Initially arriving last August as VR’s premiere live-remixing rhythm game, Survios’ Electronauts lets players fiddle with the individual tracks and pieces of popular songs, mixing loose effects and loops together with vocal and instrumental stems at their own leisure [our review]. The free ‘Heatwave’ update nearly doubles the total track count to more than 80 songs.
Aptly titled, this update broadly features summer-flavored tunes by artists such as Tipper, Feed Me, and Kill the Noise. But if you’re not a fan of bass-heavy EDM, you’re still in luck. Also making an appearance is a broad set of styles and tastes ranging from the likes of Kygo, Giraffage, Childish Gambino, and similar contemporary artists. Here’s the full lineup of artists with songs in the update.
Image courtesy Survios
“It’s been really gratifying to see this tool unleash creative expression, both in people who are already super creative and in people who don’t normally tap into their creative side,” said Hunter Kitagawa, Survios’ Director of Marketing, in a statement on Oculus’ blog. “The main thing they’ve been asking for since launch is more songs. With this update, we hope we’re delivering on that.”
That said, creative minds and curious explorers no longer need to wait for new music to play with. The Heatwave update is free for all owners of Electronauts, which is available to purchase and download on the Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest, SteamVR, and PSVR platforms today.
Update (August 21st, 2019): The Heatwave update added 39 new tracks to Electronauts, Survios has confirmed. This article previously stated the number was 45, but that was actually the number of artists (Survios said some tracks include more than one artist credit). The article above has been updated with this correction.
Beyond the known world is a galaxy of infinite exploration and endless possibility. That is, of course, until you meet your end at the whim of an angry detachment of Sentinels, or breathe in too many atmospheric toxins and collapse on the surface of some backwater planet. With over “18 quintillion” procedurally-generated planets to explore, there’s heaps to see (and flee in terror from) in No Man’s Sky VR. While No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games has called the new BEYOND update the ‘2.0’ version of the game, No Man’s Sky’s brand new VR support feels like ‘1.0’ in many key respects, jarringly reminding me that while the sky’s the limit for the studio, their flagship title’s initial entry into virtual reality has some serious turbulence to work through.
Developer: Hello Games Available On: Steam (Vive, Index, Rift), PlayStation Store (PSVR) Reviewed On: Rift (CV1) Release Date: August 14, 2019 Price: $60
Note: While No Man’s Sky Beyond is the title’s seventh major update in over three years, we’re focusing solely on how the VR portion of the update plays in its current state. Understanding that save progress and multiplayer gameplay are seamlessly shared with the game’s flatscreen mode and flatscreen players, this review does not reflect the experience that a player may have if/when they choose to play No Man’s Sky Beyond outside of a headset.
Gameplay
The only laws in a procedurally-generated universe are the ones you choose to follow. No Man’s Sky VR begins its descent into lawlessness by letting you choose between loading up an existing save or starting an entirely new one. You’re given four save slots, corresponding with the four modes available to choose from as a new player: ‘Normal’, ‘Survival’, ‘Permadeath’, and ‘Creative. If your PSN or Steam friends are online, you can even jump directly into a session with them from the main menu.
While ‘Normal’ is ostensibly the most popular—at least, it constitutes the definitive No Man’s Sky VR experience—there’s an entirely different experience hidden in each mode. ‘Survival’, for instance, keeps most of the core gameplay intact but challenges you with modifiers that make every action less rewarding and every potential threat more dangerous. ‘Permadeath’, which is something I’d never want to experience in a game that can rack up tens, hundreds, or thousands of hours of play, is aimed squarely at those who crave a vastly heightened feeling of urgency in the game’s exploration and combat encounters. Meanwhile, ‘Creative’ is far more permissive towards those who just want to chill out and build bases, offering invulnerability and limitless crafting supplies.
Note: The remainder of this review is based on my time in the ‘Normal’ difficulty mode, which encompasses the baseline No Man’s Sky VR experience.
Image courtesy Hello Games
Opening a new save file from scratch one, the immediacy of survival becomes clear. You are no more than a tiny speck upon the surface of a dusty planet in an unfamiliar system. Finding yourself alone without a spaceship or a weapon, surrounded by hostile atmosphere and aggressive wildlife, you quickly realize that your protective exosuit is failing and that you are going to die in short order if you don’t do something about it.
But there is hope. On the lower right corner of your helmet display, a tutorial canvas informs that you’ll survive—if you repair your scanner and fetch up a source of sodium, the naturally-occurring element that allows you to recharge your suit’s ‘Hazard Protection Unit’. Following these directions, in addition to keeping you alive, begins a series of small tasks that you’re compelled (not required) to complete as you gain familiarity with your environment, your equipment, the interface, and very shortly, your first ship.
Captured by Road to VR
No Man’s Sky VR doesn’t intently hold your hand, but it does give you pellets to follow in the form of primary missions. For the first several hours, each of the game’s systems are taught on a task-by-task basis. Unfortunately, many of these first missions aren’t telling you much more than “go here, do this” without a stronger narrative context. And since the game is so open-ended, they constitute no more than a subtle nudge for a player who wants to get out into the universe and explore sooner rather than later.
It’s an awkward juxtaposition, because there definitely is a narrative, but you won’t even come in contact with it until after completing the tutorial period, several hours into the game. In fact, the real meat of No Man’s Sky VR—the journey to the galactic core which features freighters, higher-tier solar systems, the Artemis story path, exocrafts, advanced base blueprints, and the ‘Space Anomaly’ multiplayer hub—is hidden behind the hyperdrive, which is awarded at the end of these lightly enforced, very helpful, but seemingly monotonous tutorial quests. The game certainly does teach you everything you need to know, but only if you’re patient, attentive, and willing to learn at the pace dictated by Hello Games.
Image courtesy Hello Games
As soon as you gain access to the wider universe, however, the real fun begins. Holistically, No Man’s Sky VR is hard to encapsulate because it can be so many things for so many people. There are such a great deal of systems running simultaneously that it’s difficult to keep track of what to do and where to go at any given time.
