featured – Page 34 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

November 7, 2016

Whack-a-Vote and Trump Piñata: 5 VR Experiences To Get Through Election Day

“Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die,” this ancient gladiator quote seems oddly fitting to recall on the eve of the most contentious and, let’s face it, depressing U.S. presidential election in recent memory.

This year, voters will have the privilege of choosing between a candidate with so many skeletons in her closet that she can’t even close the door (and must therefore resort to borrowing outfits from 90’s hip-hop legends), or a candidate that is the best at everything…including racism.

Personally, I will be writing in my vote. Instead of Trump/Pence or Clinton/Can’trememberhisname, I’ll be throwing my weight behind the Harrison Ford’s character in Air Force One/Bill Pullman’s character in Independence Day ticket. Unless there’s a sudden groundswell in support for early ’90s fictional presidents my plan will most likely fail and I, like most Americans, will find myself looking for a way to escape this reality all together. That’s where VR comes in.

UploadVR encourages everyone to get out and vote tomorrow and, after you do, here are five VR worlds you can dive into that are way more fun than this one.

Whack-a-Vote: Hammering the Polls

You know how when you’re really angry at someone they tell you to write them a scathing letter that you never actually send? Well rather than preparing for Civil War (and not the fun Robert Downey Jr. kind), why not take out some of that election day-stress in smashing VR style?

Whack-a-Vote: Hammering the Polls is a hilarious little VR experience for the HTC Vive created by the indie group Subreality Studios. By releasing your political frustrations with a mallet rather than a musket, hopefully we can try to avoid a repeat of the whole “bloodiest conflict in American history” thing. Plus: fun lights and sounds!

TrumPiñata

Forget emails, incriminating recordings, and hidden tax returns, the biggest question of this election has always been: is Donald Trump actually full of candy and toys? Well, here’s your chance to find out.

TrumPiñata is exactly what it sounds like. It’s Donald Trump but he’s a piñata now. You hit him with a stick and candy falls out.

AltSpace VR: Democracy Plaza

The social VR platform AltSpace VR will be hosting a live election watch party tomorrow in their digital “Democracy Plaza.”

Hearing bad news is always easier with other people to commiserate with. No matter what happens tomorrow night, chances are we could all do with someone we can look at and say “hey, it could’ve been worse,” or “pack the car we’ll make a new life in the forest with the children.”

The event kicks off tomorrow at 6 pm PT.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades

One of the most politically charged issues this campaign has been gun control. Some have argued that having more mass shootings than days of the year indicates that our nation’s attitude toward the availability of firearms needs to change. Others believe that McDonald’s should start including Lugers in its Happy Meals.

No matter how you feel about real guns, there’s no denying that firing virtual weapons can be immensely therapeutic. Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades has dozens of digital weapons for you to blast away the panic with. Plus there’s the added bonus of ensuring you know how to operate a firearm before we collapse into a Thunderdome-esque wasteland. Always be prepared.

Thrill of The Fight

When I was a kid and my brother wouldn’t let me play Zelda (even though it was clearly my turn according to the chart Mom made), I’d often resort to the time-tested tradition of beating my pillow to a pulp. That way, my puny pre-pubescent punches would only be harming a cushion rather than the face of a loved one. Why not embrace a similar philosophy for election night?

Thrill of The Fight is a VR boxing experience that will let you target your primal rage toward a digital opponent rather than something valuable like your television. Plus, it will also leave you far too exhausted at the end to be concerned with small issues like the increasingly tenuous transfer of power for a nation that is allowed to exist only as long as the people peacefully accept the outcomes of an open election….oh boy. Might be time for another round.

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Jokes aside, Please do get out and vote tomorrow. You can find your polling location here and let us know in the comments below what VR experiences you’ll be indulging in tomorrow. Go America! Freedom!

November 7, 2016

Preview: ‘Project Sansar’ Could Give Social VR Worlds a Second Life

I’ve been covering virtual reality for almost a year now. In that time my jaw has only dropped once: when I saw the whale in my very first VR experience, The Blu. Since then I have been impressed, mystified, overwhelmed, etc. many times, but I have never truly managed to recapture that “this changes everything” sensation from my first ever demo. This meant that I was as surprised as anyone to feel my jaw hit the floor earlier this week as I stepped inside Linden Lab’s project Sansar and once again saw the future being written before my very eyes.

