Last week we met with Vrvana, formerly ‘True Player Gear’, for our first hands-on with the Totem VR headset. We’ve got a juicy interview on the way with Vrvana CEO, Bert Nepveu. The company launches a Kickstarter campaign for their headset starting on Tuesday, September 16th.
Perception Neuron, a VR motion input suit by Beijing-based Noitom Technology, took to Kickstarter on August 8th and came to a very successful conclusion yesterday, reeling in nearly $572,000, more than twice the campaign’s $250,000 goal. Perception Neuron uses up to 30 tiny sensors to track movement from entire limbs down to individual fingers.
The first glimpse at NextVR’s camera rig for recording stereoscopic 360 degree video for VR has been revealed in new photos. The camera platform uses the six of the RED Epic Dragon cameras to capture up to 6K resolution in stereoscopic 360 degree video.
Following the announcement of $5.2 million raised in seed funding, AltspaceVR revealed their exciting VR software to the public for the first time yesterday in a presentation at SVVR #13. Road to VR’s Brian Hart was on the scene to capture the presentation as it happened.
After our Gear VR Roundtable Chat last week, I was informed that not everyone in the VR community had the same warm and fuzzy feelings that were conveyed in our discussion. I felt the need to allow a few others to voice their opinions in this latest episode of the Rev VR Podcast.
For developers who have predominantly worked in traditional screen-based game development, moving into development for VR titles can be a journey full of surprises, requiring new ways of approaching existing gameplay conceits and presenting many fresh opportunities for interaction and gameplay.
As the senior game designer for Project Morpheus, Jed Ashforth has spent several years exploring this exciting new frontier and compiling a new set of guidelines and best practices for how to approach, and make best use of, the new gameplay paradigms that virtual reality represents. In this presentation, he will discuss how we need to reboot our existing design assumptions to start unlocking the mind-blowing potential of this new medium, and will look at many of the new areas and opportunities that VR opens up to game designers.
Speaker:
Paul James will be live blogging the talk direct from VRTGO 2014, updates should appear below, no need to refresh your browser.
Star Citizen is of course the space combat game funded by a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign, which has pledged support for the Oculus Rift.
With VR still a developing technology, many games may opt to support VR rather than build solely for it from the ground up. Star Citizen is attempting to do just this and this talk covers the wins, pitfalls and lessons learned from this approach.
Speaker:
Paul James will be live blogging the talk direct from VRTGO 2014, updates should appear automatically below, no need to refresh your browser.
Altspace VR has today announced significant follow-on funding to their initial investment round which more than doubles the company’s seed funding, putting the total now at $5.2 million. The company, which has been largely in stealth mode, intends to publicly demonstrate their shared virtual reality environment for the first time today at the SVVR Meetup in Mountain View, CA.
EVE: Valkyrie is a VR-exclusive, fast-paced space dog-fighting game from EVE: Online creators CCP Games. As one of the first games to showcase the incredible possibilities of VR technology in games, EVE: Valkyrie has played a pivotal role in VR’s recent ‘coming of age’, helping to convince an initially sceptical gaming world that VR is the future of games. This groundbreaking title, developed at CCP’s Newcastle studio, has been widely acclaimed as one of VR’s ‘killer apps’.
EVE: Valkyrie creators Andy Robinson and Erich Cooper chart the 15-month history of EVE: Valkyrie from a ’20% time’ project for a small group of friends in Reykjavik, Iceland to the multi-platform AAA game that has become the poster-child for VR. Learn about the challenges we faced developing for rapidly-changing platforms and under more NDAs than you can shake a stick at, and what it took to showcase the game to tens of thousands of players at events such as E3, GDC, CES and Gamescom.
Speakers:
Road to VR Editor Paul James is live blogging the talk live from VRTGO UK 2014, updates will appear automatically below, no need to refresh.
ZeroLight, a UK-based digital visualization company, is adding virtual reality support to their virtual showroom engine. Doug Wolff, Executive Producer at ZeroLight, is set to speak tomorrow at the VRTGO conference about the company’s work with virtual reality in non-gaming experiences and the need for a ‘reality check’ during the design process.
NextVR, formerly Next3D, have announced a $5 million funding round designed to grow the company and develop their virtual reality live-broadcast technology. The company has been working with Samsung on Gear VR since before the reveal, and its stereoscopic 360 content will be pre-loaded onto the device for users to enjoy.
Considering that Samsung Gear VR is yet to go on sale, the breadth of content announced thus far is impressive. One thing that is clear however, Samsung and Oculus clearly see this device as much as a video delivery device as a gaming platform. But details on what video content will look like on the platform and how it’ll be delivered are somewhat thin on the ground. We’ve got 10 images from content produced exclusively for im360VR, the platform that will be used by Samsung to deliver and let you play 360 video content on the Gear VR.
As the world’s best selling game, there’s serious demand for Minecraft in virtual reality. While developer Mojang is busy with things other than VR, some enterprising folks have been unofficially adding Oculus Rift support to the game since the DK1 with the excellent mod Minecrift. Now the team has made available a preview build supporting the Oculus Rift DK2, including full positional tracking.
Pollen from Helsinki based developer Mindfield Games is an immensely promising ‘Oculus Rift Optimised’ story driven adventure set on Saturn moon Titan. I got a chance to catch up wit of the Mindfield team at this year’s Gamescom in Cologne, Germany and try an early version for myself and also sit down for a chat to find out more.
