TPCAST, the company known for creating a wireless adapter for HTC Vive, announced that they’ll be delivering a device that supports the Oculus Rift by the end of the year.
Update (10/19/17): TPCast has provided further clarification that their wireless solution for Rift is a separate unit from those Vive-only units sold in China and Europe.
If you own a PC VR headset (aka ‘tethered’), you’ve probably already mastered the strange dance you have to do to untangle the cable during room-scale gameplay. The cable, housing within it an HDMI and data/power-transmitting USB cord, is probably one of the greatest limiting factors to making the room-scale experience truly immersive.
image courtesy TPCAST
TPCast maintains their solution can transmit up 5 meters away at 2k (2160×1200) with a latency of less than 2ms. Battery power, provided by an external powerbank, is said to last up to 5 hours.
This is accomplished via a head-mounted transmitter that draws current from a 20,000mAh power bank. The signal is transmitted through both a dedicated WiFi router for data and a special receiver attached to your PC for video.
The company first launched its Vive-only transmitter in China six months ago and has been filling orders until it went out of stock just recently. While pre-orders for the transmitter aren’t available in the US anymore (Microsoft’s pre-order page has since disappeared), the European market is expecting pre-order delivery later this week from its various distributors.
TPCast maintains their “Wireless Adapter for Oculus Rift” is slated to arrive “by the end of Q4 2017.” It’s unclear in what capacity Rift support will arrive, whether it be in a dedicated Rift-specific unit, or a unit that supports both Rift and Vive. We’ve reached out to TPCast for comment, and will be updating soon.
“TPCAST is committed to support the Oculus Rift HMD with our unique wireless technology solutions, and provide VR users a high-quality, immersive VR encounter,” stated Michael Liu, TPCAST CEO. “With the TPCAST wireless adapter, we will be changing the VR usage and experience by providing the complete freedom of movement with no cables.”
Microsoft’s Windows 10 ‘Fall Creators Update’ is available for download today, making the operating system compatible with its line of Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets, which coincidentally are arriving on doorsteps and store shelves starting today too.
Windows 10 Fall Creators Update was first announced at the Microsoft Build dev conference back in May, and promised to bring with it some incremental updates alongside one of the most important of all: support for its line of Windows VR headsets. You can wait for the timed rollout, which is said to come to all compatible PCs over the next few weeks, or skip the line entirely and download the update today.
Setting them apart from other PC VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, Windows VR headsets (confusingly named “Mixed Reality”) include inside-out tracking thanks to the on-board vision processing sensors, meaning there’s no need for external sensors or base stations—a truly ‘plug and play’ experience. As a product of the same reference design, the headsets pack identical specs, although the build quality and design aesthetic seem to differ along price lines.
Windows VR Headsets: Basic Specs
Dual displays at 1440 x 1440 per eye
2.89” diagonal display size (x2)
Front hinged display
105 degrees horizontal field of view
Display refresh rate up to 90Hz (native)
Built-in audio out and microphone support through 3.5mm jack
Single cable with HDMI 2.0 (display) and USB 3.0 (data) for connectivity
Inside-out tracking
4.00m cable
Headsets from Acer, Dell, HP, and Lenovo are available both online and in select stores starting today.
Acer Windows Mixed Reality Headset
Image courtesy Acer
At the lowest price tier for $400 (with controllers) is Acer’s retro-styled headset. Like all headsets in Microsoft’s lineup, it features a halo-style head strap and a flip-up design, although it uses less expensive materials in its construction, making it seem a little more plasticy than the others while offering the same basic functionality.
Dell Visor
Image courtesy Dell
Smooth and futuristic, Dell’s Visor falls in line with some premium styling that will set you back $450 (with controllers). A rubberized texture gives the headset good grip without collecting finger prints, and was supposedly weighted in strategic spots to be more comfortable for longer play sessions.
HP’s headset is more business than play in styling, with its facial interface featuring cutouts for eye glasses to go along with its sober grey scale tones. HP matches Dell in pricing at $450 (with controllers)
Lenovo Explorer
Image courtesy Lenovo
Another headset that looks like it means business is the Lenovo Explorer. With styling that looks at home with Lenovo’s line of ThinkPads, the headset sits at the lowest price tier of $400, of course offering all the same functionality.
