Realities, a ‘virtual travel’ title that presents near photo-realistic VR captures of real-world locations, has received a major update. In addition to a new explorable location, the software has been overhauled to support forward rendering and improved support for Oculus Rift and Touch.
Practically as old as photography itself, use cases for photogrammetry (making measurements from photos) have evolved over time, from triangulation and georeferencing through to movie CGI production and most recently, real-time game environments. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a famous example of using the technique in Unreal Engine 3 (see The Astronauts’ blog for a detailed explanation), and Realities.io took a photo-realistic approach to create their free SteamVR product Realities using Unreal Engine 4, which launched alongside the HTC Vive in April 2016.
After a strong start, the Realities team remained fairly quiet as work went on behind the scenes. The limited selection of scanned environments is now being expanded, with a major update that adds 6 spots in California’s Death Valley, combined with new, atmospheric audio. The update also adds improved Oculus Rift and Touch support, and a number of visual improvements that affect all the environments, including a switch to forward shading, which allows for better anti-aliasing (now able to run on a minimum spec PC with 4xMSAA).
Full details can be found on Realities’ News page on Steam, and according to a developer post on Reddit, further scans are coming soon in diverse locations such as Maine State Prison, Cologne Cathedral, and Omaha Beach.
Oculus Rift exclusive title Robo Recall – which launched just yesterday – can already be played on the HTC Vive, using the infamous Revive mod. And, as you can see in this video, the game seems to work remarkably well.
Oculus’ approach to encouraging development on their Rift virtual reality platform via funded exclusive (be that timed or permanent) has been one of the most divisive and hotly discussed since consumer VR became a reality. It’s something that’s divided the VR community and is brought into sharp focus when exclusive titles are perceived as particularly desirable, as is the case with Robo Recall – a title developed by Epic Games exclusively for Oculus Rift and Touch motion controllers, published though Oculus’ content portal Home.
Whatever your views are on Oculus’ stance on the subject of exclusivity, the fact remains that there are a lot of VR enthusiasts out there who only own the Steam VR powered HTC Vive headset who would very much like to play Robo Recall, one of the most polished VR titles yet published. Luckily for them they can, thanks to the infamous Revive software mod, and as seen in the video above, this is exactly what some Vive owners are now doing.
What’s perhaps surprising is how well it seems to work. The YouTuber MERPTV (above) puts the title through its paces, with the most obvious potential issue – the lack of thumbsticks on the Vive’s Steam VR controllers – taken care of with the trackpads used in substitute.
Of course, if you don’t own an Oculus Rift and Touch device, the title won’t be free to play on the Vive. You’ll need to stump up the £22.99 ($29.99 in the US) on the Oculus Store to get access to the game first – a price I’m sure many are willing to pay for such a polished VR title. After which, Vive users should head to Revive’s GitHub page which includes the latest version of the injection software as well as a setup guide for new users. One important note here – we’ve not yet had a chance to try this out for ourselves and would point out that running such a configuration will be officially unsupported by the software’s developers and publishers. If you’re happy with those caveats, you should be good to go.
Of course, the game was developed with the Touch controllers in mind, and as pointed about above, although using the SteamVR controllers may not be the optimal experience, they are certainly more than functional.
Let us know how you get on with Robo Recall on the Vive using Revive in the comments below.
Whereas traditional FPS titles have settled on the gun as a primary weapon, it seems the bow & arrow is increasingly becoming a favorite of the VR FPS. Twisted Arrow, the next title from Phaser Lock (the studio behind the well received Final Approach) lets the player wield a superpowered bow for high-action gameplay.
Compared to Final Approach (2016), an arcade puzzle game about guiding planes safely onto runways, Twisted Arrow is a huge step in the action direction for studio Phaser Lock. At the center of TwistedArrow is a high-tech bow that makes the player a deadly opponent for the hordes of enemies they will face.
Hordes indeed, but Phaser Lock CEO Michael Daubert says the game is absolutely not a ‘VR wave-shooter’, a genre which is on its way to becoming overrun with bland experiences. Instead, players will work their way through six hand-crafted levels, four of which will culminate in boss fights, for some four to six hours of gameplay. Enemies will vary from para-military combatants to robots, zombies, drones, and more.
Daubert told me that many of the game’s design decisions were about keeping things fast paced. The high-tech bow that the player will wield is at the core of that pace. Instead of slowly unlocking new abilities over time, the player gets access to everything up front. That includes multiple special arrows (like freeze and explosive), and the ability to temporarily transform your bow into a force shield.
