Blog V Reality

Friday, 31 August 2018

Over A Dozen New Sessions Added To Oculus Connect 5, Focused On Storytelling

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Facebook’s annual Oculus VR focused press and developer conference is fast-approaching in its 5th installment as Oculus Connect 5. From September 26 – 27 thousands of panelists, executives, media, and developers will descend on the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

Now today, over a dozen new sessions have been announced across a wide variety of topics including storytelling, social presence, and diversity. Previously, talks focused on porting content from Rift to Santa Cruz were confirmed, as well as over a dozen other sessions.

Check the blog post for full descriptions of each session:

Authentically Us: Providing a Platform for Unrepresented Voices in VR
Paula Cuneo, Oculus Partner and Strategic Marketing Director; Shannon Scott, US Air Force Veteran; Jesse Ayala, Fovrth Studios Filmmaker; + Jeremiah Allen, Pride Foundation Project Director

Breaking the Story: Emergent Narrative from Shared Experiences
Colum Slevin, Oculus Head of Experiences

Creative Ways to Get More Eyes on Your App
Caitlin Bigham, Oculus Ecosystems Manager; Peter Howell, Lucifer’s Mask Developer; Tess McCrea Martov Producer; Lucas Rizzotto, Where Thoughts Go Creator

Developing Different Genres in VR: Learnings from the Edge of Reality
Martin De Ronde, Force Field Creative Director

The Future of Home for Rift: Developer + Roadmap Updates
Brandon Dillon, Oculus Rift Product Manager; Lizzy Donahue, Oculus Software Engineer; + Nancy Xiao, Oculus Product Manager

Medium and Quill for Prototyping
Speakers TBA

The Next Generation of Storytelling with Immersive 6DOF Capture
Brian Cabral, Facebook Engineering Director

Oculus Avatars: Maximizing Social Presence, Part II
Mike Howard, Oculus Product Manager

Oculus Go Content Panel: Success for Mass Market VR
Tina Tran, Oculus Developer Relations Specialist; Paul Raphaël, Felix & Paul Studios Co-Founder; Anthony Matchett, MelodyVR ounder; + Melissa Swanepoel, FarBridge Producer

React 360 + Oculus Browser: Uniting the Web with VR
Andrew Mo, Oculus Mobile Product Manager

Unlock the Visual Potential of VR Using Unity’s Scriptable Render Pipeline
Brad Weiers, Unity AR/VR Technical Product Manager

UX Research in VR
Tara Franz, Oculus UX Researcher; Brian Espinosa, Oculus Hardware Researcher; James Lin, Oculus Research Scientist

VR for Everyone: Lessons for Building Compelling Social VR Experiences
Mike Booth, Facebook Social VR Creative Director; Cecile Eskenazi, Facebook Product Manager; Mike LeBeau, Facebook Product Manager; Cody Sumter, Facebook Product Manager

According to our sources, we’re expecting to hear confirmation of a Q1 2019 targeted release date for the upcoming standalone VR headset from Oculus, code-named Santa Cruz. The Grand Finals of VR League Season 2 will also happen at OC5 that week as well.

Are you going to Oculus Connect this year? We’ll be on the ground covering all the latest from the show! Let us know down in the comments below!

Tagged with: facebook, oculus, Oculus Connect 5

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Insomniac And Oculus To Host Public Demo Session For Stormland At PAX

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Editor’s Note: This story originally published on August 16th, but has been republished today to coincide with the event.

Original: If you’re attending PAX West later this month or happen to live in and around Seattle, WA then consider yourself one of the lucky few that will have the first-ever hands-on opportunity with Insomniac’s upcoming fourth Oculus Rift exclusive, Stormland. Oculus will be hosting demos only on August 31st as a one-time pop-up event with limited swag available.

For those interested, check out the event page on Facebook — it’s being held at 1927 3rd Ave, Seattle, WA 98101 on August 31st from 11AM PT – 9PM PT. That’s a huge block of time, so hopefully you’ll be able to get in if you want. The demos are totally open to the public meaning you do not need a PAX West badge in order to play the game.

This will be the first time anyone outside of either company is getting the chance to go hands-on with the game. In Stormland you play as a robot in an ever-changing world that’s engulfed in a constantly swirling and always changing massive storm. Every so often the storm shuffles the world, changes the environment, and resets everything — which lends itself very well to a dynamic, evolving game space.

