May 2019

BioWare’s most celebrated role-playing games from the late 1990s and early 2000s are headed to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch later this year. The games include Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Neverwinter Nights.

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Head of Xbox Phil Spencer has revealed that 14 exclusive Xbox games will be shown at E3 2019. Which Xbox games should we expect among the collection? We dig through reports and rumors to share a few that are possible or almost inevitable.

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VR Pioneers Steam Bundle Offers Big Discounts On Groundbreaking Games

Some of VR’s groundbreaking developers blazing a new trail with early VR releases are providing a lower-priced bundle on Steam.

The “VR Pioneers” bundle costs around $123.95, or 20 percent off, for a set of incredible games. Normally it would cost more than $150 to get all the games included in this bundle. I-Illusions’ Space Pirate Trainer, Cloudhead’s The Gallery Episodes 1 & 2, Survios’ Raw Data and Sprint Vector and, of course, Owlchemy Lab’s Job Simulator can be purchased together in the VR Pioneers bundle on Steam starting today. If you’ve already got some of these games the 20 percent discount should still apply to the remaining titles. This should allow VR headset owners to more inexpensively complete their libraries if they’ve missed buying a couple of these games over the years.

For those unfamiliar, Space Pirate Trainer is perhaps the definitive wave shooter of VR’s first generation and a fantastic introductory arcade VR experience alongside Owlchemy’s Job Simulator. Survios Raw Data and Sprint Vector explore the range of single player and multiplayer game modes with an assortment of weapons and ways to navigate through virtual worlds explored. Cloudhead’s The Gallery, finally, is a wonderfully inventive adventure with deep world-building and engaging puzzles.

If you’re new to VR in 2019 or just looking to catch up on a few missed games, this new bundle looks like a great way to catch up on quality VR software you might’ve missed.

Facebook just released the Oculus Rift S, HP is launching the Reverb and Valve’s Index headset is due to arrive in the coming weeks to early buyers — all brand new VR headsets on which these games can be played.

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Bring Trover Saves The Universe Into AR With This New Snapchat Lens

Trover Saves the Universe is out today, and we were impressed with Squanch Games’ unique brand of humor – developed alongside Rick and Morty’s Justin Roiland. If you can’t get enough of the VR experience, you’ll also be able to take Trover Saves the Universe into AR, thanks to a partnership with Snapchat.

In order to access the AR lens in Snapchat, you’ll need to get a copy of the game. Next, just open up the Snapchat app on your phone and flip to your rear-facing camera, then point it at the game case or game’s key art image. The face on the front will begin teasing you, voiced by Justin Roiland himself.

You should then instantly gain access to the Trover Saves the Universe AR lens, turning your own face into a fever dream. Your eyes will be replaced by red and blue power baby faces like the ones in the game, and the game’s title will appear above your head. You can also scan the first scene in the VR game itself for more information. That sounds a whole lot better than turning your face into a dog or making yourself look slightly older, and it’s more likely to confuse your friends and loved ones – it’s a win-win situation.

Trover Saves the Universe is out today on PlayStation VR and will be coming to PC June 4. It also has non-VR support, both on PlayStation 4 and PC. It’s best for a slightly older audience due to some vulgar jokes, but fans of Roiland’s work on Rick and Morty will undoubtedly enjoy themselves.

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Pixel Ripped 1995 Is A Full Sequel To Last Year’s Nostalgia Hit

Ready for more VR-fuelled gaming nostalgia? A sequel to Pixel Ripped 1989 is on the way, and it’s jumping six years into the future.

Pixel Ripped 1995 will continue the series’ theme of revisiting beloved gaming eras of the past in VR. In the original game, you played through a fictional game series on virtual recreations of classic consoles. Indie developer ARVORE this time tackles the time in which the original PlayStation was just coming to market and Nintendo transitioned to the N64. It was the dawn of the era of 3D gaming.

The team is promising “innovative use of classic mechanics, gaming references, secrets and of course, the challenging gameplay of the 90s classics.” There’s no gameplay footage or images to speak of right now but you can expect to grab a virtual gamepad and play along to the latest iteration of the virtual series. We’ll be interested to see what ‘real’ world situations we’re put in, too.