Players will navigate around each mission through a node-based teleportation system. Daubert says that when they tested the game with an open-ended teleport system, players spent too much time trying to position themselves for cover using artificial locomotion. Changing to a node-based system encourages the player to physically move about their playspace to dodge and use the virtual cover that’s available at the nodes. Asking players to actually dodge bullets and duck behind cover increased the physicality of the game too, something that the studio wanted to be part of the experience (without it being too physical that players get tired quickly).
Daubert says the studio has carefully tuned the bow mechanics to maintain a sense of high-speed combat. Instead of drawing the arrow from a quiver on your back (as some VR bow & arrow games do), simply grabbing the bow string will nock an arrow and leave you ready to fire. They’ve also designed the bow and its drawing mechanics to favor a somewhat tilted orientation, so that players avoid hitting their VR headset with their controllers when pulling the string back (as with a real bow you would pull your hand right up to your check to aim down the arrow).
At one point during development, the studio had an olympic archer visiting to give the game a try just for fun; Daubert says he was far and away the highest scoring player to try the game so far, with something like 98% accuracy.
Twisted Arrow will launch on both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, with a tentative release date set for mid-March. Following the launch, the game will get updated to support competitive and cooperative multiplayer that’s cross-platform, along with leaderboards. The game will launch priced at $25 with a 25% launch discount.
CCP games, the developers behind EVE: Valkyrie, have revealed their next made-for-VR title Sparc, a futuristic TRON-esque sports title for HTC Vive, PlayStation VR and Oculus Rift & Touch.
This is Sparc, a new multiplayer sports title from the developers that brought us the slick online space combat shooter EVE: Valkyrie, one of the first VR-only titles ever to be announced by a major developer.
There’s a chance that Sparc may look a tad familiar and that’s because you may have seen it in an earlier form, originally sporting the codename ‘Project Arena’, an internal CCP VR demo that graduated to be shown to attendees of last year’s EVE Fanfest 2016. Described at the time as a competitive full body VR experience. That already polished demo has evolved into an even slicker looking title, now set for release on all VR platforms later this year.
“After our early experiments with standing VR gameplay, we were excited by the idea of building an original sport designed for the current generation of VR hardware. We’ve designed Sparc so that players can express and improve their skill through their physical actions.” said Morgan Godat, Executive Producer at CCP Atlanta. “Ultimately, we want players to think of Sparc as a virtual court in their living room where they can meet and compete with other players from around the world.”
Sparc will allow you to join players online to spectate or compete in matches but will also feature single player focused elements too if you really can’t stand other people. Should you venture online, CCP promise a full ‘free form’ social area to hangout while watching courtside. More detail on the game will be revealed later in year, in the mean time take a look at this excellent mixed reality the team released after the title’s original debut as Project Arena last year. Meanwhile, Sparc will be playable on the show floor at GDC 2017.
Alvin Wang Graylin is the China President of Vive at HTC, and I had a chance to talk with him at CES this year about what’s happening in China. He provided me with a lot of cultural context, which includes support from the highest levels of Chinese Government to invest in companies working on emerging technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence. There were a flood of Chinese companies at CES showing VR headsets, peripherals, and 360 cameras. On average, the VR hardware from China tends to be no where near the quality of the major VR players of the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Sony PSVR, or Samsung GearVR, but there were some standout Chinese companies who are leading innovation in specific area. For example, some highlights from CES include TPCast’s wireless VR, Noitom’s hand-tracked gloves, and Insta360 with some of the cheapest 360 cameras with the best specs available right now.
After CES, I was convinced that if you want to understand what’s going to be happening in the overall VR ecosystem, then it’s worth looking to see what’s happening in China. The VR market in China is growing, and there is a lot more optimism for technological adoption and enthusiasm for having VR arcade experiences. Education in China is also very important with the one-child/two-child policy, and Graylin says that if VR can be proven to have a lot of educational impacts then the government will act to get VR headsets in every classroom. Once VR is in the classrooms, then it’ll help convince more parents to buy one for the home if they believe it’ll help their education.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
In an extensive round-up of Chinese-driven VR growth from Yoni Dayan, he mentions a moonshot project called Donghu VR Town, which is a proposed “city built in the south of the country, designed with virtual reality intertwined in every aspects from services, healthcare, education, to entertainment.” Here’s an untranslated promotional video that shows off what a VR-utopian city might look like:
China is a complicated topic and ecosystem, but after having a direct experience of the TPCast wireless VR, Noitom VR gloves, and the great-looking and high-res stereoscopy from a Insta360 camera at CES, then I think that it’s time to really look to China as a leader in innovation. If China really does go all-in on VR and AI and continues to investing large sums of money, then that type of institutional support is going to leap-frog China as one of the leading innovators in the world. I’ve already have started to see this at CES this year and at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence where there was a very healthy representation from China, and the thing to watch over the next couple of years is any big educational infrastucture investments by the Chinese government as well as the evolving digital out-of-home entertainment hardware ecosystem.
