Category: GDC

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GDC 2017: Vive Tracker And Deluxe Audio Strap Cost $100 Each

vive tracker

Last month HTC announced two big products for the HTC Vive in an add-on Tracker and optional integrated audio headstrap. Today, both got vital release information.

The Vive Tracker will be “available to order” to developers on March 27th for $99.99, the company confirmed just before the doors to the 2017 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona opened up, where it’s exhibiting the device. The kit is essentially another peripheral that’s tracked by SteamVR but can be attached to real world objects allowing you to bring virtual representations of them into your VR experiences for the first time. We’ve tried it with apps like a baseball simulator, local co-op first-person shooter, and even a fire fighting simulator, while other developers hope to use it to enable full body tracking in VR and more.

The device has a lot of potential, though you need tings to actually attach it to in order to use it, which is why a developer release first makes a lot of sense.

Though this initial release seems to be aimed at developers, it’s not yet clear if consumers will be able to get their hands on it, much in the same way they could easily buy a development kit for the Oculus Rift by labeling themselves as a developer. HTC did say that “general consumer availability” would be available later in the year. Earlier this month the company started to roll out 1,000 free developer kits to select teams that applied for one.

We’ve asked HTC if the price will be the same for the consumer edition.

The audio strap, meanwhile, is launching pre-orders on May 2nd for $99.99, with deliveries set to arrive in June. As the name suggests, it includes a pair of integrated headphones similar to the Oculus Rift. Previously users would have to plug in their own pair of headphones, and many fans had requested an integrated option. The strap is also being integrated into the Business Edition of the HTC Vive for no extra cost.

Neither is quite hitting the initial Q2 release window we were expecting, then, but they’re still on track for 2017.

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GDC 2017: HTC Vive Payment Plan Revealed

GDC 2017: HTC Vive Payment Plan Revealed

VR headsets are expensive, especially the $799 HTC Vive. It’s certainly not something just anyone can afford upfront, but HTC and retailer partners are now giving consumers more options.

Last year we reported that UK games seller Game was offering a chance to get the Vive through monthly payments. Now other companies are taking that on board. In America, JD.com will sell the Vive with a 0% financing scheme with monthly payments of $138 (plus tax and shipping) over six months, or $66.58 over 12 months. A 7.99% plan for $40.13 a month over two years is also available.

In China, meanwhile, three 0% financing schemes are on offer. One is for three months at ¥2,296 ($334.05), the next is for six months at ¥1,148 ($167.02), and the final is over a year at ¥574 ($83.51).

This may be a key way of getting VR into people’s hands, though that money still doesn’t get them the expensive, high-end PC needed to actually use a Vive. It’s one of several varying business models the company is trying for its kit, the other including upcoming subscriptions for content services, and offering software to location-based arcades. Just how well any of these schemes stack up to more traditional business models remains to be seen.

Updates on this story to come.

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Community Download: Who Will Have The Best VR Games at GDC 2017?

Community Download: Who Will Have The Best VR Games at GDC 2017?

Welcome to the community download. This is a place for people from all different walks of life to come together as one and disagree on the room-scale capabilities of different VR headsets. In all seriousness though, this is a post meant to inspire thoughtful, informed discussion about virtual and augmented reality. Today we stand on the cusp on one of our industry’s most significant times of year. Next week, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) will be getting underway in San Francisco and this year’s show should be a big one for VR.

Last year, going into the event, the only headsets we had commercially available to us were powered by smartphones. This year, the gaming PC your friends all said you’d “never use” is now happily humming away, powering your eighth straight hour of Space Pirate Trainer without a bathroom break.

Last year’s GDC was all about teasing an amazing new era of gaming. This year, it’s all about delivering on that promise. We’ve already ran through what we expect to happen at GDC, so now our question for all of you this week is this: out of all the VR studios, manufacturers and conglomerates attending GDC this year, which do you think will be bringing the most exciting VR games?

Before you answer let’s consider your options.

HTC/Valve/Vive: The double threat of VR companies, HTC and Valve worked together to release the Vive VR headset. Thanks to an early emphasis on room-scale VR and hand tracked controllers, the Vive has become the best selling PC-powered VR system on the market today, according to third party estimates.

Since last year Vive has started Vive Studios, an organization with the sole purpose of finding, supporting, and developing the best VR games it can. On top of that, Valve itself has recently teased that they it will be releasing not one, not two, but three new VR games in the near future. What better time than GDC to shine a light on these mystery projects?