Are you interested in trading goods and lining your pockets? Each solar system has its own economy which responds to supply and demand; you can learn the best trade routes and even crash entire economies for your own benefit. Would you rather live out your juiciest intergalactic geoarchaeological fantasies? The galaxy is brimming with unmapped planets to find and scan, alien ruins to defile, and valuable treasures to dig out with the Terrain Manipulator.
And if you’re thinking about becoming a pirate, you don’t have to wait another moment. You can hunt civilian ships and loot their precious cargo, then warp away into the next system as you escape the justice of responding Sentinel authority interceptors.
As you accumulate Nanites, the game’s secondary currency that operates as a stand-in for experience points, you can buy upgrades for your Multi-Tool that let you earn more currency each time you scan a new oddity. Or you can spend those same Nanites on exosuit upgrades that keep you protected from extreme weather patterns, allowing you to explore longer without seeking shelter. If vehicle customization or bigger, better weapons are more your style, you can invest in those as well.
Image courtesy Hello Games
And those are only mere examples of what this game offers in terms of content and replayability. There’s also base-building, creature taming, undersea diving, exocraft racing, 32-person multiplayer, faction missions, bounty hunting, farming, crafting and smelting, artifact scavenging, black hole charting, frigate collecting, cave digging, punching mineral nodes to dust with your bare hands, and an entire 30 hours of story content. There’s even more to do than what I’ve listed, but the big question is how do any of these aspects feel while inside of a headset?
Immersion
I figure it’s worth examining what really ties this whole experience together: the spaceships. On the one hand, there’s a lot to be said about piloting a spaceship with a throttle and a joystick while staring out into space from the interior of your cockpit. That part is, for lack of a better term, extremely cool. And that first moment of blasting off from a planet’s surface and out into space may very possibly be memorialized as one of my favorite VR moments of all time.
As I broke atmosphere and launched into orbit, I took a moment to shut off the throttle and gaze into space. I drank in the panorama of planets casting shadows on one another, the flecks of cosmic dust hitting my ship’s exterior hull as it bumped around in the solar wind, the game’s idyllic retro-electronic synth pads harmonizing underneath it all. That was the moment that the gravitas of No Man’s Sky VR became clear to me. If I could see it in my headset, I could go to it. And nobody was going to stop me.
Other great moments followed shortly behind. My first dogfight in space was adrenaline-pulsing; slingshotting between asteroids to get the drop on an enemy ship while an ocean of stars swirled around in my peripheral vision. It was something out of a movie, though I could see how, even with consistent frame rates, dogfighting in VR may make other players sick.
My third favorite moment occurred after I’d dug a shelter out of a cave in the middle of an ice storm with the Terrain Manipulator, proudly stood in the middle of my room, watching the snowdrift blow into the cavern’s opening as light shone off the walls, in awe of what I’d created with my hands.
But No Man’s Sky’s greatest VR moments, for all they’re worth, are also why I ultimately am left so disappointed with much of how the rest of the game is presented. For every fantastic tidbit of VR immersion this title conjures up, there’s another poorly-translated relic from its flatscreen roots that mucks the entire experience. It pains me to say that the issues that have plagued No Man’s Sky since its launch: unintuitive interfaces, by-the-numbers NPC interactions, and immersion-breaking bugs—while far cleaner in the newest desktop version, they still crumble under the microscope of VR.
Too much of my time playing the VR update was spent drifting between large text boxes, busy menus, and digital cardboard NPC dialogues for me to truly absorb the grandiosity of the universe that Hello Games had laid out before me. Granted, while on foot, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was remotely controlling a player character—a human portal to a set of stats and records—rather than embodying that same character in a world that responded to me as a living being that actually existed. Which was, of course, to be expected from a port, but disappointing nonetheless.
Captured by Road to VR
Scanning different lifeforms and minerals on each planet with the Analysis Visor and the Multi-Tool is one of the core elements of gameplay in No Man’s Sky VR, but even that piece involves standing in one place, pointing at something, and holding the trigger for a few seconds. It’s an overly rudimentary form of progression even in the desktop mode, and in stark contrast to the high-impact ship commandeering experience, it’s plain unfun in VR.
It doesn’t help that your Multi-Tool, the single thing you’ll invariably rely upon the most throughout your time in No Man’s Sky (aside from your ship), is hardly more than a floating mesh in VR. It offers no recoil or additional interactivity beyond a wrist-mounted menu, from which you can point and click on an icon to toggle between mining and weapon modules, or reload if you have a weapon module equipped. It’s just about the least immersive way to introduce a ‘gun’ mechanic in a VR game, and it explicitly casts the Multi-Tool as a weightless toy. This, in turn, makes many on-foot interactions feel disconnected—reminding you once more that you’re simply touring the world rather than existing inside of it.
The HUD is locked forward, meaning that it doesn’t follow your actual view around. Thus, I found that I needed to shift or even reset the HUD location using artificial locomotion each time I swiveled my head or turned my body while on foot. I understand that this is meant to accommodate for players who prefer to keep facing forward at all times, but the lack of an option to toggle off the HUD lock is a burden if, like me, you enjoy moving around your entire physical space.
Furthermore, it’s downright annoying when you forget that the HUD is entirely behind you but the game still thinks you’re facing in its static direction. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if it didn’t have implications on gameplay, but it does. The ‘Rocket Boots’ module, an upgrade for the jetpack which is supposed to make navigating on foot much more convenient, automatically moves in the direction that your HUD is pointed. It’s activated by a quick tap of the same button that would otherwise activate the jetpack, which means that it’s easy to leap in the entirely wrong direction when you forget to reset your position or adjust to the direction of your HUD. It’s the sort of thing that jars you out of your experience if you aren’t paying attention, but even then, avoiding it altogether means remaining conscious of boring interface elements that are removed from the virtual world.
