Rift / Vive / VR General

[Venser]

 

[Dexter]

Paper Beast from Eric Chahi (Another World, Heart of Darkness, From Dust) for PSVR:


A new game narrated by Captain Picard for the Oculus, called "Shadow Point". I'm assuming this will also release on the "Oculus Quest", so expecting a lot of the new releases from Oculus here-on out to have low-polygon Mobile graphics, since that is the path Facebook wants to go:

 

[Dexter]

This shit looks rather dope:

 

[Dexter]

https://www.businessinsider.de/facebook-weird-messages-oculus-touch-controllers-2019-4

Facebook accidentally put hidden messages in ‘tens of thousands’ of VR controllers like ‘Big Brother is Watching’ and ‘The Masons Were Here’

Rob Price, Business Insider

Facebook

• Facebook accidentally included cryptic hidden messages in "tens of thousands" of virtual reality controllers.
• Printed inside its Touch controllers were phrases like "Big Brother is Watching" and "The Masons Were Here."
• Nate Mitchell, the cofounder of Facebook's Oculus unit, says the messages were intended for prototypes but were included in production units by accident.

Facebook accidentally included hidden bizarre messages "tens of thousands" of virtual reality (VR) controllers, including "Big Brother is Watching" and "The Masons Were Here."

Nate Mitchell, the cofounder of Facebook-owned VR organisation Oculus, wrote on Twitter on Friday that the company inadvertently printed some unusual messages inside its Touch controllers, handheld devices for playing games and navigating inside VR.

These messages were intended only for prototypes, he said — but a mistake meant they were included in regular production devices. Some messages were included in developer kits aimed at people building software for the product, while different messages made their way into consumer kits in significantly larger numbers.

"Unfortunately, some 'easter egg' labels meant for prototypes accidentally made it onto the internal hardware for tens of thousands of Touch controllers," the tech executive wrote.



"The messages on final production hardware say 'This Space For Rent' & 'The Masons Were Here.' A few dev kits shipped with 'Big Brother is Watching' and 'Hi iFixit! We See You!' but those were limited to non-consumer units."

(iFixit is a tech repair company known for publicly deconstructing new gadgets and posting photos of their innards online.)

Mitchell added: "While I appreciate easter eggs, these were inappropriate and should have been removed. The integrity and functionality of the hardware were not compromised, and we've fixed our process so this won't happen again."

Facebook spokesperson Joanna Peace told Business Insider that while none of the affected consumer devices had been shipped yet, they will ultimately go out to consumers with the hidden messages inside.

"To be clear, no devices have been sold with these messages yet, since Quest and Rift S have not yet shipped. That said, as mentioned in Nate’s tweet, the messages will be inside tens of thousands of controller pairs that will ship to consumers when Quest and Rift S ship," they wrote in an email.

"We think it’s important to be transparent with our community and take responsibility when there’s an error."

The Oculus Touch controllers.Oculus VR

While most users of the Touch controller will never see the hidden messages, it's an awkward misstep for Facebook, which has faced sustained criticism on privacy issues for more than a decade.

It comes as Facebook attempts to push virtual reality into the mainstream, and the company is also gearing up to launch its long-awaited Oculus Quest, an all-in-one virtual reality headset, in the coming months.

Facebook is also quietly developing augmented reality (AR) technology, and Business Insider previously reported that the company restructued its AR glasses division late last year as it inches closer to launching a commercial product.

What clever hijinx to include in hardware that ships with what are essentially 5 Webcams attached to them providing almost 360° coverage and a Live microphone. Maybe the developers are trying to tell people something?



A German site interviewed Polish Superhot developer Tomasz Kaczmarczyk and he said that the VR version of his game apparently sold over 800k units cross-platform and it made more money than the desktop/console version: https://mixed.de/superhot-vr-ableger-macht-mehr-umsatz-als-pc-version/

This is funny, since they didn't even want to invest into VR at first at all, before they got extra funding: https://www.roadtovr.com/superhot-v...for-oculus-touch-free-to-kickstarter-backers/

But what of that exclusivity deal with Oculus? “The budget was waaaay too scary for our indie studio’s thirst for survival. We wouldn’t be able to make it without diverting resources from all the other crazy stuff we’re creating in the SUPERHOT universe,” the developer states, “Towards the end of last year, we rang up Oculus and pitched to team up – to pool together enough resources and VR design knowhow; to give us a shot at fleshing out a fully fledged, no-compromise SUPERHOT VR. A couple of weeks later, we already had our first full time VR dev happily coding away, and we had enough runway in the budget to keep us from having to cut the project short.”