“Thanks to the success of the first game we are able to dedicate more resources and have a lot more experience to create a game that is an even crazier nostalgic adventure. The setting of 1995 also gives us a lot of great classics to reference and a whole new world to explore,” says Ricardo Justus, Co-Founder of ARVORE said in a prepared statement.

Pixel Ripped 1995 is due on all major VR platforms. No specifics, but the original arrived on Rift, Vive and PSVR. We’d really love to see a Quest version, just saying.

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Super Smash Bros Ultimate Just Got Switch VR Support

Nintendo just added VR support to another one of its tent pole Switch games – Super Smash Bros Ultimate. Yup, really.

Update 3.1.0 for the game brings limited support for the Switch’s Labo VR headset. You won’t embody a fighter in first-person, but you will watch and play from the sidelines as if you were really there. When using Labo you can either face off against one other computer player or watch four other CPU players duke it out. Sadly, there’s no support for bigger battles or online play.

You do get to choose from ‘dozens’ of the game’s stages. You can look around and see areas of each scene you wouldn’t on a traditional display, which is pretty cool. This also technically marks a VR debut for a heck of a lot of game franchises; the chance to see Samus, Solid Snake, Mega Man, Sonic and more in VR is enticing.

We haven’t tried the support for ourselves but we wouldn’t get too excited. Labo VR is a novel piece of kit, mainly intended for kids to use. But the Switch’s 720p display and limited horsepower hold it back from really bringing lots of content to life. We’ve played Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in the headset, for example, and neither really held up.

Still, it’s better than nothing. Nintendo seems to be quite willing to throw VR support into its biggest games, which makes us think this won’t be the last we hear from the headset.

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Today, Activision announced it would be bringing real-time ray tracing to its revised version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, scheduled for release October 25, 2019. Can this implementation finally prove Nvidia's investment in ray tracing?

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Microsoft has revealed the Xbox Game Pass for PC, expanding the Xbox brand and value of the monthly subscription service for those that don’t game on Xbox One. It will launch with a curated collection of games specifically for PC gamers.

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The Fortnite week 4 challenges are out and the biggest obstacle players face this week tasks them with dancing inside a holographic Tomato head, Durr Burger head, and giant Dumpling head. Here is our guide to completing this challenge.

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Grab Obduction On PC Via GOG For Free Until June 1

Cyan, the developers behind classic adventure series Myst and upcoming Kickstarter-funded adventure game Firmament, released their spiritual follow-up Obduction back in 2016. The game builds on the puzzle-solving and atmospheric gameplay of their iconic series and you can get it for free until June 1 on GOG.

To claim Obduction for free, all you have to do is click on the above link and hit the green “Go to Giveaway” button you see under the trailer window. Scroll down on the next page until you spot the game and click “Get It Free,” and log in with your GOG account. Once this is done, the game should show up in your GOG game library.

Obduction is a science-fiction adventure game rather than a fantasy adventure like Myst. After an artifact descends from the sky, you are transported to various locations and time periods. The warmth and attention to detail seen in Myst is still alive and well in Obduction as it was designed by Cyan founder Rand Miller, who also portrayed the character Atrus in the Myst series.

GOG purchases don’t always support VR in the same way as Steam, but users have found some success enabling VR by altering the name of program files. You will also need to have SteamVR running when you launch the game. Your results may vary as VR support isn’t an explicit feature on the GOG version, but you will still be able to play it traditionally if you cannot get the VR mode to work, though it should. That being said, any chance to go inside a Cyan game’s virtual world is a chance worth taking.

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game of thrones vr

HBO is launching an official Game of Thrones VR experience tomorrow.

Called ‘Beyond The Wall’, the experience will be exclusive to HTC’s Viveport Infinity subscription service.

Viveport is HTC’s VR app store, similar to the Oculus Store. It isn’t exclusive to HTC hardware however, it also officially supports Oculus Rift headsets. In fact, next month it will even get support for Windows MR headsets.

While Viveport sells games like a regular store, it also offers a subscription service called Infinity. Infinity gives subscribers access to over 600 games and experiences on the store. Think of it as like a Netflix for VR. Beyond The Wall will be available exclusively on this subscription service.

Since Beyond The Wall is a Viveport exclusive, that rules out the possibility of a port to Oculus Quest. Quest only runs the Oculus Store. It could however come to HTC’s own Vive Focus Plus standalone some day in future, but there’s no word on that.

