Extended Reality (XR) - Page 71

A few months ago we heard that some of the developers from Infinity Ward had formed Reload Studios, a VR-based first-person shooter studio. Reload Studios is now teasing its upcoming multiplayer VR shooter, which will arrive as a VR first-person, arena-based multiplayer shooter which currently has no name.

Founder and CEO of Reload Studios, James Chung, has said that the studio is aiming at VR as the primary platform for their unnamed shooter, acknowledging the challenges that building an FPS for VR gives them. Chung said: "Our focus is on virtual reality because you can't just port or make a non-virtual reality game and expect it to work. The games on VR have to be made from the ground up. So we are making a game from the ground up to make sure it will work on VR".

Although an FPS from the ex developers of Infinity Ward, who focused on FPS titles like Call of Duty, is something that isn't breaking the mould, making a VR-focused FPS is. Chung continued: "Trying a shooter in VR is actually difficult because nobody has a solution on how to make the experience compelling, especially on the controls issue. A lot of people have a lot of points on what not to do, but not a lot of people are coming up with what to do. And that's the side that we're trying to resolve".

Everyone is wondering when Oculus VR will launch their consumer Rift headset, with its current broad ETA being 'sometime in 2015'. But after his speech at the Web Summit 2014 in Dublin, Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe said that the Rift is months away from a consumer launch, not years away.

He said: "We're all hungry for it to happen. We're getting very close. It's months, not years away, but many months. We've gone out there and set this bar and said, 'We want to get it right.' We don't want it to be four or five years. We're eager for this to happen". Many months could still see it being released late next year, and during an investors meeting last week, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and owner of Oculus VR said that the Oculus Rift could only be "meaningful" as a computing platform if it sold 50 million to 100 million units over the next 10 years.

Facebook-owned Oculus VR doesn't plan to release a consumer headset until motion sickness-related issues are resolved, according to company officials. Some users said they suffer from motion sickness while wearing the headset and playing video games or watching movies.

"We're really looking forward to this as an industry that takes off... A number of companies will come in, even companies we haven't heard of yet two or three or five years down the road," said Brendan Iribe, Oculus VR CEO. "At the same time we're a little worried about some of the bigger companies putting out product that isn't quite ready. That elephant in the room is disorientation and motion sickness. We're encouraging other companies, particularly the big consumer companies, to not put out a product until they've solved that problem."

Without naming Sony directly, it would appear Iribe is speaking of the Japanese electronics giant - which unveiled Project Morpheus earlier this year. Virtual reality isn't necessarily a new technology, but only recently became a realistic goal, as hardware and software makers look to the budding market.

PAX AU 2014 - Oculus VR is a company I just have to meet at any trade show I go to, with PAX Australia 2014 being no exception. The now Facebook-owned VR startup was showing off four different titles at the show, where we jumped on two them: Alien: Isolation and Superhot.

The crowd at Oculus VR was absolutely huge, and it never slowed down. Other than the League of Legends crowd, Oculus had the biggest crowd.

Alien: Isolation was just the tech demo that was shown off at E3 2014, with Oculus Rift support baked in, but it worked incredibly well for something that wasn't built for the VR headset from the ground up. Superhot is similar, in the way that it wasn't built for the Rift, but worked incredibly well.

Floating around in space can't be all that fun, and after being up there for days, weeks, or months on end, you'd get pretty bored, right? Well, NASA is looking at solutions to this boredom, where it is looking at creating a VR holodeck, using the Oculus Rift.

Scientists over at the University of Dartmouth's Digital Arts Leadership and Innovation lab (DALI) have been working on this type of software and technology since 2001, where they recently received a grant of $1.6 million from NASA to fund their work. They are now on a mission to create virtual environments and digital therapists to de-stress astronauts in deep space, as well as help manage inter-personal conflicts, if they were to arise.

Dartmouth research professor Lorie Loeb said in a press release that the team was working on multi-sensory experiences, something that included smells and sounds that would "trick the brain and make people feel as if they are in a variety of beautiful and calm settings, such as with their family at home or strolling on the beach". Not only that, but the team is working on digital therapists that would "assess and manage psychosocial problems to prevent them from becoming serious enough to jeopardize a mission".

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor has an insane Ultra HD texture pack, with a requirement of 6GB of VRAM from your GPU. But, by the looks of a comparison between the Ultra HD texture pack, and High settings, there isn't much of a change in visuals.

