Oculus Connect 4 is already disappearing into the distance behind us as we rocket through the remains of 2017, indeed there is little in the way of big virtual reality (VR) events left on the horizon now. With one-day events like Develop: VR joined by the big lingering presence of PlayStation Experience 2017. But other than that it’s a smooth ride into the new year and the next big stop, that of CES 2018. Which is taking place at a slightly later date than the previous couple of years. One far friendlier for press and industry members alike.
This does not mean we are done talking about the event though with Oculus themselves continuing to put up footage of the event sessions as well as discussions from the floor and behind the scenes. One such series of videos is the Developer Perspectives series, which previously featured quick snapshots of creators for the Oculus platform giving their philosophies on VR and content creation. The series returned at Oculus Connect 4 with some quick interview snippets of various VR developers as Oculus asked them for their development tips, what they are finding exciting them about VR and what they think is to come.
There’s a whole host of them, and you can find them all below. You may even spot some familiar faces from the VR scene. VRFocus will be back soon with a number of interviews from Oculus Connect 4 as well as all the news from around the VR and AR industries.
Back at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) this year, VRFocus managed to get hands-on with Space Junkies behind closed doors, speaking with Adrian Lacy, Producer of Ubisoft Montpellier about the videogame.
This multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) was shown again at Oculus Connect 4, where four players could fight two versus two in a futuristic map filled with asteroids. In this interview Lacy not only plays the game, but also explains a bit about the maps, the mods and the characters you can play.
Like in Echo Arena, players are able to see their whole body as an avatar and you are able to pick up different weapons such as the “Sunblaster” and “Bioguns” in interior or exterior maps. Lacy also discusses how Ubisoft created a special VR engine named Brigitte in order to help the VR developers jump in and out of the game.
Oculus Connect 4 (OC4) featured plenty of trailers for upcoming content, from the latest big name videogames to new animation and apps. One such piece of content was Melita which made its debut at the 74th Venice Film Festival (VFF) earlier this year. Now VRFocus has the latest trailer and screenshots for you to peruse.
Melita is a 20-minute animation created by Future Lighthouse. Consisting of three parts, with the second and third still in the development, Melita tells the story of two strong female characters on their quest to save humanity due to climate change’s irreparable damage to Earth.
Melita will launch for Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR on 17th October.
For the latest VR news and updates, keep reading VRFocus.
Windlands (2016), the high-flying exploration game from Psytec Games, is getting a sequel next year that’s looking to alter its predecessor’s formula with the addition of co-op adventuring as well as combat. We got a hands-on with the newly revealed game at this year’s Oculus Connect, which puts a bow and arrow in your hands on top of your trusty grappling hooks.
There are a few elements new to the series, the first of which reveals itself almost immediately as I start the demo: enemies. Riding on a speeding land-boat traveling at high speed through a dusty desert, a giant sandworm appears out of nowhere, looming over my live companion and me. I’m told I have to shoot the beast with my bow, and although I’m not certain why, we both comply, conjuring it up with the Touch’s grip button and firing a hail of arrows at the sandworm until he disappears into the sandy desert below.
It’s all very cinematic, if not a little telling about the journey to come. Gone are the zen-like, pressure-free heights requiring quiet tenacity to surmount, which are now replaced with level bosses and the active chatter of real-world companions by your side.
Satisfied with our performance, a bearded NPC named Tohir beckons us to move forward through the level set before us, a tree-filled canyon that functions as a straight obstacle course clearly built for our grappling hooks to take hold. Studio co-founder Jon Hibbins raced ahead of me, chatting along the way about the game’s art style and some of the new additions to the series’ second game.
Passing by Tohir again, I remarked that the art style looked awfully familiar. To my surprise, Hibbins told me Psytec had hired one of my favorite developers from the early days of VR, Nick Pittom (aka “Red of Paw”), an indie dev known for lovingly recreating several scenes in VR from various Studio Ghibli films such as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Toroto and Howl’s Moving Castle.
Predictably, the locomotion system functions nearly the same as Windlands, providing you with green trees for hook-holds and incremental save points that you can pass through along the way. Full of myself and overconfident of my own swinging abilities, I fell a few times, reappearing back at these save points on my forward journey through the level.
At the end of the tree-filled canyon, Hibbins and I faced off with the level boss, a strange legged robot with a number of shields on its legs. Finally using my bow to good effect, Hibbins and I took turns firing on the robot, trying to break the shields. Success was quick, and out of the strange enemy came a recognizable glowing golden prism. Demo over.
From what little I’ve experienced of Windlands 2, the game feels pretty different in scope from the first. Although the quiet vertical parkour puzzles seem to be gone with the second game in the series, the game is still in development, so there’s no telling if the lofty heights will return or if the game will be more linear like we saw in the demo. Either way, the added benefit of being able to explore the world with a friend and have that shared experience adds something I only wish were a part of the first game.
Windlands 2 is coming to Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Playstation VR sometime in 2018.
