Samsung’s Developer Conference has certainly made its presence felt in the VR community today. At the keynote event earlier, Samsung announced that the ‘Innovator Edition’ of their Gear VR headset would be released in ‘early December’. In a blog post on their website, Oculus has announced that the headset collaboration with Samsung will retail for $249 with a bluetooth gamepad and $199 standalone.
It’s interesting to see genres and themes returning in an entirely new and yet familiar form. Grid-based dungeon crawler Crystal Rift is built from the ground up for virtual reality, yet draws on some very traditional game mechanics. The two-man development team behind the game have now launched a Kickstarter campaign.
“This session will focus on the Oculus SDK for Mobile developers. Topics will include tips for getting started with the SDK for both native and Unity application development, an overview of the TimeWarp architecture and its impact on development, tips for high-performance mobile VR applications, interface design in VR, planned improvements, and insights gained and challenges overcome during the development of Gear VR. Attendees will have an opportunity to ask questions of the engineers responsible for developing the Gear VR SDK.”
Speakers:
Ben Lang is on the ground at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco for the Samsung Developer Conference 2014 to liveblog this event. Updates will appear automatically below, no need to refresh your browser.
iRacing’s recent Season 4 update finally brought with it Oculus Rift DK2 support, but it was missing something fairly crucial – positional tracking. In the latest update available now, the world’s most popular online sim racer has now addressed that omission.
Positional tracking is of course vital to battling one of VR’s biggest enemies to a pleasant experience, motion sickness. Despite iRacing’s gameplay being decidedly fixed in terms of seating position, making it ideal for VR, it’s surprising how much positional tracking was missed. Once you’re used to the subtle cues the Oculus Rift DK2, your really miss it once it’s gone.
There is an as yet unresolved issue inherent to games which incorporate the ability to alter your lateral view with head movements, it’s awfully easy to break the game by ‘clipping’ through in-game assets (walls, cockpits etc.). So it’s interesting to note that iRacing has adopted to limit the user’s lateral movement to prevent these sorts of issues. We’ll see how this works out long term, but it certainly seems as if the developer has taken care with this implementation. In any case, iRacing remains one of the best VR experiences out there alongside it’s rival Assetto Corsa.
You can sign up to and download iRacing here.
“The commercialization of virtual reality provides an exciting space for designing user experiences and interfaces. However, this mostly unexplored technology holds a different set of opportunities and challenges for traditional two-dimensional designers. In this session, we will demonstrate the Gear VR, review research pertaining to VR experience design, and discuss the implications VR can have on your working process.”
Speaker: Alex Chu, Interactive Designer at Samsung Research America
Ben Lang is on the ground at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco for the Samsung Developer Conference 2014 to liveblog this event. Updates will appear automatically below, no need to refresh your browser.
Oculus has just released their long awaited mobile SDK for Android development on Samsung’s forthcoming Gear VR headset.
SDC 2014 has just kicked off and at the opening keynote, Samsung have just announced that, alongside their new Note 4 based VR Headset, they’ve also got a 360 Stereoscopic 3D camera, designed and built to capture video for virtual reality.
Today at Samsung Developer Conference 2014, the company has announced that their mobile VR headset, Gear VR, will launch in early December, just in time for the holiday season.
John Carmack, famed developer and Oculus CTO, is known for being open and frank. Having prodded Minecraft developer Mojang on the topic in the past, now that the company has changed hands following its sale to Microsoft, Carmack has once again reached out publicly to ask what needs to be done to get Minecraft on Gear VR.
Synthesis Universe is a rare thing, a virtual reality game which has been in development for over 3 years. Paul James goes hands-on with the neon infused, futuristic teaser experience for the Oculus Rift DK2 and comes away wanting more. Much more.
The BBC has today released a Google Cardboard VR app which commemorates soldiers that fell in the 1st World War by celebrating one of the most famous poems from that era.
Today is Armistice day, commemorating the agreement that was reached between Allied troops and Germany which marked the beginning of the end of the first world war. 2014 marks 100 years since the beginning of the conflict which lead to over 16 Million people losing their lives.
The BBC have been running a series of programmes across their Radio and TV channels this year that look back on the world’s most horrific conflict. Today, in conjunction with arts and media production company BDH, the BBC have released an Android application which is compatible with Google Cardboard.
‘War of Words’ is a VR application that attempts to put you “..uses virtual reality to take you back to 1916, and into a mindset captured by Siegfried Sassoon in his controversial poem ‘The Kiss’”. The application that’s available on Google’s Play store now, is compatible with Google Cardboard, Durovis Dive and other stereoscopic viewers.
The app uses onboard accelerometers to allow you to glance around a stylised, animated recitation of the celebrated poem, using minimalist animated aesthetics to poignant and arresting effect. The ‘performance’ is certainly short but surprisingly effective.
War of Words executive producer Michael Poole says: “Using virtual reality to explore one of the most hard-hitting poems to come out of WW1 really enhances the power of Siegfried Sassoon’s words. We really hope that people, young and old, will find this an illuminating experience to coincide with the BBC’s Remembrance Season.”
It’s an interesting demonstration of VR’s potent capabilities when tasked with bringing emotive subjects such as this to a new audience. I hope it’s a trend that continues to grow.
You can find the application on Google’s Play store right here.
Earlier this year Mozilla began exploring virtual reality capabilities for the web. Now, they have released MozVR.com, which they call “a VR website about VR websites,” in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Firefox. It uses a virtual reality enabled version of Firefox that can navigate seamlessly through VR worlds built and hosted on the web.
As we’ve written before, Unity was been the platform of choice for most VR development from the very beginning of Oculus VR’s release of the original development kit (DK1). Which subsequently means there is a lot of Unity based games and demo out there. Therefore, the latest Unity SDK Integration update from Oculus which claims to fix judder is very welcome indeed.
Rothenberg Ventures is a venture capital firm located in San Francisco, California. Started in 2012 by Mike Rothenberg, the firm has now invested in over 60 technology companies and was recently part of AltspaceVR’s $5.2 million seed round. Dylan Flinn, investment professional at Rothenberg Ventures, tells me why the VC firm has its sights firmly set on the virtual reality industry.
