Last October Oculus announced its ‘Oculus Rift for Business‘ bundle, offering for the first time a package which included a warranty and license officially sanctioned for commercial use. This week the company dropped the price of the package and announced availability in four new regions, but China still isn’t on the list.
HTC began offering its own business bundle, the ‘Vive Business Edition’ for $1,200, back in mid 2016, and appears to have taken a strong lead over Oculus in the out-of-home sector. It wasn’t until more than a year later that Oculus followed suite with its own business bundle, which includes the Rift headset, Touich controllers, three sensors extra face cushions, cables, preferential customer support, and a warranty & license allowing for commercial usage.
This week the company announced a price cut of the Oculus Rift for Business bundle from $900 to $800, apparently in an effort to be more competitive against the Vive Business Edition ($1,300) and Vive Pro ($1,600 for the full enterprise package), the latter of which crucially offers an even larger tracking area, making it more suitable for some out-of-home use-cases.
Alongside the price drop, Oculus is now shipping their business bundle to Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and Taiwan, in addition to 17 prior regions. The company is still not offering the bundle (or even the consumer version of the Rift) in China, which has seen a lot of activity in the out-of-home VR space. That policy has made HTC the de facto choice of headset for high-end out-of-home VR deployments in the area.
In addition to the Rift for Business bundle, Oculus also offers a ‘Go for Business’ bundle, a similar commercially focused package for their standalone Go headset.
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Space Junkies, Ubisoft’s upcoming VR arena shooter, is now in closed beta, which goes until July 2nd. I called Space Junkies VR’s spiritual successor to Unreal Tournament in our preview, but you can check out some of the real action here in a complete match played by yours truly.
Space Junkies features a bevy of weaponry, giving you two slots for main weapons and two slots for secondary tools/weapons like sonar, a lightsaber, a temporary shield, or and EMP that disables your enemy’s boost.
Starting with a standard repeater pistol, I quickly gravitated towards the larger weapons available: rail guns, gattling guns, and rocket launchers.
Plenty of health and armor is dotted along the way, and two teleport points flank each side of the map: a nice way to surprise, and summarily gank unsuspecting enemies.
I’ve removed some of the downtime from the gameplay video for easier watching. Waiting times in the lobby area can be fairly high if you have to coax unresponsive, or otherwise uncooperative players into the small start area, which is where you vote for maps and generally screw around until the game decides whether you’re in a team deathmatch or a free-for-all.
Matches are five minutes-long, so it definitely presents a good case for short pickup games or long sessions alike. The game doesn’t have an official launch date yet, although Ubisoft’s Montpellier studio maintains it should be out “soon”.
In the meantime check out our preview here.
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Last week we played Echo Combat on our livestream, but this week it’s time for some Space Junkies action from Ubisoft instead. Both games are similar in that they are competitive zero-G shooters, but they have a lot of differences as well. For starters, Space Junkies has more weapon variety and is less objective focused.
Starting this week Space Junkies is entering a beta testing phase, but you need a key in order to gain access. During the livestream today we’ll be giving away four Oculus Home beta keys. The beta only lasts until July 2nd, so you’ll need to get your playtime in over the weekend. If you want a chance to grab a key for yourself, you’ll have to watch the livestream.
We’ll be livestreaming Space Junkies on PC using Rift with Touch starting very soon (which means we’ll start at approximately 3:00PM PT) and aim to last for about an hour or so. We’re going to use Restream to hit both YouTube and Twitch at the same time!
Embedded livestream coming soon
You can see our archived streams all in this one handy Livestream playlist over on the official UploadVR YouTube channel (which you should totally subscribe to by the way). We’re also rebooting our Twitch channel too.
Let us know which games you want us to livestream next and if you want to see more Space Junkies in the future. Comment with any feedback down below!
Tagged with: livestream, Space Junkies, ubisoft
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It’s an unusually quiet week across the three PC VR platforms. In fact we can only really find stuff to talk about on Vive this week. Sorry, Rift fans!
