Volkswagen Group, the multi-brand automotive company, has developed VR apps to make long-distance collaboration in production and logistics an easier task. Using the HTC Vive, the company has created what it calls the Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub Group, a VR platform that will help the company’s employees collaborate across the Audi, SEAT, ŠKODA and Volkswagen brands.
The company has used its suite of VR apps to allow multiple users to simultaneously collaborate while physically located between Volkswagen logistics office in the Czech Republic and the company’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany. Apps in the platform already include VR logistics training, realistic workshop environments created using photogrammetry, and VR spaces for exchanging best practices—all of course with avatars so employees can talk face-to-face.
Developed with VR production studio Innoactive, the Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub made its public debut at the Digility conference and exhibition in Cologne this week.
image courtesy Volkswagen Group
Mathias Synowski, a VR user from Group Logistics, says the company’s VR app will “make our daily teamwork much easier and save a great deal of time.”
“Virtual reality creates the ideal conditions for cross-brand and cross-site collaboration,” Jasmin Müller from Audi Brand Logistics explains.
“[E]xchanging knowledge is just as important as bundling knowledge. That’s why we came up with the Volkswagen Digital Reality Hub central platform in collaboration with Innoactive. All employees have access to all existing VR elements as well as existing knowledge via the platform. That way, we enable individual units to implement new use cases quickly and jointly move in VR applications so they can plan new workflows interactively,” says Dennis Abmeier from Group IT.
The Volkswagen Digital Realities Team is currently developing more apps for production and logistics intended for the company’s fleet of HTC Vive Business Edition headsets.
At this year’s E3, we got a chance to go hands-on with Augmented Empire, a narrative-driven tactical RPG coming exclusively to Gear VR on July 13th. Created by Coatsink, the studio known for the Esper series and Gang Beasts (2016), the action plays out on a tiled game board displayed as an augmented reality diorama.
Looking at the little dollhouse-sized diorama set before me on top of a virtual desk in my virtual hideout, it’s amazing just how much detail Coatsink was able to pack into a Gear VR title. While I’m willing to admit that miniature objects always look better in VR because of the perceived bump in detail, I just can’t help but admire the game not only from a technical aspect, but from a level design one too. Telling from the 30-minute demo I had, I can say I’ve certainly seen less-appealing visuals on more graphically-capable headsets like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Simply put, the game doesn’t bite off more than it can chew technically and fills in the gaps with what I’d consider to be an engaging story—something that’s currently pretty rare on mobile VR platforms.
image courtesy Coatsink Software
Oozing with a neo-noir atmosphere, you’re tasked with controlling 6 misfits across the world’s three castes, a social system simply called the “Citizen Grade System.” And it’s not an upstairs-downstairs comedy either; high society types live in luxury at the summit in complete ignorance of the world below, and the world’s outliers and criminals live in Detritum, a cockroach-filled ghetto at the island’s depths.
Using gaze-based controls and the Gear VR’s touchpad, I maneuvered a little 3-inch avatar through an interesting story about a mother tracking down her long-abandoned high-caste daughter. Turn-based actions let me sneak past guards, shoot them, and hide from their direct line of sight as they tried to stop me with bullets. Each room was filled with items I needed to go forward, including scrap metal that you can forge into customizable parts for weapons.
image courtesy Coatsink Software
At the end of the demo, I was then given my god’s-eye-view control over the daughter, who making her way through the criminal underworld reveals just how depraved society can be. I would put dialogue somewhere between ‘PG-13’ and ‘R’.
I was told by CEO Tom Beardsmore that each ‘episode’ would last around 20-30 minutes, and the entire multi-episode game would be comprised by hundreds of hours of voice overs from established actors such as Kate Mulgrew (Orange is the New Black, Star Trek Voyager), Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), Doug Cockle (The Witcher Series), and Garrick Hagon (Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, Horizon: Zero Dawn).
In fact, there is so much dialogue, users will have to download the game in discrete batches, otherwise risk taking up too much space on their smartphones.
image courtesy Coatsink Software
“With a strong focus on story and deep but accessible gameplay, we wanted to give Gear VR gamers an extraordinary experience. We’re thrilled with the calibre of talent involved in Augmented Empire” said Beardsmore.
