Battlefield 2042’s open beta starts next week. Here’s when you can play
Battlefield 2042's beta will start earlier for EA Play subscribers or customers who have pre-ordered the game already.
Battlefield 2042 officially delayed following earlier rumors
Battlefield 2042 will now release on November 19, four weeks after its original release date.
Battlefield 2042 will feature fan-favorite maps from previous games
Two more game modes are also being revealed for Battlefield 2042 before the game launches this coming October.
Battlefield V to get final stand-alone update in June, weekly rewards to follow
DICE will continue its anti-cheating initiatives
This Year’s DICE Awards Finalists List Features Lots Of VR Games
With over 20 different award categories, the 23rd annual DICE Awards have released their list of finalists, including two entire categories just for immersive reality, and it features lots of VR games across multiple awards.
The winners will be announced at the DICE Awards ceremony on Thursday, February 13th at Aria Resort Las Vegas as the culmination of the week-long industry gathering at the 2020 D.I.C.E. Summit. For the fourth year in a row the show will be hosted by Greg Miller and Jessica Chobot.
At the DICE Awards the two VR-focused categories are Immersive Reality Technical Achievement and Immersive Reality Game of the Year. You can see the full list of nominees below:
Immersive Reality Technical Achievement
Asgard’s Wrath
Blood & Truth
Pistol Whip
Stormland
Westworld Awakening
Immersive Reality Game of the Year
Asgard’s Wrath
Blood & Truth
Pistol Whip
The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets
Trover Saves the Universe
Both are very good lists. Every game nominated in these two DICE Award categories made appearances in our own Best VR Of 2019 Awards and they’ve done a great job picking titles that represent a wide gamut of what VR can offer. And it’s focused on actually new releases.
Beyond those we’ve also got some VR and VR-optional games showing up in other categories too. PSVR-exclusive Concrete Genie, which includes some side VR content, is nominated in both Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction and Outstanding Technical Achievement — deservedly when taking the entire game into account. We’ve also got another PSVR-exclusive getting some love with Golem showing up in the nominee list for Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition. Finally, the VR-optional DiRT Rally 2.0 is nominated for a DICE Award in the Racing Game of the Year category.
Who do you think will take home the honors for each category at the DICE Awards next month? Let us know down in the comments below!
The post This Year’s DICE Awards Finalists List Features Lots Of VR Games appeared first on UploadVR.
Redemption? Star Wars Battlefront II gets The Rise of Skywalker goodies Tuesday
A new free update for Star Wars Battlefront II has added The Rise of Skywalker content to the game, including a new forest planet, new appearances for several heroes, and new playable characters.
Researchers Develop Method to Boost Contrast in VR Headsets by Lying to Your Eyes
A team of researchers from Cambridge, Berkeley, MIT, and others has developed a novel method for boosting perceived contrast in VR headsets. The method exploits human stereo vision by intentionally mismatching elements of the view seen by each eye; the brain resolves the conflict in a way that boosts perceived contrast, the researchers say.
In the latest round of VR headsets, most major headset makers have moved from OLED displays to LCD displays. The latter offers greater pixel density, a reduced screen door effect, and likely lower cost, with the biggest trade-off being in contrast ratio. While OLED displays offer a wide contrast range and especially deep blacks, LCD displays in today’s headsets deliver a more ‘washed-out’ look, especially in darker scenes.
Researchers from Cambridge, Durham, Inria, Université Côte d’azur, Berkeley, Rennes, and MIT have developed a novel method which could help boost perceived contrast in VR headsets. The system is called DiCE, which stands for ‘Dichoptic Contrast Enhancement’. In a paper published earlier this year in the ACM Transactions on Graphics journal, the researchers say the method has “negligible computational cost and can be directly used in real-time VR rendering.”
The researchers say that while tone mapping methods can boost perceived contrast in images, they are too slow and computationally expensive for practical use in VR rendering. Instead they propose a system which exploits the natural behavior of the human stereo vision system fool it into perceiving greater contrast.
Generally speaking, the goal in VR headsets is to always render stereo-accurate views; if the image shown to each eye has unexpected differences, it creates ‘binocular rivalry’ (AKA stereo-conflict) which can be visually uncomfortable as it creates a mismatch which is difficult for the brain to properly fuse into a coherent image. The DiCE method aims to exploit mismatched stereo images for enhanced contrast while preventing binocular rivalry. A video summary explains:
A key component to the method is figuring out how to render the images to enhance contrast without causing significant binocular rivalry. The researchers say they devised an experiment to determine the factors which lead to binocular rivalry, and then designed the stereo-based contrast enhancement to avoid those factors.
The main challenge of our approach is striking the right balance between contrast enhancement and visual discomfort caused by binocular rivalry. To address this challenge, we conducted a psychophysical experiment to test how content, observer, and tone curve parameters can influence binocular rivalry stemming from the dichoptic presentation. We found that the ratio of tone curve slopes can predict binocular rivalry letting us easily control the shape of the dichoptic tone curves.
After finding an approach which minimizes binocular rivalry, the researchers tested their findings, claiming “our results clearly show that our solution is more successful at enhancing contrast and at the same time much more efficient [than prior methods]. We also performed an evaluation in a VR setup where users indicate that our approach clearly improves contrast and depth compared to the baseline.”
The researchers believe the work is well suited for VR rendering, noting, “as tone mapping is usually a part of the rendering pipeline, our technique can be easily combined with existing VR/AR rendering at almost no [computational] cost.” The team even went so far as to publish a Unity Asset package for other researchers to play with.
The research team included Fangcheng Zhong, George Alex Koulieris, George Drettakis, Martin S. Banks, Mathieu Chambe, Fredo Durand, and Rafał K. Mantiuk.
The post Researchers Develop Method to Boost Contrast in VR Headsets by Lying to Your Eyes appeared first on Road to VR.
‘Battlefield V’ adds Squad Conquest mode in ‘Lightning Strikes’ update
Electronic Arts and DICE have detailed what is included in the Battlefield V update Lightning Strikes. The update includes access to the mode Squad Conquest through the end of January.
The post ‘Battlefield V’ adds Squad Conquest mode in ‘Lightning Strikes’ update appeared first on Digital Trends.
EA and Dice give us a taste of the first ‘Battlefield V’ Tides of War update
Battlefield V developer Dice has detailed the first Tides of War update coming to the game December 4. It will include a new campaign mission and multiplayer map, as well as other quality of life changes.
The post EA and Dice give us a taste of the first ‘Battlefield V’ Tides of War update appeared first on Digital Trends.
The best weapons in Battlefield 5
As of Summer 2020, Battlefield 5 will not be receiving any further updates. Here are the best weapons to use for each class in Battlefield 5's multiplayer.