A new commercial-focused hardware bundle including Rift headset, Touch controllers, three Sensors, and three facial interfaces was revealed at Oculus Connect 4 this week. The bundle, which can be ordered in bulk, for the first time offers a commercial license, enterprise-grade warranty, and dedicated customer support.
Hugo Barra, VP of Virtual Reality at Facebook, announced the Oculus for Business program on stage during the event’s opening keynote, highlighting two examples of existing commercial partnerships, one with Audi who have Rift experiences for viewing custom car configurations installed in hundreds of showrooms worldwide, and Cisco, who created a VR collaboration environment on top of their Spark platform:
Oculus have been slow to entice the enterprise & commercial sector, perhaps because their room-scale solution took far longer to reach a high standard compared to the HTC Vive, which offered a near-flawless room-scale VR package since its launch in April 2016. HTC introduced a $1,200 Vive ‘Business Edition’ in June 2016, dominating the enterprise sector for well over a year.
The new Oculus Rift Business Bundle, which starts at $900, has been detailed on the official Oculus Blog, stating that the Rift can be used to “boost productivity, accelerate trainings, and present the otherwise impossible to their employees and customers—across industries like tourism, education, medical, construction, manufacturing, automotive, and retail.”
Oculus still doesn’t doesn’t offer a commercial/enterprise app platform, something that Valve and HTC have been focusing on lately through Steam and Viveport. Interestingly, Oculus is shipping to 17 counties, none of which are China, a country where VR adoption is relatively high but largely dominated by HTC’s Vive headset.
Revealed during the Oculus Connect 4 keynote today, Coco VR is Pixar Animation Studios’ first-ever VR project, coming to Oculus Rift and Gear VR. Timed with the launch of Disney-Pixar’s new animated film Coco in November, Coco VR is described as a “next level social virtual reality” experience.
The brief gameplay footage shown the trailer, which appears to run at an unusually low framerate, shows various scenes in which players appear as characters from the Land of the Dead, with plenty of interaction and customisation on offer.
According to this report on Oh My Disney, the app uses Facebook’s technology to enable social functionality, allowing users to explore the world of Coco with their Facebook friends. Animation World Network reports that the project is “a co-production from Disney-Pixar and Oculus, with VR creative development and execution by Magnopus.”
Coco VR will be available for preview at various Día de los Muertos festivals across the US and at Camp Flag Gnaw Music Festival in LA beginning October 28th, as well as in select Disney Stores and movie theatres through November 22nd. The app is due to launch on Oculus Rift on November 15th, followed by Gear VR on November 22nd.
Red Matter is an upcoming story-driven VR adventure puzzle game, first revealed at Oculus Connect, that puts you in a retro-futurist world that borrows elements from the Cold War-era and teases them out to an interesting logical conclusion.
Created by Madrid-based studio Vertical Robot,Red Matter places you in the role of an astronaut from the Atlantic Union who’s tasked with investigating one of a Volgravian top secret research project located on a distant planet.
Starting out the demo in an a rocky clearing, I find what appears to be a Volgravian sign bearing some faux-Slavic language using the Cyrillic script. With a data tool in my left hand and a gripper claw in the right, I point to the sign to activate the data tool’s translator function, revealing that a research facility is just up ahead.
image courtesy Vertical Robot
The low-gravity environment of the planet means that instead of bounding your way around by foot, it’s more efficient to use your boosters to get from place to place. In real-world terms, this functions as an on-rails teleport; you pick your landing point and are transported there in a lofty arc at a variable speed controlled by the player. The default speed is nice and slow with no abrupt changes in acceleration, although you can speed up the boost from place to place to make it a quicker experience.
Moving towards a brutalist-style concrete building featuring a giant Soviet-style red star above its sign, I point my translator tool again at the illegible Volgravian script sitting below it. Yup. That’s the place I need to get into.
Pushing a button with my claw, the door retracts, revealing an industrial facility of some sort. The research subject is still unclear as I make my way further, replacing some fuses to another door that I scrounge from nearby panels. The door is heavy, and moves satisfyingly slow, giving it a weighty feel.
image courtesy Vertical Robot
With one door puzzle down, I enter a small round room with a strange device in the middle. On the wall is a diagram with written instructions on how to operate it. Reading carefully, I pop open the device to reveal a strange two-handed crank that rotates the interior shell of the room to face an unseen metal blast door, that upon opening leads to an employee area.
I head into the employee area leading to several engineering departments. A schedule on the wall tells me which sector I need (of course with all the Soviet iconography of gold-trimmed red stars), as I’m told by my commander I need to find a specific secure room with who knows what in it.
image courtesy Vertical Robot
Rustling through the employee lockers, I find a keycard. Instead of putting the card into my inventory, I was told I could scan it with my translator tool and record the data so I could then spit it back out later so I could leave the physical card behind. Traveling to the door and opening it up with my copied keycard data, I find a cell-sized room with a single lever covered with a few strange plants. Touching the alien flowers turns them an iridescent color – a sign that something even more strange was next if I pulled that lever.