The Ultra HD texture pack is a separate 3.7GB download, but when enabled, apart from requiring 6GB of VRAM, it doesn't seem to look much better. There are some comparison screenshots above, and below, which compare both the Ultra HD texture settings, and the normal High setting within the game, that doesn't require 6GB of VRAM.

In the screenshots, the top half is the High settings screenshot, while the bottom shot is from the Ultra HD texture pack enabled version of the game.

Oculus VR did demo its Oculus Rift headset using 'Alien: Isolation' during E3 2014. It looked very promising and gave a taste of the good things to come. But nobody knew if Creative Assembly's latest sci-fi survival horror game was just few keystrokes away from making the game work with Oculus Rift. Although this counts as 'unofficial' Oculus Rift support, the company behind the game did say that the game won't be supporting VR at the time of launch.

That didn't stop a group of Reddit users to com together and see if they can make the game support VR. As it turns out, they didn't really have to make a lot of efforts since the coding was already present. There are few issues, but as an end result VR works nicely for a game which doesn't have official VR support. The game also has positional tracking as seen during the demos of Oculus Rift's Development Kit 2.

Neither SEGA nor Creative Assembly said anything about the latest finding by the Reddit users, but the unofficial support is far from perfect, as expected. According to latest updates by the Reddit user, the game crashes due to a CPU problem from their end.

Warner Bros and DC Entertainment are making the virtual reality version of the Batcave so that you can check out Batman's underground crib in VR, with the help of the Oculus Rift.

The Dark Knight's VR Batcave is based on classic '90s cartoon series called 'Batman: the Animated Series'. The VR interaction will also be made compatible with other VR devices along with Oculus Rift. The company that will be responsible for this project is Otoy, but the series' original producer Bruce Timm is also involved in the project.

Warner Bros' Sam Register said "We are continuously exploring new and exciting ways to tell stories and share experiences with audiences around the globe, and we're excited to be working with Otoy on this cutting-edge adaptation from Batman: The Animated Series". He continued, "More to the point: It's super-cool, eye-popping stuff, and fans are going to love it. We can't wait for them to have the chance to see the Batcave from the show again - for the very first time."

During an interview with Japanese site AV Watch, Xbox boss Phil Spencer had some interesting things to say about Xbox, and more. There was a question thrown in about VR, which is the most interesting part of this interview.

When asked about the potential and rumored spin off of the Xbox brand from Microsoft, Spencer replied with: "Creating the appropriate tools, finding the right developers, we have gathered such a great community. With Xbox 360, our efforts were crowned by considerable success. And I'm committed to the success of Xbox One. In the past six months Xbox One has changed. We introduced to gamers the version without Kinect and broadened the choice. We will continue to update the system, and starting with Japan we're launching in new markets. The launch in Shanghai in China will happen next week, and I believe that by such changes we'll gather an even bigger audience".

Spencer also talked about VR, where he said good things about the competition in Oculus and Sony, but teased that Microsoft is working on its own VR tech for Xbox, but isn't ready to talk about it just yet. Spencer said: "The industry as a whole continues to invest in research and in new elements. New technologies invite us to explore new gaming world's. I believe that Kinect, voice and virtual reality are those key new elements. That's why I'm glad that Sony and Oculus are investing in VR. We're also working on an investment of our own, but it's not at a stage in which we can talk about it yet".

Samsung is soon to launch its Gear VR device, alongside the Galaxy Note 4 smartphone, but what about the software and games that will float onto Samsung's first VR device? That will be controlled by Oculus.

First, you'll need the Galaxy Note 4 smartphone, followed by (of course) the Gear VR headset itself, and finally, in order to get it all working, the software will be coming from Oculus. Oculus' vice president for Mobile told Polygon: "On Gear VR, there will be an Oculus store and that's how you'll get Gear VR applications". This means that there is no way for developers to release games through the Google Play, or other Android stores for Gear VR. Cohen added: "No. You'll need to go through Oculus storefront for mobile VR".

While this might sound strange, it gives Oculus the control to keep the quality of the content at a much higher grade. Second, it provides Oculus, and Facebook, with profits from the sales, in the same way Valve takes a cut of profits from each game sold on Steam. Cohen added: "We'll have a lot more details about this later, but it's going to be something that's very developer friendly. Our goal is to be the platform, to provide the tools that developers need, and to bring the users in," he stated. "And that it will be as painless as we can make it".

