Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
Sony kept the talking to an absolute minimum during its E3 2017 press conference, instead choosing to show off an hour of uninterrupted trailers. The details are slim, but there's plenty to watch.
The post Here’s everything Sony announced at its trailer-heavy E3 press conference appeared first on Digital Trends.
Sony unveiled a brand-new trailer for the upcoming God of War game, painting a grim portrait of Kratos’ future in the frozen lands ruled by the ancient Norse gods who are every bit as bloodthirsty and brutal as old Greek gods.
The post In the new ‘God of War 4’ trailer, Kratos is old, grizzled, and as brutal as ever appeared first on Digital Trends.
Here's how to watch the PlayStation E3 2017 briefing. Expect to learn more about a myriad of upcoming Sony exclusives, including God of War, Days Gone, Gran Turismo Sport, and much more.
The post Sony’s E3 2017 show goes live at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific, watch it here appeared first on Digital Trends.
The lineup for the first E3 Coliseum has been announced. Produced by Geoff Keighley, the two-day event features 24 presentations, including ones from Bungie, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Hideo Kojima, and many more.
The post Check out the star-studded lineup for the inaugural E3 Coliseum appeared first on Digital Trends.
Editor’s Note: With God of War PS4 set to release soon, we wanted to call attention to this often forgotten tech demo of God of War on PSVR. This article was originally published on May 19, 2017.
All major console manufacturers have flagship first-party characters that define their systems and audience. For Nintendo it’s always been the colorful cast of the Mario, Donkey Kong, and Zelda franchises. For Microsoft it’s the Halo and Gears of War games. But for Sony, it’s changed with each console generation. The PS1 had Spyro and Crash Bandicoot, the PS2 had Ratchet & Clank, Jak & Daxter, and Kratos from God of War. The PS3 also had Kratos, but then saw the debut of Nathan Drake with Uncharted.
Most of those games wouldn’t really be that great of a fit for VR you’d think. They’re all third-person action games. Even though Lucky’s Tale proves it can work it’s not exactly the go-to genre for VR, so consider me a bit surprised when I learned that years before the PlayStation VR (PSVR) headset (previously known as Project Morpheus) actually released, Sony’s Santa Monica Studio created a prototype demo for a God of War VR game.
During an interview with Glixel, the Head of PlayStation’s Magic Lab, Richard Marks, recounted the several years the company has been working on some form of experimental technology that contributed to the creation of the PSVR headset.
“So this is 2009, 2010,” Marks said. “We had the PlayStation Move controllers, and a lot of people were just doing different stuff with them. We put them on our head and did this with the TV. Another guy in R&D was putting it on his head and having a phone screen in front of his eyes, and that’s, you know, more like VR. And the same thing happened down in Santa Monica Studios. They made, like, a God of War VR demo.”
You can see some of the prototype running on an old experimental headset with a Move controller strapped to it. The footage starts around the 5:45 mark during the GDC 2014 presentation embedded below:
The most surprising part about this prototype to me isn’t that it’s a God of War VR demo, but that it’s a first-person God of War VR demo. That flips the whole franchise around and truly turns it into something brand new. Similar to the treatment Resident Evil 7 received.
“They took the code and just did the same thing with a screen in front of their face, a phone screen,” said Marks. “And then some guys in the UK were doing the same, but they were working more on better optics, so they actually made it so it looked better. And then some people in Japan, too. So it was this grassroots thing at Sony – a lot of engineers liked VR and wanted to do something with VR. So they all had a poor man’s VR system because they had this cheap tracking system thanks to the Move controller, that they could use, and it just worked with the PlayStation hardware already, so they could just plug their game straight into it and do stuff. And so everyone came to these internal events and showed each other what we were doing, and kind of got some bottom-up momentum, and then from the top down the head of hardware and the head of content development and the head of the game studios, they decided, ‘Yeah, let’s do this as an official full-blown thing.'”
