Author: Scott Hayden

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Apple iOS 11 Rolls Out Today, Augmented Reality Apps Now Showing Up on App Store

Apple is rolling out iOS 11 today, its mobile operating system that’s compatible with “hundreds of millions of devices” including iPhones going back to the iPhone 5s, and a variety of recent iPads. If your device is able to update (check here), that means you may be getting a number of features like an optimized App Store and a sleeker user interface, but it also means you can start to delve into the world of augmented reality too.

While there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to find apps that have updated to include ARKit support, we rounded up a few that you can download today, and a few more that are sure to drop in the coming weeks.

Downloadable Today

Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade

When a young Imperial Knight sees their noble house destroyed by the twisted forces of Chaos, they join forces with the Dark Angels Space Marines chapter as a Freeblade. Experience an epic story in over 170 single player missions as you command your Freeblade on a journey of honour, redemption and vengeance. Test your skills and patrol the world of Tarnis to slay endless invaders.

Witness your Knight in the REAL WORLD with this new augmented reality photo mode for ARKit compatible devices!

Download here

CARROT Weather

CARROT Weather is a crazy-powerful weather app that delivers hilariously twisted forecasts.

Use AR mode to ‘CARROT’ into your world. Just don’t poke her ocular sensor.

Download here

One Drop Diabetes Management

Sync health data from thousands of apps via Health app, including: Dexcom, One Touch, Accu-Chek, Agamatrix, iHealth, Dario, Garmin, Fitbit, Nike+, UP by Jawbone, Misfit, Pebble, Human, Strava, My Fitness Pal, Lose it!, Lark, Weight Watchers, Withings. Also includes scheduled medicine reminders and glucose pump data.

Visualize your Daily Moments and Glucose in Range graphs in AR. To check it out: tap on your stats, then tap on the cube icon in the upper right.

Download here

Complete Anatomy 2018 +Courses (iPad only)

Transform your anatomical learning with Complete Anatomy. Explore the most detailed 3D anatomy model ever created, with incredible levels of anatomical accuracy and high fidelity textures. Discover a rich Library of reference content created by subject matter experts. Share your work and collaborate with your classmates and teachers.

Bring the full 3D anatomical model into the real world through augmented reality. Tap the AR Mode button to open the camera, select a flat surface to place the model, and view it from any side and any angle. Your anatomy atlas has never been this real. (Available for iPad Pro users on iOS 11 only)

Download here

Upcoming Apps

The Machines

Coming from Directive Games, The Machines was demoed on-stage at the iPhone X unveiling. The competitive multiplayer RTS lets you duke it out with your friends in the same room in augmented reality. Using two Apple iPhone 8s, the developers played a quick match to show off the little tabletop game.

Sky Guide 

The AR update to Sky Guide, also teased during the iPhone X event, will allow you to overlay constellations on top of the sky, apparently whether its day or night, so you can finally learn something beyond the Little Dipper and Orion’s Belt.

MLB.com At Bat

image courtesy Apple

Also shown at the iPhone X event last week was a new AR mode for MLB.com At Bat, which overlays player data on top of real-time games.

IKEA Place

IKEA Place is said to give you a catalog of 2,000 AR items, including all of the company’s sofas, armchairs, footstools, coffee tables and cabinets.

LEGO

image courtesy TIME

Although not specified yet, LEGO is also working with ARKit to produce an AR-capable version of its software.

We’ll have our eye on more apps to come, but remember, while the greater iOS 11 ecosystem has access to AR today, some of the larger unreleased apps might come in sync with the iPhone 8 launch later this week, and then later in November for the iPhone X.

The post Apple iOS 11 Rolls Out Today, Augmented Reality Apps Now Showing Up on App Store appeared first on Road to VR.

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Crytek Adds HTC Vive & Oculus Touch Support to ‘Robinson: The Journey’

Originally launched in November last year as a PSVR exclusive, Crytek’s Robinson: The Journey (2016) made its way early this year to Oculus Rift via Oculus Home and also eventually Steam too. Critically missing however was official support for HTC Vive and any support for motion controllers.