Linden Lab is best known for the massively multiplayer online community known as Second Life. I’ll let my friend Dwight explain it to those of you who are unfamiliar.

Second Life is less of a game to play, it is more of a place to be. That place is populated by hundreds of thousands of dedicated participants all creating, enjoying and even selling digital creations for real world payouts. According to Linden Lab CEO, Ebbe Altberg, “Second Life has a GDP of around $500 million dollars,” making this virtual economy larger than that of certain smaller nations.

Following the creation of one successful online universe, Linden Lab is now poised to release a second. Its new creation, Project Sansar, has been teased in various forms during its three years in development, but now the company is finally ready to show it in action to a few lucky participants. On Tuesday, I was one of those fortunate few.

Project Sanar is as hard to describe to the uninitiated as Second Life. It is not a game, a film, a tech demo, or a specific social VR experience. Sansar is raw, limitless virtual potential that can truly be forged into the inter-connected digital world we’ve been dreaming about since Snow Crash.

In my brief demo inside the platform I walked on the surface of mars, strolled through the Scottish Highlands, explored a mysterious door to another world, examined a photorealistic Egyptian tomb, stood inside of a 360 video, and enjoyed a massive, outdoor, 4k amphitheater.

Each of these moments could be an entirely separate article on this site made by a company solely dedicated to photogrammetry ruins, or watching 360 videos. But in Sansar, these are just products born from the infinite potential of a platform that may represent our best chance at a true VR metaverse.

What sets Sansar apart from the wealth of other “social VR” applications out there are the creation tools. Apps like AltSpace VR, Oculus Social, Big Screen and Rec Room all build specific spaces for you and your friends to inhabit with pre-set activities for you to enjoy. Sansar flips that script and gives you the opportunity to create any place and enjoy activity you choose with other people.

These spaces are built using Linden Lab custom creation engine and released using their cloud-based publishing system. The world you make could be as small as a classroom for teaching biology, or a digital recreation of Westeros for taking the Iron Throne. There will also be scripting tools that enable designers to create their own games and avatar abilities (like shooting fire out of your mouth or flying) in the editor as well. Creators are encouraged by Linden Lab to design and import their own 3D assets into Sansar as well, and there will be a marketplace similar to that of Second Life‘s where users can exchange their creations for real world dollars and cents.

Each and every world I visited in Sansar was beautifully rendered, enjoyably designed and, most importantly, completely different from one another. The creators of Sansar emphasized to me over and over again that this is not an experience, it is a platform. From what I saw it is a platform that could replace many of the ancillary and disparate VR projects we’re seeing released today while democratizing the industry and exposing it to the mass creativity of the entire planet.

Sansar is shaping up to be our world’s first true exposure to science fiction programs like the “OASIS” from Ready Player One. We won’t have to wait until the far future to enjoy the project either. Linden Lab is targeting a “late Q1” release for a full Sansar release. It is currently in “creator preview” for a handful of testers.

We will have more insights from our interview with Sansar‘s creators next week. For now, start dreaming of the world you want to live in, because very soon you’ll have the ability to create it.

November 4, 2016

Exclusive: ‘The SoulKeeper VR’ Is a Glimpse Into The Future of Gorgeous Virtual Reality RPGs

It doesn’t take a whole lot to catch my interest on a personal level. If you ever see me at an event, walking down the street, or on Twitter, just mention a video game and I’ll probably have something to say about it. We can chat about The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, EverQuest, The Elder Scrolls, or anything else. If you were paying attention though, you probably noticed that every property I just listed off is based in some type of a traditional fantasy setting. That’s my sweet spot, although I love all genres.

Suffice it to say that Vanishing Realms [Review: 8/10] is still one of my personal favorite VR games and it has a lot to do with the setting, mechanics, and general premise of dungeon delving inside a virtual reality headset.

The SoulKeeper VR is a bit different in that it aims to provide a more visually immersive and overall more engrossing experience, but it taps into the same stylistic splendor that fantasy RPGs have become known for over the years.