As the name suggests, the experience is set beyond the famous northern wall of Westeros. Players take on the role of a brother of the Night’s Watch. Armed with a sword, they will fight off hoards of wites and even an undead polar bear.

Viveport Infinity costs $12.99 per month, but if you wanted to just play this experience you could take advantage of the two week free trial period.

The experience will be available in English in the USA, UK, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. There’s no word yet on it expanding to further languages and territories. This may be a licensing issue with HBO.

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lightsaber two hands oculus quest vader immortal

A video from Derek Ham shows his latest iteration of a magnetized accessory for the Oculus Touch controllers which connect and align the controllers along a single axis.

After checking out the video (embedded below) showing a small accessory snapping onto the Oculus Touch controllers, I reached out to Ham with a few questions to get more details about the work he’s doing:

He wrote in an email it works exactly as shown — no physical modification to the Quest controllers or the game needed — and he “found the game play to be enhanced.” He wrote that he was at the F8 developer’s conference and ordered the Quest from his seat and that they’d already been working on the design for the older original Rift Touch controllers when the new standalone headset finally arrived. According to Ham, they went through 20 designs and 3D printed dozens of versions in the process. When used with the original Touch controllers “we have to use a small foam pad insert to compensate for the length (it’s slightly shorter than the new controllers) but overall our device works well with both.”

“Everyone wants to hold a lightsaber with two hands,” he wrote.

Ham wants to hold a Kickstarter campaign later this summer for the accessory which he’s calling the “AxeOne“. Ham has worked on a variety of other VR-related projects, including an early Cardboard app for The Bible.

“We have to balance the pull-strength of the magnets while not interfering with the magnetometer found inside the Oculus Controllers,” he wrote. “The AxeOne has so many VR applications beyond swords and lightsabers: shovels, axes, rowing a boat, and sweeping with a broom to name a few. And let’s not forget about the Darth Maul Saber hold.”

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As part of its yearly broadcast schedule, virtual reality (VR) platform NextVR has held a longstanding partnership with the NBA to showcase highlights of games via its app. As official VR partner of the NBA, NextVR will be able to offer basketball fans free on-demand highlights of the 2019 NBA Finals presented by YouTube TV featuring the Toronto Raptors vs. the Golden State Warriors.

NextVR

Via the NextVR app fans will be able to access highlights in the NBA Finals channel, following each game, being able to go ringside and enjoy the action first hand.

“NBA Finals highlights are among NextVR’s most popular sports experiences, year after year. We are fired up to provide fans with their favourite experience for the third year in a row,” said Danny Keens, Vice President of Content at NextVR in a statement. “This year with NBA Finals highlights centred on a unique viewpoint, from the stanchion, NextVR is putting fans closer to NBA Finals action than ever before.”

“The NBA Finals is the most anticipated event of our season, and we are excited to once again partner with NextVR to deliver innovative VR highlights following each game,” said Jeff Marsilio, NBA Senior Vice President, New Media Distribution. “NBA fans will have the opportunity to experience the Finals in a unique and immersive way.”

NextVR

As well as the highlights, viewers can continue to experience NBA feature content available via the NBA League Pass channel.

The NextVR app is now more widely available than ever. Originally a mobile app for headsets like Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream, NextVR brought support to Oculus Go, Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, HTC VIVE Pro, HTC Vive Focus, HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality. And to help with distribution, the app arrived on Steam earlier this year.

NextVR isn’t just about basketball either. The VR broadcaster puts you up front for WWE fights, NHL games and football matches, as well as concerts, and stand-up comedy gigs. As the company expands its VR content roster, VRFocus will bring you all the latest news and updates so you know what and when to watch.



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nReal Light Is A $499 Consumer AR Headset, Shipping This Year

Today AR headset company nReal have announced the debut of the nReal Light, a consumer-focused AR headset with a small sunglasses form factor for just $499. It begins shipping later this year. nReal is also launching the developer edition for $1,199. To help teams get started building experiences for nReal, the SDK will launch in August.

Out of all the AR companies we’ve seen in recent memory, nReal is one of the more promising ones. The nReal Light model has a 1080p display and is focused on ease-of-use. During demos we watched AR concerts on tabletops, streamed video on virtual floating screens, played simple games, and checked tasks with pop-up calendar displays.

