NVIDIA’s booth at PAX Prime 2015 recently saw a special competition that put six game industry artists to task, where they created wild and wonderful sculptures—not with complicated CAD software though, but rather with the help of Tilt Brush, a VR creation tool coming to the soon-to-release HTC Vive headset.
Virtual reality pushes the capabilities of computers like no other current technology; putting a 3D world in front of you and making it interactive requires a lot of power. But the payoff? A new medium that directly engages with you, multiplying your perspective and allowing a new kind of empathy. Phil Chen, Chief Content Officer of HTC’s Vive, is working to intensify that experience by stressing interactivity—not just putting you into a virtual world, but encouraging you to engage with it. You can stick your head inside a jet engine or walk inside your own brain.
Photo storage and sharing giant Flickr is taking a step into the virtual soon if early plans for VR integration on their service reach fruition. According to Engadget, the site plans to introduce a VR button, which allows the viewing of immersive photography (i.e. 360 photos) in your favourite virtual reality headset.
Here’s a positive sign of the VR industry’s encroachment on the entertainment industry proper, a recognised, industry award given to a virtual reality project. In this case, the Sleepy Hollow Virtual Reality Experience for the Oculus Rift DK2
Sébastien Kuntz is the founder of MiddleVR, which is a middleware solution that allows you to connect to a wide range of consumer and industrial VR peripheral devices. He talks about some of the other VR locomotion and 3DUI features that are included within the MiddleVR Unity integration.
The HTC team are in marketing overdrive mode right now, with an estimated arrival date for their (and Valve’s) first VR headset slated for the end of the year (albeit in limited numbers), the team’s whistle stop ‘world’ tour is getting the tech onto as many people’s heads as possible. As a result, it’s garnering some pretty good reactions from the public (and the occasional celebrity). This video, collated from reactions to the company’s PAX Prime presence, is the best kind of hype.
The extremely promising looking space combat shooter Everspace, focused on accessibility and adrenaline rather than space trading, has completed its Kickstarter campaign, raising a whopping 420,252 EUR ($477,139) of it’s original 225,000 EUR target.
As we approach Oculus’ 2nd developer conference, Connect 2, we’re expecting to learn much more about the next generation of mobile VR hardware the that might emerge from the Samsung Oculus partnership. The latest specification leak for Samsung’s forthcoming Galaxy S7 mobile phone, suggests the device may house a depth-sensing camera, which could be used to provide a form of Gear VR positional tracking.
We reported yesterday that critically acclaimed The Vanishing of Ethan Carter had received VR support as part of the Redux edition, a rebuild of the game on the Unreal Engine 4 engine. It now appears that VR support was released by mistake – according to Co-owner of developer The Astronauts Adrian Chmielarz.
One of the most elegantly terrifying games available on the Oculus Rift, one that debuted in Oculus and IndieCade’s VR Jam back in 2013, has been brought back up to date – receiving Oculus Runtime 0.7 support.
Version 4.0 of the ’80s inspired NewRetroArcade is out, now offering an even wider selection of ’80s and ’90s emulated titles. The developers, DigitalCyberCherries, have added some major features in this release including remappable controller buttons and support for Oculus’ latest 0.7 runtime as well as Windows 10 support.
The German banking and financial services giant Deutsche Bank has projected the virtual reality industry to be worth up to $7 Billion within 5 years as mainstream adoption of the immersive technology ramps up post retail release in 2016.
In a short film exploring the evolution of storytelling, veteran Disney animator Glen Keane, creator of some of the most iconic characters of all time, steps into virtual reality to learn how to draw in virtual reality, with Tilt Brush and the HTC Vive.