Now, Crytek has finally launched an update on Steam which includes official support for HTC Vive, and full support for both Vive and Oculus Touch motion controllers. Oculus Home will also see an update including Touch support today.

Like Crytek’s The Climb (2016), Robinson was initially built for gamepad-only input. Although Crytek eventually made a major update to The Climb which brought Touch support to the game, Robinson has sat on both Steam and the Oculus Store this part year with only gamepad support to its name.

A few months after launch of both titles however, Crytek unexpectedly shuttered all of their branches outside their Frankfurt and Kiev studios, which could point to why the company has been so sparse with critical updates to their VR games.

Following a young boy names Robinson and his chipper AI pal HIGS who’ve crash landed on a planet inhabited by dinosaurs, Robinson was initially lauded for its patently lush visuals and life-like dinos. Still priced at its original launch price tag of $40, the game currently holds a ‘Mixed’ rating on Steam, and a [3.5/5] star rating on Oculus Home.

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China’s Largest Messaging App ‘WeChat’ is Creating its Own AR Platform

WeChat, known in China as the app that offers everything from messaging to a ubiquitous payment service, is getting its own augmented reality framework; at over 963 million active users, the popular Chinese app could put AR in the hands (and minds) in more than just the mobile tech savvy.

Tech in Asia recently caught wind of WeChat parent company Tencent’s plans to bring AR to the app’s gargantuan feature list, which includes payments, entertainment, shopping, and transportation. In some Chinese cities, it even has a ‘City Service’ that even lets you book doctors appointments, pay electricity bills and traffic fines.

Called QAR, WeChat’s AR framework is touted to be an open platform for third-party developers looking to get in on the coming tide of AR apps.

And why does China need another AR app marketplace when both Apple and Google have their own in the works, thanks to Apple ARKit and Google ARCore? Well, China’s government regularly blocks popular Western apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the entire Google Play Store, and also levies heavy restrictions on Apple’s App Store, so it’s not a surprise the largest ‘everything app’ is looking to capture the coming AR app boom.

More importantly, Tencent has been building out its own digital marketplace for some time now. Back in April, the company teased a sort of in-app app store (via China Channel), populated with something called “WeChat Mini Programs,” or light apps built on top of WeChat that are both quick to download and integrate into the WeChat payment ecosystem. These Mini Programs would also include AR, and considering Tencent is the largest gaming company in the world, it means the app wields considerable influence in China.

According to Tech in Asia, WeChat’s AI team is also building its own 3D rendering engine and their own simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology to boot. A few tech demos captured with a screen recording app show the possibilities of the platform’s casual, smartphone-based AR.

While there’s no release date in sight, you can bet when WeChat finally launches its AR framework, it’ll command more than a few curious glances from the West hoping to understand how China’s ‘everything app’ fares.

The post China’s Largest Messaging App ‘WeChat’ is Creating its Own AR Platform appeared first on Road to VR.

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Sci-fi Survival-Adventure ‘The Solus Project’ Launches Today on PSVR

The Solus Project (2016) is a sci-fi adventure-survival game from Grip Game and Hourences. Once only available for traditional monitors and PC VR headsets like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, the game is now available starting today on the PlayStation Store for PlayStation VR at $20.

The Solus Project started its tenure as a PC-only title on Steam Early Access, and while the blend of cinematic storytelling and survival initially met a mixed critical response, the developers Hourences and Grip Games went on to push an update that fixed bugs and critically implemented what they described at the time as “work in progress” VR support, including support for Rift and Vive.

Road to VR‘s Matthew Magee got a chance to review the game this time last year, saying at times he was “completely immersed in the illusion.”

Magee especially like the survival elements, which require you to find food, water and medical supplies as you burn through calories, H2O, and get injured from the alien terrain’s many perils. Featuring rain storms and meteor showers to keep you on your toes as you traverse the planet, your trusty AI balances out the danger with a chipper voice of reassurance.

The story, Magee says, can be a bit lacking however.

