Downpour Interactive and Coatsink today announced that Onward, the VR tactical shooter, is coming to Oculus Quest on July 30th.
Downpour Interactive founder Dante Buckley first announced the studio was making a Quest port of Onward back at last year’s ESL VR League Season three championship, stating that the game would would feature cross-play with both Oculus Rift and SteamVR headsets.
The studio has made good on its word, and in the meantime also included Coatsink, the studio behind the Esper VR series and Shadow Point (2019), as publisher.
Image courtesy Downpour Interactive, Coatsink
“I’m incredibly excited for Onward to come to the Oculus Quest: to have players be inspired by the freedom of the platform while at the same time experiencing the realism and immersion that Onward brings to the table. And I think I speak for my whole team when I say we’re excited to see our players get their hands on the game after almost a year of development,” said Buckley.
The Quest version is said to include all of the game’s standard features, including solo and co-op game modes, and multiplayer battles with up to ten players. Bringing a greater focus on realism, Onward doesn’t include mini-maps, or crosshairs, as players rely on real-world communication, shooting, and navigation skills to accomplish objectives.
The release on Quest will, like its PC VR versions, be available in Early Access when it first launches on the Oculus Store on July 30th, priced at $25.
There’s no time frame on when the game is said to leave EA, as the studio says it still needs to add “finishing touches, improving stability, optimisations to the game’s source code, and general polish.”
Google today confirmed in a blog post that it’s acquired North, the Canada-based smartglasses maker behind Focals. The acquisition price wasn’t disclosed, however early reports suggested it was around $180 million.
Founded in 2012, North (ex-Thalmic Labs) first set out to create Myo, a gesture-based armband. Pivoting from Myo and rebranding to North in 2018, the company then released Focals, which focused on creating a stylish, unobtrusive pair of prescription-compatible smartglasses.
“Over the last while, it became clear that aligning with Google would significantly advance our shared vision,” North said in a news brief.
The company says that it will be winding down support for its 2018 Focals smartglasses, and that Focals 2.0 is effectively cancelled.
North seems to be making a clean break with its legacy product, Focals 1.0. Starting July 31st, 2020, users won’t able to connect or use Focals or access their North accounts. The Focals app itself is also going to be removed from both Google Play and Apple’s App Store.
Refunds are being offered, as the company says in an FAQ that “[f]ull refunds will be given for all paid Focals orders starting June 30th, 2020 using the original payment method.”
The acquisition seems to have been a fairly quick deal, as North was talking up Focals 2.0 up until March 2020, advertising its prospective 2020 ship date.
This, you might conclude, may mean that Google is getting ready to completely integrate the IP somehow into its own Google Glass project, which has reemerged to serve the enterprise sector. It may equally as well rebrand Focals 2.0 as a Google device targeted at fashion-conscious consumers.
Is Google heading back into consumer smartglasses territory with its latest acquisition? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
Google unveiled a method of capturing and streaming volumetric video, something Google researchers say can be compressed down to a lightweight format capable of even being rendered on standalone VR/AR headsets.
Both monoscopic and stereocopic 360 video are flawed insofar they don’t allow the VR user to move their head completely within a 3D area; you can rotationally look up, down, left, right, and side to side (3DOF), but you can’t positionally lean back or forward, stand up or sit down, or move your head’s position to look around something (6DOF). Even seated, you’d be surprised at how often you move in your chair, or make micro-adjustments with your neck, something that when coupled with a standard 360 video makes you feel like you’re ‘pulling’ the world along with your head. Not exactly ideal.
Volumetric video is instead about capturing how light exists in the physical world, and displaying it so VR users can move their heads around naturally. That means you’ll be able to look around something in a video because that extra light (and geometry) data has been captured from multiple viewpoints. While Google didn’t invent the idea—we’ve seen something similar from NextVR before it was acquired by Apple—it’s certainly making strides to reduce overall cost and finally make volumetric video a thing.
In a paper published ahead of SIGGRAPH 2020, Google researchers accomplish this by creating a custom array of 46 time-synchronized action cams stuck onto a 92cm diameter dome. This provides the user with an 80-cm area of positional movement, and also bringing 10 pixels per degree angular resolution, a 220+ degrees FOV, and 30fps video capture. Check out the results below.
The researchers say the system can reconstruct objects as close as 20cm to the camera rig, which is thanks to a recently introduced interpolation algorithm in Google’s deep learning system DeepView.
This is done by replacing its underlying multi-plane image (MPI) scene representation with a collection of spherical shells which are better suited for representing panoramic light field content, researchers say.
“We further process this data to reduce the large number of shell layers to a small, fixed number of RGBA+depth layers without significant loss in visual quality. The resulting RGB, alpha, and depth channels in these layers are then compressed using conventional texture atlasing and video compression techniques. The final, compressed representation is lightweight and can be rendered on mobile VR/AR platforms or in a web browser,” Google researchers conclude.
In practice, what Google is introducing here is a more cost-effective solution that may eventually spark the company to create its own volumetric immersive video team, much like it did with its 2015-era Google Jump 360 rig project before it was shuttered last year. That’s of course provided Google further supports the project by say, adding in support for volumetric video to YouTube and releasing an open source plan for the camera array itself. Whatever the case, volumetric video, or what Google refers to in the paper as Light Field video, is starting to look like a viable step forward for storytellers looking to drive the next chapter of immersive video.
If you’re looking for more examples of Google’s volumetric video, you can check them out here.
