Category: chroma lab

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Something for the Weekend: Discounts on Steam

For those who may find themselves looking for something now to play over the next week on their HTC Vive, Oculus Rift or OSVR, we have just the thing. VRFocus has delved into Steam’s library of virtual reality (VR) titles to find discounts for the budget-conscious.

Assetto Corsa

Compatibility: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, OSVR

For those who don’t fancy waiting for Project Cars 2 or Gran Turismo Sport, there is another option. Driving simulator Assetto Corsa is available at a 60% discount, reducing it to just £9.19 (GBP). Alternatively there are DLC or Season Pass bundles available for £11.99 or £5.16, a saving of 60% and 71% respectively.

Elite Dangerous

Compatibility: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, OSVR

Elite Dangerous doesn’t really need an introduction. A vast multiplayer space opera where players can get control of a small spaceship and then proceed to do… pretty much anything they fancy. The base version of Elite Dangerous is on sale for £13.39, a 33% discount. Or you can buy the Elite Dangerous: Commander Deluxe Edition for £26.79, also a 33% discount.

FORM

Compatibility: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift

Adventure-puzzle title FORM is offering surreal exploration for a discount. The sci-fi puzzler by Charm Games is available for £8.99, a 40% discount off the usual price of £14.99.

Chroma Lab screenshot1

Chroma Lab

Compatibility: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift

For those who miss the gold old days of trippy WinAmp visualisations, this particle physics simulator might just be for you. The recently launched title is being offered for £3.59, a 10% discount on the usual price.

The Sniper VR

Compatibility: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift

As you would expect from a videogame with that title, The Sniper VR is all about cutting down foes from a distance. There’s even a stabilisation system for those who don’t have the steadiest of hands. The Sniper VR can be bought for £8.24, a 25% discount.

Dead Effect 2 VR screenshot

Dead Effect 2 VR

Compatibility: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift

The latest addition to the popular Dead Effect franchise by Badfly Interactive brings the first-person shooter into VR. The title is available to buy for £11.99, a discount of 20% on the usual price.

Final Soccer VR

Compatibility: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift

One for the Football fans (Soccer to our readers in the US). Experience what it is like to be a goalkeeper or striker, hone your skills with animations made my motion capture of real football players. Final Soccer VR is available for £7.49, a 50% discount. Or you can by the VR Arcade bundle with four titles for £24.56, a 56% discount.

A Legend of Luca

Compatibility: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift

A VR rogue-like RPG using Greek/Roman mythology as a basis. Players can pick up one of the ‘weapons of virtue’ and enter procedurally generated dungeons to hunt down evil. A Legend of Luca is available for £7.49 at a 50% discount, or can be bought along with the soundtrack for £9.49, also a 50% discount.

VR Regatta – The Sailing Game

Compatibility: HTC Vive, Oculus Rift

If you’ve ever wanted to go sailing, but live too far from the water, fear not, there is an answer. In VR Regatta – The Sailing Game, players can learn the intricacies of running a sailing yacht without ever getting wet. The title is available for £7.25, a discount of 34%.

Aeon

Compatibility: HTC Vive

A VR shooter title that discards intricate story in favour of fast-paced action. Players start out with a pair of swords and two guns and then are charged with cutting down the enemy, with a bullet-time slow motion mechanic to make things easier. Aeon is available for £15.19, a 20% discount.

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Listen to the Colour of Your Dreams With Chroma Lab

Something about the immersive nature of virtual reality (VR) seems to make it attractive to creators who have a slightly more psychedelic view of the world. From the neon-lit distortion of Rez Infinite, to the bizarre trippy world of Polybius, and some of the more esoteric creations in Tilt Brush. Another entry into this specific VR sub-genre is particle physics and fluid simulator Chroma Lab.

At its heart, Chroma Lab is a custom particle physics engine that uses the power of modern graphics cards to calculate the millions of forces that act upon particles in order to allow them to behave like a fluid. This engine is used to create a VR experience the is somewhat like an interactive version of old-school music visualisations such as those found in WinAmp.

