Mobile VR Games – Page 5 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

August 11, 2017November 22, 2017

‘Rez Infinite’ is Now Available on Google Daydream

Back in August, developer Enhance Games announced that Rez Infinite (2016) would launch on Google Daydream “later this year.” With little forewarning, the futuristic action-shooter is now available on Google Play for Daydream-compatible smartphones.

Update (11/22/17): Rez Infinite just dropped on the Play Store. Check it out here. While you can download a trial version of the game for free, you’ll have to pay to unlock the full game. Daydream Ready Headset & Controller is required to play.

Original article (08/11/17): Enhance Games had a surprise launch of Rez Infinite on PC this week, bringing the remake of the famed 2001 Rez to the platform following the game’s initial 2016 launch on PS4. The PC version of the game is claimed by the developers to be the “best version yet,” thanks to enhanced graphics and VR support for the high-end Rift and Vive headsets.

But maybe you don’t happen to own a high-end gaming PC and VR headset, but still want to get your Rez on. Well, if have your hands on Google’s Daydream headset, you’re in luck, as Rez Infinite is due to launch for the platform later this year. For the uninitiated, the developers describe the game as such:

Experience 360 degrees of mind-blowing synesthesia as you blast your way through waves of enemies and massive transforming bosses, with your every move triggering colors and sounds that sync and blend to the beat of the legendary techno soundtrack of Rez. […] Rez Infinite must be seen—and heard—to be believed.

You can watch the PC launch trailer here to get a sense of the gameplay.

Details on the game’s Daydream release are extremely limited at this time; yet to be announced is the price, specific release date, and exact control scheme (whether it is head-aimed or possibly makes use of the Daydream controller for motion input).

Our expectation is that it will be the full game—including the new ‘Area X’ which was added for the remake—with visuals optimized for mobile performance. We’d also expect the mobile version to be priced lower than the $25 PC pricetag.

We’ll relay more as further details are released.

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August 9, 2017

Coldplay to Livestream ‘Head Full of Dreams’ Concert on Gear VR for Free Next Week

Ever wanted to go to a Coldplay concert? If you own a Gear VR headset, you’ve got a free ticket for the VR livestream of the band’s ‘A Head Full of Dreams’ performance next week.

Samsung and Live Nation are teaming up to bring Coldplay’s performance on August 17th from Chicago’s Soldier Field straight to your headset, starting at 8:30 pm CT (your timezone here). The concert will be streamed in VR live on Gear VR through the Samsung VR app, and will also be available for replay for a limited time following the event.

Gear VR users in more than 50 countries will be able to view the VR livestream, and Samsung promises that the VR broadcast will let fans “[experience] the energy of the show like never before.”

‘Casino VR Poker’ Holds Tournament with Real Prizes, Oculus Rift + Touch Bundles for Top 3 Players

Casino VR Poker (2016), online multiplayer casino hosting live Texas hold’em, is offering real prizes in their ‘High Rollers’ poker tournament taking place on 20th August including multiple Oculus Rift + Touch bundles, hundred of dollars worth of gift cards, and Casino VR swag like t-shirts and playing cards.

Casino VR Poker has run plenty of free-roll tournaments in the past, but these only had virtual prizes to match. While the winner of the upcoming tournament will grab $5 million in-game poker chips, the real prize is the Oculus Rift + Touch bundles, which go to the top 3 players in the tournament.

The High Rollers Tournament takes place August 20th at 1pm PST (your timezone), and is by-invitation-only, which can be obtained by fulfilling one of the following basic objectives.

Survive the sharks and play in the Pro Casino for a total of 2 hours.
Place in the top 3 in any of the satellite tournaments (check the app for the exact schedule).
Attempt to bribe (or otherwise curry favor with) Marco, our resident pit boss.

After completing one of the objectives, you can then unlock a purchasable tournament ticket that costs 100,000 Casino VR Poker chips. All players starts with 10,000 chips and 10/20 blinds that increase every 7 minutes.

‘Casino VR Poker’ on Rift

‘Casino VR Poker’ on GearVR

Casino VR Poker allows crossplay between Oculus Rift, Gear VR and Daydream, though only Oculus Rift and Gear VR users will have access to the tournament. There’s a reason behind this.

Both Rift and Gear VR versions of the game are free, however Daydream costs $4.99. Laws allowing for the existence of sweepstakes or contests like the upcoming tournament expressly forbid prior purchasing requirements. In-app purchases do allow you to buy in-game chips—which are no longer tradeable or hold a monetary value once they’ve landed in your virtual coffers—but are not required to get the necessary virtual entrance fee, as you’re given a free amount of chips.

