Photogrammetry capture brings the Royal Opera House to life in VR.
Developed by makemepulse in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and Château de Versailles, VersaillesVR – The Palace Is Yours, a free app available now on SteamVR-compatible headsets that allows you to tour a hyper-realistic recreation of France’s famous Palace of Versailles in VR.
Built at the behest of King Louis XIV and completed in May of 1682, the historic structure includes The King and Queen’s State Apartments, the Royal Opera House, the Hall of Mirrors, and the Royal Chapel among several other infamous locations hidden within its hallowed walls.
Using photogrammetry capture, every detail — even the smallest imperfection on a painting — if brought to life in vivid detail. Every tapestry, piece of furniture, and painting is captured with stunning clarity, allowing you to explore every nook and cranny of the legendary structure as if you were actually there. Once you’ve toured the entirety of the area, you can then switch to night mode and explore the compound in the dark with only chimney fires there to light the way.
Image Credit: Google Arts & Culture
According to Google, you’ll be able to teleport across 24 individual rooms scattered across 36,000 meters of capture space. Some of these locations feature various interactable objects accompanied by informative descriptions.
“VersaillesVR The Palace is yours” offers you a unique visit of the palace built by Louis XIV,” states the official SteamVR release. “Alone, and free to discover the works in the most emblematic rooms, immerse yourself fully in the Palace of Versailles.”
Image Credit: Google Arts & Culture
“Tapestries, paintings, ceilings, sculptures and furniture, everything is within reach of your controller to grant you unlimited and privileged access to the treasures of Versailles.”
VersaillesVR The Palace is yours is available now for free on HTC Vive/Vive Pro, Windows Mixed Reality, and Valve Index via SteamVR.
Similar to VersaillesVR, Il Divino: Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling in VR , which debuted earlier this year at SIGGRAPH 2019, offers users the chance to explore a life-like recreation of Michelangelo’s legendary Sistine Chapel. Composed of 15-years worth of high-resolution scans and photographs, the ambitious immersive VR tour features 100 clickable locations and an hour-long audio tour guiding you through Michelangelo’s masterpiece.
In the past, we’ve touched upon technology’s importance in immortalizing historical landmarks, specifically photogrammetry and volumetric video capture. The ability to capture and photorealistic recreations of real-world environments that users can physically walk throughout is a game-changer in terms of preservation.
Tilt Five took to Kickstarter seeking $450,000 in funding to bring its AR headset to life. The headset, which uses a unique projection display method, is heavily focused on tabletop gaming applications. With 28 days remaining, the Kickstarter has nearly doubled its funding goal, and looks well on the way to passing the $1 million milestone with momentum to spare.
Update (September 30th, 2019): The Tilt Five Kickstarter is holding strong momentum since reaching its $450,000 funding goal just 17 hours after launch. The AR tabletop gaming headset project has nearly doubled that initial goal with $870,000 presently pledged. With 28 days remaining in the crowdfunding campaign, the Tilt Five Kickstarter looks well on its way to passing the $1 million milestone.
At $750,000, the project unlocked its first Stretch Goal which will bring a new color option to the display board (apart from the default black). Backers will get to vote on which color they’d like, and the most popular choice will be made available.
The project’s next Stretch Goal, coming up at $1.25 million, is a new color option for the headset and wand. One again, backers will get to vote on the color choice. The following stretch goal, at $1.5 million, has not been announced yet.
Update (September 25th, 2019): Tilt Five is officially funded, having reached its goal within the first 17 hours of the project going live. At the time of this writing, the Kickstarter is sitting at over $580,000 and its showing no signs of stopping.
The first stretch goal is at $750,000, which will bring with it a new game board color, voted on by the backer community. A second stretch goal, at $1,250,000, had yet to be revealed, revealing just how ambitious the creators are.
The original article announcing the project follows below:
Original Article (September 24th, 2019): Starting at $300, Tilt Five is an AR headset which hopes to revolutionize tabletop gaming by fusing board games and traditional gaming into a shareable and even networked experience. Multiple players are able to gather around a single board, each getting a unique view of the game world. While wand controllers can be used for both motion and button input, the Tilt Five board can also detect special playing cards and miniatures, allowing the board to react to the physical objects in interesting ways.
