The famous Steam Summer Sale of 2014 is upon us. This is the first year of the Summer Sale since Valve announced SteamVR, the company’s adaptation of their ‘Big Picture Mode’ for use with the Oculus Rift in virtual reality. Here is a list of all 27 games that support the Oculus Rift and SteamVR available on Steam—you’ll want to keep your eye on these for a chance of deep discounts once the annual firestorm of sales begins.
When the guys at Survios invited me over to check out their setup, I had no idea that it would turn into an epic podcast that felt more like a recorded party than an interview.
In a welcome announcement for Unity engine developers and fans alike, Unity have just announced that it’s engine will feature support for the Sony Playstation 4. As Unity is hugely popular with small, independent developers, throwing in support for a major console is great news for devs and gamers alike,
But that’s not all. In addition to PS4 support, Unity have said that support for Sony’s forthcoming VR Headset Project Morpheus will also follow soon. This brings Unity into line with Unreal Engine 4 which announced Morpheus support back in April.
It’s great news that two cutting edge, accessible and affordable engines to allow developers of all budgets take those experimental steps into VR game development. This can only be a good thing for both gamers and developers in the long run.
We’ll let you know once Unity finalises support for Project Morpheus.
As we approach the point where companies involved in virtual reality start to solve the first wave of hard problems associated with virtual reality and more people immerse themselves in VR, it’s clear that for many, merely seeing their virtual world isn’t going to be enough. They want to feel it too.
Whilst we’re potentially years away from convincing haptics for the entire body, an enterprising group of developers have come up with a solution to a problem you may not have realised existed. A virtual reality fan, and it started its Kickstarter campaign recently.
Petal is (as far as we know) the world’s first commercial VR fan peripheral. The idea is that, once integrated with a game, output data from the program is fed to the Petal fan and it interprets data into airflow directed at the player. Imagine swooping through Metropolis as Superman, wearing your Oculus Rift and favourite set of headphones with a convincing breeze from Petal filling in the sensory gaps.
It’s an intriguing idea and the team at Petal have put some real thought into their implementation. The fan (currently at the proof of concept stage) will offer a powerful, responsive fan which can react to changes in gameplay. Also, if one fan isn’t enough, you can daisy chain multiple fans together for more airflow to cover a wider/taller field.
The team are working on Unreal Engine 4 and Unity integration right now and plan to release their SDK as open source to the community should the project get off the ground.
Pledge tiers at which you receive a Petal fan range from the current Early Bird tier, $50 for the developer kit to a ‘Meet the team’ option at $2,999.
One of the things we’re written about many times on the site is the possibilities for virtual reality inside the entertainment sphere but outside the scope of traditional games. Virtual Tourism, VR Cinema and Virtual Arcades are all tantalising prospects when the virtual reality experience becomes convincing enough, which by all accounts won’t be long at all.
Virtual Theme Parks however I’d never specifically considered. Unlike developer Rift Away, who liked the idea so much, they made an Oculus Rift demo around it.
Cyber Space puts you in the seat of a physics bending, stomach churning pendulum ride – propelling you from the ground 100s feet into the air, flipping you high above a detailed townscape. As with every good ride, Cyber Space starts you slow and builds to 360 degree loop the loops – think of this as your final endurance test before congratulating yourself on earning your Rift Legs.
For all the stomach flipping action, the title is actually great looking with a fully realised park town to gaze upon whilst you concentrate on keeping your lunch down so kudos to Rift Away for not just relying on brain flipping for the core experience.
It’s an interesting experiment in the kinds of experiences VR will excel at once it hits the market, providing developers who might not be interested in creating traditional games the opportunity to produce content that virtual reality users can enjoy in a way they couldn’t on any other platform.
We reported yesterday that VR relaxation title Eden River HD was on it’s way to Steam soon and shared a teaser trailer for the title. Now Unello Design founder Aaron Lemke shares some thoughts on why he wanted to revisit his original Oculus Rift demo and what we can expect to find in the new title.
I decided to make Eden River after getting the Rift and seeing most Rift demo download sites over-saturated with horror games. I wanted to make a counter point to these games. Also it’s an experiment looking at whether or not virtual nature can have the same physical, psychological and emotional effects as physical nature.
Aaron’s also hopeful for consideration in this year’s Indicade festival of games:
I don’t know Indie Cade’s level of interest in VR at this point but Ive got my fingers crossed. They did have an option in the submission form specifically for Oculus Rift games so thats a good sign.
In terms of the feature set, well they’re not yet set in stone, but Aaron say we can expect the following:
“Story” Mode – a linear mode where you can interact with various forms of wildlife along your journey.
