The VRNRGY Power Pack, an auxiliary battery pack designed specifically to fit on the back of an Oculus Quest, is now available for order on the company’s website.
Generally, the Quest only offers up around 2 hours of gaming battery life on a single charge, as we mentioned in our mostly glowing review of the standalone headset. When both devices are completely charged, the VRNRGY Power Pack promises to keep the Quest alive for triple that amount of time, offering “up to 6 hours of VR gaming” as stated on the product webpage.
The VRNRGY Power Pack also acts as a counterweight by placing the battery on the back of the front-heavy headset, right inside of the triangle opening that normally grips the crown of the user’s head. While we noted in our review that the perceived weightiness of the Oculus Quest is often a result of users misfitting the side and top straps to the shape of their head, this counter-weight is supposedly designed to allow easier fitting and adjustment right off the bat.
The power pack is held in place by a “breathable” neoprene strap, which is visibly designed around the form factor of the Oculus Quest. The battery itself is based on Samsung’s Li-Ion technology, boasting 7,000 mAh which VRNRGY says can subsidize up to 6 hours of VR gaming or 8 hours of video streaming without interruption.
The VRNRGY Power Pack retails at $50 MSRP, but is currently available at a discounted launch price of $35. VRNRGY also sells a protective front travel cover (MSRP $20) for the Quest, which is currently discounted to $15. The protective cover ships on October 20.
Spuds Unearthed, a mashup title which combines real-time strategy and MOBA elements, has launched on Rift and Vive headsets following nearly nine months in Early Access.
Set in a persistent battlescape where players contend against one another for planetary control, Spuds Unearthed is about building and maintaining a tribe of ‘spuds’. These spuds can be used to go forth and conquer planets from other players asynchronously, or even tackle dangerous ‘Zombuds’. Players can also unlock and upgrade ‘hero’ spuds, advanced soldiers that dish out increased mayhem.
In addition to maintaining their own army of spudly soldiers, players get to hop directly onto their own personal turrets and fire at incoming enemy troops. Throughout their time in Spuds Unearthed, players will discover or craft an arsenal of specialized and improved turrets with which to assist their spud forces, claims developer Gamedust in the title’s storefront description. “There are many different turrets to choose from that support different playstyles and are useful in different situations,” the description states further.
At least at the beginning of the game, there are two basic turrets placed on the left and right of the player. Both are completely mannable, featuring interactive handles and cranks that operate like a real hand-cranked turret would. The circular platform which houses the turrets (and the player) can be raised or lowered at any time with a flick of the analog stick or the thumbpad. Further, players can extend or retract their virtual hands to reach distant objects outside of their immediate boundaries, a useful option for those who prefer to play seated.
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Image courtesy Gamedust
Image courtesy Gamedust
Image courtesy Gamedust
Image courtesy Gamedust
Image courtesy Gamedust
Spuds Unearthed is available as of September 19th on the Oculus Store and Steam Store for $20. The title is currently marked down to $15 as a launch discount on both major storefronts, and will remain so until September 26. It is also available to Viveport subscribers. The game launched in Early Access on Steam in January and this release marks its ‘full’ 1.0 release.
Strategy games that hybridize VR embodiment with top-down gameplay are, seemingly, becoming more and more common in VR. A few weeks ago, tower defense strategy game Home A Drone released with some similar stylings.
There is no official word on a native compatibility with Valve Index or Windows MR headsets. However, the title’s Discord community server is likely where new information will become available first.
The title contains five different multiplayer modes, each of which are pointed at giving players something unique to do with one another while delving through various Japanese cartoon-inspired environments. Each of the five modes can be explored with others or enjoyed solo. Among the five available activities are hide and seek, swimming underwater, gliding through the air, competitive dancing (wiggling, rather), and playing a game of “human tetris”.
“Half + Half is the culmination of four years of multiplayer research at Normal,” the company stated in a blog post. “We’ve created warm, rich, and organic spaces for you to hang out with people. We’ve spent countless hours tweaking our blobby avatars to communicate well through body language and to feel approachable in VR.”
The title is designed to make each player look “as ridiculous as possible” in real life. The developer holds that this is to facilitate social interaction in VR while enriching time that would otherwise be spent in front of a smartphone or computer monitor.
Image courtesy Normal
Half + Half is now available on the Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift storefronts for $10. The studio has not stated plans for a port to Steam or native support for any other headsets.
Prior to creating Half + Half, the studio developed Cutie Keys, a VR keyboard app from which Normal VR cultivated the art direction that’d later be fully realized in Half + Half.
“Tower Defense-inspired” VR FPS Home A Drone is set to release in Early Access on Steam and Viveport this Thursday.
