Eye-tracking is arguably one of the most important pieces of VR’s future, and SensoMotoric Instruments (SMI) and Valve are working together to bring the tech closer to reality.
As reported by Tom’s Hardware, SMI partnered with Valve to integrate its eye-tracking tech into OpenVR SDK and API, which will allow other companies to implement support into their VR software. Not only that, but the pair have also successfully integrated SMI’s tech into select HTC Vive units.
Those units have been shipped out to research partners who are currently busy toiling away at getting the most out of VR eye-tracking. In fact, this tech is apparently behind the mixed reality face-scanning tech that Google demonstrated last week, bringing a user’s full face into these videos. It’s not clear if Valve or HTC currently has any plans to offer any sort add-on device for consumers to bring eye-tracking to Vive, nor if a future iteration of the device includes it, though the latter is a safe bet, no matter how far off it is.
On the surface, eye-tracking might only appear to be useful as another means of input for VR experiences, but its importance actually runs far deeper than that. Firstly, the tech is vital for foveated rendering, a term that refers to a VR experience only fully rendering its graphics directly in the center of where a user’s eyes are looking. This hugely efficient process means apps won’t have to render a full screen at all times, and could feasibly lower the barrier to entry for VR hardware.
That’s something that eye-tracking headset FOVE is looking into, as announced this week, and will no doubt become an important feature of many devices in the future.
Furthermore, eye-tracking will one day be essential to recreating virtual avatars of ourselves for social VR experiences. If our virtual bodies are to become truly indistinguishable from our real ones, then incredibly accurate eye-tracking will be required, the kind not seen by any current device.
We’re hoping to go eyes-on with this solution at GDC this week, so stay tuned.
At GDC 2017, Unity held a keynote discussing their impact on the gaming industry, future updates to the engine, and much more. The Unity engine and titular company have been very accommodating when it comes to VR development, having added a feature that even allows developers to work within VR and provided the framework that makes it easier to develop for VR in general. Thus, it’s no surprise that the new 5.6 update to the engine included a couple announcements that benefit VR platforms. The update itself also now has a release date.
The focuses on stage were the fixes for the NavMesh and the progressive lightmapper that adds improved lighting workflow with path tracing solutions & flexible ways to merge shadows. In between details on features, they brought up surprise guests to demo the new Power Ranger Legacy Wars mobile game. The original Green Ranger himself, Jason David Frank, and the Black Ranger in the new film, Ludi Lin. The two played a match against each other, which was won by the Green Ranger of course, and then they shared another announcement for Unity 5.6. For Android and iOS, 5.6 adds support for Google Daydream and Google Cardboard and the full launch of the update will happen on March 31st.
Unity 5.6 also will ship with support for the Vulkan API, a GPU standard from Khronos Group who announced updates to the API and the new VR/AR standard OpenXR at GDC this year. The demo shown on stage was for a mobile game which showed 10%-15% reduction in power consumption when using the Vulkan API over OpenGL|ES. Hopefully, with the added VR extension for the API, immersive experiences will see a rise in efficient computing for the highly demanding virtual experiences.
If you’d like to get early access to Unity engine features, you can join the beta via their website with 5.6 as part of the beta as of today. Stay tuned to UploadVR for more news from GDC 2017.
We’re not even one year into the release of the current crop of VR HMDs and mobile headsets, and while sales are in the millions, it’ll still be a while before every household has a VR device or every person walks around the city with AR-equipped glasses. So what will it take for VR and AR to be an omnipresent technology? Price is certainly one important factor, but Epic Games’ founder Tim Sweeney thinks it’ll come down to two things: better optics and smaller form factor.
“To displace monitors and keyboards and mice and become truly the way we do all these things in real life, you’re going to need about 4K resolution per eye,” Sweeney concludes. “And miniaturization that’s much more convenient to wear all day, every day.”
Thankfully, Sweeney doesn’t see these hurdles as issues that will take long to overcome.
“All these things are already happening; Moore’s law alone will get us to 4K per eye,” Sweeney postulates. “There are multiple manufacturers building 4K LCDs that are smartphone-sized, and as soon as they’re miniaturized and built into OLEDs, that’ll be the next step.”