 

[Venser]

‘Superhot VR’ Has Now Generated More Revenue Than The Original PC Game

Superhot VR (2017) just celebrated a big milestone. Having sold more than 800,000 units across all supported platforms, developers Superhot Team say the VR title has now generated more revenue than their original hit PC game Superhot (2016).


It’s no surprise the unique VR action game has done extremely well for itself. After all, Superhot VR ranked as the number three best-selling PSVR title of 2018 on the US PlayStation Store; on Steam, it was one of the top 12 best-selling VR games of the platform two years running.

Speaking to German VR publication MIXED, studio co-founder and business director Tomasz Kaczmarczyk gave rare insight into the VR title’s success. To Kaczmarczyk, the number of Superhot VR copies sold has a strong correlation to overall headset sales, something he says has a lot to do with a largely unshakable best-sellers list across all platforms.

“We saw a huge uptick in our sales,” Kaczmarczyk said, referring to the 2018 holiday season. “There’s just more people that have headsets, and a lot of them will buy Superhot VR. It’s not anywhere near the patterns you see for regular [non-VR] games, where you see your sales decline over time and people start getting bored and they buy new stuff. For VR, if you’re in this “best-selling” list, your sales pattern is just about people buying headsets, and people buying your game.”

Kaczmarczyk tells MIXED that the game’s holiday 2018 uptick was partially due to the hype around successful VR rhythm game Beat Saber (2018), a title that’s cemented its meteoric success by selling over one million copies as of March across PSVR, Steam and the Oculus Store.

“When we started out, my expectation for Superhot VR was that it was not going to be impactful at all, because VR was very very small basically at that point,” Kaczmarczyk tells MIXED. “We were making a game for devices that weren’t out and for market that was just hype; nobody really understood how it was going to get to multi-million numbers, to somewhere close to mass market. So my expectation was that it wasn’t going to do anything. But just like a few weeks ago, we actually crossed the threshold, and we’re now actually a legit VR studio because we made more money—we had more revenue with Superhot VR than the we had from Superhot.”


Image courtesy Superhot team


Although the studio says the VR sales have been encouraging, they still employ two production teams working on non-VR titles, one dedicated to creating the expansion to the original Superhot, and another for a non-VR game that should be announced this year.

“I hope that once we’ve got some of that shipped, or streamlined to a point where we can downsize the teams, we can start figuring out what will be next. I would like to work on something again in VR, and have a new VR project. [However] it’s not decided yet.”

Superhot VR’s next stop is Oculus Quest, where it will be a launch day title. Many of the long-reigning champions of the best-sellers lists are also making their way to Quest, including Job Simulator, Beat Saber, I Expect You to Die, Moss, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, OrbusVR: Reborn and more. We’ll be waiting patiently to see just how these ‘legacy’ titles fare on Oculus’ upcoming VR headset, one that promises to not only bring many of the games that ostensibly sold PC VR systems in the first place, but is doing it at a decidedly more consumer-oriented $400 price tag.

https://www.roadtovr.com/superhot-vr-outsells-superhot-pc/

 

[Dexter]

Some Aussie Cyberpunk/Sci-Fi game:

 

[Venser]

Sony confirmed the current PSVR headset will be compatible with PS5

https://uploadvr.com/next-playstation-psvr/

 

[Venser]

 

[Venser]

“I spent my everything. I broke.” – Tetsuya Mizuguchi on burnout and creating the “new-wow”


One of the first things Tetsuya Mizuguchi – creator of psychedelic on-rails shooter Rez – showed at his Reboot Develop presentation was a painting of Moscow. The abstract artwork from Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky sees the metropolis rendered as an otherworldly-yet-recognisable smudge.

Kandinsky is famous for having synesthesia, a sensory quirk that means he could see colours and sounds, associating them with other concepts: for example, he saw yellow as middle C on a brass trumpet, and he believed the colour black signified closure. The painting imagined the noise of the city rising as paint streaks, a transient heat haze. The sun swirled above like a golden vortex.

“In this industry, we can create anything,” Mizuguchi says.

The Japanese developer’s first video game creation was 29 years ago, working at Sega in his first ever games job. It was a Sega Game Gear – a handheld system from the console manufacturer – that he had rigged to strap to his face. A DIY VR kit. Nobody asked him to make it, but he took it into a board meeting anyway, where it was promptly ignored. This was in 1991.