For $499 you get the glasses themselves that must be connected to a smartphone running Snapdragon 855 or better. This keeps the cost down so they don’t need to ship the device with its own processing unit.

“nreal light provides a light-weight XR Viewer that allows consumers to take advantage of 5G including high bandwidth and low latency to deliver immersive experiences virtually anywhere,” said Hugo Swart, head of XR, Qualcomm Technologies in a prepared statement. “We worked closely with nreal to ensure Snapdragon smartphone compatibility and ecosystem integration to transform the way people connect and consume entertainment, and to further advance XR to make it the next generation of mobile computing.”

This sort of lightweight and frankly pretty stylish design is likely the future of AR headsets as opposed to bulky visors. nReal’s field of view reportedly falls right around 52 degrees, which is a step up from the original HoloLens and just barely wider than the Magic Leap One’s 50 degrees.

The consumer edition of nReal Light will start shipping in limited quantities later this year but will be mass produced in 2020. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!

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Ultrahaptics Buys Finger Tracking Company Leap Motion

Ultrahaptics announced a “strategic deal” with hand tracking company Leap Motion to combine their startups and technologies.

The Wall Street Journal reports Ultrahaptics bought the company for around $10 million.

The combination of the two means Ultrahaptics will have tracking and haptic technologies to provide a sense of touch in certain types of products. Ultrahaptics “projects ultrasound-drive tactile sensations onto users’ hands” while Leap Motion tracks the movements of the fingers. Some location-based VR experiences, like The VOID, use this kind of hand tracking for impactful immersive effects. We’ll be curious to see if, Leap Motion combined with Ultrahaptics, we might see more ambient immersive effects integrated into various entertainment or education initiatives.

Leap Motion made an early impact in the developer and early adopter community with its USB-connected sensor which could provide hand tracking without the need for a handheld controller. Though it received many software upgrades over the years which improved performance and interaction quality, Leap Motion’s input approach never saw widespread adoption. Some head-mounted displays include USB ports which can connect to Leap Motion sensors for integrated hand tracking. The consolidation of the two companies makes some strategic sense as the first VR and AR headsets haven’t integrated either technology yet into the core of their platforms.

We’re also curious what this might mean for Project North Star. The open source AR headset effort backed by Leap Motion includes instructions on how to build a wide field of view AR device with integrated hand tracking. We’ll provide updates as we learn more.

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Yesterday, Viveport announced that it will be adding support for Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) headsets in June. Today, the online virtual reality (VR) distribution platform has revealed some unique content is coming its way, based on the rather popular fantasy series Game of Thrones. 

Viveport GoT

Called Game of Thrones: Beyond the Wall, the immersive VR experience will put you on the northern border of Westeros to fight and defend the wall for the Seven Kingdoms.

Developed by Framestore in partnership with HBO, you’ll be able to test your sword-fighting skills against a terrifying undead polar bear and a hoard of reanimated dead soldiers.

“VR is the perfect pairing for Game of Thrones fans who can now step onto the battlefield of Beyond the Wall as part of Viveport Infinity,” said Rikard Steiber, President of Viveport in a statement. “Beyond the Wall gives you the first-hand experience of joining the Night’s Watch and protecting the realms of men with your flaming sword from the army of the dead.”

Viveport GoT

Game of Thrones fans love exploring the world of Westeros and beyond, and now they can feel the rush of fighting the undead from the safety of their home in VR through Viveport,” said Sabrina Caluori, EVP of Digital and Social Marketing at HBO. “We’re committed to giving our fans unique and cutting-edge opportunities for engagement, and we think they’ll love this latest entry in our VR portfolio.”

To play Game of Thrones: Beyond the Wall you’ll need a Viveport Infinity account which retails for $12.99 USD a month, or less with a prepaid annual subscription – a 14-day free trial period is available. Compatible with both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, the experience will launch in English in the US, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, the U.K., and Canada on 31st May.  Additionally, members are entitled to perks such as premium content on Viveport Video, monthly coupons, weekend deals and free title giveaways.

Windows Mixed Reality headsets will gain Viveport support on 5th June but there’s been no mention regarding headset compatibility with Game of Thrones: Beyond the Wall at present. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Viveport and its subscription services, reporting back with the latest updates.