After a hectic day at E3 of walking, writing and interviewing, sitting down with Augmented Empire was an exceedingly relaxing experience as I dialed into the drama and action before me, albeit pint-sized. I was promised that my decisions, chosen via the game’s dialogue tree system, would allow for multiple endings and hours of gameplay. I’ll be looking forward to checking out Augmented Empire in my review when it launches next week, and hope the tactical ‘cover-and-shoot’ system can hold my attention even if Kathryn Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager (1995) and Ed from Shaun of the Dead (2004) are personally charming additions.
When laser tag came into arcades and theme parks around the world in the 80s and 90s, a new industry of custom, commercial-grade laser tag hardware was born—coincidentally the same point in time when VR experienced its first massive hype cycle and went back into proverbial hybernation. Now that VR is back, location-based entertainment (LBE) facilities are eyeing virtual reality as ‘the next laser tag’, a place where a group of friends could go and experience something unique together. Enter VRstudios.
VRstudios, the Seattle-based global provider of VR arcade equipment, today announced the release of a new system called VRcade Arena which bills itself as a wireless ‘warehouse-scale’ VR platform that can provide multiplayer games and experiences for up to eight simultaneous users. Offered as a turnkey VR solution for businesses, VRcade Arena is built on the company’s proprietary Attraction Management Platform (AMP) that provides content, user analytics, and software/hardware integration of 1st and 3rd party equipment.
image courtesy VRStudios
Designed for amusement parks, family entertainment centers, cinemas and casinos, VRcade Arena was created to make setting up and maintaining a multiplayer VR installation an easy task for businesses that otherwise would have to cobble together consumer-grade equipment. To boot, the company also offers users a fully wireless experience together with custom VR headset, and peripherals like pistols and motion controllers.
Dave Ruddell, VRstudios’ cofounder and Chief Architect, says that the company currently operates more than 40 VRcade systems around the world, and that the new VRcade Arena system “enables an exciting new level of immersive out-of-home experiences for everyone, from casual VR enthusiasts to serious eSports competitors.”
image courtesy VRstudios
The company’s VR system runs on a hardware-agnostic platform, and currently features a number of multiplayer titles including; Time Zombies, Barking Irons, planktOs: Crystal Guardians, and VRcade Drone Storm with the promise of more to come.
The new eight-person, multiplayer system is said to ship with content specifically designed to leverage the unique features that can only be experienced in a location-based ‘arena-scale’ system.
Truth is oftentimes stranger than fiction, but because wide-spread, photorealistic augmented reality is still in the realm of science fiction rather than science fact, we usually defer to the storytellers and visual effects gurus to explore the possibilities. In one such sci-fi short called Strange Beasts, augmented reality is capable of delivering a realistic Tamagotchi game superimposed onto the physical world.
Written, directed and produced by Magali Barbé, Strange Beasts is a futuristic tale of a startup headed by Victor Weber, a games developer and founder of a fictional company that’s created an AR game that lets you customize, grow, and play with an AI-driven virtual pet. Parodying a promo video you might see on a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter or IndieGogo, Strange Beasts (the game) is made possible by a fictional pair of “nano retina” AR lenses that Victor says can project a digital light-field image directly on your retinas, a technology, that in effect, mimics AR company MagicLeap’s mysterious digital light-field display.
Victor then introduces his daughter, showing a heartfelt scene of the two playing with their respective fantastic pets, Walter and Bloobee. That’s when the sci-fi short leaves you pondering just who the “strange beast” really is.
Speaking to the UK’s Huffington Post, film creator Barbé says inspiration for the film first came when trying Tilt Brush (2016) in the HTC Vive. He then watched hundreds of videos about VR, AR, the latest game trends, the future of gaming, and Google Glass. “I guess watching all this put me in a specific mood, a mix of fascination and fear. I wanted to translate this feeling into film, so I’m glad that people picked up on it,” Barbé told Huffington Post.
image courtesy Magali Barbé
“Of course, I have seen those videos where people are running around everywhere chasing Pokémon, and that definitely inspired the film. I generally love reading about science and technologies. I’m always wondering about what’s next and I like to read crazy or serious theories about the future of humankind… I’m fascinated by the theory that the future of humanity will be fully digital, and that it will entirely lose its material side. People see it as either the end or the future of humanity. It’s an interesting question.”
Varjo Technologies, a Helsinki-based startup now out of stealth, recently demonstrated what it calls the world’s first human eye-resolution headmounted display. Intended for its own swath of Varjo-branded headsets, the new display configuration promises “unprecedented resolution of VR and AR content limited only by the perception of the human eye itself.”