In case you’re not familiar, Moore’s law states the density of transistors a circuit board can hold doubles about every two years, and that means smaller size, greater computing power and reduced weight.
“Reducing the weight is just a matter of componentization,” explains Sweeney. “Remember what computers looked like 20 years ago and what they look like now, and think about everything Apple packs into a tiny iPhone package. If you open it up you’ll see they’ve designed custom circuit boards and custom components that all mesh together in these amazingly compact ways — that’s all coming to VR and AR.”
“I think what we’re seeing in VR is we have not yet even gone through a single cycle in which custom hardware has been built just for the application; we’ve been repurposing cameras and displays and motion sensors from smartphones,” Sweeney continues. “When someone starts designing from the ground up for VR, the results are going to be staggering, not only in the quality and capabilities, but also the ability to be reduced into a more convenient form factor.”
While Sweeney believes the technology will hit great strides in comfort and usability over the next few years, it may be a bit longer until we’re at the point where it’s as ubiquitous as smartphones.
“I think we’re on a 10-to-12-year track until the display part of VR and AR is reduced to the size of your glasses — no more weight, no more inconvenience, something you can wear all the time and make part of your everyday, ordinary life.”
Tim pauses for a second before adding an important and clever clarification, “And if it looks goofy, that’s okay… it’ll Photoshop everyone else’s out in real-time.”
The most memorable part of Blade & Soul Table Arena wasn’t the game itself — which is a lot like Dragon Front if it leaned toward real-time strategy more than a trading card game.
Blade & Soul is a massively multiplayer online game that premiered in Korea from Ncsoft. This Table Arena game, though, is said to be using intellectual property from that world but is otherwise unconnected. The space where I picked out my creatures for battle is filled with a bunch of Amiibo-like figures. It is a rich and detailed area of the game that was an absolute feast for the eyes.
You can pull one of the figures off the shelf and place it in front of you to use as part of your team. Hold one creature in each hand and move them close together to watch them do battle. You can also power them up. It’s a very cool thing to see for anyone who likes small figures or remembers the holographic chess game from Star Wars. All of the figures on the shelves were eye-catching and uniquely designed, and I wanted to pull each one down and examine it.
The game itself was structured somewhat like Dragon Front in that you are dueling with another player and arming yourself with a set of creatures you can send into battle. I enjoyed winning a few matches as I powered up my creatures to much higher levels in the lab before each subsequent match.
Dragon Front is a cross-platform title available on both Gear VR and Rift, which can help with match-making as it widens the pool of possible players. It is unclear whether we would ever see a mobile version of Blade & Soul Table Arena — it was shown on Rift with Touch. For a game like this, launching with enough players so everyone can find challenging matches is important. Developers gave me no timeline for its possible release.
Oculus has said before that 2017 is all about content for its VR headsets, and it sure proved it today. As part of its showcase for this year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC), the company revealed a slate of new titles heading to both the Oculus Rift and Gear VR in the coming year. There’s a lot of them to get through, so we thought we’d list them below.
We’ve got impressions of each of these games live now, so make sure to follow through for more information and deeper thoughts on each. One thing’s for sure: Rift and Gear owners have a lot of goodness heading their way. Let’s take a look at some new Oculus games.
Esper developer Coatsink is back with this brand new strategy RPG for the Gear VR, channeling classic games like XCOM and Mass Effect 2 for what it says will be a much deeper experience than anything it’s made before. Expect this to be a truly hardcore offering for the mobile VR audience, which isn’t something we often seen.
Trust the makers of Defense Grid 2 to craft a compelling strategy game for VR. Unlike the studio’s last VR game, though, Brass Tactics is designed for use with Oculus Touch. It’s a multiplayer game that focuses on tactics, getting players to utilize huge armies to wipe out their opponents. It looks like a colorful take on the gengre, and heaps of fun.
The developer’s of Chronos return with a much more ambitious game. This is a procedurally-generated space adventure that has all the elements you need to make your sci-fi dreams come true. Team up with friends to maintain your ship and visit other worlds, battling dangerous enemies on the way.