I don’t mean to imply that The SoulKeeper VR will be on the same tier as the other properties I listed before such as D&D or The Elder Scrolls — it’s made by a small team, on a small budget, with modest ambitious — but it does serve as an exciting glimpse into the future of even more massive and ambitious VR RPGs we might see later on down the line and that’s extremely exciting.

Earlier this year, I pulled back the curtain on The SoulKeeper VR and it’s changed a lot in the months since then. In the teaser trailer near the top of this article, you’ll notice several different types of enemies, spells, weapons, environments, and more. Luckily, I can confirm it looks just as epic inside the HMD.

For starters, this new demo featured a much-needed tutorial section. It walked me through how to use my staff, sword, and spells. The staff is accessed by reaching over my left should with my left hand and pulling the trigger — similar to switching weapons in other games like Space Pirate Trainer. From here, I can tap (as in lightly touch my finger to different areas) on the touchpad to switch between the different abilities on the staff, such as a flamethrower, a teleportation spell, and an energy shield.

Similarly, I reach over my right shoulder with my right hand to grab my sword, which I can use to cut down my foes up close. The ragdoll physics and lack of haptic feedback (a common problem in melee combat for VR) was a bit immersion-breaking, but I’d imagine those issues will get ironed out over time. When either hand is empty it can pick up objects and can also draw symbols in the air to access spells. The symbols have been simplified from things like boxes and swirls to arrows and lines this time around — they’re much easier to draw accurately and quickly now.

After I passed the tutorial, I played through a more polished version of the same demo as before. However, this time, the movement system has been expanded. Previously, I could only teleport using the staff, but now there is full optional touchpad locomotion, similar to Onward, that I much prefer since motion sickness does not impact me at all. I still found myself teleporting to cover larger distances.

After I completed a simple puzzle and fought off a few enemies, the roof opened up with a mighty dragon and I was transported to a preview of a new environment, which you see in the featured image at the top of this article. The sky was dark and brooding, the cliffsides were steep and terrifying, and the massive statues were intimidating. This is the area that finally realizes the vision of a grand, immersive fantasy adventure that few VR games have accomplished thus far.

There were a couple small wyverns (small dragons) flying around a tower, but they didn’t seem hostile. Eventually, I got tired of their mocking me and slayed them with well-placed fireballs. After walking around outside a while longer, taking in the sights, I touched the large crystal at the center of the map and was met with an ending screen for my short demo.

This is still just a small slice of the world that HELM Systems is building, but fans of RPGs and fantasy games in VR such as Vanishing Realms, Roomscale Tower, and Sword Master VR, should keep their eyes on The SoulKeeper VR. Don’t be surprised if this ends up being one of the first robust, immersive, fantasy adventues you take in the metaverse.

When The SoulKeeper VR eventually releases into Early Access for a paid fee on Steam, it will be even more expanded than it is now. Currently, the alpha version of the game is being distributed exclusively to early subscribers. There is no definitive date set for the eventual Early Access other than “soon.” We’ll keep you posted on any developments.

You can also read our original story for more details about the lore and setting and keep track of the game on the official website.

November 4, 2016

‘The New Creative’: How Three Young Entrepreneurs Are Rethinking 360 Content

“360 Videos are not real virtual reality.”

If you’ve spent any time following the VR Space chances are you’ve heard that phrase more than once. As immersive and interesting as 360 videos can be, there are those that refuse to accept them as “true” VR due to their lack of interactive elements. 360 camera technology is improving all the time, but the content itself needs to improve as well if the medium wants to silence its critics within the industry. Fortunately for this emerging genre, however, a group of young San Francisco innovators setting out to make 360 videos cooler, more engaging, and, dare I say it, fun.

The SOAP Collective consists of three young entrepreneurs: Logan Dwight, Ian Hirschfield, and Jaurreau Bowen (pictured above from left to right). This team may be small, but they have a very large goal: change the way people think about 360 videos and immersive media in general.

Looking at the SOAP Trio you probably wouldn’t peg them as a group of dedicated computer programmers and audio visual geeks. The traditional coder stereotype of stained clothes, messy hair and ill-fitting garments doesn’t apply to this group of tattoo-clad, stylishly dressed millenials. The SOAP boys are, for lack of a better word, cool. And they are trying to bring that same attitude to the somewhat-stagnant world of 360 video production.

