Oculus has officially confirmed that Toybox, the highly anticipated multiplayer sandbox application built from the ground up to show off the Oculus Touch motion controllers, will be made available to every touch owner for free after launch.
Oculus Touch debuted at a special event just prior to E3 2015 alongside the final retail design for the Rift and went on to make quite an impression at the gaming expo shortly afterwards. At the time however, it was early days for software Touch support.
At Oculus’ E3 booth backstage booth, there was just one application on show to demonstrate Oculus Touch and its capabilities. Toybox was an unapologetically barebones application, filled with what Oculus founder Palmer Luckey described as “programmer art” (simple, flat-shaded 3D objects) all brought to life with a realistic physics model. The demonstrations were given to two players at a time, each occupying a separate ‘room-scale’ booth isolated from one another, each kitted out with two Oculus sensors.
The players joined each other via networked systems, communicating via the Oculus Rift’s integrated microphone. There were blocks to stack, shrink rays to use on your companion, table tennis bats, fireworks to set off and slingshots to play with. Toybox was indeed an apt name for the demo, but most importantly it was an incredibly effective way to show how accurate and effective Oculus’ ‘Half moon’ prototype controllers were, powered by the same outside-in ‘Constellation’ tracking as the Rift itself, really were.
The application was a big hit and after HTC’s Vive made its debut at GDC earlier that same year, sporting their extremely impressive room-scale tracking and incredibly precise SteamVR motion controllers, it felt like the wait for Oculus’ own answer to the question of hand presence in VR had been well worth the wait.
Now, as we approach the launch date for Oculus Touch on December 6th, the question remained as to whether Toybox would remain a trade show demo app only or whether the wider public would have a chance to sample its delights once hardware reached them.
A few days ago, Oculus’ Head of Content Jason Rubin tweeted to clarify the state of the Touch’s freebie content, seemingly letting slip that Toybox would indeed make its debut at launch. However, some confusion remained whether this was an official announcement or an error on Rubin’s part. So, we reached out to Oculus for clarification and they confirmed that Rubin’s tweet was indeed accurate and Toybox will join Dead & Buried, Oculus Medium, First Contact, Oculus Quill, Robo Recall and The Unspoken as packed-in content for all Oculus Touch pre-orders.
We took at look at each of the free pieces of content made available to Touch owners in this article a couple of days ago and it’s hard to argue that Oculus isn’t going out of its way to give those still on the fence about investing in Oculus’ motion controllers a chance.
Ben Lang also took an in-depth look at Oculus Medium, the company’s impressive virtual sculpting and modelling application. We’ll have a full and detailed review of Oculus Touch up on launch day so check back then for our verdict.
Oculus dropped prices on several VR titles on their store for Thanksgiving with those prices likely to persist through the weekend until Cyber Monday. Here’s what’s on offer.
In addition to offering $100 in Oculus Store credit for every new Rift purchase from Best Buy, Amazon, and Microsoft (US), GAME (UK), Saturn (Germany), and FNAC (France), Oculus have provided some significant software discounts on the store, highlighted below:
Dirt Rally – $40 (33% off) – a superb rally sim from Codemasters. Particularly effective with a steering wheel controller, this game is both punishing and rewarding.
Edge of Nowhere – $30 (25% off) – a stunning third-person action thriller. Insomniac Games’ first designed-from-the-ground-up VR title, this is one of the premier experiences on the Rift.
The Assembly – $20 (33% off) – an engaging first-person adventure from nDreams. Strongly narrative-driven, you’ll have to solve puzzles and deal with some moral challenges.
While Oculus had a robust day-one launch lineup of more than 50 titles back when Touch initially dropped in December of last year, owning an Oculus Rift + Touch grants you more titles than ever with unfettered access to at least seventeen pieces of spectacular free content.
There are gads of free games and experiences available on the Oculus Store to keep you busy for a while before you start dropping real cash, but before you get to downloading, take a look at some of the best free content Oculus has bootstrapped to Rift + Touch.
First Contact (free for all Touch owners)
First Contact is Oculus’ introduction for new Touch owners, similar in scope to Oculus Dreamdeck for the Rift itself. It’s a short demo-like experience that immediately follows the controller configuration and tutorial. In it, you’ll find yourself in a retro-future setting in the presence a friendly robot. It’s no Toybox, but the beautifully rendered and detailed experience will have you playing with plenty of toys as you learn how the controllers let you naturally interact with the virtual environment.
Dead and Buried (free for all Touch owners)
Dead and Buried is a multiplayer-focused Touch shooter featuring versus and co-op gameplay for up to four players all wielding badass weaponry in the game’s supernatural-western style. The title was developed in-house by Oculus.
Another first-party app from Oculus, Medium lets you sculpt 3D content in real time, as if you were shaping virtual clay. The program is more of a tool than a game, but gives users a way to create truly unique works of art inside of VR.