According to a hands-on by Tech Crunch, the headset packs a pair of high-resolution Sony MicroOLED displays measuring 0.7 inches diagonally that boast 3,000 pixels per inch (PPI)—a significant jump from Oculus Rift of HTC Vive’s 447-461 PPI. Microdisplays don’t typically provide an acceptable field of view (FOV) for the purposes of VR, but Varjo is combining a few methods to provide the pixel-dense picture to an entire 100 degree FOV.
As reported by Tech Crunch, these microdisplays “fill up about a 20-degree field of view which is reflected off of mirrors in the headset while the wider scene is displayed on a more normal resolution display in the background.”
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image courtesy Ubergizmo
image courtesy Ubergizmo
image courtesy Ubergizmo
Codenamed 20|20, Varjo (meaning ‘shadow’ in Finnish) built their early prototype inside of a hacked Oculus Rift by a team of optical scientists, creatives and developers who formerly occupied top positions at Microsoft, Nokia, Intel, Nvidia and Rovio.
Billed as a “bionic display,” the prototype shown to Tech Crunch featured a “fixed focus display” that was set at the center point of the users vision, but the company says its currently building systems that will dynamically adjust the microdisplay-reflected image to your gaze thanks to the future addition of integrated eye-tracking technology.
For now, the headset is destined for professional users, as the technology will no doubt require a top-in-class computer due to the graphical constraints of delivering rendered images that can make use of the display’s high pixel density. It’s also difficult to say how a hardware-based solution will stand up to everyday use since it requires lenses to physically move every time your eye shifts position.
Comparative matrix
Effective resolution
Field of view
Varjo 20|20
70 MP
100°
Oculus, Vive
1.2 MP
100°
VR in 5 years *
16 MP
140°
HoloLens
1 MP
32°
ODG R9
2 MP
50°
Meta II
1.8 MP
100°
* Prediction 2016 by Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash at Oculus Connect 3
“Varjo’s patented display innovation pushes VR technology 10 years ahead of the current state of-the-art, where people can experience unprecedented resolution of VR and AR content limited only by the perception of the human eye itself,” said Urho Konttori, CEO and founder of Varjo Technologies. “This technology, along with Varjo VST, jump-starts the immersive computing age overnight – VR is no longer a curiosity, but now can be a professional tool for all industries.”
The high resolution display technology will be shipping in Varjo-branded products specifically for professional users and applications starting in late Q4, 2017.
Echo Arena, the VR sports game from Ready at Dawn and Oculus Studios, went back into open beta last week. Although it was supposed to end yesterday, the developers are extending the access window so Oculus Rift owners can rocket around in the game’s micro-gravity environment mere days before its official July 20th launch.
Update 07/11: Info on open beta extension added.
Celebrating a critically successful first open beta session last month, Echo Arena is back by popular demand. The game, which is technically considered a multiplayer mode for the upcoming first-person adventure Lone Echo, will be free to all Oculus Rift owners at launch later this month.
The game requires Oculus Touch, the platform’s optically-tracked motion controller.
image courtesy Ready at Dawn
Featuring a ‘full contact’, zero-G mix of Ultimate Frisbee and an exceedingly comfortable locomotion system that lets you fling yourself through virtual space, Echo Arena really hits the sweet spot of speed, comfort and replayability—something that some are calling the “killer app” of VR.
Stepping into last month’s open beta, only basic matchmaking was available and the party-creating feature wasn’t supported. According to Ready at Dawn, the goal with the second open beta was to further test network updates, skill-based matchmaking, and the first iteration of the Echo Arena Party system. Besides more pre-launch bug fixes, the teams is also prepping a ‘VR Challenger’ series, which they’ll be revealing soon.
For first time players, Oculus has published a ‘tips and tricks’ guide so you can get a better handle on the nuances of throwing the game’s disc, jetting around with your hand-mounted boosters, braking in mid-air, and maneuvering around the space so you can get a leg up on your opponent (and punch their lights out).
You can download the beta for free right now on the Oculus Store and jump in before the game officially launches on July 20th alongside Lone Echo.
Gorn, the blood-soaked battle simulator from the makers of weird and wild games Broforce (2015) and Genital Jousting (2016), is officially coming to Steam Early Access on July 10th.
Free Lives, the studio behind the game, have developed Gorn on a unique, fully physics-driven combat engine that lets you melee battle in a single-player arena against brutal AI combatants. The game is releasing on HTC Vive, and required a 360 degree tracking area with at least 2m x 2m of space to play.