While Oculus VR is on its fourth headset before it even goes retail: DK1, Crystal Cove, DK2, Crescent Bay, Sony is still tinkering away with its Project Morpheus headset. Sony Worldwide Studios' President, Shuhei Yoshida, spoke with The Wall Street Journal recently, about the company's adventures in VR.

Yoshida said that Sony "finished 85 percent of the work needed to make the product available" but didn't elaborate on when Project Morpheus would launch, or what type of price to expect. Yoshida did say that most of Project Morpheus' components are found in smartphones, which would help keep the price from floating up.

From what we can expect, Sony's Project Morpheus headset offers a 1920x1080 display with a 90-degree field of view (FOV) and full 360 degrees of head tracking. Considering Oculus just announced, and showed off, Crescent Bay, with an improved display, less latency and full 360-degree head tracking, Sony has its work cut out for it, big time.

Oculus Connect is currently underway in Los Angeles, with Oculus VR announcing the latest prototype of the Rift, known as Crescent Bay. Crescent Bay features numerous improvements and new tricks even over the just-released, and still-shipping Rift DK2 unit, such as 360-degree head tracking.

Not only do we have 360-degree head tracking (which is done by having sensors on the back of your head, something completely new), but we have a higher resolution screen (no exact numbers, but most reports and hands-on use point to it being better than Samsung's Gear VR which uses the QHD or 2560x1440 panel from the Galaxy Note 4), lower latency, and a built-in headset.

Crescent Bay has been working out, dropping a little weight, with Oculus providing improved ergonomics so it feels better when wearing it, and with the integrated audio, 3D audio can now be something big thanks to Oculus' collaboration with licensed technology from the University of Maryland, and RealSP. Oculus' Brendan Iribe explains: "We're working on audio as aggressively as we're working on the vision side". For the various reports on the latest VR headset from Oculus, most have said that it is much closer to what is expected from CV1 (the first consumer, or retail Rift).

NVIDIA Editor's Day 2014 - There were two stations to play with the Oculus Rift and Maxwell-powered GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 GPUs at NVIDIA's Editor's Day 2014, with the first being the EVE: Valkyrie station, and the second Epic Games' "Car Flip" VR demo. It's hard to explain, so watch the video below.

As you can see, it's an on-rails VR demo that plays out in slow motion, with a blend of 'The Matrix' meets 'F.E.A.R.'. It was one of the more impressive demos I've witnessed, and while there's nothing you can do during the game with it being on-rails, the experience is like nothing else. Watching bullets fly past you makes you feel like you're in The Matrix, and watching the explosions take place in front of you while the car flips over you, is simply awesome, there's no other word to explain it.

NVIDIA Editor's Day 2014 - After the top press in the world heard about the new GeForce GTX 900 series, and its more-than-impressive Maxwell architecture, the demo room was open for a few hours for us to all go have play around in. One of the demos that I simply had to try was EVE: Valkyrie, on the Oculus Rift DK2, powered by NVIDIA's new Maxwell-powered GeForce GTX 980 GPUs, in SLI.

You can see the video above, a tour of the various demos, toward the end we check out the EVE: Valkyrie setup - with four PCs running GeForce GTX 980 SLI, and the Oculus Rift DK2.

The four PCs filled with various media playing around in the deep space of EVE: Valkyrie.

NVIDIA Editor's Day 2014 - One area of NVIDIA's new direction with Maxwell is virtual reality, with a totally new focus on VR with something NVIDIA calls VR Direct. VR Direct provides multiple technologies from the Maxwell architecture, and previous technologies from NVIDIA, to make the VR experience much better.

First, we have low-latency, which will reduce the amount of time it takes for the scene to be rendered on your PC, and displayed to the VR display sitting just an inch or so from your eyes. Second, we have VR SLI: something that will help your GeForce GTX SLI setup render the two scenes (one to each eye) much better, resulting in improved performance and better yet, scaling between your GPUs.

Latency is something NVIDIA is very concerned about, with the company wanting to remove as much of it as possible, in order to get a better VR gaming experience. As you can see, right now we have around 50ms of delay between the image being rendered and outputted to something like the Oculus Rift, but NVIDIA have some new technologies to remove much of this delay.