This is the Q&A (Questions and Answers) to the Pimax NOW event on June 29, 2020. The Pimax NOW Event is brought to you by the Pimax team presenting the latest news and updates regarding the Pimax 8KX shipping, release date and more! During Pimax Now, we are revealing the current progress of Pimax VISION 8KX, Pimax Artisan Limited Edition, all Pimax VR accessories and also all about the new "Pimax VR Experience" software. Watch the entire Pimax NOW Event here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD38JaCjWwM Learn all about the Pimax products on the official Pimax website and online store: https://www.pimax.com
Facebook published new research today which the company says shows the “thinnest VR display demonstrated to date,” in a proof-of-concept headset based on folded holographic optics.
Facebook Reality Labs, the company’s AR/VR R&D division, today published new research demonstrating an approach which combines two key features: polarization-based optical ‘folding’ and holographic lenses. In the work, researchers Andrew Maimone and Junren Wang say they’ve used the technique to create a functional VR display and lens that together are just 9mm thick. The result is a proof-of-concept VR headset which could truly be called ‘VR glasses’.
The approach has other benefits beyond its incredibly compact size; the researchers say it can also support significantly wider color gamut than today’s VR displays, and that their display makes progress “toward scaling resolution to the limit of human vision.”
Let’s talk about how it all works.
Why Are Today’s Headsets So Big?
Photo by Road to VR
It’s natural to wonder why even the latest VR headsets are essentially just as bulky as the first generation of headsets that launched back in 2016. The answer is simple: optics. Unfortunately the solution is not so simple.
Every consumer VR headset on the market uses effectively the same optical pipeline: a macro display behind a simple lens. The lens is there to focus the light from the display into your eye. But in order for that to happen the lens need to be a few inches from the display, otherwise it doesn’t have enough focusing power to focus the light into your eye.
That necessary distance between the display and the lens is the reason why every headset out there looks like a box on your face. The approach is still used today because the lenses and the displays are known quantities; they’re cheap & simple, and although bulky, they achieve a wide field of view and high resolution.
Many solutions have been proposed for making VR headsets smaller, and just about all of them include the use of novel displays and lenses.
The new research from Facebook proposes the use of both folded optics and holographic optics.
Folded Optics
What are folded optics? It’s not quite what it sounds like, but once you understand it, you’d be hard pressed to come up with a better name.
While the simple lenses in today’s VR headsets must be a certain distance from the display in order to focus the light into your eye, the concept of folded optics proposes ‘folding’ that distance over on itself, such that the light still traverses the same distance necessary for focusing, but its path is folded into a more compact area.
You can think of it like a piece of paper with an arbitrary width. When you fold the paper in half, the paper itself is still just as wide as when you started, but it’s width occupies less space because you folded it over on itself.
But how the hell do you do that with light? Polarization is the key.
It turns out that beams of light have an ‘orientation’. Normally the orientation of light beams at random, but you can use a polarizer to only let light of a specific orientation pass through. You can think of a polarizer like the coin-slot on a vending machine: it will only accept coins in one orientation.
Using polarization, it’s possible to bounce light back and forth multiple times along an optical path before eventually letting it out and into the wearer’s eye. This approach (also known as ‘pancake optics’ allows the lens and the display to move much closer together, resulting in a more compact headset.
But to go even thinner—to shrink the size of the lenses themselves—Facebook researchers have turned to holographic optics.
Holographic Optics
Rather than using a series of typical lenses (like the kind found in a pair of glasses) in the folded optics, the researchers have formed the lenses into… holograms.
If that makes your head hurt, everything is fine. Holograms are nuts, but I’ll do my best to explain.
Unlike a photograph, which is a recording of the light in a plane of space at a given moment, a hologram is a recording of the light in a volume of space at a given moment.
When you look at a photograph, you can only see the information of the light contained in the plane that was captured. When you look at a hologram, you can look around the hologram, because the information of the light in the entire volume is captured (also known as a lightfield).
Now I’m going to blow your mind. What if when you captured a hologram, the scene you captured had a lens in it? It turns out, the lens you see in the hologram will behave just like the lens in the scene. Don’t believe me? Watch this video at 0:19 at look at the magnifying glass in the scene and watch as it magnifies the rest of the hologram, even though it is part of the hologram itself.
This is the fundamental idea behind Facebook’s holographic lens approach. The researchers effectively ‘captured’ a hologram of a real lens, condensing the optical properties of a real lens into a paper-thin holographic film.
So the optics Facebook is employing in this design is, quite literally, a hologram of a lens.
The Pimax NOW Event is brought to you by the Pimax team presenting the latest news and updates regarding the Pimax 8KX shipping, release dates and more! During Pimax Now, we are revealing the current progress of Pimax VISION 8KX, Pimax Artisan Limited Edition, all Pimax VR accessories and also all about the new "Pimax VR Experience" software. Learn all about the Pimax products on the official Pimax website and online store: https://www.pimax.com
In Death (2018), the fiendishly difficult bow-shooting roguelite, is getting its Oculus Quest version on July 23rd.
Originally created by Sólfar Studios and adapted to Quest by Superbright VR, In Death: Unchained is slated plop you down into Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell.
With bow and a selection of arrows in hand, you stalk around its procedurally generated levels through an increasingly difficult wave of enemies. It’s hectic, fun and it always kept us guessing, which is why we gave it a solid [8/10] in our review on PC.
1 of 3
Image courtesy Superbright VR
Image courtesy Superbright VR
Image courtesy Superbright VR
In Death: Unchained appears to be much the same game as the title released on PSVR and SteamVR headsets, however Superbright says Unchained has been “thoroughly extended with new content, experience, and love that the title deserves.”