“We’ve been deeply involved in technology and media since we were kids,” Dwight writes, “[I] designed and developed my first video game when I was 9 years old. Ian has been coding websites and making movies since junior high. We’re part of the generation that grew up with the Internet, and that has given us a unique set of creative skills and tastes. We know we’re not alone either. Our creativity sits at the axis of design, illustration, animation, interaction, and code. We call this skillset “The New Creative”.

For the SOAP collective, Achieving this New Creative is the key to unlocking better immersive content. The problem, however, is that most companies — even those in creative capitals like Silicon Valley, LA and New York — fail to adequately understand the power of their employees and the roles that they fill.

We’ve felt that there hasn’t yet been a definitive industry model built around The New Creative,” Dwight writes. “Often people are silo’d into jobs that utilize one or two skills. They are meant to focus down on a limited set of tasks. There are more cases of multi-skill jobs in the startup world, but they often come paired with extremely long hours and a lack of career stability. We wanted to build a company that embraced being a ‘creative swiss-army knife’. To solve this, we wanted cover 2 major things: Ownership and Lifestyle.”

The idea of ownership for SOAP is that, “every person, no matter their job, is some form of creative. Sales, HR, Accounting, etc. are all creative in their own ways…We are dedicated to creating a sense of ‘I built this’ in every project a person works on.”

On the other side of the coin, Lifestyle is, “the idea that your work should allow you to live the way you want to live. Your work should feel like a natural part of who you are, but it should not own and define your whole life.”

By putting an emphasis on creativity and the personal empowerment of each and every employee, SOAP is hoping to transform even the most basic immersive project into a memorable, artistic experience. On of their main series, VR Love Letters, is attempting to bring emotion and intimacy to a medium that is typically used to tell broad stories.

The SOAP Collective has so far done mostly private work for banks and other types of businesses, but their goal is to push their envelope even fuller as 2017 gets closer.

“The most current news for us is that we’re expanding our studio’s focus to push strongly into room-scale 3D VR. Following a year of strong development in the 360 video space, we’ve always planned to move the business into full VR on platforms such as Rift, Vive, PSVR. Our team has a background in video game and software development, so in many ways this is a homecoming for us,” Dwight writes.

The studio describes this mystery project as being, “Not quite a video game, but not passive VR cinema either. Our goal as a studio is to find the ideal storytelling niche for VR, to create interactive virtual worlds that everyone can enjoy.”

SOAP will also continue to make and innovate 360 videos in their search for the New Creative. Whether or not you believe 360 videos is VR, these young men are determined to convince you that they are art.

Disclaimer: The SOAP Collective is currently working out of an office in The Upload Collective co-working office, which they pay for. The Upload Collective and UploadVR are separated entities under the Upload umbrella to avoid conflicts of interest. This story was written solely on the merits of this interesting studio, and has not been sponsored in any way by SOAP.

November 2, 2016

Kickstarting your imagination with AR

Hi everbody,

we´ve been discussing the hottest new hardware, tracking technologies or big cheese industry updates for the working life impact of AR. But today I wanted to get back to a bit smaller solution that I liked very much. Just a quick post. The approach reminds me of the roots of AR and what we can use it for – for fun!

It´s a prop-based AR visual effects in real-time tool that let´s your record fun videos easily. The staff from Special FX Master wants to kick off their idea via kickstarter and their pledge runs for two more days. About time to give them our support here! The kids in my family tried their system and were recording AR videos all day! Check out SFX Master with one of their videos:

It is a marker-based approach used on your phone or tablet. I like the ease of use and the number of fun props to use and how to apply them. The kids in my family (8 and 11) loved the app and wouldn´t give the tablet out of hand during the whole day (time for battery packs) running around through the house having fun.

Tracking is limited and sometimes fails or jitters, though. But the system makes sense for this concept: you add a piece of armor to your wrist or a poster to the wall to easily start without additional work to do. It can be easily understood by all kids (or adults) without any setup time. We can extrapolate how this could simply scale up with updated tracking using the upcoming Lenovo Phab Pro 2 with Project Tango tracking technology. But sometimes it´s also better to have a physical prop. During professional visual effects productions you will always have a physical prop dummy to hold in your hand, to interact with.

