We always love getting to try out some new technology and learning more from the best and brightest in the business, and that’s exactly what Nina got a chance to do when she spoke to Christophe Dissaux, Executive Vice President of 3dRudder, a company that wants to revolutionise the way we move in virtual reality (VR) videogames and software.
We first saw 3dRudder’s new Blackhawk controller at CES 2018, Las Vegas, where they received a CES 2018 Innovation Award; the third year in a row they’ve grabbed the achievement. At the time 3dRudder CEO Stanislas Chesnais said; “The new design, including leds and foot straps, coupled with the Active Dead zone functionality represents a step forward in the VR foot motion controller technology that we started developing 4 years ago and a new standard for all VR accessories.”
In the interview video below Nina speaks to Christophe in person, where he holds the new Blackhawk controller aloft so we can get a good look at the new, more ergonomic design and the flashy LEDs they’ve attached to the device.
3dRudder created the very first foot-powered controller that was specifically designed for use in VR software such as videogames. He tells us that the Blackhawk is the second generation of the controller, and is intended to help players move more intuitively in VR – after all, what motion could feel more natural to move than moving your legs?
You can use the Blackhawk controller with Steam VR games and is compatible with a variety of software for both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, but Christophe makes a point of saying that they are looking into having console compatible versions of the controller available by Q3 of this year. He says nothing is confirmed, but clearly the company has big ambitions.
For the full interview just watch the embedded video below where you can see Nina chatting with Christophe and getting her own chance to strap into foot powered locomotion in VR. We’ll have all of the latest news on 3dRudder and their controllers as it happens, so for all of the latest news, keep checking back with VRFocus.
Anyone that’s tried to lose weight will happily tell you that it’s not as easy they’d like. Diets are stressful, exercise routines are tiring, and the benefits take an incredibly long time to actually show themselves. But tracking your progress with videogame-like statistics using devices like FitBit have, for some people, really helped the process. Now you can lose weight in virtual reality (VR) thanks to Black Box VR, and Nina’s spoken to Jim Bradbury, Black Box VR’s General Manager, to find out if this is the future of weight loss.
The idea of Black Box VR is convincing the user that instead of going to gym or doing a tedious work out, they are in fact playing a videogame, enjoying themselves, and working to improve high scores. You can compete against friends and family with high scores and, of course, burn even more calories.
Black Box VR uses unique trackers and arm shields that are necessary because working out in VR is difficult with controllers in your hands. Black Box VR isn’t meant for home use sadly, but instead should pop up in boutique Black Box gyms, but may be licensed to other gyms and manufacturers in time. You’ll be pulling against weights with variable forces being pushed back against you, and the videogame is designed to make you rest and work more frenetically at the perfect moments to give you a vigorous work out.
You can see everything you need to in Nina’s interview with Jim Bradbury below. We’ll have everything you need to know on Black Box VR and working out in VR right here on VRFocus, so if you need a futuristic way to lose weight, don’t look any further.
We are always crying out for more unique and interesting ways to view and interact with entertainment in virtual reality (VR) and thankfully, the sector is expanding every day. Proof of that is Antoine Cayrol and his new studio Atlas V, who are working to make new, immersive entertainment in VR.
Atlas V is founded by a group of talented desingers and producers. Antoine Cayrol and Pierre Zandrowicz have worked on I, Philip and Alteration, Fred Volhuer is from Shuttershades, and Arnaud Colinart has worked on Notes on Blindness.
The studio will debut their first works, Martin Allais’ Battlescar and Eliza McNitt’s Spheres, at Sundance’s New Frontier. Sundance has had some impressive displays on VR experiences and movies, with Sam Macaroni, a VR filmmaker, telling VRFocus; “Going to Sundance this year was amazing because the VR buzz was overwhelming. Everywhere I went people we talking about it. The New Frontier program has grown to become a major presence at the festival in just a few short years. We really are at the beginning of a new media form.”
Battlescar follows a Puerto-Rican-American called Lupe living in New York City in 1978, where she finds trouble but eventually finds a new identity in the punk rock underworld. Starring Rosario Dawson and directed by Nico Casavecchia, in addition to Allais, they hope the new medium will help immerse people in their coming of age tale.
In our interview below with Atlas V’s Antoine Cayrol, he tells us about who the company are, what projects the company are working on, while alluding to some big projects planned for the next year, and even explains the Atlas V business model. The new company has developed quite the buzz around both Battlescar and Spheres. Both are debuting at the Sundance Film Festival, where Atlas V hope the studio will gain renown for their high quality experiences.
