/vir/ - Virtual Reality

http://vrfocus.com/archives/24766/asus-suggests-oculus-ready-pcs-to-include-100-oculus-rift-discount-voucher/

Back at its 2015 Oculus Connect developer conference in September virtual reality (VR) specialist Oculus VR introduced the Oculus Ready PC Programme. This concept essentially consists of a line of PC rigs from a range of manufacturers that include a simple label to let consumers know that the given machine meets or beats the company’s recommended specification for running the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD). What Oculus VR didn’t mention is that these PCs might include huge discount vouchers for the Oculus Rift too.

That is according to Tom’s Hardware, which recently took a look at two of Asus’s upcoming Oculus Ready PCs, the G11CB and the G20CB, which will be re-released with the branding. According to the site, company reps explained that they are even planning to package the machines with a discount voucher for the Oculus Rift itself. In fact the voucher is reportedly looking to be worth $100 USD, making it a significant saving off of a device that is known to cost at least $350 at this point in time.

Outside of that estimate and a Q1 launch window, the final release date and price for the Oculus Rift are yet to be revealed, although the latter at least will be announced when pre-orders for the device go live later this year.

http://uploadvr.com/chinese-internet-giant-tencent-reveals-vr-project/

We have been wondering when Chinese Internet giant Tencent would enter virtual reality and now we know. Previously, Tencent had invested in Epic Games and Altspace VR, but now the company has its own big plan for virtual reality.

Tencent revealed its VR project overnight (for those in the western hemisphere) during the announcement of its miniStation. The project’s main page (http://vr.tencent.com/) is already online. The miniStation game console comes in two versions and they appear to be tiny Android-powered cubes. The higher end version is said to be compatible with VR and connects to a Tencent-manufactured head-mounted display. The system is said to be powered by a customized Qualcomm chip comparable with an Intel i5. However, the HMD prototype hasn’t been shown yet.

The tech giant is also planning to support an assortment of apps from gaming and movies to live-streamed events and social while also developing its own unnamed virtual reality game.

A VR cinema is planned as well. According to the project’s main page, you could enjoy a movie with other users once you put on the HMD.

Tencent is a tech giant that grew to enormous size serving the Chinese market with games and services like Wechat, which is a social network second only to Facebook. Communications platforms QQ and Wechat could be leveraged by Tencent to build out a virtual reality ecosystem and help developers to reach users.

Most Chinese VR teams are very happy to see Tencent is taking VR seriously. However, many are also worried the giant may cut off their future.

http://www.roadtovr.com/unreal-engine-to-add-nvidia-multi-res-shading-and-vr-sli-support/

Today at the VRX conference in San Francisco, Epic Games, developers of Unreal Engine, announced that they’re partnering with NVIDIA to integrate their Gameworks VR featureset into UE4. VR SLI and Multi-res shading will be availabl in forthcoming updates.

NVIDIA’s Tony Tamasi, speaking at today’s VRX 2015 conference in San Francisco has announced a partnership with Epic Games to bring their own flavour of virtual reality enhanced GPU features to Unreal Engine 4.

Although not yet fully confirmed, it’s thought that the new features will make their way into release 4.11 of UE4 – coming ‘soon’ according to NVIDIA themselves. Gameworks VR, a suite of features designed to integrate tightly with GPU, drivers and VR hardware / software to deliver lower latency and higher frame rates, has been covered in depth by NVIDIA on this very website. But here is a breakdown of the key features of interest.

For game and application developers:

VR SLI—provides increased performance for virtual reality apps where multiple GPUs can be assigned a specific eye to dramatically accelerate stereo rendering. With the GPU affinity API, VR SLI allows scaling for systems with >2 GPUs.

Multi-Res Shading—an innovative new rendering technique for VR whereby each part of an image is rendered at a resolution that better matches the pixel density of the warped image. Multi-Res Shading uses Maxwell’s multi-projection architecture to render multiple scaled viewports in a single pass, delivering substantial performance improvements.

For headset developers:

Context Priority—provides headset developers with control over GPU scheduling to support advanced virtual reality features such as asynchronous time warp, which cuts latency and quickly adjusts images as gamers move their heads, without the need to re-render a new frame.

Direct Mode—the NVIDIA driver treats VR headsets as head mounted displays accessible only to VR applications, rather than a typical Windows monitor that your PC shows up on, providing better plug and play support and compatibility for VR headsets.

Front Buffer Render—enables the GPU to render directly to the front buffer to reduce latency.

As said, this is NVIDIA’s set of proprietary APIs for enhancing virtual reality rendering. It’s not clear if or when we’re likely to see AMD’s equivalent LiquidVR API suite implemented into the engine.

Nvidia is a cancer on the graphic industry, they can take their proprietary shit and shove it up their ass.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-arcade-release-all-samsung-gear-vr-compatibility-21-arcade-games/

With the reveal of today’s pre-order for the first consumer Gear VR, Oculus has launched the beta version of Arcade, the company’s first-party title currently featuring 21 classic arcade games from Sega, Midway, and Bandai Namco. Oculus Arcade beta is available on all Gear VR units old and new.

Announced at the end of September at Oculus’ developer conference, Oculus Arcade is a collection of classic arcade games that are playable on Samsung’s Gear VR headset (which was made in cooperation with Oculus). Requiring one of three currently supported gamepads (Samsung EI-GP20, Moga Pro, or SteelSeries Android), the game convincingly places you in front of arcade cabinets of years past.

Oculus Arcade is now available on all Gear VR phones and headsets, from the first release (Galaxy Note 4) to the current (Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge) and will be available on the first consumer version of Gear VR which launches later this month (compatible with Galaxy Note 5, S6 Plus, S6, and S6 Edge).

The following 21 arcade titles are available, and we’re expecting to see more added down the road.

Bandai Namco

Pacman (1980)

Galaga (1981)

Midway

APB (1987)

Defender (1981)

Joust (1982)

Gauntlet (1985)

Gauntlet II (1986)

Rampage (1986)

Root Beer Tapper (1983)

Spy Hunter (1983)

Sega

Altered Beast (1988)

Golden Axe (1989)

Phantasy Star II (1989)

Shinobi III (1993)

Sonic the Hedgehog (1991)

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992)

Sonic Spinball (1993)

Streets of Rage (1991)

Streets of Rage 2 (1992)

Virtua Fighter 2 (1994)

Ecco the Dolphin (1992)

Rather than charge for Oculus Arcade as a whole, the company has gone the in-app purchase route; each arcade title gives you 20 minutes of play time (total), and then asks you to pony up a few bucks to unlock the cabinet for good.

oculus arcade lobby

The machines are divided into different rooms for each publisher. There’s no locomotion between each, just point-and-click to teleport into the publisher’s room and then up to your desired machine. Each arcade cabinet has unique art on the top and sides. The shape of the cabinets is generic, but the buttons and nobs are designed to match the controls of each game and move in sync with input from your gamepad.

It’s easy to become absorbed in the games and forget you’re even in VR; the peripheral views of the controls and cabinet can at times seem frighteningly real.

No word yet on whether or not Oculus Arcade will support social play, but it does seem like something that would fit well with the setup.

Nice.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/24793/htc-originally-reached-out-to-oculus-before-valve/

The HTC Vive is currently one of the most promising virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) on the horizon and it comes from a surprising partnership. The Taiwanese smartphone maker teamed up with none other than Valve to help work on its kit, with the Half-Life developer implementing its new SteamVR system into the device. The story of how these two came together is well-known; HTC approached Valve itself after the Steam Dev Days event back in early 2014. This week, though, it’s been revealed that HTC ‘reached out’ to Valve’s VR rival before then.

Speaking (http://vrfocus.com/archives/24749/vrx-2015-fireside-vrar-the-ultimate-computing-platform-liveblog/) at the VR Intelligence Conference and Expo (VRX) in San Francisco this week, HTC CTO Phil Chen revealed that the company had first approached Oculus VR, creator of the Oculus Rift, before it teamed up with Valve. According to Chen, the company got in contact with Oculus VR following its historic Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign, which ended on 1st September 2012 with $2,437,429 USD raised. It wasn’t clear if the company approached Oculus VR with the intention of a Facebook-style acquisition, a partnership similar to what can be seen with Valve, or something entirely different.

In any case, Oculus VR and HTC are set to become competitors in the next few months as the two release their respective HMDs in Q1 2016. The HTC Vive will also be seeing a limited release later this year before a wider rollout in early 2016, though it’s currently not clear exactly how many units will be available. A final release date or price for either device is yet to be set, though details on the Oculus Rift’s launch should be arriving towards the end of the year as pre-orders for the device are put up.

http://uploadvr.com/dysonics-motion-tracked-audio/

I’m sitting in the front row of a comedy show in virtual reality. Sitting to my left there’s a woman and to my right is a man. When laughter erupts all around me I get an eerie feeling I’ve not had before in VR.

The distinct sound of a woman’s laugh came into my left ear and a man’s laugh came into my right. A few minutes later I’m transported to the front row at a concert and I begin turning my head left and right as the band plays. When I turn my head I hear the instruments more clearly in whichever ear is directly facing the performers, and when I look straight ahead I am fully engrossed in the music in a way that’s as close as my ears have heard to real life while being immersed in VR.

Until I heard the audio captured by Dysonics for these two VR videos I’d not experienced realistic sound in VR — at least not that I could remember. The term “binaural” audio is being used by a number of developers and startups to give the impression their technologies or apps provide realistic sound. I’m not exactly an audiophile but the term might as well be marketing jargon to me. Technically, “binaural” just means using both ears. If you had just used two microphones, one next to each ear as implied by the term “binaural,” then the audio would only sound realistic if a person kept their head perfectly still matching the way the microphones were positioned. That’s not great for VR, obviously, as the technology is all about enabling a person to look anywhere. This is where Dysonics comes in.

The difference, says co-founder and CTO Robert Dalton Jr., is that for these live recordings Dysonics is using eight microphones in a rig it calls RondoMic. This microphone array captures audio and stitching algorithms are used to put it together in a similar way to how camera footage is stitched together from different cameras to provide 360 degrees of video. Dysonics calls it “motion-tracked binaural” sound. According to the company, it is more difficult and intricate to do correctly than stitching a panoramic video together.

“We’re essentially doing four binaural recordings simultaneously,” he said. “So it’s about as life-like as you can get with all the motion-tracking kind of features.”

Dysonics emerged from a UC Davis incubator in 2012 and the company partnered with Virgin America earlier this year to bring some of its technology to in-flight entertainment. The technology is on Delta flights too with more airlines planned. They also sell RondoMotion, a tiny clip-on accessory that adds motion tracking to any headphones as well as software called RAPPR designed to create more immersive sound environments for headphones. Combined, the software and accessory are designed to provide a realistic sound experience inside traditional headphones.

That said, VR appears to be where the company is aimed in the future as it partners with content creators and 360 camera companies to add their audio capture technology for more immersive VR experiences.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/24888/valve-on-htc-vive-all-efforts-are-being-geared-to-commercial-release/

With under two months left of 2015, time is running out for HTC and Valve and their supposed limited launch of the HTC Vive virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD). The companies have suggested over the past few months that a small number of units will become commercially available towards the end of the year before a wider role out in Q1 2016. Some fans are concerned that this limited launch may not happen at all with so little time left, but Valve has recently assured that ‘all efforts’ are currently being focused on a commercial release.

The company’s Jeremy Selan recently said as much during his ‘Keeping an open mind in VR’ talk at the 2015 VR Intelligence Conference and Expo (VRX) over in San Francisco, California. When asked about a possible date for the consumer rollout of the HTC Vive, Selan simply replied: “I’m not the person to ask. I know that all efforts now are being geared to commercial release.” VRFocus recently spoke to HTC itself about this potential limited launch, though the company also wasn’t willing to give a date.

Not only are fans waiting to hear a release date for the HTC Vive but also a price point and specifications for a PC capable of running the device too. The device works with Valve’s SteamVR system, which offers Room Scale user tracking. This uses a laser-based peripheral known as Lighthouse to follow players around an area of up to 15-feet by 15-feet and have those movements replicated within the given experience. It also features two position-tracked controllers to replicate hand movements within a title.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/24896/luckey-it-would-have-been-impossible-to-start-oculus-vr-in-the-mid-2000s/

One question that those working in the virtual reality (VR) industry are often asked is ‘why now’? This isn’t the first time that VR has tried to break into the mainstream market, with earlier attempts ultimately failing to catch on. Fans know why this time is different; consumer-level hardware is now powerful enough to bring VR into the home. But, according to Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) creator Palmer Luckey, this has only very recently become the case.

Luckey said as much in a recent interview with Maximum PC (http://www.maximumpc.com/palmer-luckey-discusses-the-future-of-vr/). “There’s kind of two sides,” he replied when asked as to why VR should succeed this time. “One is the side we control, so things like displays, optics, motion sensors. Those weren’t nearly as good in the past. It’s really only in the last few years that it’s become viable to build a good virtual reality headset.

“But, more than that, it’s the proliferation of high-end computers for everybody. If you look back to the 80’s and 90’s when virtual reality was first kind of having its first serious run at mainstream penetration, the best VR experiences were running on like SG workstations that cost tens of thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But now everyone’s computer is capable of rendering high framerate 3D graphics. Maybe not photorealistic ones, maybe not to the level of quality we want from virtual reality in the near and distant future, but it’s enough to make it work.”

He continued, adding: “And so, for the first time ever, virtual reality is actually viable as something you can use at home. If you look back to the 80’s and 90’s again, those companies didn’t fail because of bad business or bad marketing or because consumers thought it was weird. It’s because people just didn’t have machines that could render an experience that was anything close to comfortable or compelling and that’s all changed.”

When asked it past failures were primarily concerned with timing, Luckey replied: “It’s almost entirely a timing issue. It would have been impossible to start Oculus in even the mid-2000’s. It wasn’t until between 2007 and 2009 was when the technology was becoming viable to build something on the level of the development kits that we’ve shipped so far.”

http://vrfocus.com/archives/24905/time-warner-and-more-invest-30-5-million-in-nextvr/

NextVR is a name that many virtual reality (VR) fans will have heard of over the past year. The company has been working in 360 degree content since being founded in 2009, and has this year made strides in livestreaming real events to Gear VR mobile head-mounted display (HMD) owners. This includes the likes of recent political debates and even Oculus Rift creator Oculus VR’s own Oculus Connect 2 developer conference in September. This week NextVR is announcing the completion of a series A round of funding, raising a significant amount of money to help its work.

The company has raised some $30.5 million USD in funding with the help of some big investors. These include Time Warner Investments, Comcast Ventures, Peter Guber, RSE Ventures, The Madison Square Garden Company and dick clark productions. This dwarfs the previously raised $5.5 million that the company had and will go towards helping NextVR deliver its platform on all major HMDs including the likes of the Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, and HTC Vive. No release date has been revealed for these versions, although the HMDs themselves are yet to launch.

“NextVR is at the forefront of a transformative technology that is revolutionizing how live-action content will be consumed,” Scott Levine, Managing Director, Time Warner Investments, said of the news. “We are thrilled to be a part of an experience that consumers will really love and excited about the opportunities ahead.” Levine will also join NextVR’s board as an observer.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/24884/kite-lightning-talks-bebylon-battle-royale-vr-esports-and-more/

Kite & Lightning is finally making a full virtual reality (VR) videogame. The developer, known for its work on popular VR experiences such as Senza Peso, last week announced Bebylon Battle Royale for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR (http://vrfocus.com/archives/24377/kite-lightning-announces-its-first-vr-videogame-bebylon-battle-royale/). Featuring an unusual premise, stylised characters and a focus on multiplayer, it promises to be unlike anything the studio has worked on before. As such, VRFocus spoke to the developer itself to learn more about the project.

In the interview below Kite & Lightning’s Cory Strassburger talks about the basic concept for the title, explaining how the customisation might work. He also touches about the spectating aspect of Bebylon Battle Royale and if it might be considered an eSport in the future.

VRFocus: Can you tell us a bit about Bebylon Battle Royale?

Cory Strassburger (CS): So it’s a multiplayer vehicular melee brawler that takes place in this world called Bebylon which is filled with a bunch of eccentric bebies from the future.

VRFocus: So a multiplayer vehicular brawler… what does that mean?

CS: It means that you’ve got vehicles and you’ve got babies on these vehicles and they’re battling each other. And one of the fun parts is that it’s a first-person and third-person game kinda like [Epic Games’] Couch Knights where you’re in an avatar, a baby avatar, your opponents are in baby avatars and it’s basically like a remote control vehicle and you’ve got this arena front of you.

And the possibilities within that space are pretty dramatically grey. We’ve played with a whole spectrum of different types of gameplay within that space and even bouncing between first-person avatar and first-person into your vehicle and back. And so there’s nothing we’re committing to on that front yet but there’s going to be a lot of interesting gameplay dynamics within one game.

VRFocus: How does the control system work? Is it like a MotorStorm RC kind of experience?

CS: Yeah, it’s very similar, yeah. At this point they’re hover vehicles, so you’ve kind of got that hover craft dynamic. You’ve got the weapons and things like that. And, yeah, it’s very much like a remote control.

VRFocus: How does that translate when you’ve also got to worry about what your opponent is doing?

CS: Are you saying when it’s still third-person?

VRFocus: Yes

CS: Well it’s going to be a long process I think of just dialling things in. Like as we lock down the scale of the worlds, as we lock down on the spatial relationships with things in the world and the gameplay itself in terms of battling and the manuverability, I think we’re going to be dialling in that stuff for months I think before we lock down on what feels good.

VRFocus: How does the combat work?

CS: So, as of now, the combat is – you know, it’s a comedy based game, right? So instead of shooting missiles and guns our versions of those are going to be very like comedic weapons, like weapons of humiliation. And there’s a whole spectrum of the types of damage that those will do. But generally speaking, you know, as you start the game you’re going to like pick your arsenal of different things strategically depending on sort of your opponent or what level you’re at and then, for the most part, you’ve got the fundamental aspect of battling your opponent in terms of like health degradation. But you also have like ego points and things that sort of inspire showmanship.

So if you’re able to do a crazy knock down but at the same time taking a selfie-type thing you get ego points, you get showmanship points. That that’s kind of how you have an effect on the game as well, so that’s like the dual components, I guess.

>>1559

VRFocus: So are those a currency or just a score?

CS: There’s probably going to be some level of a currency system because there’s a big component of materialist qualities to the world and to the characters and to being the badass beby in Bebylon. So being able to buy fur coats and colours and an entourages and all these things are like a big component. So there’s going to be some level of currency. But as of now the ego points system is something that we haven’t fully fleshed out. So it’s going to be something that coincides with the money system and the damage system.

VRFocus: Can you talk a bit about that customisation?

CS: Again, a lot of this stuff is to be determined in terms of the amount of that makes it in the first game but the idea is that there’s two levels to this, right? There’s basic avatar customisation, there’s basic vehicle customisation, there’s definitely choosing your weapons and things? But then on the comedy front it’s kind of like a lot of the weapons – almost like the bare minimum example would be like in Joan of Arc, if you ever saw The Messenger, the English were attacking the French and they were writing messages on these cannon balls that they were like flinging over there.

And it was like this base level of something that was funny and personalising these weapons. So at a base level you’re going to be able to customise your weapons, make them more funny and fuse images into them, record voices into them. And those can actually – if they’re really effective with the right weapon – you could actually make your opponent laugh and maybe laugh really hard, in which case you could take advantage of that opportunity. I think if that becomes a strong part of gameplay, it’s like the funniest guy really is getting these advantages, that would be awesome maybe.

But it’s like we’re trying to fuse a lot of this open creativity into the game to sort of see what comes out of it, what people gravitate towards in terms of being funny and fusing their thing into it.

VRFocus: Do you see a future in sharing these creations online?

CS: Yeah, for sure. I think so, yeah. I mean, right now, it’s like there’s almost no limits in thinking about that aspect to it because the world just embodies so many awesome potential things like that that I think we want to at least be thinking about right now or actually putting in there if it makes sense.

VRFocus: I have to ask about microtransactions. Are you going to be offering these things for real world money?

CS: We haven’t locked down on that. We’ve obviously talked a lot about it. We’ve talked about every sort of possibility at this point but we just haven’t figured out how we’re going to approach that.

VRFocus: Let’s talk about spectators. When they’re in a match do they all sit around a table in VR?

CS: There’s that potential, yeah. I mean from my standpoint the more realistic it is or has the potential to be the better. So that would be an option. The other option is that, because there’s sort of this miniature world, you can actually as a spectator jump on these kind of floating buses, and those buses kind of shrink into the game. They become a part of the level. So you could actually sit and spectate with other people on these things inside a level and that thing can kind of move around and follow the action and things like that.

VRFocus: Will they have a level of interactivity? Like in a wrestling match where someone throws in a chair?

CS: That’s the idea. We definitely want to have the spectators be able to influence the outcome of the game. To what degree? Not sure. But definitely that’s an exciting thing for us.

VRFocus: So this almost sounds like an eSport. Is that something you’ve considered?

CS: It does seem so, right? I mean, at its core, we’ve got the game. But as you start thinking about these other layers it really does start to embody a lot of those qualities. I mean, a lot of – most people who do eSport games are like ‘Don’t game a game first. Don’t make a game out of a game that’s meant to be an eSport game, even though this seems like it really wants to be that.’ But, again, we want to make it fun and dynamic even if there’s no players in there and in that world. You’re still going to have this sense of people watching the spectating aspect to it. And if people are able to start filling in that world and it becomes something that would be awesome.

Because to me it’s like if the comedy’s really there and people are having a lot of fun with it, it’s just going to be a treasure trove for people just going in there and recording these things virtually like camera men, you know? If you’re like a spectator and you actually want to earn some points by shooting some killer videos of these top matches and editing them together, we want to try and make that a possibility.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/24951/loot-interactive-working-on-an-oculus-rift-title/

With just a few months to go until the launch of the consumer version of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) plenty of videogame developers have come forward to pledge support for the device. Of course there are still many more titles for the device that remain under wraps. One team that’s recently confirmed it is working on a project for the Oculus Rift is LOOT Interactive, known for its work porting indie projects such as Back to Bed and The Last Tinker: City of Colors to consoles.

Studio co-founder Danilo Moura confirmed as much this week at the 2015 Virtual Reality Intelligence Conference and Expo (VRX). During a panel (http://vrfocus.com/archives/24809/vrx-2015-vr-user-interaction-and-storytelling-in-games-liveblog/) on VR interaction and storytelling Moura confirmed that the company is currently working on two projects, one of which is targeting the consumer version of the Oculus Rift. “I can’t wait to show them to you,” Moura said of both projects, though didn’t offer any hints as to what they might be and when fans might see them for the first time.