Samsung HMD Odyssey
Samsung’s sleek Odyssey headset may be slated for a November 6th launch in the US (now available for pre-order), but it sets itself a part from the others with a higher comparative resolution with its 2880 x 1600 OLED, pushing a 90Hz refresh and up to 110 degree field of view. Integrated audio and integrated dual mic array clearly put this ahead of its cousins, but it also comes at the price tag of $500 (with motion controllers), $100 more than the Oculus Rift.
Image courtesy Microsoft
The headsets are being sold in a bundle including two wireless controllers that utilize the headsets’ room-tracking tech. Ergonomically, the controllers aren’t that great when compared to Oculus Touch, although they seem to provide positional tracking that is clearly above that of PSVR’s Move controllers. Check out our hands-on here.
If you’re worried about whether your computer can handle the headsets or not, Microsoft recently published a minimum spec list that says the only thing you need is a desktop or laptop with a fairly recent i5 processor and a GPU with integrated Intel HD Graphics 620 or greater DX12 capable integrated graphics card. You’ll also need a minimum of 8GB of RAM, a single HDMI 1.4 or DisplayPort 1.2, and a single USB 3.0 Type-A or Type-C port to get you started in the world of VR.
Granted, a PC reflecting Oculus or Vive’s recommended specs will get you into more graphically intensive applications like games on Steam, although you won’t be able to play Steam games just yet. Developers already have a preview version of Windows Mixed Reality SteamVR support, but consumers will gain access sometime before the end of the year.
We’re putting out our deep dive hands-on with the hardware later today, so check back for the most comprehensive breakdown you’ll likely find on the subject.
It’s been a whole year since the PlayStation VR launched, and Sony is nearly doubling down on its extensive catalog of games with +60 more titles confirmed to come to PSVR between now and early 2018.
While the platform already claims to host over 100 games, PSN will be seeing 69 more titles in the next few months, including highlights such as Moss,Obduction, Doom VFR, Golem, Skyrim VR, The Inpatient, and The Solus Project.
At the time of this writing, this is the full list of games coming to PSVR up until early 2018:
Coming to PSVR in 2017
Bravo Team
DragonBlast VR
Radial-G: Racing Revolved
Doom VFR
Dream Angling
RadianVR
Gran Turismo Sport
Drunkn Bar Fight
Rec Room
Megaton Rainfall
DWVR
Run Dorothy Run
Moss
End Space
Sculptrvr
No Heroes Allowed!
Everest VR
Serious Soccer
Obduction
Fishing Master
Shooty Fruitie
Pixeljunk VR: Dead Hungry
Flatline: Experience the Other Side
Snow Fortress
Stifled
Ghosts in the Toybox
Stardrone VR
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR
Hex Tunnel
Super Amazeballs
The Inpatient
Honor & Duty
Survios
Anamorphine
Hopalong: The Badlands
The Rabbit Hole
Ark Park
Justice League VR
The Solus Project
Brain Voyagers
Light Tracer
Virtual Engagement Confronting Fears
Chernobyl
Monster of the Deep: Final Fantasy XV
VirtuGO
CoolpaintVR
Nothin’ But Net
VR Apocalypse
CubeWorks
Prana
Discovery
Quar Infernal Machines
Coming to PSVR in 2018
Golem
Blasters of the Universe
Dungeon Chess
The American Dream
Chainman
End of the Beginning
Torn
Cold Iron
Knockout League
Xing: The Land Beyond
Dead Secret
Penn & Teller VR: Frankly Unfair, Unkind, Unnecessary and Underhanded (including Desert Bus)
Windlands (2016), the high-flying exploration game from Psytec Games, is getting a sequel next year that’s looking to alter its predecessor’s formula with the addition of co-op adventuring as well as combat. We got a hands-on with the newly revealed game at this year’s Oculus Connect, which puts a bow and arrow in your hands on top of your trusty grappling hooks.