“As good as the setting is, the game does indulge itself with some clunky storytelling at times. At one early point your character delivers a monologue to impart some sudden realisation… except it’s not sudden, and you will have had this realisation yourself a good half an hour earlier. You are left to construct much of the backstory yourself, by observing your surroundings and reading crew logs conveniently strewn about the place. It’s good to know that even in the distant future humankind still write their logs on paper. Fireproof, crash proof, waterproof paper.”

Check out our full review here. Since it was reviewed while the game still featured experimental VR support, we weren’t able to give it a proper point-based ranking, but Magee contends The Solus Project is memorable, atmospheric, beautiful, and occasionally terrifying too.

The game supports both DualShock 4 and Move controllers.

The post Sci-fi Survival-Adventure ‘The Solus Project’ Launches Today on PSVR appeared first on Road to VR.

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AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 Now Available, Offering Close Competition with NVIDIA GTX 1080

AMD’s Radeon RX Vega 64 is finally out after the long wait, promising to offer stiff competition with what’s become the new standard for high-end VR, NVIDIA’s 16nm Pascal architecture-based GTX 1080.

Created as a replacement for the Radeon Fury X and Radeon Fury, the RX Vega 64 is manufactured based on the 14nm FinFet architecture, incorporating 64 compute units and 4096 stream processors with a base clock speed of 1247 MHz (1546 MHz under load). Critically, AMD’s new card doubles Fury’s RAM from 4GB to 8GB of the company’s second generation of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2).

We stacked up the GTX 1080 against the GTX 980ti in a head-to-head VR benchmark, something worth looking into if you’re not familiar the with NVIDIA’s consumer-grade graphics card. Needless to say, the GTX 1080 has become a high-end go-to for VR systems for a reason—it can chew through nearly anything current games can offer on high settings at a reliable 90 fps.

While we’ve thoroughly tested the GTX 1080, we haven’t had a chance to test out the RX Vega 64 for ourselves, but our friends over at EuroGamer maintain AMD’s newest GPU it’s competitive enough with Nvidia, but critically “offers no knockout blow – in the here and now, at least.”

image courtesy AMD

Similarly, a review by TechAdvisor contends the RX Vega 64 performs well out of the box for VR and 4K gaming, closing in on GTX 1080’s performance only by just a handful of frames per second depending on the game and quality settings, but also has a greater requirements in both power and cooling departments than the GTX 1080.

Coming in both liquid-cooled and air-cooled varieties, the Vega 64 gulps down the wattage, with a typical board requiring 345W (liquid) and 295W (air)—nearly double the GTX 1080’s base 180W max load.

Initially announced at a starting MSRP of $500 for the air-cooled card, the RX Vega 64 is supposed to be less expensive than the GTX 1080 was after its May 2016 launch date at $599 MSRP. Realistically though, online retailers are currently selling the cards at a heavy markup, coming in at $650-$700. You can probably thank cryptocurrency miners for that.

Despite a high introductory price, what remains to be seen is whether the GPU can eventually justify the price tag once developers get a chance to optimize their programs around the card’s new features. Only time will tell though, as the GTX 1080 has had more than a year for developers to work out all the best ways to squeeze every last drip of performance out of the card.

What about VR?

VRMark, the VR benchmarking software from Futuremark, offers a few options for testing GPU performance, including the Orange Room and the Blue Room benchmarking tests.

According to Futuremark, The Orange Room benchmark certifies whether your system can meet the strenuous requirements for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The Blue Room however is a more demanding test, designed to benchmark the latest graphics cards by pushing 5K rendering resolution and volumetric lighting effects.

Here you can see the RX Vega 64 compared to both GTX 1080 and GTX 1080ti:

1 of 2
image courtesy TechAdvisor
image courtesy TechAdvisor

The RX Vega 64 also supports AMDs Vulkan API, DirectX 12.1, and is a ‘Radeon VR Ready Premium’ GPU, a class of hardware that AMD contends “meet[s] or exceed[s] the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive recommended specifications for graphics cards.”

