Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
MLB: The Show 17 introduces a new “Retro Mode” this year, making it easier for less experienced players to join in on the fun. More information on the mode will be unveiled in February.
The post ‘MLB: The Show 17’ Retro Mode takes baseball gamers back to the 8-bit basics appeared first on Digital Trends.
Home run! Great hit! Awesome swing! These are words that I never heard during my short lived little league baseball career. However, if I had been able to access Trinity VR’s technology at the time, perhaps I would have.
Trinity VR is an ambitious new virtual reality company behind DiamondFX — an experience that combines the immersive power of the HTC Vive with the unending statistics of Major League Baseball. The result is a virtual pitching machine that can throw Justin Verlander’s fastball or Clayton Kershaw’s curve. I had the chance to try DiamondFX at the Upload offices in San Francisco and the results were that I struck out…a lot.
If you’ve ever wanted to know how difficult it is to hit a 90 mph fastball the answer is: very. DiamondFX uses an actual, wooden, regulation MLB bat with a jerry-rigged Vive controller on the handle to determine your position in the digital ballpark it has created. The software behind the experience then crunches a herculean amount of statistical information to create a pitcher that throws just like the professional pitcher of your choice. I chose Verlander and soon recognized the gravity of my mistake.
The digital ball whisked by me at lightning speeds without me laying so much as a grain of wood on the cowhide. I struck out again and again only to be eventually informed that the app wasn’t even set to true “professional” settings during my run. My handlers flipped that switch and then I could hardly even see the ball I was trying to hit. Professional baseball, it seems, will not be a part of my life story.
But DiamondFX may indeed be part of the story for a number of MLB franchises. According to Rahat Ahmed, co-founder and chief strategy officer for Trinity VR:
“We’re in discussions with a few MLB teams at the moment as we are actively looking for developmental partners. We know there’s still a lot to do, but we believe DiamondFX has the capability of being the next generation of Moneyball: Our goal isn’t just to help you fix your swing but to help teams draft better, sign free agents more intelligently and engage with fans more effectively. It’s an all-encompassing platform that uses VR as a foundational tool to deliver teams higher quality data in large volumes as to help coaches, executives, scouts and players to make the best decisions possible.
…The reception has been very solid. From what we know, we’re the only top-to-bottom solution where we’re not only recreating pitchers but also capturing high levels of data from the batter in one system. That allows us to tell more “complete” stories to aid predictive analysis. Ultimately, though, we actively listen to domain experts to continue to improve the product. “
From my perspective, DiamondFX is an impressive tool for batting practice and, according to Ahmed, the goal is to create an adversary for pro-batters that is indistinguishable from a real world pitcher:
The core of our tech is to replicate a professional pitcher—because those guys aren’t going to come to your team’s practice. We do this with a combination of taking in existing pitching data that Major League Baseball has tracked for nearly a decade and re-creating it within a game engine. We have an in-house custom physics engine that can now replicate most pitches to about 95% accuracy.
Trinity VR has kept DiamnondFX in stealth mode until recently but is now ready to begin unveiling it more significantly to the world. DiamondFX may be new but Trinity VR has been around for a while now. According to Ahmed:
For those who’ve followed the VR industry for a few years, our name probably rings a bell because we started off as a motion controller and tracking company. Back in 2014, we had a product called the Trinity Magnum that was a bit too early for its time. We followed that up in 2015 with a haptics-based shotgun for Starbreeze’s The Walking Dead VR Experience. But a year ago, as news was coming out regarding competing input and tracking, we looked at our expertise and asked ourselves, “How can we build something that goes beyond just interaction—what if we could capture data?” We have some in-house experience in data that allowed us to treat VR as a tool for creating low-cost simulations, an idea that we first decided to apply to professional baseball because we believed the market was sizable and the technology was ready.
Ahmed explained that Trinity VR has completed a successful round of “internal fundraising” but is now, “at the precipice of a much larger round…That being said, we want to get baseball right first. It’ll give us the credibility to move onto other sports/industries.”