If you like Rick and Morty humor, you'll love Trover Saves The Universe. We're playing this today on the Oculus Quest for the first time, but beware: we are leaving it uncensored! ► Check out our VR equipment → https://www.amazon.com/shop/caschary Trover Saves The Universe is from the co-creator of Rick and Morty. This means funny narrative, weird storyline and lots of swearing. Are you ready? Come hang out with us while we have some fun! Today's topic(s): Trover Saves The Universe on Oculus Quest First Impressions (Uncensored) LINKS - Trover Saves The Universe on Oculus Quest: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2718107161580827/ - Get an Oculus Quest here (US): https://bit.ly/oculusquest-cc NORMAL SCHEDULE Every Friday at: 🕛 12 PM PT 🕘 9 PM CET 🕗 8 PM UK Time 🍿 Watch us from within Bigscreen VR too! SUPPORT US Subscribing and watching our videos is by far the biggest support you can give us. However, if you want to do more - you can also donate. All donations go to improving the channel. BUY US A COFFEE & BOOST THE CHANNEL ► One-time donation → http://bit.ly/DonateCasandChary BECOME A CHAMPION (LONG-TIME SUPPORTER) ► Become our Patron (includes exclusive rewards) → http://bit.ly/PatreonCasandChary ► Become a Sponsor on YouTube (includes exclusive rewards) → http://bit.ly/JoinCasandChary USE OUR LINKS TO SUPPORT US ► VRcover → http://bit.ly/CCVRCover ► VR Prescription Lens Adapters (5% discount code: "CAS&CHARY") → http://bit.ly/CCWidmoVR ► Play PC VR games with your Quest (10% discount code: "JWGTCASCHARY") → http://bit.ly/CCRiftcat ► More on our website → https://casandchary.com/discount-codes-affiliate-links/ OUR GEAR Our VR equipment → https://www.amazon.com/shop/caschary Full PC Specs → https://casandchary.com/vr-equipment/ GET LATEST UPDATES Twitter → https://twitter.com/CasandChary Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/casandchary/ Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/casandchary/ Join our Discord → https://discord.gg/YH52W2k A special thanks to these Patreon Champs for their support: - BaxornVR: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1tmq8Y3jC7gNGvW7asmv1Q - Wintceas - Studioform VR - Andy - Albert - Ben P. - Steve Dunlap - Thomas M. Rice - Andy Fidel - VR Balance MUSIC Music we use is from Epidemic Sounds → http://share.epidemicsound.com/zqM3g DISCLAIMER Links in this description may contain affiliate links. We may earn from qualifying purchases from these links (without costing you more). VR on! - Cas and Chary VR #troversavestheuniverse #oculusquest #casandchary
Iron Man VR is the next big PlayStation VR exclusive; the title is being published by Sony and developed by studio Camouflaj. Following a demo of the game released last month, and a ahead of next week’s July 3rd launch, the studio has shared a deep dive on what players can expect from the game.
In a post on the official PlayStation Blog, Iron Man VR director Ryan Payton today shared a heap of new details about the game, including new game footage showing off environments, combat, and more. Payton also revealed that players should expect 8 to 10 hours of playtime.
Payton spoke to some of the movement and combat capabilities that players will have access to:
Boost
We heard how much you love boosting at high speeds, so just a few weeks ago, we further increased the frequency at which you can boost in the full game. Buckle up!
Rocket Punch
My favorite mechanic. I can’t get enough of punching enemies with a one-two-three hit combo and then finishing them off with a Repulsor Blast or auxiliary weapon.
Auxiliary Weapons
By spending Research Points at the Armor Station, you can unlock powerful auxiliary weapons that fire out of your gauntlets. When you play the full game, please do me a big favor and check out the incredible detail artist Chris Foster and animator Benjamin Meals put into each weapon. I can’t tell you how cool it is to see those weapons emerge from your forearms in VR.
Ground Pound
The rough-and-tumble cousin of Rocket Punch, Ground Pound allows players to descend on enemies at furious speeds. Mastering Ground Pound takes some practice, but once you do, you will be a powerful force on both horizontal and vertical planes!
Unibeam
Eagle-eyed players noticed blasting enemies charges the Unibeam meter. Once it’s fully charged, you can fire a mighty Unibeam blast out of Iron Man’s chest. The trick, however, is determining the optimal time to trigger it…
Payton says there’s more mechanics that players will discover in Iron Man VR, and that players will face a “true test” in a “tough-as-nails optional mission that unlocks once you’ve completed the game.” Bring it on.
Garage & Armor Station
Beyond combat abilities, he also revealed the Armor Station in Tony Stark’s garage, which functions as an interface for players to equip their amor with upgrades and weapons.
Payton says there will be more for players to do while hanging out in Tony’s garage too. “Try roaming around Tony’s garage, squeeze in a workout, give Pepper a call, or maybe listen to our in-fiction podcast series hosted by a close(ish) family member of Tony Stark…”
Story and Characters
Payton also spoke to the game’s story-focus and said that players will see some classic Marvel characters in the game, like Pepper Potts, Nick Fury, and Friday, along with others that haven’t been revealed yet.
The game’s cast is comprised of Josh Keaton (Tony Stark), Chantelle Barry (Ghost), Leila Birch (FRIDAY), Ike Amadi (Nick Fury), and Jennifer Hale (Pepper Potts).