The Oculus Rift itself is due out in Q1 2016, though a specific date and price are yet to be announced.

http://www.roadtovr.com/4-thoughts-on-carmacks-vrscript-from-tony-parisi-creator-of-vrml/

Oculus CTO John Carmack has been working on a VR scripting environment called—simply enough—VrScript. After getting a glimpse of the environment at Oculus Connect, Tony Parisi had some thoughts to share.

VrScript is a fast VR prototyping environment for Samsung’s Gear VR developed by Oculus CTO John Carmack. Carmack said of the current state of VR development, “building native projects is a lot more burdensome than it needs to be”, which is one motivation behind creating VrScript. The idea is to use it to develop simple VR applications, similar to “web page content” and allow you to “remote develop” for the Samsung Gear VR.

Carmack demoed VrScript for the first time at Oculus’ ‘Connect’ developer conference in September (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs). During the presentation, I was fortunate enough to sit next to Tony Parisi, creator of VRML and WebGL expert, and now the VP of Platform Technology at WEVR, who had a lot of follow up thoughts about the new environment. Parisi’s work with VRML and related projects means he’s spent a lot of time thinking about the challenges that VrScript aims to solve; I was happy to catch up with him after the talk and hear his thoughts.

VrScript is a Great Idea

Parisi said VRScript is a “great idea because Oculus is pushing casual use of VR. It’s even better that this is coming from John Carmack, who has been writing complex game engines for years, but as the CTO of Oculus he is working on making VR development accessible to the average developer, not just expert game programmers.”

The fact that John Carmack is promoting casual mobile VR applications shows Oculus’ forward thinking approach to mobile VR beyond gaming. If VrScript is as easy to use as Carmack makes it out to be, then Oculus is opening the doors for all kinds of non-game developers, to create simple VR applications and get more people involved in the VR ecosystem.

Scheme Might Not Be the Best Foundation

Parisi said “I’m a big fan of Scheme, it’s one of my favorite programming languages. However, the syntax is based on a language called LISP, which was a very early language used for artificial intelligence programming; LISP has many fans in research circles and in the world of computer science, but as a practical language, it’s never achieved widespread success. I am dubious that it’s going to achieve widespread success as a VR language. Carmack did mention that someone could make a JavaScript layer that would talk to his runtime environment. Which sounds promising.”

It will be a huge win for mobile VR if VrScript supports more popular and modern languages, making it usable by many more developers.

Will It Be Open to Non-oculus Platforms?

The question burning on everyone’s mind is if Carmack/Oculus will move beyond having VrScript work on the Gear VR and offer support for other platforms. Parisi notes that “many developers are going to want to build for multiple VR platforms” and the environment could see muc more widespread adoption if Oculus opens up VrScript to these other platforms.

VrScript’s Hyperlinking Model is the Right Path to the Metaverse

This belief resonates with one of Parisi’s recent blog posts where he voices, The Metaverse is Too Big for An App Store (https://tonyparisi.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/freedom/). Over the years Tony has been vocal about bringing the web and VR together, especially the idea that we can immediately access VR content without a download, by simply clicking a hyperlink.

“Why can’t we just click a link, or type a URL, and instantly enter virtual reality? Why download and install apps? There’s so much friction this way. As long as that paradigm rules the day, we won’t have mass-market VR.” Apparently Carmack thinks similarly, as VrScipt supports spontaneous, web-like access to and between VrScript experiences. If Carmack leads the way in breaking from the crippling app model, we’re one step closer to a connected metaverse.

During his live coding session, Carmack said that he’d be releasing VrScript in the coming days or weeks. In the meantime, you can get more of Tony’s insights on virtual reality on his blog.

Not really 'news', but I found the article interesting enough to post.

http://uploadvr.com/convrge-altspace-respond-oculus-social-expanded-multiplayer-apps/

Social VR services ConvrgeVR and AltspaceVR are expanding their platforms for DK2 owners after the recent launch of Oculus Social, adding virtual home theaters of their own along with games that can be played while in VR.

While Oculus is offering a home theater that can be shared by five people wearing Gear VR headsets to watch a selection of Vimeo and Twitch videos, for Rift development kit owners AltspaceVR began offering a new home theater environment to watch Netflix with friends and Convrge is following suit for YouTube and anything on Twitch.

While Alstpace has allowed people to watchNetflix in VR with others for a long time, a new home theater environment provides a more intimate setting for the experience.

Altspace has allowed people to watch Netflix in VR with others for a long time but a new home theater environment provides a more intimate setting for the experience.

Convrge is also working to support Gear VR and the HTC Vive (AltspaceVR recently announced support for both platforms) while also introducing games into their multiplayer apps. AltspaceVR teamed with Wizards of the Coast to bring official Dungeons & Dragons games into VR while Convrge plans to introduce poker in the coming weeks.

While each of the services differ somewhat from one another in their feature sets and functionality (for example Convrge offers a “shrooms” button to make the environment go psychedelic), they also have a number of similarities. Each service features voice chat and your head movements in real life are shown accurately on avatars in VR. While Oculus Social has the benefit of being a first party solution likely to be tightly integrated with the hardware of both the Rift and Gear VR, third-party apps like Convrge and AltspaceVR can attempt to adopt experimental features and cross-platform communication to connect people with different VR equipment.

The near-simultaneous moves by AltspaceVR and Convrge to match the feature set of Oculus Social is notable because it indicates just how compelling sharing an experience with a small group of people can be. It’s looking like in the future we can mill about in a virtual lobby with dozens of other people to find folks with similar interests who will want to go watch a movie or play a game with you in a more intimate setting.

Each new social feature makes virtual reality a more compelling technology to bring into your home and we’ve found ourselves spending long stretches of time in social VR. I can’t wait to see how all these platforms evolve in the coming months with the launch of more consumer hardware.

Looks cozy.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/25076/playstation-vr-complicated-settings/

The virtual reality (VR) industry is currently in shying away from the idea of competition, given that each of the major players wants the technology to succeed in the long-term. But it isn’t too long now until the majority of head-mounted displays (HMDs) will be available and fighting for consumer’s money. Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) is one company entering this race with its PlayStation VR HMD for PlayStation 4. According to the group, one of its kit’s ‘biggest advantages’ is that its PC-based competitors require ‘complicated settings’ to run.

SCE Japan Asia (SCEJA) Deputy President Hiroyuki Oda said as much in a group interview attended by Rappler this week at Singapore’s GameStart Asia 2015 event. “There are many people who play casual games like smartphone games and I believe there are hurdles when they think of Playstation gaming. They think it is too complicated, too difficult,” Oda said. “But for the PSVR, as you’ve played it, it is easy for those without gaming experience to play with the PSVR.

“Customers can easily plug the PSVR to the PS4 and they immediately can start PSVR gaming, while I suppose our competitors may have some complicated settings required,” he added.

“And also our customers do not need a high performance CPU. Just plug in the PSVR, plug in the PS4, that’s it. That’s our biggest advantage,” he elaborated.

Indeed Oculus Rift creator Oculus VR is running an ‘Oculus Ready PC Programme‘ for PCs that are capable of running the device, but prices are set to start at around $950 USD, far more than that of the $349.99 PlayStation 4. Just how much of an advantage this gives SCE in the long run remains to be seen. PlayStation VR is currently tipped to launch in H1 2016, meaning it could arrive after the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive HMDs in Q1 2016.

I'm sure that even our low performance CPU PCs are better than your pathetic excuse of a machine Sony. I wonder how many concessions any game will have to make to even run on your DOA VR headset.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/25069/built-in-mic-planned-for-consumer-htc-vive/

Virtual reality (VR) fans are eagerly awaiting news on the consumer launch of the HTC Vive head-mounted display (HMD) from both the Taiwanese smartphone maker and Half-Life developer and Steam creator Valve. Developer editions of the device are currently out in the open but a final version is yet to be revealed, dated, or priced. Fans are expecting some significant updates to the consumer version, but aren’t sure when it will be announced. That hasn’t changed this week, but Valve has at least confirmed that the upcoming kit should feature a built-in microphone.

A Steam developer asked as much over on the site this weekend. Valve programmer Jeep Barnett simply replied: “A USB microphone should work on the developer edition. Current plan is to have a built in mic on the final version.” Don’t take this as official confirmation, then, although this would bring the HTC Vive more in line with the consumer version of the Oculus Rift PC-based HMD, which does include a built-in mic. Other anticipated updates to the new version of the HTC Vive include improved battery life for its position-tracked controllers.

While no dates have been confirmed, the HTC Vive is expected to see a launch in 2015, albeit in a limited fashion. Neither HTC nor Valve has stated just how many units it expects to make available this year. A full release, however, is expected to take place in Q1 2016, which is the same time at the Oculus Rift. The HTC Vive sets itself apart from its rival with a Room Scale user tracking system provided by Valve’s SteamVR system. This consists of a laser-based tracking system known at Lighthouse which tracks a player’s real world movements in an area of up to 15-feet by 15-feet and replicated those movements in-game.

>>1570

>I'm sure that even our low performance CPU PCs are better than your pathetic excuse of a machine Sony.

You're ignoring the lack of overhead and benefits of optimization by having a single system to design for on top of mature development tools. They might be using low power APUs from 2011 but they have the advantage of almost 30 million consoles sold and that will be around for at least another 4-5 years. They've have the upper hand when it comes to potential adopters compared to the Vive or CV1.

For most people a PSVR combined with a PS4 (less than half a grand probably) will make a lot more sense than a desktop computer they don't have with a dedicated high end GPU inside plus the $300-400 HMD.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/25212/valves-faliszehort-durations/

One of the many questions facing current virtual reality (VR) technology is just how long people can spend inside a head-mounted display (HMD). Older Oculus Rift hardware such as the first development kit (DK1) was prone to causing simulation sickness with many users, making shorter sessions essential. But, as the tech has improved, it’s becoming more and more viable to spend longer periods of time inside VR. In fact one of the key forces behind Valve’s VR efforts believes that players will be able to spend their usual gaming times inside VR.

The company’s Chet Faliszek said as much on Twitter this week. He began by saying: “The idea VR is only for short durations is broken. As cool new content goes from a weekly thing to daily, extended sessions are regular.” When one follower made the suggestion that the assumption over length might be to do with press demos being so short, the developer replied: “That influences it and older hardware was more fatiguing.”

“Extended sessions = regular gaming times,” Faliszek later clarified. “I still game for hours most nights.”

Valve is of course one half of the equation that’s working on the HTC Vive along with the Taiwanese smartphone maker. The company’s SteamVR system provides the kit with Room Scale user-tracking in which players can walk around a real world area of up to 15-feet by 15-feet and have those movements replicated in-game. It also includes a pair of position-tracked controllers. Release dates and pricing for the device are yet to be announced although a limited launch is expected before the end of the year. Following that, a full release of the HTC Vive will set for the first three months of 2016.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/25127/carmack-gear-vr-streaming-will-probably-happen-screenshots-coming-soon/

Oculus VR and Samsung’s first consumer ready virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD), Gear VR, will be launching later this week. The mobile-based kit will be arriving in the US on 20th November 2015 with dates for international territories soon to be announced. Fans can expect plenty of updates to the device in the coming weeks and months as Oculus VR and Samsung continue to update certain features and add new ones. Recently, Oculus VR CTO John Carmack has teased what some of the new additions could be.

Answering questions on Twitter this week Carmack confirmed that the ability to take screenshots on Gear VR – a feature that’s become standard when using any smartphone on its own – should be added in the next System Activities update. That said the feature will only be supported by apps that were built by using Oculus VR’s mobile software development kit (SDK) 1.0, so don’t expect titles that launched earlier in the year for Innovator’s Editions of the device to support it. There’s currently no date for the next System Activities update.

Elsewhere, Carmack also confirmed that the ability to stream titles from Gear VR, something that’s become commonplace on consoles and PC, will ‘probably happen’ at some point, but not for a while. “No streaming support right now, but it will probably happen eventually,” the developer stated. It will be interesting to see how features such as these work out given that, as with other VR systems, Gear VR’s display showcases two imagines side-by-side that appear in stereoscopic 3D when viewed through a pair of lenses. Without those lenses, will these features still hold up?

http://vrfocus.com/archives/25269/jaunt-now-captirtual-reality/

Jaunt, one of the best known cinematic virtual reality (VR) production companies has today announced a new partnership to combine the competitive world of eSports with the immersive technology of VR. The company is collaborating with MTGx, the digital arm of international entertainment group Modern Times Group (MTG) and ESL, one of the largest eSports company’s, for an event this weekend. Jaunt will capture and develop 360 degree experiences of the Intel Extreme Masters event in San Jose, California.

A number of sporting events have been given the VR treatment by companies like Jaunt and NextVR, but this is possibly the first eSports event that fans around the world will be able to experience in VR.

“We are excited to find new ways to connect millions of global esports fans to our mega events like Intel Extreme Masters via VR and 360 video experiences. It’s still early days, but I do believe the future VR revolution will start with our passionate gamer audience,” said Ralf Reichert, CEO of ESL in a statement.

“Virtual reality presents an exciting opportunity to enhance the experience of eSports events like the Intel Extreme Masters. With MTGx at the forefront of the growing eSports phenomena, we are harnessing the power of VR to help companies like ESL and DreamHack reach their millions of fans across the globe. Cinematic virtual reality provides eSports fans with an experience that rivals the in-person atmosphere from within the stadium,” said Jens Christensen, CEO of Jaunt.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/25288/vr-might-need-new-ratings-system-admits-europes-videogame-ratings-body/

Virtual reality (VR) technology serves to intensify any type of videogame that a user experiences. For some titles that means deeper levels of relaxation or perhaps concentration. For others, it means greater levels of fear and more convincing violence. It only makes sense, then, that a new type of ratings system that’s either separate or altered from the standard videogames is considered. Now it appears that European ratings PEGI is indeed looking at changing the way it rates VR content with a consumer release on the horizon.

PEGI operations director Dirk Bosmans recently said as much to MCV: “PEGI should examine the coming wave of VR products using the current questionnaire, but reserve the right to reassess certain elements – more specifically the criteria around fear (currently rated PEGI 7) and horror (as in non-violent scary imagery, currently rated PEGI 12) – once a broader range of products hits the market in the coming period of time.”

That broader range of products isn’t far off; the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) will all be available by July 2016 and with them will come lots of new VR videogames and experiences.

Bosmans’ comments are in line with those of Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) Head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida, who recently admitted that ratings systems may need to change for VR. In fact, some countries have already started assessing VR experiences differently. Back in January 2015 it was revealed that the German Ratings Board had classified one popular experience for the PlayStation VR, The Deep, higher in-HMD than when viewed on a standard display. Can we expect to see this situation become much more common as VR hits the market over the next 8 months?

http://vrfocus.com/archives/25317/25317/

Back at the Oculus Connect 2 developer conference in September 2015 Oculus VR announced a new initiative known as Oculus Concepts. Designed to keep the ‘spirit’ of the Oculus Share software portal, this new system essentially allows developers to release experimental videogames and apps as well as provide early access to projects that are still in the works. Oculus Concepts was confirmed for other the Oculus Rift and Gear VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) and has today launched for the latter.

It takes the form of a new part of the Oculus Store from which Gear VR owners and purchase and download content. It appears and some videogames, demos and experiences that were previously available for the Innovator Editions of the Gear VR have now been moved over to this new section. This includes the likes of Mobile VR Jam winner The Night Café, Evil Robot Traffic Jam, Look Both Ways and InMind.

Furthermore, a new addition to Gear VR’s submissions guidelines has added in details for brining content to Oculus Concepts. The launch of course coincides with the arrival of the consumer version of the Gear VR itself in the US today. The kit is available for $99 USD and works with partnership Samsung’s range of 2015 phones. That includes the Galaxy S6, S6 edge, S6 edge plus and Galaxy Note 5. You can also expected the Oculus Rift version of the store to go live when the HMD finally launches in Q1 2016.

Oculus Concepts is part of the Oculus Platform, which consists of a number of other systems that will eventually provide players with accounts, achievements and matchmaking services for multiplayer titles, though it’s not clear when these other features will be going live. Again, these features will be cross-platform between Gear VR and Oculus Rift.

http://uploadvr.com/gear-vr-sold-out-on-amazon-and-best-buy-still-available-from-samsung/

The dawn of consumer VR is finally here, and people can’t get enough. Less than 24 hours after the device’s release, the Samsung Gear VR has sold out on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Gear-VR-Virtual-Reality/dp/B016OFYGXQ) and BestBuy.com (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-gear-vr-for-select-samsung-cell-phones-frost-white/4637800.p?id=1219786370026&skuId=4637800).

If you haven’t gotten yours yet don’t fret, they are still available from Samsung directly (http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/wearable-tech/SM-R322NZWAXAR). The “Sold Out” marker on major online retailers like Amazon and Best Buy suggests a strong initial demand for the headset, possibly even stronger than anticipated. Reaching out to local Best Buy stores in San Francisco, I was informed that the retailers didn’t have any in stock locally either.

The new $99 Gear VR is the first consumer VR headset, not counting Cardboard-class headsets (if you do, there are already millions of them out there), so its success will be a good barometer for the industry going forward. It may be a while before Samsung releases any sales figures, but being sold out this early can only be a good thing for VR as it enters into the mainstream.

The Gear VR is compatible with the Samsung Galaxy Note5, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge.

https://sketchfab.com/models/5c204391b95944f8b1160403e2662139

http://uploadvr.com/so-what-exactly-is-a-light-field-volume/

To understand what a Light Field Volume is, it’s important that we first grasp the concept that a captured Light Field consists of rays of light traveling in every direction, with their brightness, color, and their path, which is the direction and position of those rays. To learn more about what is a Light Field, here’s Ryan Damm’s previous article (http://uploadvr.com/light-fields-are-dead-long-live-holography/) on the subject.

When light illuminates a scene, light rays bounce off objects in the scene, reflecting in every direction mixing colors of each surface they’ve hit. Rays bounce off surfaces in their path, eventually dissipating their energy as the light is absorbed gradually with each bounce. Some of those rays are occluded (blocked) to create shadows while other rays bounce at different intensities appearing to viewers as reflections or highlights.

A Light Field can be captured using an array of multiple cameras as well as a plenoptic device like the Lytro ILLUM, with an array of microlenses placed across its sensor. The core principle in both cases is that the Light Field capture system needs to be able to record the path of light rays from multiple viewpoints.

With the just announced Lytro Immerge Light Field camera for Virtual Reality, the light rays’ path is captured via a densely packed spherical array of proprietary camera hardware and computational technology. In its spherical configuration, a sufficient set of Light Field data is captured from light rays that intersect the camera’s surface. With that captured Light Field data, the Lytro Immerge system mathematically reconstructs a spherical Light Field Volume, which is roughly the same physical dimension as the camera.

From any location within that spherical Light Field Volume, every viewpoint of the surrounding 360º scene can be recreated virtually, from the furthest left to right, top to bottom and front to back, in every direction and angle. The Lytro Immerge Player uses that Light Field Volume data to reproject captured light rays and virtually render the scene, with the rays’ color, brightness, and path. The Lytro Immerge Player automatically performs this critical last step, reconstructing the correct flow of light in the scene to deliver full parallax movement, natural reflections and shadows, all without any stitching artifacts.

>>1585

When viewed through a VR Head Mounted Display placed virtually inside the captured Light Field Volume via the Lytro Immerge Player, the reconstructed scene is displayed as perfect left/right stereo views throughout the entire volume, using any interpupilary distance (IPD) necessary for optimal viewing experience (distance between the eyes of the viewer). When viewing a Light Field Volume from within it, the viewer is able to enjoy a truly lifelike, immersive sensation of virtual presence with full Six Degrees of Freedom and uncompromised stereo perception at any IPD. Moving forward, side-to-side or twisting one’s head, the scene has the same natural parallax as if the viewer was looking at the original scene. Objects closer to your point of view shift naturally as you move side to side or back and forth.

In comparison, with typical stereo spherical 2D capture rigs (a cluster of 2D cameras arranged as a ring or sphere), the individual videos from each camera must be laboriously stitched into a pair of spherical 2D video streams. These two streams are recorded at a best-guess IPD, pre-determined and locked in space when the distance between each pair of cameras was set. As a result, the stereo depth perception in the VR video is only correct in a single direction and the stereo effect degrades as the viewer’s head turns.

Conversely, as you look around within the Light Field Volume using the Lytro Immerge Player, the reprojected scene will respond interactively to your head’s motion, in real time, to precisely match your point of view. Move closer to the edge of the volume and a smaller area of light ray data is used. Pull your head back and more light ray data is included in the reconstruction. As you pan and twist, the player reprojects the correct Light Field rays for your exact viewpoint. The size and shape of the capture rig directly defines the area of physical movement a viewer can move around in when exploring a reconstructed Light Field Volume. In the case of the Lytro Immerge, the navigable Light Field Volume is slightly smaller than the actual camera size.

Lytro Immerge is designed to be configurable so it can meet the requirements of various productions and cinematic projects. In the case of a 360º scene, the light ray information from every direction is captured in the Light Field Volume. But other scenes may only need 180º views, or even planar views, and the Lytro Immerge can be configured accordingly to capture a Light Field Volume that suits the needs of each story. The Light Field Volume can even be combined with CG elements to produce effects such as a musical performance on a 3D stage, or create a live-action backdrop to CG characters. Content creators can also merge captured volumes in post-production to create larger or differently shaped virtual scenes. In future blog posts in this series, we’ll cover how various shaped Light Field Volumes and compositing techniques can play a part in cinematic live-action content creation for VR.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/25441/windlands-devs-join-psytec-games-coming-htc-vive/

Back in October 2014 a pair of developers launched an IndieGoGo crowd-funding campaign for a brand new virtual reality (VR) videogame named Windlands. The colourful experience proved to be a big hit on the platform, with creator Ilja Kivikangas and musician Simo Sainio raising some $20,473 to fund its work on it. Since then the team has released some playable demos and such for backers but today brings a big update for both Windlands and its developers. Windlands is now a part of UK-based studio Psytec Games, the team behind the upcoming Crystal Rift.

New artwork for the title can be seen below. This essentially means that the first-person experience will benefit from added resources, including work from Psytec Games members Jon Hibbins and Nick Pittom, the latter of which recently helped to release COLOSSE on the Gear VR head-mounted display (HMD). Windlands has previously been described as an action adventure title that takes inspiration from the likes of The Legend of Zelda series and Shadow of the Colossus, tasking players with finding and defeating bosses while also utilising grappling hooks to swing through environments.

