X-Plane 11 (2017), the highly-touted and expansive flight simulator for PC, now has a few new badges under its Steam listing, which includes support for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
Developers at the South Carolina-based Laminar Research previously added beta VR support late last year, although the studio now says that all of the default fleet (minus the SR-71) is VR-ready.
Image courtesy Laminar Research
Laminar says however third-party aircraft “are probably far less usable in VR unless you use the 3D mouse to interact with the cockpit. Feel free to try other aircraft but be aware they may have limited functionality & use.”
Supporting motion controllers, keyboards, joysticks and other USB devices, the action is mostly all about accurately recreating the feeling of flying a number of commercial and military aircraft, although you can technically move around the aircraft or the world by teleporting. Some parts of the aircraft have a ‘hotspot’ which will light up and snap you to that location such as seats, Laminar says in a blog post.
Image courtesy Laminar Research
X-Plane 11on Steam for $60. The update also includes:
New aircraft Aerolite 103
1315 new airports with 3D buildings
Customizable jetways for airport authors
Landmark scenery for Sydney, Australia
Enhanced night lighting at large distances
Higher performance with AMD graphics cards
Take a look at Laminar’s overview of some of the game’s VR-specific features below:
Beat Saber, the VR rhythm game in Early Access that made its way to the top spot on Steam this past weekend, is getting a level editor soon that will let anyone build and slice away to whatever music they like.
Developing studio Hyperbolic Magnetism released word of the level editor in a tweet yesterday, saying that not only would it be available “soon,” but that there would be more information coming on Friday, May 11th.
Beat Saber currently only features 10 songs, each with four difficulty levels. The addition of the Level Editor would be a boon to repeated playability in the short-term as the game continues Early Access, although it’s uncertain still if the studio will actively promote sharing levels due to copyright issues.
The developers already endorse a community-built song injector, and unofficial 2D and 3D level editors, although these are admittedly less user-friendly than having a native, in-game option available to the casual player.
Some modders have already taken to the community-built tools, building custom levels using commercial music such as Imagine Dragons’ song Believer (seen below).
BOXVR (2017), a VR boxing rhythm game from fitness game studioFitXR, is hosting a free access period for Rift players this weekend.
BoxVR’s free access weekend takes place between May 3rd and May 7th, ending at 3:00 AM ET (local end time here). Simply download the game via the Oculus Store and get punching, ducking, and dodging to the beat.
The game, which pits you against a variety of incoming punching targets and barriers, features some pretty high BPM music, resulting in a calorie-burning workout that will get you squatting and shadow boxing until you can’t take any more.
With all of the limelight on Beat Saber (2018) following its spectacular release, which saw it shoot to the number one spot on Steam, BoxVR is determined to not be overlooked, as it just updated to add a new futuristic environment, new punching cues that are “more natural to hit,” and two new beginner workouts.
The game currently boasts a 4/5 star rating on the Oculus Store, and a 98% positive review rate on Steam.
Although punching cues have changes somewhat since launch, check out VR Fitness Insider’smixed reality video below to see what’s in store:
Funktronic Labs, the studio behind Cosmic Trip (2017), today launched their latest title, an arcade remote-controlled taxi game dubbed Starbear: Taxi (2018). Starbear: Taxi launched today on Rift, Vive, and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
The year is 3064 CE. For whatever reason bears rule the earth – and they don’t have Uber. That’s where you come in, a remote controlled taxi dispatcher dubbed ‘Starbear’ who lives in the Jetsons-esque future where tiny adorable bears live high in the sky. Why? There is no why – there is only cute dancing bears, and that’s reason enough for me.
Image courtesy Funktronic Labs
To ferry your furry passengers from start to end goal, you use a single motion controller to fly an RC taxi, that admittedly isn’t the easiest way to guide the softball-sized saucer ship around the increasingly large map. I didn’t always find the control mechanic simple to use, as you have to tilt your motion controller in the desired direction, so it definitely takes some getting used to.
Much like Crazy Taxi (1999), you’ll have to pick up all types of passengers, each with their own bonus bar hovering over their heads, and some with a special task too like picking up honeypots. But it isn’t so ‘A to B’ as you might like. You’ll have to avoid pesky raccoon bandits along the way who steal your gold.