On the Chinese market, it’s an attractive prospect for Antoine Cayrol and Atlas V, but the market is so different from in the West that Chinese fans might be kept waiting for a while.
Watch the full interview below, and for more updates on Atlas V, keep reading VRFocus.
VR is in many ways awesome, but still in many ways lacking. Ease-of-use, especially when it comes to playing in VR with friends, is presently a huge pain point for the experience. Oculus’ solution to that pain point—announced more than seven months ago—launched on Gear VR where it was welcomed with open arms. Bizarrely, the same features remain painfully absent from Rift, Oculus’ high-end VR platform, especially in the face of major improvements to multiplayer VR gaming on SteamVR. Nate Mitchell, Head of Rift at Oculus, offers an update on the fate of Rooms and Parties on the Rift.
Rooms & Parties
Announced at the end of 2016, Oculus Rooms and Parties are a new app and a new feature designed to fix perhaps the most frustrating problem with multiplayer Rift gaming: finding your Oculus friends in VR. Once you actually get into the same game and match together, multiplayer on Rift is usually pretty great, but getting to that point is a frustrating challenge because once you don the headset you lose easy access to most of your usual digital communication tools like messaging and VOIP apps.
The Rooms app was designed as a universal pre-game lobby for Oculus where friends could find each other, discuss what they wanted to do in VR, and launch into that experience together. Importantly, it also gives players something to do while they wait for friends to arrive, instead of just sitting around with a headset and peeking out the corner to check their phone for messages from said friends.
Parties, meanwhile, are a feature of the underlying Oculus dashboard: global VOIP chat allowing friends to talk to each other no matter where they are in VR. That makes it way easier to sync up and play because you don’t have to take off your headset (or uncomfortably peek out) to use out-of-headset means of communication like messaging and VOIP apps, only to transition to in-headset VOIP once you get into the same place together. It also means players can play single-player games in VR but keep the conversation going.
Back at the time of the 2016 announcement, both Rooms and Parties launched on Gear VR and have been updated continuously. At the time, Oculus said that both would come to Rift in 2017, and naturally users were excited after putting up with a multiplayer experience that’s not up to par with what what they’d expect from a typical gaming platform.
Missing in Action on Rift
Now seven months into 2017, Rooms and Parties still haven’t come to Rift. Their absence is increasingly painful in the face of the launch of SteamVR Home Beta, a multiplayer pre-game lobby built into SteamVR which—combined with existing Steam voice call and chat features—provides essentially all the functions of Rooms and Parties. It isn’t perfect, but at least it’s there.
In ‘Rooms’ on Gear VR you can watch video until your friends arrive. | Image courtesy Oculus
For a platform that’s in many ways surprisingly mature for its age, Oculus Home for Rift is seriously lacking in multiplayer ease of use, and players are noticing. We’ve heard calls from the Rift community, both indirect and direct, asking us to reach out to Oculus for an update on when there will be improvements to the experience.
From the Horse’s Mouth
Fortunately, we had an opportunity last week to sit down with the perhaps the single best person to speak on the topic: Nate Mitchell, Head of Rift at Oculus, who filled us in on the fate of Rooms and Parties on Rift, first offering a quick recap of where Rooms is on Gear VR.
“We’ve got Rooms on Gear VR, we’re really happy with it. The Rooms team is moving super fast. They’re shipping releases—pretty major updates—more or less every month, adding new features we’re excited about; we’re seeing usage continue to tick up. So overall we’re really excited with where Rooms is at on the mobile side.”
Nate Mitchell has been with Oculus since the beginning. | Image courtesy Oculus
Then he addressed criticism he’s heard online from people saying that Rooms should be a quick and easy port over to Rift on PC.
“[…] a couple of folks were like ‘Why would they [spend time expanding it on mobile] instead of bringing it over to PC?’. Well, realistically, with a limited team, they’re able to move much much faster on a bunch of features and get more value out to folks on the mobile side by focusing only on one platform rather than trying to bring everything over to PC simultaneously,” Mitchell said. “And that’s especially true just because Rooms is actually built in Unity, it’s using Android, and so there’s always gonna be features that they’re doing that are specific to Android (codecs and things, especially for video or audio) that don’t just come over whole cloth, ‘wham-bam’ to PC.”
Parties, Coming Soon to a Rift Near You
For people who want to ‘hang out’ in VR, certainly one function of Rooms, Mitchell says that Facebook Spaces fills that need and that it’s being actively worked updated and expanded. But Rift users have been looking to Rooms not as a place to hang out (there’s already many of those to choose from), but as a way to fix the high-friction experience of syncing up with Rift friends to play VR together. To that, Mitchell confirms that Parties—global group voice calls that span across apps—is on the way to fix one aspect of that friction.
