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Respawn will share more about its 'AAA' VR shooter later this year
Back in 2017, Facebook and Respawn Entertainment revealed the developer was working on a virtual reality AAA shooter. While things have been fairly secretive since (so much so that it might have fallen off your radar), we'll hear more about it at this year's Oculus Connect, which is scheduled for September 25th to 26th in San Jose.
Oculus will livestream its next Connect conference in VR
The VR community's biggest annual event, Oculus Connect, is just over a week away, and as you'd expect from the tech in question, you won't have to actually be there in order to enjoy proceedings. The company will livestream key OC5 moments in Oculus Venues, so you can experience keynotes, esports action and gameplay alongside other fans in the crowd, using Oculus Go or Gear VR.
The VR reading library Oculus hid at its developer conference
Oculus' annual developer conference serves as a touchstone for its community; a time to see how far virtual reality has come in the last year and to inspire, motivate and help developers build the VR experiences of tomorrow. Most of that comes in the form of announcements, panels and software showcases, but in the media demo rooms, the VR company hid dense sources for inspiration in plain sight. Stacked just above the TV in at each demo station was a small collection of books -- all of them about either games, game development or the effect of virtual reality on our culture.
'Rock Band VR' is a completely different kind of guitar game
When Oculus first teased Rock Band for virtual reality, it sounded like kind of a stupid idea. A guitar game? In 2016? In virtual reality? How passe. It was hard to imagine how the series' iconic stream of colored notes would translate to VR, and I immediately dismissed the idea. It turns out I was right -- Rock Band's classic game mode didn't make a smooth transition to VR, so the team at Harmonix had to come up with something completely different -- and it's so much better than awkward rhythm game I was expecting.
Walking in virtual reality is hard, so 'Lone Echo' got rid of it
First generation virtual reality may have nailed sense of presence, but one major limitation keeps it from feeling truly immersive: Walking. The endless landscapes of the digital world are hampered by the confines of reality -- your playspace is only so big, and if you walk too far in any given direction, you're going to hit a wall. Most games get around this with teleportation mechanics, allowing the player's avatar to jump to far-off locations. Ready at Dawn Studios' Lone Echo took another approach: turn off the gravity, and eliminate the need to walk altogether.
Customize your appearance in VR with Oculus avatars
Oculus avatars allow anyone using the Rift to create a customized version of themselves, complete with more than 1 billion permutations of clothing, accessories, hair, face and color choices. Oculus VP of Product Nate Mitchell introduced the new avatar system, personalizing a character live on stage during today's Oculus Connect 3 event. The avatars will be used in various games and social experiences in the Oculus ecosystem, including the newly announced VR Rooms and Sports Bar VR, and the whole endeavor goes live when the Touch controllers ship on December 6th.
Watch the Oculus Connect 3 keynote at 1PM ET
Oculus' developer conference is going down in San Jose, California this week and today the keynote address will reveal the big news. You can stream all of the announcements as they happen at Oculus Connect 3 on Twitch or if you happen to own a compatible headset, you can watch with NextVR. On top of a load of software news, we're expecting to get more details on those Touch controllers, including final pricing and an official release date. The event starts at 1:00 PM ET/10:00 AM PT and we've embedded the stream down below for your viewing pleasure.
'Oculus Arcade' brings 'Pac-Man' and other classics to Gear VR
Oculus Arcade offers classic games from Sega, Midway and Bandai Namco, all playable in the Samsung Gear VR. Oculus announced the nostalgia fix during its Oculus Connect 2 conference, where it also announced the new, $99 Gear VR. The new Gear VR will be available in time for Black Friday in November. Oculus also showed off a slew of new games coming to Gear VR, including Land's End (from the Monument Valley team), Gunjack and the new VR Adventure Time game. The company also briefly showed off Netflix and Twitch running in Gear VR.
Watch the Oculus Connect 2 keynote right here
Can't make it to Hollywood for Oculus' second virtual reality conference, Oculus Connect 2? Fret not -- the Facebook-owned VR company will be livestreaming the event's opening keynote on Twitch. But better yet, because this is Oculus after all, there's also going to be a stream in virtual reality, which you can check out if you have one of Samsung's Gear VR headsets. The keynote, led by Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe, starts at 1PM ET today. To enjoy the 360-degree immersive experience, you'll need to download the NextVR app on your headset, otherwise we have a 2D way for you to watch the keynote right here.
The gospel of virtual reality according to Oculus
This past Saturday, I found myself in the front row of what felt like an old-time revival, only instead of religious zealots, I was surrounded by roughly 800 disciples of virtual reality. Onstage at the inaugural Oculus Connect VR developer conference, the high priests of the medium, Palmer Luckey, Brendan Iribe, Michael Abrash and John Carmack preached the gospel of presence -- the Holy Grail of virtual reality. Presence is a simple concept to grok once you've experienced it, though describing the feeling can be difficult. Essentially, presence is shorthand for what results when you fool the human brain into perceiving a virtual world as it does the real one.
New Oculus Rift prototype brings out the best in virtual reality
Presence. It's the ability of VR headsets to fool your mind and body into thinking that you are actually in a virtual world, and that experience is what Oculus seeks to deliver with its latest prototype. Code-named Crescent Bay, it's an evolution of the DK2 headset that only recently started making its way into the hands of developers. I got to try out the new hardware today at Oculus Connect, the company's inaugural developer conference. Come live vicariously through me, dear reader, as I tell you how it went.
Oculus wants a VR app store for every device you can think of
When we saw the Samsung Gear VR at IFA, Oculus CTO John Carmack showed us a basic version of an app store made for mobile virtual reality. But when the headset ships to consumers sometime later this year, the VR outfit has bigger plans. It's rebranding the current Oculus Share "store" into Oculus Platform and turning it into a launcher of sorts for apps and other experiences, as noticed by TechCrunch. Platform will act as common store across the firm's entire platform including the Rift and mobile. Like the prototype from earlier this month, the store will exist within virtual reality and will house games, apps and stuff like the virtual movie theater, Oculus Cinema.
The new Oculus Rift headset is Crescent Bay and has built-in audio
Oculus VR has a new headset. CEO Brendan Iribe showed the prototype, dubbed Crescent Bay, off today at the first Oculus Connect conference. It has built-in audio, it's lighter and packs 360-degree motion tracking. Iribe says that the jump between the new prototype and the previous developer kit (DK) is as dramatic as the jump between DK1 and the recently shipped DK2. Of course, it has a higher resolution screen and refresh rate, but the focus on this version though, seems to be audio. The headset sports onboard headphones that apparently can be removed if you'd rather use your own, and custom audio software (with help from the University of Maryland's RealSpace3D tech) to make "presence" much more convincing. "We're working on audio as aggressively as we're working on the vision side," Iribe said. Which makes sense, considering that sound is at least half of the experience for most entertainment.