This was technically announced last week but we got a much clearer picture of it at GDC. inXile Entertainment is known for RPGs like the Wasteland series, but it’s turning to another classic genre, the dungeon crawler, for its VR debut. Mage’s Tale will be a lengthy action game that fully utilizes Touch to put you right in the loot raiding action.
The developers of Landfall only just released their debut VR game, but they’re already onto the next. Term1nal is an intriguing entry into the stealth genre for Gear VR, casting you as a hacker that must infiltrate the facility of a massive corporation using robots.
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We also got updated hands-on with some games already announced for both platforms, including Singspace and Dragon Front, which is getting Oculus Touch support. Check out our updated previews below:
From Other Suns, a brand new VR title by Gunfire Games, draws heavy inspiration from several existing concepts and combines them all together, effortlessly, into a fresh and shiny package. It’s got the ship and crew management of games like Star Trek: Bridge Crew and FTL, it’s got the cooperative first-person shooter elements of games like Onward and Borderlands, with tons of loot to gather and gear to acquire, and it’s got the crazy ragtag crew antics of something like Guardians of the Galaxy — you can watch the trailer below to catch all of the vibes.
Even though it’s designed primarily as a three-player cooperative multiplayer game, the first time I played From Other Suns at GDC 2017 this week I was on my own. The other two demo stations were occupied by players also playing alone so I’d be rolling solo for my first mission. It was like my own private trial by galactic fire, as it were.
Everything began aboard my starship as the onsite Gunfire Games developer walked me through the controls and movement systems. On my wrists are a couple of buttons I can press with my opposite hand to pull up things like the options window or a map screen. The Oculus Touch controller face buttons toggle an inventory and an equipment display.
The default, more comfortable, movement system was a bit unique. You start by pressing forward on the left analog stick and then as you move around you watch your avatar from a third-person perspective.
Once you let go of the analog stick, you immediately teleport back into your body as you’re standing still. It feels almost like an out of body experience, but is a good option for those sensitive to motion sickness. It seemed to be a decent stop-gap solution, but I can’t imagine someone playing the entire game this way. It’s just wonky and feels like an inferior way of experiencing it.
For me, I preferred the full locomotion movement. It worked very similarly to Onward, allowing me to freely move around the world with few issues.
Once I got that down, it was time for my mission briefing. I headed to the bridge and looked down at my star map. After I selected a space station that was in trouble, my commander informed me that robots had overtaken the vessel and killed everyone on board. Because of course they did.
I made my way back to the chamber with the teleportation pad and inspected the guns on the wall. My starting pistol was good, but not great. Each of the guns had different fire rates, magazine sizes, and damage output. One functioned like an energy rifle, another shot lighting bolts, and then another was sort of like a short range shotgun. Plenty of diversity with options for every situation.
Once my loadout was set I stepped onto the pad and beamed down onto the ship. The developers told me that in the real game, maps like this would be procedurally generated from tilesets. This means that no two mission will ever be the same due to randomization, but it won’t be as lifeless as a truly randomized area.
Knowing that killer robots were on the loose, I was much more cautious than when freely roaming my own starship. I slowly edged around corners, poked my head out from cover to sneak a look, and made sure to stay mobile.
Eventually I encountered my first enemy, a robotic adversary that resembled the droids from the Star Wars prequels a bit. He was flanked by two similar robots, so I started by poking out from around the corner, gunning for headshots with my pistol. Soon, I swapped to the automatic rifle and peppered the chest of the closest one until it dropped. Once they got too close I switched to the shotgun and blasted their heads off. It felt extremely satisfying, especially with full locomotion.
Upon death, the robots dropped a few glowing items. One was a shield, which I could hold in one hand and squeeze the trigger to activate — if it got hit too many times it’d break and need to recharge. The second glowing item was green and I found out it was a syringe, which I could stab myself with to heal. Stocking up on those saved me a few times later in the mission.
When I came came back to the booth at a later time I was able to hop into a multiplayer session with UploadVR’s own Senior Editor, Ian Hamilton. While exploring the starship I quickly realized that I could hear him just fine over voice chat, but he couldn’t hear me. It was just a minor hardware issue. I decided to use this to my advantage.
