I took a look at a very early version of a DK2 enabled Senza Peso demo recently (see the above video) just after Oculus’ second VR Headset shipped and it remains one of the most impressive VR showcases out there. Seems Epic Games thought so too as they chose Kite and Lightning‘s VR mini opera to showcase Unreal Engine 4 at this year’s PAX Prime in Seattle this week.
Contrary to the grandiose presentation that Samsung gave Gear VR at their IFA Unpacked event earlier today, Gear VR will launch in 2014 first under the moniker ‘Innovator Edition’ which isn’t aimed mainstream smartphone users.
Samsung is launching their Gear VR headset with the subhead ‘Innovator Edition’. We’ve got the full specifications, which include sub-20ms motion-to-photons latency.
Early photos of the Samsung Gear VR smartphone adapter firm up Samsung’s partnership with Oculus showing a ‘Powered By Oculus’ logo on the side of the new headset.
Just seconds after Samsung announces their long rumoured VR Headset the Gear VR, we’re receiving word on the first applications available for the device.
Samsung, at the company’s ‘IFA Unpacked’ event in Berlin today, have officially revealed their ‘Gear VR’ headset.
With Samsung rumored to be revealing their ‘Gear VR’ device later today, we went digging through the company’s patent portfolio to see what information we might be able to glean. We stumbled upon a patent that caught our attention from Sony that’s for a “Head-mountable display with determination of the interocular distance.”
A ‘whitehat’ hacker scored some serious cash for identifying security vulnerabilities in Oculus VR’s developer portal. The exploits, which could have been used to plant malicious code in the Oculus SDK, among other mischievous things, have been patched and the hacker rewarded through Facebook’s ‘Bug Bounty’ program.
Hey Rifters!
Missed the last episode of SundayVR? No worries, catch the video recording and written recap here! Live for Speed steals the show, we see some incredible Descent-like action from SubLevelZero, and I (finally) got Half-Life VR up and running.
Back in October 2013 Road to VR’s Ben Lang described HL2VR, a Half-Life 2 mod specially crafted to make playing in VR as cool as possible, as “The best way to experience Half-Life 2.” The new version (1.4) is out and brings Oculus Rift DK2 support and the ability to play through both Episode 1 and 2 of Half-Life 2.
The Proto Awards are being held by the Virtual Reality Foundation, a non-profit organization formed by the founding members of VRLA. The organization has extended the deadline for submissions to September 2nd and encourages “all developers to submit their VR experiences, even in an unpolished state.”
Oculus VR hosts its inaugural Connect developer conference in September. The company has remained quiet about the schedule until recently posting the initial itinerary which features keynotes from John Carmack (CTO), Michael Abrash (Chief Scientist), and Brendan Iribe (CEO), along with a birthday toast for Palmer Luckey (Founder) on the conference’s opening day.
Leap Motion creates a gesture camera for hand tracking input. The company has been progressively pivoting their technology toward virtual reality, and now appear to be going all-in on the emerging industry with a tease of a next-generation sensor, codenamed ‘Dragonfly’, along with a VR Mount for the Oculus Rift and VR-focused updates to the company’s SDK.
David Rowe continues to develop the unofficial CtrlAltStudio Viewer, the first viewer to bring Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2 support to Second Life. The latest alpha release of the viewer supports positional tracking on the Oculus Rift DK2, which Rowe says “adds significantly to the sense of immersion.” Today Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg also confirmed that DK2 support is in the works for the official Second Life viewer.
Road to VR was invited to an event at Red Bull Studios London to be among the first to try the latest version of the Red Bull Air Race VR Experience with positional tracking and the Oculus Rift DK2, an experiential marketing application developed by Rewind FX. Road to VR’s Jon Tustain sits down to speak with Solomon Rogers, founder of Rewind FX, about the company’s work with virtual reality experiences.