Sony: Sony is a GDC veteran. These guys were likely running keynotes at the Moscone Center back when VR meant the virtual boy. Sony knows how to make great content and how to communicate it to the world. Its PSVR headset is projected to be quite a hot seller already, but there hasn’t been a huge amount of high profile games lately other than Resident Evil 7, or rumors that there will be more on the horizon.

GDC is Sony’s chance to prove its commitment to PSVR and remind us all who the video game legend in the room really is. Fingers crossed its got some tricks up its sleeves.

Oculus: GDC has been around since before Oculus was even so much as a glimmer in Palmer Luckey’s dad’s eye. However, Palmer Luckey has a new dad now named Mark Zuckerberg. And Daddy Zuck has very deep pockets.

Oculus has already made a name for itself as “the platform with the AAA content” but that content has come at a price. At OC3 Zuckerberg announced that Facebook has already spent $250 million facilitating high quality VR content. He also revealed that his company would spend at least that all over again on even more content for the future. Now’s the time for Oculus to show us what that big war chest can do.

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What do you think? Which of these companies, or any other company, is going to be keeping you glued to livestreams next week? Let us know in the comments below.

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GDC 2017: The 3 VR Tools That Got Us In

GDC 2017: The 3 VR Tools That Got Us In

There’s beauty in the chaos of a startup’s early days when the team decides to roll the dice. For virtual reality entrepreneurs there are some amazing tools which help amplify this mindset, allowing you to move fast and, hopefully, make things. With these tools, a little luck, and a lot of tenacity, our six-month-old VR startup is heading to the Game Developers Conference to present our new game at Valve’s booth.

I’ll tell you how we did it.

We learned that Valve was offering space at its GDC booth for a few VR developers with something new to show. New features on existing games didn’t qualify, so we had only one option: Get our new idea ready for prime time. But we had barely locked our game development document. To be considered for GDC, we had to make a complete demo and show it to Valve… in two weeks.

Our new game, Kiss or Kill, is the first room-scale VR game show. It’s a 1v1 trivia death match with weapons, hi-jinks, and shenanigans. The winner of the game is faced with a big decision: Take the safe route and kiss the loser, or go for double points in a fight to the death. In Kiss or Kill death is permanent. If you lose the fight then your global rank, upgrades, and character are gone forever.

We were confident in the core concept after simulating it in real life, but there’s a big difference between pretending in your office and actually playing the game. To hit the deadline, fast tests and prototyping were mission critical.

Just a year ago, the concept of Kiss or Kill would have required months to translate into something playable. Luckily, amazing tools like VRTK, PlayMaker, and Photon have enabled creators like us to do the formerly impossible, impossibly fast.

VRTK

VRTK, the Virtual Reality Toolkit, is a collection of foundational VR elements for Unity. Out of the box it provides locomotion, interaction, body physics, buttons and a lot more. It provides most of the elements of ‘reality’. You’d be surprised at how difficult something as seemingly simple as grabbing an object in virtual space can be. With VRTK, it just works. And did I mention that it’s free?

Using VRTK gave us the breathing room to work on more critical elements like the fight mechanics.

PlayMaker

PlayMaker allowed us to quickly prototype core gameplay mechanics without needing to code them. Using Play Maker we can understand whether a concept works before spending hours coding it. It’s also a more efficient way to show our developers how something should function. Instead of telling them how a big hammer should function as a weapon, which can be interpreted in a million different ways, we can download a hammer from the Unity Asset store and script its rough functionality within Unity. It is $65 well spent.

Photon

Finally, Photon gave us a complete multiplayer package providing everything from logic to servers. Just like with VRTK, if Photon didn’t exist, we wouldn’t exist. The months required to stand up servers and code all the logic for multiplayer would have been a showstopper. Photon is free for up to 8,000 monthly active users, then it is tiered pricing for more users.

With the help of these assets (plus, of course, Unity) we had networked players interacting with objects in a scene within hours. Days after committing to a demo date with Valve, we had a rough game. Late into the night we did our first complete playthrough.

It was glorious.

Big risks often have conclusions that come down to the wire, and ours was no different. On the day of the Valve demo, the Steam build wouldn’t run (still not sure why), and the Dropbox file wouldn’t connect (ports blocked at Valve). But finally, all three players were on the set of Kiss or Kill.

