The competition between HTC’s Vive and Facebook’s Rift is a closely watched battle, with the two leading PC-powered headsets racing to expand upon the groundwork laid by the SteamVR and Oculus platforms in 2016. It seems the next step for each company is to support a wide range of accessories that can enhance a virtual world...
Tag: #VR
EmbodyMe Is A Social VR App That Uses Your Own Face
Social VR apps are a big part of the industry’s future, but everyone’s got their own ideas as to what they should offer. Avatars are a big part of that discussion, as how we represent ourselves inside VR forms a big part of the connections we can make with others. We’ve seen plenty of interesting...
Boston Students Are Turning Classic Novel Ulysses Into A VR Experience
We’re seeing a surprising eagerness from creatives to turn classic novels into VR experiences. Winking Entertainment is trying its hand at retelling ancient Chinese story, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, inside the HTC Vive, and now a group from the Boston College is attempting to do the same for James Joyce’s Ulysses. The Irish tale...
‘Witcher 3’ Developer “observing [VR] with interest”, Awaiting Compelling Content
Developed by Polish studio CD Projekt RED, 2015’s Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is surely one of the best regarded games to launch in recent memory. Studio co-founder Marcin Iwinski says the studio is watching VR carefully, but he’s still waiting to see what compelling made-for VR content looks like. Speaking to Glixel in a recent...
VR Experience From Stanford Shows How We’re Killing Our Coral Reefs
Ocean acidification is not something most people are immediately passionate about. Unless they understand it, that is. When you realize that this process will effectively wipe out some of some of our world’s most beautiful landscapes, and decimate countless species of marine flora and fauna that depend upon it, then it starts to become a...
Intel Headsets, Vive Conferences and VR Cats: The Week’s Biggest VR News
GDC 2017 is starting to fade into the distance and the VR industry is settling down again once more before the next big week of events. Still, we have some big stories surface from some of the post-show announcements to get through, plus some cool experiments from the development community this wekk. Intel’s Standalone VR...
Report Predicts AR and VR Headset Shipments to Approach 100 Million by 2021
In a new report from IDC (International Data Corporation), the market research firm predicts a near 10 fold increase in the shipments of augmented and virtual reality headsets in the next 4 years, bolstered by a plethora of new devices and “expanding array of content for both consumer and enterprise users.” Lets be honest, the...
Xbox Cofounder Seamus Blackley Takes R&D Post at AR Firm Daqri
Seamus Blackley, the cofounder of the Xbox, has teamed up with augmented reality startup Daqri to run a new research and development effort for them. The initial work will focus not on AR. Rather, it will look into the commercial applications related to an instant 3D printing technology that Daqri makes possible. Daqri is working...
Experiential Technology Event Shows How Far VR Has To Go
I attended the Experiential Technology Conference (XTech) in San Francisco this week to hear talks about creating virtual experiences that truly immerse you in another world. It showed me that virtual reality has only scratched the surface. I liked the event, curated by Zack Lynch of Jazz Venture Partners, because it reminded me of the...
NASA’s ‘Mission: ISS’ is an Impressively Detailed View of Life in Zero Gravity
NASA and Oculus have launched their collaborative project ‘Mission: ISS’ for the Oculus Rift for free and it’s offers a detailed, visually sumptuous virtual reality trip to space that most of us would otherwise never experience. Virtual Reality’s transportative powers being used to live out experiences most of us will never have in real life...