One of the very first full VR games finally makes its way out of the Oculus ecosystem. In Esper you have telekinetic abilities that will be tested through a series of puzzles that will have you moving objects through pipes and more. It’s hardly essential but it’s a good bit of fun.
A pretty neat VR exploration app that virtually recreates an ancient Egyptian tomb with digital scanning. You’re free to roam around the remains and find highlighted paintings. Best of all? It’s completely free to download.
Tagged with: esper
The post The Biggest Rift, Vive And Windows VR Releases Of The Week 06/24/18 appeared first on UploadVR.
The creators of Pokemon GO present AR technology that can detect real-world objects.
You may know Niantic as the American software company behind the cult-sensation Pokemon GO. Or perhaps you’re familiar with them as the team responsible for the geocaching app Google Ingress and the upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.
Whenever there’s a groundbreaking mobile new AR experience on the market, it always seems as though Niantic is responsible.
That was once again the case earlier this week as the busy AR-based developers unveighled the Niantic Real World Platform, an exciting new cloud platform capable of supporting cross-platform AR experiences on smartphone devices.
The real hook, however, is the platforms ability to recognize real-world objects and deliver augmented renderings that can interact with reality. So say you were chasing down a digital Pikachu in Pokemon GO. In the current version, that would mean a simple animation of Pikachu resting stationary in the real-world. With this latest technology, however, that same Pikachu would instead be zipping around your real-world environment, popping out from behind real walls and jumping onto of real object.
Here’s how the magic happens: utilizing your smartphones camera and computer vision, Niantic Real World Platform, monitors physical objects and landmarks in real-time, keeping note of any changes in the environment throughout. Machine learning is then employed to classify the detected objects so that NRWP can seamlessly bridge digital with physical.
Niantic looked towards Escher Reality when building out the low latency multiplayer component, while recruiting Matrix Mill to handle the actual digital interactions.
“We think of the Niantic Real World Platform as an operating system that bridges the digital and the physical worlds,” spoke Niantic CEO, John Hanke, in a blog post. “Building on our collective experience to date, we are pushing the boundaries of geospatial technology, and creating a complementary, interactive real-world layer that consistently brings an engaging experience to users.”
Now word on when we can expect Niantic’s “Occlusion Technology” will hit smartphones, but the developer has already stressed that the technology will be made available to other AR developers as well – a classy move during a heated AR platform war such as this.
Developers interested in getting involved can sign up over at Niantic’s official website.
Image Credit: Niantic
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Not a big week in PSVR land, but there are two smaller titles that are worth checking out. That’s especially true if you’re a puzzle fan.
One of the very first full VR games finally makes its way out of the Oculus ecosystem. In Esper you have telekinetic abilities that will be tested through a series of puzzles that will have you moving objects through pipes and more. It’s hardly essential but it’s a good bit of fun.
This looks like a pretty intriguing VR puzzle game. You help disgruntled salarymen escape their boring lives by manipulating blocks that open up passages. We can’t say that this is the sort of thing that definitely benefits from being in VR, but it is at least unlike anything else we’ve seen on the platform.
Tagged with: esper, Salary Man Escape
The post The Biggest PSVR Releases Of The Week 06/24/18 appeared first on UploadVR.
Not so sure exactly what destination to head to next? Kayak VR is a new Google Daydream app designed to help travelers scope out a new destination ahead of time and pre-plan trips. The app includes travel tips and an audio tour.
The post Try before you travel — Kayak launches virtual reality exploration tool appeared first on Digital Trends.
Oculus is rolling out an update to its public test channel which turns Oculus Home into a social experience. Rift owners can invite up to seven friends to share their virtual home.
The update should allow people to stream their Windows desktop to others for co-watching, much like startup Bigscreen has been doing since 2016. This sort of functionality built into the core of the Rift system and available to all users, however, could make meeting up with friends in VR both easier and more useful. (Bigscreen is useful because its service can connect people across VR headsets from different manufacturers.)