For more details about the gradual development of the PSVR you an read the entire interview on Glixel. We haven’t heard anything about God of War VR becoming a real thing, but interestingly, Sony’s Santa Monica Studio collaborated on the development of PSVR horror game, Here They Lie, and published Bound, which did receive a gorgeous VR update. So maybe we aren’t so far away from a full-blown project from the studio eventually.
Let us know what you think of the prototype and idea for a full title down in the comments below!
Tagged with: god of war, sony santa monica
It’s that day of the year which every journalist hates. 1st April, aka ‘April Fools Day’, is a day in which every news story that comes your way has to be scrutinised twice as hard. Some press releases are obviously intended for nothing more than a moment’s titillation, others walk a line far too close to reality for comfort. Some however, are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. Here’s VRFocus’ picks of the best efforts in 2017.
Bound is a wonderful and often forgotten gem in the PlayStation VR’s line-up. God of War is a brutal and beloved PlayStation exclusive franchise. Why not combine the two? Developed in collaboration between Plastic Studios and Sony Santa Monica – the latter of which is the studio responsible for many of Kratos’ adventures – Bound today had some new downloadable content (DLC) announced for it, in which Kratos becomes the highly animated hero. This is more than a little suspicious, but would undoubtedly sell well if it weren’t.
Announcing standalone DLC for #BoundPS4 “Kratos’ Reminiscence” coming soon to your @PlayStation ! pic.twitter.com/wrOFpQ1m92
— Plastic (@plasticdemo) April 1, 2017
Another April Fools Day, another videogame coming to Nintendo’s much berated Virtual Boy. This year the responsibility has been handed to Funktronic Labs, the developer of – you guessed it – Cosmic Trip for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Of course, the studio isn’t really working on a Virtual Boy edition of their VR videogame; they’re still working on finishing the high-end PC version currently in Steam Early Access.
UK virtual reality (VR) content developer REWIND has a had a hand in many well known projects, including the recently launched Ghost in the Shell experience for Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Rift. With a number of years of experience under their belt, why not step into the world of hardware development? Because that’d be stupid. That’s why.
For many, the next landmark development in VR won’t be wireless (although that technology does rank highly on near-everyone’s ‘wish list’), it’ll be haptic feedback. What’s better to aid immersion than incorporating all your senses – not just sight and sound – into the experience? Well, one of Google’s many April Fools gag delivers just that, with Haptic Helpers: a new programme in which people enter your home to aid you in your suspension-of-disbelief.
It seems like every week someone at VRFocus proclaims this acronym on the group chat. Most frequently with the word ‘not’ in front of it and a massively sigh afterwards. Yes, there are many VR conferences. So many in fact, that they’re starting to overlap due to there simply not being enough days in the year. Bertie, we don’t want AFVRC. Nobody does.
Of course, there’s plenty more April Fools gags coming from the VR industry. Let us know your favourites in the comments section below.
The new 'God of War' is one of the most exciting reboots on the horizon. Though we still know little about the forthcoming title, we've rounded up the latest news, rumors, and anything we can find about Kratos' next adventure.
The post ‘God of War’ rumors and news appeared first on Digital Trends.
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the PlayStation 3’s release in Europe. Sony’s third home console was easily its most controversial, launching with a ridiculous $599 price tag and using proprietary hardware that became notoriously difficult to develop with. It was a rare stumble for the brand. By the end of its life, though, it had raked back PlayStation’s reputation with a line-up of fantastic exclusive games.
It was also on PS3 that Sony started experimenting with what would become PlayStation VR (PSVR). The release of the PlayStation Move position-tracked controllers got groups within the company experimenting with primitive head-mounted displays, forming the foundation for the new headset. PSVR owes PS3 a lot, then, and we know the perfect way to thank it.
Sony is sitting on top of an ocean of games that, with the proper care and optimisation, could make for great PSVR experiences. True, the best VR games are built from the ground up, but that hasn’t stopped amazing pre-existing games like DiRT Rally and Fallout 4 shifting to fit the tech. Below are nine PS3 exclusives we think the company should adapt to bulk out PSVR’s library and give us reasons to revisit some classics.