Bethesda Game Studios made the surprise announcement at E3 last year that the company would be porting the entirety of Fallout 4 to virtual reality, and confirmed it would be released for both the HTC Vive and in VR on the forthcoming Xbox ‘Project Scorpio’ console. Since then, the company has been relatively silent on the status of the project, but has recently affirmed ongoing progress.
Speaking recently with IGN, Todd Howard, Executive Producer at Bethesda Game Studios, said that Fallout 4 VR was among seven major projects the company is currently working on. Progress on the VR port sounds to be going well, with Howard once again stating that the game would be playable “start to finish in VR.”
“There’s no content that we removed or changed [for VR],” Howard told IGN. “It’s interface work, it’s other things,” he said.
Around the time of Fallout 4 VR’s reveal, Howard said of the game, “The interface is already on your wrist [with the Pip-Boy], you can pull it up and switch around, playing with the weapons. It’s exciting for us where even though we’ve lived in the game, to step it into VR it becomes real on another level.”
Road to VR went hands-on with Fallout 4 VR back at E3 2016, and while the experience gave us a glimpse of a AAA VR production, if it was launched in that initial state many may have been left unsatisfied. As Road to VR’s Scott Hayden opined:
Bethesda’s VR version of Fallout 4 is far from ready for the eyeballs of the paying public, as there still no way to interact with world objects (outside of shooting them), no adaptation of the inventory system, and teleporting across the Wasteland still feels a bit like cheating.
Fortunately, the VR-version of the game will have seen a lot more development attention by the time it launches sometime in 2017. Howard told IGN that locomotion specifically is something the studio is continuing to work on.
“There are issues with locomotion, how you traverse that much space, and we’re hoping to support as many modes as possible… It’s not done yet, there’s work to do, but the parts that are there, I’m biased but it’s pretty incredible.”
Back at E3 2016, Bethesda said that a VR version of Doom was also in the works (though Howard didn’t give an update on that project), and teased a ‘Bethesda VR’ initiative, writing that Fallout 4 VR and Doom VR are “…just the beginning of Bethesda’s future in virtual reality.”
Bethesda parent company ZeniMax recently won a major lawsuit brought against Oculus; thus far it’s unclear how the results of the case will impact the likelihood that any Bethesda VR games will end up on the Oculus Rift.
If you’re planning to pick up an HTC Vive any time soon you’ll net two extra titles with your purchase in addition to the two already offered.
Through March 31st all new Vive purchases will include the current purchase bundle including Zombie Training Simulator and The Gallery – Episode 1: Call of the Starseed, along with two extra titles, Everest VR and Richie’s Plank Experience. The extra titles are redeemable through Viveport, HTC’s own VR app store. The company says the bundle is $75 worth of content—a nice bonus for sure, but not terribly much if the face of the Vive’s $800 price tag. So far it appears the extra titles are available if you purchase direct from HTC or through Amazon.
On Steam, Zombie Simulator is rated ‘Very Positive’ with 95% positive reviews; The Gallery is ‘Very Positive’ (86%), Richie’s Plank Experience is ‘Very Positive’ (93%), and Everest VR is ‘Mixed’ (40%).
The current purchase bundle featuring Zombie Training Simulator and The Gallery has been in place since August last year and replaced the original bundle which was Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption. For a time, Tilt Brush had come with both bundles, but is no longer included.
HTC says that we can expect regular refreshes to the purchase bundle thanks to a new redemption platform that will “enable us to continually and dynamically update the content bundles for Vive, ensuring the best content is readily available to new Vive owners.”
Designer and Creative technologist Dong Yoon Park has painstakingly recreated a Star Wars battle scene inside VR with Google’s Tilt Brush. Watch this beautiful digital art come to life in this walkthrough and speeded up realtime recording.
Virtual reality artistry really has exploded since the HTC Vive gave the world room scale, motion controllers and made Tilt Brush possible. We’ve already seen examples of real artists embracing the new medium as a way to explore different forms of creative expression and now an artist with a penchant for doodling has painstakingly recreated an authentic looking Star Wars space battle in VR.
