We’re busy compiling, editing and putting our footage and images together for some more formal articles, but to give you a glimpse inside Oculus’ private booth and a flavour of new Oculus co-published title Lucky’s Tale here’s Rev. Kyle rocking the DK2 doing just that. Brief summary of his feelings? He loved it! ;)
We’ll have more impressions and reports from the E3 show floor as we enter day 2.
Our team at E3 have now played Alien: Isolation at Oculus VR’s booth, amongst other things and we’ll have reactions and videos soon. But what is everyone else making of what could potentially be a recipe for heart failure if done well – Aliens in virtual reality?
User ‘goodgreenganja’ (my new favourite reddit user name) on subreddit /r/oculus has collated recent reaction tweets from those that have played the game in the Rift. They are presented below. Thanks to ‘goodgreenganja’ for the fast work! General summary? It’s f*!*ing terrifying! ;)
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Just experienced @AlienIsolation on @oculus rift at #E32014. Most frightening video game experience ever. I’m still shaking.
— PHNK (@brandonfoy) June 10, 2014
No gaming experience on a 2D screen could match the two games I just played in the DK2 @oculus Rift. Not even close.
— Ian Hamilton (@hmltn) June 10, 2014
Just played Alien: Isolation on Oculus Rift. I … need new pants. #E3Joy
— Jess Conditt (@JessConditt) June 10, 2014
You may look dumb using it, but your mind is fully convinced it’s real #oculus #JackatE3 pic.twitter.com/Ru8p956Rmu
— 140mafia (@TheLuvingFather) June 10, 2014
Being immersed in the world and community of VR, as we are here at Road to VR – trying to gauge reaction from those outside the community is incredibly important. As the launch of Oculus Rift CV1 and Project Morpheus approaches, virtual reality developers are going to have to focus on the gamers rather than the enthusiasts or risk launching to a disinterested public.
With that in mind, it’s always gratifying and reassuring when those who aren’t VR geeks, come away from a virtual reality presentation not only ‘getting it’ but becoming evangelistic about the experience. That’s the category the above video from ‘Strength Gamer‘ fits into. He’s been one of the first to articulate his experiences at Oculus’ Booth and they range from universally positive to downright aghast.
We’ll have our own impressions from the E3 ground team for both Oculus’s and Sony’s show floor demonstrations very soon indeed. Stay Tuned!
As reported earlier, Control VR have been going out of their way to demonstrate to the VR community that their upper body motion capture system which incorporates some pretty awesome finger tracking data gloves, is completely awesome and well worth the $600 entry fee (for the dual hand pledge tier at least).
This video includes ggodin, who we quoted in our last report as one of the first users to zip over to the Control VR office to have a go with the system. He seemed impressed in that report and the video seems to back that up nicely.
Control VR are $6.5k away from their $250k goal as of writing, so it seems this round of proactive is aimed at pushing their tital as far beyond the goal as possible. As yet, no stretch goals have been announced.
As stated, we’ll be going hands-on with Control VR at E3 this week. Stay tuned.
Despite what must be a hectic time for the Oculus crew with E3 about to hit the ‘go’ button on the show floor, they found time to release some news snippets via their blog.
First up is yet another high profile hire for Oculus, Jason Rubin one of the founders of the enormously successful Naughty Dog development studios has joined the company as Worldwide Head of Studios. Naughty Dog are behind such huge franchises as Jak and Daxtor and the Uncharted series of games for Playstation platforms. As we’ve continually emphasised, Oculus are dead serious about content – they know that not only will good, compelling content sell the dream of VR and help adoption rates, but that once the hardware puzzles are ‘solved’, the revenue stream will be software. It’s another huge win for the company that has hit it’s stride since Facebook acquired them for $2bn back in March.
There have only been a handful of times in my life where I saw something that I knew would change everything. The awe-inspiring tech Oculus is building is a portal into an incredible world that my daughter will one day consider to be normal. The moment I put it on, I wanted to help define that future.
And as it’s becoming very clear that Oculus VR’s focus at E3 is, quite logically, content – it’s fitting the remainder of the update is games, games, games. The confirmed list of titles ready to play on the Oculus VR booth at E3 this year are as follows:
SuperHot:
SUPERHOT is a unique first-person shooter game where time moves only when you move, making each level a deadlypuzzle fueled by fluid time mechanics and relentless foes. It’s one of the most fun experiences we’ve seen on the Rift.