There are a few elements new to the series, the first of which reveals itself almost immediately as I start the demo: enemies. Riding on a speeding land-boat traveling at high speed through a dusty desert, a giant sandworm appears out of nowhere, looming over my live companion and me. I’m told I have to shoot the beast with my bow, and although I’m not certain why, we both comply, conjuring it up with the Touch’s grip button and firing a hail of arrows at the sandworm until he disappears into the sandy desert below.
It’s all very cinematic, if not a little telling about the journey to come. Gone are the zen-like, pressure-free heights requiring quiet tenacity to surmount, which are now replaced with level bosses and the active chatter of real-world companions by your side.
Satisfied with our performance, a bearded NPC named Tohir beckons us to move forward through the level set before us, a tree-filled canyon that functions as a straight obstacle course clearly built for our grappling hooks to take hold. Studio co-founder Jon Hibbins raced ahead of me, chatting along the way about the game’s art style and some of the new additions to the series’ second game.
Passing by Tohir again, I remarked that the art style looked awfully familiar. To my surprise, Hibbins told me Psytec had hired one of my favorite developers from the early days of VR, Nick Pittom (aka “Red of Paw”), an indie dev known for lovingly recreating several scenes in VR from various Studio Ghibli films such as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Toroto and Howl’s Moving Castle.
Predictably, the locomotion system functions nearly the same as Windlands, providing you with green trees for hook-holds and incremental save points that you can pass through along the way. Full of myself and overconfident of my own swinging abilities, I fell a few times, reappearing back at these save points on my forward journey through the level.
At the end of the tree-filled canyon, Hibbins and I faced off with the level boss, a strange legged robot with a number of shields on its legs. Finally using my bow to good effect, Hibbins and I took turns firing on the robot, trying to break the shields. Success was quick, and out of the strange enemy came a recognizable glowing golden prism. Demo over.
From what little I’ve experienced of Windlands 2, the game feels pretty different in scope from the first. Although the quiet vertical parkour puzzles seem to be gone with the second game in the series, the game is still in development, so there’s no telling if the lofty heights will return or if the game will be more linear like we saw in the demo. Either way, the added benefit of being able to explore the world with a friend and have that shared experience adds something I only wish were a part of the first game.
Windlands 2 is coming to Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Playstation VR sometime in 2018.
Apple CEO Tim Cook thinks augmented reality is going to be something big, a fairly simple claim to make thanks to the company’s recent inclusion of its AR tech into every Apple device capable of updating to iOS 11. But when we talk about AR, the natural terminus isn’t the smartphone’s screen, but rather a perfectly immersive pair of AR glasses that have yet to come. Speaking to The Independent, Cook says the technology to create an AR headset in a “quality way” just isn’t possible yet, but when it is, Apple will be the best.
“The products themselves have to have a lot of processing power, and a fair amount of different sensor technology in order to do this locational stuff,” Cook tells The Independent. “So having it on iPhone changes the game for developers, because instantly they had hundreds of millions of potential customers. If it were on a different device then you would never have a commercial opportunity, and without the commercial opportunity you’d never have 15 million people that say, ‘I want to design my passion with AR’.”
image courtesy Apple
As a ready-made launchpad for AR interactions with a built-in audience, the iPhone and iPad are great, but what about AR headsets? Cook is doubtful in the short-term, saying the technology itself “doesn’t exist to do that in a quality way.”
Despite some telling patents made by the company, Cook says consumers shouldn’t really expect an Apple AR headset in the short-term in spite of the growing number of AR headsets already coming to market.
“The display technology required, as well as putting enough stuff around your face – there’s huge challenges with that. The field of view, the quality of the display itself, it’s not there yet,” he says. “We don’t give a rat’s about being first, we want to be the best, and give people a great experience. But now anything you would see on the market any time soon would not be something any of us would be satisfied with. Nor do I think the vast majority of people would be satisfied.”
“Most technology challenges can be solved, but it’s a matter of how long,” he says.
Red Matter is an upcoming story-driven VR adventure puzzle game, first revealed at Oculus Connect, that puts you in a retro-futurist world that borrows elements from the Cold War-era and teases them out to an interesting logical conclusion.