Psytec Games will be helping to expand and refine the videogame but will also be bringing its own experience working with tech such as the HTC Vive HMD and its position-tracked SteamVR controllers, both of which Windlands will be supporting along with the Oculus Rift HMD and Oculus Touch controllers. The title will also be seeing full controller support for other gamepads. The developers will also ensure that IndieGoGo backer rewards are met.

A deal was actually reached around three months ago, but the developers are finally ready to announce the news today. Kivikangas will of course continue to work on the title too. An Early Access version of the videogame is expected to launch within the next few months.

“Windlands is an amazing VR game that we have loved from the beginning and it is a dream come true for us to work on this game,” Psytec Games said in a statement. “We love it! With the new team, Windlands will not only be released, but will enable Ilja and team to make it the awesome game it deserves to be.”

The deal comes as work on Psytec Games’ debut title, Crystal Rift, begins to wrap up ahead of the consumer launches of the HMDs it will be appearing on in 2016. Psytec Games hopes to reveal a new look at the title in the near future.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/20/despite-2015-promise-htc-vives-community-launch-still-doesnt-have-a-release-date/

It’s starting to feel less and less likely that even the earliest of adopters will have a chance to get one of the big PC-based virtual reality devices in their home before the end of the year

HTC, the Taiwanese hardware manufacturer, is staying quiet about its Vive SteamVR device. It hasn’t shared anything new about the motion-tracking head-mounted display since revealing in August that it needed to delay the full consumer release into 2016. But at that time, the company did not slam the door on 2015 completely. HTC and its partner, Valve, which is responsible for much of the technology powering the Vive, said that they would have a “limited quantity” of Vive devices for sale “later this year.” When we asked for an update about those units, HTC said it had nothing new to share. We’ve also asked Valve for a comment, but it has not provided a response.

But time is running out on 2015, so what’s the deal? As a reminder, here is what HTC and Valve said in August via a spokesperson:

“Later this year, HTC will offer the first commercial Vive units via a limited quantity of community and developer systems, with larger quantities shipping in calendar Q1 2016.”

Clearly, developers are already getting the Vive. You can see plenty of unboxing videos and posts on Reddit about the device from game-making studios.

It’s not surprising that developers are getting systems. They need them to start producing software. Oculus has sold Rift development kits for years. But that doesn’t explain what “community” means.

We asked HTC and Valve to define what it meant when it said it would ship community systems before the end of 2015, but we have not received an answer from either company. And the longer we go without concrete information, the more it feels like that community won’t include you and me.

You should, however, expect more info at some point in the future — a lot more. HTC has previously told GamesBeat that it won’t send out review units until it reveals the final consumer version of the Vive. And it is not saying when it will do that.

So, for now, we wait.

2016 isn’t that far away, and now HTC and Oculus VR are both promising to release their devices in the first quarter. Sony will follow up quickly with PlayStation VR in the “first half” of 2016. That’s all exciting, but the wait also makes it painful.

See you in the metaverse next year, I guess.

>Oculus face when.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/25592/htc-people-will-use-a-smaller-space-for-vives-room-scale-tracking/

Arguably the defining feature of the HTC Vive virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) is its Room Scale user-tracking, provided by Valve’s SteamVR system and its Lighthouse laser-based solution. The concept works by tracking a user’s movements in an area of up to 15-feet by 15-feet and having those movements then replicated within the given experience. But those with limited space shouldn’t worry about having room to use the HMD; HTC is well aware that many people will be using smaller spaces.

HTC Vice President of Virtual Reality Daniel O’Brien recently explained as much to Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/video/4630520249001/). “With the SteamVR solution you actually have a chaperone system,” he said. “So, once the user actually goes into their headset for the very first time they will actually set up their safe space, right? And that’s very dynamic. Everybody else is going to be able to choose their space and how big it is. We tell people today “We can go to this very large volume of space but we’re really showing off the robustness of it, right? What it could do.” But we know people are going to use a smaller space, some people are going to use a seated experience and we’re prepared to do that with the Vive.”

VR fans are anticipating a limited release of the HTC Vive before the years’ end, although a date for this launch and information on the amount of units that will be available is yet to be revealed. Following that, a wider rollout will be coming in Q1 2016, which is around the same time that Oculus VR will be launching its own PC-based HMD, the Oculus Rift. Final dates and prices for either HMD are yet to be officially confirmed.

http://uploadvr.com/one-of-the-biggest-companies-in-porn-just-got-into-vr-sfw/

Today Kink, one of the largest studios in the adult entertainment industry, announced a new virtual reality focused branch of it’s site, KinkVR.com, along with a plan to deliver free content through the end of the year.

Porn in VR isn’t anything new, earlier this year Naughty America began producing content for the new medium while startups and individuals like Ella Darling have been experimenting with adult content in it for even longer. But in line with the company’s philosophy, Kink is taking things to a new extreme with specialized content they say pushes “the limits of what VR can do.”

“VR has the opportunity to change the adult industry,” says Michael Stabile, Kink’s Head of Media Relations, “but even more so for BDSM and fetish content, which engages the viewer emotionally more than a traditional vanilla shoot would.” For example, Stabile says that VR allows viewers to really feel like they are “a part of the power dynamic,” something that wouldn’t be possible with the flatscreen medium. But it isn’t just about engaging viewers, it is about giving them a safe space to explore.

“In VR we are safe to explore new sexual fantasies,” says best-selling author and erotic photographer, Natacha Merritt. “It allows you to explore things you might not feel comfortable exploring in reality.”

There’s no denying the historical impact the adult industry has had on the mainstream adoption of technology. In the 70’s, when home video technology began to finally reach consumers, porn was the first thing they turned to, accounting for over 75% of tapes sold in 1978. It then later helped VHS win the format war over Betamax when the Sony-backed technology choose not to support pornographic material on their format (a lesson that Oculus has appeared to take heed of, even if they won’t let it into the store). When the Internet and E-Commerce began to take off in the 90’s it was porn, not retailers, who led the way.

The point is porn might bring a lot of people to VR and help drive the technology into the mainstream, which ultimately is a good thing.

KinkVR.com debuts with four pieces of content which the company is giving away, with a new free shoot added every week between now and December 25th. From there Kink will “move from the theoretical to the actual, and begin production in earnest.” The content will be available for download for playback across all major VR headsets.

Great, though I'm more into the stylized stuff.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/25973/25973/

With just four weeks left of 2015, virtual reality (VR) fans are anxious to find out more news on the HTC Vive head-mounted display (HMD). The kit is still thought to be getting a limited release before the end of the year ahead of a wider launch in early 2016, but details such as dates and pricing are still yet to be revealed. Recently HTC itself has at least offered another hint towards the latter aspect, as well as reaffirming that updates on the kit will be arriving within a matter of weeks.

HTC’s Graham Breen recently said as much in an interview with RTÉ News. “We’re really close, actually,” Breen replied when asked about a potential release date for the device. “So this is a dev kit that we’re working on, but we’re going to be launching it early next year so we’re going to be making some proper announcements in the coming weeks. But we’re really close, actually, so it’s a pretty exciting time.”

When it came to pricing, Breen stressed that the kit would neither be cheap nor too expensive. “It’s not going to be super cheap because you’ve got an amazing piece of technology here,” he said, “but it’s also not going to be bank-breaking. So more to come in the coming weeks.”

The HTC Vive has been created in a partnership with Valve and its SteamVR system. As such, the kit is the first to support Room Scale user tracking, in which players can walk around an area of up to 15-feet by 15-feet and have those movements replicated within the given experience. It also consists of two position-tracked SteamVR controllers which are used to give players hand presence within a VR title. The HTC Vive is a PC-based device in line with another major VR HMD, the Oculus Rift, which is also due out early next year.

http://uploadvr.com/sony-mobile-vr-patent/

The Gear VR is only a couple weeks old and it may already be getting some serious competition. Digging through patent filings, UploadVR uncovered a patent application from Sony for a “head mounted display system having interface with mobile computer device for rendering virtual reality content.”

The application, which was submitted on May 14, 2015 and posted this morning, details two different types of holders that are “configured to receive a smartphone or smart device.” The patent appears to describe two different form factors, one is goggle-like and seems similar to a Gear VR while the other more closely resembles a pair of glasses.

There are multiple mentions of a cloud based system in the patent.

Similar to the Gear VR, the “holders” could also house internal electronics including inertial sensors, an on-board processor, on-board memory, “shutter control logic,” and “optics controller logic.” Interestingly, the goggles version appears to have an on-board battery as well. On the Gear VR the internal hardware helps to create a more comfortable experience and is one of the platform’s major advantages over other mobile VR headsets like Google Cardboard.

While Sony’s potential mobile HMD also has internal hardware, it’s execution appears to be different from the Gear VR in many key ways, including potentially integrating with external hardware for positional tracking (more on that in a moment).

One of the major differences that Sony describes in the patent is the headset’s approach to 3D images. The patent describes an onboard processor “configured to set the shutter control logic to successively switch between rendering image data obtained from the screen of the smartphone to only a lefteye-side of the optics and then only to a righteye-side of the optics.” What this is describing is essentially active shutter 3D, a technique that has been used for 3D TV displays for a number of years now.

Basically, active 3D glasses close off (or shutter) the view to one eye and then rapidly switches to the other eye. When this happens quickly, at a minimum of 120Hz, each eye sees the picture half the time and you perceive a 3D image. The previously announced PlayStation VR HMD has a display with a 120Hz refresh rate, meaning Sony already has access to smartphone-sized screens that could be used in this way. Additionally, the active shutter approach could potentially be used to create a low-persistence effect on the Xperia Z5’s 4K LCD screen, which could be incredibly interesting as it help reduce motion blur.

It is worth noting that in a recent post on Sony’s official blog the company said “We also believe Xperia Z5 Premium is capable of offering the clearest, sharpest Virtual Reality platform – we’re working on a few things here internally, so stay tuned for more news soon.” This patent may detail what the company was hinting at there. Sony also just sent out invites to a press event on January 5th, the day before CES begins in earnest. The invite appears to feature a brand new phone that that company may unveil at the show.

In addition to describing a different methodology for rendering 3D in VR, the patent also outlines various methods to add positional tracking to the mobile headset. Including integration with Playstation VR’s tracking system using a series of LED lights on the front of the mobile headset, as well as another version which seemed to describe a lighthouse like integration.

>>1611

In addition to tracking the user in the room’s space, the patent suggests that the headset will use the phone’s camera as a way of detecting objects that the user might run into, transitioning into the real world view automatically if they come near something:

“If the user walks around a particular space and is dangerously approaching stairs, a wall, or some other object, a notification can be provided to the user in the head mounted display as a message, notification, alarm, sound, tactile feedback, or the like…. [the] user can also be provided with transitions out of the virtual reality space into the real world space in partially transparent views, fully transparent views, blends of fully and partially transparent views, or partial views that may show actual features that are of interest to the user or may be dangerous when the user is wearing the head mounted device.”

This system seems somewhat similar to Valve’s Chaperone system which helps set boundaries for a user, along with the forward-facing cameras which can detect things like small pets. It is an important addition that will help prevent VR related injuries.

Sony also describes a variety of possible ways to provide input to a VR experience delivered by the headset, including with a system on the headset itself, voice control, a controller or a hand gesture. For example, “the user in the real world space can place his hand into a view space of the front facing camera, and this is detected by software operating on the smartphone to allow blending of the user’s hand 14 into the VR space. The user’s hand can be rendered into the VR space as the users actual hand or as augmented reality, or as a blend of augmented and real world.” This very well may be related to Sony’s recent acquisition of SoftKinetic, a company who specializes in computer vision problems like tracking hands in space.

The patent outlines a number of other things related to the system, including what appears to be a method for streaming virtual reality through the cloud, a task that seems a bit heavy for today’s current wi-fi standards. Despite the number of signs that seem to be pointing to this being legitimate, it is important to note that the breadth of the patent appears to purposefully cover a lot of bases around the headset, offering multiple configurations. The patent also has only been filed and has not been approved.

Sony has a major event this weekend in San Francisco, perhaps the company will begin to open up a bit more about its plans going forward then.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Virtual-Reality-Interest-Highest-Among-Gen-Z/1013295

Although virtual reality is still in its early stages, consumer interest is highest among Gen Z. But younger generations aren’t the only ones fascinated by the technology; older generations are drawn to it too.

According to October 2015 data from Greenlight VR and Touchstone Research, 79% of Gen Z US internet users—defined as those ages 10 to 18—said they are interested in virtual reality. But other generations were also drawn to the technology.

Almost three-quarters (73%) of millennials said they are interested in virtual reality and 70% of Gen Xers said they were as well. Virtual reality even appeals to baby boomers; 64% of them said they were interested in it.

Younger generations are likely most excited about virtual reality because of how it will elevate their gaming experience. Samsung Gear VR, powered by Oculus, is already available for purchase, and Sony will launch its PlayStation VR next year. However, virtual reality is not just for gaming. Retailers are also harnessing its power to help improve the overall shopping experience.

December 2014 research by Walker Sands found that more than one-third of US internet users said VR would make them open to purchasing more online since it would give them a more realistic feel of the product remotely. Additionally, 22% of respondents said they would be less likely to visit a physical retail store with the introduction of VR.

But virtual reality has ways to go before the intersection of retail and technology fully merges. For example, Walker Sands also revealed that 37% of internet users said they don’t believe that virtual reality would impact their shopping experience and 19% of respondents said they would be unlikely to use virtual reality in their shopping experience.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/26216/g2a-com-to-launch-g2a-land-as-free-download-in-2016/

G2A.Com a global digital marketplace has been investing over the last two years in research and development to establish new cutting edge technologies. One of these is a virtual reality (VR) project called G2A Land. The G2A.Com team consisting of VR, artists and inventors has announced that G2A Land will launch as a free download in 2016 for the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD).

G2A Land is a virtual amusement park that will feature, a shooting range, virtual cinema, rollercoaster, a space horror ride, an underwater adventure and much more.

Several rides like the shooting range are already finished, while attractions like the space horror ride where players will have to try and rescue an abandoned space station taken over by an unpredictable madman whilst avoiding traps is currently in development.

Marcin Kryszpin, Head of Oculus Team at G2A.COM said in a statement: “VR adds a new dimension to the gaming world that we know. We’ll be able to experience some titles in a deeper way and it definitely allows developers to use new tools to absorb gamers in the game world.”

With G2A Land due to be ready for Oculus Rift’s consumer launch in Q1 2016, VR fans should be able to get their hands on the title soon.

So a theme park. Might be a cool one-off thing.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/26209/dirt-rally-launches-today-on-steam/

Codemasters & Koch Media today announced that the full version of the DiRT Rally has launched on Steam. The title launched via Steam Early Access in April of this year, complete with Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) support as standard, even though the official description of the title from Codemasters offered no mention of VR nor the Oculus Rift HMDs.

Today’s Steam launch also brings with it the Winter Wonderland update, which delivers a new rally set in the snow and ice of the Varmland region of Sweden. These stages are known for their snow banks and Codemasters has developed a new soft edge tech that simulates the density of snow. As a result, players can now lean on the snow banks when pushing for those stage records. The Winter Wonderland update is free to all DiRT Rally Early Access players. The update also brings two new cars to the game, the Hyundai Rally and the Volkswagen Polo Rally.

And as part of Codemasters commitment to improving the features in DiRT Rally the Winter Wonderland update also sees the introduction of Steam Workshop support that allows players to share Car Setup & Force Feedback settings. The update also sees improvements and refinements made to Global Leaderboards and League support.

DiRT Rally will also be coming to Sony Computer Entertainments (SCEs) PlayStation 4, Microsoft’s Xbox One and Windows PC(DVD) on April 5th 2016. With Codemasters current commitment to VR with Toybox Turbos also featuring support, the studio may well decide to bring DiRT Rally to PlayStation VR as well as Oculus Rift.

http://uploadvr.com/htc-vive-consumer-version-slated-for-april-2016/

Vive developers just received a doozy of an email stating a new developer kit will premiere at CES in January (essentially a Vive DK2) and the consumer version of the headset is slated for release in April 2016.

HTC also posted a blog (http://blog.htc.com/2015/12/htc-vive-update/) with the following:

We will be starting the new year by making an additional 7,000 units available to developers, followed by commercial availability in April 2016.

The email from the SteamVR team details a new HTC Vive developer edition premiering at CES in January with a new industrial design that is said not to impact development. The reveal will be followed by a content showcase in Seattle where some developers will show experiences they have been working on to press and public. This event will be followed by additional showcases throughout the first quarter of the year as well as showings at SXSW and GDC.

The first developer event is being held in Beijing from Dec. 17 to 18.

This is a huge blow as HTC had promised to ship the consumer version of the Valve-powered headset in 2015. The new timeline likely puts the release of the consumer Vive hardware behind that of Oculus. However, the systems are different as the Vive is built for room-scale VR with hand-tracked controllers from the moment it arrives while the Oculus Rift will add hand-tracked controllers with the freedom to move more freely around a room in the first half of the year.

So it’s looking like the Rift will arrive for consumers in the first few months of the year, Vive will arrive sometime around April and then Oculus will ready for phase 2 with the Oculus Touch controllers shipping to more closely match the more capable feature set of the Vive.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3013144/legal/facebooks-zuckerberg-ordered-to-testify-over-oculus-purchase.html

Facebook had argued that its CEO should not be required to depose in the lawsuit

Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been ordered to depose in an intellectual property dispute between Oculus and ZeniMax Media, as he has "unique knowledge" of his decision to buy and his valuation of the wearable virtual reality technology company.

ZeniMax sued Oculus in May 2014 for exploiting commercially intellectual property the games publisher allegedly shared under a non-disclosure agreement with Oculus, which enabled it to improve on its "crude prototype" of a virtual reality headset.

Facebook had asked last month the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas division to rule that Zuckerberg should not be asked to depose as the plaintiffs had demanded to depose him before taking a single deposition in the case. A deposition is the recording of oral testimony from a witness outside a courtroom, usually used to discover the facts before the trial.

"This is clearly improper under the apex doctrine, which requires a party to demonstrate that a high-ranking corporate executive has unique, relevant personal knowledge before attempting to take their deposition," according to the Facebook filing. A litigant has to first exhaust less intrusive discovery options, it added.

ZeniMax had argued that Zuckerberg had personally tested prototypes of the Rift virtual reality headset, including features that were allegedly based on misappropriated ZeniMax technology, before deciding to go ahead with the purchase of Oculus. Facebook said in March last year that it had reached a deal to buy Oculus for about US$2 billion.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul Stickney ruled this week that Zuckerberg's deposition should be conducted after other depositions so that "less intrusive discovery" can be completed and information that can be obtained from lesser ranking employees is acquired before the CEO's deposition.

The intellectual property dispute hinges around alleged collaboration from April 2012 between Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, then a video game enthusiast working on a headset, and John Carmack who was technical director for ZeniMax's Texas-based subsidiary id Software, until he joined Oculus in August 2013.

Carmack and others at ZeniMax worked with Oculus to transform the Rift by adding hardware components and developing specialized software for its operation and modified it to run with id Software's computer game "DOOM 3: BFG Edition," which enabled demonstrations of ZeniMax's virtual reality technology, according to a filing by ZeniMax in May last year.

"Without it, there would not have been a viable Rift product," according to the complaint, which claims that ZeniMax did not receive any compensation whatsoever.

Luckey formed Oculus to commercialize the Rift after a successful demo of the technology at the Electronic Entertainment Expo ("E3") industry convention in Los Angeles in June 2012, it added.

ZeniMax did not contribute to any Oculus technology, Oculus has countered previously.

Facebook said in a recent filing that Zuckerberg had "nothing whatsoever to do with the technology that is the heart of Plaintiffs’ complaint—because he had no relationship with Oculus (nor, for that matter, Plaintiffs) during the development of that technology."

The social networking company could not be immediately reached for comment on the decision this week by the judge. "Litigants often demand Mr. Zuckerberg’s deposition, not to uncover discoverable information, but as a tactic to put pressure on Facebook and harass its most senior executive," it had said earlier in a filing.

Whatever gripe you have with Facebook and Zuckerberg it doesn't change the fact that ZeniMax are in the wrong and are being colossal dicks.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/26318/oculus-rift-will-support-other-markets-outside-of-oculus-store/

Oculus VR may only have one virtual reality (VR) product on the market so far in the Gear VR mobile-based head-mounted display (HMD), but the company is already building an ecosystem akin to PlayStation and its range of consoles and portables. That is to say that both the Gear VR – made in partnership with Samsung – and the long-anticipated Oculus Rift will be a part of the same ecosystem that will, according to creator Palmer Luckey, power the majority of the VR marketplace at some point in the future.

Luckey recently made a series of comments on Twitter about the company’s long-term plans and how that involves much more than just releasing content for the Oculus Rift. “Only on Oculus” does not mean “Only on Rift”,” he explained. “Our platform and store already support both the Rift and Samsung’s GearVR.

“We have to focus on launching the Rift right now, but Oculus will eventually power the majority of the VR marketplace,” he added. When asked if this meant the Oculus Rift would be compatible with other marketplaces outside of Oculus VR’s own solutions, the creator simply replied: “Yep!”

As an example, Oculus VR introduced the Oculus Platform back at its Oculus Connect developer conference in September. It presented a long list of features such as user profiles, matchmaking and achievements that would be making their way to both the Oculus Rift and Gear VR in the future. Meanwhile, aspects such as the Oculus Concept store, a unique marketplace for experimental VR experiences and early access releases, is already on Gear VR and will debut with the launch of the Oculus Rift on PC.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/26349/oculus-rubin-vr-is-in-the-doom-stage-but-will-get-to-the-call-of-duty-stage/

Virtual reality (VR) needs all the help it can get if it’s to become as big as just about everyone wants it to be. Companies such as Oculus VR wouldn’t have been able to get far off of the ground without an initial round of investments, and now a new venture capital firm is launching with the aim of finding and helping other VR and augmented reality (AR) companies get the funding they need. That firm is Presence Capital and it’s been founded with the help of HTC’s Phil Chen, who founded the HTC Vive head-mounted display (HMD) and brokered a deal between co-creator Valve.

Joining Chen at Presence Capital is former Uber and Unity advisor Paul Bragiel, who has launched three startups in the past and take part in over 150 other seed rounds of funding. Also on board is Amitt Mahajan, a technology entrepreneur with and investor that’s worked for the likes of the now Zynga-owned MyMiniLife and served as the CEO of the Google-aquired Toro.

