It’s upon us. Oculus Connect, probably the most eagerly anticipated event this year (at least for the VR community) and perhaps Oculus VR’s most important event in it’s young life, kicks off at the Loews Hotel in Hollywood, CA tomorrow evening.
Developer Shaun Edwards (aka Sh0v), not content with producing Lunar Flight, one of the best early VR enabled games for the Oculus Rift, is already releasing a playable demo of his second VR-enabled title. Lucid VR Games has been working on hard on ZVR Apocalypse, a virtual reality zombie shoot ’em with a neat twist, the zombies shoot back.
Today the team released a fully playable demo in order to give potential backers of their Kickstarter campaign a taste of what to expect. The new demo shows off a host of gameplay features, some of which are the developers attempting to find solutions to known problems in virtual reality gaming, still in its infancy right now. The demo lets you experience the game’s first and third person modes, cover systems, calling in air strikes and (perhaps best of all) lets you enjoy your zombie destruction in bullet-time.
As this demo is pre-alpha, the team are particularly interested in player feedback, especially on certain control mechanisms the team are introducing here for the first time. You can join the discussion and give the team your opinion over at the /r/oculus thread here.
ZVR’s Kickstarter launched recently and is currently over a third funded with around 10 days left. If you’re interested in supporting the game, head over to support the Kickstarter now.
Developers Pixel Router, the team behind the Star Fox inspired Rift Wars, have been quiet lately. They’ve now come out of hiding brandishing a video of their recent to the Boston Festival of Indie Games. They had the latest version of Z0NE (previously known as Rift Wars) on display and attendees were treated to a 3 minute demo and then asked what they thought. For many it was likely their first taste of an Oculus Rift and almost certainly the DK2, in short – people sure seemed impressed.
The developers are currently putting the finishing touches on a new public demo sporting DK2 support, keep an eye on their website for details soon.
After the first day of Vrvana’s Kickstarter campaign for the Totem VR headset the company has raised more than $100,000 CAD toward their $350,000 goal. I recently spoke with Vrvana CEO Bert Nepveu to learn more about the Totem headset, including details on the planned hardware acceleration that’s designed to increase VR rendering performance.
Don’t strap on the Oculus Rift like ski goggles to eliminate smears on lenses from oil on your hair and forehead.
At this year’s Gamescom in Cologne, I got the chance to meet up with the team from Poppermost Productions, a small development team from Sweden who are mad keen on throwing themselves down steep slopes strapped to planks of wood. Snow is the company’s debut title and promises an innovative mix of exploration and freestyle skiing. What’s more, it’s slated to support the Oculus Rift.
In a unique bout of transparency, Epic Games makes publicly available their internal to-do list for Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) development. The company has an entire category of the list dedicated to virtual reality features; support for Samsung Gear VR and Google Project Tango is expected within the next month or two.
The inaugural Proto Awards, a ceremony to honor those making early strides in consumer virtual reality development, has revealed the nominees for 10 categories. Award winners will be announced at the award ceremony at the end of this week hosted by Thomas Middleditch of HBO’s startup-comedy, Silicon Valley.
The Totem VR headset Kickstarter has launched. Vrvana, formerly ‘True Player Gear’, is seeking $350,000 CAD to get a dev kit of the product into the hands of developers. I sat down with Vrvana CEO Bert Nepveu to learn more about the Totem headset and get my eyes on the first working prototype that’s been shown to the public.
Last time we checked in with the Oculus Connect schedule, the company had elaborated on most of the sessions that would take place, but left several timeslots ‘to be announced’. Oculus has now updated the schedule with all but one timeslot now filled, including the addition of a session dedicated to Samsung’s Gear VR headset.
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.