The project started out during last year’s 7 Day First Person Shooter game jam, where we decided to make something that really stood out in the genre – a title that felt satisfying, while not requiring superhuman reflexes. Something like a game of real-time chess, except that all the pawns are out there to murder you. – SUPERHOT Team
Lucky’s Tale:
Lucky’s Tale is a new made-for-VR adventure by the team atPlayful. Introduced in last week’s blog, Lucky’s Tale is a “delightful platforming adventure game” designed exclusively for the Rift that reimagines the genre from the ground up. Lucky’s Tale is premiering for the first time here at E3 2014, so be sure to swing by the booth and check it out on the Rift!
Alien: Isolation:
Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation™ is a new survival horror game set in the Alien™ universe. A terrifying experience, particularly in virtual reality, Isolation is all about survival.
In the E3 Rift demo, you’ll use every tool at your disposal to escape from a ruthless Alien in the wreckage of your spaceship. Underpowered and underprepared, you’ll scavenge resources and improvise solutions; not just to succeed, but to survive.
EVE Valkyrie:
EVE: Valkyrie is the highly anticipated multiplayer, space-dogfighting shooter being developed by CCP and co-published by Oculus. Valkyrie, running on the Rift HD Prototype, was a contender for Game of Show at last year’s E3. It returns, but with an all new style, running on the graphical horsepower of Unreal Engine 4.
We’ll bring you our thoughts on the new titles once our team of crack reported have had a chance to try them out on the show floor.
One of the highlights of a very positive Sony press conference last night was a stunning trailer by a small, UK based development team called Hello Games. It’s called No Man’s Sky and it’s a stunning, procedurally generated space / world exploration title coming to the PS4 and PC.
Last nights’s trailer was preceded by an introduction by founder of Hello Games, Sean Murray. He described the team’s desire to create a boundless universe where players can join each other in procedurally generated universes and where every player will receive their own, completely unique home planet. The trailer is majestic, beginning as a wander through a planet’s surface admiring vegetation and wildlife before whisking the viewer into the heavens to explore the galaxy. Impressive stuff.
Although last night was all about the PS4, No Man’s Sky started life as a PC game and a few months ago, the team tweeted themselves receiving and playing with an Oculus Rift HD Development Kit. The team had previously stated they’re interest at the possibility of support for the VR Headset but as of yet have yet to officially confirm that it’s in development.
Problem! There are less steps in the stairs in this VR demo, than there are in our office. Will probably be fine pic.twitter.com/30DOSstVEz
— Sean Murray (@NoMansSky) April 3, 2014
We reported recently that an extremely promising new motion control system based on the IGS Glove, known as Control VR, hit Kickstarter. Well, the upper body motion capture system which includes the impressive finger tracking data gloves has rocketed to 95% of it’s $250k goal in just 5 days. Now, the company is openly welcoming members of the VR community to one of their offices for an open demonstration of the new system.
In a reddit post on subreddit /r/oculus, BrandonJa one of Control VR’s developers, invited anyone in the downtown LA area over to their offices for beer, pizza and come hands-on time with Control VR. Shortly afterwards, impressions from those who took Brandon up on his offer began to appear and the feedback is resoundingly positive.
Reddit user ggodin was one of the first to post some of his thoughts:
The first demo with the gloves that I got to try was a moon exploration demo that they created. Your avatar is wearing a full astronaut suit with some weird interface at the bottom of your helmet that I didn’t really get (I think they should remove those). Once Spencer told me that I could look at my hands I was amazed! I could rotate them, squeeze them, do weird finger movements and they were all tracked fluidly. The latency was barely noticeable honestly. I would guesstimate it to around 50-75 ms between moving a finger and seeing it move in the HMD. They also had a TV behind showing what I was seeing. Later on I could notice the TV had a much higher latency than what you actually see in the HMD.
It’s interesting to note that, with proper calibration, the gloves in particular seem to be extremely accurate and the latency low:
I tried several things to push the gloves limits. I tried holding my hands together; the palms were touching in the game but the fingers were bending backwards a little bit. This was due to calibration they said and in fact later on, after re-calibrating, my fingers were closer when doing the same pose. The arm models moved very closely to my actual arms, this was quite impressive. The shoulders of the skeletal model were probably a little wider than mine so some arm/elbow movements were a little off. Also when putting a hand on top of my head, the hand appeared a n inch in front of my forehead in game. Again I think the little glitches come from the initial calibration. It’s important to note that none of the demos had any noticeable drift. In fact, the rift yaw (DK1) seemed to drift while my arms and fingers stayed in place.