At this point, you probably shouldn’t pull out the big bucks for a card that hasn’t proven itself worthy against the GTX 1080 just yet. If you’re looking to up your rendering power on a dime, we’d wait until the cards sell at (or below) the initially advertised MSRP before making any hasty purchases. Admittedly, AMD offers a number of cards in their ‘Radeon VR Ready Premium’ class that are much easier on the wallet, including the $450 RX 480 (4GB). If you’re determined to build an AMD-only system, check out the list of the company’s GPUs here.

AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 Specs:

Interface

Interface: PCI Express 3.0

Chipset

GPU: Radeon RX Vega 64
Core Clock: 1247 MHz
Boost Clock: 1546 MHz
Stream Processors: 4096 Stream Processors

Memory

Memory Speed: 945 MHz
Memory Data Rate: 1.9 Gbps
Memory Size: 8GB
Memory Interface: 2048-Bit
Memory Type: HBM2

3D API

DirectX: DirectX 12
OpenGL: OpenGL 4.5

Ports

HDMI: 1 x HDMI 2.0b
Multi-Monitor Support: 4
DisplayPort: 3 x DisplayPort 1.4

The post AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 Now Available, Offering Close Competition with NVIDIA GTX 1080 appeared first on Road to VR.

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This Company is Building an AR Version of ‘Minecraft’ for iOS and Android

South African startup Speak Geek? recently teased an update to their project that aims to replicate the official Microsoft version of Minecraft for HoloLens, the company’s $3000 AR headset, and put it on mobile devices capable of running Google’s ARCore and Apple’s ARKit.

This is the company’s second attempt at bringing Minecraft to AR, the first taking place in 2015 right after the multiplayer version for HoloLens was unveiled. Now, with the release of Google ARCore and Apple ARKit, Speak Geek? says they’re streamlining their first attempt to make a smoother experience for users to view their worlds in AR.

The app interfaces with Minecraft via Forge and the Raspberry Jam Mod. You then find an open world via WiFi and display it.

While the prototype only incorporates a viewer function at this time, the company says they have their eye on building a complete Minecraft client which would include a way to interact with the map via “minions” who you could order to collect resources while away from the PC. The company maintains that these ideas aren’t currently implemented, but could become a reality in the near future.

With enough support, Speak Geek? says they’ll release a version soon to a select group to start playing. Keep an eye on the MinecraftAR for more updates.

The post This Company is Building an AR Version of ‘Minecraft’ for iOS and Android appeared first on Road to VR.

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Review: ‘The Gallery: Call of the Starseed’

The Gallery: Call of the Starseed (2016) is a first-person adventure from Cloudhead Games that’s unashamedly a ‘first’ in many categories. As a Vive launch title, it was one of the most cutting-edge adventure games of its time, and although it’s showing its age at this late review date, it remains an intriguing, well-realized cinematic experience that will leave you more than ready for the next episode. Since we didn’t have a chance to review it the first go around last year, we took a moment to go through in preparation for the sequel due this month, The Gallery: Heart of the Emberstone.

The Gallery: Call of the Starseed Details:

Official Site

Developer: Cloudhead Games
Available On: Steam (HTC Vive, Oculus Rift), Oculus Store (Rift), Viveport (Vive, Rift)
Reviewed On: Oculus Rift
Release Date: April 5, 2016

Gameplay

Created with the love of ’80s fantasy films like The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986), Call of the Starseed begins in the most patently ’80s way possible—you’re left a cassette tape from your twin sister, Elsie, beckoning you to meet her down by a deserted, windswept cove as she’s taken the liberty of running off on a wild adventure of her own; to what end, you’re not sure. Drawing you further with yet more tapes found along the way, you meet a sewer-dwelling, addle-brained professor who knows where Elsie’s gone, and sends you after her in what proves to be a mind-bending ride into the unknown. And what’s a Starseed? You’ll have to play to find out.

