Iconic multiplayer board game The Settlers of Catan is making the leap to VR. Coming this holiday season to Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR, the game is aptly named Catan VR.
Developed by Experiment 7, Asmodee Digital and Catan Studio, Catan VR is an immersive take on Klaus Teuber’s tactical board game. Created specifically for virtual reality, Catan VR lets players engage in games either in online multiplayer or against ‘Catan personalities’. The creators haven’t shown any specific gameplay yet, and have only released a teaser featuring creator Klaus Teuber.
The game will feature cross-play between Oculus Rift and Gear VR. The developers maintain additional VR platforms (likely HTC Vive) will follow after the initial launch.
According to the developers, “players can watch the island come to life in VR for the first time, with beautiful in-game environments.”
“The first time I saw Catan on the Magic Table, I was fascinated by what VR has to offer,” said Catan creator Klaus Teuber.” The game I made in our living room with my family 25 years ago in Virtual Reality? It’s incredible. I never imagined actually stepping into the world of Catan when we first started making cut-outs and dreaming about exploring new lands.”
VR game studio Experiment 7 also created Magic Table Chess and Dungeon Chess, two fantasy-based VR chess game for Oculus Rift.
Duck Season is a first-person adventure game created by Stress Level Zero, developers of multiplayer shooter Hover Junkers (2016). While it’s hard to pin down exactly what sort of game it is with its unique, nostalgia-inducing narrative style and horror elements, we’ll be finding out soon enough, because Duck Season is slated to release on Steam and the Oculus Store on September 14th.
Back at GDC in March, we had a chance to pop into the beautiful spiral into madness that is Duck Season. Playing out between your family home and a realistic version of the Nintendo lightgun classic Duck Hunt (1984), Duck Season departs from the happy-go-lucky ’80s and ’90s gaming staple when the dog, who you invariably always took a shot at for being a smug bastard, would eventually come back to exact his revenge.
Duck Hunt, image courtesy Nintendo
According to Duck Season’s Steam page (Oculus Store link coming soon), the game has seven unique endings, seven mini games to play on your Kingbit Entertainment System (i.e. not-Nintendo), dozens of Easter eggs and hidden secrets, multiple short films found on VHS tapes, and additional mysterious sub-plots.
TPCast, the wireless streaming device that lets HTC Vive owners play VR games cable-free, is now available for pre-order in most of continental Europe starting at €349 (or the regional equivalent) and the United States at $299.
Update (09/02/17): Pre-orders are now available in the US through the Microsoft Store with release slated for 9/25/2017. The $299 pre-orders are only currently available online through Microsoft, although the TPCast websitehasn’t updated with any such vendor list and will possibly include more retailers in the coming days.
Original Article (9/01/17): TPCast pre-orders are available in the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and UK. Many distributors are quoting late October shipping dates.
Customers based in the US will still have to wait, as the company hasn’t said when US pre-orders will go live. The website however maintains that they’ll be shipping in the US “before Sep. 30th, 2017.”
TPCAST has already been available for pre-order via HTC’s Chinese Vive online store since November last year. Only a few short months later, HTC announced at CES earlier this year that the device would go on sale worldwide in Q2 2017 for $249. Now it’s apparent HTC isn’t handling regional distribution like they did in China though, as TPCast themselves have hand-picked a patchwork of online retailers.
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image courtesy TPCast
image courtesy TPCast
image courtesy TPCast
image courtesy TPCast
In contrast to the current European price, which converts to $415 USD, it’s uncertain if the wireless VR solution will maintain such a low price as previously stated. Despite the built-in ~23% value-added tax (VAT) found in most European countries, US pricing will likely see a similar raise in expected price.
The company says their battery provides 5 hours of play time, and that the powerbank itself is swappable for extended operation. Our friends over at UploadVRgot a hands-on, stating that visual fidelity of TPCast was “very high” and there was no noticeable latency when they tried it back in June.
Lenovo Mirage AR headset is now available for pre-order at BestBuy.com for $200, which includes a Lightsaber controller, base station, and the star of the show: a collection of mini-games called Star Wars: Jedi Challenges. But will it be enough to attract would-be Jedi to the augmented reality side of the Force and keep them there?