All very promising indeed then. And we have to say that the way Control VR has chosen to ‘do business’ on their Kickstarter campaign shows an impressive understanding of the growing VR community. It also shows an inordinate amount of confidence when they’re willing to invite anyone into their offices to try their prototype hardware.
We’re hoping to get some hands-on time with Control VR during the E3 show this week. We’ll of course update soon with our impressions once we have them. And Control VR’s Kickstarter page can be found here.
Just a quick addition our previous story covering Oculus VR’s new co-published title Lucky’s Tale. Gametrailers has upped the reveal and demonstration as a separate video, so we thought you might like to see it, assuming you didn’t manage to catch the live stream last night. The title is shown running on an Oculus Rift DK2 and leverages the new unit’s positional tracking capabilities.
We hope to get some hands-on time with this title soon. Once we have, we’ll bring you our impressions.
A prototype experience of #AlienIsolation will be on the Oculus Rift stand. For those brave enough to try it #E32014 pic.twitter.com/xQnStO998t
— Alien: Isolation (@AlienIsolation) June 10, 2014
This is pretty incredible news if, like me, you’re a huge fan of the Alien franchise. A tweet from the Alien: Isolation team shows an image of a player wearing a DK2, apparently demonstrating the title’s Oculus Rift support.
Alien: Isolation is a Sega published, multi-platform title that drops you into Ellen Ripley’s (played by Sigourney Weaver in the movies) daughter Amanda’s shoes as she searches for the truth behind her mother’s disappearance. The title seems to be leaning towards the original Alien movie in tone, i.e. tension and suspense as opposed to balls-out action as with it’s sequel Aliens. It’s not known how far developed the Oculus Rift support is, but the game itself ships on October 7th for all major consoles and PC.
Frankly, the idea of being thrown into a believable, virtual world with an Alien on the loose is both a terrifying and a exciting prospect. Let’s just hope the game doesn’t turn out to be the turkey that Aliens: Colonial Marines did.
Apparently the Oculus Rift version will make an appearance for demo on the Oculus VR stand. We’ll be heading there as soon as we can to find out more and get some hands-on time with the game. We’ll leave you with some screenshots to whet your appetite in the mean time.
As Oculus VR announced recently, they continue to push their drive for virtual reality specific content by co-publishing their 2nd title (the first being EVE Valkyrie) and it’s a 3D platformer called Lucky’s Tale. Tonight on Gametrailers’ ‘All Access at E3’ show, Paul introduced the game which looks like a polished mash up of Mario 64, Conker and a dash of Yoshi’s Islans – and was demonstrated using an Oculus Rift DK2 – by a gentleman looking very much like Oculus VR’s Aaron Davies, Director of Developer Relations.
Whilst 3rd person games of any type are relatively thin on the ground right now, there have been some enormously successful examples of platform games utilising the immersive qualities of the Oculus Rift to great effect. And when you place the DK2’s positional tracking into the mix of qualities VR can bring to a game, it makes even more sense. Now, instead of merley rotating the camera to hunt for secret passages or objects you can lean in and peer round entirely naturally. Also, perfect stereocopy probably makes judging depth in the 3D world much easier, making the platforming itself more natural. Bettner claims that his company Playful have been working with Oculus for over a year to refine what eventually became Lucky’s Tale.
I have to say that the title looks like a breath of fresh air to the Oculus Rift catalogue, and I’m fairly sure that’s one of the many reasons Oculus VR decided to back the game and take it to market.
We hope you get our hands on Lucky’s Tale this week as the Road to VR team roam the E3 show floor looking for the latest E3 VR news.
The general consensus is that we’re going to see Oculus throw their hat into the VR input ring very soon, possibly right here at E3 2014, but one element of immersive gaming systems that still seems to be missing, that’s any advance in haptic feedback systems.
Cue Kor-FX is a new device which claims to allow you to physically feel impact suffered in game. The device works by taking an audio feed from your game and transferring those signals into syncronised haptic vibrations that gives the impression of things hitting you or low end vibrations caused by large nearby objects. The device is wireless, and incorporates on-vest adjustable controls for ‘depth of field’ and effect intensity. The vest is being pitched directly at the hardcore gaming and in particular the virtual reality enthusiast community.
Kor-FX seems to have been around for some time in one guise or another for quite some time. I recall seeing an early version of this device, ready for retail a few years back. It seems Kickstarter’s ability to propel new devices into the public conciousness works for older devices too.
