Owlchemy Labs’s Job Simulator has become a staple demo in the HTC Vive demo reel thanks to its fun and intuitive room-scale interactions with everyday kitchen items. The studio has just revealed a teaser of another job that will have players employed in a convenience store.
Epic Games has shown the world some of the most visually stunning VR experiences to date, and today, one of them (Showdown) is being released for free as a UE4 VR sample for developers to learn from.
Pantomime, the company founded by VPL-alumni David Levitt and Sims-developer Don Hopkins, released its Playground app for iOS today. Pantomime describes the app as a “Consumer Immersive 3D Platform” that does not require a headset—think a radically mobile VR display that can be paddled like a Nintendo Wii controller—but with greater precision.
Pollen is an upcoming first-person sci-fi puzzle exploration game produced by Finland based Mindfield Games. Taking you to the far-off research station on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, you follow an ominous quest to explore a mysterious time-bending phenomenon that has taken hold of the space station.
This 360 degree VR video of a young mountain gorilla taking an accidental ‘selfie’ was so affecting, it drove the photographers to create their own company, VR Gorilla, in honour of the event.
One of the challenges with a first-person VR adventure game is that locomotion causes some people motion sickness. People have a wide range of tolerances for how much they can move around a VR space with a controller, and room-scale VR helps to eliminate nausea because your real movements match your virtual movements 1:1 and there’s no disconnect within your vestibular system. However, there’s still the problem of how to move within a virtual space that’s larger than your limited room-scale VR physical space. Cloudhead Games has come up with a really elegant solution in their The Gallery experience for projecting your room-scale volume within your virtual space in a system they call “Blink,” and it does really lives up to the promise of 100% nausea-free VR locomotion.
IM360, the company behind the recent MTV VMA red carpet live stream, are heading to VR expo Immersed Europe to capture “key points” of the show in immersive 360 degree video, designed for VR viewing.
VR creators Kite and Lightning, the minds behind the dazzling Senza Peso amongst many others, have released their latest experience named ‘GE Neuro’, dubbed by the team as a “…portal into the human brain, allowing viewers to enter, view, and explore the mind in a brand new way.”
While the Oculus Touch controller is largely designed to tell the computer where a user’s hands are, the controller also has an idea of what a user’s fingers are doing. New documentation adds to our understanding of the controller’s hand-tracking capabilities, and reinforces the device’s deliberate name.
Cloudhead Interactive were at PAX Prime in Seattle this weekend, showing off their latest (and newly titled) first installment in their ‘The Gallery’ saga, Call of the Starseed, featuring their recently announced ‘Blink’ VR locomotion system. The game was available to try on the HTC Vive, and this gameplay video from BoredatWork.com gives you a glimpse of what to expect.
The VRLA Summer Expo was held this weekend at the LA Convention Center, and it was bigger than ever. Otherworld Interactive was there, showing off their brand new HTC Vive game Nimbus Knights, a cutesy RTS where your aim is to capture floating islands by guiding Knights with your malevolent virtual hands. Guest writer Frank He had some brief hands-on time with the demo and reports back on his experience.
Sarah Northway & Colin Northway talk about the process of converting an open world building game of Fantastic Contraption to a room-scale VR experience with the HTC Vive.
Rumours surrounding Apple’s entry into the immersive technology sector have been circulating for years. But as both AR and VR retail products begin to ship this year, Apple’s latest hire has lead an analyst at Piper Jaffray to suggest that “…we believe Apple has a team exploring the AR space.”
This weekend’s PAX Prime convention in Seattle was home to a number of exciting new experiences for the HTC Vive. This audio report from Voices of VR host Kent Bye gives us his impressions with the latest room-scale experiences.