From an Oculus blog post:
Up to eight people can hang out in the same Home at the same time! For now, your Home is locked for editing when you have visitors over, but we’ll enable object interactivity for multiplayer in a future release.
Look for the update in the public test channel.
Tagged with: rift
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Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore may have multi-million-user installed bases, but so does Niantic’s Pokémon Go, the first hit augmented reality game. Now Niantic plans to offer its custom AR software to other developers as the Real World Platform, and is teasing advanced features that go beyond the capabilities of Apple’s and Google’s development kits.
Already used in Pokémon GO, Ingress, and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the Real World Platform is an evolving software engine that adds digital characters and shared social experiences to real-world map data. Niantic has recently bolstered the AR platform’s development team by acquiring computer vision specialist companies Escher Reality and Matrix Mill (which also has machine learning expertise).
Matrix Mill’s machine learning will power one of the Real World Platform’s upcoming tricks — a realtime AR occlusion engine. As demonstrated, the feature enables 3D versions of Pikachu and Eevee to disappear behind real world objects and people, even as both the camera and people move. Niantic is using a machine-trained neural network to determine which objects should be considered “foreground” or “background” versus the AR characters.
On current AR platforms, AR characters are merely superimposed on top of live camera video, so they cannot hide behind real-world objects. The reason for that is the amount of processing power necessary to make occlusion work in real time may be prohibitive on at least some current devices. The demo’s frame rate is not high enough to be fully smooth, and Niantic hasn’t said when the feature will actually come to the Real World Platform.
Another AI-assisted feature will be object recognition. By training the platform to recognize certain items, objects in the environment could automatically trigger AR events. For instance, if the AI spots flowers in a video, an AR bee could appear.
Last but not least, Niantic addressed shared AR spaces, which Google and Apple have recently updated their platforms to support. Niantic says that it has developed new “proprietary, low-latency AR networking techniques” to help multiple people enjoy a shared AR experience across different platforms using a single code base.
Developers interested in applying for access to the Real World Platform can do so at this sign-up page. Niantic says it will select a handful of developers to gain access to the tools later this year.
This article by Jeremy Horwitz originally appeared on VentureBeat.
Tagged with: niantic, pokemon go
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Yesterday we finally found out the release date for Oculus Studios’ Marvel Powers United VR, launching on Rift on July 26th. Now we know when we’ll find out more about the game, though.
Powers United will be featured during the Marvel Games Panel on July 19th at San Diego Comic-Con this year. Kinda Funny’s Greg Miller will host the Hall H panel that will also include a look at Marvel’s mobile games and the upcoming PS4 exclusive Spider-Man game from Insomniac. Oculus is promising to bring along a new trailer for the show.
Hopefully that means some new character reveals are in store for the show. Yesterday Oculus announced that the king of Wakanda, Black Panther himself, was joining the fight alongside the likes of Thor and Deadpool, but there’s still so many other characters we want to be included in the game. Surely Iron Man and Captain America are going to get a spot, right?
We’d assume the game will actually be playable there too but that’s not confirmed yet.
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Earlier this year Supermassive Games launched a cooperative military shooter named Bravo Team on PSVR. Given that this is the team that brought us Until Dawn and its VR spin-off, Rush of Blood, we expected big things. Sadly, the game was a bit of a disappointment, with a wealth of issues holding it back. Today, though, a new patch has fixed some of those problems.
Some of our biggest complaints about Bravo Team were to do with the game’s scaling and positioning issues. For the former, the player’s hands and weapons appeared absolutely massive in-game, which made aiming with the otherwise-excellent PlayStation Aim controller feel clumsy. Well, thankfully, that’s now fixed and the weapons and hands appear at a normal size. As you can see in the video below, it makes for a huge improvement and adds in a lot more immersion.
We also found ourselves getting confused by the camera shifting when moving from cover-to-cover in the original game. That’s now been fixed, too, and there are plenty more points to actually take cover from, giving players much more freedom. Better yet, you can now do 90 degree turns to take out any pesky baddies you might have run past. The accuracy of aiming reticules has also been improved so you don’t waste ages trying to hit one enemy.