Endless Mode – an endless, randomly generated version of “Story” Mode, except with no animals. Endless mode is a pure relaxation experience.
Classic Mode – an HD update to the original Eden River demo.
Classic Endless – an endless HD version of the original Eden River demo.
And when can we expect to get our hands on Eden River HD? “Im shooting for a late July early August release.”
E3 2014 was the year of content not hardware for virtual reality, and Oculus lead the charge proudly demonstrating the fruits of their push to get developers to support their Oculus Rift platform.
I had some time on the last day of E3 2014 to hang out with Anton Mikhailov and Jeff Stafford, members of the Sony Project Morpheus team. They were wrapping up their final demos and wanted me to come back to try their Street Luge demo and chat.
Unello Design are probably the most chilled out VR developers in existence right now. Aaron Lemke‘s approach to game design seems to start with throwing away anything that could traditionally be considered a game. From the meditative Waking Man through to the lucid dreaming of Lunadroid, his music infused work is designed as pure escapism with perhaps a touch of enlightenment if you’re lucky.
As such, Aaron’s work neatly illustrates the opportunities for ‘gaming’ to develop new genres that aren’t about objectives, missions and shooting people in the face. Eden River was a good example of a title where just being inside was enough. All you did was float down a river, surrounded by beautiful scenery rolling your head gently from side to side to glide in that direction – and in VR, it was pure relaxation.
Now, Unello Design are working towards an expanded version of Eden River and is engaging with the VR community to find out what they’d like to see in Eden River HD – a commercial follow up, to be sold via Steam.
Popular suggestions for added features are to have a more expansive world, control over your cruising speed most tellingly a new ‘endless mode’. Could we see people falling asleep adrift on an infinite river?
You can find more on Eden River HD over at Unello Design‘s website here. No release date has been announced as yet for the title, we’ll let you know as soon as we do.
The Oculus Rift is seemingly finding it’s way into numerous fields of application beyond gaming. We reported recently that Marketing in particular seem to have seized the Rift’s wow factor and unique presentation capability in their campaigns. Well, now it seems the UK Army see potential in Oculus’ VR headset too.
UK company Plextek with funding from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) has developed a simulation to help UK Army medics learn to deal with situations they may face on the battlefield. The system involves the trainee donning the Rift and whilst immersed in the simulation, the instructor sets up and monitors the events – sort of like an enormously worthwhile Dungeon Master.
Plextek’s aim was to try and prepare soldiers for the reality of life under fire and by presenting different scenarios to the trainee, equip the soldier better.
Collette Johnson, medical business manager at Plextek Consulting, told the Daily Mail:
Our work with DSTL is enabling us to revolutionise the way medical treatment can be applied in the battlefield, while creating a multitude of opportunities for advanced health training applications across a breadth of industries,’
The innovative technology used in immersive reality solutions enables such a real-life perception that the education and response level of the trainee can be greatly heightened.
Any negative psychological effects could also be improved, by preparing the trainees better with a more accurate vision of what they could experience during military conflict.
Armed forces adopting consumer VR equipment seems to have been a theme of late. The Norwegian Army revealed recently that they’re testing a system to enhance their tank driver’s visibility in situations where all hatches are sealed. Using the Rift saves the army a pretty penny too, some $100k.
One of the defining and ingratiating aspects of Oculus VR as a company is their openness in sharing their progress and gathering knowledge from places other than their own offices. Their engagement with the community and their willingness to demonstrate new hardware and software at every possible opportunity is, I think, an enormous differentiator for them and one of the reasons they’ve been so successful at accelerating the push for great virtual reality into the consumer space.
So the Road to VR tradition of Oculus Rift reactions continue. Although this wasn’t the first outing for Oculus Rift’s DK2 hardware at a public show, there’s no arguing that E3 is much more consumer focussed than the DK2’s previous venue, GDC.
So, in the interests of gauging public perception of VR at E3 and the new hardware, Reverend Kyle stalked those who tried it out at Oculus’ opulent booth on the show floor gathering some interesting impressions.
Did you have an opportunity to try the DK” at E3 this year? What were your thought? Feel free to share them in the comments below.
3D Cinema’s return was billed as the saviour of the Multiplex. People would flock back to their local picture-house and revel in the wonders of modern entertainment technology whilst shelling out more money on admission for the privilege.
Of course, that didn’t quite happen and, although it certainly hasn’t turned out to be quite the white elephant it’s biggest detractors were predicting, no one could argue it gave way to any sort of revolution in movie making or watching.
3D Cinema and its equally beleaguered home equivalent, 3D TV, failed to capture the public’s imagination because the experience wasn’t anything that different. The technology that underpins 3D Cinema is not new, Stereoscopic movies, have been around for decades and its revival was driven primarily by movie studios and TV Manufacturers not the consumer.