The game was a bit clunky. The music manager misbehaved. But the game worked. Valve was excited at what we had made.

And we were invited to GDC.

This wealth of resources allowed a six-month-old startup to execute on a previously impossible goal and we are but one example. Ultimately, enabling creators to express their visions in innovative ways is exactly what a new medium is meant to do. Our path to GDC is a step in that direction.

Nick Robinson is co-founder of RLTY CHK. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter.

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What to Expect From VR at VRDC and GDC 2017

What to Expect From VR at VRDC and GDC 2017

The 2017 Game Developers Conference (GDC) and accompanying Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC) are right around the corner. Just like last year, they will run essentially concurrently again in and around the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. Panels and discussions kick off Monday 2/27 through Friday 3/3, with the Expo hall itself opening from Wednesday 3/1 until the end of Friday 3/3.

Whether you’re attending the show or just scoping out the news and events from home, we’ve got you covered. If you’re attending, then you should absolutely check out these 12 talks that we’ve selected as some of the most important VR-focused discussions of the entire week, as well as this massive list directly from GDC. But beyond that, what about the news? What about the announcements? The demos? The tech? The games?

There’s a lot going on at GDC every year, but with VR’s first big consumer year in the books last year, 2017 should be bigger than ever for our industry. The Oculus Rift and Touch, HTC Vive, PlayStation VR (PSVR), Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, and so many other headsets are all available for purchase. It’s a crazy time to be alive. But if 2016 was VR’s debut year, then 2017 needs to be the year of VR content.

We’ve put together this article to run down what we think are the biggest things to keep an eye out for coming out of VRDC and GDC this year. We might be wrong on some points and we might miss some surprises that we could have never predicted, but let this serve as a preview into where our heads are at heading into next week for the major providers and other segments of the VR industry.

What to Expect from Oculus

Oculus always has a big showing at GDC and they will again this year, especially since they were mostly quiet at CES. Last year they had a big Media Day before GDC officially started and this year is no different. On Sunday 2/26, members of the press (UploadVR included) will attend a full-day long set of demos of all the latest upcoming games, but we can’t talk about them until Tuesday 2/28. Last time, GDC was just before the launch of the Rift itself, so we had a good idea of what we were getting, but this year the event is mostly shrouded in mystery.

At Oculus Connect 3 late last year, we had the chance to try out a ton of Oculus Touch titles ahead of the device’s launch and a few of those games still aren’t out yet. This means we fully expect to get hands-on time with titles such as Killing Floor: Incursion, Robo Recall, Arktika.1, Lone Echo singleplayer and multiplayer, as well as many others. The VR company recently promised “months of high-profile rollouts” and that likely starts at GDC 2017.

On the hardware side, we don’t expect much news. The Rift CV1 will likely continue its run with mobile VR picking up some fun titles here and there, such as SingSpace from Harmonix. We saw Santa Cruz at OC3, but it probably won’t be at GDC.

What to Expect from HTC

CES was a big show for HTC. They showed off the Vive Tracker accessory, a new headstrap and audio solution, and solidified excitement for the TPCAST Wireless Accessory. As a result, GDC will likely be a much more reserved show for the company.

There will be new content from Vive Studios on display, as well as developers demoing their projects from their booth, but you won’t see a massive day-long Media Extravaganza like Oculus is doing the day before the show starts.

What to Expect from Valve

Valve is likely in a similar boat to HTC. We know they are working on brand new base stations, shown in the image above, as well as experimental controllers they teased at Steam Dev Days last year. We also know the company is working on three VR titles right this very second. We do not, however, expect to learn much more about those things just yet.

If they decide to turn back the curtain on those projects this year, that will likely happen at E3 or a dedicated event of its own. It would certainly be a wonderful surprise next week and Valve does have its own booth space, along with developers showing games out of their area too, but if we had to put money it, we would bet against new Valve-developed titles being on display at GDC this year.

What to Expect from Sony

The long and short of it is that you shouldn’t expect much from Sony at GDC this year. They have some impressive-sounding NPC technology that will be showcased a bit, but there likely will not be new game announcements or flashy demos that we haven’t heard about or played already.

Last year Sony had a massive GDC presence, announcing the price and release window of the PSVR headset, as well as demoing a litany of titles to members of the press. We tried out a ton of them at the event, but we don’t expect anything like that this year — all that stuff is out or is coming soon. Resident Evil 7 just launched in VR and other titles like Farpoint are on the horizon.