Iron Man VR can be pre-order today in a digital or disc Standard Edition ($40) and a Digital Deluxe Edition ($50) which includes four Iron Man armor skins that are unique to the Deluxe edition, extra upgrade points, the full soundtrack (digital), and an Iron ManVR PS4 theme.
Sony is also making available an Iron Man VR PSVR bundle for $350 which includes the headset, camera, two move controllers, and the Standard Edition Iron Man VR game on disc.
Pre-ordering either version of the game (or the PSVR bundle) will net you four armor skins that are a unique to pre-orders.
It seems legendary programmer and Oculus Consulting CTO John Carmack has tried to bring Minecraft to every Oculus headset in existence. That includes Oculus Quest, and although we still don’t have a proper port, it certainly wasn’t for the lack of trying.
Responding to a question about why there’s still no Minecraft for Quest, Carmack responded that he’s actually already implemented a version on the standalone 6DOF headset, but for some reason it just didn’t work out.
“I had it running with full position tracking, but we never got the schedules aligned to be able to take it into production,” Carmack says in a recent tweet. “You could still make yourself sick bounding up and down around the terrain, but walking around was great.
From as far back as 2015, Carmack has considered Minecraft in VR his “quest” of sorts. Unfortunate wording aside, it sounds like internal conflict back-burnered any chance of the block-based sandbox game from arriving on the 6DOF standalone.
John Carmack showing off Minecraft on stage at E3 2016, Image courtesy Xbox
It’s a pity, considering even the now largely obsolete Samsung Gear VR has its own bespoke version of the game, which was released in the 2016 heyday of the 3DOF mobile VR headset.
Even Oculus Go, which benefits from many games in Gear VR’s library, doesn’t have its own version of Minecraft. This, according to findings by VR Scout, was based on technical matters at the time. Here’s what a Minecraft developer had to say about Go and Quest support back in October 2019:
“One of the major things holding up the Go was a library dependency which my team has been adding for the upcoming 1.14 update. That’s necessary but not sufficient – when we add a new platform, we have to support it fully in our daily testing, both with hardware and more importantly with time from everyone working on it. The Quest will be extra engineering work above and beyond the Go. I can’t promise either version until they officially have the green light.”
There may still be a glimmer of hope for Quest users, dashed Carmackian implementations notwithstanding. As the platform matures, Oculus will need to continue funneling system-moving games onto the Oculus Store.
It very well might have come down to the company’s need to keep a tight grip on Quest’s official content library when it first launched in May 2019. The company’s recent bid to let Quest developers publish their apps through an upcoming alternative app distribution channel, which may function as an early access store or Oculus Share-style platform, is an interesting proposition. Maybe a potential ‘experimental’ version of Minecraft could land there, which would remove it from needing to have the high bar for comfort which Oculus has exercised as a content gatekeeper.
Of course, we’re not holding our collective breaths, but at least we know there’s a version sitting at Oculus offices ready to go now.
Survios, the studio behind Creed: Rise to Glory (2018) and Raw Data (2017), announced its currently developing a VR version of the ’90s tile-matching arcade puzzle game Puzzle Bobble (1994).
Also known as Bust-a-Move in some regions, the game is being developed in partnership with Taito, the Japan-based creators of the original franchise.
“You’ll be able to enjoy the familiar, lovable world of Puzzle Bobble in 3D,” Taito’s Yuichi Toyoma says in a video announcement.
There’s no gameplay video yet, however a concept image shows that the VR adaptation of Puzzle Bobble will involve a hand-held slingshot, challenging users to match-up a colored 3D cluster of bubbles.
Taito also intends on putting all new tracks created by the studio’s in-house sound team, Zuntata.
There’s no release date yet, although we’ll have our slingshots ready when Survios and Taito release word.
Schell Games’ VR hack-and-slash roguelite Until You Fallis leaving Early Access on PC sometime in fall 2020. Along with it comes two new platforms, PSVR and Oculus Quest.
Once out of early access, both SteamVR and Oculus Rift platform versions of the game will feature performance optimizations, achievements, balance updates, bug fixes, and quality of life updates.
We were impressed with Until You Fall in our early access review for bringing a surprisingly rich melee combat experience, which we think fuses meta-game elements in a unique and interesting way. Of course, as a roguelite it lacks any real narrative beyond a setting and a bit of lore, but it definitely makes up for it in the combat department.
The game, which is normally priced at $20, will cost $25 on all platforms when it heads out of early access.
Until You Fall for SteamVR-compatible headsets is however currently on sale for the duration of the Steam Summer Sale, bringing it down to just $12, or 40% off.
VR may still be young, with an install base still small compared to the world of traditional gaming consoles, but it can’t be ignored that mounting sales of the Playstation VR headset—effectively a very expensive PS4 accessory—is adding up to considerable revenue. In a generation where PS4 has maintained a significant install base lead (and PS5 set to support VR when it launches later this year) pressure is mounting for Microsoft to figure out its Xbox VR strategy.
Update (June 25th, 2020): Article updated with Sony’s latest official sales figures for PS4 (106 million) and PlayStation VR (5 million), which were announced in January, and the latest movements (or lack thereof) of VR on Xbox.
Moving the Needle
Photo by Road to VR
Sony’s official figures put PS4 sales (including PS4 and PS4 Pro) at 106 million units as of the end of 2019. Microsoft meanwhile hasn’t publicly revealed their Xbox One sales figures for some time, though recent estimates put it somewhere around 50 million units. Competitively, that’s a massive gap. And it isn’t helping Microsoft that, for gamers on the fence between the two consoles, PlayStation has a big fat check mark in the VR column while Xbox doesn’t.