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Superhot Quest Launch Sales ‘300% Higher’ Than Rift Without Cross-Buy

Superhot VR was one of around 50 titles available when Oculus’ new Quest headset arrived last week. Despite stiff competition, the development team says sales were 300% higher than when it first launched on Rift.

The developer didn’t provide any specifics, as to how long that launch window is or, indeed, how many units it sold on Quest. What we do know is that, before Quest launch, Superhot had sold 800,000 units across Rift, Vive, Windows VR and PSVR.

In a prepared statement, Tom Kaczmarczyk, Cofounder & Director at Superhot, said the team was “amazed” by the game’s reception. “[Quest is] a watershed moment for the industry and the sales numbers suggests that players believe so too,” he said.

Notably, Superhot is one of several VR games that launched on Quest without cross-buy support on Rift. Cross-buy is an optional feature for developers, allowing them to provide players with both a Rift and Quest copy of the same game through Oculus Home. Many games, including Oculus’ own Studios-produced titles, have adopted the scheme. But some of VR’s biggest games, including Superhot, Beat Saber and Moss, confirmed to UploadVR that they wouldn’t support it.

Superhot VR first launched on Rift in December 2016, on the same day as the Oculus Touch controllers. Given the various factors and unknowns at play there, we couldn’t use this info to estimate how Quest is performing in relation to Rift. Still, it paints a positive picture.

Of course, it helps that Superhot VR is one of Quest’s best ports. It brings the entire original game to the standalone headset, which feels even better without the wire.

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Mare Is A Mythical VR Game With A Stunning Art Style

We don’t tend to highlight trailers that are a few months old here at UploadVR. But we’ll make an exception for Mare, a game that seems to have flown under our radar.

We were recently alerted to this upcoming game from Visiontrick Media and had to share its latest trailer. In Mare, you follow a lost girl and a mechanical bird she has a strange connection to. Using gaze-based controls, you guide both through a mythical world, solving puzzles and avoiding what looks like a race of evil crow-people.

But let’s just stop a minute and talk about that trailer, huh? I’d imagine Visiontrick is sick of hearing comparisons to ICO and Shadow of the Colossus right now but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that looks so tonally close to those masterpieces. Misty vistas, labyrinthine architecture, tranquil nature, this seems to have the lot. In fact the game’s website has a few more GIFs to share and, well, yeah…

Yeah, safe to say we’ll be keeping a keen eye on this one going forward. Mare’s actually been in development since 2016, but Visiontrick says it’s still on the way to ‘Oculus platforms’. As this point that could mean anything from Rift to Go and/or Quest. It’s due to release later this year.

Like what you see? Well good news – we’ll have another look at Mare in our E3 VR Showcase on June 10. In fact, we’re going to have a heck of a lot to talk about there. Make sure not to miss it!

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VR Visual Novel Tokyo Chronos Coming To PSVR In August

Looking for something a little different to play on PSVR? there’s a chance you might be interested in MyDearest’s Tokyo Chronos.

The VR visual novel, which started life under a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign, is coming to Sony’s headset on August 22. At least, that’s in Japan. We don’t know if the game’s planned for release in the west around the same time. That said, it’s already available on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive with full support for the English language, so we’d expect the localized PSVR release to be around the same time too.

Tokyo Chronos adapts the niche visual novel genre to VR for the first time. In the game, you join a group of school friends in a deserted version of Tokyo. Exploring the abandoned city together, you have to figure out how you got here and where everyone else has gone.

The PSVR version of the game will be getting a full disc-based release in Japan. In a follow-up tweet the team said a physical version of the game had been a “long-felt wish”.

It’s definitely a game for a specific audience. Personally, I found the slow pacing and reliance on text to be far too tedious. However the game’s got a positive overall rating on Steam and certainly seems to have found a home with existing fans of the genre. If you think it might be to your liking then, by all means, give it a try.

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Toshihiro Nagoshi, the director for the Yakuza series, spoke during a broadcast about the potential of Sony's next-generation console. Specifically, he thinks PS5 games will see artificial intelligence evolve more than graphics.