What to Expect from Microsoft

With 2017 now in full swing and Microsoft moving their conference to a full day earlier at E3, we can expect that Scorpio and its VR functionality are likely being saved for that show too. HoloLens continues to gain traction in the development scene, meaning some demos will likely be on the show floor, but we likely won’t see any huge news on that front.

The biggest thing that we expect to learn more about is the impressive Windows Holographic platform that was first announced at the Intel Developer Forum last year. It’s slated to arrive on Windows 10 PCs later in 2017. Also, we know Microsoft is partnering with several manufacturers on VR headsets of its own, so we may learn more about some of those as well.

What to Expect from Epic

Robo Recall. It’s one of the most-anticipated releases of the year and is expected to arrive sometime very soon, for free, exclusive on Oculus Home for Rift and Touch users. We’ve been nothing short of blown away each and every time we’ve seen or talked about the game, so you should expect, at the very least, a release date for this exciting shooter.

Additionally, Unreal Engine is one of the premier VR development ecosystems and new advancements on the technology side of the company will likely be announced as well. Don’t be surprised if they’re working on other stuff, too, seeing as how Robo Recall is just a beefed up and overhauled version of Bullet Train. We’re still waiting for an Unreal Tournament or Gears of War-caliber game from Tim Sweeney and company.

What to Expect from Ubisoft

In 2016 Ubisoft quickly emerged as one of the premier publishers of virtual reality games. With Eagle Flight and Werewolves Within all achieving quality launches with full cross-platform multiplayer on PSVR, Rift, and Vive, it’s exciting to think about what they could be cooking up next. Chief among the things we know about is Star Trek: Bridge Crew.

The game was recently hit with another delay, along with the promise of new content, so an updated look at the game with some fresh announcements — or maybe even a brand new VR title in the works — would be awesome news to come out of GDC.

What to Expect from PC Hardware Companies

GDC is always a big event for companies like Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, among others, but with CES wrapping less than two months ago, it may not be time for any earth-shattering news to come out from the woodwork just yet.

We’ll likely hear about incremental advancements and new hardware for high-end users that can continue to push systems to new levels, but with the current generation of VR hardware less than a year old, major jumps in fidelity or performance aren’t likely.

What Else to Expect

Those are the big names to look out for in headlines, but there will be plenty of other stuff going on too. GDC is one of the best conferences to discover indie games that were previously unknown, which is great for us here on the Editorial Team at UploadVR. It’s a great networking event for meeting people in the game industry. There’s more going on than we could possibly know about, so expect to see lots of interviews and hands-on demos from us throughout the next few weeks summarizing our time at the show.

What are you most excited about for GDC and VRDC? What are you expecting?  Let us know in the comments below!

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Sony Showing More Believable VR Characters In PSVR GDC Tech Demo

Sony Showing More Believable VR Characters In PSVR GDC Tech Demo

Creating more believable virtual characters will play an essential role in further immersing us in single-player VR experiences in the future, and Sony intends to demonstrate that on PlayStation VR (PSVR) this GDC.

The company’s headset traditionally has a big showing at the event, having been revealed there in 2014, but this is the first iteration of the show in which the device is already on the market. Instead of focusing on tech specs and release details, then, the company is showing more to do with VR development. One big part of its showcase will be a new VR tech demo from PlayStation Magic Lab, the division of the company that’s worked on the headset for the past few years.

This demo will focus on “simple 3D prodcedural spatial behaviors for VR characters.” That roughly translates to virtual characters that understand the spaces they’re standing in and their position in relation to the VR user. According to Sony they “imbue a sense of shared space”, reacting to both sound and motion created either within the area or by the player. They can also register the direction in which a user is looking and adjust their eyes, head and body in response.

These characters will only react to things they see inside their own field of view, and also blink and breathe in response to your actions. Attendees will be able to switch the feature on and off to compare it with more traditional non-playable characters that we see in games today and get a sense of what a difference it makes.

While it doesn’t look like Sony is revealing any big new VR games next week (they’ll likely save that for E3), the company will also debut VR Trace, a new tool designed to fix common issues that spring up in multiple VR applications. There are scheduled Unreal Engine 4 and Unity Engine PSVR demonstrations too. They’ll also be showing off the upcoming PSVR Aim Controller ins conjunction with its first game, Farpoint. A new talk based on the controller has been scheduled too.