Finally, there are improvements for enemy AI, including giving them more cover points. Overall it makes for a much better experience. Full patch notes are below.
All that said, the patch can’t fix Bravo Team’s core issue, which is that it’s simply a rather straightforward and uninspired military shooter. It’s no longer the train wreck of a shooter many people thought it was upon release, though. If that’s good enough for you, then it might be worth grabbing Bravo Team in a sale.
Movement & Cover System
Weapons
Enemy AI
Miscellaneous
Tagged with: Bravo Team
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This has to be one of the better attempts at bringing a real-world location into VR that we’ve seen in recent months.
Developed by Experius VR, Nefertari: Journey to Eternity, uses digital scanning to virtually recreate the Egyptian tomb of Queen Nefertari on the HTC Vive. You descend into the tomb to explore its many paintings, which have been captured in crisp, high-resolution textures that really make you feel like you’re there.
As you explore certain paintings will be highlighted to make sure you don’t miss them. It’s only a short experience but a great game of what VR is going to be able to do for education and virtual tourism in the years to come. Also it calls itself a ‘Tombscale’ VR experience which is just about the best pun ever.
The experience is free to download, so don’t miss out on it.
Tagged with: Nefertari: Journey to Eternity
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Niantic, the developer behind Pokémon Go and the upcoming Harry Potter AR game, announced they’ll be opening up access to their latest work in AR, dubbed the ‘Niantic Real World Platform’, to third-party developers soon. To boot, the company also introduced a few key AR technologies that will have you salivating over the possibilities of actually chasing down pocket monsters on your commute to that next Pokéstop.
Niantic says their Real World Platform blends machine learning and computer vision to tackle the classic challenge of building a useful and realistic AR experience on mobile devices—something that can sense small details, understand surroundings, and model them in an interactive 3D space that a smartphone can digest.
One area of research Niantic has been work on is proper occlusion, or making sure digital imagery fits into the physical world correctly, and allowing it to be obscured naturally by objects in the environment. The company published a quick video on their blog, showing off their latest work in the area of AR occlusion. What better test subject than Pikachu?
Creating correct occlusion in AR requires that the computer, in this case a smartphone, contextually understands the world around it. Slowing down the video some, it becomes a little more clear however that the company still has a ways to go, as the occlusion masks oftentimes overcompensate, or misjudge the alignment of objects as Pikachu scampers about. While a proof-of-concept, it’s definitely a tantalizing look at the near future of smartphone AR, and a clear departure from what we saw at Pokémon Go’s launch back in Summer 2016.
The Niantic Real World Platform is also focusing on cross-platform AR for shared, multiplayer experiences. The biggest obstacle, the company says, is invariably latency. To this effect, the company says they’ve developed “proprietary, low-latency AR networking techniques” to overcome this problem, which allowed them to realize a unified, cross-platform solution with a single code base. To demonstrate, Niantic built a multiplayer smartphone AR shooter, dubbed ‘Neon’, which shows six users playing at once.
We can attribute some of this to the company’s recent acquisitions; Niantic recently acquired Escher Reality, a studio touted for its cross-platform, multi-user AR platform, and the computer vision and machine learning company Matrix Mill—two decisive moves forward after the company’s $200 million Series B finance round.
“It’s through the coordination of these teams that we’ve been able to establish what the Niantic Real World Platform looks like today, and what it will be in the future,” Niantic says in a statement.
As for third-party developers looking to get in on Niantic’s platform, the company says they’ll be picking a “handful” of devs to begin working with their tools later this year. To receive more information, sign up here.
The post Niantic Offers Tantalizing Peek at Upcoming AR Tech, Announces New Platform for Third-party Devs appeared first on Road to VR.
The popular online payment platform patents AR glasses in hopes of a ‘look-and-buy’ economy.
Have you ever wished you could just walk down an aisle at any store, and simply look at an item to find out if it was in stock, how much it cost, what the payment options are, get information on the return policy and then purchase the item without ever having to go through a checkout or even pulling out your smartphone or credit card?
