Sony at their press conference earlier in the week may have slightly downplayed their answer to the Oculus Rift, the VR Headset they call Project Morpheus, but they’ve turned out in full force on E3’s show floor to demonstrate the device.
One of the new demos available to try was called Street Luge, a sort of urban racing game that put you the player prone riding a street luge (think big skateboard you lie on) whilst tearing downhill trying to avoid being wiped out by oncoming traffic.
Ben Lang got a chance to try it out and found that he was asked to sit almost fully reclined in a beanbag to try and match the prone position of your avatar as closely as possible. Direction of travel is controlled by adjusting your gaze left or right. Ben commented on yesterday’s Rev. VR Podcast E3 2014 Special that you only had to make tiny head movements to shift direction, making it a challenging demo.
We’ll have more on Sony’s Morpheus presence at E3 2014 later on.
Reverend Kyle summarises Day 2 at the world’s largest gaming event with Ben Lang.
They discuss thoughts on their experiences with Control VR and IMU based tracking in general. Plus, Ben talks about his time with Survios’ Prime 3 untethered virtual reality experience. Also Kyle shares his thoughts on Cmoar, a new VR viewer headset using your mobile phone.
We’ll be releasing content throughout the day and of course Rev. Kyle and Ben will be back on the show floor for the final day of E3 when doors open this morning.
They say that man is the most dangerous game to hunt, but I don’t think they considered an Alien xenomorph being the hunter. Alien: Isolation, a new title (with Oculus Rift support) based on the famous franchise, traps you helplessly in a claustrophobic space with one of sci-fi’s most frightening monsters. The experience is terribly frightening.
Control VR, the company that offers a solution for tracking the detailed movements of your upper body and fingers, have managed to whip up quite the storm over an amazingly short period of time.
Ben Lang trying Control VR
Since their Kickstarter campaign launched a week ago they’ve not only hit their goal of $250k but as of writing have blown past it by $30k – still with another 23 days left on the timer. Additionally, they’ve shown extraordinary confidence in the strength of their product by inviting VR enthusiasts from subreddit /r/oculus to pop over to the office and try it for themselves – this resulted in a series of positive impressions being posted back to reddit and it’s fair to say the company has been welcomed into the VR community.
Ben Lang and Rev. Kyle swung by Control VR’s booth and grabbed some hands-on time with the system (more on this later) and Ben sat down with the company’s CEO Alex Sarnoff and their CTO Ali Kord to dig a little deeper into what the system is all about.
There’s a marked shift in VR’s perception at this year’s E3. As each successive trade and gaming show has come and gone, Oculus VR, their employees and evangelists have tirelessly put out the message that not only was virtual reality back, but it was the future of .. well everything. People, even ‘normal’ non-geeks know about VR or at least know someone who does. That’s a huge indication of just how much progress a once tiny company founded by one persistent individual has made.
Just three years ago, if you’d have asked me if in 2014 I’d see a Playstation blog entry listing a game that was built from the ground up for virtual reality and the Playstation 4 I’d have laughed in your face. But today, it was an expected albeit very notable event. How far we’ve come.
The game in question is The Assembly by UK developers nDreams. It’s a ‘Mysterious VR adventure game” apparently designed from the ground up for virtual reality. The team have had access to VR Headsets since mid 2013 (presumably Oculus developer kits), have been experimenting with techniques to leverage VR’s potential for storytelling.
It has to be said however, that the announcement is short on details about the game itself. The trailer is equally mysterious and a little dull truth be told. However, the blog entry does detail some of the base ideas the team are thinking of incorporating:
The Assembly includes lots of the gameplay mechanics that we found worked well in VR. For example, you get to control two different characters at various points, and in VR, you really notice details like their different heights, sounds and voices. Rather than playing as a silent character, we found that playing the role of characters in the story works really well, and helps make The Assembly feel quite different to most other VR projects.
nDreams claim to be equally as interested in ensuring the story is as engaging and rich as possible:
The game has a rich story written by Tom Jubert, a talented young writer behind indie hits like FTL, Penumbra and The Swapper. Players are flung into the underground world of The Assembly, a secretive collection of scientists, academics and engineers who believe morality in society is preventing scientific advancement and are committed to discovering a universal theory of everything, at any cost.
nDreams have a playable demo on the show floor at E3 this and we’ll do our best to seek it out and get some hands-on time with it to see if we can answer some questions.