Home A Drone will allow players to fight off invading swarms of enemies by placing structures that automatically target and shoot at whatever approaches, similar to other tower defense-style games like Defense Grid 2. Unlike traditional tower defense titles, however, Home A Drone will invoke the power of VR by allowing players to jump directly into the action with their own handheld weapons, much like in any conventional shooting game.
Image courtesy Construct Studio
Developer Construct Studio says that the title’s narrative beats center around DroneCorp, an overzealous corporation bent on monopolizing all forms of artificial intelligence. In an attempt to defend Scrappy, the player’s home-built drone that DroneCorp appears obsessed with reclaiming for its own purposes, players will set traps and wield weapons, such as the “Battery Blaster, the Saw Sniper, and the Football Flinger,” against an invading army of DroneCorp drones.
The studio pitches the following on the game’s Steam page:
Arcade and Tower Defense-inspired gameplay, built from the ground up for VR! Balance your preferred gameplay style against your resources during fun, fast paced action!
Play Offensively or Defensively… Should you use skill with weapons to fight back the DroneCorp onslaught, or should you use strategy to place traps to most effectively stop the drones in their tracks? Why not both? In Home A Drone, you decide how you should play!
DIY-inspired creations like the Battery Blaster, the Saw Sniper, and the Football Flinger are your instruments of battle. Upgrade your weapons and traps with the Scrap from each drone you defeat, making them more powerful and changing their characteristics.
Fight for friendship, and discover the truth about DroneCorp and Scrappy!
Flamingos!
Home A Drone is headed to Steam and Viveport this Thursday, September 19th, priced at $10. The game will be released in Early Access and only with official support for the HTC Vive, though the developer says that support for the Rift is expected “really soon.”
Image courtesy Construct Studio
Construct Studio also developed The Price of Freedom VR (2016). Downloaded just over 85,000 times, in 2017 it was nominated for the ‘Best Narrative VR’ and ‘Narrative Achievement Award’ at Unity VR/AR Vision Summit and was featured at the Sundance Film Festival by HTC.
Aside from developing games, the studio also designed VERA, a plugin system that’s meant to smoothen the direct integration of 3D model data into a game engine like Unity.
The perennially avant-garde singer-songwriter Björk has brought her entire 2015 album, Vulnicura, to virtual reality. Available today, headset owners can finally get to dive into a collection of immersive music videos that only previously graced museums worldwide via the Björk Digital Exhibition since late 2016, Pitchfork reports.
The Vulnicura Virtual Reality Album is now available Steam (Oculus Rift, Valve Index, HTC Vive) priced at $30. The album features a collection of live-action 360 video and real-time rendered experiences set to the album’s tracks.
The seven tracks that headset owners will get to experience with full VR visuals are ‘Notget’, ”Family’, ‘Stonemilker’, ‘Lionsong’, ‘Mouth Mantra’, ‘Black Lake’, and ‘Quicksand’.
“I am someone who absolutely loves music and gets so moved by the sensation of it,” Björk stated on Instagram. “When Andy [Thomas Huang] proposed filming ‘Stonemilker’ on the beach [in 360] it was perhaps him tapping into how spatial and connected to nature my songs are.”
“The themes for the digital animations were a collaborations (sic) of mine with James Merry and I would like to thank him for being my co-pilot for the visual art direction for this whole thing,” she continued.
In addition to music videos, the Vulnicura VR album also includes dynamic 360-degree visuals that have been created by Stephen Malinowski, who invented the Music Animation Machine that visualizes musical notation and logic in sync with the rhythm of music.
The most recent musical release from Björk is her 2017 album Utopia, which is also the ninth studio release in her discography. After originally releasing Vulnicura in 2015, Björk followed it up with Vulnicura Strings, a redux of the original album without the electronica elements.
Attaining your first freighter in No Man’s Sky VR (read our review here) is an absolute joy. You can warp it into existence from nearly anywhere, making it the perfect mobile base of operations. But how does one come into possession of such a titanic craft? Well, it’s actually much easier than you might expect.
But before I explain how to get your first freighter (for free) in No Man’s Sky VR, I want to break down the way that freighters are classified. No Man’s Sky VR boasts ‘regular’ freighters and ‘capital’ freighters, which vary wildly in inventory size and exchange value. Inside of each category, there are then C, B, A, and S-class freighters.
Regular freighters range from 15 to 19 inventory slots and are valued between 8 to 15 million units. Capital freighters, meanwhile, range from 24 to 34 inventory slots and are valued between 26 to 178 million units, respectively.