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Blood & Truth and Trover Saves The Universe PSVR Combo Livestream

Curious about how we livestream the way we do? Then look no further than this handy guide for general tips and this guide specific to our Oculus Quest setup.

Two really big new PSVR games released today with Blood & Truth and Trover Saves the Universe. One is Guy Ritchie-style action thriller full of guns, explosions, and epic set piece moments, while Trover on the other hand is ridiculously hilarious and bizarre action platformer from the mind of Justin Roiland. These games could not be more different but both are very good in their own ways.

For the stream I will be playing both games on PSVR (Blood & Truth with two PS Move controllers and Trover with a DualShock 4) on a standard PS4.

The stream is planned to start around 2:30 PM PT and we’ll aim to last for about an hour or two. We’ll be livestreaming to the UploadVR YouTube directly. You can see the full stream embedded right here down below once it’s up:

Embedded livestream coming soon

You can see our most recent past archived streams over in our YouTube playlist. There’s lots of good stuff there so make sure and subscribe! You can also now Join our YouTube Community as a member to get special perks like in-video shout outs, custom emojis and badges in chat, and the ability to vote on future video content.

And please let us know which games or discussions you want us to livestream next! We have lots of VR games in the queue that we would love to show off more completely.

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Volvo Invests In Varjo After Testing XR-1 Prototypes On The Road

Volvo is investing in VR headset-maker Varjo after testing out its XR-1 prototypes to “test-drive virtual car designs on the road.”

The XR-1 Developer Edition is a “video-pass-through headset” promising “visual parity” between augmented and real elements presented to the eyes.  The headset is supposed to ship late this year.

According to Varjo:

The XR-1 upgrades Varjo’s human-eye resolution headset (VR-1) with a front plate featuring dual 12 mpx cameras. The core technology making photorealism possible is video-pass-through. It means that the device uses cameras to digitize the world in real time, and then multiplexes it inside the GPU with the virtual content to show the combined result to the user. The Varjo VR-1 is the only device with the high resolution to make the seamless visual blending possible, and the XR-1 has the only camera technology capable of producing high resolution with unperceivable latency (< 15 ms).

Volvo released a video showing the headset and their efforts to visualize early designs with the system.

The headset promises to let wearers “switch seamlessly between mixed reality and full virtual reality modes” with depth sensors to map real-life objects. “XR-1 enables examining photorealistic mixed reality in a full field of view. With the XR-1 virtual objects appear as real as anything in the physical world and can themselves cast shadows or even illuminate reality. Black objects appear truly black, opaque objects indeed block real or virtual light, and semi-transparent objects will refract the light from the real world behind it.”

We’ve seen some demos from Varjo in the past with its VR-1 headset providing impressive resolution improvements. We’ll report back when we get to go eyes-on the XR-1 as well.

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Tactical Haptics Launches Dev Kit Preorders For ‘Haptic Controllers’

Tactical Haptics launched preorders for its Reactive Grip controller development kit. The controller uses “haptic feedback” to give you a sense of touch in applications such as virtual reality games.

The hope is that the next big frontier for VR technology will be the sense of touch, as the visuals already do a good job of making you feel a sense of presence, or immersion in another place.

William Provancher, CEO of Tactical Haptics, will give demos of the controller dev kit at the Silicon Valley VR Meetup tonight in Mountain View, California. I’ve known about Provancher’s technology for years, and I recently tried it out at the VR Arcade event in San Francisco.

Provancher’s controllers go a step further than today’s VR hand controllers. The Tactical Haptics controllers use tangential shear and friction forces to create compelling physical feedback that you can distinguish. With this motion controller in hand, users get a realistic experience of the stretch of a bow and arrow, the inertia of a ball swinging on a chain, the impact of a ball on their virtual tennis racket, the tug of a fish in a fishing game, or the kick of a gun in shooter game.

Above: Dean’s VR machine gun

Image Credit: Tactical Haptics

Provancher created attachments so that you can wield things like a two-hand machine gun in VR.

The dev kit preorders are targeted toward enterprise training, location-based entertainment (LBE), and research and development customers. Pricing is expected to range from $650 for a single dev kit controller to $1,500 for a pair of fully loaded dev kit controllers. The company anticipates an initial ship date in the fourth quarter 2019 for the first batch of dev kit pre-orders.

