights of New York City to demonstrate the new camera’s prowess.
Clouds is a documentary of a different sort. Using real-time interactive data visualizations set as the backdrop to over 10 hours of interviews with artists, hackers, and designers—all captured as weird and wonderful point clouds—there’s no way you’ll walk out not feeling like you inner-child just experienced something out of the film Hackers (1995).