Stormland is also a cooperative action game with full locomotion, climbing, flying, and a tremendously ambitious sense of freedom in movement. You can read more details about Insomniac’s vision for the game in our detailed feature from earlier this year. Watch more gameplay here.

Let us know what you think of the game and if you plan on attending down in the comments below!

Tagged with: Insomniac Games, PAX, Stormland

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Firewall Devs On DLC: ‘This Is Not A Release And Forget Game For Us’

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Editor’s Note: This interview was originally published prior to launch and is being republished for the launch weekend.

Original: Earlier this week we had the chance to go hands-on with the final, release build of PSVR-exclusive shooter, Firewall: Zero Hour from First Contact Entertainment. In our final pre-launch impressions article we spent a lot of time analyzing the game’s balance, the various maps, and detailing how customization options work. You can read all of that here and find our full rundown of everything you need to know about the title here.

During that event we also got the chance to speak with Hess Barber, President & CEO at First Contact Entertainment and Game Director Damoun Shabestari. We talked about the game’s upcoming launch, reception to the title thus far, as well as post-launch support in the form of potential other game modes and other types of prospective DLC.

Right now Firewall only has one single game mode for the main 4v4 PvP multiplayer offering: Contracts. Equal teams of 4 are separated into Attacking and Defending where the attackers must hack a firewall access point and then gather intel from a laptop, whereas the defenders must prevent the intel from being captured by lasting until the timer runs out (5 minutes) or killing all attackers.

That’s the only game mode other than Solo and Co-Op training, so obviously one of the main burning questions is what about other modes? Team Deathmatch? Capture the Flag? More co-op offerings?

“We’ve definitely talked about all that, but the obvious reason not to do that right now is the player base,” said Barber. “Even if it’s as big as it could be, it’s still gonna be smaller than a normal PS4 game so we don’t want to have multiple game modes spread out and chopping up the player base. Once we see what happens with the players and if there is a good, consistent player base, and it keeps rising, plus DLC, and people keep coming to it, then we’ll release those game modes so we don’t chop up players as much.”

The reasoning makes sense, but it’s still a big want from the community and the game’s not even out yet. Alternative options such as offering a single playlist that cycles game modes (similar to Overwatch) or having timed event for special game modes, like a weekend special for double XP in Team Deathmatch, then it’s gone, or something do exist. But time will tell if that sort of thing is implemented.

“We’ve discussed all kinds of game modes and we’ve tried [team deathmatch] internally since a lot of people naturally play all shooters like a team deathmatch and then adapt to a more tactical style,” said Barber. “So a mode like that is very, very different and it does work and it’s fun, but we just don’t want to split people up. There’s also the immersion factor when you don’t respawn and bullets are hitting all around you and you can feel the pressure and the need to pull back and duck and survive.

“One of the modes we’ve thought of is a hardcore mode where there is no wrist map tablet, one shot you’re down, no names over heads, friendly fire, and all that stuff we want to get to down the track. Definitely something that we’re planning and discussing because there will be that group that wants more intense stuff.”

DLC can take the form of many things, though. Other than game modes or maps, there is potential for new contractors, new guns, new attachments, and more. Some titles even let you purchase in-game currency using real money to sidestep the amount of time it takes to unlock everything — so we asked about that too.

“No, you can’t buy in-game currency,” said Barber. “We didn’t want to have multiple currencies or anything like that. You’re able to purchase items with crypto in-game, but we never have plans to sell currency for money.”

So I understand the need to limit scope and manage resources, but the greedy consumer version of my brain still really wishes there was more Solo or Co-Op content even if not a proper campaign.

“We wanted to do both single player and multiplayer from the start, but when it really came down to it and we budgeted it, the time needed to do a really good single player would probably have been two or three years to really do that well,” said Barber. “So we wanted to be able to have a way for people to play solo, but we didn’t want to call it Single Player because people would expect a campaign so we came up with Training. You can level up and progress in there, but it’s much less than in Contracts.”

The most important thing for Firewall’s success, other than it being a good game once we get the chance to really dig in at launch, is that the community continues playing it. There needs to be enough to do to keep people busy and post-launch support via things like DLC could be a big part of that if done well.