It certainly seems to offer to plug a gap that exists currently, despite the glut if VR related peripherals that have appeared over the last 18 months. How well it works, we’ll endeavour to find out and report back.
In the mean time, you can check out the Kickstarter page here.
Sony became console land’s great white VR hope at GDC earlier this year when they announced the existence of Project Morpheus, a dedicated VR Headset for the Playstation 4. Along with a re-animation of the dorment Playstation Move controllers, Sony demo’d the system heavily throughout the show and it’s fair to say made a very good impression on us. And, although Sony has been very careful to emphasise the development / prototypical nature of Morpheus, it hasn’t escaped people’s attention that it looks an awful lot like a finished product. Combine that with their declaration they’d been working on the project for years and you start to wonder if Sony isn’t poised for a release of their VR entrant very soon, perhaps even this year.
We’re hoping to hear from Sony when Morpheus may go on sale and perhaps even a look at what they plan to release to consumer. In addition, look out for games made exclusively for Project Morpheus at the show and perhaps the appearance of standard games with VR functionality announced during the conference. None of the former of course is confirmed, but we’d be surprised Sony would make such a huge splash at GDC without following up on it at E3. We shall see.
Video should appear below.
Ever since Gametrailers revealed their schedule and keen eyed Oculus Rift fans spotted Palmer Luckey’s name in the line up speculation became rife that the founder of Oculus would be revealing something brand new for the VR Headset. In fact, he introduced the admittedly awesome, but hardly brand new, Super Hot – the off-the-wall action shooter that fiddles with causality that recently hit Kickstarter for funding.
But, in true Palmer style, the incorrigible VR geek flipped out for the camera in what can only be politely called a physical mini explosion. Of course, gif monkeys everywhere sprang into action and the residents of subreddit /r/oculus were treated to another mesmerising looping clip of the event. Enjoy the full force below and check out the SuperHot Kickstarter here. We’re hoping to speak to Oculus at E3 tomorrow and will report what else they have to say thereafter.
There is a chance you may not have seen Atajrubah before, but it’s one of the earlier titles to be launched pledging to be built from the ground up for the Oculus Rift. The development team describe the game as a ‘Arabian inspired Survival Game for the Oculus Rift and traditional input devices’, an intriguing and refreshingly little explored concept, especially in the VR gaming space.
The game is set in a fantasy desert environment bearing a striking resemblance to the middle-east during the 30s and 40s. You’ll be able to explore the world along with others online, seeking out treasures and secrets as you go. To summarise the gameplay style, I’l borrow a neat sentence from the team’s IndieGogo Campaign: “Think Minecraft meets DayZ meets the Middle East, but with Ghuls and Djinn instead of Zombies or Creepers.”
So, how’s development going? We asked Alan Robinson, Lead Developer at Nexy Media to give us an update and share some images of the game in action. Over to Alan:
The past couple months since Comicon Dubai have seen Atajrubah get a total overhaul. We’ve switched to Unreal Engine 4,welcomed new team members on board, got Atajrubah running on different platforms and much more. Its been such an exciting experience watching the game grow and working with Unreal Engine 4 has been a great experience thus far.
Steamworks was integrated fairly easily early on. In addition to that we’ve got Atajrubah running on Mac and plan on approaching a Linux build in the coming weeks.Over the past week or so I’ve been tackling some technical work in Unreal Engine4 by setting up foliage meshes,Level Of Detail and a flexible terrain material setup.This will help myself and the environment artist more easily decorate a vast yet varied and performance efficient world for players to explore.
As with any development team and especially so with an independent one , team members tend to move on when bigger opportunities arise. Irsyad Ishak our concept artist and Joe Dodd our character artist, were both fortunate enough to get hired full time at studios in Singapore and Houston respectively.
Fortunately we have found some amazingly talented artists to fill their roles, I’ve provided some information about the new team members below.
Team Member: Tien Chi
Role: Concept Artist
Portfolio: http://www.artoftienchi.com/portfolio.html
Tien has been hard at work creating all kinds of model sheets and concept pieces to guide and inspire myself and the other team members.
Team Member: Dan Hitchen
Role: Character Artist
Portfolio: http://www.danhitchen3d.co.uk
Dan has taken on the task of overhauling the character assets for Atajrubah, at present he’s in the process of finishing the texturing process for the sculpt below.
![[Atajrubah Male Player Character]](https://roadtovrlive-5ea0.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/char-concept.jpg)
Many thanks to Alan for the update, we’ll keep you posted on the game’s progress. In the mean time, check out the title’s Steam Greenlight page here.