Image courtesy Funktronic Labs
With a clock counting down, you can imagine how hectic it can be to ram straight into a bomb, get hit by a guided missile, and then completely biff the goal with only seconds left on the game clock. Yes, it’s all about leaderboards, but the emphasis is on quick, increasingly difficult gameplay that you can pick up anytime. I would have liked some deeper gameplay, but it is what it is.
Priced at $8, you’ll find Starbear: Taxi on Steam for HTC Vive, Rift and Windows VR headsets, and on Oculus Store for Rift.
Funktronic Labs is also targeting GearVR, Oculus Go, and Google Daydream at some point in early May. A PSVR version will also launch “later this year.”
Go Guess (2018) is a new interactive VR quiz game from developers Oblix that tosses you into Google 360 captures and makes you to guess where you are. The twist? You’re playing against other people, and you can hobnob in a social VR space between rounds.
Like its 2D forebears such as GeoGuessr (2013), Go Guess tasks you with investigating the captures by hunting for clues. You might be out in the wilderness looking at plants, or on a sunny beach hunting for a sign—anything that will help you distinguish the Welsh countryside from Tasmania, or Japanese islands from the Pacific North West coastline.
Image courtesy Oblix
Giving you a number of nodes to teleport to, you can investigate the scene as much as you like. Rounds take place periodically, although avatars are named randomly currently, so it may be difficult to find and make friends in between matches, which is represented as a 3D render of Times Square in New York City.
Once you’ve found out where you are in the linked-together captures (or where you think you are), you can pull up a globe, mark the map and do some fine-tuning until you’re happy with the location. The closer your guess is to the actual location, the higher the points.
The app is free and supports Oculus Rift headsets, although since it’s on Steam, it’s likely SteamVR-compatible headsets such as HTC Vive and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets will work as well, albeit without appropriate controller models.
In the Echo Arena update this week a blocked off section of the new lobby says ‘Echo Combat – Under Construction’, suggesting that the upcoming zero-G VR FPS would remain an expansion of Echo Arena rather than a separate game. Oculus has indeed affirmed this is the case, and says to expect more details at E3 in June.
Echo Arena is one of the Rift’s most acclaimed multiplayer games, and fans have been anticipating the upcoming Echo Combat, which is planned to be an FPS take on Echo Arena’s signature zero-G locomotion. Oculus first teased Echo Combat in October 2017, but has remained tight lipped since.
An update to Echo Arena launched earlier this week totally revamped the game’s social lobby, and also included a huge new section that’s currently cordoned off with a sign that reads: ‘Echo Arena – Under Construction.’
While Oculus had described Echo Combat as an “expansion” of Echo Arena when it was first announced, it wasn’t until the next month that news broke that Echo Arena would become permanently free, at which point it became unclear if Echo Combat would would remain as an expansion (and thus free), or if it would be made into its own paid experience as an offshoot of Echo Arena.
An Oculus spokesperson today told Road to VR that Echo Combat will indeed remain as an expansion to Echo Arena and players will launch into matches from the shared lobby space. That’s good news because it means that players are almost certain to be getting that new content for free, thanks to Echo Arena having been made free back in November.
The spokesperson also said that players can expect to hear more about Echo Combat at E3, the annual games industry event held this year from June 12th–14th. Road to VR will be on the scene.
Back during the 2017 announcement of Echo Combat, Oculus had also teased that developer Ready at Dawn is working on the next chapter of Lone Echo, the critically acclaimed single-player sibling of Echo Arena. At the time the company said to “wait for a big announcement shortly,” but more than six months later there’s been no followup. Thus, we’re expecting to also hear more about what’s next for Lone Echo at E3 in June.
As part of Mozilla’s ongoing efforts to make VR a first-class citizen on the web, the company today announced Hubs, a WebVR-based social experience which makes for effortless, one-click creation of virtual spaces which anyone can join—from smartphones desktop browsers to VR headsets—directly from the browser. The approach removes a heap of barriers that traditionally stand between two people and a face-to-face conversation in VR.
