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Valve brings 360-degree videos to Steam VR
While it's not quite as immersive as a full virtual reality experience, 360-degree videos and photos are becoming more common (especially on Facebook and YouTube), and now Valve has released a Steam 360 Video Player. It uses adaptive streaming from a company called Pixvana, which should enable playback with just one click on your Rift or Vive headset. According to the FAQ, even if you don't have a headset, it will soon support playback on the desktop with control and navigation by mouse.
Visit the ISS in virtual reality with an Oculus Rift
Most of us will (sadly) never be able to visit the ISS in person and will have to make do with photos and videos of the orbiting lab. If you have an Oculus Rift, though, you have a far more immersive choice: a true-to-life simulation you can visit in virtual reality. Oculus has teamed up with NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency to create the Mission:ISS VR experience. You can explore the virtual station like you're actually in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), but you can do more than that, as well. So long as you're using an Oculus Touch controller, you can dock incoming spacecraft, go out on spacewalks and even perform mission-critical tasks like a real crew member.
'#Archery' is a quirky VR party game for the HTC Vive
I wasn't expecting to start my day using a bow and arrow to shoot ice cream cones at kids, or riding on the back of a pickup truck slinging newspapers in a suburban neighborhood. But thanks to #Archery, a virtual reality game from indie studio VRUnicorns, I was able to do just that using an HTC Vive headset. The title, which hits Steam Early Access on March 30th for $10, features a handful of main levels and mini games within each one of those. My experience consisted of scenarios like what I mentioned above, where I took charge of a digital bow and arrow to fire different objects at characters around the environment.
The Oculus Rift and Touch bundle is now $200 cheaper
We're just a few weeks away from the one-year anniversary of Oculus shipping the Rift to consumers, so now would be a good time for the company to drop some news. And here it is. Starting today, Oculus will begin selling Rift and Touch bundles on its store for $598 -- about a $200 price cut. On their own, the Rift headset is now $499 while the Touch controllers are $99, meaning that each saw a price drop of $100. Oh, and the cost of an extra Oculus sensor is now $59, which is $20 less than before.
'Brass Tactics' is a VR RTS that puts you in a clockwork battlefield
Real-time strategy and VR don't seem like they would go together. After all, the key attraction to virtual reality is feeling like you're in someone else's shoes in a faraway land of make believe. The top-down view of typical RTS games doesn't quite lend itself to that level of immersion. Or does it? After a few minutes playing with Hidden Path Entertainment's Brass Tactics at an Oculus demo event, I found myself so engrossed in a cutthroat tabletop battle that I almost forgot I had a headset on at all. Now, there have been other real-time strategy games in VR -- Tactera and AirMech come to mind -- but Brass Tactics has a decidedly more medieval feel. The developers describe it as a "clockwork battlefield," as your buildings and minions appear to be built out of parts of a clock, gears and all. Yet, the design of Brass Tactics reminds me very much of tabletop war games -- living soldiers take the place of miniature figures while 3D-modeled landscapes replace plastic terrain. Gameplay itself should be pretty familiar to anyone who's played a real-time strategy. You start out with just your warriors and your archers, but you can upgrade them over time. To attack, you simply direct your battalion to a spot on the table with the Touch controllers. As you capture more regions, you can build more towers to create even more units like a flying squad or cavalry tanks. If you like, you can also use catapults to launch fire balls at your opponent. With Brass Tactics, you can also actually move "through" the landscape like an omniscient god, so you can get up close and get a better idea of how to manage your resources. You also need to move from region to region in order to build and maintain towers. It was pretty cool to be directly in the middle of everything, sending off troop after troop to capture or defend regions. I felt a little bit like an orchestra conductor, except instead of cueing violins, I was deploying archers. As engrossing as it was though, I'll admit it can be a little chaotic. It seems like it would be easier to hotkey or mouse your way through a battlefield than it is to figure out where to flail your arms. That said, it's probably a matter of getting used to it, and I can see improving my skills over time. If you're an RTS fan who also likes a bit of tabletop gaming from time to time and you happen to have a Rift, then definitely take a look at Brass Tactics when it comes to the Oculus Store later this year. Click here to catch up on the latest news from GDC 2017!
'From Other Suns' lets players move in VR however they want
When I boot up a new VR game for the first time, the same question always hangs in my mind. "So," I think, "how do you teleport in this game?" It's become a standard in virtual reality, the go-to movement system that lets players explore the digital realm without contracting simulator sickness. It works, but not perfectly. Warping from place to place avoids the disparity between vision and physical movement that causes nausea, but teleporting across a tiny walkable distance feels a little weird. From Other Suns doesn't change the basic function of the teleport mechanic but adds a nice twist: It lets you see your character actually walk to the teleport location.
Google's VR painting app lands on the Oculus Rift
Tilt Brush, Google's virtual reality painting app, is available today on the Oculus Rift, complete with a few tweaks to make your 3D art take shape as naturally as possible. Tilt Brush landed on the HTC Vive in April 2016 and it's generated some awe-inspiring work.
Oculus now owns an eye-tracking company
Google isn't the only company trying to figure out eye-tracking for virtual reality -- Oculus VR is on the case too. The Facebook-backed VR company has confirmed that it recently acquired Danish startup The Eye Tribe, a firm best known for creating software developer kits that bring gaze-based controls to smartphones, tablets and PCs. Now, that technology belongs to one of the highest profile VR headset makers on the market.
Dino VR adventure 'Robinson: The Journey' stomps to Oculus soon
Virtual reality is the best (and safest) way to get up close and personal with dinosaurs. And next month folks with Oculus Rift headsets can do just that thanks to Robinson: The Journey's PlayStation VR exclusivity going going extinct expiring.
