Oculus Rift Games – Page 53 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

January 26, 2017

‘RaceRoom’ Racing Sim Gets Initial Rift and Vive Support Through SteamVR

RaceRoom Racing Experience has received a major update that introduces Vive and Rift support through SteamVR. The update also includes a number of improvements and adds new content to this often underappreciated racing sim.

Developer Sector3 has been largely silent about potential VR support for RaceRoom, despite the title offering an excellent, experimental VR mode for the Rift DK2 dev kit back in 2014. Today’s update has, along with some major feature and content additions, enabled a ‘first pass’ of VR support, much to the delight of the community.

RaceRoom can be considered an established racing sim at this point, despite being technically still a ‘beta’. It has a colourful history, having been originally developed by the SimBin, famous for classic racing sims such as GT Legends (2005) and GTR (2005). RaceRoom’s approach was different, both in terms of being a free-to-play title with paid additional content in the form of cars and tracks, as well as aiming to have accessible physics. This lead to the sim being dismissed by large sections of the community, and ultimately, the demise of SimBin.

Now that Sector3 is at the helm—which operates effectively as a restructured SimBin— RaceRoom is back on track, having seen massive physics and force feedback improvements, making the sim far more appealing to the enthusiast. The return of VR support is another indication that RaceRoom is heading in the right direction.

‘SUPERHOT VR’ Getting New Challenge Modes in February Update

Superhot VR is one of our favorite Oculus Touch launch titles. Like many of the best VR games so far, the thing we craved the most was more. A new update will extend the replayability of the game with several new modes that amp up the challenge.

In Superhot VR, time only moves when you do. Which means if a bullet is flying at your face and you freeze in place, it will freeze to. That gives you some time to think your way out of the situation—which probably means narrowly dodging the bullet and then making a well-aimed knife throw at the enemy, before pausing again to assess viable solutions to the next most pressing threat. It’s a novel mechanic that uniquely thrives in VR. We gave Superhot VR a 9.1 out of 10 in our full review.

Now the developers have announced the ‘Forever update’, coming next month, which will extend the replayability of the game with new challenge modes, and some undisclosed “Secrets” for players to explore:

Test your aim where only headshots take out enemies
Race against your best score in bullet time and real-world time
Try to complete the game without shooting
Get hardcore with faster enemies and less reaction time

There’s also the 10-minute challenge, which tasks players with completing the entire game in 10 minutes (we mentioned we craved more content from this game, right?).

As this information comes from an entry on the official Oculus Blog, it seems Oculus may be working more closely with the developers to expand the game’s offering. According the post, the above is “just a taste of what the update has in store,” and further implies that there will be more updates to come.

The post ‘SUPERHOT VR’ Getting New Challenge Modes in February Update appeared first on Road to VR.

January 20, 2017

‘Dear Angelica’, Oculus Story Studio’s Latest VR Film, is Out Now for Free

After its announcement nearly a year ago, the much anticipated illustrative VR narrative from Oculus Story Studio, Dear Angelica, finally makes its way onto the Oculus Store. It stars Geena Davis and Mae Witman and it’s out now for free on the Rift.

Oculus Story Studio was set up with the remit to explore what was possible in the newly emerging medium of virtual reality storytelling. As such, the studio has up to now produced two VR films, each markedly different in look and feel from the last. Whilst Henry was a bright, colourful tale of a Hedgehog searching for friendship, Lost was a more muted affair, reminiscent of early 80s Spielberg.

So it continues with Dear Angelica, a new story which takes a drastically different visual approach from either of its forebears. The film is directed by Saschka Unseld who also fills the role of Creative Director at OSS. It tells the story of Jessica, played by Mae Whitman through animated illustrations representing memories of her late mother – the titular Angelica, played by Geena Davis.

Prolific VFX Artist Kevin Mack Brings Surrealist Sculpture to Life in ‘Blortasia’

Kevin Mack is a digital fine artist and prolific visual effects designer known for his work across films such as Fight Club (1999), A Beautiful Mind (2001), The Fifth Element (1997), and What Dreams May Come (1998) for which he won an Oscar. Outside of supervising VFX for big budget Hollywood films, Mack creates abstract surrealist art, realizing them as 3D printed sculptures, 2D renderings, and now through his newly founded VR production house Shape Space VR, immersive virtual reality experiences that let you explore his strange and beautiful globular creations up close and personal. Enter Blortasia.

Blortasia is his second public VR art piece, arriving a few months after the pre-rendered 3D 360 video Zen Parade for Gear VR. Created for HTC Vive and Oculus Touch, Blortasia is a real-time VR experience that lets you fly in and around the abstract sculpture using either system’s hand controllers, and letting you freely explore the universe’s undulating, cavernous structure in the sky. According to Mack, Blortasia is an exploration of virtual reality as an aesthetic medium, one that is necessarily unconstrained by the limits of ordinary reality.

Accompanied by a calming soundtrack, I can’t help but feel a deep relaxation as my brain goes on autopilot while I watch the living, breathing lava lamp before me. Like watching clouds, I see faces, hands, objects—a neurological illusion thanks to a phenomenon called Pareidolia. I exit Blortasia a little more refreshed than I went in, a little more aware of my physical world outside virtual reality.

Even the platform below your feet shifts in color and shape

To learn more about the nuts and bolts of the experience, I spoke with Kevin Mack about how it was made.

Mack tells me that among custom-made animated shaders for Unity and other techniques created by himself, Blortasia was built using tools and rule-based procedural systems in Houdini, a procedural content creation software from SideFX.

The results, Mack says, are a type of “directed randomness that are hybridized and seeded with manually created elements.” So while Blortasia’s textures aren’t entirely random, but are rather derived from images painted by Mack in Photoshop, Blortasia obeys what he calls “a natural system where the rules of nature are aesthetically defined.”

This means that the starting structure of Blortasia is fundamentally always the same, but it undulates over time and is painted with different colors that are recalculated when you start the experience, something that makes the sky-bound creation appear different each time you visit.

But what about the name, Blortasia?

Mack told me it was named after the self-coined word ‘Blort’, an acronym deriving from the process that he used to create the otherworldly sculpture. Blort stands for “blobs that have been rotated, translated, and scaled.” Whether the neologism catches on or not, one thing is for sure: Blortasia is exactly what virtual reality was intended for—bringing to life something vibrant and alive that would otherwise be impossible in our daily physical reality.

‘Blortasia’ on Steam

The post Prolific VFX Artist Kevin Mack Brings Surrealist Sculpture to Life in ‘Blortasia’ appeared first on Road to VR.