GDC is, as usual, going to be a massive event for VR. We’ll be there all of next week to bring you the latest from the show.

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Qualcomm’s Standalone VR Is Getting Embedded Leap Motion Hand Tracking

Qualcomm’s Standalone VR Is Getting Embedded Leap Motion Hand Tracking

Last September we reported on the fact that Qualcomm was launching their own VR development kit with the ability to deliver standalone VR. What made the VR 820 so compelling was that it had 6-DoF tracking as well as integrated compute (Snapdragon 820) which was on par with all the latest flagship phones. It even had support for eye tracking, which we now know was through a partnership with none other than SMI. However, there was one thing that was missing, hand tracking. In fact, Intel was already demoing hand tracking this year at CES with their Project Alloy prototype.

Anyone that has used mobile VR knows that controllers are nice, but unless you can ‘see’ your hands and interact with your surroundings with your hands, the immersion is lost. HTC and Valve do this with their Vive controllers that are super low latency and extremely accurate and Oculus does this with their touch controllers and their extremely natural ergonomics. When it comes to mobile, in many cases you’re either stuck with a Bluetooth gamepad on Samsung or a controller like the Daydream controller which simply put isn’t good enough. Thankfully, the team at Leap Motion have been working tirelessly to deliver hand tracking and late last year launched their much more compact hand tracking solution specifically aimed at mobile form factors.

Now that their technology has been miniaturized, it can be integrated into platforms. One such platform that’s launching at MWC and GDC (since both shows are happening simultaneously), is Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 835 VR development kit. This new Snapdragon 835 VR development kit features a 2560×1440 AMOLED display, 6DoF tracking, eye tracking, foveated rendering and many other performance and power saving features. This system is essentially an upgrade over the Snapdragon 820 developer kit that Qualcomm launched at IFA 2016. The real improvements are increased performance, power savings and support for Leap Motion. While we don’t quite yet know the performance of the Snapdragon 835, the expectations are that it will be quite a bit faster on the GPU than the Snapdragon 820, which is a blessing for VR. The Snapdragon 835 VRDK is expected to be available in Q2 through the Qualcomm Developer Network. This device is really designed to help developers optimize their apps for the Snapdragon 835 HMDs that are due out in the second half of this year.

In addition to announcing the partnership and support of Leap Motion and a new VR development kit based on Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm is also announcing an HMD accelerator program. This program is specifically aimed at accelerating the time to market for HMD manufacturers, which has been an issue for some companies. The program is designed to help HMD manufacturers reduce their engineering costs and time to market so that they can seed the market with these HMDs faster. Part of this program utilizes the newly announced Snapdragon 835 VR HMD and will connect OEMs with ODMs like Thundercomm or Goertek, the two leading HMD ODMs in the world. The program is designed to help OEMs modify the reference Snapdragon 835 VR HMD and enable pre-optimized features like SMI’s eye-tracking and Leap Motion’s hand tracking.


These three announcements are very closely intertwined and show where mobile VR and more specifically standalone VR is going. Mobile VR itself will still benefit from the advances that result from these new developments, however standalone VR is currently the focus of this platform. The interesting thing about the mobile industry and players like Qualcomm is that they can iterate so much more quickly than their PC counterparts that we are seeing mobile HMD feature sets leapfrog PC. The fact that the Snapdragon 835 VR platform will support both eye tracking and hand tracking is huge because both of those are natural interfaces. Combining hand tracking, eye tracking and voice recognition into a single device means that a user can naturally interface with their VR HMD without ever needing to touch anything. Ultimately, hands free VR is the holy grail and I think that Qualcomm has brought us one step closer to that reality.

Disclosure: My firm, Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided research, analysis, advising, and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including Google, Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung cited or related to this article. I do not hold any equity positions with any companies cited in this column.

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Report: 39% of Game Developers Working on AR/VR Headsets

A survey of game developers attending the annual GDC conference suggests major growth in the number of developers building games for AR and VR headsets.

The 2017 GDC State of the Game Industry report, which gathered data from 4,500 attendees of the annual GDC conference, has been published. Among the insights from the report is that a healthy 39% of respondents are developing titles for AR and VR headsets.

