Samsung officially showed off 13 Gear VR titles at SDC 2014 last week. The titles, which varied from games to 360 video experiences, were being showcased on the second floor in the Game Zone area of the event. Eight Gear VR units were available, each housing a unique set of demos. After circling through the lines a few times, here are our first impressions.
At this year’s Samsung’s Developer Conference in San Francisco, Samsung finally announced it’s Oculus and Note 4 powered Gear VR headset would be available in early December. A page was launched simultaneously for US enthusiasts to register their interest in the so called ‘Innovator Edition’. It seems there’s also a UK version of this page too.
Jaunt has been busy shooting several made-for-VR experiences which the company says will be released for VR in trailer form “imminently.” Road to VR has the first look at three of Jaunt’s forthcoming cinematic VR experiences.
It’s not the moniker most developers would relish being attached to their work, but in the case of the developers at Shiny Shoe, creators of Desert Bus VR, it’s entirely appropriate.
Virtual Reality is still in it’s infancy, but in the last two years has inspired countless developers to push the boundaries of this fledgling platform. The 2014 Virtual Reality Awards aims to highlight the talent that’s helping to build the future.
In a surprise announcement at SDC, Samsung revealed Project Beyond, a 360 degree 3D camera for filming virtual reality content. We got to take a look at the unit first hand and experience the VR video that it captures.
“This talk will focus on the human component of VR: your perceptual system. Virtual reality systems like the Oculus Rift and Gear VR replace the visual input to your brain in a way technology never has before; for better or worse, this raises unprecedented opportunities and challenges. I will give a brief, high-level overview of some key perceptual system functions, some interesting phenomena that occur in VR, and the importance of understanding them all for building comfortable content.”
Speaker: Richard Yao, Research Scientist, Oculus VR
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.
In this episode of the Rev VR Podcast, I am joined by Rob Swatton and David Weir from Earth & Sky in New Zealand. They have plans to bring Virtual Reality and Astronomy together to create an amazing guided tour of the universe.
“Our experiences in the real world are formed using multiple senses and include audio cues from objects which may not even be visible. In virtual reality, one of the main challenges is recreating this true spatial immersion. In this session, you will learn about Phonon, a cross-platform audio physics engine that uses the physics of sound to recreate spatial immersion. Phonon analyzes the 3D model of the environment, and figures out direct sound paths, early reflections and occlusion, and reverberation in real-time. Phonon is available as a Unity plugin, and a C API that supports integration with any game engine and audio engine. Using advanced techniques such as Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs), convolution reverb, and physically-based diffraction, Phonon can help you deliver true spatial immersion in VR applications.”
Speakers:
Anish Chandak, CEO, Impulsonic
Dinesh Manocha, Phi Delta Theta Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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.
Think Tank Team, the alias given to Samsung’s ‘Research America’ group have launched a website celebrating the research, design and engineering that went into Project Beyond, Samsung’s newly announced 3D 360 VR Camera tech.
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.