Do Not Buy Any Freighters Below Class A
Freighters are expensive. They’re also easy to get as a quest reward very early into the game, without much effort or investment at all. Unfortunately, this isn’t explained too well through regular gameplay. You will often see lower-tier freighters in No Man’s Sky VR warp into systems and pitch themselves up for sale, enticing players that have saved up just enough past the opening hours of the game. This is a shame for anybody who invests their hard-earned units on a ship they could easily have gotten for free.
That said, you can only have one freighter at a time, and you can’t sell additional freighters outright, so buying a C-class or B-class freighter is useless. Especially considering you’ll quickly learn that you can earn a freighter of equal or near-equal value for absolutely no units at all.
It’s possible for your free freighter to be an A class or even an S class freighter, despite the likelihood being far, far lower than with the other classes. What I’m saying here is that you might just not want to buy any freighters at all. Let the game do its thing, then upgrade once you find the one you’re satisfied replacing your free one with.
Do Go Looking for Trouble in No Man’s Sky VR
In order to stumble over the quest, you’ll need to go hunting for pirates. Not just any garden-variety No Man’s Sky VR pirates will do in this case, either. Once you’ve completed the first series of tutorial missions and acquired the hyperdrive, start moving from solar system to solar system as you please until the quest springs up. Using a Conflict Scanner to tell which systems are more dangerous than others might not prove useful here, since the game actually calculates whether it’ll give you a rescue mission based on the number of times you’ve warped.
Once you find the quest, you’ll know it. You’ll get a distress signal in your ship communicator from the captain of the gigantic ship sitting in front of you that’s being attacked by no fewer than six pirates. While you can accept this and complete the mission as requested, you can also turn the captain down and fly off, or worse, shoot down the freighter’s cargo pods and take whatever precious loot you find, essentially aiding the pirates.
Unfortunately, becoming a pirate and siding with the attackers won’t help you get a free freighter in No Man’s Sky VR, so we’ll go with the first one.
Blast all of the pirate ships in the area, which should be easy with even the most basic starter ship, and land your ship inside of the freighter afterward. You should have gotten a message from the captain once all of the pirates were shot down, and they should now be waiting to speak with you up in the ship’s bridge. Proceed from the docking bay up the stairs and follow the corridor to the bridge.
Speaking with the captain will quickly reveal that they’re way too old for this job and they’d prefer not to have to run such a massive ship on their own anymore. Guess who’s extending an offer to replace them? The captain will give you the entire freighter for the grand price of 0 units, which is quite fair given that you saved their life and all of their cargo a few moments prior.
Currently, it’s possible to earn a capital freighter rather than a regular freighter by not accepting the first free freighter you run across. When you break the siege on the second freighter you discover under attack, you should receive an offer for a free capital freighter with greatly expanded inventory slots over the first freighter you ran into previously.
Enjoy Your New No Man’s Sky VR Freighter
Freighters in No Man’s Sky VR are useful for a number of things. You can warp them to you from the ground or from space without incurring any fuel cost. But what’s the point of warping your freighter around at all? First of all, it operates as a mobile parking garage that stores all six of your regular-size starships. Second, any vacant parking space can be occupied by an NPC ship, which means that it’s a mobile trade hub as well. Third, you can amass a fleet of frigates to send out on missions that foster pretty sizeable monetary and mineral rewards.
You can remotely teleport items from your exosuit and ship inventories to your freighter inventory, clearing up space on the fly. And then you can build the freighter’s interior out as much as you’re able to afford, meaning that you can construct a very large but aesthetically consistent base right here, then take it anywhere you go.
While expanding your freighter base, also note that you can put cargo containers in for immediate remote access to any of those fine storage slots you’ve been filling up at your planetary bases. If you put a valuable item into storage on Planet A, you can pluck it right back out while you’re onboard your freighter, and vice versa.
On a final note, your new No Man’s Sky VR freighter will also spawn ships to defend you from pirate or even Sentinel attacks, making it the perfect floating fortress from which to stage interstellar heists or defend trade routes. If the heat gets too hot in space (despite space being mostly vacuum) you can always fight in style — with a freighter and an entire personal fleet at your back.
For more on No Man’s Sky VR, don’t forget to check out our coverage hub and read our other guides on getting started in VR, making money fast, and base building basics. Or read/watch our full review here. And keep an eye on the official website for updates.
Social VR networking app AltspaceVR is now live on the Oculus Quest. The social VR app is best known for having been purchased by Microsoft in 2017 after nearly shutting down, but low-key visual design and wide accessibility have cemented AltspaceVR as a staple social tool among loyal supporters and industry professionals alike.
Update (September 13th, 2019): AltspaceVR is now available on Oculus Quest. Download it for free here.
The original article announcing Quest support follows below:
Original Article (September 3rd, 2019): Each environment and avatar in Altspace is minimalistic as a rule, erring in favor of a core social experience that runs well on lower-end systems and scales with each simultaneous user. As a result, AltspaceVR notably hosts a higher concentration of professionals than might be found so easily in other social VR apps.