Check out our hands-on with Casino VR Poker to get a better idea of what the game has to offer enterprising gamblers.

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July 5, 2017

Hands-on: ‘Augmented Empire’ is an Engaging, Story-Driven Tactical RPG for Gear VR

At this year’s E3, we got a chance to go hands-on with Augmented Empire, a narrative-driven tactical RPG coming exclusively to Gear VR on July 13th. Created by Coatsink, the studio known for the Esper series and Gang Beasts (2016), the action plays out on a tiled game board displayed as an augmented reality diorama.

Looking at the little dollhouse-sized diorama set before me on top of a virtual desk in my virtual hideout, it’s amazing just how much detail Coatsink was able to pack into a Gear VR title. While I’m willing to admit that miniature objects always look better in VR because of the perceived bump in detail, I just can’t help but admire the game not only from a technical aspect, but from a level design one too. Telling from the 30-minute demo I had, I can say I’ve certainly seen less-appealing visuals on more graphically-capable headsets like Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

Simply put, the game doesn’t bite off more than it can chew technically and fills in the gaps with what I’d consider to be an engaging story—something that’s currently pretty rare on mobile VR platforms.

Oozing with a neo-noir atmosphere, you’re tasked with controlling 6 misfits across the world’s three castes, a social system simply called the “Citizen Grade System.” And it’s not an upstairs-downstairs comedy either; high society types live in luxury at the summit in complete ignorance of the world below, and the world’s outliers and criminals live in Detritum, a cockroach-filled ghetto at the island’s depths.

Using gaze-based controls and the Gear VR’s touchpad, I maneuvered a little 3-inch avatar through an interesting story about a mother tracking down her long-abandoned high-caste daughter. Turn-based actions let me sneak past guards, shoot them, and hide from their direct line of sight as they tried to stop me with bullets. Each room was filled with items I needed to go forward, including scrap metal that you can forge into customizable parts for weapons.

At the end of the demo, I was then given my god’s-eye-view control over the daughter, who making her way through the criminal underworld reveals just how depraved society can be. I would put dialogue somewhere between ‘PG-13’ and ‘R’.

I was told by CEO Tom Beardsmore that each ‘episode’ would last around 20-30 minutes, and the entire multi-episode game would be comprised by hundreds of hours of voice overs from established actors such as Kate Mulgrew (Orange is the New Black, Star Trek Voyager), Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), Doug Cockle (The Witcher Series), and Garrick Hagon (Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, Horizon: Zero Dawn).

In fact, there is so much dialogue, users will have to download the game in discrete batches, otherwise risk taking up too much space on their smartphones.

“With a strong focus on story and deep but accessible gameplay, we wanted to give Gear VR gamers an extraordinary experience. We’re thrilled with the calibre of talent involved in Augmented Empire” said Beardsmore.

After a hectic day at E3 of walking, writing and interviewing, sitting down with Augmented Empire was an exceedingly relaxing experience as I dialed into the drama and action before me, albeit pint-sized. I was promised that my decisions, chosen via the game’s dialogue tree system, would allow for multiple endings and hours of gameplay. I’ll be looking forward to checking out Augmented Empire in my review when it launches next week, and hope the tactical ‘cover-and-shoot’ system can hold my attention even if Kathryn Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager (1995) and Ed from Shaun of the Dead (2004) are personally charming additions.

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June 9, 2017

Visualizing An Invisible Cyber War with ‘Zero Days VR’

yasmin-elayat There’s an invisible cyber war that’s happening between major nation states, and Zero Days VR takes you inside of it in a completely new way using virtual reality. You go on a journey into a hyper-stylized cyberspace world where you embody the Stuxnet computer virus as it navigates programmable logic controllers, changes code, and destroys Iranian nuclear centrifuges.

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Zero Days VR is one of the most powerful VR documentaries that I’ve seen so far since it uses the unique affordances of VR to visualize what’s at stake for weaponizing security vulnerabilities, and it uses these volumetric affordances to innovate what’s possible in immersive storytelling. The end result is a visceral and embodied experience of an otherwise complex and abstract topic of cyber warfare that is probably one of the most important stories in our world today.