Though glasses are involved, the system doesn’t use a traditional lens & display setup as you’d expect from other AR headsets. Instead, the headset hides a tiny projector which beams the image onto a retroreflective pad that rests on the tabletop, effectively turning the pad into the display.
The dots around the pad are seen by cameras on the headset and used to determine its position, which allows the projected image to update in real time according to the movements of the user. The headset itself plugs into a host device for processing, and Tilt Five currently indicates compatibility with Windows and Android but doesn’t mention iOS.
The nature of the retro reflective surface means that the light from the projector bounces straight back to the user, while others nearby can’t actually see the image. That means that a single pad can be used to give perspective-correct views to multiple players (you can think of it like a 3D display which gives each user the correct view based on their position). This also means that players can have unique views of the ‘same’ board, which could, for instance, come in handy in a game where one player sets traps that the others can’t see, or for a dungeon master to see the entire playing field while explorers see a ‘fog of war’ covering the landscape.
Image courtesy Tilt Five
Though the Tilt Five headset certain encourages multi-user play (including the potential for networked multiplayer games), the board is also pitched as supporting single player games too. Each of the Kickstarter tiers includes an introductory game pack which includes six titles, some of which are single player and some multiplayer (though you’ll need more than one headset for the multiplayer games). All of the included games work on Android and Windows.
Image courtesy Tilt Five
Tilt Five starts at $300 for a complete kit, which includes the headset, wand controller, display board, and more. Two SKUs are available, the LE and the XE, with the only difference being the size of the display board (and the XE comes with a ‘kickstand’ which allows you to prop up the side of the board allowing you to see further into the virtual world. More expensive tiers offer up the larger board, a deluxe box with carrying handle,” and access to stretch goal options. Yet more expensive tiers offer more than one headset in the box so that you can play with your friends.
Image courtesy Tilt Five
According to Tilt Five, the headset has 720p resolution, 110 degree diagonal field of view, and supports games up to 60Hz. There’s also on-board audio, a microphone, and an 8MP camera on-board for computer vision. Meanwhile, the headset weighs just 85 grams.
Though the company says it’s for “early adopters”, Tilt Five is not explicitly designating the headset as a dev kit, but says that any version of the headset can be used as such for developers who want to build games for the platform using an SDK provided by the company, including support for Unity and UE4.
Tilt Five says that third-party developers are already building content for the platform, including a commitment from Fantasy Grounds, a virtual tabletop platform that supports popular tabletop RPGs like Dungeon & Dragons.
If you’re thinking some of Tilt Five’s work looks and sounds familiar, it isn’t déjà vu.
CastAR prototype headset | Photo by Road to VR
Technical Illusions, which spun out of Valve in 2013 with Jeri Ellsworth (also one of Tilt Five’s founders), was working on very similar projection-based headset called CastAR for several years, though its ambitions went far beyond tabletop gaming. Though the company raised $15 million in venture funding, it was reportedly shut down in 2017 before it was able to get its AR system to market.
Though we don’t know the full reincarnation story at this point, Tilt Five has taken a much more tractable approach by focusing specifically on the tabletop gaming use-case, and looks ready to springboard off of the late CastAR.
Verizon’s acquisition will include Jaunt’s volumetric capture and machine learning technology.
It’s been a rocky couple of months for Jaunt XR. Late last year the software development company conducted a series of layoffs to its staff as part of a transition from VR content to the development of AR technology with a focus on volumetric video capture. In November, the company began seeking buyers for its VR business and this past December company co-founder Arthur van Hoff announced his departure from the organization.
Image Credit: Jaunt XR
Today, Jaunt revealed the latest sale of company assets as part of a new acquisition by Verizon Communications Inc. Sold for an undisclosed amount, Verizon has purchased access to Jaunt’s software, technology, and various other assets, including volumetric video capture technology.
“We are thrilled with Verizon’s acquisition of Jaunt’s technology,” said Mitzi Reaugh, President & CEO of Jaunt XR, in an official release. “The Jaunt team has built leading-edge software and we are excited for its next chapter with Verizon.”
