Hot on the heels of HTC’s suprise ‘Vive’ VR Headset announcement – a partnership with Valve, Owlchemy labs has teased it’s newest virtual reality IP, to debut on Valve’s Steam VR platform.
At HTC’s ‘Utopia’ event at the Mobile World Conference, the company just announced a partnership with gaming giant Valve, seemingly including the production of a new VR headset. We’re gathering info, but it seems the unit which comprises ’70 sensors’ can provide 360 degree positional tracking, it looks to include inside out tracking.
Featuring “the highest quality graphics”, the unit features a 90Hz refresh rate. No details on resolution as yet. Interestingly, the company is also promising a pair of wireless motion controllers designed to be used with the headset.
Here’s all our coverage of this new headset so far:
Unsurprisingly, the headset forms part of Valve’s new SteamVR platform, based around Steambox hardware – systems designed to bring high quality PC gaming to the living room. We’re due to find out much more about Valve’s plans for VR at GDC next week.
HTC also announced its lineup of partners which include Cloudhead Games, Owchemy Labs, Wemo Labs and Bossa Studios – all presumably working on VR experiences for the Vive.
This story is breaking, we’ll add more details as we get them.
Virtual Architectural Visualisation is one of many non-gaming applications for virtual reality, and one that’s seeing growth.
UE4Arch is a company dedicated to creating and selling hyper-realistic virtual creations that can be experienced in virtual reality. The company works in Unreal Engine 4, the cutting-edge 3D engine from Epic, which allows 3D artists to render with frightening precision and realism. The engine also provides ‘out of the box’ support for the Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus VR headsets.
See Also: Epic Games Offering up Cash from $5 Million Fund to ‘Anyone Making Cool Things with UE4′
The company just released a video and download for their latest project, a virtual re-creation of Venice in UE4 that is compatible with the Oculus Rift DK2 and it’s extremely impressive. One word of warning though, this is a demanding demo – so if you’re having trouble maintaining a good frame rate, consider grabbing the low poly version.
You can find both high and lower quality versions for download on UE4Arch’s blog here.
Cloudhead Games, one of the earliest VR studios to begin production on a project for the Oculus Rift, today announced that they’ve signed Jeremy Soule, the composer behind Skyrim (2011) and many others, to score the company’s forthcoming title, The Gallery: Six Elements.
Background artist Damien Labonte is excited about Valve’s forthcoming SteamVR reveal. So excited, in fact, that he spent his evenings over the last week creating five very impressive themed mockups of the unit. We have the entire series to share, and also heard from Labonte about his inspiration and thoughts on what the company will show next week.
One of the longest serving members at Oculus, Joe Chen will be a familar face to anyone who has followed that company’s meteoric rise over the last few years. But now, he’s moving to pastures new, jumping ship to VRSE.Works, an organisation specialising in short-form VR experiences.
Mastertronic have just released a ‘announce’ trailer for their Sigtrap developed, 6 degrees of freedom shooter Sublevel Zero, which looks to be heavily inspired by the classic PC shooter Descent.
Packing 3D pixel-art style visuals and Oculus Rift DK2 support, it looks like a blast and is sure to test your virtual reality ‘legs’ to the limit as you pitch and roll at subterranean depths blasting aliens.
The game will arrive this Summer on PC, Mac and Linux and seemingly ships with Oculus Rift support out of the box. Find out more at Sigtrap’s website here.
Is the future going to be filled with paper thin displays and touch interfaces abound? Microsoft thinks so, because they’ve been fleshing out their “productivity future vision” concept videos ever since 2009, underlining just that. But what could these omnipresent displays do that augmented reality can’t?
A new puzzler from developers Deco Digital has just hit Steam available for a limited time with 10% off.
The game has you playing the god ‘Pneuma’, traversing a beautiful, puzzling world rendered using the cutting-edge Unreal 4 engine accompanied by your own comedic narration. What’s more, it ships with full support for the Oculus Rift DK2 headset, allowing you to gaze upon the loveliness in virtual reality.
The game itself has garnered some critical success, be warned however that running the game at the DK2’s required 75FPS may prove challenging for many without high specification machines.
You can grab Pneuma: Breath of Life on Steam right here and check out the developer, Deco Digital‘s page right here.
The DAQRI Smart Helmet is a prototype in the works by a Los Angeles-based company who is approaching augmented reality from an industrial standpoint rather than a commercial one. It features thermal imaging, head tracking, motion sensing, pattern recognition, and much more.
I tried out this unique AR headset at the 4D Expo hosted by DAQRI in downtown LA that lasted two days. The relatively small conference included presentations from various industry leaders along with panel discussions and even a fireside chat with LA’s CIO, Peter Marx. Among the demonstrations, the DAQRI’s AR Smart Helmet was by far one of the most exciting technologies that the company had to offer.