Zero Days VR is based upon the journalistic work of Alex Gibney’s Zero Days documentary, but it’s not a promotional experience for the movie but rather a self-contained experience that uses VR to tell aspects of the story that didn’t work as well in the 2D version. The VR experience tells the story as if the main character is code, and they created different immersive environments that reflected testimony from a range of computer experts as well as a number of official government denials.

At Sundance, I had a chance to talk with Scatter’s Creative Director Yasmin Elayat about directing Zero Days VR, and how this project came about through the use of their Depthkit technology in Gibney’s documentary. We also talked about their failed experiments to make this into a non-linear and interactive experience. It turned out that too much journalistic integrity and overall context was lost when they surrendered control over the linear release of evidence, and so they had to abandon the more interactive components of the experience that they were building off from their previous experience on interactive VR doc CLOUDS created by James George and Jonathan Minard.

Zero Days VR was released on June 8th on Oculus Home for both the Oculus Rift and Gear VR, and it also won an award for Narrative Achievement at Unity’s Vision VR/AR Awards.

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May 23, 2017

‘Audio Factory’ is a Compelling Showcase of Google’s Spatial Audio Engine for VR

Google has released a Daydream VR app called Audio Factory, a polished and even entertaining demonstrating their Spatial Audio Engine for VR. Described as “VR’s second sense”, spatial audio is a key aspect of maintaining a high level of immersion, and all major VR platform providers offer their own solutions as part of their SDKs, including Google.

‘Direction’ in VR—as in, how to effectively direct the user’s attention when they are allowed to look wherever they please—is still a major design challenge for many VR content creators who are making the leap to this new medium. Although sight is clearly the leading attention-getter, how can you draw the user’s attention to what’s outside of their field of view? With their new Daydream app, Audio Factory, Google has effectively demonstrated the answer: spatial audio; that which sounds as if it’s originating from a distinct source within the VR environment.

Released alongside Google’s I/O Developer event last week, the Audio Factory app is a compelling showcase of the significance of spatial audio in VR, presenting a variety of interactive environments that highlight “evocative sound design”. Ostensibly the app is designed to demonstrate how useful and important spatial audio design is to developers and game designers, but it’s such a polished experience that it’s worth a go by anyone who owns a Daydream headset (just be sure to use headphones and turn up the audio!).

Google first introduced spatial audio to the Cardboard SDK in January 2016, and then presented their Spatial Audio Engine for VR at last year’s I/O, and they’ve recently announced Daydream 2.0, which adds several further audio improvements, including real-time early reflection rendering, pre-computed room acoustics, and spatial ambient baking.

Using Head-Related Transfer Functions, which determine the way in which audio enters your ears (affected by the position, size and shape of the head, along with many other detailed variables), the SDK can simulate audio coming from a particular point in 3D space, which enables immersive audio that can elevate a VR experience to the next level. Further information about the Google VR SDK’s audio rendering engine can be found within Google VR’s Spatial Audio guides.

The free app is available on the Google Play store.

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May 8, 2017

Intel to 360 Livestream PGA Tour at TPC Sawgrass Golf Course on Gear VR

Broadcast during all four days of The Players Championship starting May 11th, 360 video will be livestreamed from the famous 17th hole at the TPC Sawgrass golf course. The collaboration with Intel, Twitter, and the PGA Tour will be viewable on Gear VR headsets or via Twitter and Periscope.

Described as the PGA Tour’s “first live VR production”, the ambitious livestream will feature three simultaneous 360 videos from key vantage points at the 17th hole—the tee, the walkway from tee box to green, and in the water next to the ‘Island Green’—captured using Intel’s True VR cameras.

Since acquiring VR broadcasting company VOKE in November 2016, Intel has been using the stereoscopic True VR technology as part of the Intel Sports Group, aiming to be the leader in VR sports broadcasting.

“The Intel True VR platform will provide golf fans with a new, immersive experience using our end-to-end solution”, said David Aufhauser, managing director, Intel Sports Group. “Working with the PGA Tour, as well as global distribution via Twitter and Periscope, gives us the ability to expand the Intel True VR experience to more fans.”

The broadcast will be available on the Oculus Gear VR store via the PGA Tour VR Live app, which compliments the existing PGA Tour VR app, something the organisation has experimented with since February 2016. Those without a Gear VR headset will be able to watch the standard 360 video output on Twitter or Periscope which also marks the first time Twitter has livestreamed 360 video during a major sports event.