Presence Capital has already closed an inaugural fund of $10 million USD and began investing. Along with some unannounced companies the firm has already helped fund Harmonix’s VR work, which includes the newly-announced Rock Band VR for the Oculus Rift and Harmonix Music VR for the PlayStation 4. There’s also Baobab Studios, investment of which was announced last week, and an AR company named Waygo.

“We believe there’s a gap in funding at the early-stage level mostly given the VR and AR markets haven’t been clearly defined yet. Now the market is becoming primed it’s important that the startups entering the market are providing value, have room to be creative and can help the global community fully explore what is possible,” said Chen of the news.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-wants-to-work-with-other-hardware-vendors-founder-reaffirms/

Responding to criticisms about the potential for Oculus Rift game exclusivity, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey reaffirms that the company is interested in working with other hardware vendors through the Oculus platform.

While the Oculus Rift may be the first desktop VR headset to support games and experience sold through the company’s storefront, it may not be the only one.

“If customers buy a game from us, I don’t care if they mod it to run on whatever they want,” Luckey writes in response to a user of Reddit criticizing the company’s choice to create games exclusive to the Oculus platform. “The software we create through Oculus Studios (using a mix of internal and external developers) are exclusive to the Oculus platform, not the Rift itself.”

Luckey reaffirms that last piece means that VR experience sold through the Oculus store could one day support desktop VR headsets other than the Rift, but cautions that making that happen is a challenging task.

“The issue is people who expect us to officially support all headsets on a platform level with some kind of universal Oculus SDK, which is not going to happen anytime soon,” writes Luckey. “We do want to work with other hardware vendors, but not at the expense of our own launch, and certainly not in a way that leads to developing for the lowest common denominator – there are a lot of shitty headsets coming, a handful of good ones, and a handful that may never even hit the market. Keep in mind that support for the good ones requires cooperation from both parties, which is sometimes impossible for reasons outside our control.”

Luckey defends the company’s rhetoric against critics, saying that his comments are “exactly what we have been saying for years,” citing Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe saying back in 2014, “We are openly talking to any kind of partner that wants to jump into VR, and there’s a lot of interest right now.”

Perhaps Oculus’ biggest competitor, Valve, is pushing ahead with efforts to support multiple headsets, including the Oculus Rift, with their ‘OpenVR’ SDK.

http://www.roadtovr.com/flickr-vr-360-photo-app-released-samsung-gear-vr/

Flickr, the Yahoo-owned image and video hosting website, has today released a Samsung Gear VR app that lets you view the top rated 360-degree photos from the platform’s global userbase.

Flickr boasts over 60,000 panoramic photos on their site currently, a fraction of which are viewable on the Flickr VR Gear VR app.

The app presents you with an infinite carousel of the site’s top-rated 360 photos, everything from dentist offices to breath-taking vistas—and all extremely high quality to boot. According to a Flickr blog post announcing the new VR app, “Flickr is the best platform for 360° photos because we respect the image quality of uploaded photos, and we want to be one of the best ways to access engaging virtual reality experiences.”

There’s no shortage of 360 photo-viewing apps on the Gear VR store currently, but Flickr VR is the first to source the images directly from their user base. Quite how Flickr’s plans to move forward with plans to expand its 360 photo sharing and viewing service is as yet unclear, but with years as one of the top players in the marketplace, it’s another top name to add to the list of industry heavyweights backing immersive technologies like VR.

We’ll have our own hands on impressions with the new app up soon, meanwhile check out the 360 content already available on Flickr’s dedicated portal (https://www.flickr.com/vr), or download the app for Gear VR from the Oculus Store now.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-2015-pre-order-oculus-touch-new-year-approaches/

Following the HTC Vive delay which pushed the headset just into Q2 2016, eyes turn to Oculus to see if they can deliver on the Rift’s Q1 2016 release date window.

While Valve and HTC’s initial Vive shipping target of Q4 2015 appears to have been too ambitious, Oculus is still on track for their Q1 2016 release window, as far as we know.

In addition to a stated release date of Q1 2016, the company has also said that the Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch controllers will become available for pre-order starting in 2015. 22 days remain until the New Year, and VR hopefuls are now watching the company closely to see if Oculus can stick to their promise.

We reached out to Oculus to ask whether or not things were still on track but the company declined to comment.

Responding to a comment on twitter asking if Rift pre-orders would begin before Christmas and whether or not the user should thus ask for the VR headset as a gift, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said to “Ask for a raincheck!”:

Legend Begins: Will Rift preorders be open before christmas? I'd like to know if I should ask for one or wait for now. Thanks for all you do!

Palmer Luckey: @Tech_Demo Ask for a raincheck! Can't say when they will open just yet.

At least as far as what the company has revealed, things seem to be on track for the Rift’s Q1 2016 release date window. Back at Connect in September, Oculus said that the first Rift headset had rolled off the production line as part of a manufacturing test.

“We set a date out for ourselves for when we wanted to build the first product and we hit that date on the nose,” said Oculus Hardware Project Manager, Stephanie Lue, on stage at Connect. “Our hardware teams are pouring our hearts and souls to get it just right for the experience and for manufacturability so that we can get this out to as many people as possible. It’s definitely worth the wait.”

While the Oculus Rift is set to launch in Q1 of 2016, the company gave a more broad release window for their ‘Touch’ VR controllers, which they say will launch in the first half of 2016. Although there may be a mismatch between the launch dates of the two products, the company confirmed that Touch pre-orders would open alongside the Rift.

While Oculus Touch remains entirely unpriced, Oculus confirmed to Road to VR that the Rift would cost “More than $350,” which is believed to exclude the cost of Touch. Each Oculus Rift will come bundled with an Xbox One controller and EVE: Valkyrie.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/28398/oculus-hosting-research-study-next-month-offering-400-gift-card/

While Oculus VR is releasing major virtual reality (VR) products this year in the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) and Oculus Touch controllers, the company is also committed to the long-term future of the technology and the products it will release in the years to come. Back in 2014 the group set up Oculus Research to look into advancing VR and this week it’s been revealed the Oculus VR will soon be hosting a research study for which it is now looking for applicants to take part in.

Various members of the Oculus VR Subreddit have claimed to have received an email from the company about the study, which Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey himself has confirmed to be real.

The email reads: “We hope you might be interested in participating in an upcoming Oculus research study!

“We are looking for people 21 years or older to participate in a 6-hour research study on February 9, 10, 11th, or 15th. The study will take place in your home and will be conducted by 2 researchers from the Oculus Research team. To thank you for your time, you’ll receive a $400 Visa gift card if you are selected to participate.

“If you are interested in participating, please complete this brief 3 minute survey as soon as possible!”

It’s not clear exactly what Oculus VR will be looking for here, nor what people will need to take part. It could be that the test will involve the use of the second development kit for the Oculus Rift (DK2). It’s important to note that the dates are well over a month before the launch of the consumer version of the device, pre-orders for which are now open. Could the results of this survey impact the launch of the Oculus Rift in March?

http://vrfocus.com/archives/28333/htc-viveport-store-is-optional-designed-for-people-who-cant-use-steam/

Late last year it was revealed that HTC was working on a digital content storefront for its upcoming virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD), the HTC Vive. The news came as a surprise to many fans as the device has famously been made in a partnership with Valve, the creators of the immensely successful digital PC store, Steam. Why would HTC feel the need to build a store that could possibly compete with Steam, then? That’s a question that the company has recently answered for all.

HTC’s Shen Ye said as much in a Q&A session (http://www.twitch.tv/colognevrmeetup/v/37202816?t=01h31m10s) at the recent Cologne VR meet up. Following a presentation on the HTC Vive, Ye was asked about the thinking behind the creation of the Viveport store. “The HTC store is more of an option for people who can’t use Steam,” he explained. “You’ll be able to use it anywhere but if you take a look at China, for example, where we had the dev conference, Steam doesn’t really have that much user base there. So we’re trying to fill in the gap so that anyone who gets hold of a Vive get the possibility to go and download content.”

It sounds as if countries in which Steam thrives won’t need to pay much attention to Viveport, then. That said, Oculus Rift HMD creator Oculus VR is readying its own Oculus Store to sell content for its device. That store should be going live when the Oculus Rift finally arrives on 28th March 2016, while the HTC Vive will be launching in the following April. The former costs some $599 USD, though the final price for the latter is yet to be announced.

http://uploadvr.com/gdc-vr-survey/

A new survey released by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) reveals some interesting stats regarding interest in VR development. Polling of more than 2,000 game developers who attended the conference in recent years, this year’s survey reveals 16 percent are working on VR titles compared to 7 percent in last year’s survey. 15 percent said the next game they make will come to VR while 7 percent said the same last year.

Another section of the survey more narrowly focused on mixed reality showed higher results, with 19 percent of developers saying they’re currently making a game for the Oculus Rift, 8 percent working on Samsung’s Gear VR and 7 percent on Google Cardboard. PlayStation VR and HTC Vive are being targeted by about 6 percent of the respondents.

On the flip side, 44 percent of those surveyed said they weren’t involved in VR development while another 25 percent said they aren’t currently interested in developing for VR/AR headsets. Only 17 percent of developers hadn’t tried any VR platforms. Of those who had tried mixed reality platforms, this was the breakdown of what they’ve experienced:

Oculus Rift (77%)

Google Cardboard (46%)

Gear VR (31%)

PlayStation VR (21%)

HTC Vive (19%)

Microsoft Hololens (8%)

castAR (3%)

Perhaps one of the most interesting questions asked was whether the developers believed VR/AR was a long-term sustainable business, with 75 percent agreeing and 25 percent disagreeing. In another question, 38 percent of those surveyed predicted VR/AR hardware would be in 10 percent of U.S. households by 2020. The vast majority, 86 percent, think it will happen by 2030. Just 9 percent think it will never happen.

GDC will be held this year alongside the Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC) from March 14-18 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. The 2016 “State of the Industry Survey” is the fourth year GDC surveyed developers.

http://www.roadtovr.com/facebook-oculus-rift-sales-expectations-2016-not-going-to-be-material-to-our-financials-this-year/

During Facebook’s Q4 2015 earnings call this week the company reiterated conservative expectations for Oculus Rift sales in 2016.

Responding to a question by Macquarie Group analyst Ben Schachter, Facebook CFO Dave Wehner said that revenues relating to the Rift wouldn’t be “material” to the company’s 2016 financials:

Schachter: On virtual reality, another question. Can you just discuss the supply constraints in terms of how many units you can ship per month? And should we expect those shipments to accelerate into the holiday? Then also related to that, how are you going to work with retailers to show consumers the power of Oculus in-store and in person? Thanks.

Wehner: So Ben, just following up on VR and supply constraints, so we have two products… you’ve got Gear VR and Samsung is really handling all of that from a hardware perspective, and obviously they are well prepared on that front. With Rift, it’s really… you know it’s early in the evolution of VR. It’s early to be talking about large volume, so at this point I don’t think we’re giving a lot of color around supply chain and that sort of thing. It’s not going to be material to our financials this year.

Facebook nor Oculus have given any specific sales figures for the Oculus Rift which became available for pre-order in early January and is set to ship the earliest units at the end of March. Currently the headset is backordered some four months.

With Facebook’s 2015 revenue sitting at $17.93 billion, it’s tough to say exactly how much money constitutes “material”. As the company’s earnings slides list revenue in thousands of millions, it should be a safe bet to think that anything pushing the needle by a minimum of $1 billion dollars would certainly constitute “material.” Put into perspective, $1 billion in Rift sales would be 1.67 million units at the current $599 pricetag. To be less safe, but perhaps more reasonable, $500 million in revenue (which I suspect shareholders would agree is “material”) would track to 834,724 Rifts at the current price.

Any way you slice it, it seems that Wehner’s statements call into question projections and forecasts expecting multiple millions of Rift headsets to be sold in 2016. Sales of less than a million units in 2016 is consistent with prior statements from both Facebook and Oculus CEOs, Mark Zukcerberg and Brendan Iribe.

Iribe told CNBC earlier this month that Oculus could produce “many tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands [of Rifts] no problem this year…” During Facebook’s Q3 2015 earnings call, prior to the headset opening for pre-orders, Zuckerberg set expectations for first year Rift shipments in the “hundreds of thousands of units”, comparing the development of the VR industry to that of the early smartphone market.

Responding to a question during this week’s Facebook Q4 2015 earnings call about whether or not he was happy with Rift pre-orders, Zuckerberg said, “Yes, I am happy. I don’t show much joy, but I’m happy. Sorry [laughing]. It’s going to be gaming for the beginning. I mean, that’s the initial market. There are about—I think it’s around 250 million people who have Xboxs, PlayStations, or Wiis. That’s the initial market of folks who we think are going to be most interested in the early VR experiences, especially at some of the higher price points.”

For Palmer Luckey’s part, the founder of Oculus, he said days after Rift pre-orders opening that they were “going much better than I ever could have possibly expected.”

http://uploadvr.com/apple-building-secret-vr-team/

Apple is actively growing a secret team building VR and AR headsets, reports The Financial Times. If true, the article represents the most substantive example yet of Apple’s efforts to develop a mixed reality platform to outshine Facebook’s Oculus Rift and Microsoft’s HoloLens.

The article by Tim Bradshaw also reports Apple acquired Flyby Media, an AR startup that provided Project Tango software for object recognition and 3D positioning. The acquisiton is reminicscent of Apple’s 2013 purchase of PrimeSense, which provided the depth sensor inside the original Microsoft Kinect. In other words, Apple is buying up technology powering some of the innovative mixed reality efforts of its biggest competitors.

Apple also purchased AR startup MetaIO and facial recognition and animation startup Faceshift. Just a few days ago Apple CEO Tim Cook was asked about VR and said “I don’t think it’s a niche…it’s really cool and has some interesting applications.” The comment came as earnings suggest Apple’s iPhone might be peaking and that future growth at the company will have to come elsewhere.

Apple also acquired Beats headphones and rumors indicate the tech giant is considering phasing out the headphone jack on its mobile devices. Beats helped Apple reshape its core iTunes service around a monthly streaming plan but if Apple is building a VR platform, audio is half of the experience. Taking more control of the audio stack and injecting more sound experts into the company wouldn’t hurt.

Bradshaw also recently broke the story Apple hired VR expert Doug Bowman. His new report says Apple “has been building prototypes of possible headset configurations for several months.” Apple filed a number of VR-related patents over the years but the company is notoriously secretive and keeps projects in quiet development for years until it creates an integrated hardware and software package deemed fit to be marketed as “revolutionary.”

While he has long been absent from Apple, in 2014 co-founder Steve Wozniak responded to a question about VR and said “I do think that is going to be the next big thing.” It’s increasingly looking like current Apple management is starting to agree with him.

Yeah no. Knowing Apple they will make a overpriced walled garden that's also shit.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-hits-the-fcc-for-approval-leading-up-to-march-launch/

As with the HTC Vive in late December, the Oculus Rift VR system has now made its rounds through the FCC, the U.S. regulatory body that certifies devices for electromagnetic spectrum compatibility for consumer usage.

Before any company can sell a consumer product in the U.S. which utilizes any part of the electromagnetic spectrum (wifi, radio, BT, etc), it has to be certified by the FCC. Certification marks one step closer to the launch of a product. Now that Oculus has opened pre-orders for the Rift, certifying documents have also appeared at the FCC.

Aside from the publicly available documentation, Oculus, like many companies, has submitted a Confidentiality Request to keep the following documents out of the public eye:

Schematics

Bill of Materials/Parts List

Block Diagrams

Theory of Operation

And furthermore have asked for a period of ‘short-term confidential treatment’ extending 180 days for the following documents:

Internal Photos

User Manual

Test Set-up Photographs

Available documentation reveals compatibility test reports for the Rift headset, Tracker, and Remote (referred by the documents as ‘SID’ – Simple Input Device). One photo shows that the Remote is powered by a button cell battery which, despite the lanyard, would suggest that the device is not motion tracked (as the power requirements to do so would likely make such a battery a bad design choice).

The only mention of the Oculus Touch (which will ship sometime after the Rift) comes from a document showing the required labeling that will be present on the devices. The Touch label is described as being inside the unit’s ‘battery well’ which suggests the device will have a removable battery, as FCC labels must be in a ‘user accessible area’. Oculus has not detailed previously how Touch will be powered.

The documents appeared in the FCC’s public database on January 6th, the same day that the company opened pre-orders for the Rift. However, some documents, like the Confidentiality Request, are dated as far back as October, suggesting the process began months earlier.

The first Oculus Rift units are set to ship on March 28th, but the headset is backordered some four months (http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-pre-order-backorder-july/).

http://uploadvr.com/nintendo-vr-round-2/

On Tuesday morning, recently instated Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima took on the difficult task of remaining positive despite his company’s 36 percent drop in profits during the last quarter. During a briefing, the successor to the beloved and recently deceased Satoru Iwata chose to focus on the gaming icon’s future innovations rather than addressing the Wii U-shaped weight hanging around the company’s neck. These innovations include the long overdue beginning of Nintendo’s mobile gaming initiative as well as the expression of a – somewhat surprising – interest in VR.

Nintendo’s sudden interest in VR was revealed via tweet by Serkan Toto, CEO of the Tokyo-based gaming consultancy Katan Games.

@serkantoto: So Nintendo (at the briefing) just said no change in plans for the smartphone app roll out. Says they "are looking" at VR - with no details.

No concrete details were added to clarify this new attitude, but it comes as a surprise considering Nintendo’s somewhat controversial history with the virtual reality scene. Last year at E3, Nintendo of America’s president Reggie Fils-Aime issued a quote during an interview with Polygon that echoed throughout the VR world.

“We have knowledge of the technical space, and we’ve been experimenting with this for a long, long time,” said Fils-Aime. “What we believe is that, in order for this technology to move forward, you need to make it fun and you need to make it social…I haven’t walked the floor, so I can’t say in terms of what’s on the floor today, but at least based on what I’ve seen to date, it’s not fun, and it’s not social. It’s just tech.”

This is quite a different stance from the open-minded attitude expressed during Kimishima’s briefing and the reason for this juxtaposition is more than likely monetary. The Nintendo Fils-Aime represented during E3 last June was a very different company from the one Kimishima controls today.

In June 2015 Nintendo was still riding high on a 33 percent rise in share price following the March announcement of its mobile gaming ambitions. It also had a much more established, respected and trusted President in Satoru Iwata. That Nintendo was in more of a position wait for an emerging technology to mature. The Nintendo that exists today, however, is not.

Nintendo needs a boost, and fast. The company’s flagship Wii U console is underperforming in sales and its bread-and-butter 3DS handheld is starting to stagnate as well. Nintendo optimists discovered some hope when the new “NX” console was revealed in early 2015, but the system is still a complete mystery and may not be ready soon enough to plug the leaks in Nintendo’s bow.

Nintendo’s reticence to participate in VR could also be related to the disastrous saga of the Virtual Boy. The Virtual Boy was a failed system released by Nintendo in 1995 that comprised a controller and a stationary headset. However, unlike the Rift, the Virtual Boy’s technology was intentionally low budget and too early to be truly compelling, showing images in only shades of black and red.

The system was both a critical and commercial failure – selling only 770,000 units according to a report by Goldman Sachs. The embarrassing experience undoubtedly left a significant bruise on the Japanese company’s ego that made it unwilling to revisit the technology and remind the world of this failure.

Nintendo ignored the phone gaming market and was content to watch it evolve into a revenue-generating juggernaut for the industry before getting involved. Even though they are now only months away from involving themselves in that market with mobile titles like Pokemon Go!, it’s a decision that comes many years, and many millions of potential dollars, too late.

It seems the company might not be repeating that mistake when it comes to VR. Kimishima’s open-minded statement about the space is indicative of both his company’s desperation, and VR’s emerging status as the new land of opportunity for technology companies in 2016.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/28926/new-funding-round-values-magic-leap-at-4-5-billion/

More investment news has surfaced for the secretive mixed-reality company Magic Leap Inc. This week the startup has confirmed that its latest Series C funding round has raised $794 million USD, bringing it to a total of $1.4 Billion USD in investments and valuing Dania Beach, Florida, company at $4.5 billion USD.

This round of funding was led by Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba reports the Wall Street Journal. This will also give the company a position on Magic Leap’s board of directors, although reports differ on who this will be. Alphabet Inc. (Google), and Qualcomm Inc., have reinvested, while J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Time Warner Inc. unit Warner Bros and others are now added to that list.

The amount of funding Magic Leap has raised will be remarkable for many due to the company having not released any real details for its product, only a couple of teaser demos are currently available. But those that that have seen first-hand demos do seem to jump on board quickly. Weta Workshops, a New Zealand-based design studio has come on board to build games, while Neal Stephenson a sci-fi writer is Magic Leaps chief futurist.

CEO Rony Abovitz also released a blog on Tuesday to state Magic Leap was ‘gearing up’ for its first product. “We are setting up supply chain operations, manufacturing”, wrote Abovitz. He also named the technology it has been developing, calling it ‘Mixed Reality Lightfield’. As the CEO describes it: “It comes to life by following the rules of the eye and the brain, by being gentle, and by working with us, not against us. By following as closely as possible the rules of nature and biology.”

When Magic Leap is likely to release concrete information is unknown but VRFocus will continue to report an any further announcements.

http://www.roadtovr.com/valves-gabe-newell-to-speak-at-unity-vision-summit-alongside-oculus-sony-and-google/

The 2016 Unity Vision Summit focuses on immersive technologies and in its second year is boasting quite a long list of luminaries as part its line up. This year, alongside addresses from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, Clay Bavor, Vice President of Virtual Reality at Google and Dr. Richard Marks, Director of the PlayStation Magic Lab, there’ll also be a rare public appearance from Valve’s Gabe Newell, giving a special address.

Unity as a company have spearheaded the support and adoption of virtual reality as a technology since the early days of the Oculus Rift. Their game development platform has enabled the creation of a huge number, the vast majority in those early days, and remains an excellent choice for VR developers today.

To mark this commitment to immersive development, last year Unity announced it was to hold a conference dedicated to Augmented and Virtual Reality. The inaugural Unity Vision Summit was a great success, and this year it’s back with a roster of speakers that reflects the technology industry’s growing focus on virtual and augment reality.

A surprise and rare appearance from one of gaming’s most famous of names, co-founder and Managing Director of Valve, Gabe Newell. Newell’s appearance at the event is of course in light of this year’s big push from Valve for its SteamVR platform and the first virtual reality hardware developed for it, HTC’s Vive VR headset. The system will launch in April and from what we’ve seen, Valve’s full force is behind the project with developers all over the world building projects

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey will give a speech too, marking the company’s ramp up to delivering their much anticipated Oculus Rift VR headset, which opened pre-orders in January and is due to begin shipping at the end of March.