I knew I had to, so I pulled the lever, and that’s when a strange substance leaked out of the panel, slowly spreading out over my whole field of view to obscure the world around me. Fade to back, demo over.
Design Director Tatiana Delgado calls the game’s Volgravian setting a “cross between the encroaching surveillance of George Orwell’s dystopian societies and Kafka’s absurd bureaucracy.” Delgado told me that while it’s still in development, that Red Matter is aiming for a 2.5-3 hour gameplay length, but it was too early to talk about launch dates at this time. The game is currently being advertised as an Oculus-only experience.
During the Oculus Connect 4 keynote today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed a new VR experience in development called Oculus Venues, described as a way to view live sports, concerts, and other live events in VR with friends and strangers alike.
Zuckerberg’s opening speech reinforced his views about VR’s ability to ‘create opportunities for everyone’, and his newly announced long-term goal of getting 1 billion people into VR (on an unspecified timeline). Cost of entry is a major hurdle, which is being addressed with price cuts to existing hardware and a low-cost standalone headset coming early next year, but Facebook’s main focus continues to be on improving the social VR experience.
Image courtesy Oculus
One of their new social VR projects, releasing next year, is Oculus Venues, a way of viewing live events in VR with multiple virtual participants. “Venues lets you watch live concerts and live sports, and premieres of movies and TV shows all around the world with your friends and with thousands of other people at the same time,” said Zuckerberg on stage. “It’s another example of how VR is going to bring us closer together in ways that might not be possible in the physical world.”
On the Oculus blog the company specified “up to 1,000” people for simultaneous viewing. The very brief footage shown during the keynote appeared to show a live concert captured with a VR/360 camera, but then it transitioned to flat footage of the concert in front of many virtual avatars watching together in a virtual arena. The company says they’ll share more on Oculus Venues in the next few months.
Nate Mitchell is one of the Oculus co-founders and continues to be a key leader at Facebook defining the product strategy for VR going forward. While he works closely with the Rift team, he’s also keenly aware of VR’s evolution over the last five years as he’s part of a small group of Oculus executives who helped create an enormous rush of interest in VR when they sold their startup to Facebook in 2014 for roughly $3 billion.
This acquisition set off a wave of investment in VR that saw numerous startups funded alongside giants like Google and Microsoft dramatically stepping up efforts to build out VR headset strategies. This year, though, public sentiment around VR entered a gap of disappointment and the market found itself in the trough of disillusionment. Oculus hasn’t helped in dispelling this sentiment because the company hasn’t released official figures about the sale of its flagship Rift.
“We did build up a lot of hype, and we really believe in all that hype — the potential for VR, VR as a computing platform. This is going to be a transformative thing,” said Mitchell. “We always said…this is a decade-plus journey that we’re on. But everyone’s expectations got ahead of themselves, maybe not Oculus, but definitely in the media.”
In Mitchell’s view, just because not everyone has a VR headset yet doesn’t mean the technology is a failure.
“Our goal is to continue growing the ecosystem of users and developers every single year,” he said.
Oculus announced a pair of standalone all-in-one VR headsets at Oculus Connect this week, the first of which (Oculus Go), is priced starting at $199 to introduce people to VR without phone or PC needed.
“We think that will be, over time, almost a step function change in the types of people and number of people who get into VR,” Mitchell said. “Now it’s not gonna necessarily be more than Gear VR because Gear VR is cheaper.”
I also found Oculus CTO John Carmack surrounded by developers pinging him with questions and asked him how big he expects sales to be for Oculus Go. He echoed Mitchell’s assessment, suggesting expectations for the headset to fall between Rift and Gear VR sales. Earlier this year, Samsung said it sold more than 5 million Gear VRs. It should be noted Gear VR sells for around $129 but it is often bundled free with the sale of Samsung phones.
The new Oculus Go standalone headset was revealed yesterday at Oculus Connect, the company’s annual developer conference. According to Oculus CTO and legendary programmer John Carmack, developers could have their hands on the $200 standalone mobile headset as soon as next month. As an added piece of the puzzle, developers can also request Oculus Go dev kits via the company’s dev portal starting today.
In Carmack’s famous stream-of-thought keynote speech today, where he touches on almost anything on his mind when it comes to the future of Oculus, he revealed that devs should expect to get their hands on Go starting next month. Since Go wasn’t present at Oculus Connect, it lends credence to the idea that he means Go developer kits, and not Oculus Go demos as such.
Image courtesy Oculus
Using it as a dedicated media device for the past few months, Carmack says he’s been using the headset to watch Netflix in short intervals, watching 15 minutes of a show at a time and returning back to work. Although the friction of entering VR is much lower when it comes to a dedicated standalone like Oculus Go, he says developers shouldn’t make Go-specific applications, instead targeting both platforms as one in the same.
Image courtesy Oculus
Both Go and Gear VR feature a single 3DOF controller and will share the same mobile software, says Carmack, although the $200 price-point makes the dedicated standalone headset more ‘giftable’ than a Gear VR of Oculus Rift.
Oculus maintains Go is headed to consumers in “early 2018.”