A recently approved patent filed by massive digital payment platform PayPal with the United States Patent and Trademark Office titled, “Augmented Reality View of Product Instructions,” would allow you to do just that. According to the patent, a pair of AR glasses would create a ‘look-and-buy’ shopping experience that uses your PayPal account to purchase items just by looking at the product and then navigating a pop-up AR menu.
It’s a bold concept that could very well end up making PayPal quite a bit of profit.
Currently, PayPal charges a fee of 2.9% of the transaction plus a fixed fee of .30 cents per U.S. transaction (fees and fixed fees vary in other countries). With over 60% of all web transactions being processed by PayPal, that adds up to a huge chunk of change for the company. In 2017, PayPal reported $13.06 billion dollars in revenue from said fees.
A recent PayPal report showed the company brought in $3.69 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2018 – an increase of $700,000 from their first quarter the year before – and with 237 million customers using PayPal, the opportunity to leverage a tool like AR glasses to make shopping and spending easier would be a dream not only for the customer, but for businesses and PayPal as well.
But those numbers are mostly web transactions, and with more and more brick and mortar retailers accepting payments through PayPal, and with AR wearables becoming a hot subject, it makes sense that a company like PayPal would want to figure out a way to leverage both of those facts to their advantage.
The idea of an AR and VR shopping experience is far from new. Companies such as eBay (who owns PayPal) and Alibaba both have VR shops, and box stores like IKEA, Amazon, and other shopping apps allow customers to preview products in AR.
However, being able to just walk down the aisle of a store, choose an item simply by looking at it, and then pay for it through your PayPal account would be much different. Plus, for those of you who hate shopping – merging the physical and digital shopping experience together might make a trip to the store less daunting and dare I say, maybe more fun?
You could even walk down the street and shop simply by looking at the clothes on the mannequins or the items in the window display, never actually needing to step foot into the store.
What it boils down to is that PayPal’s AR glasses would be all about convenience. Of course the potential of shopping through AR glasses goes beyond the ‘look-and-buy’ scenario.
Imagine finding yourself with a couple of extra hours in your day, and on a whim, you decide to purchase movie tickets just by looking at movie poster. Or maybe you’re exploring a museum and you find a piece of art that you hope comes printed on a t-shirt in the museum store. On an impulse, you could just look at the artwork, and through your PayPal AR glasses, see a menu that would allow you to choose your size, add it to your cart, and then pay for the shirt using your PayPal account.
It’s that impulse, or in this case ‘glance-and-go’ purchase, that could provide a big jump of revenue for PayPal. A study of 2,000 U.S. consumers showed that we can spend an average of $450 a month on impulse purchases. That’s a whopping $5,400 a year of potential additional revenue per person. AR glasses tethered to your PayPal account would make capturing those sales a whole lot easier.
Still, a lot of questions about security lingers when it comes to making purchases through AR glasses At this point PayPal’s AR glasses exist as just a patent with no actual release date planned.
Image Credit: PayPal / RocksDigital
The post PayPal Sees A Future With AR Glasses appeared first on VRScout.
Eighteen months since its initial release, Oculus is delivering some major updates to its Medium “immersive sculpting tool” in a free 2.0 update that’s being released today.
The artistic tool is one of the company’s few first-party apps on the PC Rift platform. Today’s updates focus primarily on performance bumps, a UI revamp, and some features the company says were frequently requested by users, including snapping grids and increased layer limits.
“This is the culmination of a year of listening to our users and not only seeing what they’re creating but how—and learning what tools and features they love and lack,” Oculus’s Jessica Zeta said in a blog post.
While VR art apps like Google’s Tilt Brush have seemed a bit amateurish in vibes, Oculus has been looking to position Medium as a more professional application that’s easy to get going with but hard to master. Alongside the new layer limit of 100 layers, Medium 2.0 will have a new file managements system and some UI changes that the company hopes will make navigation a bit quicker.