“So people are asking, ‘So when is Rooms coming to PC?’. We have something coming to PC pretty soon which is Parties. So we are gonna have persistent VOIP calls coming to PC independent of Rooms, launching pretty soon. So you’re gonna be able to open up the Universal Menu, and you’re gonna be able to say ‘Hey I wanna chat with Nate’; I’ll get a notification, it’ll say ‘Hey do you wanna join a party with Ben?’; I’ll say ‘Absolutely, love Ben, can’t wait to chat with him again’; and then bam, we’ll have persistent voice across multiple titles.”
Gestern ist mit Blocks eine neue Software für kreative Köpfe erschienen, über die ihr hier mehr erfahren könnt. Wir haben uns jedoch nicht nur die Software angeschaut, sondern auch mit den Entwicklern hinter dem Projekt gesprochen:
Interview mit den Entwicklern
VR Nerds: Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Launch von Blocks! Erzählt uns ein bisschen aus der Vergangenheit der Entwicklung von Blocks.
Blocks Team: 3D-Objekte sind die Bausteine jeder AR- und VR-Erfahrung. Aber diese zu bauen ist schwer! Nachdem wir selbst VR-Erfahrungen erschaffen haben, dachten wir uns, dass es eine intuitivere Lösung geben muss, diese Bausteine zu erstellen. Und sie in VR zu bauen, könnte die Antwort sein. Wir haben Blocks entwickelt, um es jedem zu ermöglichen, tolle 3D-Objekte zu erstellen – ungeachtet der vorhandenen Modeliererfahrung.
VR Nerds: Mit Anwendungen wie Tilt Brush und Blocks haben wir jetzt schon zwei spannende Kreativ-Tools von Google. Warum sind solche Tools wichtig?
Blocks Team: Die Entwicklung von VR-Experiences findet heute größtenteils auf 2D-Bildschirmen statt. Unsere Gehirne allerdings sind auf 3D geschaltet. Design in VR bietet dem Gestalter den Vorteil, sein Werk direkt vor sich in 3D zu haben. Wenn du dir Gedanken um Symmetrie oder Proportionen machst, kannst du einfach einen Schritt zur Seite gehen. Wir freuen uns Blocks der Palette der Kreativ-Tools hinzuzufügen, um kreatives Potential in VR aufblühen zu lassen.
VR Nerds: 3D Modeling in Virtual Reality ist ein riesiges Unterfangen. Worauf lag euer Fokus?
Blocks Team: Wir wollten Blocks so einfach wie möglich gestalten, um jedem Menschen die Möglichkeit zu geben, tolle 3D Modelle zu bauen. Daher lag unser Fokus auf Einfachheit und Geschwindigkeit. Dies wiederum bedeutete für uns, ein leicht zu verstehendes Tool zu entwickeln, dass es dem Designer ermöglicht, alle Ideen in kürzester Zeit zu modellieren. Egal ob es sich um eine einfache Kugel oder um einem komplexen Roboter handelt. Die Low-Poly Ästhetik war uns auch sehr wichtig. So ist es möglich, eine einheitliche Optik bei allen Blocks-Modellen zu erhalten und nur mit Blocks alleine VR- und AR-Apps zu gestalten (Von den Performance Vorteilen ganz zu schweigen!).
VR Nerds: Was würdet ihr gerne von der Community sehen?
Blocks Team:Wir haben bereits erstaunliche Werke von der Community und frühen Testern sehen können. In unserer Gallerie werdet ihr viele Beispiele finden. Wir freuen uns schon auf die Beiträge vieler Künstler, Designer und jedem Menschen der von VR begeistert ist. Von dem Remix Feature erwarten wir, dass sich die Community gegenseitig inspiriert.
VR Nerds: Worauf können wir uns, was Blocks betrifft, in Zukunft freuen?
Blocks Team: Wir können es kaum erwarten, zu sehen, was die Community erschafft! Wie bei jedem von uns entwickeltem Produkt, werden wir mit großer Aufmerksamkeit auf das Feedback der Community achten und in die zukünftige Entwicklung einfließen lassen.
Playing videogames and losing weight? It seems almost too good to be true, but VirZOOM intend to help you do exactly that, with the VirZOOM Bike and VZ Sensor. We looked at the VirZOOM platform before, but now we can hear about the future of getting healthy from VirZOOM themselves.
VirZOOM promises the kind of workout most can only dream of, the kind that sees your burning calories while setting high scores in a variety of virtual reality (VR) games. You can use either the VirZOOM Bike, which offers the full VirZOOM experience, or the VZ Sensor, which is a small sensor which will track your movements, turning any normal exercise bike into a VirZOOM compatible bike.
