Take a room full of geeks, a collection of networked gaming PCs, a trio of Oculus Rift DK2s and the latest virtual reality racers and what do you have? A somewhat unconventional christmas party.
FOVE, a VR headset prototype in the works by a Japan-based team, is quickly closing the experience gap between itself and the Oculus Rift. If they continue at this pace, they could catch up, and with a trick up their sleeve—eye-tracking.
nDreams, a UK based videogame development studio, today announced a $2.75 million investment from Mercia Technologies for the development of VR content. The studio has several projects in the works including Gunner, which was recently launched as a demo on Samsung’s Gear VR headset.
It’s easy to see that virtual reality will change the face of gaming. We can see just by the volume of VR developers that have stepped into the spotlight over the course of the last year that video games are the big place to be right now. Or is it? Stefan Pernar and I dig deep into the corporate world and expose untapped areas where VR could change major industries.
‘The best camera is the one that’s always with you,’ so goes the saying. The folks from Cordon, a Canadian digital agency, are hoping that the same will be true about virtual reality; that’s why they’re making a smartphone case that transforms into a VR headset. I recently got to check out one of their early prototypes.
Technical Illusions recently began shipping their first early, pre-production sets of castAR augmented reality glasses to backers. We met up with the team at CES 2015 and got the chance to try out the new hardware. Here’s what we saw.
Sander Sneek, developer of Soundscape VR and semi-finalist in the IndieCade Leap Motion 3D Jam, has recently issued an update to his beat-mixing jam machine that adds a few more bells and whistles, fleshing out the demo to an experience that could have us spending much more time in the Tron-inspired space than ever.
GDC 2015 is just around the corner and the event’s conference schedule has revealed that semiconductor giant AMD will be sharing tips and tricks designed to help developers targeting virtual reality to get the best performance for virtual reality from the company’s GPUs.
Google has recently announced the discontinuation (or as they put it, “graduation”) of its beta phase wearable, Google Glass. As Glass 2 is teased by its (now dedicated) team, Google’s investment in secretive ‘cinematic reality’ company, Magic Leap, has us scratching our heads at what may come next.
YouTube is adding support for 360 degree video, a move that could put the video streaming giant in a position to offer the largest cross-platform service of its kind. And when it comes to the topic on who will become the ‘YouTube of VR’, who better to fill the role than YouTube itself?
UploadVR is marking the start of an 11 city international tour of VR enthusiast gatherings tonight with a VR World Tour Kickoff event in San Francisco. Can’t make it? The panel discussions will be livestreamed.
There’s only a week remaining in Pinć VR’s crowdfunded drive to take mobile VR out of backpacks and makeshift carry cases and put it straight in your pocket, and with the recently addition of support for selected Android devices, the IndieGogo campaign could be searching to put their device in a lot more pockets than initially planned.
Fractal artist Julius Horsthuis has released Foreign Nature, a 360 video aimed for playback on the Oculus Rift DK2, which sends you through a fractal world where the line between man-made and natural is never quite clear. The free download is available now.
From the get-go, the Virtuix Omni VR treadmill was designed to be both adjustable and collapsible, allowing it to work for users of different heights and be stowed away out of sight. For the first time at CES 2015, Virtuix showed off the production version of the Omni and how easy it is for a single user to get up and running.
Oculus’ latest feature prototype VR Headset, code-named Crescent Bay, was out in force at this year’s CES, blowing minds left, right and centre. But whilst debate rages over precisely what optics and display it contains, Crescent Bay’s audio has been somewhat sidelined. Here’s why Oculus’ work on building a dedicated audio pipeline with high-end hardware matters.