“To be clear, this is not a release and forget game for us,” said Shabestari. I’m eager to see how much longevity a game this ambitious has in the end. With over 3 million PSVR headsets out there, the market is larger now and certainly growing all the time.

Firewall: Zero Hour is slated for release exclusively on PSVR this August 28th. We won’t have a pre-launch review of the game, but you can catch up with our latest hands-on impressions and read our info dump full of details on how everything works.

Let us know what you think of Firewall so far down in the comments below!

Tagged with: Firewall, Firewall: Zero Hour, First Contact Entertainment

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Watch the ‘Real’ Magic Leap Whale Take Flight in ‘Helio’ Web Experiment

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Back in 2016, Magic Leap released a video clip of a breaching augmented reality whale as a backdrop to their freshly redesigned website, something meant to grab the attention of prospective investors, developers, and consumers alike. Now, through Magic Leap’s Helio browser, we can finally see what an augmented reality whale actually looks like running on Magic Leap One.

Here’s a quick refresher in case you don’t remember (Woooah!).

Magic Leap’s Helio browser essentially allows users to pull 3D objects from the web and view them in AR, similar to how WebXR based browsers like Mozilla let you quickly pop into a VR headset and experience lightweight virtual experiences and games without downloading a dedicated executable. There are only a few experiences listed in the ‘Helio Experiments’ section right now: the ‘Majestic Mammal’ whale, a demo called ‘Artistic Escape, and an ‘E-Retailing’ demo.

The video below was recorded thanks to ML1’s ability to capture footage through the perspective of the user. To company’s ultimate credit, seeing a giant whale—albeit a lower resolution one that’s not nearly as lifelike as the whale seen back in 2016—is still probably pretty impressive in vivo. That said, the direct comparison of concept to reality should definitely set some expectations of what the hardware is capable of.

The Helio-based experience also adds a few more things that may engage kids more than a quick breach of a gymnasium floor. Included in the demo, which was captured by Anima Games, is a host of whale facts.

Check out this hands-on from a dev’s perspective for a more detailed look at what makes Magic Leap tick.

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‘Torn’ Review: Masterful ‘Black Mirror’ Style Storytelling Tarnished by Repetitive Puzzles

Downward Spiral: Horus Station’s PSVR Version Dated

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Last week’s PlayStation Blog suggested that the PSVR port of 3rd Eye Studios’ Downward Spiral: Horus Station would be releasing this week. Well, you actually have to wait just a little while longer.

Downward Spiral is now arriving on September 18th with full (and optional) support for PSVR. The console version of the game will support the DualShock 4 and PlayStation Move controllers and will be released for $19.99 / €14.99 / £14.99.

The game is a sci-fi adventure in which you find yourself on an abandoned space station orbiting an alien planet. You make your way through the facility in zero gravity, trying to find out what happened to the crew and fighting off mechanical enemies. The game’s got full co-op support (though works great in single-player) and also comes with competitive multiplayer to boot.

We really, really like Downward Spiral, so we’re actually glad it’s not releasing in the same week as Firewall Zero Hour and other big PSVR titles. The game’s got a great control scheme (which will be implemented for the first time on PSVR unlike on Rift where there’s also Lone Echo) and an unbeatable atmosphere. If you need a break from all the military action in three weeks time you should absolutely pick it up.

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Google’s Next VR Spotlight Story Looks Absolutely Gorgeous

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Google’s Spotlight Story series of gorgeously animated 360-degree videos has produced some of the best-looking experiences you can have inside a VR headset. Its latest entry, Age of Sail, is no exception.

The trailer for this latest story, which is on display at the Venice Film Festival this week, just dropped. Directed by John Kahrs, who’s best known for his Oscar-winning 2012 animated short, Paperman, the piece tells the story of an old sailor that saves a girl in the middle of the North Atlantic. The two quickly fall out of sorts, with the sailor seeking isolation. It stars Ian McShane and Cathy Ang.

Visually the piece looks absolutely jaw-dropping, with a beautiful hand-drawn art style that boasts a unique sketchiness to it. We don’t know when it’ll launch on headsets, but it will make its US debut at LA Film Festival’s VR & Immersive Storytelling Showcase on 22nd – 23rd September.

Tagged with: Age of Sail

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