While speaking to The Verge, a spokesperson for Jaunt confirmed the company has sold “all” of its technology, but was unclear on whether or not the company would continue to operate independently. According to the release, Jaunt will spend a brief period of time assisting Verizon in familiarizing themselves with the technology.
Image Credit: Jaunt XR
Founded in 2013 in San Mateo, California, Jaunt has released a variety of cinematic VR content over a variety of platforms, including their own dedicated app. In 2015 – 2016, the company received a $64M investment from Disney. Since then the company has struggled to generate traction with users with its catalog of VR content.
The upcoming Hand Tracking feature for Oculus Quest reduces battery life by just 7 minutes, according to Facebook.
Hand Tracking was announced during the week at Oculus Connect 6, Facebook’s annual VR/AR conference. Releasing early next year, it will allow users to interact with the Quest menu and supported apps without using the Touch controllers.
During the developer talk ‘Hand Tracking Deep Dive: Technology, Design, and Experiences’, Engineering Manager Robert Wang explained that keeping power usage low was a top priority in developing the feature.
Part of the explanation for this is that Hand Tracking cannot be used at the same time as Touch Controllers. The headset tracks the user’s fingers or their Touch controllers, but not both at once. Thus, the normal power usage of controller tracking is not present.
The team used breakthroughs from recently published machine learning papers such as depthwise convolutions and inverted residual networks. They also used 8 bit integers instead of floating point numbers.
This is the first time we’ve seen finger tracking in a standalone headset. HTC’s Vive Focus offers basic hand tracking but rather than tracking individual fingers it only recognizes a set of predefined gestures.
With Facebook’s Hand Tracking confirmed to not have a significant impact on battery life, media apps like BigScreen and passive experiences should be able to make hand tracking their default input method and still let users play for hours. This also opens up the potential of a successor to the Oculus Go for which hand tracking is the only included input.
Microsoft’s upcoming next generation flight simulator will not support VR at launch, according to a YouTuber who was given hands-on access at a Microsoft hosted event.
However, Microsoft did apparently tell the YouTuber, Pete Wright, that it would “maybe” come later on, as “perhaps a longer term goal”.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was announced at E3 2019, for Windows 10 and Xbox One. It uses ultra-high resolution aerial imagery from Bing Maps. Machine learning technology in Microsoft’s Azure cloud generates 3D scenery from these images on a global scale. The sim will work offline too, but the world will be significantly less detailed.
Games journalists who have gone hands-on so far have reported the map generation being so accurate that they’re able to recognize their own apartment complex from the air. The graphical realism is also reportedly far ahead of any other simulator on the market. From the screenshots, it almost looks photo-realistic.
The weather data is also pulled in from the live real world conditions, and the ambient AI models real flights happening in real-time. Even natural disasters can be experienced in real-time in the simulation.
Microsoft’s simulator is clearly the true next generation of flight sims. We’re disappointed that it won’t support VR at launch, as it’s difficult to go back to the limited perspective of a monitor once you’ve experienced virtually being in a cockpit. Nonetheless, we’ll be watching this sim closely as it develops.
For now, we’ll just have to be satisfied with Aerofly FS2 and DCS on Steam.
Haptic feedback in VR refers to the artificial sensation of actually feeling virtual objects and materials. Imagine one day putting on a VR glove and feeling the smoothness of rubber and the roughness of sandpaper.
The “skin” is made of silicone. Tiny pneumatic actuators pump air into a membrane which causes it to inflate and deflate rapidly. These actuators have a variable frequency, up to 100 Hz, and variable pressure. This allows a wide range of touch materials to be simulated.
A strain sensor, made of liquid-solid gallium mixture, measures the movement of the user’s finger. This can be used to adapt the haptic frequency and pressure based on the finger’s position and deformation.
The researchers claim this skin can be stretched for up to one million cycles, which could make it suitable for consumer products one day.
Right now this is just a research project, but the researchers say their next step will be to develop a “fully wearable prototype” to prove out its viability.
This technology sounds somewhat similar to one of the haptic VR glove patents we’ve seen from Facebook Reality Labs. Pneumatics may play an important role in delivering the rich haptic hands we all want to see in VR one day in the future — although another technology may prove to be the answer instead.