Remote presence is one of VR’s greatest strengths. Video chatting has been widespread for more than a decade now, and while it’s a nice way to see the person you’re talking to, it doesn’t feel like you’re actually in the same room with them, not to mention that ‘interacting’ in such a context amounts to little more than sending files or links back and forth to each other.
In VR, your sense of actually being in the same room as the other person is much more pronounced, and interactions happen by means of manipulating objects naturally with your hands, using gestures and tools to communicate ideas in ways much closer to face-to-face communication in real life. There’s also the all important unspoken body language which comes through much more clearly in VR, especially as it relates to the way that group conversations often rely on nonverbal cues to pass the baton of the ‘active speaker’ from one person to the next.
For those reasons, I’ve actually come to prefer the experience of taking remote meetings inside of VR rather than by phone or video chat. But those advantages in VR have, until now, come with some pretty big downsides: the person (or people) I’m meeting with would need to download an app in advance—which typically involves creating a new account—then figure out how to add me as a friend to their account, and then figure out how to actually join the same virtual space that I’m in.
It’s a cumbersome process and, for people who aren’t VR savvy, it tends to be more trouble than it’s worth for a quick 30 minute chat with a business acquaintance, even if they have a VR headset close at hand.
I’ve been yammering on Twitter in the last few months about this friction that’s preventing me and many others from capitalizing on a clear-cut value proposition that VR should be great at providing—that meeting up with someone in VR should be as simple as clicking a link which could be shared through existing challenges of communication like messaging apps or the web. Today, Mozilla has made that a reality.
Hubs is Mozilla’s WebVR-based social platform (which they’ve released as an “experiment” for now), that allows you to create an virtual chat room literally in seconds. Once you’ve made the room you can share it with others by sending them your room’s URL; when someone clicks the link, they are brought directly into your room, allowing you to very quickly start a conversation. And this all happens inside of your existing browser, with no need to download new apps or make a new account.
The beauty of WebVR means that this works across any browser, whether it’s on a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. And if you’re using a browser that supports WebVR out of the box then you’ll be able to join the room with a range of VR headsets. No matter which device, or which combination of devices are connected to the room, everyone can see each other, voice chat, and interact.
Image courtesy Mozilla
Performance wise, Hubs feels like pretty much any other social VR app I’ve used, and fully supports all the stuff you’d expect, like hand input, locomotion, and direct object interaction. And while the platform’s feature set is limited in this experimental phase, the company has demonstrated a strong foundation, with a unique advantage, that it intends to build upon.
On the project’s announcement post, Mozilla’s VR team offers a glimpse of what they’re working on next for Hubs:
Custom Spaces – As mentioned in our original announcement, we think creating your first virtual space to spend time in should be as easy as creating your first website. We’ve already shown off some early work towards a space construction kit to reducing the barrier to creating virtual spaces. Needless to say, spaces created with this kit will be designed to work well with Hubs, so that you can quickly share a link to have others meet you there. You will also be free to use your own fully custom GLTF scenes with Hubs.
Avatars and Identity – Mixed Reality provides an unprecedented opportunity to design things in a way that ensures people can express themselves on their own terms. As part of this, we think that you should always have as much control as possible over how you appear in Mixed Reality. We are working on ways to reduce the barriers to avatar customization so anyone can create an avatar that embodies how they want to be seen. We’ll have a lot more to say about this later in the year.
Existing Tools – We think Mixed Reality communication should complement, not replace, the existing ways we connect on the web, like chat and voice. We will be exploring ways to integrate Hubs with existing communications tools, so people can start experimenting with Mixed Reality as a new way to spend time together alongside the tools they already use.
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Thanks to its drastically lower friction and wide device compatibility, Hubs is definitely a candidate for becoming my new defacto VR meeting space. I’ll be experimenting with it over the next few weeks to see if it can dethrone Facebook Spaces.
Echo Arena, which ranks among our 5 favorite Rift sports games, has seen the release of patch 9.0, which totally overhauls the game’s social lobby, a place where players can socialize and participate in a number of activities while waiting for matches to begin. An incomplete section of the lobby teases forthcoming Echo Combat content.
Launched in 2017, Echo Arena is the multiplayer spin-off of Lone Echo. It’s proved to be a popular and competitive title, bringing zero-G ultimate frisbee-like action to VR.