Virtual reality owes much of its popularity to mobile VR, with its promise of abundant, economical and serviceable headsets like Samsung Gear VR and the even cheaper Google Cardboard—the sort of ‘headset shells’ that only require a suitable smartphone to run. While Apple and Google have already made their first big moves into the realm of augmented reality with the release of their respective software development kits for smartphone-based AR, there still isn’t a widespread ‘Cardboard for AR’ yet, no opening gambit that potentially put an AR headset in every Christmas stocking.
With the entrance of Lenovo’s Mirage AR headset and the bundled Star Wars: Jedi Challenges, the exclusive Lightsaber-centric AR experience teased by Disney and Lenovo a few months ago, you may have to wait a little while longer for the cheap and cheerful AR solution of your dreams. With a $200 price tag (twice the cost of Gear VR) and ostensibly only one experience to its name, it’s hard to say what the future of the Mirage will be.
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image courtesy Lenovo
image courtesy Lenovo
image courtesy Lenovo
image courtesy Lenovo
image courtesy Lenovo
Inside the box is the smartphone-powered Mirage AR headset, a dedicated “collectible quality” Lightsaber controller, a base station to optically stabilize the headset’s tracking, batteries, charger, and all the right cables to connect up whatever modern phone you happen to own (see compatibility list below). Once you’ve got your smartphone seated correctly and the whole kit is sorted, you can then download the Star Wars: Jedi Challenges experience and start the fun.
In the experience itself, you get a chance to engage in Lightsaber battles against Star Wars universe baddies like Kylo Ren and Darth Vader, play the iconic HoloChess, and clash against the Empire in a tabletop real-time strategy game.
CNET went hands-on with the headset, calling the field of view “too narrow to really be immersive,” and saying the AR elements “felt like they were floating around, probably because it’s not true room tracking.” According to the article, the Lightsaber battle’s graphics were also “underwhelming.”
Engadget’s report was much less damning on the software side, saying the Lightsaber demo was “really fun and immersive experience, and I liked the haptic feedback I got whenever I blocked or took a hit.”
Mixed previews notwithstanding, the question remains of what to do with the headset when you’re finally finished with all three games.
image courtesy Lenovo
You may argue that mobile VR, including Google Day Dream, Samsung Gear VR, and Google Cardboard, are all gimmicks in their own right and that the Mirage is no different. Regardless of your stance, mobile VR platforms all have fairly mature marketplaces stocked with plenty of content to chew through, the result of which required developer funding campaigns lead by Oculus and Google to establish back before their respective launches. If the Mirage for some reason can boast this healthy marketplace of apps between now and its holiday season launch, the proposition of a ‘Cardboard for AR’ becomes that much more real as it veers out of gimmick territory into a legit AR platform.
Best Buy remains the exclusive vendor for pre-orders, although the Star Wars AR pack will be available online and in stores starting in November. The AR headset is compatible with a variety of phones including the iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 6s, Samsung Galaxy S8, Samsung Galaxy S7 edge, Samsung Galaxy S7, Google Pixel XL, Google Pixel, and Moto Z. The Best Buy order page contends devices with iOS 9 and above, Android 4.1 and above will be able to hook into the headset.
We’ll be keeping our eye on the Mirage in the coming months to see just what Disney/Lenovo have in store (if anything).
Based on the Voltron: Legendary Defender series from Netflix, DreamWorks is launching a single-player game coming to PSVR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift on September 26th. Called Voltron VR Chronices, the game promises to deliver an immersive Voltron narrative alongside the chance to pilot the Blue Lion, stand on the bridge of the Castle Ship, and solve interactive puzzles and challenges.
Developed by Digital Domain Interactive, Voltron VR Chronicles puts you in the shoes of Lance, the blue Paladin of Voltron, giving you the duty to pilot the Blue Lion in your battle against the Zarkon’s forces.