It isn’t just the weight of VR support that could be furthering PlayStation’s edge, there’s revenue to be considered too. PSVR’s install base might not be huge relative to PS4, but it’s an expensive device—often even more expensive than the console that powers it—bringing the company considerable additional revenue.
Earlier this year Sony officially reported that the PSVR install base has reached 5 million units. The headset has been sold in various configurations since launch, with Sony lowering prices over time from the original $500 Launch Bundle to today’s bundles priced around $350. The company has also run aggressive sales each holiday shopping season since the headset launched.
Roughing out a $400 average selling price for the first 2.5 million units and a $300 average for following 2.5 million, we can estimate that Sony has generated nearly $1.75 billion in revenue from PSVR hardware alone.
Software revenue on top of that stands to add considerably more. As of August 2018, Sony said it sold 21.9 million PSVR games, which at the time was an average of 7.3 games per headset at the time.
We can use that figure to extrapolate a more recent count of games sold (based on the latest 5 million headset milestone); we end up with an estimate of 36.5 million PSVR games sold. If we figure a conservative $15 for each title, that’s another $547 million in revenue generated by PSVR software (some of which goes to Sony and some to developers).
Bringing all together, we can estimate that PSVR hardware and software has generated $2.3 billion in revenue. Not all of that revenue goes to Sony (some goes to developers, distributors, etc) but it’s still a significant market that the company has proven to exist.
$2.3 billion is a lot… though not a huge amount in comparison to revenue from the PS4 console itself (which is in the tens of billions), but it’s definitely a needle-moving figure—and a new revenue stream that Xbox isn’t tapping—that furthers Sony’s console lead. Pressure is mounting Microsoft to figure out how its VR plans pan out on Xbox.
A False Start for VR on Xbox
Xbox One X was announced with VR support, but those plans evaporated before launch | Photo by Road to VR
Back when it was first introduced at E3 2016, Microsoft made a clear point to talk about how their latest console (at the time) Xbox One X would “lead the industry into a future in which true 4K gaming and high-fidelity VR are the standard, not an exception.”
Microsoft Says “Nobody is asking for VR” on Xbox Series X
Image courtesy Microsoft
By now it’s clear that Xbox One X will never see VR support. But what about Microsoft’s latest and great, the Xbox Series X? The company still hasn’t changed course after its initial VR flip-flop.
In late 2019, Xbox head Phil Spencer doubled down on his decision to steer clear of VR on Xbox. Speaking to Stevivor, he said he doesn’t see the demand to warrant supporting VR on Xbox Series X.
“I have some issues with VR—it’s isolating and I think of games as a communal, kind of together experience. We’re responding to what our customers are asking for and… nobody’s asking for VR.”
“Nobody’s selling millions and millions” of VR units, he added. That’s a choice quote, considering that Sony has managed to sell an average of around 1.35 million PSVR units per year since the headset’s launch, and announced that it had topped 5 million units by the end of 2019.
Missing Synergy
Xbox head Phil Spencer at E3 2019 | Image courtesy Microsoft
The announcement and then retraction of VR as a prominent feature on Xbox One X is an oddity. Especially because Microsoft is already well established as a player on the PC side of VR.
The company executed an impressive rollout of their ‘Windows Mixed Reality’ VR platform on PC in late 2017, which saw the launch of Windows VR headsets from a slew of PC hardware vendors, and a big update to Windows 10 which baked VR directly into the operating system.
With the Xbox Series X being the most PC-like Xbox console to date (ostensibly with an OS based on Windows 10), and Microsoft having already build its own VR platform based on Windows 10, the lack of coordination between these two facets of Microsoft is almost painful. Oh, and did we mention that Xbox Game Studios is teeming with VR talent?
But it may take more than platform synergy and demand to bring VR to Xbox Series X.
So far that hasn’t panned out; while HTC sells an official Vive wireless adapter, it’s expensive and requires users to mount additional hardware. To date, no other major headset maker has introduced a wireless headset or wireless accessory—though reliance on a tether hasn’t stopped Sony and others from selling headsets.
If Microsoft is planning on waiting for seamless wireless VR tech before rolling out a VR offering on Xbox, they risk handing away a couple billion more dollars in extra revenue to a competitor which has maintained a sizeable lead in console sales over the last generation.
The Steam Summer Sale is here and runs through July 9th. For the first time the event puts Half-Life: Alyx on sale, bringing the price down to $45 (25% discount), and you’ll get another $5 off Alyx or any other purchase over $30. Heaps more VR games like Boneworks, Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, Vacation Simulator, Until You Fall, and Pavlov VR are on sale too.
Half-Life: Alyx launched just a few months ago and was quickly crowned as one of VR’s best games to date [our review]. If its critical acclaim wasn’t enough to make you pull the trigger, Alyx is now on sale for the first time during the Steam Summer Sale. You’ll save 25% on the game, and an extra $5 on any purchase of $30 or more thanks to the ‘Road Trip Special’ deal that’s part of the Summer Sale.
The Steam Summer Sale has also brought discounts to hundreds of other VR titles. Here’s a handful that caught our eye:
Bigscreen today released an update that brings to the social VR viewing platform a video player that lets you watch your own video files. Yes, even on Oculus Quest.
Bigscreen’s new video player lets you watch your own files alone, or with friends—provided they have the same file stored on their local machine. If your friends do happen to have the same file, Bigscreen automatically syncs everyone in the room so you can watch it together.