“We tested Intel’s True VR technology on a live basis at the Genesis Open in February, and were very pleased with the quality”, says Rick Anderson, PGA Tour Chief Media Officer. “We decided that executing a live VR experience on one of the most dramatic holes in golf was something that our fans would love, and the fact that we are partnering with Twitter to deliver 360 video will offer tremendous scale.”

Golf fans will be hoping this year’s tournament delivers a few more memorable moments at the iconic 17th.

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April 24, 2017

Google Nominates Top AR/VR Apps for 2017 Play Awards

This year’s 2017 Google Play Awards include new categories for top VR and AR apps, to which Google has nominated five apps each. The award ceremony will take place on Thursday, May 18th at 6:30PM PT during Google I/O, the company’s annual developer festival.

Ever since the reveal of Google Daydream at last year’s I/O event, and the launch of the first Daydream phone and headset late last year, Google has been making a big push for VR on Android.

Among 12 categories, the company had added two new ‘Best Experience’ categories for AR and VR to the Google Play Awards 2017.

Nominees were selected much like last year by cross-functional teams throughout Google who work hand-in-hand with the relevant categories and product areas. While category specific criteria can be found below, the common requirements across all categories focused on high star rating, technical performance and freshness, requiring a launch or major update since April 2016.

Here’s a look at the nominees:

Best VR Experience

Virtual Virtual Reality – Tender Claws

The Arcslinger – Big Red Button Entertainment

Mekorama VR – Martin Magni

Gunjack 2: End of Shift – CCP Games

The Turning Forest – Media Applications Technologies for the BBC Entertainment

Best AR Experience

Dinosaurs Among Us – American Museum of Natural History

HOLO (beta) – 8i

WOORLD – Funomena

WayfairView – Wayfair

Crayola Color Blaster – Legacy Games

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April 24, 2017

‘Alien: Covenant In Utero’ VR Experience Launches Wednesday

The forthcoming Alien: Covenant movie is getting a VR experience, Alien: Covenant In Utero and it launches this Wednesday on Oculus platforms.

Following the news of director Ridley Scott’s film production company launching a VR division, the release date for the Alien: Covenant In Utero experience has been announced in a brief teaser (seen heading this article); it’s coming April 26th to Oculus platforms.

ALIEN: COVENANT In Utero is a 360-degree virtual reality journey into a living nightmare and offers a terrifyingly close and personal encounter as an alien neomorph at the time of its birth. Fans will be able to experience the world around them, reliving the very first memories of the neomorph in an immersive environment.

So far the information we have says that the experience is launching “on Oculus,” which we presume to mean it will be available as a 360 video on both the Rift and Gear VR, though we’ve reached out to 20th Century Fox to clarify, as well as the price (which at this point we presume to be free).

Both 20th Century Fox and production company RSA have worked together on VR projects in the past, including the The Martian VR Experience (2016) which was associated with The Martian (2015) film starring Matt Damon.

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February 10, 2017

Oculus Home Voice Search Now on Rift and Gear VR Makes Browsing Your VR Library a Breeze

Recent updates to Oculus Home on both desktop and Gear VR have added a Voice Search feature which makes zipping around your VR content library much easier than the old method of digging through menus and thumbnails.

The industry is still figuring out the best way to make user-interfaces in VR. Oculus Home on Rift and Gear VR is a start, but there’s still usability trouble that comes with the need to support a userbase which could be controlling the interface with some combination of their head and a static input device (like a touchpad, gamepad, or Oculus Remote) or with motion controllers like Touch, none of which have a method for quick keyboard input.

With no keyboard (the way we search for pretty much everything on computers), finding specific items in your library or the store means hoping that you’re looking in the right section of some categorization system, or scrolling slowly through thumbnails to find what you want.

The new Voice Search feature (which Oculus says is in beta) now available in Oculus Home on Rift and Gear VR makes it way easier to get to exactly the app or group of apps you want, whether in the store or in your own library. See how it works in the video heading this article.

On both headsets you can click the Voice Search button to search for apps by category (ie: Racing, Action, Social), to find the library page for specific apps (ie: “find Altspace”), or to launch specific apps outright (ie: “Launch Dead and Buried“). Both can also be used to perform a ‘Recenter’ action to get the headset re-aligned in case you move.

The Rift version can be conveniently triggered with the command “Hey Oculus”, in addition to clicking the button. At this point though, it seems the voice activated command is only responsive when in Oculus Home, though hopefully we’ll see it expanded into the Oculus menu (which can be called up while apps are running), and into apps themselves (with the hope that expanded capabilities would allow you to easily send invites and do other friends list functions).