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Monday, 3 December 2018

GIVEAWAY: Win Rebellion’s New VR Game, Arca’s Path, On Steam

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Put your Perplexus down; there’s an all-new type of marble maze heading your way this Christmas.

Arca’s Path, the first full VR game from Dream Reality Interactive (and published by Battlezone developer Rebellion) is set to launch on almost every headset under the sun tomorrow, but we’re giving you the opportunity to win one of ten copies for your Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or Windows VR headset via Steam.

Win A Copy Of Arca’s Path On Rift/Vive/Windows VR!

For those that don’t know, Arca’s Path is an intriguing new VR game in which you follow a young girl on her journey across a futuristic wasteland as she hops into her own sort of virtual reality and steers a ball through a maze. It’s a blend of both relaxing gameplay dotted with more demanding challenges, and its hands-free control system makes it an ideal way to introduce others to the wonders of VR. We’ll have our full review of the game when it launches on December 4th so check back soon.

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Hands-On: War Dust Mostly Delivers On Its Ambitious ‘Battlefield In VR’ FPS Promise

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The best VR experiences are always the ones that really make you take a step back, pick your jaw up off the floor, and think about what you just experienced. Whether it’s emotional and moving moments in Dear Angelica, the sheer sense of pure immersion in Lone Echo, or an epic feeling of grandiose presence during set piece moments in The Gallery, VR is pure magic when done well and hyper-polished to a glimmering sheen.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be janky, rough, and nearly broken while still retaining the core of what it means to be fun along the way too. War Dust falls into this chaotic and unrefined second category of VR experiences. War Dust is a massive-scale VR shooter that pits two teams of 32 players against one another. Similar to Conquest game modes in Battlefield, you’re tasked with taking and holding control points spread across a massive map with access to jets, helicopters, tanks, and more. It’s utterly incredible that it works as well as it does.

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For every expertly modeled and balanced bullet you shoot in Epic Games’ Robo Recall, there’s a tank glitching through a mountain or an avatar falling through the map in War Dust. And I love it.

Growing up as a teenager during the early days of 3D gaming on the N64 and PS1, I’m used to games being janky. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that it can foster a more charming, approachable aesthetic at times. War Dust is an early access VR shooter in development by Raptor Labs, the same team behind Stand Out: VR Battle Royal, Deus Vult, The Art of Fight, and IrreVRsible. Three out of their five VR games, including War Dust, are waffling around in the pits of Early Access game development with no end in sight.

War Dust has a ton of issues, but it’s so earnestly ambitious and throws caution to the wind to deliver its vision, it’s hard not to love it. There just isn’t any other VR game out there that lets me fly a jet over a war zone, shoot missiles at real players, eject out and parachute down to a control point, shoot a rocket launcher at a tank, gun down some enemies, manually reload my gun with my hands, and then duck down behind a rock for cover while I wait for backup to arrive. All while I’m surrounded by dozens of other real players.

Well, sort of. All of that is possible and it has happened to me, but you’re not always surrounded by real players. Similar to Stand Out: VR Battle Royale and Pavlov VR, War Dust will fill matches with bots if there aren’t enough players. Honestly, this doesn’t bother me. I’d rather have a full match than an empty one and frankly, there just aren’t enough people with VR headsets to sustain a game like this on actual human body count alone.

Visually it looks about like a late PS2 or early PS3 era game. Textures are often muddy with lots of jagged edges, maps are empty outside of the densely designed areas, and visual effects like lighting and shadows leave more than just a bit to be desired. But nevertheless, it’s addicted, fun, and absolutely exhilarating to play.

War Dust works so well because it’s what VR gamers are hungry for. Onward scratches that Arma-meets-Ghost Recon itch, Pavlov satiates the Counter-Strike crowd, Firewall Zero Hour is there for fans of Rainbow Six, and Stand Out is a serviceable stand-in for a VR PUBG, but there isn’t an option for fans of large-scale FPS games like Battlefield. Well, until now.

According to the Steam page they plan for the game to be in Early Access for about 12 months, meaning it should, theoretically, hit full version 1.0 by October or November in 2019. Since it first released in Early Access on October 19th, 2018, it’s already received big updates introducing multiple new maps, new weapons, and more.