Like many adventure games, puzzles aren’t high on difficulty in Call of the Starseed, acting more as an interactive way of pushing the story forward. That said, the first puzzle you encounter doesn’t really make sense outside of the explanation of “Duh, it’s a game. Games aren’t supposed to be realistic,” which doesn’t really feel like a great start for something that should strive to create presence. If you can ignore it though, you’ll find the rest of the hour-long game much more thematically consistent.

Note the reader: This gripe has been marked for easy gripe-skipping. If you don’t wish to read this gripe, please jump down right before the ‘Immersion’ section for a less gripe-filled reading experience.

Gripe begins: Wandering along the beach, I pass by a seemingly important basket. Before I can inspect it though, the basket is automatically winched out of reach, almost as if the developers themselves are saying “nice try.” In fact, that’s exactly what’s written on the bottom.

Continuing forward, I walk into the professor’s cave hideout where I decipher a message written in Morse code that tells me to ‘shoot the bells’. Finding myself with the task of using a flare gun to shoot a number of bells to distract an inexplicably sentient lighthouse, I dutifully aim and take fire without the slightest idea why. Once you’ve shot the right bells and sufficiently distracted the lighthouse, the epic music swells, telling you you’ve done something magical and important. Did I? I wasn’t so sure. And I still feel like I’m missing something.

Clattering down to the beach, you return to the basket which you find lowered to reveal a door handle to the sewer where the old professor can be heard crowing away about the CIA or some such. Why was the basket lowered? Why did the old man keep an extra handle there? Why did he write “nice try” on it when any able-bodied person could hit the damn thing down with a bat? Maybe I should lighten up. After all, it’s just a game, right?

Gripe deescalates: While These things can’t go without saying, the first episode of The Gallery has to be viewed within context. As the first class of motion controller, room-scale games that allowed full object interaction, its job was much bigger than to just tell a logically consistent story with equally consistent puzzles. It had to teach us how to move through the world and pick things up; it created a unique inventory system, pioneered blink teleportation, and it did it all without tutorializing the player to death.

Despite my overblown gripe, Call of the Starseed could have suffered a much worse fate as one of the first built-for-VR adventure games for motion controllers, and while it’s hard for me to judge it with the same temerity that I would a modern game that’s necessarily had the benefit of learning from Call of the Starseed’s misgivings—i.e. short gameplay length and some less than perfect locomotion—the game is decisively a joy to play, offering something truly out of the ordinary, even with a year and half of games between its debut and now.

Immersion

Again, as one of the first games of its kind, there’s plenty of slack to be cut for Call of the Starseed when it comes to some of the more negative visual aspects. Both Oculus and Valve have done much to optimize VR’s graphical load on GPUs, not to mention NVIDIA and AMD have brought out new, more powerful GPUs in the meantime. That said, even on high settings, textures seem a little too basic for such a well-realized atmosphere, detracting from the game’s ingenious lighting and frankly awe-inspiring cinematics.

Object interaction isn’t nearly as fine as you’d see in later titles either, the exemplar being Lone Echo (2017) for its dynamic hand poses that allow you to grab items at any angle and grip them realistically. Holding items never quite feels ‘right’ in Call of the Starseed because you’re given only a few specific handholds for each item, giving a knock to immersion somewhat.

Story-wise though, Starseed nails the plucky ’80s fantasy vibe it was going after. Its cast of characters, although cartoonish, are undeniably real people. You can attribute this to a well cared for script, and top-notch voice acting that really make the world’s characters come alive.

Comfort

Cloudhead Games was one of the early developers of teleportation and snap-turn comfort mode, both of which are industry standards of locomotion. There’s a few different styles of teleportation, so you’ll have to experiment to find what’s right for you. Despite this, the locomotion scheme shows its age somewhat, as I often had trouble getting a lock on an appropriate place to teleport.

Smooth-turn junkies will find the settings menu critically lack their world-twisting yaw motion. Better luck next time, guys.