Google’s Clay Bavor will also speak. Co-creator of Google’s Cardboard project, Bavor now heads up Google’s stronger focus on the development of immersive technologies, including their 360 video technology pipeline, Jump and perhaps their own consumer line of VR hardware.

Rounding out the list of speakers from this year’s virtual reality battle for VR supremacy battle is Dr. Richard Marks, Director of the PlayStation Magic Lab, credited with the creation of PlayStation Eye, Move and Project Morpheus, the PS4 VR headset now known as PlayStation VR. The PSVR is due in the 2nd half of 2016 for PlayStation 4.

The event takes place February 10-11 in Hollywood at the Loews Hollywood Hotel, CA and will play host to more than 40 breakout sessions covering the latest technologies and best practices, designed to help make developers lives easier when building VR and AR apps and games in Unity. You can grab tickets to the event right here.

http://www.roadtovr.com/the-htc-vive-pre-is-now-shipping-to-developers/

The second generation SteamVR development kit, the HTC Vive Pre, was unveiled at CES in January and included numerous enhancements. Valve have now announced that the new Pre systems are on their way to developers.

In the run up to CES, HTC made a ‘bold’ statement about a new revision of their SteamVR based virtual reality system, the HTC Vive. The company had to issue a climbdown on the original anticipated release date for the Vive, originally to be during the 2015 holidays. The Vive instead would launch in April 2016, with pre-orders going live on February 29th.

The reason for the delay? A statement from HTC’s CEO Cher Wang cited a “very, very big breakthrough” as the culprit. Which, of course, ensured that the hype train for SteamVR was fully fuelled all the way until CES hit.

What was unveiled was the HTC Vive Pre, a second generation developer system with refined, sleeker VR headset, redesigned SteamVR controllers and a set of slimmed down Lighthouse laser base stations. That “very, very, big breakthrough” was the integrated, wide-angle, front-facing camera – which allows visions of the real world to be overlaid onto the virtual environment when inside the Vive headset. Additionally, the Pre incorporated a common image enhancement technique which deals with OLED panel shortcomings, Mura correction. Important additions both, with the former adding much needed environment awareness and safety enhancements the latter improving image quality noticeably. The jury’s still out on just how much of a breakthrough these additions will prove to be however.

Now, Valve has announced that the first batch of Vive Pre’s are on their way to developers already holding mark I ‘Developer Edition’ Vive systems. This is an important milestone given the short lead time until consumer edition units are due to ship in April. Developers will want to be sure that any incorporation of the front-facing camera is tested thoroughly. Developers will very likely have known about the additional feature well ahead of the CES reveal however, so hopefully this won’t be a last-minute addition for them.

It’s thought that the HTC Vive Pre represents a close approximation of the eventual shipping unit, at least in terms of feature-set. However, we’ve still yet to see the integrated headphones which we were told might be on the way for the consumer unit.

http://www.roadtovr.com/googles-unannounced-vr-headset-will-launch-this-year-report-suggests/

Late last month we spotted Google job postings that heavily pointed toward the company developing its own high-end mobile VR headset. Now a new report from Financial Times indicates the company plans to launch the headset this year.

Google’s Cardboard initiative offers a cheap way for users of even dated smartphones to experience an entry-level VR experience by relying entirely on the smartphone for processing, sensing, control, and display. But Samsung’s Gear VR headset sets the bar much higher thanks to on-board hardware and special cooperation between the headset and the phone, putting Gear VR in another league entirely.

Now it seems that Google wants to make a competing device, and they could launch it this year, according to Financial Times [paywall], who cite “people familiar with [Google’s] plans.”

Supporting much of what we surmised from the earlier job postings, the Financial Times report describes a Gear VR competitor:

The new headset will be a successor to Cardboard. the cheap-and-cheerful mobile VR viewer that Google launched in 2014, and feature better sensors, lenses and a more solid plastic casing… Google is expected to release its rival headset, alongside new Android VR technology, this year. Like Cardboard and Gear VR, the new headset will use an existing smartphone, slotted into the device, for its display and most of its processing power.

The report further indicates that the headset would be compatible with a wider range of smartphones than Gear VR, which is currently limited to five of Samsung’s phones (depending upon which of the three versions of the headset you own).

That makes sense to leverage Android’s huge range of handsets and partners, but it remains to be seen how inclusive such a device could be; a quality VR experience is perhaps the most processor-demanding activity a smartphone can undertake, and an OLED display is necessary for ‘low-persistence’, an important technique which significantly reduces blurriness for a sharper and more comfortable experience.

The Financial Times report indicates the headset will launch alongside “new Android VR technology.” We suggested previously that Google may develop the VR headset as a Nexus device, their flagship brand which cooperates with prominent hardware partners on high-end Android devices. The headset may come alongside a new compatible phone and VR-ready version of the Android operating system. This could lay the foundation for other Android hardware partners to create compatible phones for the headset, or perhaps open the door for an entire Android VR headset ecosystem, just like we see with Android handsets.

The launch of a Google VR headset will put the company in a curious position with Samsung, who is of course a major player in the Android smartphone ecosystem and has collaborated with Google to produce Nexus devices in the past. A new Google VR headset could potentially be compatible with Samsung’s Gear VR-compatible smartphones, or it could exclude them; either way, the platform politics are likely to get awkward fast, especially with prominent Google products like YouTube still missing from Gear VR.

Nobody will buy a data mining box Google, you are less trustworthy than Facebook when it comes to that.

http://www.roadtovr.com/unity-is-making-big-improvements-to-their-vr-rendering-pipeline/

Unity is making a huge push to position itself as the leading game engine in the virtual reality space today at its Vision Summit where they made a series of new partner announcements and previewed big improvements coming to their VR rendering pipeline.

Latency is one of the most critical aspects of a real-time virtual reality experience. With too much latency, the viewer’s virtual world won’t respond as quickly as the real world, and this can quickly lead to discomfort in VR. Reducing the so called ‘motion to photons’ latency—the time it takes from the instant a user moves their head until the VR world moves around them—down below 20 milliseconds is vital to a convincing and comfortable VR experience.

One big part of that pipeline is the time it takes to render each individual frame of a VR experience. When a user moves their head, that movement data needs to be sent to the computer, and the computer must run through a bunch of code an math in a matter of milliseconds to calculate what the next picture of the scene should look like.

More efficient rendering means that we can bring even better graphics into virtual reality without crossing that vital 20 millisecond threshold of latency.

On stage today at the 2016 Vision Summit, Unity previewed major improvements they’re making that are expected to launch in Unity 5.4 in March.

On stage the company walked through some of the new render technology they’re implementing including Double Wide Rendering and Render Loop Jobs. Combined together, these technologies cut the main thread and render thread timings in half.

What this ultimately means is that developers can refill that time with better graphics, physics, and lightning than they were able to before.

Unity 5.4 is expected to launch in mid-March, but it isn’t clear yet how much of this new VR rendering development will make it into the launch of 5.4.

http://www.roadtovr.com/unity-will-soon-let-developers-build-games-inside-vr/

Today at Vision Summit 2016 in Hollywood, Timoni West, principal designer at Unity Technologies, took the stage to show Unity’s answer to the recently revealed Unreal Engine 4 VR editor.

West demonstrated Unity’s newly revealed VR scene editor using the Oculus Rift and Touch controllers, where she created a modified a scene within virtual reality. Competitor Unreal Engine revealed similar prototype functionality just last week using an HTC Vive Pre.

In Unity’s implementation, the interface elements, which are tied to the Oculus Touch controllers, naturally allowed West to pull out assets, place them, resize them, and make a number of modifications to make an entire balcony scene around her.

According to West, “in the long term the vision is that [the VR editor] should be just as customizable as Unity is in 2D. You should be able to pull off assets, put them where you want, put windows where you want… make a little utility belt.”

Now with two of the largest game engines soon to offer in-VR options for content creation—and not to mention both are free of charge—we expect to see a renaissance of interest in the space as traditional game developers investigate further into supporting VR for their projects. Because after all, selecting an item and placing it down with your own two hands is as natural and approachable as it gets.

http://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-pre-arrives-with-developers-twitter-rejoices/

HTC’s second iteration of their SteamVR hardware, the Vive Pre, was unveiled last month at CES with a number of ergonomic and technical enhancements. Well it looks like developers worldwide are taking to twitter to rejoice the receipt of the last Vive, and here are some of the lucky developers who took to Twitter to celebrate.

The new HTC Vive Pre brings with a lighter weight construction, better headset ergonomics, refined SteamVR controller design, quieter, smaller Lighthouse Base stations, improved display clarity courtesy of Mura correction and a front-facing camera for glimpsing reality.

The new Vive revision was announced to be shipping to developers already in receipt of the first HTC Vive developer editions, and it looks like they started to arrive last week. Here’s 7 developers who just got theirs.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/29608/eyefluence-begins-showcasing-its-eye-tracking-technology-in-hmds/

There’re several companies developing eye-tracking technology, where users can simply use their eyes to control or highlight what they see on screen. Eyefluence is one such firm that has recently begun demoing its tech for augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) devices.

Eyefluence’s vision-driven iUiTM interaction model looks to harness natural eye movement and intends to enable users to be able to do anything a finger can on a smartphone or tablet with their eyes on smart glasses, but faster and easier.

Several experiences have been shown to a select few, demonstrated on Oculus VR’s Oculus Rift DK2 headset, retrofitted with Eyefluence’s eye-interaction technology,

These demos have included: Texting and SMS messaging with your eyes; perusing weather and travel information; browsing, zooming and sharing photos; purchasing anything you see in the real world in real time with real orders placed; searching and spinning a 3D globe and many more.

Eyefluence Founder, CEO and serial inventor Jim Marggraff said in a statement: “Users simply think and look, without waiting or winking, jabbing or poking, pointing or clicking, to perform actions and communicate more quickly than researchers thought was humanly possible. This is a pivotal moment for our company, and for the HMD industry as a whole, that will accelerate the adoption of AR and VR hardware and experiences, with our technology deployed in forthcoming headsets. All HMDs are fundamentally incomplete without eye-interaction, and all will be enabled with eye-interaction technology in the future.”

Motorola Solutions has been a lead strategic investor in Eyefluence’s Series B funding round, working with Eyefluence on integrating eye-interaction into its innovative “smart public safety” applications.

“Imagine if police officers could get information on an unfolding crime scene without visibly moving a muscle,” said Paul Steinberg, chief technology officer, Motorola Solutions. “Instead, they would use only the motion of their eyes behind glasses, leaving their heads up and their hands free to manage the scene and take quick action.”

As the technology is still in development there’s been no indication as of yet about possible public demonstrations, but VRFocus will bring you any further updates and announcements from Eyefluence as details are released.

http://uploadvr.com/new-view-master-headset-this-fall/

This year brings the release of commercial VR headsets for a mass-market audience. Oculus Rift, PSVR and HTC Vive will all be on store shelves by Christmas and now one more fighter is entering the ring. View-Master announced they will be releasing an updated version of the entry-level VR headset, dubbed the View-Master DLX, this fall.

Mattel launched the initial VR View-Master last year for $30, with Google Cardboard compatibility. The device can be found at stores like Toys R Us and Target and is positioned as an easy-access entry point into VR for casual shoppers looking to pick up a birthday gift. The new version will be nowhere near as robust as the Rift or the Vive, but will boast several new features that may elevate it past the kids toy status it currently holds.

The DLX will feature updated lenses and a Gear VR-like focus wheel for sharper images. It will also provide a sorely-needed headphone jack to enable immersive sound in its VR experiences. Sound is an important part of the VR experience and its absence on Mattel’s original View-Master model is a significant weak point for the system. The final update of note is an enclosure system to better house the smartphone that makes the whole operation tick. The enclosure is designed to prevent the phone from plummeting to an early demise in the hands of younger users or the occasional clumsy adult.

Mattel will also sell “Experience Wheels” for $15 each, serving as the platform’s form of content distribution. Mattel also recently made VR history by seeing its View-Master become the first piece of VR hardware to be sold either in-store or online by Apple.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/29713/virtual-reality-feature-strongly-ted-2016/

Virtual reality (VR) continues to seep into the mainstream, and there is no question of whether or not there will be positive reaction to it, and the inclusion of VR in major tech events only reinforces this. Tomorrow there will be two major names in VR that will take to the stage in TED 2016 to discuss VR in technology, entertainment, and design, along with ongoing showcasings of VR throughout the week.

With most VR action happening tomorrow, speaking at the event during the ‘Fantasies and Catlysts’ session is Vrse’s founder and CEO, Chris Milk, who has presented and talked at the event in previous years regarding immersive storytelling in VR, and it is said that attendees will be able to use an app from Vrse using Google Cardboard. The creator of Microsoft’s Hololens, Alex Kipman, will also be attending to share his experiences during the ‘Outside the Box’ session. As well as these speakers, it is said that there will be a showcasing of Void, a cinematic VR experience that places the user in a world where they can cast spells or fight in alien wars.

It was reported by Re/code that Chris Anderson, curator of TED, said: “There are speakers at TED who’ll be arguing that VR and augmented reality offer the chance of a dramatic shift in how we interact with computers and with the real world,” and went on to say “From digital to analog, from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, from observation to immersion, the demos they are working on are jaw-dropping. We can’t wait.”

http://uploadvr.com/oculus-preview-event-to-focus-on-multiplayer-games-in-march/

March 28 is launch day for the Oculus Rift and as soon as that calendar flips over from 03/27 you will finally be able to get your hands on the long-awaited VR headset. Well, okay, you’ll get it as long as you pre-ordered back in January. Actually, to be completely clear, you’ll only get the Rift on the 28th if you were able to snag a unit within the first 0.4 micro-seconds after the pre-order went live. Oh, and you might have to allow for shipping time of course. In any case, March 28 is still the official launch day and just 15 days before the big one Oculus will be hosting a launch preview event in San Francisco where Facebook’s VR division will highlight multiplayer experiences.

The invite-only media event, called Oculus Game Days, will run from March 13-15. Oculus is not ready to release the full list of experiences that will be shown. What is known, however, is that Game Days will be a showcase that specifically highlights multiplayer experiences available for the platform.

Multiplayer VR gaming is a hot topic right now. VR is sometimes painted as an isolating experience, but studios like Survios are showing us all just how engaging and addictive an active, cooperative experience inside a headset can be.

Game Days is taking place alongside GDC 2016, which will lumber into the Moscone Center on March 14 in tandem with a first-ever Virtual Reality Developers Conference. Oculus is clearly planning to capitalize on this momentum to get some exposure for the Rift’s launch library.

UploadVR will be attending and we will give you the inside scoop on everything being shown as soon as we lay eyes on it ourselves. Stay tuned.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/29776/leap-motion-controller-gets-price-slashed-on-best-buy/

Leap Motion had some big news to share yesterday as it announced Orion, a new software and hardware initiative that aims to deliver faster, more accurate hand-tracking for virtual reality (VR) experiences. A software beta was launched for developers at the same time, and the hardware aspect will be seen later down the line with embeddable tech that will be used within head-mounted displays (HMDs). As for the original Leap Motion Controller? The sensor is now on sale for a huge reduction over at Best Buy.

The kit can be picked up for $39.99 USD in a clearance sale, which suggests that once it’s gone it won’t be coming back. The RRP is set at $79.99, so that’s just over half off. Shipping should take place within one business day too though fans should note that, if they’re hoping to use the kit with a HMD such as the Oculus Rift, they’ll also need to buy a mount that attaches the controller to the front of the given kit. From there, however, developers and enthusiasts will be able to enjoy hand-tracking in VR experiences that implement it.

With Oculus VR buying up Nimble VR and Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) doing the same with SoftKinetic, hand-tracking looks set to play a big part in VR’s future. For now, however, these companies are option for position-tracked controllers such as the Oculus Touch and PlayStation Move devices for VR input. It may take some time before hand-tracking becomes an essential part of the VR experience, then, but it looks like Leap Motion itself is busy preparing for that future right now.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-to-preview-rift-latest-titles-at-special-pre-gdc-event/

Oculus has announced an invite only event to coincide with GDC which promises a preview of the games new owners will be able to get their hands on after launch.

The long awaited Oculus Rift consumer VR headset went up for pre-order during CES in January, due for a late March ship window. But, other than the titles every new Rift owner will receive inside the box, details of the devices launch line up have been thin on the ground.

Oculus has an advantage that perhaps isn’t as much talked about as it should be. Its Rift VR headsets have been around (in one form or another) as a potential games platform longer than any other. It may appear that the company credited with re-launching the fortunes of consumer virtual reality as concentrated primarily on tackling VRs “set of hard problems”, as one Gabe Newell once put it.

However, since inception, Oculus have been all about the software. Founder Palmer Luckey knew that he could produce the best, most cost effective, most compelling VR hardware in the world, but if there’s nothing interesting to use with it, it’s dead in the water.

This was the entire ethos behind the original DK1 Kickstarter, to get developer kits into the hands of creative people such that they can begin to wrap their heads around what virtual reality had to offer as a platform and begin working. In today’s games industry, with gestation periods for some games measures in years, that’s an oft overlooked advantage Oculus hold over their competitors.

We of course have seen some big announcements from Oculus in relation to games, some which went down better than others. Luckey’s triumphant Minecraft announcement at Oculus Connect 2 in September last year, a coup that CTO John Carmack had pursued doggedly to achieve, was a big deal. Later, the Rockband VR announcement, made at the 2015 Game Awards, was perhaps not quite as clear cut in terms of its PR success.

Now, Oculus is perhaps preparing to unleash its software secrets to the world. At an invite-only event, due to take place ahead of the San Francisco Game Developer Conference (GDC) on March 13th, Oculus are asking members of the press to “come check out the latest titles and multi-player games.”

The event’s announcement, in conjunction with hints from Palmer that we “will hear more very, very soon,” about the last big Oculus software news before launch, seems to indicate we’re likely in for at least some surprises come March 13th.

Valve recently held a similar event earlier this month, designed that a solid software line up was forming for the launch of their flagship SteamVR hardware HTC Vive in April. In the end, although the titles on show were extremely promising, the event perhaps lacked a single title which would instantly appeal to traditional gamers looking for brand recognition before they take the plunge into VR.

So, in the face of a formidable rival, it’s up to Oculus to pull out their big software guns to make impact as possible ahead of their small retail head start in March.

http://www.roadtovr.com/acer-introduce-vr-tech-surprise-everyone-mwc/

Acer has announced its plans to release a VR device in the first half of this year. While Acer is staying mum on the details, we could be seeing prototypes at next week’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.

Acer CEO Jason Chen told reporters on Tuesday that the company “has been conducting research and development of VR technologies for a while,” and that the Taiwanese tech giant would be “planning to introduce some new technologies to surprise everyone,” reports Taipei Times.

“We are thinking of how to expand Acer’s reach in the field and turn our VR technologies into a business. And that is an important element in the process of Acer’s corporate transformation,” Chen said.

According to a report from PocketNow, Acer has been rumored to be showing prototypes at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Road to VR will be attending MWC 2016 with hopes of seeing if the rumors pan out, and just what sort of mysterious VR device—headset or otherwise—Acer has been developing.

Making a competitive VR headset nowadays isn’t as easy as slapping a smartphone in a plastic holder with lenses anymore. Large hardware manufacturers Like Samsung and HTC have included virtual reality in their next growth strategy for some time, and in a bid to stay competitive they’ve started to retool their manufacturing processes to make way for custom-built parts like VR-specific displays and ultra-sensitive IMUs capable of sub 20 millisecond latency. Now with VR clearly out of the niche sector and headed straight into the factories of tech giants like Acer, we’ll be interested to see just what the big boys of global manufacturing are going to pull out of their R&D labs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/46hh47/i_dont_post_my_own_threads_here_very_often_but_as/

With the launch date of the Oculus Rift virtual reality system drawing nearer, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey recently took to forum community reddit's semi-official /r/oculus subreddit to make a special announcement.

"👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀 good shit go౦ԁ sHit👌 thats ✔ some good👌👌shit right👌👌th 👌 ere👌👌👌 right✔there ✔✔if i do ƽaү so my selｆ" remarked Mr. Luckey on the quality of the near-final content lineup expected to launch alongside the Oculus Rift once first pre-orders begin shipping in late March. "💯 i say so 💯 thats what im talking about right there right there (chorus: ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ) mMMMMᎷМ💯 👌👌 👌НO0ОଠＯOOＯOОଠଠOoooᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ👌 👌👌 👌 💯 👌 👀 👀 👀 👌👌Good shit"

While there may still be questions regarding 4 Chan and his connection to Palmer Luckey, the superior dankness of his memes is undeniable. When accused by one redditor of in fact being the famous hacker in disguise, Palmer feigned ignorance and inquired about the identity of this mysterious person. But Palmer, of course, knows better than anyone else.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/29806/kojima-on-vr-im-very-excited-about-it/

In the world of videogames there are few names that standout as much as Hideo Kojima. The producer created the Metal Gear Solid series and is well respected within the industry. Since his well publicised split for Konami he’s been having some time off popping up at various events around the globe. He’s at the current DICE event in Las Vegas, Nevada and discussed his viewpoint on virtual reality (VR).

Kojima spoke to IGN through a translator saying: “I’ve been interested in VR for a long time now. VR came up over 20 years ago. What was described back then is finally coming to our everyday lives, so I’m very excited about it.”

But his first experiences the new iterations of VR weren’t great: “A few years ago, I tried the development kits, and I’m very susceptible to 3D motion sickness, so I couldn’t do it. And now the latest technology I’ve been trying, it doesn’t produce nearly as much motion sickness. I’m fine with it. A while ago, I was like, ‘there’s no way I can develop anything for this. I’m going to spend every day puking. That’s not worth it.’ But now, with the latest technology, I’m feeling maybe more confident to develop something.”

But on developing a VR title Kojima has already been thinking about what route he’d take, with the horror genre of particular interest: “Shooters are always fun, but I’m more interested, for example, in bringing out feelings in people that are unique to VR. Some feelings, maybe displeasure, maybe horror. But not the kind of horror you get from grotesque or gory things, but a different kind of horror.”

“Let’s say you put the VR headset on and there are a lot of people here, people you’re not familiar with,” he explained. “You’re not being told who you are, why you’re there. That alone is scary. That alone makes you want to look away. For example, when you look away you can have someone come [into the room]. You don’t need to explain anything. That’s something completely different. That alone is so interesting, the possibility of creating that.”