While this was technically a cooperative multiplayer game, the folks at Gunfire didn’t want to cut any corners. This is a hardcore game about manning a starship and trying to survive. Friendly fire happens. I learned this by opening fire on Ian as he was still trying to find his way around the ship; I could even hear the booth attendees talking to him over the microphone.
One thing led to another and I killed him in cold blood before the mission even started. I didn’t need him slowing me down, but he just respawned and joined me anyway.
While we were down there, team dynamics started to emerge. Whoever had the shield could walk in front, drawing fire and keeping enemies busy, while someone else headed up the rear taking aim with more powerful and precise weapons.
The inclusion of thrown weapons like EMP blasts to stun robots or grenades to blow apart large groups would be a welcomed addition if the developers decided to add them. Later on, large robots with rocket launcher weapons could demolish a fully charged shield in a single blow, making it clear this wouldn’t be an easy game when it finally releases.
During our time with the game, Gunfire also mentioned a suite of features that weren’t available in the demo we tried. For starters, while aboard your ship, you can actually engage other ships in combat. Gameplay during these moments would consist of sending crew members to repair parts of the ship and actively rerouting power to shields or guns during a fight.
Ultimately, even though I was more successful and actually beat the mission on my own before joining forces with Ian, playing as a team was rewarding and exciting. Perhaps with a more competent partner things wouldn’t have broken down so quickly.
I ended up killing him again out of pure spite before the demo was over. It didn’t make me feel any better.
From Other Suns is in development by Gunfire Games as an Oculus Rift with Touch exclusive, currently slated for Fall 2017. Even though it’s being built with three player co-op in mind, it’s still playable in single player as well.
[Editor’s Note] – This article was originally published in February during GDC 2017 and has been republished to coincide with the free Open Beta weekend happening at the time of publication.
We just had a juicy bit of information dropped on us by Valve — LG is showing a headset prototype at the company’s booth.
Very little is known about the device right now, though Valve did confirm to UploadVR that this is a SteamVR tracking headset, making it the second such device to be revealed, two years after HTC first introduced its Vive headset and nearly a year after it was released.
According to a statement from Valve, the device will offer a “high fidelity, next generation VR experience.” Though not confirmed, we assume that makes it another PC-based device rather than another mobile-based headset, with LG has dabbled with in the past. The company intends to meet with developers during the event to showcase its prototype and collect feedback. Final pricing and launch dates are not being revealed at this time.
Don’t expect this to be the last SteamVR device; last week Valve dropped requirements to attend a $3,000 class for its platform and 500 companies having signed up to work with its Lighthouse tracking technology, be they new headsets, controllers or otherwise.
SteamVR isn’t alone in licensing VR technology, however. Microsoft is also working with companies like Dell and Asus to produce its own VR headsets using inside-out tracking and running on its Windows Holographic OS.
There are still a lot of questions about this headset to be answered, then, and we’ll be sure to hunt answers down during GDC week.
Here’s the statement from Valve:
LG Electronics will unveil its first VR HMD prototype at this year’s GDC in San Francisco, CA. Being shown in Valve’s GDC booth, the LG HMD prototype is designed to deliver a high fidelity, next generation VR experience.
During the show, LG will be meeting with developers to collect feedback and impressions as part of its effort to define the first commercial units. Pricing, launch dates, and territories will be announced at a later date.
Given that Unreal Engine powers dozens of VR games, experiences and toolsets, it’s no surprise that Epic CEO and Founder Tim Sweeney is excited about the future of the medium. But what does he think will be the killer app for VR?
“I think social interactions are the thing that everybody’s underestimating,” Sweeney affirms. “The applications of VR to mass market social experiences that everybody participates in is going to be the number one use of the technology.”
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” continues Sweeney. “Even if you’re only seeing a low-fidelity approximation of them, you feel like you’re there. We did not have that prior to VR.”
But Sweeney also admits that the technology has to be convincing enough to not be off-putting or grotesque.
“We’ve undergone millions of years of evolution that causes our brains to pick up on very subtle queues on how humans communicate, and keeping digital humans out of the uncanny valley is a big challenge for all game engines, and one we’re investing in heavily.”