The scene, which includes ships featured from the lowly X-Wing all the way up to Imperial Star Destroyers, strongly reminiscent of the jaw dropping final act of the 3rd film (the prequels didn’t happen OK!?) Return of the Jedi (1983). Take a look at the video below, where Park first walks you through the battlefield, then shows you how he created it all. I was particularly taken with his use of neon to depict the ships’ glowing engines, and the way he’s suggested a panelled, metallic surface through meticulous layering.
“I love doodling and sketching things. Especially I like three-dimensional perspective drawings such as skyscraper and big mechanical objects,” says Park in a blog post about his work, “I love the feeling of creating the world of illusion on two-dimensional paper.” The artist then got a chance to get his head and hands into VR and take that doodling urge into three dimensions via an HTC Vive.
“Now with AR/VR/MR devices, drawing experience is being changed dramatically. Since you can literally draw in 3D space, you don’t have to create the ‘illusion’ because it is real 3D drawing. You just need to think a little bit about how to express volumetric objects in space with dots, lines and surfaces.”
One of the most fantastic things about this form of digital media is that, now that the piece is complete, the artist can not only share 2D facsimiles of his work, but the entire VR scene – for anyone to download and experience themselves (not to mention potentially add to it should they feel inclined). You can do that by grabbing the Tilt Brush file right here.
SYREN (2017)is a single-player, survival-horror game that will have you sneaking around corners, hiding under virtual desks, and flailing helplessly as you’re mauled to death by the world’s ghastly “Syrens,” a terrifying amalgamation of human/robot/awfulness. Despite some pretty distracting bugs in the game, it’s safe to say that people with high blood pressure or heart conditions need not apply.
SYREN Details:
Developer: Hammerhead VR Available On: Oculus Touch, HTC Vive (Steam and Oculus Home) Reviewed on: HTC Vive and Oculus Rift Release Date: February 15th, 2017
Gameplay
Much like Alien: Isolation (2014), Syren is an absolutely terrifying game of hide and seek, but this time instead of the clostrophobic world of a spaceship and an acid-spiting Xenomorph, you’re in an underwater research facility placed above an ancient lost city once populated by a species of kind-of-sexy, kind-of-horrific mermaids—at least they were supposed to be, as the creatures you meet are genetically engineered copies called Syrens.
Created by a scientist obsessed with eugenics, your job is to escape the now damaged facility that’s become overwhelmed with the free-roaming Syren, going across a number of levels filled with deceased colleagues and all manner of interactive item that can bring you ever closer to the 5-level facility’s next pressurized door.
Each level is essentially a puzzle with a few different solutions, from nabbing a keycard off a desk and sneaking past a lonely Syren, to all-out shoot-em-up chaos with multiple baddies as you learn the mystery of the madman who created the facility.
The game has a very specific idea of how it wants you to proceed, something I found to be slightly frustrating early on. After getting killed multiple times by the same Syren and getting tossed back to the beginning of the level, I found out that when they lunge at your throat, you can’t simply whack the beast to death with an ax that you collected earlier like you naturally would if someone was coming at you and you had a melee weapon in hand. Rather, the game wants you to physically throw the ax, thereby losing it in the thing’s face so the game can leave you without a weapon for the next trial. The only way you can figure this out is either by having the original thought to toss the ax, or by failing your way to the solution like I did.
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Although there’s a steep learning curve to how you interact with the Syren (mostly by staying far away from them, running and hiding for your life), eventually the game becomes a little more intuitive as you learn the rules that the AI Syren abide by. For example, if a Syren gets close enough to you, it initiates an uninterruptible attack that you have to stomach—a wailing monster screaming in your face and biting your neck—so you learn to avoid these pants-shitting moments as best you can, otherwise you’ll be sent back to the beginning of the level.
You can get away from Syrens by hiding stealthy, teleporting quickly to find cover, or by distracting them by throwing items far away from you to take them off your track. Since the monsters react to noise (and strangely enough not your microphone), they will scream over to where the object landed, only to find no one there, giving you some time to dodge around them. There are however multiple Syrens per level, so this is where it gets tricky.
Several times I found myself hiding under a desk, or behind a dead body for cover, all the while hearing the banshee screams and heavy breathing of the genetically engineered monster coming my way. And if it weren’t enough of a fright, no matter where they find you, cowering in a corner or halfway outside of a locker, they always grab you by the face and scream a horrifying noise into your ears.