Present AR/VR Focus

With 2016 being the year that major headsets have finally hit store shelves, there’s been major growth in the number of developers focusing on immersive platforms. According to the report, the HTC Vive (25% of respondents) and the Oculus Rift (24%) are leading the pack by a significant margin in terms of which headsets developers are currently developing for, followed by PlayStation VR (13%), right on par with Samsung’s Gear VR (13%).

gdc-survey-vr

Future AR/VR Focus

As for the future, development interest in the HTC Vive seems to be growing the most compared to other platforms. 40% of respondents said they expected their next VR/AR project (after the current project) to target the Vive while 37% said the Rift and 26% said PlayStation VR, according to the report.

Exclusivity

Among 11% of respondents who said they were working on an AR/VR game that would be exclusive to a single platform, the gap between Vive (33%) and Rift (24%) widened, with PlayStation VR coming in at 15%.

gdc-survey-vr-3Developer Interest in AR/VR Platforms

Actual present or future projects aside, the survey also asked developers what VR/AR headsets interested them most; here the Vive took an even stronger lead, with 45% of developers interested in the Vive, 30% in the Rift, and 29% in PlayStation VR. Interestingly, in terms of interest, Google’s Daydream at 17% of interested respondents, beat out Gear VR at 13%.

gdc-survey-vr-2Great Majority of Developers See AR/VR as a Sustaining Long-term Business

When it comes to AR/VR as a sustainable business, confidence is high among game developers, with 75% believing that it will be a long-term success as a gaming platform, the figure as last year’s GDC State of the Industry report.

You can download a copy of the full 2017 GDC State of the Game Industry report here, which includes additional AR/VR insights alongside broader games industry.

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Oculus: 2017 Rift Lineup Will Bring the ‘Depth’ of AAA Console/PC Games to VR

Oculus: 2017 Rift Lineup Will Bring the ‘Depth’ of AAA Console/PC Games to VR

The Game Developer’s Conference is right around the corner. For video game creators, both old and new, this means a lot of sleepless nights excitedly reading over the session list and carefully planning your trip. For journalists like us it means the PR wheel has begun turning, trying its best to crush us with emails, meeting requests, and potential demos.

Among the deluge this morning was a missive from GDC itself. Inside were several short interviews with some of the big companies attending the show this year. Included were chats with Steve Arnold, the head of studios at Oculus. Arnold’s job is to work with game developers to create top-quality content for the Oculus Rift VR headset. Most of what Arnold said in this piece is boilerplate “we’re excited for this chance to work with developers” GDC-talk. However, a few lines stood out as being particularly interesting.

Lone Echo from Ready at Dawn.

When asked what Oculus’ “big goals” for 2017 are, Arnold responded:

“We want to show the world a glimpse of the future of gaming and entertainment. Now that hardware is out there, the real interesting part is to see what developers will make. At this point, dev kits have been in the wild for a couple years now. Some studios have started shipping their second or even third game.

With that sort of time investment and knowledge base behind them, we’re confident that the 2017 game line-up is going to start showing the depth and engaging narratives that people have come to expect from existing games. Some of these will be reinventions of traditional genres in VR, while others will be explorations of new genres.

I’m personally most excited about the games get us even closer to what most perceive as AAA quality, especially those from top tier studios like Epic, Twisted Pixel, 4A, and Ready at Dawn. We can’t wait to help launch those games and see what people think.”

This coincides with the promise of “months of high profile rollouts” the company has talked about previously. What Arnold seems to be driving at here is that the Rift’s content library this year will bear a stronger resemblance to traditional, AAA console and PC titles. These are games like Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Call of Duty, etc. None of these properties are mentioned of course, but that’s the level of quality and production values that they appear to be shooting for.

Oculus has made it clear that they are committed to the creation of top-tier VR content. At last year’s Oculus Connect 3 conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company had spent $250 million on the development of VR experiences and that it would spend at least that much again in the years to come. That amount of capital is certainly enough to create many unforgettable titles for 2017 and beyond.

We already know many of the games Oculus is touting this year including those being worked on by the studios Arnold mentions above.  There is: Epic (Robo Recall), Twisted Pixel (Wilson’s Heart), 4A (Arktika 1), and Ready at Dawn (Lone Echo). All of these are promising games that we’ve tried at various shows. But, as Oculus’ head of content Jason Rubin is so fond of reminding everyone: this is just the beginning.

We know Oculus has had teams working in long-tail development cycles on bigger games that we’ve yet to see or hear anything about. GDC may be a time for Oculus to showcase it’s previously revealed heavy-hitters more thoroughly, but it could also be where we start to see just how much “depth” this young company is willing to provide.