Exactly how you obtain those files is up to you; the new update is only a video player and not a file sharing service per se.
Bigscreen’s video player supports both 2D and 3D movies (side-by-side and over-under), and is said to support most of the common file types. At the time of this writing, the video player doesn’t support 180/360 content, or DLNA/Plex, although it’s currently being considered for a future update.
You’ll find the video player there starting today; it works cross-platform across all supported headsets, including Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, HTC Vive, and all SteamVR-compatible headsets.
The social VR platform already has robust support for screen sharing, which is accomplished by mirroring the desktop of a host user to anyone in the room. With the recent inclusion of more direct streaming services, which includes both TV and movies, Bigscreen offered up a big slice of functionality to users on standalone headsets like Quest or Go, as well as to users without access to their own premium streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.
Today’s update, while offering a comparatively basic feature, actually puts Bigscreen in a better position to not only compete as a virtual desktop solution (more than it already is), but also to further fill the gaps that platform holders are leaving with their own lackluster native offerings.
There is another side to it, although it remains to be seen whether the worry is founded in reality or if it’s simple speculation at this point—anyway, insert grain of salt here. Bigscreen’s continued deals with movie studios and streaming services may put it in the position at some point in the future to somehow limit the screensharing aspect of its business on PC platform, as individual users can easily stream more movies than they could ever license for their paid (and free) movie viewings. The video player, for ill or good, may be a way for Bigscreen PC VR users to have their cake and eat it too should that particular shoe ever drop—putting the onus on the individual to share files instead of simply mirroring their monitor for all to freely view. Again, that’s a small slice of speculation for the old brainpan.
In any case, the next set of features on the agenda definitely sound exciting: a Bigscreen Friends system, more new environments, a redesigned avatar system, built-in YouTube and TV channels into rooms, and more movie studio partnerships to host 3D movie screenings.
Bigscreen supports Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index, all Windows VR headsets, Oculus Quest and Oculus Go. Find out how to download it for free here.
Time for an experiment! I'm taking Chary on a date in VRChat and we're both wearing two haptic suits by bHaptics. This means we can feel each other and other things inside the game... ► Check out Cybershoes: https://bit.ly/cybershoes-cc ► Check out our VR equipment → https://www.amazon.com/shop/caschary This is a multiplayer video in VRChat where you'll see both our screens! Cas will be playing on the Oculus Quest and Chary will be playing on the Valve Index. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 The Experiment Intro 02:29 Short Intro bHaptics TactSuit 03:05 What We Are Wearing 03:33 What You Need 04:33 VRChat Gameplay + Haptic Suits Tests 09:48 Final Thoughts LINKS ► Check out Cybershoes: https://bit.ly/cybershoes-cc ► Get your own bHaptics Vest here: https://amzn.to/3ezdm1m - More info on the haptic suit: https://www.bhaptics.com/ - Our previous bHaptics video overview: https://youtu.be/uGeZuFy9PKA - VRCHaptics for VRChat: https://youtu.be/PCnYJPk400I - VRChat: https://store.steampowered.com/app/438100/VRChat/ ► Get an Oculus Quest here (US): https://bit.ly/oculusquest-cc - Get an Oculus Quest (UK): https://amzn.to/2Jip6Zg - Get an Oculus Quest (NL): http://bit.ly/2QlCpd2 (Coolblue) SUPPORT THE CONTENT ► Become our Patron (includes exclusive rewards) → http://bit.ly/PatreonCasandChary ► Become a Sponsor on YouTube (includes exclusive rewards) → http://bit.ly/JoinCasandChary ► Check out our VR Merch → http://bit.ly/casandchary-merch USE OUR LINKS TO SUPPORT US ► VRcover → http://bit.ly/CCVRCover ► VR Prescription Lens Adapters (5% discount code: "CAS&CHARY") → http://bit.ly/CCWidmoVR ► Oculus Quest Comfort Strap (5% discount code: "CAS&CHARY") → http://bit.ly/CCStudioformVR ► Play PC VR games with your Quest (10% discount code: "JWGTCASCHARY") → http://bit.ly/CCRiftcat ► More on our website → https://casandchary.com/discount-codes-affiliate-links/ OUR GEAR Our VR equipment → https://www.amazon.com/shop/caschary Full PC Specs → https://casandchary.com/vr-equipment/ GET LATEST UPDATES Twitter → https://twitter.com/CasandChary Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/casandchary/ Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/casandchary/ Join our Discord → https://discord.gg/YH52W2k A special thanks to these Patreon Champs for their support: - BaxornVR: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1tmq8Y3jC7gNGvW7asmv1Q - Wintceas - Studioform VR - Andy - Albert - Ben P. - Steve Dunlap - Thomas M. Rice MUSIC Music we use is from Epidemic Sounds → http://bit.ly/CCEpidemicSound DISCLAIMER This video was sponsored by Cybershoes. We received the haptic suits for free from bHaptics. Per our guidelines, no review direction was received. Our opinions are our own. Links in this description may contain affiliate links. We may earn from qualifying purchases from these links (without costing you more). VR on! - Cas and Chary VR #hapticsuits #bhaptics #casandchary
Phantom: Covert Ops is a rather unique take on a stealth action game, and one that’s clearly been designed with virtual reality in mind. With paddle in hand, you’ll find yourself sleuthing through sluices in a tactical kayak. But are the waterways a welcoming venue for fun stealth action? Read on to find out.