The opening of dev kit pre-orders will directly precede the debut of a new collaboration with VR game maker Reality Smash at the Augmented World Expo (AWE) in Santa Clara, California, on May 30 to May 31.

The company will show their Reactive Grip controllers integrated with the VR LBE climbing game, Sweet Escape, in the AWE “Playground” expo area.

The company’s dev kit design embodies the learning from the simplified controller design first shown at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and 2018 Game Developers Conference (GDC). However, the dev kit is now more modular and manufacturable for increased customizability at lower costs. The original design update was supported, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The Reactive Grip mimics the tangential shear and friction forces one experiences when interacting with real objects. These shear forces are applied within the user’s hand by sliding plates on the surface of the game controller. By tracking the user’s motions and applying shear feedback in proportion to the user’s interaction forces, Tactical Haptics is able to create powerful haptic illusions of elasticity, inertia, and impacts.

The company’s dev kit is modular, allowing it to be customized and configured with accessory brackets to suit your tracking and interaction needs. The foundation of the company’s dev kit is the “Core Controller.” The Core Controller has a symmetrical design and comprises a handle with two actuated shear plates and multiple mount-points for attaching the accessory brackets that allow users to customize the dev kit.

Above: Tactical Haptics controllers let you dual wield guns in VR.

Image Credit: Tactical Haptics

The Core Controller also includes an IMU (inertial measurement unit) that provides 3-axis rotational tracking data and a replaceable battery that can be charged internally via a bullet-plug interface on the Core Controller and provided power supply.

Battery life during normal use is two hours, and can be fully recharged in approximately 1 hour. The Core Controller also incorporates standard VR game controller inputs, including analog thumb joystick and trigger, as well as standard input buttons including thumb joystick button, menu button, and grip buttons, as well as four other buttons neighboring the thumb joystick (mapped as A/B, X/Y buttons on right and left sides of the thumb joystick).

In addition to gaming, this touch feedback can also be used in augmented reality, telerobotic interfaces for manufacturing and maintenance, industrial and construction operator interfaces, toys (e.g., light saber), pilot training interfaces, automotive navigation and safety systems, computer-aided design (CAD), education, laparoscopic or telerobotic surgery, rehabilitation, swing training, or to guide the blind.

This post by Dean Takahashi originally appeared on VentureBeat. 

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via Mint VR

oculus rift rear

The Oculus Rift S has a fairly hidden setting which changes the headset’s default resolution. The setting does not state the resolution for each choice, but we were able to discover it with some digging.

How To Find & Change It

To find the resolution setting for Rift S, open the Oculus app, click ‘Devices’ and then click on ‘Rift S and Touch’:

In the list of settings that appears, scroll down and find ‘Graphics Preference’:

You’ll now see the Graphics Preference panel. This lets you choose between ‘Quality’ and ‘Performance’:

The setting can be changed on the fly, there’s no need to restart the Oculus software or even to take your headset off.

‘Recommended’ Different Based On GPU

We tested on a GTX 970 and found that this setting was set to ‘Performance’ by default, which was Recommended. We also tested on an RTX 2070 where it was the opposite- set to ‘Quality’ by default.

We asked Facebook whether this is done to maintain the same recommended spec as the original Rift and a spokesperson confirmed it is. This setting did not exist on the original Rift, which had lower resolution than Rift S.

What It Actually Does

This setting changes the default 1.0x per-eye buffer resolution for the Rift S. By querying the SDK we found the exact values it uses:

  • Prioritize Quality: 1648×1776
  • Prioritize Performance: 1504×1616

This is of course only the default resolution. Some games let you scale the resolution factor in the menu. Many others use the Adaptive Resolution feature of the Oculus SDK, where the resolution scale is automatically changed on the fly based on your current GPU utilization. Alternatively, you can use the Oculus Debug Tool to override the resolution scale yourself.

If you have a lower end gaming PC you’ll want to use the Performance setting to maintain framerate. On a high end rig you should make sure it is set to Quality.

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After first hearing about Winter Fury: The Longest Road VRFocus was fairly excited to take the videogame for a spin, with the promise of both on foot first-person shooter (FPS) action and some armoured fun in a tank. While the premise is sound, that early excitement was somewhat overzealous as you’re about to find out.