Kojima making a VR videogame would be an exciting prospect, with his years of experience in creating traditional titles. With the recent announcement that he’s formed indie development studio Kojima Productions, we might see a VR project in the future.

Kojima you dumbass, if you want to do VR projects then PSVR is not a great start. Partnering with Sony is not the way of the future too.

A lot of hardware announcement but still very little app side.

Because put aside games that won't run on current gpu, vr cinema, demos (That's all they are, don't kid yourself) and a brain concussion educational simulator no one cares about, you immediately notice the problem.

Why in hell would the large public buy those headsets if every apps available can run on a flip phone and a googloo cardboard?

Why should i invest 700$ for a headset and 700$ for a gpu (which isn't out yet)?.

The fuck is going on?

The HTC Vive will cost $200 more than its chief competition, the Oculus Rift. The $799 headset, powered by Valve’s SteamVR, will ship with a controller for each hand and a pair of “Lighthouse” laser base stations to track movement in a room-scale environment.

The price was revealed at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where UploadVR confirmed Vive will ship with an internal microphone and integrated Bluetooth support to communicate with a variety of smartphones. For a limited time, the system will come bundled with two popular titles: Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption.

Editors Note and Update: Another publication broke the embargo on this information so UploadVR is independently confirming what’s already been made public. Updates to come at 9 a.m. PST with quotes from Valve and HTC. The wording of this post was updated slightly from its original version to clarify our independent confirmation of the facts.

http://uploadvr.com/htc-vive-is-799/

http://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-price-799-and-release-date-april-1st/

HTC have finally officially announced the price of the ‘Consumer Edition’ of their Valve SteamVR powered virtual reality solution. The HTC Vive will cost a cool $799.

Those eagerly awaiting news on how much they can expect to have to lay down to own a piece of Valve’s vision of VR’s future can rest easy. HTC have announced that their Vive VR system will ship from April 1st and cost $799. Pre-orders have also been re-affirmed as going live February 29th with a more precise time of 10am Eastern (7am PST / 3pm GMT).

For your 800 bucks, this is what you’ll get in the box:

Hardware

1 x ‘Vive’ VR headset

2 x SteamVR Wireless Controllers

2 x ‘Lighthouse’ Laser Base stations (for positional tracking)

Games:

Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives

Fantastic Contraption

What’s new?

The only new feature announced today is Vive Phone Services, the ability to attach your phone via Bluetooth direct to the Vive VR headset to make and take calls and send SMS messages. The theory? Immersion breaking headset removals are irritating. Giving you the option to remain in VR whilst remaining connected to the real world is the key. And given HTC’s long history as a mobile phone manufacturer, the move is probably shouldn’t be surprising.

Other than Vive Phone Services, the ‘Consumer Edition’ looks essentially identical to the ‘Pre’ edition we got our hands on with at CES last month and which shipped to developers recently. Upgrades from the original ‘Developer Edition’ include a lighter, more ergonomic form factor, redesigned SteamVR controllers . The biggest technical addition is a front-facing camera for passing through a view an augmented overlay of the real world inside your VR experience.

HTC are positioning the Vive as a complete ‘room scale’ VR solution, that is one which ships with everything you need to enjoy their particular brand of tethered, ‘free roaming’ virtual reality is all in the box from day one.

HTC’s message is a clear effort to differentiate themselves from the Oculus Rift, the only other desktop PC VR solution in the running at the moment. Oculus’ excellent ‘Touch’ motion controllers have unfortunately been delayed until the 2nd half of 2016, forcing the company to ship their Rift consumer VR headset with an Xbox One gamepad.

The unique selling point of the SteamVR powered Vive VR system is its focus on ‘room scale’ VR, the kind of standing, walking, ducking and even running virtual reality experiences that Oculus are at present shying away from, even if they’re technically capable of delivering them. This differentiator is strong, but is tempered by the fact, despite SteamVR’s ability to fit many experiences to different room sizes, not everyone will have enough space to much use of it.

Nevertheless, despite the seemingly high $799 price tag, the HTC Vive Consumer Edition does represent a sizeable amount of technology and functionality for your money. We’ll dig into precisely how big in an article to come soom.

>April 1st

An appropriate date, retards at /v/ thinking that Vive would be somehow cheaper is a joke.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/29944/facebook-announces-social-vr-team-creating-next-generation-of-apps/

It’s not hard to see why social networking giant, Facebook, decided to spend some $2 billion USD on Oculus VR back in 2014. Virtual reality (VR) technology has some incredible applications for social platforms, and the company is already working on some areas of that potential, such as sharing 360 degree videos that can be watched in a head-mounted display (HMD) such as Samsung’s Gear VR. There’s plenty more to come, though, and Facebook is making sure it’s ready with ‘new teams’ that are creating the ‘next-generation’ of social VR apps.

Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said as much today when making a surprise appearance at Samsung’s Unpacked press event in Barcelona, Spain, just ahead of the 2016 Mobile World Congress (MWC) event. “We’ve recently created new teams at Facebook to build the next-generation of social apps in VR.” Shortly thereafter, Oculus VR itself officially announced the Social VR team from Facebook.

A statement from the company reads: “Facebook has created a Social VR team focused entirely on exploring the future of social interaction in VR. They’ll explore how people can connect and share using today’s VR tech, as well as long-term possibilities. They will work closely with Oculus and other teams at Facebook to build the foundation for tomorrow’s social VR experiences on all platforms.”

VR fans have already seen the start of Oculus VR’s work with social apps in two pieces of content. The first, The Toybox, is a demo for the Oculus Touch position-tracked controllers that also lets two people talk to each other and interact together online, appearing as avatars. An experimental social app is also available on Gear VR right now. Expect to see plenty more from the company in this field in the near future, then.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/29934/samsung-reveals-gear-360-camera/

Samsung has had no problem matching its competitors, especially when it comes to virtual reality (VR) development, and today is Samsung’s day to shine with new announcements during its Samsung Unpacked 2016 event today. The tech entertainment company have revealed its newest immersive technology, the Samsung Gear 360, a 360-degree photo and video camera device.

The spherical full range camera, compatible to use with the Gear VR and the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge smartphone, is roughly just smaller than a baseball -although not necessarily advised to be thrown like one – weighing just 153 grams (5.39 ounces). The camera has two F/2.0 fish-eye lenses that take 195-degree content, recorded in high resolution (3840×1920) in MP4 format. In terms of storage, the device can shoot up to seven hours of content with its 128GB microSD card.

The camera has four modes, including still images, time-lapse images, video, and loop. Usage of the camera isn’t too limited as it is splash resistant, meaning you can take it out in the rain and not worry about it. It is also pretty versatile in how it can be mounted on any tripod, or even a drone.

Using the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, the user can remotely control the camera from their phone, and is user friendly in how the content can be transmitted via Wi-Fi for edits, and can be viewed on the Gear VR headset or shared on social media.

During the Samsung Unpacked 2016 event the Gear 360 was showcased with a Samsung representative describing it as “a small sphere packed with the best of our technologies”. He went on to say “now you can create 360 VR experiences on your own, and your S7 in your pocket will do all the magic”.

The device is said to be available in the second quarter of 2016, however the price hasn’t been released yet.

http://www.roadtovr.com/movidius-dedicated-vision-processing-chip-coming-soon-ar-vr-headsets/

Movidius may be a little known name to the average consumer, but the company behind Google Project Tango’s Myriad 1 vision processing chip is gearing up to release their new chip architecture in both VR and AR headset manufacturers, and a lot sooner than you think.

I sat down with the Movidius team at this year’s MWC where they showed me the Myriad 2 vision processing unit (VPU), a dedicated unit capable of running simultaneous machine vision tasks that VR enthusiasts are especially keen to see integrated into upcoming headsets. Computer vision tasks like eye tracking, hand tracking, object recognition, and positional tracking—things that are usually done through GPUs—are all on the list of things Movidius wants to see shunted to their Myriad 2 VPU.

The chip incorporates image and video signal processing pipeline with programmable vision processing to support a complete camera-to-display experience. The chip could hypothetically be ‘mobilized’ as well, considering it fits into a 500 mW power envelope.

Through a TV, I was shown the unit first in a prototype configuration running in 4 separate demos simultaneously, a powerful reminder of exactly what may be next on the to-do list of AR and VR headset manufacturers. The prototype was only using a single image sensor—not ideal for VR or AR purposes which requires depth information—but the teams maintains that their VPU was only running at 22 percent of their array of 12 vector processors.

“The idea is end customers are looking for gesture, depth, eye tracking, all at the same time, and all very fast and at low latency,” said Marketing Communications Director Jack Dashwood. “So if you image along these 12 processors, you’ve got two of them being used for depth, two of them are being used for positional tracking, one is being used for eye tracking, and [the others] in some other combination depending on the customer: That is the draw for this chip.”

Although Movidius was only showing bare chips and sensors in their off-site hotel suite, I was told by Dashwood that the company is currently engaged with multiple VR and AR headset manufacturers (exactly which ones he couldn’t say), and that we may be able to expect something tangible in late 2016 or early 2017 using their VPU.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30024/oculus-ceo-theres-no-rift-2-or-3-if-first-isnt-great/

It’s no secret that the first consumer version of the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) will be far from the last. The kit, which will start to ship on 28th March 2016 for those that pre-ordered it early on, represents what creator Oculus VR feels is finally a consumer-ready product, but still has a lot of room for improvement. But, for the next iterations of the device to ship, the company feels it has to nail this first product. At least, that’s what CEO Brendan Iribe believes.

Iribe said as much in a recent interview with Wall Street Journal. “You’ve got to stay super focused on shipping product,” he replied when asked about ensuring the product was a success. “There isn’t a version two or three if there isn’t a great version one. Managing expectations is super important. There are still a lot of challenges in terms of the computer you need to power the device, the form of the device, the amount of time you’re going to spend inside. This is a 30- to 60-minute experience. We will get to hours, but that’s not necessarily the first generation.”

The first Oculus Rift costs some $599 USD. That price came as a shock to many when it was announced back on 6th January, setting a huge premium on early PC-based VR. HTC recently kept in line with that trend, however, announcing a $799 tag for the HTC Vive. Oculus VR’s product comes with the HMD, an Xbox One controller, the Oculus Remote, a tracking station, Lucky’s Tale and, for those that do pre-order, EVE: Valkyrie. The HTC Vive, meanwhile, offers the device, two Lighthouse base tracking systems for Room Scale VR, two position tracked controllers, Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30108/steam-listings-add-vr-support-section-detailing-hmds-controls-more/

It’s not uncommon for online stores to list details and specifications for video games, but it isn’t something that can necessarily be expected of virtual reality (VR) as the consumer market is still relatively small. This may be the next trend for retailers as Valve has now incorporated a complete specification overview alongside product listings on their Steam Store for users to know what they need and should expect when playing the video game.

VR is something that Valve, who partnered with HTC to bring the HTC Vive and also made SteamVR a section to Steam, has worked hard to pioneer, and with the addition of the spec sidebar there is no sign of slowing down. Categories include, as you can see in the screenshot below taken from the Windlands page, which headsets the chosen video game supports, what hardware can be used with it, and what type of area the user will need while playing.

This new feature has come within a few days of HTC’s announcement of the HTC Vive pricing, pre-order, and shipping information for worldwide consumers, as well as Valve’s very own performance testing tool (http://vrfocus.com/archives/29997/valve-launches-vr-performance-test-for-htc-vive/) to see if your PC is VR-ready.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30109/windlands-brand-new-city-world-revealed/

Earlier in the year anticipated virtual reality (VR) adventure title, Windlands, launched in Steam’s Early Access system. The release followed the news that Crystal Rift developer Psytec Games had picked up the project to help with development and publishing. Much of what’s been seen since has been similar to the version of the title that released in demo-form during an IndieGoGo crowd-funding campaign. Today, however, VRFocus can reveal the first glimpse at a brand new environment for the title in several images seen below.

Psytec Games has supplied VRFocus with the first look at a City-based level for the upcoming project. The title’s first level was set in a forest, but here you can see massive, ancient buildings that pierce the sky, a labyrinth of pipes sprawling throughout the environment and dotted patches of trees. As with the first level, players will be able to explore this world with the aid of an enhanced jumping mechanics and a pair of grappling hooks that will allow them to swing through the city at speed, gathering collectables.

Windlands is in development for both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive head-mounted displays (HMDs), and will support the Oculus Touch and HTC Vive position-tracked controllers respectively. Standard controller integration is also included, with grappling hooks them looked to the player’s head movements. Psytec Games plans to release the full version of the title either in or before June 2016, with the Early Access version continuing to be updated during that time. The price for the pre-release version and full edition will be the same at £14.99 GBP.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30020/vive-rift-and-psvr-support-planned-for-overload/

Last week VRFocus reported on the launch of a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for Overload (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/revivalprod/overload-the-ultimate-six-degree-of-freedom-shoote/description), a new 6-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) shooter from Revival Productions. The team is comprised of developers that worked on one of the defining series within this genre, Descent, and are experimenting with virtual reality (VR) support for the project. The Kickstarter campaign page doesn’t reveal exactly which head-mounted displays (HMDs) might be integrated into the project but, recently, the developer has clarified.

According to Overload‘s Matt Toschlog, the studio is looking to integrate both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive into the PC version of the title and PlayStation VR for the PlayStation 4 version. When asked to consider support for the HTC Vive over on the title’s official forums, Toschlog simply replied: “Yep, we’re looking at HTC Vive and plan on supporting it along with Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR.”

Overload is looking to raise some $300,000 USD through its campaign, which draws to a closer on 11th March 2016. Should it reach its funding then it seeks to bring back a genre that’s long been neglected by name developers. It was, however, recently revisited Sigtrap Games with Sublevel Zero, which is also experimenting with VR support. At the time of writing, the campaign for Overload has just passed a third of that goal. If successful, it should launch in March 2017.

For fucks sake, these fucking posting errors are the worst.

http://uploadvr.com/vr-announcements-affect-global-revenue-forecasts/

VR as an industry is not quite as mysterious as it used to be. It was not too long ago that the most impressive piece of VR tech was about 80% duct tape and 20% hope.

In the past two year’s, however, a flurry of announcements, acquisitions, and partnerships have elevated VR from a hobbyist’s passion into a juggernaut scene worthy of attention from serious financial analysts. As more and more data points (a price here, a release announcement there) trickle out, these analysts are factoring them together to create a forecast for VR’s future revenue potential. One of these group’s, Super Data Research, is among the first to add two major revelations from MWC 2016 – the HTC Vive’s price and LG’s foray into the mobile VR space – into that equation.

Super Data’s director of Research and Insights Stephanie Llamas reached out to UploadVR via email to share her firm’s findings. She writes concerning the HTC Vive price announcement that:

“HTC was smart in that it set pricing expectations high off the bat. So the $799 price tag didn’t hit consumers quite as hard as the somewhat unexpected $599 cost of an Oculus Rift. However, the high price of an Oculus hasn’t stopped consumers from overrunning preorders, so it’s likely the HTC Vive will face similar initial success.”

Factoring Vive’s price into the mix, the firm estimated that PC VR tech alone – including all hardware, software, and peripherals – will be a $1.6 billion industry by the end of 2016. Let me be clear about that: this firm believes VR will be and over $1 billion dollar industry in a year that will be one fourth over before the first major headset even begins to release. From there Super Data sees PC VR revenue scaling up fairly steadily year over year to $5.1 billion dollars by 2019.

MWC brought significant announcements for the mobile VR space as well. LG’s introduction of the 360 VR headset, and Samsung’s aggressive pushes to get more Gear VRs into the wild, both impacted the revenue forecasts for mobile VR.

Llamas writes of the coming battle between LG and Samsung:

“LG needs to have a competitive edge and even though Samsung beat them to the punch with VR, if they hadn’t moved forward with an HMD they would have been grossly behind. This, at least, keeps them in the running, but we have yet to really see how much power they are bringing to the table.

/

>>1748

However, Samsung is leading the charge aggressively; not only do they have first-mover advantage in the premium mobile space, and a partnership with Oculus, arguably the most visible player in the game, they have developed a smartphone specifically for VR with the S7 and an easy-to-use peripheral with the Gear 360. This not only facilitates use but agency, allowing users to crowdsource and participate in the development of VR.”

Super Data’s overall prediction for mobile VR following these announcements is that this industry will pull in a respectable $813 million this year before rising to $3.1 billion in 2016. Some will question whether if it is wise to bet on PC VR to beat out mobile as the industry matures. Also, market predictions can vary wildly between different analysts. Goldman Sachs released a report this year that predicts higher total revenue for VR during a similar timetable, and another analyst recently adjusted his prediction for the VR/AR market by $30 billion. With figures differing so dynamically from group to group, we asked Llamas to explain how Super Data arrived at their particular set of numbers:

“We have our own regional forecasts of mobile and PC game revenue and consumer spending patterns as a result of the line-by-line transaction data our industry partners send us. This gives us a sense of what we can expect on different platforms in terms of software revenue. We also use historical trends of other media, from digital cameras to smartphones and all the way back to television (as we believe VR to be a new medium rather than a gaming or entertainment peripheral).

This is combined with consumer spending trends and forecasts, public and private information we have gathered regarding money invested in VR, and survey data to get a sense of anticipated consumer interest and behavior.

We align these data with publicly disclosed sales figures for existing VR headset and likely release windows for future devices such as Apple and Google’s upcoming HMDs.”

She explains that the company’s investment figures are sourced mainly from Crunchbase; and that its sales figures are based on the Google Cardboard and DK1/DK2 disclosures from Google and Oculus respectively. Llamas clarifies that, “No major companies are yet disclosing consumer headset sales in their earnings. The rest is based on previous media trends, survey insights and off-the-record conversations with industry folks.”

/

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30172/banning-vr-porn-on-playstation-vr-a-mistake-says-naughty-america/

As virtual reality (VR) has grown over the past few years, the inevitable debate surrounding VR porn has also intensified. Porn could stand to be a huge factor in the success of the new technology and you can expect to see this sort of content quickly appear on PC-based head-mounted displays (HMDs). PlayStation VR, however, is said to be the ‘big elephant in the VR porn room’, according to a leader in the porn industry that suspects that consumers will ‘put their weight behind another contender’ if a ban is put in place.

Naughty America CIO Ian Paul said as much in a recent interview with The Daily Star. “The big elephant in the VR porn room is Sony’s PlayStation and the firm has been burned twice before by not allowing adult content,” he said. “If you look at VHS versus Betamax, Sony lost because of their refusal to support the adult industry. Sony then backed Blu-Ray over HD DVD and in the eleventh hour they finally conceded to allow adult entertainment which helped them win the HD movie battle.

“So it proves the adult industry could be a tiebreaker when it comes to these situations. Hopefully Sony won’t make the same mistake because, otherwise, the adult industry and consumers are going to put their weight behind another contender,” Paul concluded.

Although it would likely be very profitable for Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) to include porn on PlayStation VR, Sony’s wider history with the industry makes it seem doubtful that this will happen, at least through official channels. Perhaps if the company were to allow 360 video play back through internet browsers then users could get access to content this way, but the chances of SCE allowing a specific app for porn on its console seems doubtful.

SCE’s kit is yet to receive release details, although they’ll hopefully be shared during a presentation on 15th March 2016 at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

More like it will, why would any guy or anyone buy a VR headset (which replaces the job of a monitor) that doesn't allow porn (or any specific content) when other ones will? PSVR is insane when you think about it, when has a monitor ever been locked out from working on any PC or console?

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30159/oculus-planning-gdc-community-meetup/

Oculus VR is going to have a busy March. The biggest item, of course, is the launch of the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD), which finally begins to ship on 28th March 2016. Before the long-anticipated device can release, though, the company will also have a showing at the 2016 Game Developers Conference (GDC) and Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC) from 14th – 18th March. It’s already been confirmed that Oculus VR will be hosting a preview event at the show, but it appears that the company is also doing something for its community.

Oculus VR Community Manager Andres Hernandez recently took to the Oculus Subreddit to announce plans for a ‘community get-together’ during the show on 17th March. You won’t need to have a GDC pass to attend and you’re welcome to bring along ‘+1’s’. Anyone interested in going can shoot a message to Hernandez’s Reddit account, Gypsy816, or simply reply to the thread to have their name added to the list. Developers from around the VR community are already flooding in to sign up for the event, even if they’re not at the shows themselves.

Elsewhere, you can expect to see plenty of other VR events surrounding GDC this year. Along with an endless amount of talks, workshops and panels discussing the upcoming technology, Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) will be hosting another event for its PlayStation VR HMD for PlayStation 4, where it’s hoped fans will finally learn the price and release date of the kit. No doubt HTC and Valve will also be present with the HTC Vive, which will begin shipping shortly after the Oculus Rift on 1st April 2016.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30156/lucky-rubin-teasing-new-oculus-rift-title-to-be-revealed-soon/

It’s been a while since Oculus VR has announced another virtual reality (VR) title being developed under the Oculus Studios banner. Late last year saw the company reveal Rock Band VR from Harmonix and The Climb from Crytek, each of which is set to be exclusive to the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD), but news has been focused on hardware over software since then. That will soon change, however, as Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey and Oculus VR’s Head of Worldwide Studios, Jason Rubin, are teasing another title to be announced soon.

Luckey kicked off the teases on Twitter, writing: “Anyone remember the Virtual World arc of Yu-Gi-Oh? Get ready for something even better!” For those that don’t know, Yu-Gi-Oh! is a card battling anime show in which strategic battles come to life. The Virtual World story which Luckey is referring to takes place within – as the name suggests – a virtual realm. It could be, then, that Luckey is hinting at some sort of card battling VR title that brings monsters and more to life within the virtual world created by the Oculus Rift.

Rubin followed up Luckey’s tweet with: “Excited for this announcement! One of the experiences most “tested” around Oculus Studios…” No doubt ‘tested’ translates to ‘repeatedly played’, then, but there aren’t many hints of what the experience might actually be here. There’s also no word on who could be developing the experience, though studios such as Ready At Dawn and 4A Games are known to be working with Oculus VR on the HMD and haven’t yet revealed their titles. It’s also not clear if the title will be revealed later today or sometime soon.

The Oculus Rift itself is available to pre-order now for $599 USD, with first shipping taking place on 28th March 2016.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30183/superhot-arrives-today-on-steam/

Today sees the release of the much anticipated first-person shooter (FPS) SUPERHOT by developer SUPERHOT Team on Steam. Starting out as a Kickstarter crowd-funded project in May 2014, hitting its $100,000 target within 24 hours and going on to raise $250,798 in total, the videogame will be launching on PC first with an Xbox One version to follow shortly after.