Image courtesy Hello Games
After receiving three years of new content, it’s easy to call No Man’s Sky a dense game, meaning that there’s a metric ton to do and see. Unfortunately, it’s still hard to call it a particularly deep game in any of its individual aspects. Many of its features still feel janky if not entirely thought through, despite seeing tangible improvement over the years. And it’s all the more visible in VR, where you’re literally standing inside of the world rather than watching an avatar stand in for you.
Alien encounters already felt nondescript and forgettable because each random encounter was still, ultimately, just a transaction attached to some random number generation. To this day, each random NPC interaction ultimately leads to another alien word learned or another item gained, all represented on canvas slate in the HUD or in a menu. And in VR, you’re contending with all of that in addition to having to parse through a massive text box and a blank-faced NPC character that seems to look right through you.
Image courtesy Hello Games
Even so, the droll dialogues offered by random NPCs in No Man’s Sky VR are almost always detached from your adventure, near-constantly failing to leave anything resembling a meaningful or emotional impact. But that flavor of tone deafness is to be expected when exploring a universe that flaunts itself on being ‘procedurally-generated’. Of course, the main ‘Atlas Rises’ campaign (which stars Artemis, one of the few handwritten NPCs you’ll spend some actual time getting familiar with) and the world-colliding multidimensional Space Anomaly do both offer characterization and context that is more dynamic and engaging than 99% of the other habitations you’ll experience across the galaxy. But it takes some time completing those aforementioned tutorial missions to get to them, and a new player may become bored and veer off before they reach either.
Comfort
No Man’s Sky VR does offer a few comfort options, though those are still quite limited in comparison to the broader scope and selection of comfort options available in many other modern VR games. You can choose between snap-turning or smooth-turning, teleportation or hand-tracked smooth locomotion, and you can switch comfort blinders on and off. Additionally, you don’t actually have to play with motion controllers if you prefer to play with a mouse and keyboard arrangement or a gamepad. I chose to play through 40 hours of the update with Oculus Touch controllers, all smooth locomotion, and with comfort blinders switched off. Since I don’t generally deal with any motion sickness in VR at all whatsoever, I enjoyed the experience just fine.
Unfortunately, I have thorough reason to believe that most people won’t be able to endure No Man’s Sky VR the same way that I have.
Simply put, the VR mode is, in its current rendition, far too buggy to have a consistent experience inside of. Understanding that there was a lot of game here for Hello Games to weave into virtual reality, I ran afoul of more crashes, frame-sinking performance issues (on my GTX 1070), and outright broken user interface components than I’ve ever seen while playing No Man’s Sky in desktop mode since I first began playing the game during its ‘Atlas Rises’ update in 2017.
Captured by Road to VR
Shockingly, I found game breaking bugs present inside of common user interface interactions. Attempting to open my Multi-Tool and switch to the ‘Create’ function of the Terrain Manipulator inside of a space station or inside of my freighter locked me out of further gameplay interactions until I reverted to an autosave. Meanwhile, I found myself stuck in an interaction where trying to take a new base screenshot at a planetary ‘Base Computer’ turned my camera sideways and stopped my Touch controllers from inputting anything for a full 10 seconds. Yes, my entire view in VR was inexplicably turned sideways for several seconds.
To my dismay, there were serious bugs abound throughout the rest of the game as well. Wandering into the storage container units inside of my freighter dropped me underneath the capital ship’s cargo hold to my death. There’s no longer a way to upload all scanned systems, planets, flora, fauna, or minerals all at once, adding more time spent tediously floundering about inside of menu screens. Attempting to rename anything forced me to get out of my headset and use my actual physical keyboard in the real world to so much as back out of the interaction.
My list keeps going, but I’ve made my point. There are too many technical issues to list here and delineate in a timely manner, and that alone is the massive problem that I’m driving towards. It’s not even the individual bugs that I’m bothered by. It’s that much of the time there’s a feeling of needing to wrestle with the game in order to make it ‘work’. Furthermore, contending with so many bugs in No Man’s Sky VR means spending even more time staring at text in canvas menus, restarting saves, falling through the world, completely losing track of what my avatar is doing, losing track of the camera, and otherwise having an uncomfortable experience.
Captured by Road to VR
Can these issues be fixed through subsequent updates and patches? Totally. Do I expect them to be? Knowing Hello Games’ recent history, I have faith. Even outside of VR, I appreciate many of the ‘2.0’ bits of the Beyond update. But it’s safe to say that No Man’s SkyVR, while novel and exciting in many ways, is plagued with bugs, poor optimization, and seemingly obvious design oversights that create friction and, at worst, infrequently deplete the joy of playing in a headset.
Out-of-home VR attraction chain The VOID may soon reach a city near you. The company recently announced plans to introduce 25 new locations through 2022, more than doubling its current footprint.
Just a week prior to the July 25th announcement, the company announced that it had officially opened three new entertainment center locations in Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Washington D.C., totalling in 13 ‘premium’ locations (out of 16 permanent locations) now open to the public.
The Void offers multi-user VR experiences where players wear headsets and backpacks while physically walking around a ‘stage’ which is layered with the virtual reality experience. Real haptics like shaking floors, gusts of wind, and even smells are used to increase immersion.
The result of a new partnership with major commercial real estate company Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW), The Void will launch 25 new permanent locations through 2022.
“The Void aims to elevate the perception of how consumers currently see and interact with virtual reality,” states The Void Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, Curtis Hickman, in the company’s announcement.
The Void currently operates 16 locations in 11 states across the US, and one location in Dubai. The upcoming locations are slated to begin appearing across California, Illinois, New Jersey, and parts of Europe. Not all 25 upcoming locations have been announced yet, but more information is available on the company’s ‘locations’ page.
“Locations opening this summer mark the beginning of rapid growth and continued expansion for The Void,” the company’s official release statement continues. “The locations will be launching with Star WarsTM: Secrets of the Empire, the award-winning experience by ILMxLAB and Lucasfilm and Ralph Breaks VR by ILMxLAB created in collaboration with Walt Disney Animation Studios.”