Phantom: Covert Ops Details:
Publisher: Oculus Studios
Developer: nDreams Available On: Oculus Store (Rift, Quest) Reviewed On: Rift S, Quest Release Date: June 25th, 2020 Price: $30 (supports cross-buy)
Gameplay
Phantom: Covert Ops is built entirely around being in a tactical kayak—which is just like a normal kayak, except that it’s camouflaged and has some deadly guns and gadgets attached. Throughout the game’s campaign you’ll find yourself paddling through shadowy spillways, distracting guards, and destroying key objectives. The story is nothing you haven’t heard before: a bad guy (who’s just evil because… why not) wants to hurt some good guys, and it’s your job to stop him.
The core gameplay involves following objective markers along a quite linear path which will sometimes be blocked by guards at the water’s edge. Stealth tends to be the best option because when the bullets start flying you’re mostly a sitting duck in the kayak. Luckily you can slip under docks and into reeds to stay concealed, and occasionally you’ll need to dodge a flashlight or security camera as you slide from one hiding spot to the next.
As you paddle around, you can pull out your night vision goggles; with the click of a trigger they’ll ‘mark’ any guards and interactive objects in the area. Unfortunately there isn’t a particularly large variety of objects. There’s things that distract guards (like an air canister or … a box-shaped air canister), generators which can be disabled to turn off lights, and explosive barrels.
Image courtesy nDreams
These are your tools for dealing with guards, boats, and security cameras that watch the water’s edge. If you do get spotted, you have a brief moment to take down the guard that spotted you, otherwise they’ll alert the other guards too.
As for tackling objectives, you’ll be regularly asked to slip underneath structures like satellite dishes to disable them, and occasionally you’ll use explosive charges to blow up other objectives.
While Phantom: Covert Ops starts out strong with solid mechanics and interactions, the mechanics and the ensuing scenarios plateau pretty quickly.
It didn’t take long before the gameplay felt formulaic; I would enter a new area, mark everything in the vicinity with my night vision goggles, and then either slip past the guards undetected or create some small distraction and then go along my way. If I was feeling lazy I’d just drop a lone guard with my silenced pistol or sniper rifle. There was little sense of planning & executing, resource management, or overall strategy.
I was happy to see when the game finally introduced mines and security cameras—the sort of things that pushed the challenge and intrigue up a notch by requiring me to make more deliberate moves—but unfortunately that’s pretty much where the gameplay arc plateaued. About half way through the game I bumped up the difficulty from its medium setting to its highest setting which made things a little bit more interesting.
While Phantom: Covert Ops has some strong gameplay ideas, it doesn’t manage to get them to synergize particularly well; the gameplay sandbox isn’t quite dynamic enough to support the kind of thrilling scenarios that you’d expected from a great stealth action game.
Beyond the campaign mode, which took me around four hours to complete, there’s also Free Play mode and Challenges.
Free Play allows you to replay any level to try to improve your score (which is determined by factors like how many times you’ve been spotted) and you get to select your own loadout from equipment that you unlock throughout the campaign. You can also enable any of a few dozen cheats (like big head mode, super difficulty, unlimited ammo, low gravity, etc) in Free Play. Earning a high score on levels in Free Play (or the campaign mode) will unlock one of 14 challenges.
Challenges are mini-games that grade you based on time or score, and they’re actually worth a spin. Though they only take a minute or two each, they’re fun little extras like racing through a series of gates to score the best time, a range of pop-up targets to test your marksmanship, or a challenge to kill all guards along a path. Each challenge has leaderboards, so you can see just how well you match up against everyone else.
The challenges typically push the game’s mechanics to more interesting extremes, but unfortunately they smack of gameplay beats which couldn’t be effectively integrated with the main campaign.
Immersion
The core interaction and locomotion design of Phantom: Covert Ops is inherently quite immersive. Being in the kayak and paddling your way along the water feels really good. The way that weapons and gadgets are attached to your kayak around you and right within arms reach makes for a perfectly intuitive inventory system that’s always right where you expect it to be.
If there’s a lever or latch to pull, it almost always feels satisfying, and nDreams thoughtfully placed extra hand-holds near key switches and levers which makes it easy to grab hold of and pull yourself in closer for the interaction.
Weapon handling also feels quite good. The weapon models are reasonably high quality and the game applies a smoothing effect to the movement of your hands depending upon how heavy the weapon is. That prevents weapons from wiggling unrealistically, and provides a sense of virtual weight. You can also two-hand pistols right along with the explicitly two-handed weapons like the SMG and sniper rifle.
But there’s a few misses too. While the weapons look good, their actual use and mechanics are quite arcade-y. If you release any object like a gun or your paddle, it instantly snaps back into its holster. While this is of course convenient, it means you don’t need to focus too much attention on managing the items around you. You can, for instance, aim your sniper rifle and then simply release it to then reach for the SMG on your back (knowing that the sniper rifle will just pop back into its holster).
Reloading weapons also feels awkward (and even unnecessary). Throughout the whole campaign I think I might have reloaded each weapon a single time (there’s just not much need to shoot). You do so by grabbing a magazine from the pouch in front of you, and then moving it toward the magazine on the gun. Then you’ll watch as the old mag magically ejects and the new one pops into its place.
This is made more awkward by the poor hand-posing on the magazines; the way the hand clasps most magazines means that you’ll probably bump your controllers together when you try to put the new mag in—it’s as if the developers were exclusively building the game on the original Rift CV1 (which had controllers with rings facing down instead of up like on Rift S and Quest controllers).
A greater emphasis on those near-field interactions with weapons and gadgets could have been a great way to diversify the gameplay and move the player’s attention between more than just looking out for guards and the next hiding spot.