The highly stylised graphics in SUPERHOT, with pristine white backgrounds and subtle greys contrasting with vivid red enemies and red bullet tracers, help to focus the player on the videogames’ main mechanic, that being time moves only when the player moves.

If players stand still the world around them moves in super slow motion, allowing them to plan a route of attack through an onslaught of enemies, dodging bullets and other obstacles. SUPERHOT doesn’t feature regenerating health bars, ammo or weapon pickups like a standard FPS, meaning players must use their wits, fists and anything else they find to shoot, punch and out manoeuvre everything in the way.

As VRFocus has previously reported SUPERHOT had appeared at Oculus VR’s booth at a number of events throughout 2014, but during 2015 everything went quiet. Then earlier this month the developer posted a teasing quote on its Kickstarter page saying it had: “Big plans ahead for virtual reality.” These plans will be revealed after the videogame has released, so if the team mean the PC version hopefully that maybe fairly soon.

The title will cost £17.99 GBP at full price on Steam, but it is currently on a special promotion until 3rd March 2016 with 10% off, making it £16.19.

http://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-hidden-mechanism-maximum-field-of-view-lens-to-eye-distance/

Among the improvements to come to the latest version of the Vive is easier access to a feature that will maximize the device’s field of view between users and be a boon to glasses wearers.

The Vive Pre (and consumer Vive, which is essentially the same) has both a mechanism to adjust the distance between lenses (IPD), but also the distance from the user’s eyes to the lenses. Maximum field of view is achieved when the lenses are as close to the eye as they can comfortably be, and for each user this distance will be different depending upon facial structure.

Revealed in the Vive’s manual, HTC has smartly combined the headstrap attachment and lens-to-eye adjustment knob into a single mechanism. To adjust the lens-to-eye distance, grab the rubber part of the headstrap attachment on the sides of the headset and pull outward to unlock the mechanism. From there, twist each knob equally to move the lenses forward or back. Click the knobs back into place to lock in your setting.

This adjustment will come in especially handy to make room for those who need to wear glasses while using the headset. On the original HTC Vive development kit, this adjustment was even more hidden, with a tiny knob inside the face-gasket, making it impossible to adjust while wearing the headset. The Vive Pre’s way of doing it should make it easy to dial in your fit while actually wearing the device (rather than doing trial and error).

The Oculus Rift DK2 also had such an adjustment, but the consumer Rift that’s shipping next month doesn’t. Oculus instead says they’ll include several different foam liners to create a buffer for those with or without glasses, though we suspect this will be a more cumbersome adjustment, especially when passing the headset around between several users.

Sony’s PlayStation VR headset also includes a lens-to-eye adjustment though it’s achieved in a slightly different way. The PlayStation VR headset hangs down from the supporting band around the user’s head, and a button on the bottom of the headset allows the user to slide the entire display enclosure closer or further from their eyes.

http://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-pre-orders-will-get-tilt-brush-for-free/

HTC today confirmed worldwide pricing for the SteamVR powered Vive VR headset, due to go up for pre-order tomorrow (29th Feb). They also announced that those pre-orders would receive Google’s virtual reality, paint application Tilt Brush in addition to the two announced pack-in titles Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption.

Google’s Tilt Brush, originally developed by Skillman & Hackett, was one of the most unlikely sounding titles to join the flood of hype which flowed from HTC Vive’s inaugural demos at GDC 2015. It was a painting program, but one built for use in VR, complete with fluid motion controls and tweaked for room-scale VR. On the face of it, nothing likely to set the pulse racing, especially when placed next to more obvious targets like Aperture Robot Repair, set in Valve’s Portal universe. And yet, the intuitive and occasionally sublime VR painting title has received constant and sustained positivity since it appeared and has become very much associated with the SteamVR experience.

So it’s good to see HTC announce today that, when you pre-order your HTC Vive tomorrow (worldwide prices now officially confirmed by the way), along with Owlchemy Labs’ Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives and Northway Games’ Fantastic Contraption, you’ll also receive a copy of Google’s Tilt Brush. Quite an eclectic bundle of games, but all of them excellent demonstrations of the HTC Vive’s SteamVR controllers capabilities. Tilt Brush however may have broad enough appeal to attract those uninterested in gaming to the VR fold to become the Wii Tennis or Brain Training of the consumer VR revolution.

http://www.vrdb.com/news/announcing-vrdb-the-virtual-reality-content-hub-and-community

We are excited to announce the launch of VRDB.com, the newest addition to the DBolical Network. VRDB is dedicated to covering all aspects of virtual reality. As the medium and the technology powering it begins to arrive in consumers' hands this year, and its creators delve into uncharted territory, VRDB will serve as a guide: what hardware to buy; what games to play; what's in store for the future of VR.

VRDB is built upon the same systems powering IndieDB.com and ModDB.com, giving VR content creators the ability to submit their own games and media to the site. By allowing creators to directly contribute, VRDB becomes a database of knowledge for developers and enthusiasts alike.

To ensure VRDB will track and highlight the most important developments in virtual reality, we'll also be posting dedicated editorial content from our editor, Dan Hindes. Dan has over five years experience in the field, previously working as the editor of Australian PC gaming magazine PC PowerPlay, and as the Australian editor of GameSpot.com. He'll be producing news, reviews, features and interviews covering everyone from small, local VR hackers to major hardware manufacturers.

If you are a VR developer, manufacturer, publisher, or distributor, you can contact the editor at dan@vrdb.com. You can also create a VRDB account and get started by submitting your game, its screenshots, trailers, and playable versions. Join us in making VRDB the most comprehensive hub for virtual reality enthusiasts and pioneers.

http://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-rift-apple-mac-osx-support-founder-palmer-luckey-good-computer/

While Oculus had once supported the Rift on both Mac OSX and Linux with early builds of their SDK, it was back in early 2015 that they indefinitely “paused” support for those platforms. Now Oculus founder Palmer Luckey says that whether or not the Rift supports Mac is “up to Apple” and the performance of the computers they decide to release.

Speaking to Shacknews during a recent Microsoft event, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey said support for the Rift on Mac OSX was a matter of Apple releasing a computer that could handle the performance demanded by the Rift.

“If they ever release a good computer we will [support Mac OSX],” Luckey said. He elaborated, saying that even Apple’s top-end desktop system doesn’t meet the hardware specification set by Oculus for Rift support.

“It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritize high-end GPUs. You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top-of-the-line AMD FirePro D700 and it still doesn’t match our recommended spec. If they prioritize higher-end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day… we’d love to support Mac. But right now there’s just not a single machine out there [from Apple] that supports it. So even if we can support on the software side, there’s just no audience of [Mac users] that can run the vast majority of [VR] software out there.”

Luckey is of course speaking of the ‘Oculus Recommended Specification’, which asks for a minimum of Nvidia GTX 970 / AMD R9 290 GPU (or equivalent), an Intel i5-4590 CPU (or equivalent), 8GB of RAM, along with 3x USB 3.0 ports and 1x USB 2.0 port. Oculus set this bar to allow developers to target a known hardware configuration that’s capable of providing consistent rendering performance in the face of the considerable demands of the Rift (90 FPS in 3D at 2160×1200). The company is working with certain computer partners to certify systems as ‘Oculus Ready PCs’ which meet these specifications while staying under a $1,000 price tag.

Oculus had supported Mac and Linux intermittently with their SDK throughout the years, but officially “paused” support for those operating systems back in 2015. Oculus has since formed a partnership with Microsoft for purported plug-and-play support for the Rift in Windows 10, as well as Xbox One game streaming in VR.

Surprised that they even entertained the thought, Apple are all style no power.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30484/oculus-building-a-lot-of-first-party-software/

Oculus VR has lined up plenty of partnerships with well-established developers to create content for the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD). Over the course of the kit’s launch window, which begins on 28th March 2016, fans are going to see ‘Oculus Studios’ projects from second party partnerships, in which the VR specialist is funding and publishing titles from studios such as Insomniac Games and Harmonix. But what about first-party content from developers that Oculus VR itself owns? Apparently, that’s still coming.

Oculus Rift creator and company founder Palmer Luckey said as much in a recent interview with TechRadar. “We’re building a lot of first-party software and we have some second-party stuff that we’re funding,” Luckey replied when asked about the company’s work in software. “There’s also a lot of third-party developers working on stuff. I can’t play favorites and pick any one application or one product.” Luckey did not make any specific mention to any such first-party products and who might be working on them.

It seems that, while fans wait to see what first-party content might come from Oculus VR, the company will be keeping you busy with second-party content. In fact, it’s known that every single developer that Oculus VR has partnered with has either pitched a second VR videogame to the company or is already working on another one. One such studio is High Voltage Software, which last week announced card battling VR title, Dragon Front, as an Oculus Studios project on top of its upcoming VR first-person shooter (FPS), Damaged Core, which was revealed alongside the consumer Oculus Rift at E3 2015. Dragon Front is due in Q2 2016, though it’s not yet clear when Damaged Core might surface.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30412/oculus-vr-hires-a-head-of-video/

As any company working in virtual reality (VR) will tell you, videogames are just one small part of what this technology is capable of. In fact, Gear VR mobile-based head-mounted display (HMD) creators Samsung and Oculus VR recently reported that the kit is most used for watching video content right now. 360 degree content has also started to appear on Facebook, the social network that owns Oculus VR. To that end, it looks like Oculus VR itself is expanding its work in VR video content, and has now hired a Head of Video to help look after this field.

Former Hulu SVP Eugene Wei has been placed in the role, as reported by Recode. As ‘video’ has a lot of interpretations in VR, there’s been some confusion as to what his role will actually entail, but it’s since been confirmed that Wei will be working on the platforms that power 360 degree video content. His team is said to be looking mainly a 360 degree video, suggesting that his work will be separate from what’s currently going on at Oculus VR’s own film-centric division, Oculus Story Studio, which is creating CG VR features.

That’s not all Oculus VR is doing with video, however. The company’s platforms also feature movie/TV offerings that the company has now put in place on Gear VR. It’s already possible to watch traditional movies from a range of studios, and apps such as Netflix offer their entire libraries to view in-HMD. It appears that Wei’s team won’t be working on this type of content, however, despite his connects to Hulu. The new hire has also worked at Amazon and Flipboard.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30580/devolver-digital-to-publish-gory-fps-strafe-rift-support-still-on/

Early last year indie developer Pixel Titans closed out a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for a brand new first-person shooter (FPS) named STRAFE, raising some $207,847 USD for the project. The amount of money raised also meant that the team would work to incorporate support for the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) into the experience. It’s since been a quiet year and a few weeks for STRAFE but, today, Devolver Digital has announced that it has partnered up with Pixel Titans to publish the title.

STRAFE is designed as a fast paced FPS that’s inspired by the likes of Quake and Doom in both its mechanics and the buckets of gore that players will spill. The title features randomly generated levels with a variety of rooms, enemies, power ups, secrets and more to uncover, with the location of each switching up with each new life. Four different types of zone feature that are said to cater to different gameplay styles, and players will be able to upgrade their guns, with over 30 different types of weapon featuring.

Crucially, the announcement reconfirms that STRAFE will still be supporting the Oculus Rift when it launches on PC in early 2017, though there’s no mention of if it could also come to the HTC Vive, nor if a PlayStation 4 port with PlayStation VR support is possible.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30546/luckey-to-people-on-the-fence-about-rift-you-should-try-it-first/

The Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) has been available to pre-order for almost two months now and, while Oculus VR won’t share specific figures about how it’s performing, the company is adamant that it’s surpassing its expectations. There are still plenty of people yet to decide if they’ll buy an Oculus Rift, however, especially with the HTC Vive now also available to pre-order. To those people, Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey recommends that you should try the kit before you make your mind up.

Luckey said as much to ShackNews (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijyBMpm2bqQ) in a recent interview. “You should try it first,” he replied when asked what he would say to people on the fence. “That is the best way to decide if you are interested in VR or not. I bet that most people who have tried VR are going to be interested but even the people that try it and aren’t interested right now, they say ‘oh, it’s a little too expensive for me’, ‘my computer’s not fast enough’ or even just straight up ‘hey, this quality isn’t where I want it to be’. If they try the Rift, they will understand that, at some point, virtual reality is going to be really important.

“Most people can understand that if the cost comes down and the quality goes up, then VR’s going to be something they really want to have in their life,” Luckey concluded. “And that’s my real goal, is to convince people that virtual reality is going to be an important part of their life and very few people try the Rift and come away with a different opinion.”

The Oculus Rift will start to ship on 28th March 2016 and includes a tracking unit, Xbox One controller, Oculus Remote and Lucky’s Tale. Anyone that pre-orders will also get a free copy of EVE: Valkyrie.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30471/oculus-confirmed-for-e3-2016/

By June 2016, the virtual reality (VR) landscape is going to be a very different place. Both the Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) and its main rival, the HTC Vive, will have been available for a few months, though the former will still be making its way through shipping pre-ordered units, with which it is currently backdated until July. Of course, that month will also be when the biggest videogame event in the industry, E3, gets underway from 14th – 16th June. It’s yet to be confirmed if HTC will be at the show, but Oculus VR will definitely be in attendance.

Oculus VR is one of the few companies already listed on the official E3 2016 website’s ‘Participating Companies‘ (http://pr311jm731.mapyourshow.com/6_0/alphalist.cfm?alpha=O) section. There aren’t any details yet about what to expect from the company at the event, though no doubt this means it will have its usual large presence on the show floor at the very least. It’s hardly surprising; Oculus VR has been at E3 for the past few years in one form or another, and can even have its origins traced back to the event in 2012 when John Carmack was showing an early HMD pieced together with duct tape running Doom 3.

What’s not confirmed, however, is if Oculus VR will be hosting another pre-E3 press conference like it did last year. Set the week before the 2015 event, the company finally revealed the consumer Oculus Rift in full at its show, and introduced some of the launch titles for the device such as Edge of Nowhere by Insomniac Games and Chronos from Gunfire Games. This was also where Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey announced the company’s long rumoured input solution, Oculus Touch, which consists of a pair of position-tracked controllers.

http://uploadvr.com/amazon-video-vr/

With Netflix and Hulu already represented in the virtual reality space, it was only a matter of time before Amazon joined the fray. According to new job posting on Glassdoor Amazon Video is looking to hire a senior software development manager for virtual reality and it doesn’t seem like it will be a single hire either.

The posting’s description calls for a talented developer who will “lead [their] Virtual Reality team” who will be responsible for “building the Virtual Reality experience within Amazon Video.”

“Entertainment is evolving rapidly,” the description continues, “the Virtual Reality team will explore and create the platform and interface for immersive storytelling. This will include an ingestion and playback platform for Virtual Reality experiences.”

Based on the description Amazon Video appears to be building not just a platform where viewers can watch their flatscreen content in a virtual environment, similar to the approaches that Hulu and Netflix are taking, but rather a platform for distribution of 360 VR content. This could place them in the same realm as YouTube’s 360º video platform or WEVR’s recently announced Transport. While both YouTube and WEVR have been funding 360º content of their own, it is unclear if Amazon will follow suit themselves or if they will simply be more of a content distributor.

Interestingly Amazon Video’s arguably biggest competitor, Netflix, recently spoke out about a desire to get into the 360º content creation scene themselves with the company’s VP of Product Innovation saying “we’re very interested in where it could go in storytelling…We’re tracking where that goes.” From that quote it seems like they will likely take a wait and see approach, but that they are very interested in the space.

Amazon has been fairly active in the AR and VR scene as of late, releasing a number of patent designs for AR products, launching Lumberyard – a new game engine with incoming VR support, and creating a launch site on Amazon.com for VR products and with this job posting it seems that the company is going to continue to expand its efforts in the space. It seems that it is only a matter of time before Amazon begins adding WebVR and AR functionality to their shopping experience, similar to what we saw demoed with vRetail and with Meta’s AR glasses.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30704/oculus-creator-generally-speaking-rift-touch-could-run-vive/

There’s some confusion surrounding Oculus VR’s approach to Room Scale user-tracking for virtual reality (VR) right now. The company claims that its upcoming head-mounted display (HMD), the Oculus Rift, is capable of the feature that’s been prioritised within its main rival, HTC and Valve’s HTC Vive. But with its new position tracked controllers, Oculus Touch, not set to arrive until the second half of 2016 – and a second tracking unit along with it – developers and fans aren’t able to test out these claims for themselves. When that kit does arrive, however, the Oculus Rift should be fully capable to imitating the HTC Vive’s Room Scale support, ‘generally speaking’.

That is according to kit creator Palmer Luckey. Recently taking to Reddit to talk about the differences between the Oculus Touch and the HTC Vive’s own position tracked controllers, Luckey was asked if the Oculus Rift, two Oculus Touch controllers, and two tracking sensors set up as how the two Lighthouse tracking stations included with the HTC Vive are set up would be able to play titles that are in development for Valve’s HMD right now. His reply was simple: “Impossible to say with certainty until all the final hardware is out there, and game support depends on developers, but generally speaking, yes.”

No doubt many will still want to test this out for themselves before they accept Luckey’s statements, but sadly there’s still no word on when Oculus Touch will be arriving inside that broad launch window. Both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are up for pre-order now and cost $599 USD and $799 respectively. The former will start to ship on 28th March 2016 while the latter will begin deliveries a week later on 5th April.

>>1778

There's been a lot of buzz in the financial world over Intel possibly using this display in an upcoming VR HMD.

HOPEWELL JUNCTION, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Jan. 6, 2016– eMagin Corporation (NYSE MKT:EMAN) has signed a non-exclusive intellectual property (IP) licensing agreement for its unique 4 MegaPixel per eye immersive virtual reality headset technology with an undisclosed company. The deal includes an upfront licensing fee of $1M and a commitment to use eMagin’s 2,000 x 2,000 pixel full color displays in the company’s headsets. eMagin’s OLED microdisplays are the superior choice for the emerging Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) markets with features such as their speed (which helps prevent nausea), small size, low power consumption, high brightness and high contrast. These features make eMagin’s microdisplays a better choice than alternative liquid crystal based display technologies like LCOS or LCD.

“This licensing agreement confirms that our immersive headset technology is unique in the VR market,” said Andrew G. Sculley, CEO of eMagin Corporation. “Our immersive headset has four times the resolution of alternative cellphone based VR headsets and provides a more realistic, “screen-door”- free image. This agreement also demonstrates that eMagin’s OLED microdisplays are the right choice for VR applications, giving eMagin the opportunity to jump into the market with its highest resolution microdisplay offering.”

http://ir.emagin.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=96135&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2126935

I can't think of another company that would even think of using such expensive and high resolution displays asides maybe Razer in their HDK as a display option. The eMagin WUXGA microdisplay has long been considered the best one for an HMD by VR enthusiasts but too expensive at $4,000;

http://www.mellottsvrpage.com/index.php/fov-comparison-eyepieces/

http://www.roadtovr.com/valve-the-lab-portal-vr-gdc-2016-steamvr/

Valve today announced a “compilation of new VR experiments” which will be set in Portal’s Aperture Science universe. The company will show the new experiences at next week’s GDC 2016.

Valve is calling the new series of VR experiments The Lab, and says it will be set inside one of Aperture Science’s “pocket universes.” In the now famous Aperture Robot Repair VR demo, the player opens a drawer full of tiny 2D stick-people which have been a recurring theme in Portal’s marketing. The narrator in the demo mentions this as being one of Aperture Science’s pocket universes, so it seems likely that we’ll see the little creatures return.

The company vaguely says The Lab “offers multiple ways to enjoy room-scale VR.” We’ll get to see the experience for the first time next week at GDC 2016 in San Francisco, but Valve says it will be released for free for the HTC Vive on Steam this Spring.

Valve has been hard at work highlighting the small but growing library of content for SteamVR. At the end of January the company hosted a developer showcase event in Seattle highlighting a number of VR launch titles headed to the platform.

Valve has experimented with several of their own franchises in VR, including the aforementioned Aperture Robot Repair (from the Portal universe) and the Magic Shop experience (set in DOTA 2’s universe). So far the company has steered clear of any explicit Half-Life virtual reality experiences, though it does seem they may have been experimenting to that end.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30834/sonys-yoshida-suprised-by-oculus-rift-price/

Over the past few months it’s become clear that getting into early PC-based virtual reality (VR) will be an immensely expensive proposition. Oculus VR made that clear when it revealed that its Oculus Rift head-mounted display (HMD) would cost $599 USD, and picking one up with a PC capable of running VR experiences would also start at $1,499. The VR community has slowly grown to accept this cost, but there’s no denying that many were surprised at the high figure when it was announced in early January 2016. Among these people was Sony Computer Entertainment’s (SCEs’) Shuhei Yoshida.

Polygon notes that Yoshida, who serves as SCE’s Head of Worldwide Studios, was ‘surprised’ by the Oculus Rift’s price. Confusion over the higher cost had been pinned on many things, including previous suggestions from Oculus VR itself that the price would be in the realm of $200 – $400. In fact, Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey himself came forward to apologise for that confusion shortly after the launch of pre-orders for the kit, which is finally set to start shipping in a few weeks’ time on 28th March 2016. For comparison, the other major VR HMD, the HTC Vive, costs $799, though includes extras for Room Scale tracking.

Of course, SCE itself is yet to reveal the price of its own VR HMD, PlayStation VR for PlayStation 4. It’s expected that the kit will end up being cheaper than its PC competitors, however, thanks to a lower resolution screen and a less elaborate tracking system. SCE will be detailing more about the device next week at the 2016 Game Developers Conference (GDC), where it’s set up an event on 15th March. Fans are hoping that this will be the place that they finally learn not only the price but also the launch date of the kit.

Even if somehow it's cheaper it'll still be a much more shittier experience than a PC based VR headset.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30785/oculus-sample-framework-for-oculus-rift-released/

Last month saw Oculus VR release a Sample Framework app on the Samsung Gear VR head-mounted display (HMD), to aid studios developing software for the mobile headset. Now the company has released the Oculus Sample Framework for Unity 5 for developers working on its Oculus Rift HMD.

Compatible with the Oculus Rift DK2 kit the official description for the software reads: “The Oculus Unity Sample Framework assists developers in implementing Unity applications by providing sample scenes and guidelines for common VR-specific features such as crosshairs, driving, and first-person movement. The Sample Framework can guide developers in producing reliable, comfortable applications and avoiding common mistakes.”

“The Oculus Unity Sample Framework consists of a Unity project as well as application binaries for playing the sample scenes in VR. Sample scenes are navigated and controlled in-app with a simple UI, which also provides explanatory notes.”