While initially beginning operations in 2015 at a testing facility in Pleasant Grove, Utah, It seems as though the company’s original plan for a ‘flagship’ location in the same city has yet to pull through. Given the recent announcements and fresh partnership, however, the public may finally see that development reach finality.
It’s been around for nearly two and a half years, and has seen traffic ebb and flow with VR’s popularity since then. But let’s assume that the vast majority of Internet frolickers stopped caring about VRChat just short of that insufferable Ugandan Knuckles meme of early 2018. Alas, memes and anime girl tropes a social VR app does not make. Furthermore, VRChat is actually home to a lot of cool, imaginative content. It has everything from live events to games and luxurious hangout spaces; all available on its free-to-explore online platform.
It’s also a bit dense at the front end. If you’re trying to find some cool worlds, you might quickly find yourself overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of options available to you, smack dab on the front page of the main ‘Worlds’ menu. That’s why we’ve put together a list of top VRChat worlds that all virtual visitors should check out on their tour of the app’s offerings.
Note that the criteria used here is subjective, and there are so many worlds and so many creators that we probably missed tons of hidden gems. All of the worlds on this list are exploration-focused or chillout areas, so we haven’t dug into any games here. If gaming inside of VRChat is more your speed, we do recommend trying out the Cards Against Humanity world and various climbing challenge rooms, albeit them not officially making it onto our list. Also, if you’re looking for events rather than worlds, check out the VRChat events calendar.
Ready? Let’s get started with our favorite VRChat worlds.
Japan Shrine (PC/Quest) | By: ITOAR
Representing what is supposed to be a spring day, this Japan Shrine map comes complete with various nooks and crannies to sit down and relax in. If lazing back on a park bench or on a pile of cherry blossom petals doesn’t suit your fancy, you can enter any of the pagoda-topped structures and discover recreations of Japanese dining sets and kitsch decor.
Home of the Time (PC/Quest) | By: fr1ed
How do I summarize Home of the Time? It’s basically a floating island, surrounded by water, and equipped with an automated day/night cycle. The interior space is spacious and homely for a VRChat world. At the top, you can find an area with beds to hang out in. Outdoors, there is an entire garden area with statues, a patio, and greenery.
The Black Cat (PC/Quest) | By: spookyghostb
Despite being a figment of the metaverse, The Black Cat feels like a public event hall. The kind you might rent out for somebody’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah, or a wedding reception. It’s basically a social club in VR, and it’s the kind of place you might go to meet other people before staging an expedition into some other worlds.
Rest and Sleep (PC/Quest) | By: LOLI
You might not actually fall asleep while exploring Rest and Sleep, but it certainly provides the kind of atmosphere that’s useful for decompressing and relaxing with others. What stands out here is the relaxing neon blue hue of all of the decorations and furniture pieces in the room.
Sombie’s Hangout (PC/Quest) | By: Sombie
You could sum Sombie’s Hangout down to a three-story mingling space set to the backdrop of indie artwork and art deco design. It contains hidden passageways, a bar, and all the VR chess and virtual beer pong you can possibly play in one sitting. If you don’t feel like playing social games, sit down in any of the bean bag chairs and kill time chatting it out with other avatars.
The Great Pug (PC Only) | By: owlboy
As you enter The Great Pug, you can almost smell the old wood, newspapers, coffee, and fried eggs. Everything about the main floor is reminiscent of a venerable neighborhood pub; the earthen green and brown tones plus the framed ‘photos’ of notable guests add a comforting aura that should make you feel like you’re walking through a real restaurant. Bonus points if you head on up to The Roost and cozy yourself by the fire.
If you’re on Quest there is a smaller, alternate version called The Great Pug – West designed to be optimized for the standalone VR headset.
Void Club (PC Only) | By: Lycon
Of all the VR nightclubs I’ve been to, the Void Club is easily the most active. Music pumps through the venue all 24 hours a day, and there are almost always other avatars running around and dancing. You can explore various VIP spaces above the dancefloor, but don’t forget to check out the club exterior for some vibrant sci-fi vistas.
Room of Summer Solitude (PC/Quest) | By: Lucifer MStar
The Room of Summer Solitude is more than just any old bedroom. It’s one of the best-optimized bedrooms in all of VRChat, looking nearly as beautiful in the Oculus Quest as it does on PC. That said, this room is gorgeous. The panorama over Hong Kong is as photorealistic as you’re going to get in VRChat, and taking photos inside of this thing made me feel like a bougie travel photographer.
A Rainy Night In (PC/Quest) | By: Lucifer MStar
A Rainy Night In is the more detailed counterpart to Room of Summer Solitude. It’s a messier experience, and I did feel performance take a hit at various points on my Rift (but not on my Quest, strangely enough). However, there’s just so much more to explore here. Seeing as how well-trafficked A Rainy Night In is, social games are a must. On my first go, I almost missed the mysterious spinning bottle lying on the kitchen counter.
Big Al’s Avatar Corridors (PC/Quest) | By: Big Al
A maze filled with over 200 custom avatars from recognizable IPs like Rocko’s Modern Life and The Simpsons? Yes please. Wandering through the seemingly endless labyrinth of Big Al’s Avatar Corridors feels a bit like walking into a Party City before Halloween. If you don’t get totally lost, you might walk out with something you aren’t too embarrassed to show your friends. Of course, showing off your avatar in VRChat is never embarrassing because the entire thing is a non-stop costume party. Go hard.
VRChat is one of the most widely frequented (and free) social apps for PC VR and Oculus Quest headsets. If you haven’t downloaded it, you can find it on Steam or on the Oculus Store. And if you don’t own a headset yet, you can still hop into VRChat and join your friends in any of these worlds from the comfort of your desktop.
Let us know some of your favorite worlds down in the comments below!
BigScreenVR is a free application with the power to foster connection and social connection.