Speaking of quicker, Oculus says that 2.0 will get a bump in rendering horsepower after a rewrite in Vulkan which the company says will improve performance handily.
Oculus has devoted quite a few resources in its latest Rift Core 2.0 updates to bringing some customizability to the home environments that users launch experiences from. With Medium 2.0, users will be able to export their creations directly into their Home area.
Oculus has learned quite a bit in the past 18 months about writing rules and leading a trail-blazing platform; Medium’s latest update seems to offer the group an opportunity to learn from users and just give them what they’ve been asking for.
Medium, Oculus’ first-party VR sculpting and modeling tool, today gets a major update in version 2.0, bringing better performance, improved tools, and the ability to export your creations into your own Oculus Home space.
Having launched Medium initially back in late 2016, Oculus has been continuing to tune the tool for the needs of professional artists and modelers. Version 2.0, now available, adds useful tool enhancements like grid snapping and multiple lights, while also bumping the layer limit up to 100. The company also promises improved performance for large and high resolution projects thanks to a new Vulkan-based rendering engine.
Medium 2.0 also brings a new file management system and a “major UI facelift,” designed to help artists work better and faster.
But the tool is also quite approachable by novices, and luckily (since I won’t be sculpting anything worthy of being 3D printed any time soon), Medium 2.0 will allow users to export models directly into their Oculus Home space to show off virtually—a feature that’s been promised for some time.
Oculus says it’s also launching new Medium tutorials as part of the 2.0 update, which will detail new tools like Elastic Move.
Along with the new performance improvements, Medium 2.0 will now require Windows 10, in accordance with the company’s new recommended specifications.
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Pokemon Go, for all it does right to get people moving and interacting with the world through an AR lens, has a lot of limitations. One of the biggest shortcomings is how it handles the social aspect of the game. There really isn’t a way for you to interact with other players in real-time in the game world at all and even though millions of people play the game every day around the world, it often ends up feeling like you’re all just playing by yourself.
Some new advancements in Niantic’s AR “Real World Platform” could be changing that. At a press event located at their San Francisco, CA offices yesterday I got the chance to go hands-on with a new tech demo they’ve been working on that shows off seamless AR multiplayer.
It worked a bit like laser tag, you can see some footage of it here:
Basically we all ran around this warehouse room picking up white dots on the floor to get ammo. Then I’d tap on another player to shoot homing missiles at them. They couldn’t dodge the missiles once I shot it, but they could block it with a missile of their own. The demo lasted about 90 seconds, after which I was told I did “very well” scoring over 40 hits.
It was…underwhelming. I am hoping this technology will be applied to Harry Potter: Wizards Unite in such a way that real-time wizard duels are possible, but no one was willing to talk about that game at the press event. It felt like a big, giant magical elephant in the room.
The demo allowed for approximately six people to run around, all tracked in real-time, which was neat, but it wasn’t shown or explained in a usable context.
Ironically enough the far more interesting two tech demos they showed at the event weren’t playable. First was some really impressive occlusion features for Pokemon Go made possible via the acquisition of a new company, Matrix Mill, and the other was a cooperative puzzle solving game called Codename Tonehenge. Here’s that footage:
This demo impressed me for two reasons: 1) all players had avatar masks assigned to them in real-time that were animated, meaning when you looked through your phone you’d see the avatars, not human people, and 2) it’s actually collaborative with objects that can be manipulated and interacted with. Now imagine that blown up on a large, city-wide or even worldwide scale using the mapping technology that powers stuff like Pokemon Go.
Instead of people meeting up to sit and flick their phone screens at a park, they could collaboratively solve puzzles and riddles in the real world via their phones. Or in the future, using a lightweight wearable on their eyes/face.
Obviously Neon and Tonehenge are both very much tech demo ideas and not fully realized products, but they represent the first steps towards the “next generation” of mobile AR technology. And what makes it so exciting is that these advancements are happening on the software side with networking and machine learning and AI and cloud computing and don’t require significant hardware changes to realize.