Either way it should be quite a ride. We’ll be bringing you full coverage on the show floor and beyond at GDC beginning on February 27.

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12 Can’t Miss VR Talks You Have To See At GDC 2017

12 Can’t Miss VR Talks You Have To See At GDC 2017

E3, Gamescom, TGS, PAX are all great shows for exhibiting VR content. But, in the early days of this industry, it is the developer conferences, the places where creators come together to share knowledge and reveal breakthroughs, that are the really exciting events to cover. There’s no better time of the year to do that than at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

Filling up the halls of San Francisco’s Moscone Center, GDC has been a big event for the VR industry over the past few years, but it is seeing something of an explosion this year, which runs from February 27th – March 3rd. There are an overwhelming number of talks to see at this year’s show from some of the biggest names in the industry. There’s easily more than anyone could hope to see, so we’ve nailed down twelve of the most important ones you should really try to see. Even then, there’s a bit of overlap.

UploadVR is going to be at the show too, so you can expect to see plenty from us throughout the week. Prepare yourself; it’s going to be a busy one.

Lessons Learned From A Thousand Virtual Worlds

When?: Monday, February 27th, 10:00am – 11:00am
Where?: Room 134, North Hall
Who?: Jesse Schell (Schell Games)

With time spent at at Walt Disney Imagineering and a number of high-profile releases under his current studio’s belt, Jesse Schell is a man you should listen to when it comes to VR. He’s worked on the tech since before the Oculus Rift was invented and, with his team, since released some of the best games for it. It also helps that Schell is a fantastic host for these talks, and his GDC sessions never disappoint. If you go to just one of the many ‘lessons learned’-style sessions, make it this one.

Learnings Of Early Access From ‘Raw Data’

When?: Monday, Feburary 27th, 3:00pm – 3:30pm
Where?: Room 135, North Hall
Who?: Chris Hewish (Survios), Mike McTyre (Survios)

Deciding on whether or not to launch your game in Steam Early Access is a big decision that many VR developers face. Get it right and you’ll grow a strong community to fund your game through the rest of development. Get it wrong and you could be stuck in development hell wondering where to go next. Survios came out swinging with the pre-release version of Raw Data and ended up with big success, so they’re definitely a team you should listen to if you’re considering this route for your VR game.

The Holodeck Year 2: Growing the VR Ecosystem in 2017

When?: Tuesday, February 28th, 10:00am – 11:00am
Where?: Room 2011, West Hall
Who?: Rikard Steiber (HTC), Joel Breton (HTC)

As President of Viveport and Head of Vive Studios respectively, Rikard Steiber and Joel Breton are two of the most senior figures working on the HTC Vive today. While many GDC sessions are looking back at what’s happened in the past year, this one will look ahead to what’s to come. With features like the Vive trackers on the horizon, we’re expecting plenty of juicy tidbits of information here, and you should be looking for some vital knowledge on getting ready for Vive Year Two, too.

A Year In VR: A Look Back At VR’S Launch

When?: Tuesday, February 28th, 10:00am – 11:00am
Where?: Room 135, North Hall
Who?: Jeremy Chapman (CloudGate Studio), Steve Bowler (CloudGate Studio), Cy Wise (Owlchemy Labs), Andrew Eiche (Owlchemy Labs Inc), Colin Northway (Northway Games), Sarah Northway (Northway Games)

We’ll get to the headset makers later on, but this panel is comprised of some of the best indie studios developing games for them. Collectively, these people have shipped Island 359, Job Simulator, and Fantastic Contraption, some of the most well-known titles out today. It won’t quite have been a full year since the Rift and Vive launched, but listening to these teams share their insights into the past 11 or so months is bound to be fascinating.

Refocusing On VR Innovation: Can Standards Simplify Cross-Platform Virtual Reality Development?

When?: Tuesday, 28th February, 11:20am – 12:20pm
Where? Room 3022, West Hall
Who?: Cass Everitt (Oculus), Joe Ludwig (Valve), Nick Whiting (Epic Games), Devin Reimer (Owlchemy Labs), Yuval Boger (Sensics, Inc.), Alon Or-bach (Samsung Electronics), Kaye Mason (Google)

It’s not often you get both Oculus and Valve together days, let alone Google and Samsung, with bonus helpings of Epic Games, Owlchemy Labs, and Sensics. These people are more than qualified to tackle this session’s hard topic: fragmentation. What can be done to simplify VR development now that there are so many headsets out there? These representatives of the best of both PC and mobile VR are bound to have a few answers, as will the makers on Unreal Engine 4.

