For many, the modern era of consumer virtual reality is exciting and new. There’s a palpable pioneering spirit shared by denizens of the rapidly growing industry who want to harness VR technology to do amazing things—world changing things. But there are those to whom this feeling is one of déjà vu.
At Sony’s Tokyo Games Show conference this morning, the company revealed its vision for consumer VR powered by a console – it’s now known as Playstation VR. But there were also some glimpses at what we can expect, in the Japanese market at least, from games being launched for the new virtual reality platform.
Sony’s Tokyo Games Show press conference is over, and the big news is that Project Morpheus as we knew it will now be known as Playstation VR. Subsequent to that announcement, Sony have released a promo video which gives an intersting insight into how they’re approaching the marketing of this new platform as part of the Playstation brand.
Madis Vasser is a psychology student at University of Tartu Virtual Neuroscience Lab, and he collaborated with the computer science department to create a VR toolbox for doing experimental psychology research. He was showing off a demo of a change blindness experiment that he created within Unity at the IEEE VR conference.
At a press conference at the Tokyo Games Show in Japan, Sony just announced that it’s virtual reality device for the Playstation 4 will be officially called ‘Playstation VR’
In a recent Facebook post, Production I.G the animation house behind many anime movies, have announced a 360 3D Ghost in the Shell spin off named Virtual Reality Diver, and it’ll make it’s first appearance at this week’s Tokyo Game Show.
AltspaceVR today announced a Samsung Gear VR version of the social VR platform, which will hypothetically allow anyone with the mobile VR headset and an internet connection to talk online face to face.
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.