Surprisingly, the game’s lobby space—which automatically connects players together into a shared environment—has turned out to be one of the most fun social spaces to spend time in VR, thanks to its intuitive locomotion, fun props & toys, and functionality which supports Echo Arena’s actual matches (like customization and practice).
What was good is now being made better, developer Ready at Dawn says, thanks to an update which has brought a total overhaul to the social space which they’re calling Lobby 2.0. The new lobby has been significantly expanded in size and scope, adding a new quarter court to one of its wings, which gives players the opportunity to practice shots and passing on a more accurate representation of the arena used in matches.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
The symmetrical mini arena remains, leaving the door open for other types of practice and some honor-rules mini matches. Players can now summon their own ‘personal disc’ to allow for faster practice iteration and less trolling from other players who might try to steal or hide the lobby’s shared disc.
New launch tubes in the lobby let players practice the essential round-opening blitz, before entering a live match, which sees players catapulting themselves off of the launchers to be the first to reach the disc.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
The brawler room (for punching and blocking practice) and customization room return with some tweaks of their own.
In addition to Lobby 2.0, the patch also brings some gameplay tweaks to Echo Arena. Notably, the backboard behind the goals has had its geometry simplified, which the developers say should increase the consistency of bounces, leading to more predictable disc behavior.
Some issues relating to throwing inconsistencies, a few exploits, and some bugs have also been seen adjustments and fixes, along with other tweaks like single-player private matches and global control of private match settings. Check out Ready at Dawn’s blog post for the full details.
Echo Combat Tease
Image courtesy Oculus, Ready at Dawn
Last year Ready at Dawn teased Echo Combat, an upcoming expansion to the Echo universe which promises to bring zero-G FPS combat to VR. There’s been almost no details reveal thus far, but a huge section of the new Echo Arena lobby is currently cordoned off with a sign that says “Echo Arena – Under Construction.” On the Oculus blog the company writes, “And don’t forget your hardhats—one of the most exciting parts of the update is still under construction…. Stay tuned for more on Echo Combat very soon.”
This interesting development suggests that Echo Combat might be an update or expansion of Echo Area rather than its own separate title. Or perhaps the under construction section will just be a teaser or promotional element of Echo Combat. We’ve reached out to Oculus and Ready at Dawn to learn more.
Paper Valley is as pretty unique experience. Although it’s decidedly a more zen-like game without any real pressure to succeed, there’s something to itthat’s just engaging enough to keep you moving forward, hopefully getting you into the quiet, focused flowstate.
Developer: Vitei Backroom Available On: Oculus Home (Rift) Release Date: April 19th, 2018
Gameplay
Paper Valley takes place in a desolate, grey world filled with crumbling statues and monuments. But there’s a way to bring life and color back to the bleak landscape and make the waters of life flow once again. Given a number of paper airplanes styles to throw—normal, fast, loop-de-loop, and heavy—you unlock a magic that returns to world to the living by hitting talismans that spring up along your way through the half-dozen levels.
Getting the hang of throwing the airplanes takes practice. It is however pretty intuitive – simply snatch one of the airplanes lazily floating around you and let go of the trigger while executing a throwing motion. Because you can change its in-flight path with the movement of your Touch controller, you’ll have to get fairly good at correcting for obstacles such as cave walls, stalactites, and strong winds. You can also take the optional route of stretching your paper plane throwing abilities to the limit to hit those bonus orbs, which give you more ammo to throw. If you miss the golden talisman, what results is a beautiful, but equally useless plant springing up where it landed.
image courtesy Vitei Backroom
Talismans range from small golden targets that simply bring the lush plant life back to small sections of the world, to larger targets that give you a teleportation node so you can move forward through the level, usually accounting for about a third of every target you aim presented to you. In addition to your stock of yellow paper airplanes that float around you, you’re also given a immortal purple plane that lets you teleport to these specific nodes.
