Virtual Reality ist den meisten Menschen aktuell zu teuer. Dieses Problem möchte NOLO lösen und bereits für 99 US-Dollar den Einstieg in die virtuelle Welt mit SteamVR ermöglichen.
NOLO Kickstarter-Kampagne gestartet
Das Produkt besteht aus einer Basis-Station, zwei Controllern und einem Tracker für das Headset. Nolo will mit diesen Komponenten Positional Tracking und getrackte Controller auch für Mobile VR Erfahrungen bereitstellen. Doch die Entwickler setzen noch eins drauf. Über Riftcat kann das System auch mit dem PC verbunden werden und anschließend sollt ihr SteamVR Inhalte mit Positional Tracking auf dem Smartphone verwenden können.
Das NOLO System kostet zwar nur 99 US-Dollar, aber ihr benötigt noch ein flottes Smartphone und ein gutes Virtual Reality Headset für das Smartphones. Empfehlenswert ist die Samsung Gear VR oder das Google Daydream View. Ihr könnt aber auch jedes andere Headset für Smartphones nehmen und ein beliebiges Android Smartphone verwenden.
Die Entwickler streben ein Finanzierungsziel von nur 50.000 US-Dollar an und fast die Hälfte ist bereits erreicht. Aktuell sind schon alle Super Early Bird Slots weg, aber ihr könnt noch einen herkömmlichen Early Bird Slot erwerben. Die Auslieferung der Hardware soll bereits im Mai 2017 stattfinden. Wenn ihr aus Deutschland bestellt, dann kommen noch 30 US-Dollar für den Versand hinzu.
According to a report by The Verge, HTC’s VP of Design is leaving the company to join up with Google’s Daydream VR team.
Having joined the company in 2008, in recent year’s HTC’s VP of Design, Claude Zellweger, played a key role in the design of the Vive headset, The Verge reports. Now he’s taking that experience with both mobile and VR design over to the Google Daydream VR team, according to a tweet by Zellweger.
@vladsavov I am joining Google Daydream, so you can redirect your criticism:).
The Verge confirmed with HTC that Zellweger has left the company, following the same destiny as two colleagues who had both joined the company as part of the same acquisition:
In 2014, HTC lost its longtime design chief, Scott Croyle, who started afresh with the Nextbit cloud-centric smartphone. Less than a year later, Croyle’s successor at HTC, Jonah Becker, departed the company to head up industrial design at Fitbit. The two of them initially joined HTC when their design company, One & Co, was acquired by the Taiwanese electronics maker in 2008, and their third partner in that venture was Claude Zellweger. Eight years after joining HTC, Zellweger now completes the One & Co exodus.
Less than a year ago Resolution Games launched its second virtual reality (VR) title for Samsung Gear VR, a fishing video game called Bait!. The experienceproved to be popular on the fledgling VR headset, garnering nearly 150,000 downloads in less than a week the studio announced. Today the developer has revealed Bait!’s achieved another milestone, alongside expanded head-mounted display (HMD) support.
Resolution Games has managed to hit the one million player barrier for Bait!, putting it in a very exclusive group. Otherworld Interactive’s horror title Sisters achieved the one million mark back in May 2016, but that’s classed more as an experience rather than an actual video game like Bait!.
And that player count looks set to grow even further as Bait! now supports Google Daydream from today. Daydream owners can find the title on Google Play for £6.49 GBP/$7.99 USD.
“We are so excited to see the initial interest in Bait! as it crests 1 million players,” said Tommy Palm, CEO and co-founder of Resolution Games. “And, we now look forward to making the game available for the growing audience on Daydream, while adding the ability to use the motion controller for casting and reeling in fish, which adds a whole new layer to the game’s immersion within VR.”
Checkout the new Daydream launch trailer below, and for any further updates from Resolution Games, keep reading VRFocus.
Uber Entertainment’s last game had charm. Wayward Sky [Review: 6/10] was an endearing mini-adventure for PlayStation VR that told a touching story and suggested its developer had a lot more to offer this new medium. Cosmic Chef on the other hand is all about character.
The developer’s new game, currently exclusive to Google Daydream, is one of the more colorful, charismatic examples of VR gaming you’ll find out there at the moment. It takes a sprinkling of Fruit Ninja and a dash of Guitar Hero or Rock Band, serving up an enticing dish that could be perfected with just a little bit more seasoning.