War Dust is currently available on Steam in Early Access with support for Rift, Vive, and Windows VR headsets at the price point of $24.99. As long as you don’t have a hard time with VR sickness, can deal with some janky bugs, and are looking for that large-scale VR shooter fix, I definitely recommend War Dust.

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New VR Experience Simulates What It’s Like To Have Poor Color Vision

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In 2016, Czech VR developer Jan Horský set out with his company iNFINITE Production to use VR as a tool for empathy — to let people see how it would feel to be in the shoes of someone else. Given that one of VR’s strengths is as a visual tool, he decided to focus on vision-related differences in how people see the world. They considered conditions like nearsightedness, but the limited resolution of current VR made that impractical.

But when they tried colorblindness they realized current VR systems could simulate what it is like to live with poor color vision. So they contacted colorblind people, both friends and online, and asked what they thought people should know about the condition, and how this could be portrayed in VR.

Experience: Colorblindness was the result. It’s available for free on the Oculus Rift Store as well as Steam, and Viveport.

The experience shows four kinds of colorblindness — red-green, blue-yellow, and two types of total colorblindness. There’s a robotic companion that somewhat resembles the character from Oculus’ First Contact Rift tutorial guiding you through the app and the different types of poor color vision as well as how it works on a biological level. Most importantly, you get a glimpse of what it looks like to see the world this way. You can see different flowers in a garden, browse fruit in a grocery store, and view paintings in a museum.

By letting us experience life as another VR has the potential to be a powerful empathy amplifier. I learned a lot from this experience and I hope more like it are made for other conditions and life experiences.

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Nvidia Reveals Titan RTX GPU With VirtualLink Port

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Nvidia today announced its most powerful GPU yet, the beastly (literally) Titan RTX or, as it likes to call it, the T-Rex.

The Titan range of Nvidia cards has traditionally eschewed cost concerns in favor of raw power, surpassing its line of GeForce GPUs. The same is true of this latest addition, which arrives following the launch of the RTX 2000 line earlier this year.

Titan RTX using Nvidia’s Turing architecture and offers what a press release calls “130 teraflops of deep learning performance” as well as “11 GigaRays of ray-tracing performance”. The latter is a feature Nvidia widely touted with the launch of the RTX 2080 card earlier this year, bringing increased lighting effects to environments in games like Battlefield V. We’ve also seen ray-tracing used to render a Star Wars set with photorealism.

Elsewhere, the Titan RTX features 24GB of GDDR6 memory with 672GB of bandwidth per second. Though a press release largely cites use-cases like data science workflows and AI research for the Titan RTX, Nvidia did confirm the card also features the new VirtualLink port that’s also seen in the 2000 series. This new display port is designed for “next-gen VR headsets” which will only need one wire to connect to PCs.

The Titan RTX is due to arrive later this month in both the US and Europe for the jaw-dropping price of $2,499. Outside of the professional market, then, this is likely to be reserved only for the VR enthusiasts with the deepest pockets, then.

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Former eBay product chief RJ Pittman takes the reins at 3D capture company Matterport

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Matterport, a provider of 3D image capture technology, has named former eBay chief product officer RJ Pittman as its new chief executive.

Pittman will take the reins from former chief executive Bill Brown, who will continue to advise Matterport as the company looks to capitalize on its library of three dimensional scans.

The company currently has a library of 1.4 million three dimensional models that have been viewed at least 600 million times since the company launched.

According to Silicon Valley Business Journal, the company had revenue in 2017 of $33 million from selling its camera equipment and software services to businesses.

The company was launched when founders Matt Bell and David Gausebeck realized the commercial potential of the motion capture and sensor technology that Microsoft had unveiled with their Kinect camera back in 2010.

At the time, the company’s several thousand dollar pieces of hardware were the cutting edge for capturing images — now it can be done with software and a cell phone camera. The march of technology has put Matterport in a somewhat precarious position, but the company continues to lock in deals with companies like Donan, an investigation service for insurers and others that looks at fire damage.

The company has inked deals with a number of different enterprise customers — and even brought on State Auto Labs as a strategic investor earlier this year.

“Matterport has the opportunity to revolutionize how property risks are underwritten and claims are handled in the insurance industry,” said Kim Garland, Senior Vice President, Commercial Lines & Managing Director of State Auto Labs said in a statement at the time.