It’s fascinating to me that when the topic of VR is brought into conversation, oftentimes the first (and sometimes, only) thing that speculators want to address about the technology is that it’s fundamentally ‘isolating’.
Other times, speculators simply fail to recognize that VR hosts anything of meaningful social value.
Before I begin unpacking why I disagree on both counts, I’d like to mention that I was a gamer before I discovered VR. And while the term ‘gamer’ is loaded with competing social and antisocial connotations, in my own personal usage the term means that I’ve spent the better part of 25 years alone, silently boxed in a room, sat in front of a panel screen with a controller in my hands.
If VR is inherently isolating and lacks social value, then BigScreen VR is a discreet exception to the rule. As a quick rundown, BigScreen is an app (available for free on SteamVR, Windows MR, and across every Oculus headset) that places up to 12 users into designated ‘rooms’ resembling familiar locales like a movie theater or a penthouse apartment where they can chat, create 3D artwork, take photos, and livestream their own media content to massive virtual displays.
It may not sound like much to somebody who’s never experienced it, but there’s an intense feeling of liveliness that comes about when I sit next to, wave to, and bump fists with somebody who’s sitting across the planet in Australia while I curl up in my humble bedroom in Oregon.
BigScreen champions social VR media consumption by focusing its ongoing development on providing the best virtual television screen available. Between the app’s inclusion of dynamic lighting effects that bounce off of the walls and furniture to its notably smooth optimization for content streaming between headsets, the final product delivered by BigScreen is convincing enough to feel as though it’s a screening space that does exist.
When I first explored the app back in late 2017, I found that 8-bit and 16-bit content was easy to stream from my computer while running my Oculus Rift CV1. Likewise, lower resolution on the video feed meant increased visibility inside of the headset. I scanned through my Steam backlog for games I’d been avoiding and picked out Undertale, a highly personal, overtly emotional singleplayer roleplaying game that often questions the player’s sense of choice and consequence throughout.
Whereas I would have felt isolated in my own mind as I burned through the nine-hour campaign while staring at my computer screen—instead, BigScreen empowered the narrative-driven title to bloom into a collaborative experience from which I and three former strangers bonded over the course of a few memorable nights. We laughed, we cried, and yes, we all reeled over that one jump scare near the end. Whenever I got stuck, one of my guests would search up a walkthrough and dictate the page’s contents while I continued scrambling through the game.
To my surprise, each time I hosted a gaming room, it’d quickly hit capacity and then continue to retain a high visitor count. Every so often, people would join having already played the game in question, ready to hold a conversation about their own personal experiences with it. But more often than not, visitors came in to keep me company as I played simply because they didn’t feel like haphazardly scrolling through the half-finished movies and television show episodes commonly hosted in other BigScreen rooms.
Sure, donning a VR headset took me away from everything happening in my physical vicinity. That’s how VR isolates in the most literal sense.
But the intended way to enjoy any of those titles, without a VR headset strapped to my face, would have involved me slinking into the corner of my bedroom and staring at a box. No conversation, no laughter. No banter to share around. Nobody sitting on my left or right sides, lying down on their couch and watching the virtual 100-foot screen intently. Instead I’d be hunched over, quiet, listening to the fan blow on the back of my head as I stared at the very screen I’m staring at now.
At the same time, BigScreen VR allowed those simpler games to function as social catalysts, and I might not have connected so easily with others had I not made traditional gaming the focal point of my socializing efforts.
Nevertheless, when speculators associate VR with isolation, remember that ‘isolating’ technologies have existed for a very long time. Multiple forms of media that society has embraced for decades can certainly lead to isolation. Traditional, single player gaming is a potent example of isolating technology in that very sense.
But social VR apps like BigScreen do provide a clear alternative to playing video games alone. And for some, that’s the sweet spot for social connection that only VR can enable.
What are some of your favorite social VR memories? Let us know down in the comments below!
In all the time I’ve spent mucking around in Oculus Home and Rec Room—both physics-based sandbox environments that promise to let me do as I please in VR—I always felt like there was a significant time gap involved with creating anything of mechanical or creative depth. Now that Rube Goldberg machine sim Gadgeteer is available, I find myself enthralled both by its extreme simplicity and the perpetual bounty of possibilities laden within its endless supply of stackable knick-knacks and useful doodads.
Developer: Metanaut Available On: Steam, Oculus (Rift) Reviewed On: Rift Early Access Release Date: April 23rd, 2019
Note: This game is in Early Access which means the developers have deemed it incomplete and likely to see changes over time. This review is an assessment of the game only at its current Early Access state and will not receive a numerical score.
Gameplay
Gadgeteer is split between two primary modes: ‘Sandbox’ mode and ‘Puzzle’ (campaign) mode. It also comes with a short tutorial that runs you through the four tools that you’ll use to grab, clone, delete, and freeze objects with your dominant hand.
Physics are central to everything that happens in this game, which makes important the question: ‘are the physics good?’ To frame my answer to this question, after playing for 14 hours—nine of them in ‘Puzzle’ mode and five of them in ‘Sandbox’ mode—I’d like to point out that I’ve constructed an actual Rube Goldberg-style reaction machine exactly once in my life. That machine, which I designed for an 8th grade science project, consisted of a basketball, a ruler, a few dominoes, and a book. Long story short, it wasn’t all that impressive. But if I’d owned Gadgeteer at the time, I’d have felt perfectly comfortable blueprinting a much more elaborate contraption inside of the game and then proceeding to reproduce it at a perfect 1-1 scale in the real world. That is to say: yes, the physics are good. But not without a minor fault (explained in the ‘Immersion’ section below).
The ‘Sandbox’ mode is a true sandbox in every respect. As soon as you enter it, you’re granted unlimited access to all 50+ parts—an infinite treasure trove brimming with various shapes and sizes of dominos, marbles, balls, levers, hinges, and marble tracks. You also get the run of the entire multi-room apartment environment, which is normally cordoned off in the campaign mode until each room is unlocked.