In Cosmic Chef you’ll face off against seven intergalactically renowned cooks, preparing their signature dishes by slicing and squashing ingredients. Food is fired at you in time with the beat of a song that your rival sings as you work and you’ll either need to swipe at it with the standard knife or hold down the Daydream controller’s trackpad to morph it into a hammer. The necessary cooking utensil is color coded with the type of ingredient it corresponds to, though you’ll also have to avoid purple skulls that will break your tools for a brief period of time upon connection.
Your enemies are easily the star of the show here. They’re made up of a crazy cast of wonderfully imaginative personalities and vivid designs. Each chef has their own song with three difficulty levels to master. Rex Machina, for example, is an auto-tuned, hip-hop loving dinosaur that demands you cook half roast chicken, half machine that laments that he’s “gotta get me some of those” opposable thumbs when you beat him at his own game. Zarp The Conqueror meanwhile, is a carbon copy of a certain Sith Lord that likes to spend his weekends as a BBQ king.
Lyrics and introductions had me laughing out loud, while your enemies prancing and dancing is entertainingly lively. Cosmic Chef‘s band of characters make for one of the most memorable casts yet seen in a VR game.
You can select each of your rival’s songs individually or compete in a season of the show, where you’ll face each of them in a random order, with difficulty increasing as you go. Seeing through a season will only take around 15 to 20 minutes, though Uber has clearly built the game with replayability in mind. There’s a strong emphasis on score and online leaderboards. All the same, there isn’t a huge amount of content here and we definitely would have liked at least double the number of songs and characters.
Harder difficulty modes will require multiple attempts to master, though. Gameplay here requires focus and reliance on both visual and audio cues. Trying to rely on one over the other is a speedy path to failure; it’s tough to tell when’s the right time to swipe with just your eyes and the music’s complexity can make it hard to keep up if you simply move to the beat. Getting into the flow of things provides that in-tune satisfaction we’ve come to crave from games like Guitar Hero in the past few years, but it never reaches the same heights, something I suspect has to do more with platform than software.
Daydream’s motion controls aren’t the ideal input method, as I longed for the responsiveness and reliability of a button press instead of often misplaced swipes. Cosmic Chef simply doesn’t have the mechanical precision of the games that inspire it, and it ends up feeling held back. That said, it’s probably as good as its hardware allows for.
Final Score:6/10 – Decent
Cosmic Chef is light on content and, while fun, lacks the mechanical finesse of the games that inspired it. But you’d be hard pressed to find a VR game with more character and color either on PC, console, or mobile. In spite of its problems, it kept a smile on my face the entire time I was playing and that, at the end of the day, is what matters. Uber Entertainment continues to perfect the charm and presentation of its VR games. Here’s hoping it nails gameplay next time too.
This year’s Wearable Technology Show, London, will be lead by a keynote from Google’s Greg Ivanov, Business Head for Google Daydream, it has been revealed today. Taking place 7th – 8th March 2017, at London ExCel, the event will focus on digital health with 200 speakers and over 100 exhibitors showcasing the latest innovations in smart technology.
The fourth Wearable Technology Show, the event is co-located with the AR, VR & MXR Show, IOT Connect and the brand new Digital Health Technology Show, making it Europe’s biggest event for wearables, AR & VR, IOT and connected technology.
Speakers already confirmed for 2017 include Vincent Nida, Global Brand President at L’Oreal, Rachel Murphy, Digital Delivery Director at NHS Digital, Steve Moore, Director of Connected Home for Dixons Carphone and as stated above, Greg Ivanov, Business Head, Google Daydream.
100 exhibitors from more than 20 countries will be on the show floor, many of which will never have been seen before in Europe. With regards to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), these include the VR-ready MyndBand EEG Brainwave headset which allows users to control, influence and interact with videogames, apps and movies using their mind and emotions, the Navdy AR HUD, GlassUp AR smartglasses, Touch Surgery’s haptic surgery simulation devices, and Proximie, an AR platform designed to give support to surgeons from anywhere in the world.
“The Wearable Technology Show continues to grow from strength to strength, breaking new boundaries in terms of our global audience, reach and content each year,” commented COO John Weir. “The launch of the Digital Health Technology Show for 2017 is particularly exciting for visitors: digital health is one of the most innovative, ground-breaking and, literally, life-changing areas of smart technology.”