What I liked about it is the fact that anyone can jump right into creative AR without problems. The number of 50 props is good fun and I could witness tentacles, monsters and other creeps coming out of the fridge, the sewer, the bathtub. It´s a playful way to experiment with the tech and juggle around with your creative ideas quickly.

I hope they make the pledge and keep updating the system with more props (maybe open up the system to user content) and better tracking in the future!

Let´s just have fun with it and AR! Definitely we can learn from the youngest: after initial wonder they start using it without issues or tech-nagging and start building up their own worlds and ideas with it. Tech will grow on the way, but we must play around with the current state and be more creative with what we´ve got as of 2016. Go wild! :-)

November 2, 2016

Writers Assemble! UploadVR is Hiring Contributors To Tell The Story of Virtual Reality

Being a writer for UploadVR is just like being a member of a super team. We want to make the world a better place, we all bring our own unique abilities to the table, and at least two of us are powered by gamma radiation (because who has the time to stop and eat when deadlines are approaching?)

Our site is expanding faster than the Hulk’s thighs in those poor, purple shorts (that’s right, the superhero theme made it into paragraph two, baby!) But what’s growing even quicker is the VR industry itself. That’s where you come in.

We are sending up the Bat-signal (three in a row!) to all of the talented wordsmiths out there and asking them to join us in our personal Fortress of Solitude, which is basically just a Slack channel.

What will you do as a newly minted member of VR’s premier fighting force? In short: a lot. In long: pitch interesting stories, dominate assigned pieces, help us cover events, and lead the industry through thoughtful, original editorials. In return you’ll get the chance to impact a scene you’re passionate about, meet amazing people, and attend incredible events. Oh yeah, and we’ll also pay you money, which a lot of people seem to enjoy.

What you need you to have are the super powers we prize over everything else: talent, ambition, and creativity.

If you think you’ve got what it takes then send an email to contributors@uploadvr.com. Resumes and published writing samples are appreciated but cover letters are boring. Instead, show us your personality, your interests and your voice in your message. We don’t need a college thesis, just something that catches our eye.

So if you’ve been dying to join a team of super friends, then consider this your vat of toxic waste. Drop us a line, let’s talk, and we look forward to shaping the future with you soon!

November 1, 2016

Google’s Tango Team Has ‘Solved’ Inside-Out Positional Tracking For Wireless VR

Google’s Tango Team Has ‘Solved’ Inside-Out Position Tracking For Wireless VR

Last week, at a Google press event UploadVR had the chance to speak with Google Tango’s director of engineering, Johnny Lee. Tango is a software/hardware solution that allows smartphones and other mobile devices to understand their location in 3D space and translate that information into powerful applications and programs. According to Lee, this technology is also the key to solving one of the biggest problems in the burgeoning virtual reality industry: inside-out positional tracking for wireless VR headsets.

“We’ve solved it here,” Lee said, gesturing at a Tango-powered, Lenovo Phab 2 Pro smartphone. “As you can see [inside-out positional tracking] clearly works on this phone…We’ve even had people strap a tablet sized device with Tango built in into a custom VR headset and the positional tracking worked just as well as it does here…The only thing really holding us back right now are the thermals. Right now, phones just get way too hot if we ask them to run positional tracking and split-screen stereoscopic image at 90 fps…As Daydream matures and Tango continues to improve, the sophistication around tracking will also evolve over the next 2-3 years.“

Lee declined to comment when asked when exactly people can expect to see a commercially released VR headset with this kind of capability.

Tango’s director of product, Nikhil Chandhok, concurred with Lee’s assertions that, with Tango, inside-out positional tracking for VR is possible, but there are still hurdles to cross:

“We have it working. We can do inside-out tracking with six degrees of movement and we can do it today. There are just some concerns we need to address first. For example: how do you keep people safe when they are walking around freely with a headset on?…The VR use cases are just much more demanding than what we’re doing right now, however, there will be more interesting use cases in the future.”

Today’s high-end VR systems — the Oculus Rift, Playstation VR, and HTC Vive — all use what’s called “outside-in” positional tracking. This means that they all require some sort of camera, laser or sensor that live outside of the headset itself in order to understand their positions in space. Without these outside components, one could not lean into objects in an experience, and would be limited to the left, right, up, down, tracking currently seen in mobile VR headsets such as Google Cardboard or the Samsung Gear VR.