Created by Madrid-based studio Vertical Robot,Red Matter places you in the role of an astronaut from the Atlantic Union who’s tasked with investigating one of a Volgravian top secret research project located on a distant planet.
Starting out the demo in an a rocky clearing, I find what appears to be a Volgravian sign bearing some faux-Slavic language using the Cyrillic script. With a data tool in my left hand and a gripper claw in the right, I point to the sign to activate the data tool’s translator function, revealing that a research facility is just up ahead.
image courtesy Vertical Robot
The low-gravity environment of the planet means that instead of bounding your way around by foot, it’s more efficient to use your boosters to get from place to place. In real-world terms, this functions as an on-rails teleport; you pick your landing point and are transported there in a lofty arc at a variable speed controlled by the player. The default speed is nice and slow with no abrupt changes in acceleration, although you can speed up the boost from place to place to make it a quicker experience.
Moving towards a brutalist-style concrete building featuring a giant Soviet-style red star above its sign, I point my translator tool again at the illegible Volgravian script sitting below it. Yup. That’s the place I need to get into.
Pushing a button with my claw, the door retracts, revealing an industrial facility of some sort. The research subject is still unclear as I make my way further, replacing some fuses to another door that I scrounge from nearby panels. The door is heavy, and moves satisfyingly slow, giving it a weighty feel.
image courtesy Vertical Robot
With one door puzzle down, I enter a small round room with a strange device in the middle. On the wall is a diagram with written instructions on how to operate it. Reading carefully, I pop open the device to reveal a strange two-handed crank that rotates the interior shell of the room to face an unseen metal blast door, that upon opening leads to an employee area.
I head into the employee area leading to several engineering departments. A schedule on the wall tells me which sector I need (of course with all the Soviet iconography of gold-trimmed red stars), as I’m told by my commander I need to find a specific secure room with who knows what in it.
image courtesy Vertical Robot
Rustling through the employee lockers, I find a keycard. Instead of putting the card into my inventory, I was told I could scan it with my translator tool and record the data so I could then spit it back out later so I could leave the physical card behind. Traveling to the door and opening it up with my copied keycard data, I find a cell-sized room with a single lever covered with a few strange plants. Touching the alien flowers turns them an iridescent color – a sign that something even more strange was next if I pulled that lever.
I knew I had to, so I pulled the lever, and that’s when a strange substance leaked out of the panel, slowly spreading out over my whole field of view to obscure the world around me. Fade to back, demo over.
Design Director Tatiana Delgado calls the game’s Volgravian setting a “cross between the encroaching surveillance of George Orwell’s dystopian societies and Kafka’s absurd bureaucracy.” Delgado told me that while it’s still in development, that Red Matter is aiming for a 2.5-3 hour gameplay length, but it was too early to talk about launch dates at this time. The game is currently being advertised as an Oculus-only experience.
The new Oculus Go standalone headset was revealed yesterday at Oculus Connect, the company’s annual developer conference. According to Oculus CTO and legendary programmer John Carmack, developers could have their hands on the $200 standalone mobile headset as soon as next month. As an added piece of the puzzle, developers can also request Oculus Go dev kits via the company’s dev portal starting today.
In Carmack’s famous stream-of-thought keynote speech today, where he touches on almost anything on his mind when it comes to the future of Oculus, he revealed that devs should expect to get their hands on Go starting next month. Since Go wasn’t present at Oculus Connect, it lends credence to the idea that he means Go developer kits, and not Oculus Go demos as such.
Image courtesy Oculus
Using it as a dedicated media device for the past few months, Carmack says he’s been using the headset to watch Netflix in short intervals, watching 15 minutes of a show at a time and returning back to work. Although the friction of entering VR is much lower when it comes to a dedicated standalone like Oculus Go, he says developers shouldn’t make Go-specific applications, instead targeting both platforms as one in the same.
Image courtesy Oculus
Both Go and Gear VR feature a single 3DOF controller and will share the same mobile software, says Carmack, although the $200 price-point makes the dedicated standalone headset more ‘giftable’ than a Gear VR of Oculus Rift.