The promise of hyper-realistic social experiences that erode distance are both far-reaching and uplifting, and the impact it can have for family members and friends living far apart are life-changing. Seniors who live across the country or perhaps in a completely different hemisphere can spend holidays with relatives. Old friends can participate in emotional reunions. And on-duty military service members don’t have to miss the birth of a child.
However, along with these amazing experiences, Sweeney cautions developers and creators to think about the negative implications that may come along with the technology and design accordingly.
“VR is a completely new medium with the level of realism that’s unprecedented. I think it has immense potential to be used for both good and evil, if we’re going to look at it that way. Game developers are going to have to be very thoughtful about how we approach this, both in our digital work and products we choose to create and also the way we expose social experiences to players. Griefing and harassment are things that are going to feel a lot more real in VR than if you’re just hearing somebody’s voice or they’re just typing text at you. These are real challenges for the whole industry, and we’ve been very thoughtful about that at Epic.”
The transformational and transportational aspects of VR are certainly exciting, and ones that also mean travel times can be reduced from hours or even days to nearly instantaneous.
“It’s teleportation,” Sweeney quips with an enthusiastic smile. “John Carmack said at a certain level of technology, VR is going to be a super power, and he’s totally right.”
The VR revolution is taking place just a little behind another major leap for the games industry; streaming. Mixing the two together is a logical step, but Genvid Technologies is going one further.
At the 2017 Game Developers Conference this week the company will showcase interactive streaming of a game inside the HTC Vive. Monster battling game Super Kaiju will be on display, and viewers on sites like YouTube will be able to switch between multiple in-game angles during the stream as well as cheer players on and rewind footage. These aren’t exactly features that would be specific to VR but they do give people without VR headsets a way to interact with the worlds of people that do.
We could see the tech being useful to a lot of VR games out there looking to get a little more interactivity going with fans. The showcase is taking place on March 1st at 11am PDT, and show attendees will have a chance to go hands-on with the tech later in the week.
Genvid’s technology is already available in Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4, but a plug-in for Unity is also being released. The SDK allows developers to map viewer interactions in a game, the data for which they can use to advertise to streamers.
This isn’t the only avenue of VR streaming being explored right now. Others like NextVR are looking to streaming in VR itself with 360 videos that bring you closer to live events, while some companies offer in-VR streaming of non-VR game. For many developers this is going to be an important way of marketing their games in the future, so integrating the latest innovations for both VR and non-VR games is an important step.
Check back all this week for the latest on VR and AR at GDC from UploadVR.
Sony became the first of the three high-end VR headset makers to reveal official sales stats this weekend when it announced PlayStation VR (PSVR) had sold 915,000 units. How does Vive headset maker HTC take that news?
“I think it’s a very healthy sign,” Alvin Graylin, President of Vive in China told UploadVR at the 2017 Mobile World Congress today. “I mean at the end of the day, the more VR experiences out there, the more users that are using VR the faster this industry is going to grow. So we’re really happy for Sony, we think they’ve done a really good job.”
In terms of HTC’s work with the Vive, Graylin declined to provide official sales stats but did state the company was “very proud” of the numbers the headset had sold thus far. “We’re comfortable with where we are and the numbers that are going out there and showing people are paying real dollars for high quality VR,” he said.
Asked how HTC might convince PSVR users to come over to the PC-based VR headset, Graylin said trying to do so “doesn’t really make sense” for the company as PSVR owners are “a different class of users” and not the company’s “target audience.”
“I think for PlayStation it makes sense for them to target their existing PlayStation install base,” he said, later adding: “We’re going to attract the best users for our best content for the best experience. As all the awards are showing, we are the leader out there and when developers choose, they choose us. When users choose and they go for where the best experience is they choose us.”
Though PSVR and Vive are both considered high-end systems, there is a lot of difference between the two. The $399 PSVR uses a single camera for positional tracking, running on PS4s that start at $250. Vive, meanwhile, uses two-sensor system for room scale VR, which isn’t possible on PSVR, and includes position-tracked controls, but costs $799 and runs on more expensive PCs.