In all, Matterport has raised around $77 million from investors including State Auto Labs, Lux Capital, DCM Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Ericsson Ventures, AMD Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, CBRE, Felicis Ventures, GIC, Crate and Barrel founder Gordon Segal, iGlobe Partners, Navitas Ventures, News Corp, and Sound Ventures.

Matterport’s hardware can digtially capture, document, visualize and collaborate around properties in 3D on web, mobile and in VR. And its hosted Matterport Cloud service automates the creation of state-of-the-art 3D models, high-quality 4K 2D photography, floorplans and other assets and stores them in easily accessible formats.

There’s still a lot of contested space in the collection and capture of the real world for use in augmented and virtual reality and the addition of Pittman should help Matterport as it looks at a much more crowded competitive landscape.

“RJ’s operating experience at scale, paired with his entrepreneurial DNA and deep product vision will be instrumental to unlocking the full potential of our breakthrough technology and unparalleled 3D media and data,” said company co-founder and chief technology officer David Gausebeck, in a statement.

Indeed, Pittman discussed the importance of Matterport’s library when he spoke of the opportunity he saw for the company. “Matterport Cloud is an unrivaled dataset of precision 3D environments that represents an enormous opportunity to scale the company’s data services business exponentially. This will open up new strategic partnerships and investments as we realize the full value of this data,” Pittman said in a statement.

As an entrepreneur, product developer and real estate investor, Pittman is uniquely qualified to take charte at Matterport.

He previously worked on product, design, engineering and mobile payments at eBay and held roles at Apple and Google. In addition, he had also co-founded and served as the chief executive for the search engine that created the industry’s first graphical information interface, Groxis.

Finally, Pittman worked on a number of real estate projects in the U.S. and UK, giving him insight on the role that technology can play in the new architectural landscape.

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VR Anime Spice And Wolf Smashes Kickstarter Funding Goal

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Reaction to SpicyTales’ Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign for its new VR anime, Spice and Wolf, has been incredibly strong.

The experience, which comes from the developers of Project LUX, has already surpassed its $70,487 goal, currently sitting at $91,566 at the time of writing. The campaign started back on November 25th and still has 40 days to go having already reached early stretch goals.

Spice and Wolf is based upon a light novel series originally published back in 2006. In it, a merchant named Kraft befriends a wolf-deity named Holo and the two travel the world together. This VR adaptation isn’t a game so much as an experience that puts you right in the middle of the world. You’ll interact with characters first-hand as they make eye-contact with you. Think about what SpicyTales first did with the well-polished Project LUX and you’ll be on the right track.

The Kickstarter campaign’s reward tiers start at around $26, which offers a digital copy of the experience across any one of its release platforms. Those include Oculus Rift, Oculus Go and HTC Vive, though the developer also says that PSVR and Oculus Quest versions are on the way, they might just take a bit longer (and are not included in the backer tiers). Tiers go all the way up to the $3,500 mark, which offers an original short movie that can be viewed in VR too.

SpicyTales currently estimates the game will arrive in May 2019 on those initial platforms.

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Tvori’s Christmas Competition Lets You Use VR To Win Amazon Vouchers

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Dreading the inevitable assault on your wallet this Christmas? Want to save some cash for yourself instead of spending it all on *ugh* other people? We couldn’t agree more but fortunately there’s a way out of all of it. You just need a little practice with Tvori.

The VR animation app is running a Christmas competition with Amazon vouchers up for grabs. All you need to do is create your own video using the VR tool that, in the developer’s own words, reflects “the spirit of the wonderful Christmas season”. You have to shoot your videos with Tvori’s in-app camera tool and footage can’t be any less than 5 seconds.

Submissions are open from now until December 16th at 11pm PT. First place will be awarded a $100 voucher whilst second and third will get $60 and $40 respectively. If you’re looking for some inspiration then head on over to Tvori’s official competition page to see some examples and find out how to get to grips with the kit.

Full disclosure – I’m going to be a judge on the competition alongside the likes of Tipatat Chennavasin, General Partner at The Venture Reality Fund, Mike Morris, Storyboard Artist and Revisionist on DuckTales at Disney ABC Television Group and Estella Tse, Virtual Reality Artist and Designer, Artist in Residence with Google and Adobe. You might not be intimidated by me but these three are all way smarter and more important than I am so you better be on top form.

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