You can also force-grab items from a close enough distance, removing the labor of constantly bending down to pick things up. This was also a bit inconsistent though, the best example being fiddly puzzle that required you to grab battery cells floating in zero G. This puzzle took its toll on my patience as I practiced force-grabbing batteries rather than physically plucking them out of the air like I would naturally, simply because as soon as you tried to grasp a battery, it would invariably fly away in the opposite direction.

Frustrations aside, all of this makes Call of the Starseed an exceedingly comfortable experience for anyone, seated or standing. We’re hoping to see some seriously smooth second generation-level improvements in all of these departments when the sequel launches.

The Gallery: Heart of the Emberstone is almost here, so check back on launch day (TBA) for our full review.

The post Review: ‘The Gallery: Call of the Starseed’ appeared first on Road to VR.

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Multiuser VR Sculpting & Paint Tool ‘MasterpieceVR’ Now Available on Vive & Rift

MasterpieceVR is a 3D creation tool that’s looking to get an edge on the competition by offering something no other volumetric art program has so far; a multi-user, spectator-friendly, sculpting and painting tool that promises to house everything you need in a single place.

MasterpieceVR boasts some pretty impressive features outside of its 20+ sculpting and painting tools. Up to four artists can collaborate on a piece while up to 20 spectators look on—something that Google-owned Tilt Brush (2016), Oculus Medium (2017) nor Quill (2017) can manage currently.

Additionally, the program also has the ability to view a desktop window while in VR, so you can easily check reference images while you create, or just have a YouTube video playing in the background.

MasterpieceVR features cross-play with HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, with Microsoft’s upcoming VR headsets soon to see support as well. The app is available on Steam, Oculus Store, and Viveport for $30.

Like many VR sculpting programs and CAD software alike, MasterpieceVR can export models to .STL file format, making it possible to 3D print your virtual objects.

“We wanted to push the boundaries by creating an organic 3D modeling tool that is both powerful and easy to learn,” said CEO of Masterpiece VR, Jonathan Gagne. “VR was the medium to do this in. It let us take a big step forward in the development of a tool that let people work together in real-time to co-create on the same piece or contribute feedback or critique immediately.”

“I think MasterpieceVR is a really special piece of software and is focused on giving you core tools with a clean interface which allows you to jump into VR sculpting more quickly than the competition,” said traditional and digital artist, Jon Payne. “I particularly love both the subtle surface control built into the primary sculpting tools and the intelligent way the smoothing algorithm works when you are blending your shapes. These unique features combine to give you a cleaner sculpt that is faster than other VR sculpting tools out there.”

We haven’t had a chance to pop in ourselves, but artist Mary Ellis takes us through MasterpieceVR’s tools, creating a digital bust of a lion whilst comparing it to the real thing.

The post Multiuser VR Sculpting & Paint Tool ‘MasterpieceVR’ Now Available on Vive & Rift appeared first on Road to VR.

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Dell’s VR ‘Visor’ Headset Now Available For Pre-order at $350, Shipping Mid-October

Dell’s virtual reality headset may be only one out of an entire fleet of PC VR devices designed with the auspices of Microsoft, but it appears to be the first consumer headset of the bunch currently up for pre-order.

Slated to deliver their first batch on October 17th, you can pre-order the headset from Dell for $350, the controllers separately for $99, or the whole controller/headset bundle for $450. The company is currently offering free shipping for a limited time, although it’s not certain for how long.

Windows VR headsets (dubbed ‘Mixed Reality’ by the Microsoft) offer inside-out tracking, meaning there’s no external sensors needed to run a VR experience. Coming from various OEMs, other headsets are set to launch soon too from HP, Lenovo, Asus, and Acer. We got out hands on an early Acer developer kit at Microsoft’s Build conference, and reported that the headset was light, comfortable, and tracking was impressive. Check out the hands-on article here.

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We we tested the Windows VR controller, it left something to be desired in the ergonomics department however, as they were remarkably clunky in comparison to similarly designed controllers like Oculus Touch. Because the controllers are tracked by the headset itself, and don’t require any beacon or external sensor, tracking proved to be accurate for the setup, and surprisingly outperformed the PSVR Move Camera tracking solution. Check out our full hands-on with the controller here.