At E3 2014, Oculus VR debuts one of their biggest and most impressive booths yet. Stationed right near the big three (Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo), Oculus’ booth is surrounded by fans hungry to get their heads into the latest VR demos. Within the booth, a mini-museum reveals never before seen Rift prototypes.
Chez Oculus, E3 2014
If you wanted to form a very quick graphic indication of how Oculus VR has grown as a company, simply take a look at their progressively extravagant (albeit always extremely practical) show stands over the last couple of years. At this year’s E3, the company behind the renaissance of virtual reality has once again upped its own ante and taken over a huge portion of the E3 show floor with a boutique show area.
The floor is split up into mini-lounges, complete with dedicated monitors with faux objet d’art dotted about the place. Its very retro-modern, chic, and yet suitably cosy. Anyway, as Road to VR tradition now dictates, we like to be able to give those unable to be at E3 2014 a feel of what it’s like to be there. Therefore, we’ve compiled a batch of snaps which we think captures the place well.
Below you can see the extent of the line that the Rift booth attracts:
The Oculus Rift Mini-museum
Oculus are unusual in the consumer technology or gaming hardware industry, they’re incredibly open to showing their significant leaps. In the last 2 years, press and public have been treated to numerous iterations on technology and design.
Well, as a testament to how far the Oculus Rift has some since its GDC 2012 public debut, and perhaps to emphasise to the impatient fans just how much work goes on behind the scenes, this year’s booth holds an integrated mini-museum of Oculus Rift prototypes. The small, curated collection gives a good overview of the transition from past to present although it’s by no means exhaustive. Talking to Road to VR’s Ben Lang, Palmer Luckey told him “It isn’t a comprehensive display… we had to be careful what prototypes we showed…”—giving a teasing insight into perhaps design and technologies not followed but potentially still valuable in the future or to others.
For those of you who’ve been following the Oculus story from the beginning, you’ll likely recognise some of them. So here’s a challenge for you: Can you name when and where we saw each of the below devices first? Throw your answers in the comments below and we’ll see who gets the most.
(Left to right): DK2, DK2 red variant, DK2 white variant, Crystal Cove
DK2 prototypes with red and white translucent covers. Perhaps Oculus was testing IR performance between different colored plastic, or maybe looking at customization options for the eventual CV1 release?
DK2 prototypes with covers translucent to visible light haven’t been seen until E3 2014
The message is clear from Oculus VR for this year’s E3, content is king. With no hardware announcements forthcoming, Oculus are pushing new games and experiences.
Reverend Kyle is on the show floor this week checking out all the latest VR content. Today he’s joined by Road to VR Founder and Executive Editor Ben Lang and they talk about what they saw and experienced on day one of the biggest game event of the year.
Survios, formerly Project Holodeck, continues to work to create a fully immersive virtual reality environment. I got my hands on their latest prototype hardware, dubbed the Prime 3, to slay Zombies on the Holodeck once again.
We’re back with another snippet of Oculus Rift gameplay taken at Oculus’ private demo booth at E3. This time, the game Oculus VR have been pushing hard at E3 this year, the 3D platformer Lucky’s Friend.
I have to say, the more I see of this title the more I like the looks of it. I said before it resembled a mash up of Mario 64 and Conker’s Bad Fur Day, both on the Nintendo 64 console from years ago, albeit obviously visually much improved. Again, the subtleties of positional tracking are by all accounts solving the blight of 3D platformers, camera issues.
It’s some of the best quality footage I’ve yet seen of the game – despite it being off screen video. We’ll have more detailed impressions of Oculus’ demo set soon.
One of the most exciting announcements for VR fans at E3 this was that, not only was the new Sega title Alien: Isolation going to officially support the Oculus Rift but that it was playable as part of Oculus’ demo set too! We of course made a bee line to the booth to try it out.
Above is some off screen gameplay footage showing some really interesting mechanics that utilise the positional tracking capabilities of the Oculus Rift DK2 (which is due to ship next month). In particular, after pulling out the franchises signature motion tracker, the player can lean in to take a better look at the device.
Enjoy the video, we’ll have detailed impressions on all the demos at Oculus VR’s booth later on.
More gameplay from our resident Reverend as he whisks himself around the show floor with Ben Lang at E3 2014. This time, he gets his head in an Oculus Rift DK2 to play the off-the-wall action shooter that plays with causality, SUPERHOT. You can see how well the positional tracking is integrated with this title – slowing down time and dodging around bullets with your head sounds to me an incredibly cool gameplay mechanic.
More from the show floor for Day and Day 2 later today.
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.
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!
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.
