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Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo cabin surrounds you with windows
“It's a big moment because although the event may be virtual its significance is starting to open space to everyone is very real,” Virgin founder, Sir Richard Branson, noted during today’s reveal. “Somebody once said to me the Virgin Galactic spaceship was the first one to be built from the inside out,” he continued. Virgin Galactic teamed up with UK design firm, Seymourpowell to develop the vehicle’s interior to develop “an elegant but progressive, experience-focused concept,” according to a Tuesday press release.
Google makes its AR-centric Depth API available to all developers
Google's AR Depth API is now available to all developers.
Unity is offering premium game development tutorials for free
Unity, arguably the biggest game engine in the world, is giving away hundreds of hours of premium game developing tutorials for free because of the coronavirus. For three months until June 20th, aspiring game makers will be able to get their hands on courses on everything from coding to design, and get access to Unity's daily interactive live lessons, Create with Code.
'Cuphead' will be available to play in Tesla cars
Do you feel the Atari titles in Tesla cars are a little too easy for your parking lot gaming sessions? You're about to get something much harder. Elon Musk has revealed to IGN's Ryan McCaffrey that Studio MDHR's retro-styled, legendarily difficult side-scroller Cuphead should be playable on the Model 3, Model S and Model X later this summer. Storage in the cars will limit you to playing Inkwell Isle One, and you'll absolutely need a USB gamepad to play. Still, this could be a blast to play while you're Supercharging -- so long as you don't translate frustration with the game to the road, at least.
Snapchat will let you play as your Bitmoji in games
You'll soon be able to play as your Snapchat Bitmoji avatar in a wide variety of video games. Snapchat on Thursday launched a Bitmoji for Games SDK that will let video game developers replace their characters with the app's iconic Bitmoji. Players will be able to scan an on-screen Snapcode to unlock their avatar on any supported games.
'Call of Duty: Mobile' beta opens soon with classic maps and gameplay
Late last year Tencent and Activision started testing an Android mobile version of Call of Duty, and today at GDC, announced that the game will start a beta test soon that's available in regions including Europe as well as North and South America. Call of Duty: Mobile maintains the look and feel of the game's performance on at least Xbox 360 and PS3-era hardware, plus it promises familiar maps from previous entries like Black Ops and Modern Warfare. The mobile version is a free-to-play title focused on competitive multiplayer matches in modes like Search-and-Destroy, Team Deathmatch and free for all. There's no word on exactly when the beta test will start on both iOS and Android, but interested players can sign up for access on the official site here, and check out a brief trailer below.
NVIDIA may have unwittingly leaked Unity ray-tracing support
NVIDIA launched the era of ray tracing about 5 months ago with the release of the RTX 2080 Ti GPU, but so far, it hasn't gone over well -- there's just one game that supports it. Sales of the pricey cards have been slower than it expected, and the cryptocurrency collapse hasn't helped. So, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was eager to mention that ray tracing support was available on both Unity and Unreal, the most popular gaming engines. The problem is, Unity has yet to reveal anything like that, so NVIDIA may have inadvertently stolen its thunder.
Unity created a game meant solely to test AI
Unity Technologies has a new game that you can't play. The maker of game development tools is releasing a new title called Obstacle Tower that is designed to challenge the capabilities of artificial intelligence. The release of the title is being accompanied by a contest, the Obstacle Tower Challenge, that will allow participants to run their AI agents through the 100-level challenge and compete for prizes.
Unity rolls out new rules for devs after Improbable fight
Unity has had a change of heart. The company is updating its terms of service so that any third-party software, including SpatialOS, can be used in conjunction with its popular game engine. "Some of these services will be supported, others will not," Joachim Ante, co-founder and CTO of Unity said in a blog post. That's in stark contrast to the previous terms, published last December, which banned games from being run in the cloud, or on a remote server, "without a separate license or authorization from Unity."
Unity, Improbable and Epic Games are squabbling in public
What a day. Unity, Improbable and Epic Games have been wrapped up in a bizarre and unnecessarily public dispute about terms of service, and the future of games that run on a much-hyped platform called Spatial OS. The quarrel started this morning with an Improbable blog post titled: "Unity's block of SpatialOS."
Baidu taps Unity's game engine to test its self-driving cars
Unity, the same company whose 3D gaming engine brought you Cuphead and Hearthstone is now helping Chinese internet giant Baidu develop the next generation of autonomous vehicles, the two companies announced on Tuesday.