If the game weren’t already enough tongue-in-cheek, the studio says in their official description that Gorn lets you “savagely strike down an infinite supply of poorly-animated opponents with all manner of weapons—from swords, maces, and bows to nunchuks, throwing knives, massive two-handed warhammers or even your blood-soaked bare hands. The only limits to the carnage are your imagination and decency, in the most brutal and savage VR face-smashing game ever produced by man.”
First released as a free demo last year for HTC Vive, Gorn showed off some basic combat against the square-jawed, “poorly animated” gladiators. Now, while in Early Access, the developers plan on adding “many, many more weapons, more enemies to fight, and hopefully a boss encounter at the end of the game to tie it together,” the developers say on the game’s Steam page.
Check out Node Studio’s latest impressions of Gorn for a better idea of what to expect.
Trying to capture what someone is experiencing when they’re head-first in a VR game has been an interesting problem to crack. By matching up live video and a digital environment with the help of a green screen setup though, you can essentially create a video that places you straight in the action—one that better communicates the immersion of a VR game than a simple first-person screen capture. Oculus recently revealed in a blog post that in the past months they’ve been working on bringing native mixed reality capture support to Oculus Rift, and it’s available today for developers to start creating mixed reality videos.
Oculus has recently published a guide to teach developers how to capture mixed reality with two important tools (besides a VR headset): a green screen and an external camera. The company says developers can create mixed reality content with either a stationary camera or a mobile camera that can be attached to a virtual, in-game object—letting you capture the scene from various vantage points and making the action even more immersive for non-VR viewers.
To help create a fixed or mobile camera that lets you capture you while in the physical world, Oculus has also provided a 3D-printable CAD model so webcams and small DSLRs can be attached to an extra Oculus Touch controller and either mounted on a tripod or supported by hand.
image courtesy Oculus
It’s not to say everyone with a VR-ready computer can create these sorts of videos though, as the requirements for mixed reality capture are likely higher than the ‘minimum spec’ published by Oculus that allowed computers as affordable as $500 to run VR games. To help out with the additional bandwidth requirements of mixed reality capture, Oculus suggests a number of components including its Oculus-approved Falcon Northwest Tiki computer (MSRP $2,899). The company hasn’t released any hard and fast requirements for mixed reality capture, but has mentioned its selected motherboards “work well” when paired with 16 GB RAM, an SSD hard drive and a GTX 1080.
As for cameras, Oculus provided support for “any USB camera,” but says that higher-spec cameras, including HDMI cameras, will predictably result in higher-quality mixed reality capture scenes.
3D printable mixed reality mount, image courtesy Oculus
Mixed reality setups are notoriously fiddly to build, and the company says their native mixed reality integration “does require numerous steps and a certain level of technical proficiency,” and that users should follow documentation “as precisely as possible, and pay special attention to the directions regarding Oculus sensor setup, USB ports, and chipsets.” Among Oculus’ setup guide, other guides for integrating mixed reality capture support Unity and Unreal apps are also available (Unity, Unreal, Native).
As pioneers of mixed reality capture, developers of breakout success Fantastic Contraption (2016) Northway Games published an extensive guide on how to set up mixed reality capture for HTC Vive headsets last year. Valve later incorporated the same green screen setup in their official announcement of the HTC Vive.
Entering the Wasteland, sneaking up on a group of raiders and shooting them down with guns in your own two hands, tossing back a Nuka-Cola, hanging out with Dogmeat; these are some the things that get fans excited about playing Fallout 4 VR. And in case you’ve been cryogenically frozen in a nuclear bunker this past year, you should know Fallout 4 (2015) is coming to HTC Vive―that and Bethesda demoed an updated build at this year’s E3, showing off an improved UI that should address some worries about porting the flatscreen game to VR headsets.
I love blowing stuff up, especially lobbing a tactical nuke onto a nearby town full of feral ghouls, but I already got a good chance to do all of that at last year’s E3 when VR support for the game was first revealed. What was critically missing in last year’s demo was Vaul-tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.)—the game’s iconic slow-mo targeting system—inventory, interacting with companions, and more definitive locomotion style.
V.A.T.S.
V.A.T.S in VR | Photo courtesy Bethesda
Activating V.A.T.S. with the select button on the right Vive controller, I enter into the familiar slow-mo mode, automatically highlighting an enemy’s bodypart by pointing at it—all the while my action points (AP) slowly dwindle. Sound pretty normal, right?