Winter Fury

The first virtual reality (VR) videogame by Spidermonk Entertainment (staffed by former Activision and THQ veterans), Winter Fury: The Longest Road is about one Allied soldier’s lone battle against Axis forces in WWII. You’re given a special, experimental tank (supposedly) with which to wipe your foe from the battlefield, but alas, being able to cause carnage across Europe in the 1940s just wasn’t quite meant to be.

Feeling very much like an older Call of Duty (number three possibly), Winter Fury: The Longest Road is essentially a fancy wave shooter. There’s no running around so it’s super comfortable to play, with each leg of a level taking place at a different location down the titular road. You tend to be located in one of two areas, either on the back of the tank or in a concrete/sand bunker of some sort, mowing down German forces (everything they say is in German for realism).

The much-touted tank you can’t actually drive, moving automatically in a third-person viewpoint until it gets to an area which then switches to first-person. When on the back of the tank you’ll have access to a nice .50-cal heavy machine gun which does a superb job of killing anything you point it at, men, men on horses, trucks, even other tanks. The same goes for some of the bunkers, which either have gun emplacements or you can resort to the pistol on your hip, or the machine gun on your chest (a Thompson naturally). Both the heavy and regular machine guns work a treat, but the pistol aim does seem to be slightly off that aren’t really up close.

Winter Fury

Spidermonk has gone for semi-realism when it comes to certain aspects of Winter Fury: The Longest Road and more arcade-like designs in others. For example, the machine guns can be used single handed, but as you’d expect, pepper the environment – you’d struggle to hit a mountain with the MG. So holding the Thompson with both hands improves the aim while mounting the .50-cal on a sand bag or wall improves accuracy greatly. On the flipside, reloading is a stripped back affair, with a couple of quick actions needed for the heavy, while a standard weapon has an almost rapid reload effect when done correctly.

This makes for a rather lively WWII shooter where you only need to worry about health as the ammo is infinite. It’s also worth mentioning the grenades, as the studio has created a rather interesting mechanic. On the Oculus Touch controller the grip button grabs the grenade as you’d expect, with a white arc appearing from your hand. This denotes where the grenade will travel and can then be locked in place by pressing the trigger. You then throw as normal and watch as your perfectly placed explosive does the damage – no more fumbles or shit throws wasting valuable grenades. It’s a handy little system.

As Winter Fury: The Longest Road progresses things do begin to improve on the tank front, with one level involving a destroyer which needs to be sunk. There are brief – too brief – moments where you get to control the cannon and fire shells – still no direct tank control – but for the most part the destruction comes back to the mounted weapons.

Winter Fury

At present Winter Fury: The Longest Road is a bit of a weird one. You can tell the team have a decent pedigree in this style of videogame, and there are individual elements that shine – the sniper is another one. Yet the gameplay just feels a little reined in, as if the studio didn’t want to go too big too soon. VRFocus will be keeping an interested eye on this one while in Early Access, and advise everyone does the same.



via Mint VR

Space Junkies Free Update Adds New Game Mode And Two New Maps

Today Ubisoft released the second free post-launch update for Space Junkies which includes a brand new game mode called Instablast and two new maps in Final Destination an Gunner Station.

The new mode, Instablast, is a lot like the Golden Gun mode from N64’s Goldeneye in that everyone has the exact same gun that can kill opponents in a single shot, which also means everyone can be killed the same way too making each shot extremely deadly. Usually Space Junkies has a relatively long time-to-kill so this mode would be a big change.

This update comes on the heels of two highly requested features being added to the game: PS Move support and smooth turning. Players can also use the 3DRudder foot controller in “Early Access” on PSVR or PC as well that lets players move their characters by leaning their feet.

Reportedly Ubisoft will continue to add new game modes, characters, maps, and more throughout “Season 1” as the game continues to evolve and mature. Each episode contains four episodes and will last for 16 weeks. This marks episode two of the first season.

In our review we described Space Junkies as similar to Unreal Tournament with its fast-paced gunplay and heavy focus on rapid movement and full 6DOF control throughout space using a jetpack. It’s certainly one of the more intense VR games from a movement perspective and needing to constantly have your head on a swivel to look out for enemies ramps up the intensity.

Are you playing Space Junkies? Let us know what you think down in the comments below!

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