Inside-out positional tracking would allow virtual reality to become truly wireless and enable a whole host of incredibly powerful use cases. It is the latest “holy grail” for the VR scene, with most of the major companies scrambling to be first to market with the world’s first wireless, position-tracked HMD. At this year’s Oculus Connect conference, the Facebook-owned company showed off a prototype code-named “Santa Cruz” that utilized a form of inside-out tracking separate from Tango, and Microsoft is using its HoloLens tracking to bring the tech to wired VR headsets. Qualcomm and Intel are just a few of the companies trying to solve this problem as well.

The race is on for positional tracking supremacy.

November 1, 2016

Lenovo Phab 2 Pro: The First AR Smartphone Powered By Google Tango Arrives

Welcome to the beginning of a new age. Today, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro smartphone is officially being released. The Phab 2 Pro has several things that make it unique. It boasts a colossal 6.4 inch touch screen display (to put that in perspective, the iPhone 6 plus’ screen is 5.5 inches), a herculean 4050 maH battery that can hold a charge for up to two days, and it is the first ever smartphone to come equipped with Google’s revolutionary Tango augmented reality technology.

Tango is the brainchild of a dedicated team of engineers led by Google’s Johnny Lee. It is a combined hardware/software system that uses the phone’s camera, a depth sensor and a fistful of brilliant algorithms to create a device that is capable of understanding where it is positioned in 3D space.

According to Lee:

“In some ways you can think of [Tango] like GPS…Once we had the abilities of those systems, a whole ecosystem was birthed. Being able to know how we move in space around us is fundamentally important. When our devices are given that same sense of spacial reasoning, a whole new suite of experiences are possible”

Ever since the advent of GPS technologies, your phone has been able to pinpoint its location to a specific region. This is helpful for macro navigation and basic wayfinding, but Tango takes things a step further. With this system on board, the Phab 2 Pro is able to understand not only its position on Earth, but its position in your living room.

This is one of those broad-strokes computing revolutions that sounds simple enough on the surface but actually opens the door to an enormous number of powerful new applications and programs. One of the apps that shows off this tech’s potential the best is one of its simplest: Google Measure.

Because Tango is able to understand and “see” its immediate surroundings, it is capable of accomplishing tasks that no other smartphone could. As the above video demonstrates, with Measure you can use Tango to measure a bookcase, plot out a remodel, or tackle a number of other home improvement projects. This may seem trite but the importance of the jump in this phone’s “brain power” is significant.

Tango-enabled devices can also show you new things as well. A huge use case for the Phab 2 is augmented reality. Because it can process its environment, it can overlay digital data directly on top of the physical world to create a number of one of a kind experiences.

A Google blog post published today revealed what several of those experiences are:

Measure anything in your home from your door frame to your desk with
Visualize how furniture and appliances will look in your home with
Play dominoes anywhere without having to pack up the tiles later, with
Paint and draw on all the surfaces of your home with
Take epic selfies with your favorite dinosaurs using
Play with virtual pets with
Explore the solar system with
Build new digital worlds with
Race on your own personal race tracks with
Customize your videos with exciting 3D filters with

There was the occasional hiccup, however. As you can see in the video below, Tango’s ability to read a room is not 100 percent perfect yet. It sometimes failed to calculate angle and depth correctly during our demo, occasionally reading objects in the foreground — such as a leg — as being flush with the ground.

These blips were few and far between however, and most of the time Tango was able to understand its surroundings with high accuracy, to the point of being able to place a digital domino up on a table and having it fall onto the ground below.

The Phab 2 Pro is only the beginning for Google and its Tango platform. According to Lee there will be “many more” Tango-enabled handsets coming to market soon from a “number of manufacturers, providers and partners.” Google declined to comment on exactly which companies it’s partnering with and what sort of devices they may be working on.

The Phab Pro 2 costs $499 USD (unlocked) and is available for purchase now.