You really don’t even have to be all that good at throwing—there’s no ‘Game Over’ screen, no lives, not even a penalty for running out of planes. If you finish your yellow planes, instead you’re given an infinite supply of red-colored airplanes so you can keep trying for that next talisman; it’s a more psychological penalty than anything. You can also always choose to ignore bonus obstacles and just play the game for what it’s meant to be: a calm, relaxing exercise in quiet concentration. Getting that far off target, or challenging yourself to hit that out-of-the-way bonus orb and swooping back around for a direct hit on a talisman is all the excitement you’ll get.
At the end of each level, you return to a hub with a giant tree, where your airplane buddies can swirl around in a beautiful display of sentient magic. There is no obvious point system, so I assume that moving forward is its own reward, as I would do miserably in one level and still move on without a problem.
image courtesy Vitei Backroom
After having beat Paper Valley in about two hours, I felt the game was missing some variability in level design, and also didn’t deliver enough of those big ‘wow’ moments it periodically feeds you.
Because the world is grey and mostly just caves, gorges and dry riverbeds, the scenery becomes one big amorphous blob, which I thought could have used some world-building elements to better flesh out the reason for my existence there. Levels are typically straight shots from beginning to end, leading you from one teleportation node to the next, which after a while can get a bit tedious. As for wow moments, I loved seeing the colorful plants grow and take back the world, but I was still curious about what happened there, who lives there and what they were like—questions that still go unanswered.
In the end, I divided my time with the game into 30-minute sessions, using it as a relaxation tool more than anything. I still can’t shake the feeling that there’s a really engaging game underneath the quiet serenity of it all, one that I would want to explore for hours on end if the obstacles were more varied, the levels more difficult, and in more interesting locales.
Immersion
The world, although drab at the beginning, really becomes a rich and expressive place once you’ve done your duty as an airplane-throwing deity. The art style is fun and colorful to offset this drabness, and the cartoony style is ultimately really charming.
Teleportation can be disorienting at points though, especially when you’re given a few different paths to traverse near the end stages.
image courtesy Vitei Backroom
Airplane flight behavior is pretty darn consistent, although sometimes I was left scratching my head as to why my standard yellow plane, which always worked outside of windy conditions, just wouldn’t make some higher, far-off targets when it easy did similarly placed ones. Although this wasn’t usual behavior, it quickly depleted my store of planes as I futilely toss everything I had at it.
Gathering a mass of paper airplanes, all floating around you can also be annoying at moments, and they aren’t something you can simply brush out of your field of view so you can line up that next shot. Air planes would also get into a big clump and start drifting away from me, making it difficult (and sometimes nearly impossible) to get one from my arsenal, putting a complete halt to the game until I could trick them into coming back to me by teleporting to another node. This last bit seems more like a bug than a feature though.
Comfort
Because Paper Valley is a teleportation-only experience, it is ultimately very comfortable. The game makes special allowance for two-sensor setups as well, offering a novel repositioning system that spins your field of view towards your chosen destination while applying a heavy black filter, leaving only a pinhole view of the world for the brief moment during the transition.
Both systems ensure a nausea-free experience, although I would gladly exchange the turning mechanic for a simple snap-turn, as fine corrections are sometimes difficult to achieve with the current system.
COMPOUND is an intriguing VR hobby project from developer Bevan “NotDead” McKechnie which drops players into a “rogue-lite, free-roaming shooter” for VR, with a totally unique and authentic pixel-art feel. We’ve had our eyes on the game since 2017, but with no official announcements from McKechnie in nearly nine months, the fate of the title was beginning to look uncertain. A recent post from the developer assures fans that the game is still in the works, with an updated demo and Early Access launch coming soon.
In a recent post to Compound’s Steam page titled “I’m still here!,” McKechnie apologies for the months of radio silences, but assures fans that he’s “been constantly working on Compound for a while now and I’m getting very close to releasing a hugely updated demo and an Early Access version.” A series of GIFs in the post show new weapons, enemies, and environments:
New weapon: the double barreled shotgun
New weapon: the clip-loaded railgun
Two new maps, three new enemies, and lots of other new features and improvements
McKechnie says there’s “much, much more than I could show in a few gifs, but I hope you get an idea of how much Compound has been evolving.” He further says that the game’s Early Access release is “close to being ready,” and that much more content is planned between Early Access and the game’s eventual 1.0 release.