According to a PlayStation blogpost, the game is only the first episode in a multi-episode VR series and will be presented both as passive storytelling (i.e. cinematic cutscenes) and “moments of interactivity where the user takes control of Lance’s actions.” The interactive moments feature puzzles, piloting missions, and combat missions where you battle Galra forces with the series’ fantastical sci-fi weapons.
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image courtesy DreamWorks
image courtesy DreamWorks
image courtesy DreamWorks
image courtesy DreamWorks
The TV show’s voice actors will also be voicing their respective characters in the show. Showrunners from Voltron: Legendary Defender also collaborated with Digital Domain to make sure the game’s universe was accurate in every way possible.
Pre-orders are already available for PSVR at the 20 percent discounted price of $12. The regular price on all platforms is $15.
Google released a preview version of ARCore for Android yesterday, the company’s answer to Apple’s ARKit. Since ARKit was released a few months ago, we’ve seen a bevy of really cool experiments and potential apps to come from developers from all over the world, but now it’s ARCore’s turn to shine.
Developers looking to use ARCore to create augmented reality apps can start building right now on both the Pixel line and Samsung S8 line. The platform will be targeting 100 million devices by the end of preview access however, coming from various hardware manufacturers and potentially making ARCore the defacto largest AR platform when it launches on other devices later this year.
While the critical mass of inspiring (and hopefully useful) ARCore apps has probably yet to come, here are some cool early experiments that get us excited about the potential of AR to inject something magical into every day life.
Morph Face
Morph Face is an experiment that lets you morph any surface around you into a new shape. It uses shaders to achieve the morphing effect.
Built by George Michael Brower with friends at Google Creative Lab. Built with Unity and ARCore.
Portal Painter
Portal Painter gives you a fun way to create portals into other dimensions. Just point your device at a nearby surface, then use your finger to paint a portal into another world.
Built by Jane Friedhoff with friends at Google Creative Lab using Unity and ARCore.
Hidden World
Hidden World is a simple experiment that combines hand-drawn animation with augmented reality. Point your device at the ground, then tap anywhere to reveal an animated world at your feet.
Built by Rachel Park Goto and Jane Friedhoff with friends at Google Creative Lab using Unity and ARCore.
Draw and Dance
Draw and Dance lets you create your very own dancing AR stick figure that reacts to the music and sound around it – your voice, your dog’s bark, and best of all, your playlist. This character can also augment your Google Home by taking its place on top of the speaker and moving in response to whatever sound comes out.
Built by Judith Amores Fernandez and Anna Fusté Lleixà with friends at the Google Creative Lab using Unity, ARCore, Vuforia and API.AI
ARCore Drawing
This is a simple demo that lets you draw lines in 3d space. It was made as a quick example of how to combine openFrameworks and ARCore. You can get the source code here.
Built by Jonas Jongejan using openFrameworks and ARCore.
Ubisoft’s latest and greatest entry into VR, Star Trek: Bridge Crew (2017), is currently on sale for $25, exactly half the price since its launch back in late May.
As a crew member aboard the U.S.S. Aegis, a ship created for the game styled after the J.J. Abrams reboot, it’s your job to fill one of 4 roles as you clash with Klingon ships on the wrong side of the Neutral Zone. You can fly alone and hop into each role on the fly, with IBM’s Watson assisting you along the way, or you can play as it was meant to be experienced—with Trek fans across all supported devices including PSVR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
The Steam version of the game works on both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and has the added benefit of providing a mutual friends list so you can team up with your buddies regardless of whether they own a Rift or Vive.
It’s an exceptionally immersive experience captaining the Aegis with real people at your side. See why we gave this social VR co-op game a solid [9/10] in our review.
Mindshow, the app that lets you create animated movies with the use of a VR headset, is now available for general release on Steam following its invite-only alpha. Letting you essentially jump into an avatar, record physical movements, simulate facial expressions, and record audio, the imagination is truly the limit on what stories you can tell.