October 31, 2016

How ‘Euro Truck Simulator 2’ May Be The Most Realistic VR Driving Game

Euro Truck Simulator 2 has been around for several years now, providing players the ability to simply drive a few of trucks around stunning vistas in a specific depiction of Europe. You won’t find bombastic car chases or any kind of thrilling action set pieces in developer SCS Software’s calm simulator. The crux of Euro Truck and, more recently, American Truck Simulator, is to let players experience what it’s like to be a truck driver. It’s a grueling but adventurous job in which you can’t see your family for months on end. But still, the beautiful sights sometimes make it all worth it.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 is an authentic depiction of this job, putting you in control of highly detailed vehicles. But SCS Software is using virtual reality to take things up a notch. Now you can feel like you’re sitting in the cockpit of a prodigious truck while taking on stressful tasks, and basking in the glorious locales.

Porting Isn’t So Simple

“We were interested in trying the new technology and in improving the driving experience, as a cockpit-based simulator seemed to be a natural fit for stationary VR,” said Jiří Dvořák, senior programmer at SCS Software. “In the case of Euro Truck, VR introduces a feeling of being really present inside the truck – sometimes to a degree that the player would like to touch the wheel or dashboard. It also significantly improves the player’s immersion as looking into the mirror or through the side window becomes a natural movement.”

SCS started porting Euro Truck over to the Oculus Rift back in 2013. The studio is one of the earliest supporters of VR, and understandably so. Euro Truck thrives off of authenticity, and what better way to make players feel like they’re inside a truck without actually driving one in real life. SCS did not need to make any drastic changes to gameplay or level design since Euro Truck is already a stationary experience. But since Euro Truck is a port, and not a game built from the ground up for VR, SCS did encounter a slew of obstacles.

“Our desire to give the player the ability to look around freely might create additional complexities for design, art and optimization,” said Dvořák. “In our case the player’s ability to move their head in a big area means that s/he might be able to look at objects that could be culled otherwise.

“We still have a lot of situations where the player can see things which they shouldn’t be able to. For example, by physically moving their head far from the window they can see a side of the truck which we originally didn’t need to render before VR. Or s/he can clip through the seat as there are no real collisions, and we can not change the movement of the camera without inviting sickness.”

Latency, framerate, and motion sickness are other points of concern for SCS, just like they would be for most early VR titles. Reports of people getting severely nauseous and dizzy a few minutes into playing REVII are bold warnings to any VR devs in these early days. This is worrying as VR can, and will be, hurt by a few poor VR games hitting store shelves. First impressions are important, and the technology needs a strong start during the early adoption phase. SCS Software is well aware of the risks, with its focus falling away from achieving better visuals in order to focus on nailing aspects like framerate.

Entirely getting rid of motion sickness is looking more and more unlikely, but SCS is dealing with the problem as best it can without taking away from what makes Euro Truck enjoyable to play in the first place, but it’s a slippery slope. Its devoted fan base demands authenticity and realism in its truck simulators.

“We had people which were able to drive no problem for hours, and people which were feeling queasy unless the truck was standing still,” said Dvořák. “Unfortunately in our case we are limited in what we can do to mitigate this problem as the movement and acceleration of the truck needs to remain as realistic as possible.”

Some of the issues started to rise once the Oculus Rift changed its application program interface (API for short), and its operating system moved over to the DX10.

“The most complex part of the entire port is the UI because our UI framework was never designed for this kind of use, and the UI itself was designed to be used with a mouse on a high resolution display,” said Dvořák. “Another thing which complicated the development even further was the evolution of the Oculus API, which sometimes changed in radical ways. As we are still a DX9 game it even looked at one point like we would be unable to continue when the Oculus API started to require DX10+. Fortunately we were able to work around that.”

Just Relax And Drive

Hopefully the issues that continually plague early VR games and headsets will slowly dissipate as game makers become more acquainted with this tech. But there is plenty of early ambition in VR development. From competitive online mech shooters, to being able to put on Batman’s cowl, people already have quite a few interesting VR games to look forward to. There doesn’t seem to be a lack of creativity, which is obviously a healthy sign. While there are bigger VR spectacles for people to play, SCS hopes that Euro Truck’s slow pace will help differentiate it — fans online seem to agree.

“Our games are unique in that they offer low pressure entertainment rather than fast pacing, frantic action and violence,” said Dvořák. “We are doing our best to bring entertainment to a wide audience of all ages.”