Unfortunately the game’s trite story doesn’t help on the immersion front. After playing the game’s four hours of campaign, I recall the names of two characters—neither of which were interesting in the slightest due to a complete lack of character development. In fact, I found some of the throw-away guard dialogue more interesting than whatever the main characters (AKA voices on the radio) were up to.
The game’s sound and visual design are passable, but left me wanting. I found the game’s lighting to be often confusing, both visually and mechanically. In many cases, light seems to emanate from no source in particular, leaving the environment often looking light a patchwork of oddly lit and unlit spaces. And then there were places that seemed perfectly bright but I could easily go undetected right in front of a guard while waving at them in jest. P.S. Do yourself a favor and disable anti-aliasing; the reduction in aliasing isn’t worth how much sharpness the game sacrifices.
On Quest specifically, the headset’s OLED black-smear issues are truly exacerbated by the game. Dark areas of the scenes get smeared around a good bit during head movement, largely defeating the benefit of having the OLED display in the first place. The game is still playable, but I’m hoping this could get patched in the future to prevent the game from using true-black so often (thereby hopefully reducing smearing).
Sound in Covert Ops is a mixed bag too. At the start of the game you’ll see a big pop-up that says “Headphones recommended.” And you should absolutely follow that advice for an instant boost to immersion (though that’s more on the sub-par speakers of Rift S and Quest than anything else). Even with headphones, sounds in the game don’t seem particularly well polished—like the very uneventful sound effects for when you’ve been detected or the sound of incoming gunfire when you’re being shot at.
Comfort
Image courtesy nDreams
I was quite worried about the comfort of Phantom: Covert Ops in my most recent preview because the game’s smoothly turning ‘sharp turn’ mechanic clearly grated on my brain. Too much of that smooth turning and it would be a trip to nausea town.
I’m very happy that the studio has added an ‘incremental turn’ option which causes the kayak to snap-turn when you employ the ‘sharp turn’ button. Although the motion doesn’t feel as natural as smooth turn, I found that it was a hell of a lot more comfortable and that it had almost no impact on gameplay. Thanks to the incremental turn option, I could play Covert Ops indefinitely without the risk of nausea slowly building.
Thanks to the addition of incremental turn, I found the game very comfortable throughout.
Those who are highly sensitive to motion might take issue with ‘strafe’ paddling (which can slide the kayak sideways) or when using the paddle to push against the shore to move the kayak, though both can be avoided easily with almost no impact to gameplay.
I also didn’t notice a single instance where tracking was an issue—either when reaching for objects in my inventory or using the two-handed sniper rifle—which means that nDreams designed around the inside-out tracking limitations of Rift S and Quest very well.
As a seated game, Phantom: Covert Ops can be played easily in a fairly compact playspace. While I started out sitting on the floor, eventually my back got a bit sore due to no support. I stuck an arm-less chair in the middle of my playspace for the second half of the game and much preferred the back support.
ARCore, Google’s developer platform for building augmented reality experiences for mobile devices, just got an update that brings the company’s previously announced Depth API to Android and Unity developers. Depth API not only lets mobile devices create depth maps using a single RGB camera, but also aims to make the AR experience more natural, as virtual imagery is more realistically placed in the world.
Update (June 25th, 2020): Google today announced it’s making its Depth API for ARCore available to developers. A few studios have already integrated Depth API into their apps to create more convincing occlusion, such as Illumix’s Five Nights at Freddy’s AR: Special Delivery game, which lets enemies hide behind your real-world objects for more startling jump scares.
ARCore 1.18 for Android and Unity, including AR Foundation, is rolling out to what Google calls “hundreds of millions of compatible Android devices,” although there’s no clear list of which devices are supported just yet.
Original Article (December 9th, 2019): Shahram Izadi, Director of Research and Engineering at Google, says in a blog post the new Depth API now enables occlusion for mobile AR applications, and also the chance of creating more realistic physics and surface interactions.
To demonstrate, Google created a number of demos to shows off the full set of capabilities the new Depth API brings to ARCore. Keep an eye on the virtual objects as they’re accurately occluded by physical barriers.
“The ARCore Depth API allows developers to use our depth-from-motion algorithms to create a depth map using a single RGB camera,” Izadi says. “The depth map is created by taking multiple images from different angles and comparing them as you move your phone to estimate the distance to every pixel.”
Full-fledged AR headsets typically use multiple depth sensors to create depth maps like this, which Google says was created on device with a single sensors. Here, red indicates areas that closer, while blue is for farther areas:
“One important application for depth is occlusion: the ability for digital objects to accurately appear in front of or behind real world objects,” Izadi explains. “Occlusion helps digital objects feel as if they are actually in your space by blending them with the scene. We will begin making occlusion available in Scene Viewer, the developer tool that powers AR in Search, to an initial set of over 200 million ARCore-enabled Android devices today.”
Additionally, Izadi says Depth API does’t require specialized cameras and sensors, and that with the addition of time-of-flight (ToF) sensors to future mobile devices, ARCore’s depth mapping capabilities could eventually allow for virtual objects to occlude behind moving, physical objects.
The new Depth API follows Google’s release of its ‘Environmental HDR’ tool back at Google I/O in May, which brought more realistic lighting to AR objects and scenes, something which aims at enhancing immersion with more realistic reflections, shadows, and lighting.
Update (12:10):In a previous version of this article, it was claimed that Google was releasing Depth API today, however the company is only now putting out a form for developers interested in using the tool. You can sign up here.