Trinity VR will be showcasing DiamondFX further this week at CES 2017 in Las Vegas.
Tagged with: baseball, diamondfx, pitcher, pitching, simulation, simulator, swing, trinity vr
The best selling video game of all time is Wii Sports. This title came bundled with the Nintendo Wii console from which it derives its name, and to date has sold over 82 million copies, by virtue of its bundled nature. Wii Sports served as an instantly playable demonstration of what the Wii’s motion controls were capable of from the get-go. Since everyone knows how to play tennis, swinging a small white remote to move a digital racket helped newcomers connect with this never-before seen platform.
Today, gaming once again has a new platform to contend with: Virtual reality. And once again, traditional sports are being used to teach us how to play all over again.
VR Sports Challenge is the first virtual reality title from Sanzaru Games, an organization best known so far for Sonic Boom on the 3DS and its remastered ports of both God of War and Sly Cooper. VR Sports Challenge will be bundled for free with the highly anticipated Oculus Touch controllers when they release on December 6th, 2016. The game lets you try your new virtual hands at four sports: baseball, basketball, hockey, and American football. However, rather than relegating itself to a simple collection of mini-games, VR Sports manages to create a surprising amount of depth and cohesion which should serve as an example for how to do games of this ilk going forward.
Everything in VR Sports is tied together by the idea of Franchises. No matter what sport you’re playing it all connects back to an overall franchise that can be managed from a virtual office space. In your new mahogany throne room you have the chance to examine your trophies, pick your sponsors, and switch up your team name as you go. Franchise mode helps the disparate athletic experiences in VR Sports feel as if they belong to something bigger. This is a welcome shift from the play-it-and-move-on routine that other gaming collections typically stick to and feels reminiscent of the sporting theme of RIGS.
The sports themselves are also surprisingly deep. While you do have the chance to simply play 3-point shootout, hockey fighting, home run derby, or other vertical slices of each game, the core experiences each do their best to create a more fulfilling experience.
In football you play as both the quarterback coordinating the perfect drive, and the all-star receiver he is passing to. In basketball you switch from player to player as the ball is passed and you jockey for the perfect scoring position. In hockey you play as the goalie until you make enough saves and then, suddenly you find yourself in the skates of a forward making a fast break towards the opposite net, etc. etc.
Each position you move to offers a new way to use the Touch controllers and this really is the core of what VR Sports is all about. It’s a showcase for these new devices, a sort of hyper-extended tutorial that keeps the process of discovery feeling fresh and fun. Each blocked shot, swished basket and perfect pass teaches you something new about Touch and helps bond you to the product.
This isn’t to say that the experience is perfect, however. VR Sports tries to do a lot. There’s at least a dozen different game mechanics across all the different sports. Most of these work well and many of them are truly brilliant utilizations of the controllers, but some of them have their problems. If you’re not careful you’ll miss the occasional shot in hockey, fumble a dribble in basketball or strike out in home run derby. Most, if not all of these can be avoided by adjusting your sensors, body position or adding a little extra concentration, but they are notable none the less.
Multiplayer is also sorely missed in VR Sports Challenge. It’s a blast to pass the headset around your living room and watch your friends try to score touchdowns and hit home runs, but it would have been amazing to have some sort of competitive mode both locally and over the internet, especially in 2016 where online multiplayer is essentially a requirement for competent sports titles.
VR Sports Challenge is a fantastic entry point for Oculus Touch users and a truly enjoyable experience in its own right. It has hours of content, nearly infinite replayability, and enough creatively designed game modes to keep you coming back again and again. This is much more than a simple launch-day mini-game collection and if this is the type of game Oculus is giving away for free, we can’t wait to see what it comes up with next.
Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Tagged with: baseball, basketball, football, hockey, oculus touch, Sanzaru, VR sports challenge