On February 18th Intel held a developers lab in Rocklin, CA (north of Sacramento) in the new ‘Hacker Lab’ space at Sierra College. The event sought to teach devs the in’s and out’s of developing with Intel’s latest RealSense 3D Camera, which allows for interactive gesture input, thanks to a 1080p color camera and depth sensor. Road to VR worked with Intel to find a local VR enthusiast to report from the event.
“4.0?!” you say. Yup. Did you know we’ve been around since 2011? In the back of my mind I know that’s when we started, but when I’m forced to write it down as I am now… whoosh!… it comes rushing to the front in a fury of nostalgia.
It was about a year before the Oculus Rift Kickstarter when Road to VR sprung to life. VR wasn’t even on the radar in the consumer space. In the commercial sector there were pockets of use for the technology, but nothing your average technology user would ever bother with, given the sliver of proprietary software available—not to mention the prohibitive cost.
So why on Earth did 2011 seem like a good time to start writing about a technology that had been considered dead in the consumer space for at least a decade? Well, here’s what I wagered in the first article ever published on Road to VR:
The time feels right now to start tracking the journey to virtual reality as a number of important technologies are being developed and starting to hit the main stream. These technologies, that are being deployed or are in development, are all stepping stones toward virtual reality. Eventually I see these technologies coalescing into what will be known as virtual reality. A few of these technologies are as follows: motion gaming (Wii/Wii Plus, Xbox Kinect, Playstation Move, etc.), voice control (Apple’s Siri, Android Voice Actions, etc.), and AR gaming (augmented reality) which is found on sensor-rich devices like smartphones and tablets.
We’ve got the technology to make pseudo virtual reality today, and you can actually find examples of it all over the place; it just hasn’t hit the mainstream yet.
It should be apparent from the list I made above, but the first place that we’re likely to see mainstream interactive virtual reality is in video games, and something that we haven’t quite seen yet… interactive movies. These are obvious places because the experience that the creators of games or movies are attempting to convey will see vastly increased immersiveness and richness of the medium if they are able to connect to the audience at a level that is far beyond what we see today.
That, and I was completely fascinated by the possibilities of VR. I like to say: should humans ever devise a system capable of perfectly replicating the way we perceive reality, you could rewrite the laws of physics. I get that ‘tiny person, huge universe’ feeling when I think about that.
And what was why I started Road to VR, to map where we were between no virtual reality, and a perfect simulation of reality, and to find out how long it would take to reach that destination. We still have a long way to go, but the progress that’s been made in the last few years is nothing short of incredible.
In 2012, Oculus took to Kickstarter and reignited the virtual reality industry.
I sometimes hear people lamenting that Oculus and others are taking “too long” to get a consumer headset out the door. But as someone who has been carefully watching this space since 2011, I’m blown away by how fast things are happening. We’ve seen huge players jump into the arena, some of the biggest companies in the world. The money being spent on development in this space has grown tremendously. Developers have devised hundreds, if not thousands of virtual reality applications, some demos, and some full experiences. And there’s still so much more to come.
We’ve felt the growth here at Road to VR. From 2013 to 2014, we grew 233%. Two months into 2015 and we’re on track for an even greater leap, right along with the exploding industry, no doubt.
And that’s one reason why it was time for an overhaul. There’s so much important news happening that it could barely be contained by our previous site.
We want readers of Road to VR to walk away with the latest picture of the VR industry. Version 4.0 is designed to let you access more content, faster, and give us the room we need to get you all the latest.
So poke around, let us know what you think. I’m sure you’ll run into some bugs here and there, we’d really appreciate if you’d report them to info@roadtovr.com.
As has become tradition, here’s a little trip down Road to VR memory lane:
I’d like to take this time to thank our readers for their support, comments, tips, and gracious sharing of the content that we work hard to bring you. I’d also like to thank the Road to VR team and everyone who has helped us along the way. This new design would not have been possible without hard work and long nights from Road to VR’s Editor and all around tech-wizard, Paul James. Also a big thanks to our contributors, Scott Hayden, “Reverend” Kyle Riesenbeck, Matt Terndrup, Jonathan Tustain, with help from Brian Hart and our guest contributor, Kevin Williams. And a blanket thank you to all of the amazingly smart people driving this incredible technology and industry.
Stay tuned, next week is going to be crazy.
So you’ve probably heard by now that Valve is set to reveal a SteamVR Dev Kit come GDC 2015 next week. Well, some folks poking around their website found a photo hidden in the source code that reveals what might be the first glimpse of the VR headset.
While the Galaxy Note 4 is the only ‘one’ phone that is compatible with Samsung’s Gear VR headset, there’s different variations of the phone for different regions. Should you be attempting to import a Gear VR from a country where the device is not officially available, you can now check a compatibility list from Oculus before making a risky purchase.