Compatible with a range of VR head-mounted displays (HMDs), you can use the VirZOOM platform with Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PlayStation VR or Gear VR – Gear VR support is somewhat limited in the early days, with only two of the promised seven bundled games available at launch, though the full seven games are to be available before the end of the year.
In our interview below, Spencer Honeyman tells us more about the VirZOOM platform and talks about customer testimonies he’s heard. It sounds like a good way to get in shape, and we’re looking forward to trying it for ourselves.
For the best ways to stay fit in VR, make sure to stay on VRFocus.
The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has had swathes of new virtual reality (VR) news, and of course Intel have brought their very best to the table. We caught up with Intel’s Kim Pallister, Director of Intel’s VR Center of Excellence, and he spoke to us about what Intel had to show us at E3 2017.
Intel wants to move into esports and introduce competitive gaming to VR. They’re working with Ready at Dawn on Echo Arena, the recently announced competitive VR shooter, and launching the VR Challenger League.
Echo Arena already looks like a great, compelling VR experience, and with Intel’s support we’re hoping it becomes one of VR’s premier experience. We played it at E3 2017 and said; “Of all the many videogame titles that have assured they’ll be the one to break the mould, it’s Ready at Dawn and CCP Games that are most likely to attract that highly competitive audience.”
Check out our full interview with Pallister below, where he shares all the best of what Intel has brought to E3 in 2017.
For all of the latest from E3 2017 on VR, stay on VRFocus.
Having recently departed Oculus after founding the company in 2012, Palmer Luckey has assured the world that he’s still very interested in virtual reality and has hinted at some of the things he’s pursuing for future projects. Taking a cue from Sword Art Online, an anime where players get trapped in a virtual reality game, Luckey says he’s interested in the idea of a virtual game with serious real life consequences.
Speaking recently to Japanese VR publication Mogura VR in a series of interviews (translated for Road to VR into english), Luckey, among other things, spoke of his interest in the anime Sword Art Online (2012) and its dark premise.
Sword Art Online
In the show, characters wear futuristic VR headsets that intercept their brainwaves and translates them into the game. Eventually they learn that they are stuck in the game and removing their headsets would cause them to die in real life. For those curious, the show’s trailer is a good teaser.
Sword Art Online (also known as SAO) is far from the first anime to employ the ‘stuck in virtual reality’ premise, but it’s a recent and well executed addition to the genre. The show was also airing new episodes during the Oculus Rift Kickstarter, which made it a timely point of discussion among VR enthusiasts. Luckey recalls the interplay:
The week we launched the Kickstarter [in 2012] was actually the week when the third episode of SAO aired. The timing overlapped perfectly. I think that SAO made Oculus the focus of attention. At the same time Oculus might have made SAO even more popular by a small amount. Many people said that SAO seemed more realistic to them because of the existence of Oculus. Because Oculus’ existence VR didn’t feel like it was 20 or 30 years away. Many people thought that VR is going to become real in the near future.
During the Kickstarter I got hundreds of emails like: ‘Have you heard about the anime Sword Art Online?’, I still have people asking me that to this day [laughs]. I think over a thousand people have asked me about SAO so far.
When asked what he liked most about the show, Luckey says it was the stakes.
The setting of [Sword Art Online] was ‘If you die in-game you also die in the real world’. This setting became obvious right after the launch of SAO. This is a very extreme result. If a player makes the wrong decision he will have the result of his death. This is different to a normal game where you just shoot stuff, and it does not matter when you die because you can just respawn countless times.
Right after hearing the concept of SAO I was drawn to it. Even now after several years I am thinking about the concept of a game in which you have the same serious results in the real world as in the game world. It is going to cause a ‘real result’ which makes the game ‘real’. It is a game in which no mistake is allowed, you have to seriously think about everything.
“This concept of ‘serious results’ is part of one of the projects I am working on,” he said in the interview.
The game ‘Lose/Lose’ not only deletes itself from your computer when you lose, but also deletes random files on your computer each time you kill an enemy.
There are some examples of hyper-niche games which do have relatively serious consequences, like Lose/Lose which not only deletes itself from your computer when you lose, but also deletes random files on your computer each time you kill an enemy. There’s also some hardcore ‘permadeath’ MMO players who are sworn to delete their characters if they die in the game, which could mean hundreds if not thousands of hours of their lives going to waste if they follow through with the promise.
