vivepre
Latest
Steam is ready to play all your games in VR
Not too long ago Valve announced that it had a way to play all of your Steam games in virtual reality, rather than just those built solely for the medium. Well, it's officially out in beta form and if you're one of the lucky folks who already has an Oculus Rift or Vive Pre, you can take it for a spin right this moment. Valve says that any game that supports Steam Broadcast should work with Desktop Game Theater, but you might have to fiddle with graphics settings on a per-game basis to get everything working properly. Consider it the modern analog of jiggling the handle to get the giant virtual screen working in your VR cave.
A day with the HTC Vive
Virtual reality in your home is finally ... well, real. And I'm not just referring to VR-lite experiences like Google Cardboard or Samsung's Gear VR. I'm talking about graphically rich, forget where you are, so genuine you can almost touch it, virtual reality. After dreaming about the possibilities of VR for decades and following its most recent wave closely, it's hard to believe it's finally here. That sentiment hit me with the force of a virtual tidal wave when the HTC Vive Pre arrived at my apartment yesterday.
Valve's VR technology now works with the Unity game engine
For many gaming platforms, the litmus test these days is whether or not they get official support in Unity's game engine -- land that and many developers (and by extension, gamers) are likely to give them a closer look. Valve just got a big credibility boost, then, as Unity is introducing native SteamVR support. If a virtual reality game runs on Unity's seemingly ubiquitous code, it's that much more likely to work with the HTC Vive and other SteamVR-friendly headsets. And much like the Unreal Engine, teams can edit in VR if they want to know what a scene will look like for players.
The HTC Vive isn't limited to perfectly square rooms
I'm not gonna lie: I was jealous when I heard that my colleague Sean Buckley got to play 12 virtual reality games in Seattle last week. (He even moaned about it later.) I got to try "only" four on the Vive Pre at HTC's Taipei headquarters. But that's OK, because in the end I also had a blast -- to the point that I ended up running around the room, high on adrenaline. Not even the zombies in Arizona Sunshine made me do this much exercise. As I sat down to recuperate afterwards, I caught up with one of the key execs on HTC's VR team to learn about the Vive's setup process and what other features are in the works.
HTC's making virtual reality safe for the home with Chaperone
I was standing with my back facing a large glass window, the mammoth casinos that punctuate Vegas' vast expanse of excess and desert showboating behind me. Here, on the top floor of the Wynn's opulent Tower suite, a staff photographer, moving around the room looking like some sort of bluish, 2D negative image, was instructing me to strike various poses of the decidedly unsexy sort. I was outfitted with the head-mounted display and wand controllers that make up HTC's revamped virtual reality developer kit, the Vive Pre, which it recently unveiled at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show. It wasn't the first time I found myself looking ridiculous while modeling bulky VR hardware for a photographer, but it was the first time I managed to avoid doing it blindly.
