Convrge, the social VR space that regularly hosts events and weekly meetups, have announced a talk led by John Gaeta, the visual effects artist of The Matrix trilogy and current creative director of Industrial Light and Magic’s xLab.
Matterport, a company specializing in the capture and digital reconstruction of real-world environments, has announced a $30 million Series C investment round led by Qualcomm Ventures.
Sorry folks. It has been a solid month since my last podcast, and I am truly sorry that I have not been as active as I normally am. I have recently lost my job, got a new one, and am moving to Seattle. Lots of big changes for me.
We caught up with Climax Studios at E3 2015 and went hands-on with their latest Gear VR title, Bandit Six: Salvo.
When I was initially surveying the 17 Morpheus VR titles that Sony was showing at E3 2015, I came across one with a logo that was printed so small on the booth’s placard that I could hardly read it. I was about to pass it by when I saw a familiar symbol—a multicolored ‘P’—appear on the monitor below the placard. My heart skipped a beat as my brain recalled its meaning.
Somewhere in the deep of space a starship docks with a derelict science station in search of its long forgotten loot. A contract brought you there, but your employer didn’t specify the contents, or why it was abandoned in the first place. The space station is called Roulette.
Although Sony is working on engaging single-player experiences for Morpheus, their console-based VR solution is uniquely positioned for couch-based party gaming where local players interact with a player using the headset. Their new demo, The Playroom VR, does just this, shown off for the first time at E3 2015.
Salvaged is a tactical-action game for the Oculus Rift that divides your attention between command consoles and a team of 4 space marines that you must guide through the Aliens (1986) inspired sci-fi universe.
Much praise has been lavished on Valve’s ‘room-scale’-capable Lighthouse tracking system, which affords users an impressively large tracking volume for virtual reality interaction. Not to be outdone, Oculus demonstrated to us at E3 2015 that their own tracking technology is capable of a similarly sized tracking area, and says that they aren’t emphasizing room-scale VR because of feasibility constraints, not technical ones.
NextVR and FOX Sports have recently partnered to bring live streaming VR to the 2015 U.S. Open golf tournament. Live VR broadcasts of the event were available onsite and across select North American cities via Gear VR headsets.
Getty Images, the stock image company known for its vast archive of copyrighted photos, is now publishing some of their spherical content on the Gear VR ‘360 Photos’ app, with the promise of future access on the new Oculus Rift set to release Q1 2016.
