Pollen is a first-person exploration game set in space by Helsinki-based Mindfield Games. I had a chance to catch up with Project Lead Olli Sinerma at PAX Prime to talk about the story behind the game as well as some of the lessons learned from working on Pollen for the past two years.
OSVR, the open source virtual reality project founded by Razer and Sensics, today announced the latest version of their HDK (Hacker Development Kit) VR Headset. The v1.3 version of the open source headset includes an improved display and optics.
The OSVR project is celebrating the addition of a further 65 companies in support of their initiative, among them GPU technology giant NVIDIA, adding a low latency, driver optimised ‘Direct Mode’ to the list of OSVR’s features.
In the first of a new regular series of reports, Noah looks at how virtual reality could use fictional ideas like Sherlock Holmes’ ‘mind palace’ as inspiration for new productivity applications, helping us all to function at a higher level.
Oculus Story Studio, the company’s in-house content creation studio that has produced a number of highly polished experiences, recently released a surprising ‘tell all’ blog post detailing just what sort of tools the team of VR content creators use.
John Nagle is the CTO at Phaser Lock Interactive, who is developing a Vive game called Final Approach. The gameplay of Final Approach involves selecting miniature planes flying through the air and then drawing landing paths in 3D space with a 6DOF controller. It’s sort of an arcade-style air traffic controller game where you’re an invisible giant helping planes and helicopters land and take off. But then you can shrink down to normal scale and help to put out fires and clear the sea gulls from the runway.
In a tweet by Valve writer Chet Faliszek, he has confirmed that the brilliant Aperture Science demo used in Valve’s press and public displays of SteamVR hardware at various shows, will not be exclusive to the HTC Vive and will in fact work on “All OpenVR compatible HMDs with tracked controllers”.
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.