VRMark will tell you if your PC is ready for Virtual Reality
Oculus and Valve's own virtual reality compatibility tests will tell you if your PC is VR-ready, but how ready is a bit of a specification guessing game. Will you be able to run games at their maximum settings, or are you just going to scrape past virtual reality's minimum requirements? Futuremark's trying to make that question easier to answer with a new benchmarking suite designed specifically for virtual reality.
'Superhot VR' feels like a time bending, action-packed puzzle
Earlier this year, Superhot launched on PC and consoles with a fresh gameplay gimmick: Time only moves when you move. This simple idea turned the fast-paced action of an FPS shooter into an odd, methodical, and tense puzzle game where players could stop in their tracks to think their way around a barrage of incoming bullets. It's incredibly fun on traditional gaming platforms -- but it's even better in virtual reality.
You don't need a ridiculous PC to run Oculus Rift anymore
Back when we reviewed the consumer-ready Oculus Rift in March, we found its minimum specs requiring an Intel Core i5 4590 (or equivalent) processor and an NVIDIA GTX 970 graphics card to be in line with a typical midrange gaming PC. Below that, a computer won't just fail to run VR smoothly: It'll drop frames and make you sick. But without changing any of the headset's hardware, Oculus has lowered the Rift's minimum spec to a Nvidia 960 graphics card and an intel i3-6100 or AMD FX4350 processor. That's all thanks to its new framerate-fixing tech, "asynchronous spacewarp," which they announced at today's Connect keynote.
Oculus brings VR gameplay streams to your Facebook news feed
Facebook has been experimenting with livestreaming gaming for a bit, and now Oculus is coming into the fold. You'll be able to broadcast your Gear VR gameplay to the world's largest social network. From the stage presentation, perhaps unsurprisingly it resembles how the current streams work. Basically, it looks like a status update, and you can tag friends, comment and talk smack. Or, ill-timed words of encouragement from your family members as you blast away enemies. Because that's how Facebook works.
Oculus' Touch controllers priced at £190 in the UK
If you still haven't figured out why the Oculus Rift sells for a solid $200 less than HTC's Vive, let this be the final word: it's the motion controllers. According to a display in a GAME store in the UK (found by our very own Nick Summers), Oculus' virtual reality motion controllers will retail for £190, or just over $200 after deducting local UK taxes. That's expensive, but not at all unexpected -- if that price holds across the pond, it puts the cost of a room-scale Oculus Rift kit on equal ground with HTC's $800 Vive.
Futuretown's modular platform turns VR into simulator rides
When we last met Futuretown's CEO Johan Yang back in February, his startup appeared to be merely a virtual reality game studio, with its popular title Cloudlands: VR Minigolf currently owning 30 percent of the HTC Vive market share. Today, the company is entering the hardware space by announcing its 5D Totalmotion at the Tokyo Game Show. This aptly-named device is a cylindrical motion feedback machine that can fit any module on top to simulate different types of scenarios, such as riding, standing and seated experiences. To demonstrate these, Futuretown also announced four new VR games: Whiteout: Ski VR, Infinity Rider: Motorcycle VR, Wave Breaker: Surf VR and Stallion Adventures: Horse Riding VR.
Thin gaming laptops will run VR with NVIDIA's new chip
Nvidia has just taken the wraps off a trio of laptop GPUs based on its new "Pascal" chip architecture, the GeForce GTX 1060, the 1070 and the 1080. While the 1080 is by far the most impressive, it's the humble 1060 that could make the biggest impact on the market. Why? Because it facilitates using a virtual reality headset like the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift on a reasonably small laptop.
Oculus update preps Rift for room-scale VR, motion controls
When virtual reality fanatics argue about what headset is best, two arguments tend to prevail: "The Oculus Rift is more comfortable," and "only the HTC Vive does roomscale VR." Soon, that second argument won't matter as much. Thanks to a recent update, the Rift's Oculus Home software now boasts support for up to four tracking sensors -- doubling one of the basic requirements the hardware needs to be used for accurate, room-scale virtual reality.
New in our buyer's guide: All the phones (just the good ones)
It took us a while, but now that we've reviewed the Moto Z, we think we're done testing flagship phones until the iPhone 7 or next Galaxy Note come out (whichever arrives first). With that in mind, we can now confidently say that the following phones belong in our buyer's guide: the Samsung Galaxy S7, the HTC 10 and the iPhone SE. (Sorry, LG, maybe next year.) While we were at it, we also inducted the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive VR headsets, since we likely them more or less equally. And, in the less-expensive realm, we added the Roku Streaming Stick in the A/V category. Head over to our buyer's guide hub for all the details on these and many more. That's it for now, but stay tuned -- who knows what we'll add after the next gadget-reviewing frenzy.
E3 was secretly terrible for the future of virtual reality
After years of being teased with prototypes, developer kits and tech demos, it's finally happening: Virtual reality is on the cusp of going mainstream. Need evidence? Just look at the events of E3 2016. Over the past week, the first VR headset for a home console got a release date, and we caught a glimpse of virtual reality games from popular franchises like Star Wars, Final Fantasy and Batman. Better still, pretty much every major player in the industry (save for Nintendo) promised to support VR in 2017. On the surface, things are looking amazing. Dig a little deeper, though, and the situation just might be terrible.
Report: A major developer is working on a VR game for Xbox One
Ars Technica reports that a "well-known European studio" is currently working on a VR game for "set in the universe of an established, long-running franchise" the Xbox One console. The unnamed game is slated for a 2017 release. Ars received the news as part of its E3 pre-briefings and was able to confirm it with the developer's PR rep. A PC and PS4 version are both also supposedly in the works. This news lends significant credence to rumors that the upgraded Xbox One models that are expected to debut at the expo will be VR capable and compatible with the Oculus Rift headset.