The VR version of V.A.T.S. is a bit different though, letting you teleport around and potentially flank an enemy at the same time, or giving you the ability to get up nice and close for a more accurate, but decidedly more visceral kill. It’s a different feel to the non-VR version of V.A.T.S., and I can see it being used to get out of sticky situations where normal locomotion just wouldn’t cut it (read: Death Claw).
Interacting with Companions
Last year’s demo featured Dogmeat, and I more than ever wanted to hang out with him this year and interact naturally, fully expecting something like the robot dog from Valve’s The Lab. This year’s demo revealed that interacting with Dogmeat (or any other companion for that matter) would be a pretty straight forward affair just like the PC version, i.e. choose your order through a 2D quick menu, or point where you want them to go with a tool secondary to the weapon in your hand.
Predictably, inventory is managed directly from your wrist-mounted Pipboy, letting you look at the map, manage supplies, etc. While providing a 2D system UI seems kind of lazy on the surface, being able to see and use the Pipboy in real life really adds to the immersion factor in a way a plain 2D UI just can’t.
Checking the Pipboy | image captured by Road to VR
There was also a quick menu bound to the Vive controllers touchpad that lets you get to weapons and health buffs for a quick transition that won’t leave you fiddling with the Pipboy during a battle. Not only that, when you loot someone or something (missing last year), a description automatically pops up of whatever treasure trove the baddy is carrying around. While none of this is what I’d consider incredible design for a VR game, all of this worked fairly well, which oftentimes counts more than unique inventories built from the ground-up for VR games.
Locomotion
Playing on the HTC Vive, I was shown that normal in-game movement offers smooth forward motion by clicking the top of the Vive controller’s touchpad. Since you’re tackling the open world of the Wasteland on foot, Instead of forward motion dictated solely by the position of your gaze, you can point to the direction you want to go with your controllers and look left and right while moving so you can keep a better eye out for raiders while on the move. I felt only a slight ‘heady’ feeling after popping out of the 10 minute demo—something that you’ll probably have to get used to, but not approaching anywhere near game-stopping nausea, personally speaking.
Last year’s demo was limited to teleportation-only, which felt less immersive, so all of this is a welcome sight. Can you imagine having to teleport 10 feet at a time across a map that takes at least 40 minutes to walk from end to end?
Looking Forward
Fallout 4 VR is headed to HTC Vive users onSteam sometime in Q4 2017, and is currently available for pre-order for $59.99. Bethesda says they’re planning on bringing their VR games to “as many platforms as [they] can.”
Fallout 4 VR looks to be one of the most capable monitor-to-VR port since, well, ever. I own both the HTC Vive and the PC version of Fallout 4, andafter experiencing the latest E3 demo, I’m not sure I’m thrilled about having to re-purchase a game at full price that I beat nearly 2 years ago just to play it in VR. I can’t say for sure though since I only experienced two 10-minute demos with a full year between them, so you’ll have to wait for the full review sometime later this year to know for sure.
I can confidently say this though: If you’ve never played Fallout 4 and own an HTC Vive though, this promises to be one of the longest and arguably best VR adventures coming to VR outside of Skyrim VR.
Knuckles, Valve’s unique VR motion controller, is already in the hands of select developers who are no doubt designing ways to use the controller’s 5-finger tracking. In the video published by Zulubo Productions, we get a better look at just what Knuckles can do.
The demo, first seen in a Knuckles developer guide, is designed to let devs understand the controllers’ tracking capabilities, and what sorts of fine manipulation Knuckles provides users in a virtual setting.
With plenty of objects to suspend in mid-air with an anti-gravity machine, the demo lets you get used to picking up and manipulating physics objects with each finger, and use your individual fingers to poke at flat, screen-based UI.
To grab something, pinch your index finger and thumb together. You don’t have to click the trigger or touchpad, or even touch the controller. When both fingers contact the object you’re trying to pick up, you’ll grab it. You can also grab things using your other fingers against your palm, but this is difficult unless the object is cylindrical.
Using a single finger to reliably pick something up may not sound like a technical revelation, but it isn’t so much about what a few extra fingers can do physically, but rather about creating greater ‘hand presence’, or when your subconscious accepts the digital representations as ‘real enough’. Check out more about how Knuckles does it here.