If I were feeling uninspired in Sandbox mode, I could load up one of various prebuilt contraptions for reference, such as a pinball machine or a domino T-Rex. I found it nifty to dissect and play with a developer’s completed work, an exercise which gave me ideas for my own devices. That said, I can see other players spending innumerable hours coming up with increasingly complex systems—but I also found solitude in hanging out, poking the game’s physics systems, and playing my own impromptu version of Jenga with my infinite supply of dominoes.
Photo captured by Road to VR
The ‘Puzzle’ campaign mode, on the other hand, offers a set of 60 puzzles that take you from one end of the apartment to the other as you slowly power on the ‘machine’ in the center of the room. Each puzzle only grants you a limited selection of parts to play with, and you complete one by either landing a domino or rolling a marble (or marbles) into the goal chamber at the end, which fills up a green power line leading to the beginning of the next puzzle.
The mysterious machine powers up as you complete the game’s puzzles. | Photo captured by Road to VR
Beating a puzzle also rewards you with a burst of confetti and a celebratory jingle; a little dopamine release that keeps the momentum going as you progress from one scenario to the next. In the later levels, victory brings an especially welcome sense of relief after you’ve spent upwards of 30–40 minutes improvising something that feels like it could totally fall apart and fail at any time. This is to say that, in fact, the physics in Gadgeteer are not deterministic. It’s supremely satisfying to come up with an idea for a machine, iterate on it until each segment is perfect, and then watch as the chain reaction go off exactly the way you want it to. There’s always a chance that something won’t work completely right; a domino might fall in the wrong direction or a marble won’t land hard enough, making part of the challenge of building the ‘best’ machine a matter of tightening your design for the best probable outcome.
But each puzzle is, ultimately, just a very well-designed gimmick that’s intended to teach you how to manipulate a certain set of tools within Gadgeteer’s physics sandbox.
Whose apartment you’re busy making a mess of, as well as the purpose and origin of the mysterious machine in the middle of the room, are not explained in any way until the very end of the campaign. As a matter of fact, the only story in the game is during the big reveal at the end. Thinking back to how some developers like to sprinkle story throughout their worlds in clever nooks and crannies, I haphazardly triple-checked the entire apartment area for environmental story cues scattered throughout. Either I’m terribly inept at finding story bytes, or environmental storytelling simply doesn’t exist here; a missed opportunity for the time spent mulling around and trying to stick dominoes behind random household objects. If you are curious what the story is, you can find it much faster by skimming the game’s official description which talks about “the mystery behind the disappearance of a brilliant mad scientist and her daughter.”
Immersion
Image courtesy Metanaut
While storytelling can no doubt enhance immersion, the lack thereof doesn’t siphon enjoyment from the core experience of stacking blocks and building widgets in Gadgeteer. Aside from a glitch that occurs when colliders get caught on one another (which happens semi-frequently when you push things like metal marble tracks too closely together at odd angles), the physics of Gadgeteer in its early access state are almost exemplary. Though that issue would be less evident if there were a ‘snap’ function that allowed me to quickly align objects before sticking them together. Otherwise, I’m particularly impressed by how many objects I can have interacting with one another synchronously without my computer (an i7 6700K, GTX 1070, and 16GB of RAM smacked into a desktop box) showing much or any visible stress. Note that this is while playing with the game’s second highest graphical preset.
During my five hours in ‘Sandbox’ mode, I tried and mostly failed to break the physics system by throwing lots and lots of dominos at one another. I completely lost count of how many were in my virtual room at peak time, but it was certainly more than anybody in a real room would know what to do with. My framerate did end up eventually taking a hit, though that was expected. What I feel is impressive and worth pointing out, is that (while the framerate was severely dropping) the pile of virtual objects still appeared to behave and react like real objects when I pushed another domino through them to open a path.
Photo captured by Road to VR
Moving away from the physics for a moment, I’d like to compliment developer Metanaut for how polished and clean everything looks—regardless of the graphical preset, the environment is small and there are only a few different types of objects being rendered at any given time. Thus, Gadgeteer is able to make each item look like its real-world equivalent without demanding too many system resources. During my playthrough, this resulted in a much deeper experience that sold me on the machines I was building, as if they were ‘real’ contraptions that I’d put together in my own bedroom.
The soundtrack didn’t do much for me. It’s just a handful of guitar riffs that alternate based on whether you’re building a machine or whether you’re sequencing a chain reaction. I opted turned the in-game music off and played music from my own playlist (in my case, an entire Spotify playlist full of Japanese hip hop), which immediately made the experience more enjoyable.
Comfort
Image courtesy Metanaut
Unless you’re using an Oculus Rift (or Rift S, presumably), there aren’t any options to switch to something other than the ‘grab and pull’ style of artificial locomotion that Gadgeteer natively uses. For non-Oculus users, you can’t use thumbsticks for smooth or snap-turning either. Instead, you need to twist your wrist (or wrists, if two-handed turns are enabled) while you’re grabbing the world. This may bother those who play in smaller rooms and rely more on artificial locomotion to get a better angle of their workspace. It is worth noting, however, that Metanaut has recently added options to turn off the forced-on comfort blinders and the one-handed snap-turns that both made locomotion feel downright choppy when Gadgeteer first launched in early access.
It’s also worth noting that Gadgeteer will never present you with an urgent need to move from place to place. Most of the time, you’ll use artificial locomotion to center yourself in your play area so you can naturally walk and peer around your contraption while you work. Because I could just grab the world to move my position however I wanted, I never found myself craning my head too hard or making myself uncomfortable. I did, at certain points, find myself subconsciously sitting or kneeling down to tweak a machine section to perfection. At that point, the locomotion system had become so second nature to me that I didn’t realize I’d spun the world around and brought everything down to eye level until I consciously made a note of it.