While avatars in AltspaceVR are simple, the app boasts a 3D audio attenuation system that makes conversations sound like they’re happening with spatial accuracy, as they would in the real world. Users can also join large-scale events, the most prominent example being the recurring live shows thrown by Reggie Watts. Events are divided into individual sessions with a set number of other users per room.
AltspaceVR is already available for free on Steam for all major headsets, as well as on the Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, and Gear VR storefronts. Windows 10 users without headsets can still download and access the app via 2D mode. AltspaceVR will join popular social VR apps Rec Room,VRChat, and Bigscreen on Oculus Quest.
The previously delayed espionage sim Espire 1: VR Operative is now scheduled for release on September 24. After earning several ‘Best of Show’ nominations at E3 and a ‘Best of Show’ award from UploadVR, Espire 1 is available for pre-order on Steam (Index, Vive, Rift, and WMR) and soon available for pre-order on PlayStation (PSVR). The game will also launch on Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift.
Developer Digital Lode describes the game as setting a “new gold standard” for the ‘stealth’ genre in virtual reality, including accommodations for motion sickness like the optional ‘Control Theatre’ mode, which displays artificial locomotion in the game’s world as if the player were standing (or sitting) in a control room, watching the action through a series of cameras set around the Espire Agent’s peripheral view.
In addition to engaging in standard gameplay interactions like shooting and hiding behind cover, Espire 1 players will experience the game’s world in other ways, says Digital Lode. Such interactions will include activating a ‘bullet-time’ mode while hanging off of a surface, yelling “Freeze!” at an enemy guard to make them stop in their tracks, filching a weapon right off of a distracted guard, and creating distractions with loose weapon magazines.
Additional tactics will include “dozens of unique gadgets and weapons such as a tranquilizer pistol and deployable spy cameras in order to complete the mission objectives,” Digital Lode said in its release date announcement.
Image courtesy Digital Lode
Further, Espire 1’s focus on tactical, open-ended gameplay means that anyone should be able to mix and match different playstyles to move through the game’s “complete single-player story” at their own speed.
Publisher Tripwire Interactive is giving away a free copy of Killing Floor: Incursion to any who pre-order Espire 1 from Steam ahead of the game’s launch in September. Tripwire also promises that those who pre-order Espire 1 from the PlayStation Store after August 30th will receive a 15% discount.
Light Field Lab, known for its advancements in light-field display technology, successfully completed a Series A funding round, scoring the firm over $28 million in venture capital to manufacture and distribute working products. The investment round was led by Bosch Venture Capital and Taiwania Capital. Light Field Lab hopes to build large scale light-field displays capable of offering a ‘holodeck’-like experience.
At a cursory glance, light-field displays are essentially holographic panels that, as TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney puts it, are akin to advanced 3D TVs. Unlike 3D TVs, however, light-field displays don’t require special glasses to enjoy the ‘3D’ element.
Initially founded by a group of ex-Lytro employees, Light Field Lab is already notable for having secured $7 million in funding for R&D on light-field displays in January 2018, two months ahead of Lytro’s shuttering.
“The company aims to bring real-world holographic experiences to life with up to hundreds of gigapixels of resolution, including modular video walls for live event and large-scale installations,” states an official release.
The consumer market isn’t likely to see any such light-field display technology in their homes for some time, in favor of a more immediate focus on creating value within the commercial sector—where location-based entertainment sits directly under the crosshair.
Seminal VR film trilogy, The Matrix, is returning to the big screen once again. The series famous for introducing ‘bullet time’ and expanding the world’s collective imagination regarding the ‘what-ifs’ of virtual reality and AI is coming back to life for a fourth iteration.
A fourth Matrix film is set to be written and directed by Lana Wachowski, one of the original directors, reports Variety. Expected to begin production in 2020, the film will has been confirmed to include the return of Keanu Reeves (as Neo) and Carrie-Anne Moss (as Trinity).
For those out of the loop, The Matrix series prevalently depicts a virtual reality prison in which humans are trapped and fed on by a race of sentient machines. Meanwhile, the unassuming office worker Neo, master hacker Trinity, and shadowy liberator Morpheus establish a human resistance both inside and outside of the virtual program.
Totalled together, the original Matrix trilogy has topped $1.6 billion at the global box office since the first films release in 1999. It’s uncertain whether the fourth film will exist as a prequel or sequel, given the state of things at the end of the original trilogy, or whether Laurence Fishburne will reprise his role as Morpheus.
While some fans have already been spotted asking around for Warner Bros. Pictures to produce a VR tie-in experience, no such thing has been announced.