Let’s start off with an freebie. Sports Champions may have unsuccessfully tried to emulate the success of Wii Sports for PlayStation Move, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a solid mini-game compilation. Games like sword fighting and archery were some of the most realistic experiences we’d had at the time. Bringing all of the groundwork Sony laid here into VR is a no-brainer.
We’ve seen a lot of VR racers already, but nothing quite like MotorStorm. Evolution Studios’ mud-soaked driving game was a viciously good fun, propelling players down multi-layered tracks at break neck speeds.
We’re sure that bringing that into VR, with dirt flinging up into our eyes and Monster Trucks threatening to crush us beneath their weight would make for one of the most thrilling games on the platform.
One of Sony’s more forgotten early triumphs with PS3’s multiplayer service was this expansive action game. Warhawk let you commandeer tanks, planes, and buggies as well as fight on foot for some incredible battles that evoked a bit of Halo.
We’d love to revisit that world in VR, jumping into the cockpits of vehicles and making the action bigger and better than ever. We’d also welcome a VR version of its spiritual successor, Starhawk.
Nearly 10 years on from its release and Killzone 2 is still a visual milestone for gaming, standing up with if not surpassing many of today’s PS4 games. It was also one of the console’s best shooters with meaty, sluggish controls that grounded you in the experience; quite different from the rush of Call of Duty imitators that would soon be releasing in floods (including, sadly, its sequel). Killzone 2 feels like it was practically designed for the new PS Aim controller.
The car combat genre might have seen better days, but the last Twisted Metal game on PS3 was at least a respectable swan song. VR is the perfect venue for a glorious return, though, with grindy, gritty action that has you swerving out of the way of machine gun fire and jumping over rooftops. This is one title that basically deserves a VR revival.
Insomniac’s Resistance series had a hard time on PS3. The brilliantly arcadey original released close to Epic Games’ hugely anticipated Gears of War, and then its sequel leaned a little too far on the side of Call of Duty. Resistance 3, then, was a surprisingly wonderful return to form with a deep campaign that featured plenty of twists and turns. It also supported PlayStation Move, so half of the battle is already done. It would definitely need PS Aim support.
God of War might not strike you as a series that easily adapts to VR, but Kratos’ third outing actually played an instrumental roll in bringing about PSVR itself. During early experiments with the tech, Sony quickly hashed together a first-person demo that put players in the body of Kratos, and Shuhei Yoshida loved it. Beyond that, games like Chronos prove third-person action works in VR reasonably well, and no game has toppled the incredible sense of scale shown in the last chapter of this trilogy.
LittieBigPlanet may not have taken over the world like Sony hoped it would, but it still marked an important milestone in gaming, paving the way for other titles with its user-generated content focus. Bringing it to PSVR could make it the platform’s very own world builder. In fairness, Media Molecule is working on what looks like an evolution of LBP with its latest game, Dreams, which is all but officially confirmed to support VR by this point.
In the early PS3 days Sony experimented with the episodic videogame structure with a fairly obscure remake or an already little-known horror game, Siren. Blood Curse was a pretty terrifying, incredibly grimy take on Japanese horror, with a mind-bending plot that had you retread multiple scenarios with different outcomes, featuring some of the most disgusting monsters in games. What’s not to love about bringing that into VR?
Tagged with: god of war, killzone, LittleBigPlanet, PlayStation VR, PSVR, resistance, Siren: Blood Curse, Sports Champions
Christopher Judge, most well known for his time in the long running Stargate SG1 show, may have leaked the release date for the upcoming God of War game, suggesting that it will arrive in 2017.
The post Kratos voice actor may have revealed release window for next God of War game appeared first on Digital Trends.
After almost three years it appears we now have a glimpse at the canceled Sony Santa Monica IP. With shades of Horizon Zero Dawn and even No Man's Sky, was the game canceled because of its similarities to other PS4 exclusives?
The post Sony Santa Monica’s canceled game mixes ‘Horizon Zero Dawn’ with ‘No Man’s Sky’ appeared first on Digital Trends.