The actual content of the Neon demo was far from impressive, but if the features shown there and in Tonehenge show up in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, I’ll be very happy.
Let us know what you think of this down in the comments below!
Tagged with: Codename Neon, laser tag, niantic, pokemon go
The post Hands-On: Codename Neon From Niantic Is A Real-Time Multiplayer AR Laser Tag Game appeared first on UploadVR.
A lot of people still do not consider Pokemon Go “real” AR. At launch, the AR features were extremely limited and in most cases the camera would simply plaster an animated Pokemon over the top of your real world environment which resulted in the creature seemingly standing inside of objects and walking across things it shouldn’t be able to walk across. In short, it lacked real depth and environmental awareness.
Recently Niantic acquired a London-based technology company called Matrix Mill. By using machine learning and neural networks, they’ve more or less solved the issue. Watch the results in the video below:
“At Niantic, we frequently talk about how in order to augment reality, you need to be able to understand it,” says the Pokemon Go developer in a blog post. “The Matrix Mill team has come up with novel ideas that push the boundaries of what machines can process, thinking around occlusions, and seeing the world closer to the way human eyes can. As a result of this hard work, AR experiences can feel more natural to the eye, which is a goal we have squarely in our sights.”
This sort of stuff is possible today using expensive cameras and advanced equipment, but everyday smartphones with single cameras on them like the Google Pixel 2 or the latest line of iPhones couldn’t achieve this effect. Now, with Matrix Mill’s help, Niantic can deliver much more convincing AR.
By interpreting and then re-sending the data back to devices, the depth effect in AR works seamlessly and characters like Pikachu and Eevee can be occluded behind objects in the world or even people walking by in real-time.
We don’t really know the timeline for when this sort of functionality will officially roll out to users, but it’s exciting nevertheless, particularly as the company preps for the eventual launch of their next AR game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.
Let us know what you think of this occlusion demo down in the comments below!
Tagged with: Matrix Mill, niantic, pokemon go
The post Niantic’s Latest Pokemon Go AR Demo Shows Impressive Occlusion Tech appeared first on UploadVR.
Oculus Medium, the company’s VR sculpting app that launched alongside its Touch controllers in December 2016, just got a big update adding some crucial new features.
Headlining Oculus Medium 2.0 is the ability to bring the creations you make into the new Oculus Home. As those that are taking part in the Rift Core 2.0 beta will know, the new Home allows you to customize your own space with a set of pre-made items. With this update, though, you’ll be able to bring your own personal creations into the space to show off for the first time. You’ll be able to export sculpts directly into your Home inventory, which will allow you to make your space truly unique for the first time.
Just as this week’s Tilt Brush update added a new Beginner Mode, this Medium update also brings in several new tutorials to help get you up to speed. These will address new tools like Layer Resolution Visualization and Elastic Move. The app’s performance has also been updated with increased rendering power, and there’s a new management system with a UI overhaul to make sorting through your tools and creations more intuitive than ever.
Finally, as you might have expected, Medium 2.0 is going to update to become a Windows 10-only app. Yesterday Oculus announced that it is updating its minimum and recommended settings for Rift to require Windows 10, noting that users that don’t upgrade won’t be able to use all the features of the Oculus platform. It sounds like Medium is one such feature.
Oculus is promising yet more updates for Rift Core 2.0 later in the week, so stay tuned.
Tagged with: oculus medium
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One of the driving forces behind Sony’s Uncharted series is looking to start working in VR.
Amy Hennig is best known for her work with Naughty Dog on Nathan Drake’s adventures over the past decade, though recently she’s been working at EA on an untitled Star Wars project. However, last October we heard that the studio working on the title, Visceral Games, had been shuttered. Now Eurogamer reports that Hennig herself has left EA and her sights set on VR.
“I’m working independently and staying independent,” Hennig told the site. “I just started my own small little independent studio and am consulting with some people. I’m hoping to bring some people on board, I would love to have a little company of about six to eight people, 15 at the most, and do some more projects, do some VR stuff – I’m consulting with some VR companies and doing a ton of research because I haven’t played a lot to immerse myself in it.”