Revealed by Mindshow Inc (ex-Visionary VR) at last year’s VRLA Summer Expo, the company has since added several tools, settings, and flushed out its crazy cast of characters ranging from a talking Twinkie to a body building piece of lettuce. Some characters even have the ability to record audio with voice modifications, giving anyone the chance to inject a little weirdness into their creations without being expert impressionists—well, a little more weirdness anyway.
image courtesy Mindshow
One of the cool aspects about Mindshow is that it’s not only for making 2D movies, but functionally acts as a platform that lets you watch others’ performances from within VR. With the ability to share your own VR shows and view others’, you can remix anything shared publicly through Mindshow and create something new. To boot, the app will soon be featuring shows from people like Reggie Watts and YouTube viral star Tay Zonday every day of September.
While specifically stating support for HTC Vive, the app uses SteamVR, so it works nearly as well with Oculus Rift given the three-sensor, room-scale setup. Admittedly, Mindshow is optimized for the Vive, so some buttons aren’t mapped currently to Oculus Touch including the ‘mirror’ option that lets you see a ghostly apparition of your avatar while recording a scene so you can get posturing and facial expressions correct.
The user interface is pretty simple, letting you select your action with one controller; teleport, record video, hop-in to avatars, rotate and move props and characters. The other controller is dedicated to spawning menu items like characters and props, and also a progress bar and play button so you can rewatch performances.
There’s a few hard caps on avatar numbers (max 3 in each scene) and props, and each discrete recording cuts off within 30 seconds. The recording cap is true for strictly ‘VR shows’, but longer 2D shows can be created by recording the action with the camera tool and generating multiple cuts, then stringing them together with a film editing software. The show below, which takes the fake documentary-style popularized by the The Office and throws it into space, was built using basic tools and stock backgrounds.
It took me about 45 minutes to create a 2-minute show (it’s so bad I’ll only link it in the confines of parenthesis: here). That may seem like a long time, but quick cuts and short dialogue mean you have to teleport around and delete the recorded actions of avatars and record new ones. Then you need to import, cut and string all of the clips together before you can export to a video file. Shorter clips that are under the 30-second recording cap can however be shared directly to YouTube from within the app by linking your account.
One problem I ran into while making my half-brained movie was audio. The integrated mic on the Vive is just plain bad, and a clip-on external mic would go a long way in terms of audio quality. Rift is slightly better in that aspect, but I don’t have a three sensor setup, so I couldn’t get the perfect shot I was looking for due to inconsistent controller tracking. Otherwise, there were only a few hiccups when trying to interact with props, as they sometime didn’t like to stay put.
For the pros: if you’re good at video editing, you can even take advantage of the green screen background that lets you chroma key your creations into anywhere imaginable. Check out the movie below made by Mindshow to see just how crazy things can get.
Creating with Mindshow was an awesome and eye-opening experience. It’s hard to imagine that I can now direct and record any idea or skit floating through my head, however bad and half-brained they may be. There are some definite limits to what you can produce, but those sorts of bottlenecks are sure to create their own brand of viral gags that would otherwise be impossible (or expensive) outside of a VR headset.
Sensic, a long-time player in virtual reality and co-founder of OSVR, finally released their VR headset destined to make its way to public venues such as theme parks and arcades. Teasing the project late last year, the enterprise-facing headset is touted to be more hygienic, comfortable, and pack a higher resolution display than consumer devices.
Sensics, a co-founder of Razer’s OSVR initiative which produced the HDK headset, has a pretty specific approach on how out-of-home VR headsets should differ from their consumer counterparts.
pre-production model, image courtesy Sensics
Firstly, there’s hygiene. Sensics includes a machine-washable, hypoallergenic face mask that physically separates from the display, allowing for arcade-goers to strap in, get comfortable and have a chat (or selfie) before clipping into the display portion of the headset. This essentially cuts down the amount of lead time by letting customers prep before heading into their VR experience. More importantly, Sensics says the inexpensive strap can be set aside after each guest is done and sanitized for later use. If you’ve ever tried a VR headset after someone sweat in it, soaking right through the spongy foam gasket and headstrap, you can imagine how bad it would get in a facility that sees multiple customers daily.
That said, customers are going to sweat, and mitigating these effects during the experience with dual fans, which Sensics says are silent, helps remove excess humidity from the headset, keeping lenses clear from fog.