If you haven’t bought into Woof & Wood’s The Exorcist: Legion VR series yet, a great chance is coming.
Steam just listed The Exorcist: Legion VR Deluxe Edition for release in October. According to the store page, it contains all five episodes of the series for PC VR headsets. Not only that but there are apparently enhanced graphics and animations as well as upgraded movement controls. The game also features native support for the Valve Index controllers and Rift S.
Each episode of Legion VR originally released over the course of 2017/2018. Though the series has an overarching story, each episode takes you to a new environment to investigate different cases.
No price is given for the deluxe edition, but buying each episode on its own could come to around $25. Expect it to be in that range, if not a little cheaper.
We reviewed the full season of Legion VR back in 2018, awarding it 9/10. We said it was easily one of the best VR horrors experiences out there. “It honestly felt like I could hear the voices inside my own head and I could feel the heat from my crucifix as I stared down the faces of demon and eradicated the evil within,” David Jagneaux wrote. “The Exorcist: Legion VR will turn even the most hardened horror fans into whimpering piles of fear.”
This release was perhaps inevitable; the game launched on Oculus Quest earlier this year as a full package. No word yet on if the PSVR edition could see a similar release.
Since its release Wolf & Wood has gone on to launch a new game in Early Access. Hotel R’n’R is quite different from the developer’s usual brand of scares. You smash up hotel rooms as quickly and efficiently as possible.
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Last week, Facebook unveiled Horizon, a massively multiplayer VR world that’s scheduled to launch in 2020. This might seem to play to Facebook’s software strengths, but Lucas Matney argues that the social networking giant may not actually have much of an advantage against smaller game studios.
For example, the team at Against Gravity has already built a network inside VR called Rec Room that’s been maturing over the past few years, with rich environments and toolsets for multiplayer interactions. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
Users can create their own custom playlists of their favorite podcasts, or even those that combine music and audio — similar to Spotify’s newly launched playlist “Your Daily Drive.”
Earlier this year, Google and Amazon reached an agreement to bring their streaming video apps to each other’s platforms. The YouTube app launched on Fire TV in July, and now Google is adding its live TV streaming service.
Launched in 2014 as a study platform for medical students, Amboss has since evolved to offer what it claims is the “most comprehensive and technologically-advanced” knowledge platform for medical professionals.
We’re bringing some of the industry’s leaders onstage at Disrupt SF — including Bird founder and CEO Travis VanderZanden, Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun and Zoox CEO Aicha Evans.
The latest episode of Equity kicks off with the reemergence of the much-criticized startup Bodega, which is now known as Stockwell and has raised a total of $45 million in funding. Meanwhile, Original Content reviews “Between Two Ferns: The Movie” on Netflix.
After raising $100 million, virtual reality content startup Jaunt has been in a precarious position for a few years now. It seems like the saga has finally come to a close as Verizon has bought the company’s technology.
The studio rode the wave of VR hype following Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, but after years of trying to find a business in immersive entertainment, spanning software and camera hardware, the company has spent its past year trying to sell off its VR assets while pursuing a business focused on augmented reality and what it calls the “distribution of volumetric video of humans.”
A deal with Spinview Global to purchase the company’s VR tech that was reported last year never ended up happening, a spokesperson tells TechCrunch. Verizon is walking away with Jaunt’s technology assets here which is inclusive of their VR tech and their newer AR efforts. It doesn’t sound like any employees are coming onboard as part of the transition, but there will be some Jaunt folks helping with bringing the tech onboard.
The company’s spokesperson opted not to comment when asked whether the startup was winding down following the deal.
Why does Verizon want these assets? Verizon Media (of which TechCrunch is apart of) already has some assets in the VR space including the virtual reality content studio RYOT which has been playing around with 360 content and general AR/VR content. The company’s Envrnmnt arm is basically focusing on making AR and VR apps run more efficiently on mobile, which is something Jaunt has had to be mindful of as they’ve tried to focus on broadcasters that need to deal with bandwidth strains.
We don’t have a price tag on the deal, but the startup raised $100 million from investors including GV and Disney. In October of last year, the company laid off a “significant portion of its employees” and by the end of the year they were auctioning off office furniture.