Dell Visor Pre-order Page

image courtesy Dell

We also had a chance to go hands-on with a non-functioning version of headset at Gamescom in Cologne. Although we didn’t get a chance to really try it out, the premium materials used and the halo-style headstrap make for an extremely comfortable wearing experience. The added rubberization to the exterior meant for a good grip, easy cleanup and no fingerprints like some more plasticy models in the Windows ‘Mixed Reality’ headset lineup.

Dell Visor Specs

  • Dual Sharp LCDs at 1440 x 1440
  • 2.89” diagonal display size (x2)
  • Front-hinged display
  • Fresnel Lenses
  • 110 degrees horizontal field of view
  • Display refresh rate up to 90 Hz (native)
  • Single cable with HDMI 2.0 (display) and USB 3.0 (data) for connectivity
  • Inside-out tracking
  • 4.00m cable

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‘DiRT Rally’ VR Racer Currently 75% Off, Sale Ends Next Week

DiRT Rally (2015) started out as an exemplar of a PC rally racer, but after adding Oculus Rift support last year, the game has since become a hit in the VR community for its varied tracks, cars and true-to-life driving physics. For the next week, the game is on sale for a staggering 75% off on Humble Store.

The sale brings the game down from $60 to $12.50, and will last until September 21st, 1PM ET (local time here).

DiRT Rally only officially supports Oculus Rift, so HTC Vive owners looking to get into the drifting madness will have to use ReVive, a software hack that allows Vive owners to play Rift exclusives both purchased from the Oculus Store and elsewhere. The game is provided by Humble Bundle via Steam key.

‘DiRT Rally on Humble Store

Road to VR’s Dominic Brennan, a seasoned driving simulation enthusiast, called Dirt Rally thrilling, challenging and “one of the best in years.” Find out why he gave it a solid [8.3/10] in his detailed review.

Features

• ICONIC RALLY CARS – DiRT Rally boasts over 40 of the most iconic and relevant cars from yesteryear through to modern day, representing the cars that the players want, and the ones that make the most sense for the surfaces they race on. 
• SIX MASSIVE RALLIES WITH OVER 70 STAGES – Head to the muddy paths of Wales, the dusty trails of Greece and the icy tarmac of Monte Carlo. Take on the legendary hillclimb of Pikes Peak, the snowy thrills of Sweden, and the epic scenery of Finland. 
• OFFICIAL FIA WORLD RALLYCROSS CONTENT – Race at the Lydden Hill, Holjes and Hell tracks in six of the fastest off-road cars and take on your friends in high intensity, bumper-to-bumper multiplayer racing.
• CUSTOM RALLY EVENTS: Take any car on any track – configure and compete in single or multi-stage events.
• RALLY CHAMPIONSHIPS: Start on the bottom rung of the rally ladder and compete in a succession of events, earning points and money on your way to promotion. Use skilful driving and manage your repair schedules as you work your way to the top division and earn the most lucrative rewards. 
• UPGRADES, REPAIRS, SETUP AND TUNING – DiRT Rally delivers depth in areas beyond driving – elements such as repairs, upgrades, and setup & tuning add a rich and strategic dimension to your rally experience. 
• CHALLENGING, UNCOMPROMISING HANDLING MODEL – Codemasters has completely rebuilt the physical simulation for DIRT Rally to adequately capture how it feels to race across changing surfaces and has created brand new models for differential, suspension, engine mapping and turbo modelling. 
• TEAM MANAGEMENT – Hire and fire your crew members each of whom which will have different skills, improving repair times for different parts of the car. Teach them new skills as they gain experience and work together as a team to improve your performance in events.
• PLAYER LEAGUE SUPPORT – Get together with friends and run your very own racing league. Join or create unlimited leagues and run them how and when you want. 
• DAILY, WEEKLY AND MONTHLY ONLINE CHALLENGES – It’s you versus the entire DiRT community in a series of one-day, week-long and month-long challenges to earn in-game credits to improve your car and team.

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