Conclusion
In its early access state, Gadgeteer is both a fantastic Rube Goldberg-style reaction machine builder and, at its most gripping moments, a true example of VR Presence—where the act of building and testing a machine becomes so engaging that you forget you’re playing with code instead of physical toy dominos. The collider occlusion bug within the physics system should still be addressed, and continued improvements toward the locomotion system would be nice. But, content-wise, Gadgeteer is already a complete package out of the box. At $15, I consider it a steal.
Note: This game is in Early Access which means the developers have deemed it incomplete and likely to see changes over time. This review is an assessment of the game only at its current Early Access state and will not receive a numerical score.
Fugl is a sandbox game where you create the story, playing as a shape-shifting bird. Read our full-review to find out what we thought.
Imagine dipping into an alternate world to find that everything is made of voxels and that you no longer have hands. Playing Fuglin VR (currently exclusive to the Oculus Home store on PC) is a bit like that. It only takes about five minutes inside of Fugl’s world for dissociation to kick in and for the resulting wanderlust to peel you from reality. And on that note, “wanderlust” is certainly the word that I’d use to describe it.
The entire premise here is that you pilot a shapeshifting bird through infinitely generated rolling terrain. But instead of playing with the environment, you really only get to zoom through it in an entirely hands-off sort of way. All while you unlock different bird forms that resemble the other animals you find wandering aimlessly about the wilderness. That may all sound rather droll at face value, but I personally loved the modesty of it all and I could see myself returning to Fugl for unguided meditation and mindfulness practice.
When you enter the main menu, you can pick from a list of metamorphs you’ve unlocked and 10 different themed environments to explore, and then all you need to do is hit the Start button and off you go. Everything after that is up to you, and you can spend as much or as little time in any one environment as you please.
This is where I want to say that Fugl reminds me of Nature Treks VR in more than a few ways, including layout of course, but also in atmosphere. From the moment I embarked on my flight, ambient noises from other birds and animals echoed out across the crags and canyons as the musical score began to swell. In its best moments, everything hit my lizard brain just right and I felt like Fugl’s composition of sensory elements ascended its overall homogeneity in a way that was difficult to forget or escape.
I now want to address the mixture of circumstances that end up making Fugl “work” as well as it does for mindful relaxation in VR. Fugl wasn’t originally a VR game and it’s not even really a “game” at all. It was never designed with VR interactions in mind, nor was it retrofitted to compensate for the existence of actual hands in a VR environment. It is quite literally as if the developer dropped the original game into VorpX with custom controller bindings for the Oculus Touch controllers. And while that may sound like a complete insult, it isn’t.
Fugl runs at your own pace and there are no consequences for, say, missing a lunge and crashing your bird into the side of a tree. You can fly indefinitely as the planetscape populates in front of you, and you will always find new nooks and crannies to dive into. Furthermore, you might choose to chase down, meet, and unlock each of the several animal species. But that’s certainly a personal goal rather than a conventional one. There’s no formal reward for doing anything in Fugl other than achieving intrinsic satisfaction from experiencing new details.
And Fugl works because everything you’ll ever do inside of it is no more complicated in practice than what you could achieve with a NES controller. While I’d argue that the controls aren’t necessarily intuitive and do require some practice to get the hang of — resulting in many cases where I’d divebomb and crash where I meant to lunge — again, Fugl imposes no consequences for crashing or losing momentum.
Final Say:Worth Seeing
Fugl in VR is a shameless port of its original flat release in 2017. It never goes further than being a random terrain generator with tight flying controls and some voxelized animal skins to view and unlock. However, that’s precisely why it works. It seeks, singularly, to fulfill the role of a living piece of artwork. If you load up Fugl and simply begin flying in one direction without expectations, you’re more likely to let your mind off the hook so that it can soak up the available bounty of atmospheric, abstract beauty. Simple and carefree, Fugl clicks when you’re soaring high above the valleys below and the only words your brain can drum up (at all) are “Well, this is nice.”
Fugl is available in VR on the Oculus Home PC platform for Rift at $14.99. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Firewall Zero Hour continues to provide the most engaging competitive first-person shooting experience on PSVR thus far, offering a wide variety of tactical loadout options and a sense of progression that almost decidedly lifts its replayability factor far above many of its counterpart PCVR shooters.
On the other hand, assuming you’re a new player, it can be daunting to navigate the customization menus. That’s why we’ve gone through the liberty of scraping the aforementioned menus for the complete list of weapons and equipment you may currently choose from while building your loadouts, organized in alphabetical order:
Primaries
Assault Rifles
G6-Commando
Long-range assault rifle (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 30
H5 Hornet
All-purpose medium range assault rifle (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 50
JA-300
Integrally suppressed assault rifle (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 42
Kruger
Medium-range assault rifle (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 7
Reg K8
Long-range assault rifle (single-shot)
Unlocks at Level 35
Taylor X-75
Medium-range assault rifle (3-round burst)
Unlocked by default
Taylor X-75 CQB
Medium-range assault rifle (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 7
Volkov HZ
Medium-range assault rifle (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 15
Shotguns
EHG
Short-range shotgun (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 40
Richardson 640
Short-range shotgun (pump-action)
Unlocked by default
SOS
Short-barreled shotgun (pump-action)
Unlocks at Level 20
Toro
Short-range shotgun (semi-auto)
Unlocks at Level 9
SMGs
HZU
Short-range SMG (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 25
Manta Ray
Short-range SMG (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 45
Spitfire
Short-range pistol with a conversion kit (burst fire)
Unlocks at Level 15
Stalker
Short-range SMG (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 11
Stinger
Medium-range compact submachine gun (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 20
XM-R 90
Short-range SMG (full-auto)
Unlocks at Level 30
ZS
Short-range SMG (full-auto)
Unlocked by default
Secondaries
DH 44
Short-range sidearm (semi-auto)
Unlocks at Level 30
Pulse
Short-range sidearm (semi-auto)
Unlocks at Level 18
Revive Pistol
Revives downed teammates from a safe distance by firing a health syringe.