Every month we aim to round up each and every VR game release for you in one single place — this is September 2019’s list. Check the bolded and underlined entries for ones we feel are particularly worth your time.
Curious about what’s coming this month to a VR headset near you? Then we’ve got you covered. And don’t forget to watch VRecap every Friday to stay on top of the top news stories, top new releases, and enter into our weekly VR game giveaway.
If you’re a VR game developer planning to release a game soon — let us know!You can get in touch with me directly by emailing david@uploadvr.com or hit all of the editorial team by emailing tips@uploadvr.com. Please contact us about your upcoming releases so that we can know what you’re working on and include you in release lists!
Unless otherwise stated, all PC VR releases are the Steam versions.
Rift, Vive, Index, and Windows VR Game Releases For September 2019
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today, we want to know if you think the newly announced Oculus Link feature is going to basically “kill” the Oculus Rift S?
At Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) this past week Facebook unveiled a feature that most enthusiasts assumed was being worked on but probably didn’t expect to see just mere months after the Quest and Rift S launched. The feature is named Oculus Link and it will enable you to plug your Oculus Quest standalone inside-out tracked headset into your PC with a single USB-C cable to then access and run Oculus Rift content. It’s coming this November.
From what we tried based on a 10-minute demo, it seems to basically turn the Quest into a Rift S. Granted, it isn’t perfect, but it’s shockingly close. Tracking won’t be as good with the alternate camera placement and fewer overall cameras, there is slightly higher latency reportedly, and visually the image is slightly compressed compared to the Rift S natively on a PC (plus 72Hz vs 80Hz) but other than it’s extremely capable and for most users will be way better than just good enough.
Since the Rift S and Quest both cost $400 (Facebook’s official Link cable will be $79 but according to them others should work as well) do you think the company is cannibalizing their own product? Or in other words: Do you think Oculus Link for Quest will kill the Rift S? Why or why not? Would you honestly recommend someone buy a new Rift S if they could just get a Quest and Link cable to add the option or portability or PC VR connected?
It’s an interesting topic. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Sadly, last week did not bring news of an Iron Man VR release date. But! We might still get that news this week.
Camouflaj’s anticipated PSVR-exclusive adventure will star in the Marvel Games Panel at New York Comic Con. That takes place on October 4 at 3pm ET. Joining Tony Stark will be MARVEL Contest of Champions on mobile and that divisive Avengers game coming to consoles.
Iron Man VR has been billed for a 2019 release. If it is still due this year then we’d expect to find out the full release date in the near future. This panel seems as good a bet as any. We had hoped to hear the release date at last week’s State of Play broadcast but no dice. We did, however, get a look at plenty of other upcoming PSVR games like Humanity and After The Fall.
We’ve been hands-on with the game quite a few times ourselves now. We’ve always been impressed with how liberating the game’s flight is, defying PSVR’s tracking expectations. Still, we’ve seen very little from that game that’s actually new since its reveal earlier this year.
The panel won’t be the only place to catch Iron Man VR in New York. On October 5 the voice actors behind Stark (Josh Keaton) and villain Ghost (Chantelle Barry) will join creative director Ryan Payton to discuss the game. There will be a signing following the event, which kicks off at 1:45pm.
Finally, at 12:45pm on October 6 you can go ‘Behind the Script’ of the game in a session with Payton, Marvel illustrator and costume designer Adi Granov and Marvel Writer Christos Gage.
There’s plenty of reasons to suit up for New York, this October, then.
Oculus CTO and legendary programmer John Carmack took to Twitter recently to explain his reasoning behind why Rift S is still worth buying even though Oculus Quest will soon get the ability to play Rift games via Oculus Link.
A bit of backstory: Facebook first unveiled the software feature at Oculus Connect last week, which will let Quest essentially work as a Rift on VR-ready PCs by connecting to computers via a USB 3.0 cable. It’s slated to launch sometime in November, and while it’s no doubt a welcome feature to users who are looking to get one of the most capable VR headsets out of the box, it’s clear some Rift S owners feel snubbed by the news.