Oculus maintains Go is headed to consumers in “early 2018.”
Ubisoft today announced that Space Junkies, the multiplayer arcade VR shooter, is going into closed beta in early 2018. We got a chance to go hands-on with a more developed prototype of the game at this year’s Oculus Connect, and while many of the basics haven’t changed much from our time with it at E3, it’s certainly shaping up to be a fuller experience with more crazy guns and at least 4 giant arena-sized maps for the closed beta.
In a 2v2 team deathmatch, I got a chance to see what a real battle feels like in Space Junkies, asthe last time we played it was in a more demure setting with only the developers to shoot down. True to its main selling point, the match was fast-paced and featured a mad grab for the most powerful guns which float in predetermined spots in the zero-G map.
image courtesy Ubisoft
I also got a chance to play a free-for-all deathmatch, which took place in the same sprawling, meteor-encrusted mining facility as the earlier prototype, but according to Ubisoft, the map had been expanded further to give the players more hiding spots and cover from incoming fire.
Guns are greatly varied, some of them requiring two hands to pump or fire. You start out with a whimpy pistol on your hip, but you can wait for the random gun generator to give you something better before you spawn on the map. Guns like rocket launchers, OP lasers, and Gatling guns predictably take a long time to reload and charge up, but pretty much do major damage.
image courtesy Ubisoft
There’s also a light sword and shield that you can carry, but unlike the earlier version of the game, the sword was no longer able to deflect gun blasts. I would have loved to have played a swords-only match to see just how reliable the weapon is when faced with another sword-wielding player, but alas, I’ll have to wait until the closed beta takes effect in a few months to see if anyone will agree to a momentary cease fire.
Despite being on the same horizontal plane as the rest of the combatants, having the full 3 dimensions at your disposal creates an interesting dynamic, as you can never tell where the shots will come from next. As long as you’re not boosting around and going normal speed, you’ll be undetectable to the opposite team, meaning combat may evolve into a less intense hide-and-seek match of popping out behind cover and quickly retreating to safety instead of going to the center with guns a’blazing.
You can register for the closed beta here. Ubisoft says they’re aiming for a spring 2018 release on Oculus Rift+Touch, HTC Vive, and Windows VR headsets.
Ready at Dawn’s single player sci-fi adventure LoneEcho (2017) already has its multiplayer mode, the much beloved sports game Echo Arena, but the studio says it’s bringing out a new first-person shooter multiplayer mode called Echo Combat, and also an expansion to the Lone Echo game.
Announced today on stage at Oculus Connect 4, the company’s annual developer conference, Echo Combat was quickly teased in a video.
The details are still thin on the ground, but Ready at Dawn says Echo Combat is (predictably) using the same zero-G locomotion method, and is said to arrive in 2018. It’s unsure if it will be a free expansion to all users like Echo Arena was for a limited time.
Oculus further said there will also be an expansion headed to Lone Echo that reopens the world of Captain Olivia and her best robot buddy Jack (aka ‘you’) in their mission through zero-G.
The game’s high-flying locomotion method is famously comfortable, allowing for fast-paced action without the problems of feeling artificial motion-induced nausea.
Oculus says more news is yet to come during the conference, so check back for more soon.
This story is breaking. We’ll be filling in the gaps as info comes in.
Oculus Home is getting a full overhaul in the new Rift Core 2.0 update coming this December, which promises to add a level of user customization that will let you create a unique, persistent space that you can invite friends to.
Since the beta version of Home was unveiled alongside the consumer Oculus Rift, the space has been a static launchpad for games and experiences. Now the company says it’s “leveling” the current version of Home to make way for a new customizable Home that promises to reflect your own personality and sense of style. The new Home space includes toys, furniture, artwork, and a place to put your achievements on display.
Home is also being changed into a social area that remains persistent, meaning you can share your space with a friend and visit their own. The company says they’ll be opening “new possibilities for community and co-presence, letting you hang out, play, and explore with others.”
The beta for Rift Core 2.0 update will come free to users in December.