Immersion
The Syrens make a lot of noise, which should be a good thing on principle so you can avoid them efficiently, but the noise wasn’t at all muffled by objects like walls or barriers like in real life. If you find yourself sandwiched in a side room with two Syrens slinking around and breathing all scary-like, you won’t have a good idea of realistically where they are. Instead, a Syren will sound like they’re right on top of you even though you have a concrete wall between you.
Whether you’re using Oculus Touch or the Vive’s Lighthouse controllers, hands simply aren’t 1:1, making them seem a full three inches away from where your hands naturally rest on the controllers. While it’s not game-breaking, it certainly hampers immersion. In the end, this isn’t something dramatic to fix, but how such a critical error got through on launch, I’m just not sure.
On the note of controllers, Oculus Touch support could be a lot better. The game requires you to push down and click on the joystick to teleport, which proves to be just about as awkward as can be. Teleporting is much more intuitive on the Vive, requiring you to simply rest your thumb on the touchpad and engage a quick click, but Rift users beware.
Firing guns in the game unfortunately never felt natural on either Touch or Vive controller, as your trigger is used to pick up and hold items and a regular button press is used to activate or fire it. This made it feel more like changing the channel on a remote control than firing a gun.
And this is the part of the article where I make my biggest confession. I am a dirty, no good, wall-hacking cheater.
Because the game is room-scale, it means you can teleport close to walls and actually walk through them. Some games like Budget Cuts or Onward (2016) don’t allow you to do this, either by making it impossible to see or leaving your body behind to be ravaged by enemies, but not so with Syren. When a screaming water-banshee is running you down, and you can walk straight through a wall and escape, the natural choice is to flee anyway the game will let you. While I know I’m a weak and shameful person for using this cheat to get away, it really shouldn’t even be an option in the first place.
There, I feel better now.
Comfort
While you’ll never be truly comfortable with genetically modified mermaid-beasts skulking around, nuts and bolts-wise Syren is a supremely comfortable experience because it lets you explore the world using teleportation and 45 degree snap-turning—two common locomotion schemes that most everyone shouldn’t have a problem in the nausea department.
Even though at times I honestly wish I could sit down and mash a joystick forward on a gamepad instead of frantically selecting teleport sites—because it’s not only faster, but easier—the standing room-scale aspect of the game lends to overall comfort and immersion. And somehow it’s always scarier that way, as you’re on your hands and knees hoping the monster doesn’t see you.
CCP Games are updating the sci-fi dogfighting EVE: Valkyrie today with a brand new game mode, a league system, and a number of fixes and improvements. The ‘Wormhole’ mode creates new combat scenarios, as travelling into an anomaly changes the rules, visuals and other gameplay modifiers.
EVE: Valkyrie was a key feature of the Oculus Rift launch bundle in March last year, followed by hitting the launch of PlayStation VR in October, and finally coming to the HTC Vive in November. Along the way, CCP Newcastle has supported the title with several patches, and three major updates: Carrier Assault, where you can breach and attack a carrier, one of the larger ship types in EVE;Joint Strike, adding cross-platform multiplayer and a new co-op mode; and Gatecrash, adding a new map, pilot customisation and PS4 Pro optimisations.
Today, EVE: Valkyrie receives its fourth major update, Wormholes. This introduces a brand new ‘Wormhole’ game mode, a league system, HOTAS support for the PS4, and several feature improvements and balance adjustments. The video above highlights the most prominent changes, and a more detailed breakdown can be found in CCP’s detailed blog post. The update is due today, but precisely what time it will launch on each platform is not yet known, though we’ve reached out to CCP to confirm.
The Wormhole game mode allows the player to fly into the anomaly, resulting in significant distortions of both visuals and game rules. This is designed to generate new combat scenarios, with ‘unusual environments’ and ‘special upgrades’. Each Wormhole also comes with preselected ship loadouts, meaning that players might be trying hardware they don’t normally have access to. Each Wormhole anomaly will last a few days, and the Valkyrie dev team plans to launch a new Wormhole event every weekend. Further information can be found here, but it seems CCP doesn’t want to reveal all the secrets just yet.
This intriguing update should tempt lapsed pilots back to the game, and attract some new players too. For the Valkyrie enthusiasts, perhaps the most significant part of the fourth update is the new leagues, designed to encourage competitive multiplayer, giving Valkyrie a more obvious ‘esports’ angle. The full details on the Valkyrie League are found here.