Whatever the developer is planning, it sounds like early days. Still, the thought of an Amy Hennig-directed VR project is an exciting one indeed. Uncharted helped push a new wave of more believable videogame protagonists not just visually but also in the way characters acted and spoke as well. A VR experience that gives us lifelike interactions with those characters could be very intriguing to say the least.
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After a long and somewhat concerning silence, Oculus today confirmed that its superpowered exclusive, Marvel Powers United VR, arrives next month.
The Oculus Rift title, developed by Sanzaru Games, is launching on July 26th for $39.99, and is available to pre-order from today. Announced last year, Powers United VR is a cooperative action game in which up to four friends step into the boots/capes/cowls of their favorite Marvel heroes and complete missions together using a wide range of power sets. Villains like Loki and Ronan the Accuser will stand against you. We’ve been hands-on with the game and it offers a fun, if rather chaotic time.
As you may have seen, Oculus has also been teasing the reveal of a new character for the game this week. If you hadn’t already guessed (it was really pretty obvious), Black Panther is joining the fray. Straight out of his hit movie (and a role in Avengers: Infinity War), Panther brings his advanced suit, powered by a fictional metal known as Vibranium, into combat. Players can expect to wield super-human strength and agility. We’d imagine those claws he’s so fond of will come in handy, too.
We don’t have footage of Panther yet, so enjoy this Deadpool gameplay video instead.
Panther joins the six playable characters confirmed for the game so far, including Thor, The Hulk, Captain Marvel, Deadpool, Rocket Raccoon, Black Bolt and Crystal. We can’t help but notice some of the major players of Infinity War, like Iron Man, Captain America and Spider-Man, still haven’t been confirmed. Surely we can expect at least a few of these characters to be confirmed in the coming weeks, right?
Tagged with: Marvel Powers United VR
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Pokemon Go ignited a fiery passion for staring at phone screens while walking around outside so it was only a matter of time before more brands latched onto the concept. The Walking Dead: Our World is an upcoming mobile AR game created in partnership between Next Games and AMC. It’s due out for release on July 12th for both iOS and Android mobile device.
Here’s the release date announcement trailer:
In The Walking Dead: Our World you’ll walk around and explore the real world, kill zombies, rescue survivors, and level up your characters and gear in this real-world meets zombie-world mashup.
An opportunity existed to integrate some survival horror elements into the experience as well, like Night Terrors does, but it seems like they’ve gone the accessible first-person shooter route instead. It doesn’t seem like zombies will be much of a threat in this one.
You can see some actual gameplay here:
Do you intend on slaying zombies with friends in AR when this releases in just a couple of weeks? Let us know your thoughts down in the comments below!
Tagged with: pokemon go, The Walking Dead, zombies
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Epic Games’ latest batch of developer grants have been revealed and several VR companies are included in the list.
The grants, which collectively total $1 million, are awarded to developers using the company’s Unreal Engine for their upcoming games and apps. Among the 37 teams securing money in the range of $5,000 to $50,000 today are Blacksmith Studios, New Reality Co. and VitaeVR, all of which are working on VR projects.
Blacksmith is working on an intriguing puzzle game called Desolate Sands, in which players aim to dig deep by moving obstacles and using levers. VitaeVR, meanwhile, has a similarly interesting product in VStore, which is hoping to become a full VR supermarket that can be used to screen for early indicators of dementia. The game asks players to search a supermarket for certain items then pay for their items with the correct amount. Their performance is then measured and scores are delivered to clinicians.
Finally, New Reality Co. is working on an unannounced VR project that focused on storytelling and art. The studio is headed up by Milica Zec and Windslow Porter, who both worked on VR experiences that appear at festivals like Tree.
Another recipient in this round of grants is Mundfish, which is working on strange shooter Atomic Heart and released VR shooter Soviet Lunapark earlier this year. The latter title is in Early Access so hopefully some of the funding will go towards making that a bigger and better experience, too.
Tagged with: Epic Games
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