Oculus just fired an email to developers notifying them of their latest SDK release, 0.4.3 Beta. The latest version seems like a significant release with numerous feature additions and stability / performance improvements.
The Kickstarter funded Oculus Rift game Xing: The Land Beyond has continually showed promising progress since it successfully reached it’s target way back in April of last year. What’s more, the development team have been eager to share their experiences on the road to releasing the game. Their latest dev blog update is one that’ll likely inspire jealousy in VR enthusiasts everywhere.
Tron, a franchise whose style influenced the look and feel of many early VR depictions, is also the birthplace of the famous Light Cycle. Now an Oculus Rift developer has created a demo to put users on the awesome futuristic bikes.
Time Rifters is a single player co-op shooter created by Proton Studio that has been cooking in development since the early days of the Oculus Rift. The game has finally been released on Steam with a 10% off discount for the launch.
In this episode of the Rev VR Podcast, Guy Godin, developer of the Virtual Desktop, joins me in a fun discussion about his amazing app. After doing a bit of personal tech support, Guy was able to help me get it up and running on my system, and I have to say it is a great way to view your Windows environment in VR. Browsing the web and watching movies, and even coding in my Oculus Rift DK2 is wonderful experience.
These last few weeks have been the best ever for VR racing fans, with updates to Assetto Corsa and Grid: Autosport both bringing Oculus Rift DK2 support. Now, iRacing, the biggest sim racer out there, has gone live with their latest season update – now also with support for Oculus’s second generation VR headset.
While most may know him from his popular, (mostly) weekly live VR streams, Road to VR’s “Cymatic” Bruce Wooden is also head of developer and community relations at AltspaceVR, a venture-backed company in Silicon Valley with plans to bring the web experience into a social virtual reality environment. I recently sat down with Bruce at the company’s Redwood City, California headquarters to chat about AltspaceVR and explore this new world first-hand.
According to a press release revealed today, Magic Leap has closed a $524 million Series B funding round led by Google; the deal had been rumored as of last week. Magic Leap, which has been in stealth since its inception, is being a bit more wordy now that the deal has closed (but hardly less vague). The company is now soliciting developers on its website and says that “under the appropriate non-disclosures, we’d love to talk possibilities.”
E McNeill is a virtual reality developer based in San Diego, California who is working on a cyberpunk hacking game known as Darknet. Originally intended for the Oculus Rift, McNeil is now also porting the game to Samsung’s mobile Gear VR headset. Running the game at the required 60 FPS on a cell phone is a challenge that takes creative optimizations; McNeil shares some of his inventive solutions.
Oculus have prescribed that for this generation of its VR headsets, the target experience is resolutely a seated one. This means that racing games are a match made in heaven for the DK2. And, after a period of drought for VR racers, Kunos Simulazioni’s visually sumptuous racer Assetto Corsa was recently updated to RC1 and with it came Oculus Rift DK2 support.
Riftmax Theater is one of the most interesting projects currently underway for virtual reality. The software acts as a theater for both videos and live performances, where users can come together from across the world to watch a film or be part of a live production, all with the immersive power of VR. The developers have been supporting the community with their software since the early days of the Oculus Rift and are now headed to Kickstarter to take it to the next level.
Guided Meditation is a free Oculus Rift DK2 app which transports players to beautiful environments while gentle narration instructs meditative techniques. If we didn’t already have enough evidence from serene titles like Eden River HD, Guided Meditation is all the proof we need to see that ‘VR Relaxation’ will become its own genre.
Cineveo is a virtual reality movie theater for the Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2 that allows users to watch existing 2D and 3D media. The software has been recently updated to version 0.9.5 which adds a much desired file browser, support for the latest Oculus SDK, and several other tweaks.
We recently covered a (at that point unnamed) VR project by developer Tomáš “Frooxius” Mariančík, the mind behind the stunning ‘Sightline’ VR series of demos. The project fused Leap Motion skeletal hand tracking with Oculus Rift DK2 positional tracking to produce an impressively intuitive VR interface. Now, a new video of the interface shows impressive progress. We catch up with Tomáš to find out some more about this mysterious VR project.
While virtual reality is a great tool for entertainment, it’s about more than just games and movies. It has the potential to assist in treatments during therapies in the medical related fields as well. Even now, researchers are beginning to experiment with the ability of VR to treat phobias and anxiety using recently available consumer-level VR hardware.