Experiments in Social VR

When?: Tuesday, February 28th, 5:30pm – 6:00pm
Where?: Room 134, North Hall,
Who?: Stefan Walker (Google), Luca Prasso (Google)

Social VR is set to become one of the biggest uses of the tech over the next few years, and Google is at the forefront of this field with the experiments its doing with the Daydream mobile VR ecosystem. It’s shown some examples of its work with social experiences before, but we’re expecting a deep dive on them in this session, coming out with a view on the best practises for building the next generation of connected VR apps.

State Of Unreal: Epic Games’ Opening Session

When?: Wednesday, March 1st, 9:30am – 10:30am
Where?: Room 3001, West Hall
Who?: Tim Sweeney (Epic Games)

Given they make one of the industry’s most popular development engines, GDC is always a busy time for Epic Games, and this year will be no different. You can expect big updates on Unreal Engine 4, a toolkit that has closely aligned itself with VR over the past few years, from Tim Sweeney, an industry legend that is placing big bets on the future of the technology. This will be unmissable for many developers deciding where to start making their VR games.

VR 201: Lessons From The Frontlines

When?: Wednesday, March 1st, 11:00am – 12:00pm
Where?: Room 3014, West Hall
Who?: Chris Pruett (Oculus)

There aren’t many companies as well suited to talk about lessons from the frontlines of the VR industry as Oculus, so you’ll want to make sure you catch this evolution of a talk the company has been giving for a long time now. You’ll get tips on design and optimization, and developers will no doubt want to pounce the moment the floor opens for questions (if that happens). It is arguably Oculus’ biggest session of the show.

What to Pack: Exploring VR & AR With Daydream and Tango

When?: Wednesday, March 1st, 11:00am – 12:00pm
Where?: Room 3009, West Hall
Who?: Alex Lee (Google)

As pioneering platforms for both mobile VR and AR, Daydream and Tango are two of the most important topics in the VR industry right now, especially considering the two together might present a solution for inside-out tracking a VR headset using a smartphone. Daydream has been commercially available for a few months now and Tango is steadily growing a library of phones and apps. Finding out what Google has learned on its journey so far could be one of GDC’s biggest stories.

Increasing VR Presence: From Believable Character Behaviors to Developing with the New PlayStation VR Aim Controller

When?: Wednesday, March 1st, 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Where?: Room 2024, West Hall
When?: Tom Bruckbock (SIEA), Seth Luisi (Impulse Gear), Greg Koreman (Impulse Gear), Richard Marks (Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Sony doesn’t have a lot of VR talks in the books for GDC this year, but of the ones it is offering, this is definitely the talk we’d make an effort to see. Impulse Gear is currently working on Farpoint, one of our most anticipated PSVR games and the first to use the PlayStation Aim controller, a gun-shaped peripheral that makes for incredibly immersive experiences. Finding out how to best use it will be in the interest of a lot of developers as it starts to roll out later this year.

Windows Holographic Rendering: One SDK to target VR and AR ecosystems

When?: Thursday, March 2nd, 11:30am – 12:30pm
Where?: Room 2009, West Hall
Who?: Alex Pfaffe (Windows Holographic)

Microsoft is set to start shipping developer kits for its Windows Holographic VR headsets, made in partnership with companies like Lenovo and Dell, at GDC, so we’re expecting to hear a lot more about them at the show. This is the only VR-focused session the company has booked right now, but the promise of a single SDK to create content across different headsets is a very tempting one. This session will hopefully tell us all about how the company is planning to do that.

Virtual Insanity: Lessons Learned from Creating a Virtual Reality Engine

When?: Friday, March 3rd, 10:45am – 11:15am
Where?: Room 2005, West Hall
Who?: Liz Mercuri (Unity)

With its Editor VR tool now available in an early incarnation, 2017 is going to be a massive year for Unity and VR. Before it kicks off, though, Unity’s Liz Mercuri is going to talk about ‘The Horror Engine’, designed specifically for creating multiplayer content. It’s going to be another insightful look into how to get the best of the tools you’re using to make great VR content which, ultimately, is what GDC is all about.

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