As for resolution, the company maintains the screen door effect (SDE) is diminished with the headset’s dual 1440×1600@90 Hz LCD displays, a 70 percent increase in pixels over consumer devices like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. We haven’t had an opportunity to substantiate the reduction of SDE, but the company provides as comparison chart between its lower tier dual 1080×1200 OLED, which happens to be the same resolution as Rift and Vive.
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image courtesy Sensics
image courtesy Sensics
image courtesy Sensics
image courtesy Sensics
Arcade and park owners can also opt to include embedded hand/finger trackers like Leap Motion, which sits flush inside the unit behind a window that’s transparent to IR.
pre-production model, image courtesy Sensics
The public VR headset is also said to work with “hundreds of peripherals including wide-area tracking systems.” The press release announcing the headset doesn’t make specific mention of what positional tracking system it employs, saying only that it integrates a 9-axis orientation tracker, something headsets use for basic head-tracking only. Aftermarket solutions like OptiTrack’s IR-reflective positional tracking system, which uses traditional motion capture tech, would be a likely candidate for large-scale, out-of-home facilities looking to use Sensics system however.
IR motion capture for VR, image courtesy OptiTrack
Pre-production units are currently on sale on the OSVR Store in two flavors: a $2,590.00 headset with 2880×1600@90 Hz LCD display, and the lower tier $2,160.00 headset with 2160×1200@90 Hz OLED display. Large quantities of the final device are slated to ship later this year.
Specs
A choice of two screen options: 2880×1600@90 Hz LCD, or 2160×1200@90 Hz OLED including diffusion film for reduced SDE
Removable face-plate
Built-in dual silent fans to comfort and ventilation
Front IR window for optional embedded Leap Motion controller
High-quality 100-degree optics with adjustable focus
Integrated 9-axis orientation tracker
On-unit buttons for user interface (disabled in pre-production units)
Ergonomic and adjustable head strap
Supports direct mode and asynchronous time warp
Supported by all major game engines including Unity, Unreal and more
In an answer to Apple’s recently released ARKit, a developer tool used for making augmented reality apps and games that run on newer iPad and iPhones, Google today released a preview of a new Android-compatible software development kit (SDK) called ARCore.
Google prides itself on its stewardship of Android, the largest mobile platform in the world with over 80 percent of the mobile market share in 2016, according to research and advisory firm Gartner. Drawing from their work developing Tango, the company’s older AR platform that works with only two publicly available devices—Lenovo Phab 2 Pro and Asus Zenfone—Google is opening up their new ARCore SDK to run on “millions of devices,” initially supporting both the Pixel line and Samsung S8 line, running 7.0 Nougat and above.
Google is currently working with Samsung, Huawei, LG, ASUS and unnamed others, saying they’ll be targeting “100 million devices at the end of the preview.” The company hasn’t said specifically when the end of preview access will occur however.
The company outlines the ARCore’s three main abilities:
Motion tracking: Using the phone’s camera to observe feature points in the room and IMU sensor data, ARCore determines both the position and orientation (pose) of the phone as it moves. Virtual objects remain accurately placed.
Environmental understanding: It’s common for AR objects to be placed on a floor or a table. ARCore can detect horizontal surfaces using the same feature points it uses for motion tracking.
Light estimation: ARCore observes the ambient light in the environment and makes it possible for developers to light virtual objects in ways that match their surroundings, making their appearance even more realistic.
Including support for projects created in Java/OpenGL, Unity and Unreal Engine, Google is also releasing prototype AR web browsers, which allow developers to create AR-enhanced websites that can run on both Android’s ARCore and Apple’s iOS/ARKit.
Google calls ARCore their “next step in bringing AR to everyone,” but says more information will be coming out later this year.
ARCore, saddled with what Google’s learned from creating Tango’s recently teased Visual Positioning Service (VPS), the inside-out tracking system which hooks into Google Maps, could mean some wild things for current and future Android devices. We’ll be keeping our eyes out for all things Google, so check back for more updates on what could become one of the world’s largest AR platforms in short order.