Oculus VR is keen to assist as many developers as possible with their virtual reality (VR) projects, as it’ll want a steady stream of content for its Oculus Rift headset. The HMD is only a few weeks away from its 28th March shipping date, and with the Game Developers Conference (GDC) taking place next week in San Francisco, California, more news is expected from the company.

http://uploadvr.com/this-european-lab-is-working-toward-matrix-level-vr-immersion-through-psychological-research/

Two researchers in Estonia are figuring out ways to trick your brain that are effective enough to elicit physical responses, and push the sensations of virtual reality immersion way beyond anything that’s been experience so far.

If you’ve ever put on a VR headset then chances are you have experienced the sensations that Madis Vasser and Peeter Nieler are working to accelerate and perfect. The two met during an Estonian VR meetup and began exploring the best way to spend their time and resources so that they would have the greatest positive impact on the burgeoning VR/AR industry. I talked with them over Skype and learned about their efforts which be summed up in one word: Neurohaptics.

“We all know what optical illusions are and we also know what nervous system allusions. We all have felt stepping on a stand still escalator. That little millisecond swoop in your stomach that tells you something isn’t right,” said Nieler. “There must be a way to convince the brain we are actually physically feeling something. That’s what we’re trying to crack.”

“The best example of Neurohaptics I know is phantom phone vibration,” Vasser chimes in. “That feeling of ‘I’m getting a message right now’ even though you aren’t is a very real physical response created solely within the mind.”

Vasser and Nieler decided to set out on a mission to master and exploit these sensations in order to implement them into virtual reality experiences. To do this, the pair founded the Virtual Neuroscience Lab. The Lab is housed in the University of Tartu in Estona and Vasser serves as the organization’s principal researcher, while Nieler is in more of a supervisory role.

The duo explain that they, along with their staff and research assistants, employ two primary methodologies in order to prove the existence, and increase the efficacy, of Neurohaptical responses in their test subjects.

Gradual Approach – This approach, according to Vasser, involves slowly exposing the subject to stimuli such as flashing screens, quick images, and other projections that become more immersive over time. Eventually, the researchers get a baseline of what it takes to illicit responses and then they can begin to pair back the necessary stimuli to the most minimaist form possible. The idea here is to eventually elicit a Neurohaptic reaction with the least amount of input possible.

Vasser explains that his lab’s goal isn’t to get people to feel physical responses only when they’re plummeting off of cliffs or staring up at giants. He and his team want to find the micro-keys that elicit these responses to so that they can be induced as naturally as possible.

“The big idea is not to use any feedback at all ever,” Vasser explains. “This is the field we are in. It’s one of the most novel and interesting fields for VR and if we can pull it off we can create a virtual world that is indistinguishable from reality.”

“One-Shot-Learning” – The second approach that the lab employs is trickier according to Nieler because it depends on experiments that, by their nature, can not be repeated. One example of this type of experiment is the fire test. Nieler explains that when presented in VR with a realistic virtual fire and holding one hand over the flames, most subjects reported feeling increased heat sensations on their exposed appendage.

“These are very promising and powerful tests,” Nieler said. “But unfortunately they are difficult or impossible to repeat. Once your brain knows the trick it adapts and won’t fall for it a second time.”

As tricky as the research is, for Vasser and Nieler the payoff is imminently worth it:

“The brain is constantly looking for triggers and patterns,” Vasser explains. “It is a computational machine that doesn’t really want to question the data its presented if it is realistic enough. Our work revolves around anticipating the triggers the brain is searching for and providing answers to those questions that are believable enough to keep the momentum of computation going. If we can do this often enough and efficiently enough than we can keep the brain fooled and create virtual worlds that feel 100% realistic.”

As amazing as that sounds, Nieler is quick to point out that this happy future is still a long way off. In his mind, the lab is only around “five percent” of the way to achieving the type of results that would make this type of hyper-immersive VR possible. He hopes that the wider VR community will join the efforts of his team to solve this problem sooner rather than later.

VR on this level sounds like a recipe for a Matrix-style apocalypse, but you know what? I don’t care. Sign me up.

Finally some research is being put into this, this down the road this will help make true VR.

http://uploadvr.com/your-entire-steam-library-will-soon-be-playable-in-vr/

According to a press email circulated on Saturday morning by Valve Software:

“SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode is in early beta, and will be showcased at next week’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. Desktop Theater Mode enables users to play non-VR games with VR systems such as the upcoming HTC Vive and others.”

No screenshots or videos were sent to accompany this release. We have reached out to Valve for comment but at this point no responses have been issued. It looks like we may have to wait until GDC begins to fully understand just how immersive, powerful, and engaging this new feature is going to be.

What this sounds like, however, is a similar release to the Big Screen VR program we wrote about earlier in the week. This application visualizes your full desktop in a VR world as a series of summonable screens and widgets. It could be that Steam VR Desktop Theater Mode is taking a similar approach and is seeking to not only provide VR screens floating in aimless space for you to play your Steam games, but to provide a VR world in which to enjoy them.

Another question mark to be answered is exactly what the release means when it says that this feature will be supported on the HTC Vive “and others.”

Will this new program bring the same Steam-games-in-VR experience to competing headsets such as the Oculus Rift? It seems more than likely.

Valve has already gone on record as being more than willing to bend over backwards (http://uploadvr.com/valve-confirms-chaperone-can-be-used-for-walk-around-oculus-rift/) to support the Rift on its Steam distribution platform and historically Valve as a company prioritizes software over hardware 100 percent of the time. It is in the company’s best financial interest to support as many HMDs as possible so that Steam is as appealing as possible to the widest group of potential customers.

As high-end headsets move steadily closer to their mass market release dates, more and more effort is being made to ensure that you the consumer will want to spend as much time in VR as possible. The “virtual desktop” is one initiative that could potentially turn these devices from occasional entertainment systems, into everyday-use platforms.

http://vrfocus.com/archives/30723/oculus-vr-and-samsung-confirmed-for-gamescom/

Last week VRFocus reported that Oculus VR would once again be heading to the 2016 E3 event in Los Angeles, California. The company appeared on the site for the major event, which sees the videogame industry gather to show off the latest releases and make announcements for new software and hardware. What’s not confirmed, however, is if Oculus VR will be holding another pre-E3 press conference, like it did last year to show off the Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD). Today, though, it’s been confirmed that the company will be at the next major event after E3, Gamescom.

This year’s Gamescom will take place from 17th – 21st August in Cologne, Germany once more. For those that don’t know, this is a largely public show with only the first day dedicated to members of the press. Expect Oculus VR to have its typically large booth, then, showcasing the latest experiences for both the Oculus Rift and its Gear VR mobile-based HMD made in partnership with Samsung. In fact, Samsung is also on the list of exhibitors along with a long selection of other videogame companies.

This will be the first Gamescom that Oculus VR has attended with the Oculus Rift actually available to consumers. The kit is available to pre-order now for $599 USD and those there were the first to do so should be getting in in a few weeks’ time, starting 28th March. After Gamescom, Oculus VR’s next major event is usually its Oculus Connect developer conference in September, though it’s yet to be confirmed if the show will return this year.

http://www.vrfocus.com/2016/03/luckey-could-have-launched-touch-earlier-but-pushed-to-make-improvements-and-build-content-library/

Oculus VR Founder Palmer Luckey to reveal a few more details on the Oculus Touch motion controllers.

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2016 begins today in San Francisco, California, and virtual reality (VR) is going to have a strong presence at the show. Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are mere weeks away from launch, and Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) will be having its press conference on Tuesday where further news is expected on the PlayStation VR head-mounted display (HMD). Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey took to Twitter to reaffirm the company’s focus on the Oculus Rift for the event, but also mentioned the Oculus Touch would have a small part to play.

Very little has been heard of Oculus VR’s motion controllers, Oculus Touch in recent months but in a series of tweets Luckey said: “Touch launch lineup in H2 is also very strong – GDC focus is Rift launch, but we are showing a little Touch, too.” He followed that by saying: “We could have launched Touch earlier, but I am glad we pushed to make improvements and build out the content library.”

When quizzed about what improvements the company had made to Oculus Touch he remarked: “Ergonomic improvements and enhanced hand pose recognition, among other things.”

Whether these improvements will be seen at GDC is unknown currently, but with the motion controllers have some presence at the event that maybe a possibility. Oculus Rift’s main rival, HTC Vive already comes with motion-tracked controllers in the box which may sway some consumers, although the price difference between the two is fairly big.

VR fans will have to wait a little while longer until GDC 2016 opens to find out any further information.

http://uploadvr.com/amd-claims-83-of-the-vr-market-announces-new-gpu-for-devs/

At an off-site GDC press conference, chip maker AMD claimed to have garnered “83 percent of the market share” for VR-ready machines, anchored by the company’s presence on the PlayStation 4.

AMD also pulled back the curtain on a new – very high end – graphics card: the Radeon Pro Duo. This card will currently has a suggested price of around $1,500 and it is being specifically positioned for VR developers. According to company’s press release:

“Radeon Pro Duo has 16 teraflops of compute performance, establishing the VR Creator tier, and guaranteeing the highest level VR experience for developers who love to game.”

AMD also announced a VR0focused partnership with Crytek and its VR First initiative, equipping universities around the globe “as the exclusive GPU technology partner” of the effort.

AMD is one of two companies making graphics chips recommended in PCs compatible with the Rift and Vive – the other being the NVIDA.

It's $399

http://uploadvr.com/psvr-pricing-launch-details-announced-gdc/

During GDC 2016, Sony finally unveiled the retail price point of the PlayStation VR headset at $399, coming October 2016. All PSVR owners will receive The Playroom VR for free as a download. Sony also announced an exclusive Star Wars: Battlefront experience developed by DICE.

The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are priced at $599 and $799, respectively, and require powerful gaming PCs to get the full advantage out of them each. Combined, the entry price could easily rise to $1,500. The PSVR is designed to be not only cheaper, but less powerful as well, as it’s targeted at capturing the general audience instead of focusing on the enthusiast consumers.

At this price point, the PSVR has the ability to capture the early adopter audience for VR much more quickly and help establish VR as a gaming platform for the masses.

PSVR Specs:

5.7 OLED Screen

1920 x RGB x 1080 Resolution

360 degree tracking

120 Hz refresh rate

100 degree field of view

Dualshock 4 and PS Move controllers

Less than 18ms latency

The Rift launches in just a few weeks with the Vive coming later this year and with E3 right around the corner in June, we are sure to hear more information about the device and the launch lineup of games in the coming weeks and months. While the PSVR isn’t as graphically or technologically advanced as the other headsets, it has the sweetspot between the two ends of the market.

The PSVR is poised to be the first publicly available VR headset for gaming consoles with over 230 developers building content for PSVR. Microsoft is currently developing the HoloLens, an augmented reality headset, but has no publicly announced plans for VR, although recent rumors are pointing towards that possibility.

Games in development for PSVR utilize a motion detection camera, referred to as the PlayStation Eye, and the PlayStation Move controllers for in-game interactions, similar to the Oculus Touch and HTC Vive controllers.

Of course you have to buy the console and then buy the VR headset, the VR/motion controllers are separate, thus the full bundle is $750. I still think it's a DOA VR headset because it is tied down to a console.

http://www.roadtovr.com/sony-playstation-vr-will-have-50-titles-at-launch/

At a special press event held at GDC in San Francisco today, Sony have announced that the PlayStation VR’s launch line will consist of 50 titles at launch.

Sony have worked hard since we first set eyes on Project Morpheus, the codename for the PlayStation 4 powered VR headset now known as PlayStation VR, will have good body of supporting software for the platform. Seems they’ve achieved that.

Sony has announced that its forthcoming PlayStation VR headset will be accompanied by no less than 50 titles available on day one.

Andrew House, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, said that “For PSVR games specifically, the dev community has benefited by getting feedback directly from gamers. Today we have more than 230 developers building content for PSVR.”

Doubt they will be any better than what will be on PC.

http://www.roadtovr.com/amd-launches-radeon-pro-duo-dual-gpu-card-targets-vr-content-creators/

AMD has unveiled what it’s calling the worlds most powerful graphics card, the dual GPU Radeon Pro Duo, and it’s targeting the product at virtual reality content creators.

Running consumer virtual reality applications and games is already challenging enough in terms of the raw grunt required, but what about building, debugging and generally creating those VR worlds?

AMD recognises that virtual reality content creation is technically challenging but also that the VR revolution has brought on a renaissance of sorts in independent developers producing content for the next great computing platform. Getting your hands on as many compute cycles for the least amount of money is clearly an indie developers focus.

Enter the Radeon Pro Duo graphics card, announced yesterday at AMD’s special ‘Capsaicin’ GDC event. It’s the company’s next flagship GPU offering and it essentially packs 2 ‘Fiji; class Radeon R9 Fury X GPUs in one package. To boil down exactly what that means in terms of raw specs:

Stream Processors: 2 x 4096

VRAM: 2 x 4GB HBM (High Bandwidth Memory)

Texture Units: 2 x 256

ROPs: 2 x 64

On an optimised workload, one that’s taking advantage of both GPUs (this is essentially a crossfire dual GPU configuration after all), the card is in theory capable of delivering some 16 teraflops of performance. That’s a serious amount of processing power and has led to AMD claiming that the Radeon Pro Duo is the fastest single graphics card in the world, or at least it will be when it launches in Q2 2016.

Perhaps in deference to the new card’s price, it’ll set you back a cool $1499, or perhaps Nvidia’s dominance in the consumer GPU space, AMD are choosing to target the VR content professional with the Radeon Pro Duo. AMD Claim that “the Radeon Pro Duo, the platform of choice for high-end VR content development targeting the widest possible range of fields, including education, medicine, gaming and entertainment,” bold claims indeed.

The Radeon Pro Duo also forms the the bedrock of AMD’s partnership with games developer Crytek on it’s academic “VR First” (http://cryengine.com/vrfirst/) program, an initiative to encourage education institutions to establish dedicated VR labs on their campuses. The first such lab opened at the Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul last year.

https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/introducing-30-games-coming-to-oculus-on-march-28/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN6YCFlS8nU

We’re excited to announce the 30 VR games launching with Rift on March 28! This incredible lineup represents years of work from a global community of developers who are pioneering the future of VR.

These games take you to the outer reaches of space, mysterious labyrinths of wonder, and fantastic worlds of adventure. And they’re just the beginning.

We’re working with thousands of developers on entirely new VR experiences. There are over a hundred more games coming to Oculus this year.

Today we’re also introducing the new Oculus Home on Rift.

We designed Home from the ground up for VR, and it’s evolved significantly since its launch on Gear VR. Home is the best way to explore your library, discover new content, and connect with friends in VR.

You’ll also be able to explore the platform from the Oculus desktop app. The app lets you customize your Rift and easily browse the latest content in the Oculus Store.

We’ll be rapidly evolving the Oculus platform with regular updates for Rift each month.

Stay tuned for more on the apps, videos, and experiences coming to Oculus on March 28!

.

http://uploadvr.com/valve-cost-vr-graphics/

In his advanced rendering talk at GDC Valve’s Alex Vlachos revealed plans to release a rendering plugin in the coming weeks for Unity, as well as its source code, that more efficiently renders scenes for VR. The efficiencies could mean older and less expensive graphics cards — even ones as old as the 2012 680 generation of NVIDIA cards — might be able to run SteamVR and, by extension, the HTC Vive.

“As long as the GPU can hit 45 HZ we want for people to be able to run VR,” Vlachos told UploadVR after the talk. “We’ve said the recommended spec is a 970, same as Oculus, but we do want lesser GPUs to work. We’re trying to reduce the cost [of VR].”

Neither Oculus nor Valve have released a “minimum” specification to run their respective VR platforms. What they’ve released instead is a “recommended” specification. Both consumers and developers have been told by PC-powered headset manufacturers to have at least an NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290 in systems to run VR at 90 HZ. This means the graphics cards in a Rift- or Vive-ready PC are expected to pump out a stream of images, 90 of them for each eye every second, to smoothly trick the mind into perceiving a virtual world. The recommended specification means the most expensive single component in a VR-ready PC costs buyers around $300-$400. The high cost of this one component bumps up the price of the overall PC needed for VR to around $1,000.

If the “minimum” requirements for the Vive or Rift could be lowered, but still hit that magic number of 90 frames each second, however, then early adopters have more options for bringing the technology into their homes. A dedicated PC gamer could, for example, buy a Vive for $800 and use their existing PC to run it at the minimum specification. The visuals seen in VR might not look as good as the “recommended” specification but they also might not be stomach-churning.

In his talk, Vlachos outlined a series of strategies grouped together as “adaptive quality” that would essentially cut corners rendering images for VR in ways that are less perceivable. One example called “fixed foveated rendering” reduces the graphics load for a GPU by prioritizing the pixels in the center of an image because those near the edges are less likely to be noticed. If high-quality eye-tracking sensors make it into future VR headsets, similar technology can further reduce the graphics requirements necessary to make highly immersive VR work by only rendering the pixels directly in front of the eye. The approach Vlachos described, however, didn’t rely on eye-tracking.

“I can run Aperture [a graphically rich Valve-built VR experience] on a 680 without dropping frames at a lower quality, and, for me, that’s enough of a proof of concept,” Vlachos said. “Most art we’re seeing in VR isn’t as dense as that. So we should be pretty good to go…everything should be able to support that low-end hardware. But we need the right safety nets in place.”

PlayStation VR this week made big headlines by announcing its headset starts at $400. When combined with the PlayStation 4 and accessories, the overall package is much less expensive than a PC-powered system. We don’t know what Oculus is planning yet, but it seems Valve is trying to reduce the cost disparity. We’ll bring you updates as we learn more.

http://www.vrfocus.com/2016/03/vr-in-a-bar-makes-its-first-appearance-of-2016/

With the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2016 over for another year its time to see what else is on the calendar. In the UK virtual reality (VR) media marketing company Virtual Umbrella has announced the return of its VR in a Bar event, with the first one taking place in April.

There’ll be lots of celebrating going on as by that point, both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive head-mounted displays (HMDs) will have officially launched, and the company will also be celebrating its first birthday.

No exhibitors have yet been announced for the evening event, but Virtual Umbrella is looking for any developers who maybe interested in attending. Previous get together’s in 2015 included, VRgo, indie developer Psytec Games with Crystal Rift, Climax Studios the studio behind Bandit Six and Bandit Six: Salvo for Gear VR, Visualise, Smash Hit Plunder, Coatsink and Roto VR.

VR in a Bar will be held at Loading Bar in Darlston, London, on Thursday 14th, April between 6pm – 10pm BST. You will require a ticket to attend, they are free, but there’s only 120 available.

http://www.roadtovr.com/hands-on-oculus-touch-2016-prototype-brings-refinements-to-an-already-elegant-design/

Oculus Touch won’t launch until the second half of 2016, but the company continues to iterate on the impressively ergonomic VR controller. We went hands-on with their latest prototype at GDC 2016 last week.

This article discusses the changes between the Touch Half Moon Prototype (mid-2015) and the latest Touch 2016 prototype. For a more substantial overview of my thoughts on Touch as a whole and how it stacks up to the competition, be sure to read our initial hands-on:

Oculus Touch is an Elegant Extension of your Hand for Touching Virtual Worlds

Although Oculus focused the spotlight on their gamepad-only launch titles at GDC, some of the most impressive Rift games we saw were built exclusively for Touch.

When Oculus first revealed Touch back in mid-2015 they showed us the ‘Half Moon Prototype’. What I’m calling the ‘2016 Prototype’ is the version of their VR controller that they first teased us with on the last day of 2015 (and were never shown in the flesh until after the New Year); the 2016 Prototype is visually distinct and no longer holds the ‘Half-Moon’ designation. Technically the version we tried was Touch ‘Engineering Sample CO6AC’.

First and foremost we can see that the Touch 2016 Prototype has had its IR-LEDs (part of the tracking system) covered over with IR-transparent plastic for a more sleek look. The rest of the shape has been tweaked slightly, most noticeably on the triggers and handles which are more rounded.

The biggest changes come to the thumbsticks and button layout. Although not included on the initial Half Moon prototypes, later Half Moon variants would see an ‘Oculus’ button included on the controller, and this has carried over to the 2016 Prototype (this will be used to access the Oculus Home menu). The Oculus button, along with the A/B/X/Y buttons (A/B on right controller, X/Y on left), have been scooted aside to make way for a small patch of tactile bumps.

The bumps seem to serve as an indicator of the intended default position of your thumb, whereas the thumb’s resting position on Half Moon was actually on the buttons themselves. My guess is that Oculus opted to move the thumb’s resting position away from the buttons to prevent people from accidentally pressing them when using the controller’s ‘hand-trigger’ to grip objects (as the thumb is a natural part of the gripping gesture).

While the buttons, triggers, and thumbsticks on Touch are capacitive (touch-sensitive) to aid in posing the user’s in-game hand, it isn’t clear to me yet if the tactile area will be capacitive as well.

The resting angle of the thumbstick on the Touch 2016 Prototype has been tweaked slightly compared to Half Moon, as has its height. This seems to have made it somewhat easier to achieve a thumbstick ‘click’ when the stick is tilted.

When touching the 2016 Prototypes to each other, I could feel a magnetic attraction between the two controllers at the inside point where the tracking ring connects to the controller’s face. My best guess is that the magnetism has to do with the controller’s haptics, which may lend further support to the idea that Touch uses a linear actuator for haptics rather than the usual ERM motor that produces the rumble in many gamepads.

The haptics themselves seemed perhaps more powerful than before, possibly due to a change in position of the haptic components (which might explain why I quickly noticed the magnetism). Alternatively, it could be that haptics were simply better utilized compared to when Half Moon first went out the door and developers were still learning the best ways to use the feature.

At GDC 2016 we also got a peek at a box in which Oculus appears to be distributing Touch Half Moon Prototypes to developers. With styling akin to that of the consumer Rift case, we imagine Touch will eventually ship in something similar.

Although the company is distributing the device to select developers, they don’t intend to launch an open dev kit.

To my hands the Touch 2016 Prototype still has class-leading ergonomics (even compared to the Vive’s newest VR controllers) and the tracking works as well as ever. The ‘hand-trigger’ in particular is an exceptionally well executed idea, affording users an intuitive ‘grab’ function while leaving their trigger finger and thumb free for further interaction. The HTC Vive controllers of course have a similar grab button along their length but its placement doesn’t lend itself to being continuously held as a virtual ‘grab’ while still allowing natural use of the controller’s remaining buttons.

Oculus plans to release their Touch VR controllers in the second half of 2016. The cost of the controllers (and additional tracking sensor) is still unknown.