…Long Live VR Cinema
Jaunt VR Camera Array, On the set of Black Mass
VR Cinema is different, and here’s why; When it’s done right, it’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced in movies before. It’s the most visceral and immediate way to bring a film makers vision to life in front of the viewer. It opens up new doors for directors and writers that could even give way to completely new genres. This is genuinely new and people are going to love it!
Black Mass is a 10 minute short movie that aims to scare you… a lot. Greg Plotkin, the director behind Paranormal Activity 5, takes the reins with Producers Matt Winston (son of pioneering effects wiz, Stan Winston), Erich Grey Litoff, David Sanger and John Ales. Partnered with Jaunt VR, a new company dedicated to 3D VR Movie making technology who recently secured $6.8M in VC funding, this is the first made-for-VR horror movie we’re aware of and its production values are impressive. Special Makeup Effects were created by Gary J, Tunnicliffe.
The film begins with your kidnapping. Then, waking to find yourself in a strange room, you’re confronted with blood soaked floors and walls. At the moment, that’s about all we know – a good thing too, as knowing too much about this project beforehand would likely diminish the surprises that undoubtedly await you.
Whilst he was in LA for E3, Road to VR Executive Editor Ben Lang took time out to get his head into an early version of Black Mass on an Oculus Rift HD Prototype. These are his thoughts on the experience.
The short snippet of Jaunt’s horror experience that I saw opened with me in the middle of some sort of storage room. Haphazardly organized materials and tools were strewn around the area. In front of me was a young girl in a white dress, maybe 10 years old. She was staring right at me; I wasn’t just an observer, I was to be a participant in this experience. “I think you’re bleeding,” she said.
As I went to look down at my body to see what she was talking about, I was interrupted by a sudden crash from somewhere outside of the scene, it gave me, and others I watched experiencing the scene, a nice little jump. She seemed startled and ran past me to the right. I followed her with my gaze as she exited the room behind me. As I turned back to where she had been standing, I was almost certain that before me would be something terrifying—a monster, a murderer—but there was nothing; it caught me off guard. Then, another loud crash with flickering lights, and another jump in my seat.
I was fully ready to be terrified, but that’s all Jaunt was willing to let me see for now.
Scott Broock, Jaunt’s VP of content, described the full experience as “10 minutes of escalating terror.” I can’t wait to see the whole thing.
The Pitfalls…
Checking the 360 camera’s view remotely.
…for any new technology are of course many and varied and shooting a full, 360 degree live action 3D movie poses some unique technical challenges. Building a set that completely surrounds the action and then finding places to hide microphones in that set are but two. The technical oomph to stitch the images captured by the cluster of cameras found in Jaunt’s latest capture device is, as you can imagine, not insignificant either.
As Scott explains: “We have a very large plate after the stitch from the source, with an extremely high resolution. We down sample to 1080p for the Rift, with a ton of pixels to spare. Meaning that we will later re-render and have a very high resolution version of the movie for the DK2.”
Creatively too, VR Cinema needs to take care not to become pigeon-holed as a one-trick wonder, the kind you might pay to see at a theme park. It needs to escape the fate of the 50s B-Movie drive-in experience too, relegated to low-budget sci-fi and horror until it’s demise. But, if companies like Jaunt VR and their pioneering technology can make the job of capturing VR movies possible and Oculus really can achieve its vision of a Billion users with Oculus Rifts, I can’t wait to see what the next generation of directors have us immersed in.
To say we’re anxious to get our hands on the final movie is, frankly, an understatement. We’ll keep you up to date on project Black Mass and let you know when a release date is announced. Meanwhile, you can find more information on Jaunt VR at their website here.
E3 is over for another year and it’s been fun! We’ve had a very marked focus on software not hardware for VR related products and that’s been reflected in our coverage.
Again, Rev. Kyle is joined by Ben Lang to talk about the day’s events. In this final special they discuss Sixense and their newest STEM prototype and were impressed with it’s low latency, Kyle gets his turn with the Virtuix Omni, reactions from the Oculus Booth, new DK2 shipping estimates and some thoughts and info on Elite: Dangerous. Kyle also had his time with Sony’s Project Morpheus and the Street Luge demo. And of course the VRLA mixer.
We’ve already brought you Ben Lang trying out Street Luge, one of the new demo’s Sony is using to demonstrate it’s Project Morpheus VR Headset for the Playstation 4. This time a close up off screen capture of the game in action.
We think this is the clearest footage there is of the game thus far and it gives you a great idea of the feeling of speed the demo conveys inside the headset.
We hope to have more detailed impressions on Sony’s demo set soon.