Registration for this year’s Wearable Technology Show is now open on the event’s official website, http://www.wearabletechnologyshow.net/home. VRFocus will keep you updated with any further VR and AR additions to the line-up.
Since its launch a couple of months ago, Google’s Daydream View head-mounted display (HMD) hasn’t exactly been overrun with content, with titles appearing sporadically. Today those that have bought the headset have been treated to another release, this time from Uber Entertainment in the form of Cosmic Chef.
Available to download now on Google Play for £9.99 GBP, Cosmic Chef mixes up gameshows and cooking into a culinary battle royale in which players must chop, slice and smash their way through waves of ingredients, scoring as many points as possible to get a maximum three stars.
Featuring a bizarre set of characters, players need to make some tasty food to score big trying to make their opponents native dishes even better than they can.
Regular readers of VRFocusmay know know Uber Entertainment from its first virtual reality (VR) title, third person single-player adventure Wayward Sky for PlayStation VR. Most recently Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) revealed another project the studio has been working on during the PlayStation Showcase in December. This was Dino Frontier, a table top strategy sim set in the wild west, due for release this summer.
For all the latest Daydream releases, keep reading VRFocus.
Frank He goes hands-on with Huawei’s first Google Daydream compatible headset at CES 2017, one which takes cues from both the Samsung and Oculus engineered Gear VR and its closest stable mate, the Daydream View headset.
Huawei’s Daydream compatible VR headset, into which slots a Huawei Mate 9 Pro or Porsche Design Mate 9 smartphone, was shown off to the public at CES, and I’ve had the pleasure of trying it myself.
The headset looks a lot like Samsung’s Gear VR with similar features, but runs on Google’s new VR platform, Daydream. Despite the exterior, the headset still has a lot of similarities with Google’s headset in terms of the visual experience. I’ll compare Huawei’s VR headset to Google’s and Samsung’s, with an emphasis on Google’s Daydream View as the software is the same, making it much more comparable. What I can say immediately is that it took some of the good things about the Gear VR and applied them to Google’s Daydream platform.
The headset feels very much like the Gear VR. It’s made out of plastic, has a focus dial on top, has detachable facial foam, a proximity sensor, a touchpad, and a direct connection to the phone (compared to Daydream View’s ‘fit any phone’ approach). On these fronts, it eschews some of the characteristics found on the Daydream View. The View however does feel a lot lighter and a bit more portable, but it also lacks the aforementioned focus dial, and the proximity sensors so that the phone can rest when you aren’t wearing the headset.
That said, the model Huawei demonstrated at CES did not include a functional touchpad or proximity sensor. Given that the Daydream controller is a requirement for all Daydream apps, it isn’t clear if the touchpad will be enabled for Daydream use, or if it’s there to make the headset also compatible with other VR platforms (like those that the phone would likely use in China).
Visuals
The FOV seemed slightly larger on Huawei’s VR headset when compared with the Daydream View, but it seems to exhibit more warping and distortion around the far edges of the lens. Other than that, the visuals were mostly the same. Chromatic aberration, resolution, head rotation tracking, and brightness all seemed the same to my eyes. So with that said, if you know the difference between the Daydream View and the Gear VR, Huawei’s new device will fall toward the Daydream end of the spectrum.
Comfort
While the Daydream View is lighter, it is built with some relatively hard foam padding. The foam used in Huawei’s VR headset on the other hand had a very soft feeling to it, but at the same time the headset was quite heavy. If the Daydream View had softer foam, it would be the preferable option for comfort, but as they are, which ends up being the most comfortable for long term use may depend on the individual’s facial structure.
Light leakage has been a clearly noted negative on the Daydream View, but I found that it’s not a problem on Huawei’s VR headset, with perhaps a bit of light reflecting off of the lenses from the outside.
As for battery life, heat, and other aspects related to usage with time, I can’t judge much from my short demo, but it does seem like it would perform better at least in terms of heat, because Huawei’s VR headset uses a direct attachment like the Gear VR without any lids keeping the heat inside, whereas you have to close a lid on the phone with the Daydream View.
With those differences in mind, and especially with the ability to tune the focus, Huawei’s VR headset comes across as a very competent alternative to Google’s Daydream View, working on the same software platform, but it’s compatibility is restricted to Huawei’s Mate Pro 9. Price and availability remain unknown at the moment, but if done right, the headset has the potential to introduce VR to even more people as one of the first Daydream compatible headsets from a third-party.