We're much closer to see Oculus VR to release its consumer version of its Rift VR headset compared to before, but some of us may get early access of those VR headsets as the company plans for a public beta of these units by April 2015.

As one would expect from a beta, the distribution of these units will be very limited to a certain number of users initially. Its assumed that Oculus is going to use this opportunity to check if the consumers will be interested to own such a headset by having a limited launch. It is said that Oculus will send its public BETA headsets in the similar way how Google launched its public beta for Google Glass. The criteria to qualify for getting a public beta headset is unknown for now.

The specification of these consumer-final version has significant improvements over the Oculus Rift Dev Kit 2 version. The consumer version will have a significant increase in resolution compared to the dev kit's 1080p. To add further, the refresh rate is expected to be 90Hz or higher. As one would expect, Oculus really wants its Rift headset to provide the best virtual-reality experience you can provide.

Oculus VR is pushing for the future of VR to be awesome, so what better way than donating millions of dollars to a University to build a new VR lab? That's exactly what Brendan Iribe, CEO of Oculus VR has done, donating $31 million to the University of Maryland.

The money will be used to build a new computer science building that will feature a VR lab. Iribe had the idea of donating the funds after the acquisition made by Facebook in March of this year for $2 billion, after he met with Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, where he walked around the University and noticed that not much had changed around the place.

Iribe met Michael Antonov at the time, who is now the Chief Software Architect of Oculus VR, who will be donating $4 million the university to help with the construction of the building, and establish a scholarship. Iribe spoke with Business Insider, where he said: "It will have a big focus on robotics and computer vision, computer graphics, and human computer interaction. In the past, computers have been used regularly as a tool, so you don't need to bring in psychologists or the biotech side of things to understand how the computer affects the brain in order to make a great operating system. But in VR, you actually do".

A few days ago we were introduced to the Samsung Gear VR headset, a mobile VR headset that is powered by the Galaxy Note 4 smartphone. Oculus VR, the makes of the Oculus Rift, were instrumental in the design, technology and path of the Gear VR, but now you can pre-order the headset for yourself, at $249.

The Gear VR uses the 5.7-inch QHD Super AMOLED panel as its display, which should provide a clearer picture than the Full HD-based Oculus Rift DK2 unit. The pre-orders were spotted on Mobile Fun, with the retailer defining itself as a 'Samsung Authorized Dealer'. We don't know when Gear VR will launch, but I think we'll see the start of it next month.

Samsung only unveiled the Galaxy Note 4 and Gear VR at IFA 2014 a few moments ago, with the Gear VR "Powered by Oculus". Oculus VR has just announced the new Samsung Gear VR Innovator Edition, which is a new mobile VR headset powered by the Galaxy Note 4 smartphone.

The Gear VR was "created by Samsung and powered by Oculus" and over the "last 12 months, we've been collaborating with Samsung on the future of mobile virtual reality," according to Oculus. The Facebook-owned VR startup continues: "The project actually began as an experiment to see if great VR was possible on next-generation mobile hardware. Oculus CTO John Carmack and the mobile team at Oculus were able to blow everyone away in an extremely short amount of time, quickly proving that we were on to something special."

The Galaxy Note 4's internal GPU and CPU to power Gear VR, using the 2560x1440 low-persistence 5.7-inch AMOLED panel as its display. John Carmack's role as the CTO of Oculus VR is becoming more clear, as he has worked with the mobile team at Oculus on Gear VR. The year was spent between developing a new Oculus Mobile SDK, as well as optimizing Android and the GPU drivers for VR.

Something that wasn't too much of a surprise, but is an interesting new step for Samsung, is the just-announced Gear VR. Samsung has been rumored to have been working on a VR headset for a while now, but it is now official.

The South Korean electronics giant has teased that Gear VR works with the just-announced Galaxy Note 4 smartphone, which features a 5.7-inch 2560x1440 display, so it'll be interesting to see what Gear VR looks like against the Oculus Rift DK2 which features a 1920x1080 display.

The one big note here is that the Gear VR doesn't work with any other smartphone other than the Galaxy Note 4. The Note 4 will snap into the Gear VR, in front of dual-lenses that provide the 3D effect in the VR headset. There's a trackpad and back button on the right side of the Gear VR, with most of the movements and menu navigation to be performed through head movements and taps on the side-mounted trackpad. The Verge has already enjoyed some hands-on time with Gear VR, with some shots of the Gear VR teasing "Powered by Oculus".