DeepMind and Unity will work together on AI research
Alphabet's DeepMind division is partnering with Unity to accelerate machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) research. The new collaboration will focus on "virtual environments" that DeepMind can use to test and visualize experimental algorithms. Otherwise, little is known about the partnership. Today's announcement is basically a broad agreement, or statement of intent, between the two companies. "I couldn't be more excited to be collaborating with Unity, creating virtual environments for developing and testing the kind of smart, flexible algorithms we need to tackle real-world problems," Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind said in a press release light on detail.
Google opens Maps to bring the real world into games
Pokémon Go and other games that use real-world maps are all the rage, but there's a catch: they typically depend on semi-closed map frameworks that weren't intended for gaming, forcing developers to jump through hoops to use that mapping info. Google doesn't want that to be an issue going forward. The search firm is both opening its Maps platform's real-time data and offering new software toolkits that will help developers build games based on that data.
BMW used virtual reality to bring its latest crossover SUV to CES
When you're in Las Vegas for CES and want to show off a brand-new car before its debut at the North American Auto Show, what do you do? Well, if you're BMW, you do it virtually. The German automaker "brought" its new X2 crossover SUV to the desert with virtual reality, in a first-of-its-kind (for BMW, at least) demo experience that lets potential customers get behind the wheel and poke around the vehicle's nooks and crannies. BMW sees this as a natural bridge between looking at pictures online and reading brochures, and for the automaker, the medium seems like a logical next step to updating the shopping experience for the future.
Watch a developer erase his face with the iPhone X
The iPhone X's Face ID sensors have shown great potential for art, gaming and just weird apps, but a Japanese developer has taken another tack with the device. Using Unity, ViRD game developer @noshipu, aka Kazuya Noshiro, completely erased his face, except for his mouth and eyes, as shown in the 10-second clip below. Calling the trick "optical camouflage," Noshiro admitted that he has no clue what it can be used for. "If you want to make your face transparent, we're recruiting," he joked.
GameChanger brings virtual worlds to the kids who need it most
I was standing in a makeshift room at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital with a couple dozen people. Some of them were young children battling cancer, others were family and friends there to spend time with them. There was a handful of hospital staff. Spread out across the room were a young woman unknowingly about to get a scholarship, a social worker who had paid for a child's cable bill so that he could have some comfort in his last few weeks of life and team members of a charity who had brought everyone there so that sick children could have a little bit of fun for a few hours. It was an event that was both solemn and uplifting, and it was all centered around video games.
This mocap suit records Hollywood-quality animation at indie film prices
Conventional motion capture rigs -- the ones that use visual markers and arrays of infrared cameras -- cost tens of thousands of dollars, making them prohibitively expensive for everyone but major studios. But a new, cameraless system from Danish startup Rokoko, called the Smartsuit Pro, aims to make Hollywood-quality motion capture affordable for everybody.
Get ready for more AR apps for Google's Tango
With Google riding high on the back of Pixel's success, it's easy to forget that 2016 also saw one of the weirder releases from the company - Google Tango. Putting 3D-mapping tech into a smartphone for the first time, the Tango-enabled Lenovo Phab2 Pro, resulted in a phone better at tracking its surroundings than ever before. Now, it looks like the platform could be getting some much needed new software, as later this year Google's AR tech will receive native Unity support.
Create your own films on a VR movie set
When someone mentions "VR filmmaking," they're usually referring to 360-degree video, or some kind of video game environment where the story unfolds around you. One developer in Japan, however, has taken the concept in a vastly different direction. 'Make it Film' is an experimental project by 'MuRo' that lets you operate a camera inside a VR environment. Like a film director, you can frame up the shot and then hit record as characters converse or take part in an action scene. It was built on top of Unity3D and currently works with the Oculus Rift and Touch controllers.
Merch booths are coming to a video game near you
Take a look through Etsy or the countless daily T-shirt sites and nerd-focused stores online and you'll find a common theme: merchandise featuring characters and other bits from your favorite video games. Soon, you won't have to go outside the title you're playing to grab a piece of tie-in swag, however. That's because online shopping company Shopify has designed a developer tool that hooks into games made with the incredibly popular Unity toolset, and sets up a virtual shop in-game where you can buy branded t-shirts and other tchotchkes. What's more, unlike the aforementioned storefronts, it'll be officially licensed merch.