Chroma Lab gif

The particles will react with background music, with most external music players being compatible with the application. The particles can be controlled with variety of settings, including some simple presets to get users started. There is a choice of different particle shaders and colour palettes available, along with other more advanced settings to play with, including the optional ‘lava lamp’, ‘Gravity’ and ‘Black hole’ modes. Time is also a controllable variable, with the option to freeze the simulation in place, or slow time to a crawl.

Chroma Lab is available on Steam for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with Touch. It is currently available with a 10% launch discount, priced at £3.59 (GBP), compared to the usual price of £3.99.

Further information and updates can be found on the Steam store page.

VRFocus will bring you further news on Chroma Lab and other Steam VR titles as it becomes available.

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Chroma Lab Is A Trippy Particle Physics Sandbox Available Now On Vive and Rift

Chroma Lab Is A Trippy Particle Physics Sandbox Available Now On Vive and Rift

Mesmerizing particle physics simulator Chroma Lab is now available on Steam for $4.99.

It works with both Vive and Rift and lets you use your hands to interact with colorful particles floating around you. The particles behave like a fluid and can be toyed with as they react realistically to the ways you play with them.

According to UK-based developer Sean Tann, the particles will even react to background music like a psychedelic music visualizer. You can “pick up, hit, pull, explode, shoot and paint the particles,” according to Tann, or even place spheres that can teleport particles or set up blobs in orbit.

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‘Chroma Lab’ Teaser Shows Mesmerizing Interaction with Massive Particle Simulations

VR design is still in the very early stages, but something that we know leads to immersion in VR is interactivity. One developer is taking interactivity to the extreme with Chroma Lab, a forthcoming VR experience that will let you play with hundreds of thousands of simulated particles.

VR gives us the opportunity to simulate the real world and its physical laws to step into situations that we couldn’t otherwise practically experience, like driving a racecar or flying a plane. But what about simulations of the impossible, like commanding hundreds of thousands of floating pulsating rainbow particles?

Reddit user ‘Set111’ is developing Chroma Lab to let you do just that, and an early teaser looks absolutely mesmerizing:

Set111 calls Chroma Lab a “particle physics sandbox,” and says that more than 100,000 particles are simulated in VR at 180Hz using a custom GPU accelerated physics engine. The developer says the physics engine was written using HLSL compute shaders. Set111 plans to release the sandbox for free initially (“soon”) and then release DLC down the road to add more features. The experience is “a toy for now,” but the developer is considering adding game modes in the future. The game has only been shown on the HTC Vive for now, though there’s a chance that the Rift will see support through SteamVR as well.

The developer says that the game and its custom physics engine doesn’t rely on any vendor-specific rendering technology and is therefore optimized to run on any VR ready GPU, be it AMD or NVIDIA.

SEE ALSO
NVIDIA PhysX Demo Shows Rigid Body Physics Interactions on a Massive Scale

Without imposing the high fidelity rendering bar required for VR, Set111 says the physics engine written for Chroma Lab is capable of simulating 1.6 million particles at 60Hz on an AMD R9 290 (a four year old GPU); today’s high-end cards would presumably be able to push that much further. A video from the developer, which appears to be the Chroma Lab physics engine at an earlier stage of development, shows 400,000 particles simulated at 60Hz:

Responding to comments on Reddit about the Chroma Lab teaser, Set111 explains a bit more about the simulation and its limitations:

There is no limit to the amount of particles apart from VRAM and size. Ignoring overhead, rendering and counting sort, computational time is O(N) for all particle stuff and interactions (well apart from one). Increasing play space also slightly increases comp time due to counting sort and it massively increases VRAM usage. I could use a repeating grid for infinite playspace but it is not necessary for my game and having the particles in a fixed grid will be useful for future physics additions.

Assuming the fluid is not compressed, internal particles interact with about 55 others per iteration consistently.

All the particle calculations and data manipulation runs entirely on the GPU. The CPU barely does anything.

In addition to all the simulated particles, the developer says that the sandbox will have reactive music which should add some sonic spice to this visual feast.

I wouldn’t have guessed it, but Set111 says this is their first time developing a game, and that the impetus behind the project was to use it as a learning experience.

Chroma Lab‘s mesmerizing and reactive visuals remind us of Cabbibo’s work, who was recently interview by the Voices of VR podcast.