None of these examples are as high stakes as Luckey is thinking though, as he says that a ‘serious result’ is “something no one has done so far in the real world,” and I have confirmed that he’s well aware of permadeath MMO players. He of course says he doesn’t want to make a game where the outcome for losing would be death, but says that the consequences would have to be “something between current games and SAO,” in order for such a game to become popular.
The interviewer asks Luckey if he wants to be like Kayaba Akihiko, the villain in Sword Art Online who traps the characters in the virtual world and manufactures the consequence of death.
“Just a little, just a tiny bit,” Luckey says. “I can understand what he was thinking. Kayaba created a game with a ‘serious result’ and wanted to see what would come of it.”
As to why he’s interested in serious consequences for a virtual reality game, Luckey expounds:
In the real world everyone is making careful judgments. Because you do not want to die in a car crash you drive your car carefully. No one would drive a car in such a way in a game. But what if there were a game in which when you would make a mistake within, it would have a big gameplay impact. This factor would change the way you play the game a lot and would make it feel a lot closer to reality.
I think human beings want to live in a society that is careful. You would not want to live in a world without careful people. It would be a free but crazy world. In the movie The Matrix agent Smith says ‘The machine is trying to build the perfect world for humans.’ This Line is based on the idea that human beings need conflict and cannot obtain happiness without experiencing pain. Thus in the movie the machines create a world that continues to let humans experience pain.
I am not as insane as Smith [laughs], but I do think those words contain a bit of truth. I don’t think I want to live in a world in which humans control everything, without any serious results.
As for when we might see this ‘serious result’ project that he’s working on, Luckey offers no hints, “it’s still is very early, so I can’t tell you any details, but it certainly will be exciting.”
In a recent interview with Glixel, Dr. Richard Marks, head of Sony’s Magic Lab R&D team, talked about PSVR’s development history, social VR, and a possible holodeck-style future. He thinks voice input has unrealised potential, and could become the way users launch into different VR experiences in the future, customising them in real-time thanks to procedural generation.
Following a Christmas break where he studied a robot vacuum cleaner, tested all available voice-input devices for the home (such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers), and watched every Black Mirror episode, it was voice control that excited Sony’s head of Magic Lab the most. Marks thinks that a voice-enabled VR environment, perhaps in the form of a procedurally-generated sandbox, where practically any element could be changed at the user’s command, “doesn’t seem very far away.”
Marks imagines a future where voice input technology is set free in VR, limited only by the user’s imagination. He describes a possible virtual environment that is partly procedural, but containing finely-crafted areas created by development teams where users would send most of their time.
“That’s the kind of thing that will involve probably multiple groups and multiple companies even to get all the content that you would want to have happen, but that’s what I think the vision of VR is in the future. That’s why I see it as the holodeck. I just put it on and I can make my world anything I want right now”, he says.
With apps like Virtual Desktop and even Oculus Home it is already possible to use voice activation to launch VR software from within a PC headset, and there are several interpretations of holodeck-like launch environments available or in development, but Marks is imagining a time where machine learning has taken significant steps beyond where it is today, allowing users to spawn anything from a vast library, or seamlessly interact with virtual characters, with nothing more than a voice command.
Google, who recently claimed to have the most accurate speech recognition, announced its collective AI efforts are now under Google.ai during last week’s I/O 2017 conference, which was heavily focused on machine learning. Their natural language processing is at the cutting-edge of voice technology, but developers are only beginning to explore the complexities and nuances of voice user interface design, as described in James Giangola’s presentation. There are many hurdles to overcome before we can have meaningful and frictionless conversations with our virtual assistants that go beyond a limited set of commands.
Asked why there isn’t a VR version of the most popular games like League of Legends or Overwatch, Marks offers a few reasons, suggesting that the number of available players and budget determines the type of game that can be made, and that sometimes a VR version simply doesn’t make sense without effectively making two different games. He points towards Resident Evil 7 (2017), whose VR mode is currently exclusive to PSVR, as a good example of a game that works on both screen and headset.
“When the game can do it I think it’s a great thing for them to do, because they can take advantage of the huge installed base of non-VR players too”, he says. “But I think once the installed base of VR gets big enough then obviously we won’t have that issue. You can just make an amazingly deep long game that’s super high production value… It just won’t be exactly the same game.”
Referring to Star Trek: Bridge Crew, which launches at the end of the month, Marks talks about the importance of social interaction in VR and in particular, the feeling of ‘co-presence’, and how it will improve in the future as the number of VR users increases, bringing greater incentive to share a virtual space with others. But artificial characters will always have a role to play, and there is a higher expectation for believable interaction with NPCs in VR games. To highlight co-presence using AI, Magic Lab has a ‘believable characters’ demo, where you interact with robots in a playroom using natural gestures and body language.