Three years later, Mizuguchi was working on his first ever game: Sega Rally Championship. The small team had never worked on a 3D game before and yet they created this fully-fledged racing game for arcades, featuring different traction values for various surfaces, and with a mechanised car that twisted and turned while the players fought against force-feedback from the steering wheel.

There’s a clear throughline to Mizuguchi’s work – it’s all connected. The Japanese developer isn’t satisfied with you feeling just one thing while playing his games – he wants you to experience something completely new, something that takes over multiple senses at once. He wants to recreate what it’s like to have synesthesia.

With Rez, his first music-based game, every homing projectile you fire breaks off and becomes a piece of the soundtrack, laser beams forming into the rat-tat of percussion.

“Why? Why do people feel the groove?” Mizuguchi asks. “If you want to create that kind of feel, you have to know. Maybe we have a beat, you know, a heartbeat. I think this is a basic instinct. I don’t have all the answers, but naturally we have the beat. You have the beat,” he says, pointing to my chest, “and maybe we have some synchronisation. And if we play drums together, maybe in just ten seconds, twenty seconds, we can synchronise. This is the ability of all humans. Even children – any human being can connect through music. This is a big thing.”

Music is a universal language, of course. It doesn’t matter what culture you come from, each has a rich musical history that’s unique to its geography and invented instruments. As we’ve become a global planet, these genres have combined, creating offshoots and collaborations. A synchronicity, all of us connected by that beat.

“I want to create a new experience, using new technology,” Mizuguchi explains. “I think a video game is one of the best forms to create a kind of sensory experience. I got a lot of inspiration from music and music videos – music videos are audio and visuals combined to create a new narrative. It’s a great form, but it’s passive. It’s an outside of the box experience. So we have daily experiences in life and we know this is life, or this is a real thing. New types of experiences make you go, ‘Wow, what is this?’ It’s a fun moment for the player, but it’s also a fun moment for the designer. Designing those experiences was impossible, but now it’s becoming possible using new tech. It’s a new era. We are moving towards an experiential era.”

Mizuguchi is, of course, talking about the dawn of convincing virtual reality, where the world can melt away and we can truly inhabit these alien places. Before VR was where it is now, Mizuguchi felt creatively stifled by flat television screens. It was this limitation that led him to leave games in 2011 after wrapping up work on Kinect music game Child of Eden, at which point he began teaching at a Japanese university instead.

“I couldn’t make a game after this for four years because I didn’t want to make any games with 2D anymore,” he explains. “It’s very unusual and unnatural. Why does the 2D flat screen exist in our life? Our world, all the time, all things are 3D. If you’re a game designer and you imagine something, in your mind it’s this 3D image. All the time, I’m dreaming – in Rez, Child of Eden – that something comes from,” he throws a hand past his face, “here. But we need to squeeze all of this into a 2D flat space.

“I spent all my passion and energy on Child of Eden. I spent my everything. I broke. The project was amazing, but after that project, I burned out. Also, I felt this was a limit. I couldn’t move forward. I had no imagination

for the existing technology – 2D flat. Even with Kinect, you’re playing facing the monitor, but it’s small and 2D. I’m playing like this,” he waves his arms, “but I’m watching a small window. I felt kind of ambivalent. All the time I’m imagining something flying here, or hearing some sounds from here, and like this – the freedom. I needed to stop.”

Mizuguchi says teaching allowed him to see his life in retrospect, tracing it backwards. He learned things from his students and could see his games career from a different perspective. When the Oculus Rift was announced, everything fell into place. He was ready to create something entirely new, though by first looking backwards once more to one of his most popular games: Rez.

“When I made Rez the first time, I struggled with frustration and regret. In my mind, the game is like this,” he gestures widely. “But in reality it’s like this,” he makes a small rectangle with his fingers. “And it was really tough. The first Rez was a rail shooter – you can’t move freely. But Rez Infinite’s Area X finally had free movement and the technology makes that. Our frustration is getting less.”

Since then, he’s also made Tetris Effect for PSVR, reimagining one of the most perfect games that ever existed as an experiential, synesthesiac experience with pulsing blocks and 3D effects jumping in and out of the screen as each movement enhances the music. It can feel like a religious experience, temporarily transforming you out of your fleshy existence into this space where all that matters is the zone. It’s undeniably powerful and it even makes some people cry the first time they experience it.