Launched just six months ago, Rift S replaced the original 2016-era Rift as the company’s only high-end PC VR headset, and was positioned as the only way to play the platform’s PC VR titles. At the same time, Quest was launched as the only way to play a select number of bespoke VR games either ported or made exclusively for the standalone hardware, leaving both ecosystems segregated outside of the few cross-buy apps sponsored by Oculus
Carmack, who makes no bones about telling unambiguous truths on the company’s technology in his famous unscripted talks, says that Rift S still has a few key selling points over the standalone Quest:
Rift S is more comfortable, lower latency (for now; that may eventually change), doesn’t get compressed graphics, and has five-camera tracking.
Referring to Oculus Link’s current latency, Carmack additionally says that it “doesn’t make any sense to play Beat Saber over the link — play it locally without the cable!”
A fast-twitch game like Beat Saber is arguably one of the best ways to benchmark a VR headset’s hand-tracking and overall signal latency, as you can easily compare between systems the ingrained feeling of hitting blocks on the beat.
Road to VR’s Ben Lang does however point out in his recent hands-on with Link that despite the current issues mentioned by Carmack, the experience is surprisingly pretty great.
“Visually, the image felt smooth with no stuttering or obvious compression artifacts, nor significant muddying of dense textures (something you often seen with attempts at wireless VR over Wi-Fi). The edges of geometry felt sharp and maintained strong stereoscopy,” Lang writes.
The hand-tracking was also pretty good too, although Lang only got to try the upcoming Rift exclusive Asgard’s Wrath running on Quest, so there’s no telling how Link will truly perform with other titles. It was a promising enough experience for Lang to call it “like [using] a native PC VR headset.”
With two of its co-founders out of the picture, one-time VR content startup Jaunt is selling many of its assets. On Monday, the company announced a sale to Verizon (Engadget's parent company). While financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed, Jaun...
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At one of the panels at last week’s Oculus Connect 6 conference, Facebook gave an update on its Spark AR platform, including some new applications for retail and shopping environments.
The panel, titled “Bridge Virtual and Real Worlds with AR”, started off with an introduction to Facebook’s perspective on AR now and in the future, centered around its Spark AR platform, and the ways in which the technology is being adopted.
“We’ve been looking to see if augmented reality can provide the experiences that resonate in actual reality,” said Matt Hanson, Spark AR Project Design Manager. “And we’re seeing pretty strong indications that it can.” Over 1 billion people have used AR experiences across a variety of Facebook platforms in the last year, including on Facebook itself, Instagram, Messenger and Portal.
“I love VR, but it’s difficult to get your content to a huge audience in an immersive way. But because AR and VR are so complimentary, we can exchange assets with relative ease, and by leveraging spark, you can now reach the eyeballs that you couldn’t without headsets.”
Although Hanson didn’t give extensive details, he announced that Spark AR will soon support “other exciting applications”, one of which is AR shopping. Hanson said that the service would facilitate being able to virtually try products through AR on a phone camera, without having to go to a physical shop to do so. The three examples he gave, pictured below, were being able to try sunglasses on, being able to try on makeup such as lipstick, and testing out what a piece of furniture would look like when placed in a room.
He also spoke about using Spark AR to create, implement and present AR experiences in places and spaces, such as a recent experience available to visitors at the Tate Britain museum in London.
How do you feel about trying on products through an AR camera service? Do you think it could replace the real thing? Let us know in the comments below.
Jaunt, the cinematic VR company that pivoted to AR last year, today announced it has sold its software, technology, and “certain other assets” to American telecom Verizon.
Neither company has disclosed the acquisition price, or if that will include any of Jaunt’s remaining staff, although Jaunt says it will be assisting Verizon for a brief period of time with the transition of “select portions of the software and technology.”
“We are thrilled with Verizon’s acquisition of Jaunt’s technology,” said Jaunt XR CEO Mitzi Reaugh in a press statement. “The Jaunt team has built leading-edge software and we are excited for its next chapter with Verizon.”
Founded in 2013, Jaunt became known not only for producing its high-quality 360 video for consumers, but also a 360 camera dubbed Jaunt One (formerly NEO) aimed at idustry professionals looking to get into immersive video capture.