Unlocks at Level 26
Thunder
Short-range sidearm (semi-auto)
Unlocks at Level 50
TNK
Short-range sidearm (semi-auto)
Unlocked by default
Grenades & Equipment
Lethal
C4 Charge
Powerful explosive charge that can be placed on most surfaces and detonated remotely.
Unlocks at Level 32
Frag
Explodes after a short timer expires.
Unlocked by default
Impact
Explodes on impact with any surface.
Unlocks at Level 23
Proximity Mine
Armed mine that detonates when an enemy is within its proximity.
Unlocks at Level 16
Sticky
Sticks to any surface and explodes after a short timer expires.
Unlocks at Level 12
Tactical
Ammo Bag
Portable ammunition supply cache. Can be dropped on any ground surface during combat.
Unlocks at Level 29
Door Blocker
Barricade system can be deployed on doors to prevent hostile entry.
Unlocks at Level 42
Flash
Emits blinding light and deafening blast that disorients enemies.
Unlocked by default
Noisemaker
Simulates the sound of gunfire and is used for distraction and as a decoy.
Unlocks at Level 14
Signal Modifier
Intercepts and modifies wifi signals. Allows attackers to hack laptop at increased speed. Allows defenders to block laptop hacks.
Unlocks at Level 21
Smoke
Emits thick cloud of phosphorous that obscures and obstructs visibility.
Unlocks at Level 8
You can learn more about how to play Firewall Zero Hour with our list of top 7 tips for starters. Meanwhile, you can read our reviewof the game if you’re still deciding whether to purchase a copy and catch up on details regarding the massive upcoming Nightfall expansion, Op Pass, and overhaul.
More information about Firewall Zero Hour can be found on the official PlayStation Store page.
Vive Studios has released its ‘feature-length’ immersive film titled 7 Miracles. On the surface, the immersive film is a reenactment of the Gospel of John in the Bible that specifically centers around the seven miracles of Jesus Christ. Under the surface, however, it uses advanced filmmaking techniques such as photogrammetry and volumetric video capture to achieve 8K imagery.
Directed by Rodrigo Cerqueira and Marco Spagnoli, 7 Miracles was shot across Matera and Rome, both classic locales for returning viewers of The Passion of the Christ and Ben Hur. According to the official blog post, “The seven-part episodic feature runs over 70 minutes, making it the first feature-length cinematic experience from Vive Studios,” and one of the longest immersive films we’ve ever seen.
7 Miracles is also notable for winning the ‘Spirit of Raindance: VR Film of The Festival’ award at Raindance Film Festival 2018, as stated by Vive Studios in their blog post at that time.
While the award-winning biblical reenactment is predominantly meant for consumption via Viveport, where it is sold at $20 as a complete PCVR experience, Android owners can also join in on the gospel for $10 via the Google Play store.
In the future, Vive Studios hopes to bring 7 Miracles to additional platforms such as iOS and the Vive Wave. The studio also promises to introduce post-release content over time, citing ‘new 3D room-scale scenes’ for release with upcoming updates to Viveport users.
Currently, 7 Miracles is only available in English. You can find more information about the immersive experience at its official website.
With increasing demand among employers for employees with great interpersonal communication skills, VR training company Talespin is bringing ‘virtual human’ training scenarios to its platform.
‘Soft skills’—those that allow you to guide tense interactions with empathy and strong communication—are critical to the success of employees worldwide. LinkedIn reported in its 2018 Workspace Learning Report that there’s a great demand for ‘soft skills’ in talent developers, executives, and people managers. However, non-interactive forms of media don’t convey these skills effectively, and not every business has time (or budget) for its employees to reenact the often volatile scenarios which put them to the test. Talespin is building virtual human technology—AI-driven characters designed to look and act like humans—into its platform for scenario-based interpersonal communication training.
Talespin’s training platform places the user directly into a scenario guided by what the company claims is a realistic simulation of a person-to-person discussion. Each scenario is designed to be as lifelike as possible, harnessing the power of branching narrative, speech recognition and natural language processing to simulate a VR experience that can train the user on an experiential level. The idea is to present users with the messy, human side of difficult interactions in a way that will stick in their ‘emotional muscle memory’ long after they’ve exited the training simulation.
Image courtesy Talespin
Imagine that, instead of watching a training video for how to direct interactions with customers, clients, and other employees, you get to dive into a fully realized simulation of the exact interaction you’re meant to have. Inside of the simulation, Talespin says, you can develop an immediate understanding of your impact on the person in front of you (from any number of possible conversational paths), but also how you yourself might act in each turn of the conversation.
Talespin hopes its virtual human tech will afford you a chance to not only flatten out the kinks in your own communication, but to understand the essential elements of a specific interpersonal scenario and develop the skills necessary to handle it. The hope is that these skills can be honed virtually before they are tested in the workplace.
The example provided by Talespin during its initial demo was a ‘virtual human’ named Barry, who the user (playing the role of a People Operations Manager) was expected to terminate. Talespin found that termination is one of the most universally difficult workplace conversations, so it made sense to start from there.
“When a user interacts with Barry in the simulation, they navigate hundreds of possible conversation paths to effectively (or ineffectively) terminate Barry, face common wrongful termination pitfalls, and experience Barry’s realistic speech, body language, and human-like mannerisms,” Talespin said on its official blog.
Image courtesy Talespin
Listed on the Virtual Human page of Talespin’s website are a handful of potential use cases for ‘virtual human technology’, including but not limited to:
Interviews
Unconscious Bias Training
Sensitivity Training
De-escalation Training
Business Negotiations
Technical Support
General Customer Service
Public Speaking
Facilitating Group Discussions
etc.
The technology is built for scalability, the company says, to match each client’s needs. In addition to Barry, other initial ‘demo’ scenarios that Talespin has created include cold sales calls, employee performance reviews, and similarly emotional workplace conversations that would demand de-escalation.