The post ‘Chroma Lab’ Teaser Shows Mesmerizing Interaction with Massive Particle Simulations appeared first on Road to VR.

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Massive Particle Simulation Playground ‘Chroma Lab’ Launches on SteamVR

VR design is still in the very early stages, but something that we know leads to immersion in VR is interactivity. One developer is taking interactivity to the extreme with Chroma Lab, a VR experience now available on SteamVR that lets you play with hundreds of thousands of simulated particles in real-time.

Update (8/23/17): Chroma Lab is now available. This article, which was originally published on 3/28/17 and overviewed the game before it was launched, has been broadly updated with the latest information.

VR gives us the opportunity to simulate the real world and its physical laws to step into situations that we couldn’t otherwise practically experience, like driving a racecar or flying a plane. But what about simulations of the impossible, like commanding hundreds of thousands of floating pulsating rainbow particles?

Developer Sean Tann has developed Chroma Lab to answer that question. The game launched this week on SteamVR with support for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and will soon come to the Oculus store.

Tann calls Chroma Lab a “particle physics sandbox,” and says that more than 100,000 particles are simulated in VR at 180Hz using a custom GPU accelerated physics engine. He says the physics engine was written using HLSL compute shaders and that the game doesn’t rely on any vendor-specific rendering technology and is therefore optimized to run on any VR ready GPU, be it AMD or NVIDIA.

Image courtesy Sean Tann

The initial experience launched this week and is enjoying a 10% launch discount, pricing it at a modest $4.50. The experience is “a toy for now,” but the developer is considering adding game modes in the future and considering DLC as well. Here’s what Tann he calls the game’s key features:

  • Beautiful, psychedelic visuals
  • Particles react to background music (any external music player is compatible, may not work with Bluetooth headphones)
  • Tools to pick up, hit, pull, explode, shoot and paint the particles
  • Placeable force spheres which can also teleport the particles between one another
  • Save and load scenes and settings, also there are a few presets to get started with
  • Adjustable physics settings to change how the particles behave
  • Multiple different particle shaders, color pallets and other graphics settings to choose from
  • Throw blobs into orbit and create black holes
  • Optional gravity and “lava lamp” mode
  • Freeze the simulation and step through it or slow time to a crawl
  • Great as a first VR experience
  • MixCast support for easy mixed reality
  • Native Oculus Rift support
  • Number of particles can be automatically determined or manually chosen
  • Scale and bounding walls can be adjusted allowing Chroma Lab to be played from sitting to room scale

Without imposing the high fidelity rendering bar required for VR, Tann says the physics engine written for Chroma Lab is capable of simulating 1.6 million particles at 60Hz on an AMD R9 290 (a four year old GPU); today’s high-end cards would presumably be able to push that much further. A video from the developer, which shows the Chroma Lab physics engine at an earlier stage of development, shows 400,000 particles simulated at 60Hz:

Responding to comments on Reddit about the earlier Chroma Lab teasers, Tann explains a bit more about the simulation and its limitations:

There is no limit to the amount of particles apart from VRAM and size. Ignoring overhead, rendering and counting sort, computational time is O(N) for all particle stuff and interactions (well apart from one). Increasing play space also slightly increases comp time due to counting sort and it massively increases VRAM usage. I could use a repeating grid for infinite playspace but it is not necessary for my game and having the particles in a fixed grid will be useful for future physics additions.

Assuming the fluid is not compressed, internal particles interact with about 55 others per iteration consistently.

All the particle calculations and data manipulation runs entirely on the GPU. The CPU barely does anything.

Tann is a recent master of electrical engineering graduate who says he’d been developing the project in his spare time at University since January 2016, except for the last few months leading up to launch when he opted to go full time on it. I wouldn’t have guessed it, but Tann says it’s his first time developing a game, and that the impetus behind the project was to use it as a learning experience.

SEE ALSO
NVIDIA PhysX Demo Shows Rigid Body Physics Interactions on a Massive Scale

Chroma Lab‘s mesmerizing and reactive visuals remind us of Cabbibo’s work, who was recently interview by the Voices of VR podcast.

The post Massive Particle Simulation Playground ‘Chroma Lab’ Launches on SteamVR appeared first on Road to VR.