In October 2018, Jaunt made the critical to decision to pivot to AR and lay off a significant portion of its staff in the process. Since then, the company has most recently been involved in the design and training of neural networks for real-time human pose estimation and body part segmentation, something that’s aimed at creating volumetric videos and 3D models of humans for playback on AR/VR devices.
Throughout its lifespan, the company secured over $100 million from the likes of Disney, Sky, and Axel Springer, with its latest funding round in 2015 garnering the company $65 million.
Borderlands 3 VR might not be a thing (yet), but Harmonix’s Audica brings you a bit closer to it.
Revealed last week (which we missed because, you know, Oculus Connect), Audica is bringing Borderlands 3’s Maliwan Pistol into VR. The gun has orange and blue variants to fit the game’s rhythm-based action. It doesn’t change the gameplay itself in any way, but it’s a really cool way to crossover with another gaming series.
Audica is a little like a shooter version of Beat Saber. Notes fly in from in front of you and you have to blast them based on the corresponding colors. At release, we thought the game was fun if bare bones. There’s been plenty of updates bringing in new features and more tracks since then, though.
The Borderlands 3 guns arrived as part of a free update last week. Said update also brought in new calibration options for better audio syncing, Twitch Chat integration and a few other things.
Of course, Borderlands 3’s predecessor, Borderlands 2, already got the VR treatment on PSVR. A PC VR version of the game is due to launch later this month with all the DLC intact. As for Borderlands 3 VR? Gearbox says its been talked about but doesn’t have any real plans as of right now. Hopefully, that changes in the near future.
Elsewhere, we know that Audica is on the way to PSVR later this year. For now, the game remains in Early Access on PC VR headsets. What other iconic videogame guns would you like to get hold of in Audica?
Ahead of the start of the NBA season in late October, NBA Digital and their official live VR partner, NextVR, announced the schedule of games across the season. Each week, one game will be selected and broadcast in stereoscopic 3D on Oculus Venues and NextVR.
The NextVR app is available on several platforms. In order to access the weekly VR game through NextVR, you will be have to be a NBA League Pass subscriber, which also allows you to watch live games online. In addition to the weekly stereoscopic 3D game, all NBA League Pass games will also be broadcast in 2D with NextVR Screening Room, a theatre-sized screen.
If you’re not a NBA League Pass subscriber, you’ll also have the option to buy a pass for a single game through NextVR.
The same weekly stereoscopic 3D game will also be broadcast on Oculus Venues, available on the Quest, Go and GearVR. It’s unclear whether the games will be paid or free when viewed through Venues, however Venues content has traditionally had no charge attached.
In contrast to the NextVR service, Venues allows you to talk and interact with others watching the content in VR at the same time as you. This means you’ll be able to cheer, boo and trash talk each team alongside other viewers, just like watching sport in real life. I recently attended a Billie Eilish concert in Venues and interacted with the people sitting around me, which made for an interesting experience.
The awards, hosted in the center of London, included ten categories. They recognized everything from animation and interaction to documentary making and even gaming. The night’s big winner was Gloomy Eyes, the Atlas V and 3dar-produced animated love story narrated by Colin Farrell. The adorable short, in which a zombie called Gloomy falls for a human girl, picked up the Artistic Achievement and Audio Achievement awards.
Afterlife was another double winner. The searing 360 narrative, which deals with a family’s loss of a child, was awarded Best Cinematic Experience and Best Debut Experience.
Meanwhile, Immersive Game (which, for full disclosure, I was a judge on) featured hot competition between Maze Theory’s Doctor Who: The Edge Of Time, Fast Travel Games’ The Curious Tale Of The Stolen Pets, Italic Pig’s Infinite Hotel and Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky. It was The Curious Tale that took home the award.
The Spirit of Raindance award, meanwhile, went to Cosmos Within Us. The piece follows the story of an elderly man trying to recall childhood memories. It utilizes the audiences’ sense of smell and touch in a theatrical twist.
Other winners at the awards included A Box In The Desert, a theatrical VR performance in which audience members have their sense of obligation and trust test. Animated Experience went to Battlescar. The full list of winners (with trailers) follows below:
With two of its co-founders out of the picture, one-time VR content startup Jaunt is selling many of its assets. On Monday, the company announced a sale to Verizon (Engadget's parent company). While financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed, Jaun...