Currently SCS doesn’t plan on making a dedicated VR-only project just yet, but it is checking if the demand is there for VR driving simulators. Improving VR support for the studio’s existing games is its way of contributing to this tech. But having different VR games to play, especially ones that don’t require fast reflexes or the hunger for fast-paced action will help with VR going mainstream. Variety is key.

“There is a zen-like feeling in the hum of your truck’s engine, a hot road stretching to the horizon, your favorite piece playing on the in-game radio, something to drink and having a chat with your friends and family,” said Dvořák. “It’s not just driving, it’s trucking. To some extent, VR can sever your last ties to the real world and immerse you even deeper into that fantasy.”

Euro Truck Simulator 2 can be purchased on Steam for $22.99, with an overall and recent rating of ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ and features support for both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, although getting it running in either headset can be a bit complicated.

What are some of your favorite VR driving games that encourage a relaxing pace and atmosphere?

Alex Gilyadov is a freelance writer with work appearing in multiple publications, such as GameSpot, VICE, Playboy, Polygon, and more. You can follow him on Twitter: @rparampampam.

October 31, 2016

Major ‘Dead and Buried’ Update Brings Heists, Zombies and Co-Op To The Oculus Touch Shooter

When Oculus Touch launches in December it may already have its killer app releasing right alongside it. Dead and Buried is one of the most exciting titles coming to the already jam packed platform. Developed in-house by Oculus Studios, Dead and Buried is a multiplayer shooter that takes place in a literal ghost town. You assume the role of an other-worldly gunslinger brought back from the grave in order to shoot some bad guys…or some good guys.

We first saw the game demonstrated at an Oculus press event during GDC 2016. At that point, the only gameplay option available was a 2v2 deathmatch that took place in an old-fashioned saloon. Even in its unpolished state, Dead and Buried was still one of the most memorable and enjoyable demos that Oculus showed off at that event. Months later, at Oculus Connect 3, the company pulled back the curtain on the new and improved version of this hotly anticipated title.

The new version of Dead and Buried steps up an already interesting experience with the addition of two new game modes: horde and co-op. The horde mode, which Oculus Studios co-developed with Gunfire Games, lets you take your guns off of your friends and aim them instead at wave after wave of undead enemies.

The main antagonist of horde mode is a banshee-esque witch and her zombie army. You and three friends spawn into one of four cover points set up horizontally from one another. Your job is to gun down monstrosities trying to peel away your cover, and have you for dinner, while keeping yourself and your friends alive.

If you’re killed during the round you remain out-of-service until the next one begins which means there are some true hero-moments where one player can save a session for the rest of the team. There are a variety of enemy types to be aware of including standard zombies, suicide bombers, and even snipers. Each wave gets successively harder and the demo we saw culminated in a boss fight with the witch herself.

The horde mode had our team shouting like maniacs in the middle of a crowded convention hall without hesitation. It’s challenging, entertaining, and a fantastic example of co-operative multiplayer gaming, which is something we have not seen much of on VR platforms just yet. Anyone who’s ever played “what would we do in the zombie apocalypse with their friends will enjoy this immensely.

Every great western needs a great heist and Dead and Buried is no exception. In heist mode you and a friend will compete against two other human opponents as either a duo of lawmen or a posse of outlaws. The robbery, of course, takes place on a train that is divided into several different levels. In each level you need to kill your opponents a certain number of times to either advance up the train as the bandits, or push them back as the sheriffs.

If the ne’er do wells reach the front of the train then they must accomplish one last objective by breaking into a safe using a classic dial-style combination lock. But it won’t be easy as Johnny law is still hot on their tail, guns a-blazing. In this final level one outlaw takes on the safe while another takes on the fuzz with a large shield to aid him or her in that ignoble quest.

Trying to physically spin a dial in real time while bullets are exploding all around you is…stressful to say the least. During our attempt at the great train robbery we dominated all the way until the safe and then lost in spectacular fashion. But maybe we wouldn’t have if DAVID KNEW HOW TO USE A FREAKING SHIELD. Deep breaths Joe, deep breaths.

As fantastic as these two new gameplay modes are, Oculus Studios confirmed on the show floor that there is still more content to be packed into what is shaping up to be a must-have title for day one of the Oculus Touch launch. These other updates include more heists, more guns, and we’re sure, a whole lot more fun.

Dead and and Buried releases on December 6, the same day as Oculus Touch.