“It’s because it creates a new emotional chemistry through new stimulations,” Mizuguchi explains. “It’s not fake, it’s an acceptable reality. This is the big ability of the human, we have creativity. VR is just the beginning. It’s a door to much more gorgeous experiential art. I’m dreaming more. We want to make the new-good feel, the new-good zone, and the flow states. We have that feeling inside, but we don’t know how, so this is a new area. I’m just thinking about the next game. This is an ‘our life’ theme. How can we enhance experiences? We create the new experiences with sound, maybe some haptic. What is the new-wow?”
​

https://www.vg247.com/2019/04/16/tetsuya-mizuguchi-burnout-creating-new-wow/​

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

VR is shit as it gives me serious headaches.

 

[Dexter]

 

[Venser]

 

[Dexter]

Pretty cool Modular VR UI concept for Space Sims:

 

[Dexter]

The pages for the Valve Index are apparently Live: https://store.steampowered.com/valveindex
And welp, they're pricing it outside the competition of Rift or WMR.

The full package with the Headset, Controllers and two Base Stations comes in at $999. For people that already own a Vive or Vive Pro and have Base Stations there's a bundle for the Headset and Controllers for $749 and the single pricing for the Headset is $499 with the Controllers at $279:

You can check for more Details here, famously it comes with 2x 1440x1600 RGB LCDs (for a total of 2880x1600), which is the Vive Pro resolution, they have Double-element Optics to improve FoV and clarity. The Headset apparently works at 120Hz and even has an Experimental 144Hz Mode which nobody really expected and they've announced that it will have 20° increased FoV in comparison with the HTC Vive: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/index

Spoiler

More about the Controllers here: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/index/controllers



Pre-Orders start tomorrow (May 1st) and June 28 are apparently the first shipping dates. We'll likely learn more about it and the planned software support tomorrow.

 

[Spectacle]

The apparent lack of wireless in the Valve Index is a deal breaker for me. I'm not going back to tethered VR after experiencing HTC's wireless offering. Apart from that the specs seem really good, glad to see VR advancing!

 

[Venser]

YES, 120+ Hz. Index is pretty much all I hoped it would be. I wonder how the no contact headphones feel and the front expansion slot could make things pretty interesting.

 

[Dexter]

23 minutes into the Pre-Ordering period they apparently sold out of stock in the US and the shipping dates slipped into July 31:

Sold out in the EU now too after 1 hour 30.

Updated Shipping dates now August 31 across regions.

 

[Venser]

Apparently it has significant god-rays. Others reported they were worse than on Vive.

"While Valve’s dual-element optics might be focused on a wide field of view and large sweet spot, it seems to have come at the cost of an increase in internal reflections (god rays). Moderately high contrast scenes cause significant glare which unfortunately detracts from the other benefits in clarity."

https://www.roadtovr.com/valve-index-hands-on-preview-valve-vr-headset/

 

[Perkel]

It uses fresnel lenses so it must have godrays.
I still wonder why they use them where PSVR doesn't and has no issue with godrays.

 

[Tweed]

No Windows 7 no buy.

 

[anvi]

Win7 dies in less than a year anyway.

Specs of this seem quite good but I am not gonna buy VR until there are some good games for it.

 

[Jigawatt]

23 minutes into the Pre-Ordering period they apparently sold out of stock in the US and the shipping dates slipped into July 31:

Sold out in the EU now too after 1 hour 30.

Updated Shipping dates now August 31 across regions.

Never even went on sale in NZ

 

[Venser]

It uses fresnel lenses so it must have godrays.
I still wonder why they use them where PSVR doesn't and has no issue with godrays.

So they could achieve higher FOV? PSVR has tiny FOV.

 

[Perkel]

It uses fresnel lenses so it must have godrays.
I still wonder why they use them where PSVR doesn't and has no issue with godrays.

So they could achieve higher FOV? PSVR has tiny FOV.

Nope. PSVR has almost the same FOV. Difference is in vertical fov which vive has higher a bit due to squarish displays. On other hand Pimax has about 200fov and doesn't use Fresnel lenses.

Whole point of using Fresnel lenses was to avoid using "expensive" lenses but PSVR kind of shows this is a bull.
Or just anyone else can't do it when they do not produce things at mass scale.

source: i owned psvr twice and vive for a few months.

the first thing i noticed after changing from psvr to Vive is that vive doesn't actually have better technology than psvr and is about 4 times more expensive. Vive hand controllers are better though, though i don't like motion gaming in first place.

 

[Venser]