Recognized as the largest game developers jam in the world, Global Game Jam (GGJ) attracted more than 28,000 developers, scattered across 78 countries this year. With over 5,400 games produced, more than 60 were designed especially for use with the Oculus Rift Dk2. Here we take a look at some of the more memorable VR demos to come from the event, which ended on January 25th.
VRLA, a virtual reality community organization based in Los Angeles, is firing up a series of quarterly expo events designed to showcase virtual reality and the community creating it. The first expo event will be held at the end of March. You can save 50% on early-bird tickets starting today.
Convrge, a social virtual reality environment for the Oculus Rift DK2, is once again opening its doors for some virtual ‘dancing’ (as much dancing as you can do with headtracking alone). The developers are hoping to draw some 100 people into their virtual forest setting which has both a dance floor that’s reactive to music and a peaceful campfire around which to chat.
Every year the Global Game Jam (GGJ) assembles game developers worldwide—this year spanning 488 locations across 72 countries—and presents them with a theme, something to base their work on for the next 48 hours of feverish game development. This year’s theme, ‘What do we do now?’ admittedly gave participants a pretty loose framework to build upon, but seemed to fit perfectly with the open-ended nature of virtual reality. One VR tech demo caught our eye in particular, HoloCommander, which brings real-time strategy (RTS) to the virtual tabletop.
The latest prototype design of a new augmented reality device was unveiled at last month’s CES: Seebright Wave is an AR headset that plans to use the graphical power of your smartphone to make augmented reality a low cost affair. Seebright claims that the Wave has the widest field of view of see-through AR devices in its class, a poignant advantage given the commentary of the narrow field of view on Microsoft’s recently revealed HoloLens.
Sulon had an impressive presence at CES 2015, their sizeable booth on the show floor accompanied by eye-catching prototype headsets clearly designed to announce to the world that they’d arrived. Their product, an AR/VR headset named the ‘Cortex’, has an interesting ‘mixed reality’ approach and practical uses of computer vision. Ben Lang sits down with Don Henderson from Sulon to find out more.
Google will be demoing some of their new sensor-assisted virtual reality technology at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, which promises to “enable Holodeck-like experiences with less than $100 add-on cost” to mobile devices. While not explicitly named, we’ll eat our access badges if they’re not going to talk about their realtime environmental mapping dev kit, Project Tango.
Announced last month at CES 2015, the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) project encompasses a $199 ‘hacker development kit’ (HDK) VR headset, and an SDK designed to interoperate with a range of headsets, peripherals, and game engines. Both facets of the project are open source, with their components freely available to be modified and redistributed. Sensics, who spearheaded OSVR with Razer, played a major role in the development of the HDK headset. Sensics CEO Yuval Boger joins us to explain the unit’s dual-element optics, one of the things that sets it apart from most other consumer VR headsets now approaching the market.
We’ve all seen those ‘books’ about VR that seem to be nothing more than a quick cash grab, taking advantage of a burgeoning industry and hoping to dupe a few suckers into spending a few dollars. I am here to tell you that this book is nothing of the sort. Sky Nite, author of Virtual Reality Insider: Guidebook for the VR Industry is the real deal.
In a new technical demo from Leap Motion’s labs, you can use your hands to soar through space and manipulate entire constellations with mere gestures. The Planetarium aims to illustrate ideas in virtual reality user interfaces and demonstrate the versatility of the company’s motion sensing technology.
Valve isn’t holding another Steam Dev Days this year, a developers conference organized by the company in 2014. Instead they seem to be focusing their developer outreach energy on March’s rapidly approaching Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Alex Vlachos, a senior graphics programmer at Valve, is going to be sharing some hard-earned wisdom about advanced graphical rendering in VR drawn from experience with their in-house VR headset prototypes.
First class passengers on Qantas Airlines will be getting quite the surprise to go along with their eight-course tasting menu, made-to-order signature dishes from Chef Neil Perry, award-winning wine and champagnes, leaf tea and espresso coffee, cotton pajamas, slippers, skincare products, toiletries, eye mask, noise-cancelling headsets, and open access to the First Class Lounge in Sydney and Melbourne so they can enjoy complimentary treatments at Qantas’ luxurious Aurora Day Spa. They’re getting Gear VR, which is nice too.
I am pleased to announce that VR Casters, the world’s first and only 24/7 streaming VR podcast radio station is turning on its servers today at 12:oopm EST, and is ready to broadcast the future to you.
International developers have been waiting patiently to buy Samsung’s Gear VR mobile headset internationally ever since the US release on December 8th. Many of them have their virtual reality applications ready to go, yet they have no way to test them without a way to purchase the headset. That was at least until a developer in Australia plugged an Oculus Rift DK1 controller box into the Galaxy Note 4 (the phone that powers the Gear VR headset).
AltspaceVR is hosting another open beta weekend, and they want you to bring the chips and dip this time for a shared viewing of Super Bowl XLIX. Whether you’re rooting for the Patriots or the Seahawks, you’re sure to have a great time hobnobbing while watching on the largest screen playing the big game in virtual reality.