Another first-party creation-focused app from Oculus, Quill is more about illustration and storytelling than Medium which is more focused on 3D modeling. Quill was created by Oculus Story Studio, the company’s VR film division, as the visual foundation behind the forthcoming Dear Angelica. Quill looks similar to the Vive-exclusive Tilt Brush, though Oculus says the app is about illustrative storytelling, so we hope to find tools included which make it easy to form a narrative out of the VR sketches.
Epic Games is turning their much-praised Touch demo, Bullet Train, into a full title, Robo Recall, that will be released for free to Touch owners in Q1 2017. It it you’ll be looking to “recall” “damaged” robots run amok, using an array of satisfying weaponry and fun mechanics like being able to rip robots limb from limb and throw their own bullets back at them.
The Unspoken, by Insomniac Games, is a unique magical dueling game that pits Touch users against each other in 1 on 1 combat. With several magical classes to chose from, you’ll use buttons and gestures to cast spells to thwart your opponent.
Toybox is a multiplayer sandbox with lots of interactive virtual toys to play with. It was a tech demo that Oculus showed off more than a year ago during their debut of Touch. The demo saw lots of good feedback and although Oculus hadn’t given us any hints on what had become of it, the company just recently confirmed it would come free with Touch.
Lucky’s Tale (free for all Rift owners)
Playful’s Lucky’s Taleis a lovable 3D platformer that follows Lucky, a cartoon fox on his adventures to find his lost pig who was stolen from him by an evil tentacled monster. Run, jump, climb, and tail-swipe all of the world’s enemies (even if they’re so darned cute).
Farlands (free for all Rift owners)
Farlands, a production directly from Oculus Studios, is basically Pokémon Snap for the VR age. Letting you collect biometric data on a swath of weird and wild aliens, there’s a lot to love about this family-friendly freebee.
Henry (free for all Rift owners)
Speaking of family-friendly, Oculus Story Studios (now shuttered) created one of the most lovable little hedgehogs in their Pixar-esque short Henry. Don’t underestimate this magical little romp that follows the hard-to-hug Henry on his quest for friendship, because Henry was lauded with the first ever Emmy awarded to a virtual reality film.
Lost (free for all Rift owners)
image courtesy Oculus
Another cinematic VR film from the now defunct Oculus Story Studios, Lost places you in a dark, mysterious forest where something lurks. We won’t spoil it any more than Oculus has by putting a picture of the giant robot on the download page, but the immensity of the creature alongside the loneliness of the forest is certainly something to experience first-hand.
Dear Angelica (free for Rift owners)
The third and final VR film from Oculus Story Studio, Dear Angelica, is a journey through the magical and dreamlike ways we remember our loved ones. Entirely painted by hand inside of VR, Dear Angelica plays out in a series of memories that unfold around you. An immersive, illustrative short story starring Geena Davis and Mae Whitman.
Facebook Spaces (free for Rift owners)
Facebook Spacesis a new take on social VR, and functions more like a Facebook VR-chat than an open digital free-for-all. Launched back in April, Spaces has everything you’d expect; an avatar customization tool, virtual selfies uploaded directly to your Facebook timeline. You can even make video calls from within VR to the outside world.
Dragon Front (free for all Rift owners)
Dragon Frontby High Voltage is an immersive collectible card-battler that mixes high fantasy with World War II on a 4×4 grid battlefield. Alive with rampaging giants, intimidating war-machines, and soaring projectiles, you can play in single-player story mode, and multiplayer with head-tracking and VOIP that brings players from all over the world head-to-head on the battlefield. Like most collectible card games, there are in-app purchases to watch out for, but the base card decks provide plenty of fun at the very manageable price of zero dollars.
Oculus Video (free for all Rift owners)
image courtesy Oculus
Watching videos in your own private cinema is a movie-lover’s dream. No coughing, popcorn-munching, talking, plastic-crinkling allowed in Oculus Video, which lets you watch Facebook 360 videos, Twitch, Vimeo, and your own movie files. You can choose from multiple VR theater environments including in a home theater, on a phone in the forest, and even the surface of the moon.
Oculus 360 Photos (free for all Rift owners)
image courtesy Oculus
The official 360 Photos app from Oculus will take you on a tour of amazing sights from around the world. View VR panoramas of breathtaking landscapes, ancient landmarks, dazzling cityscapes, underwater vistas, and much more.
Ripcoil (free with any Store purchase)
In Sanzaru Game’s Ripcoil, you enter a futuristic gladiatorial arena packed with rabid fans as you face off against networked opponents in a disc throwing duel. A wholly unique navigation system will allow you to deftly position your hover board as you reach out with your Touch controllers to launch, catch and punch the speeding, spinning Ripcoil disc.
Echo Arena (coming soon, free for all Touch owners)
Echo Arena, launching on July 20th, feels like a hybrid between Ultimate Frisbee and Rocket League. In the game’s zero-G environment, you boost around using your hand-mounted jets, push off of the arena’s structure and punch in heads as you grapple for the game’s singular disc. Toss it into the goal and you’ve scored a point. It’s a simple formula with high-speed but super comfortable controls—surely one of the first great VR sports games.
Pinball FX2 VR’s timed exclusivity with Oculus shortly comes to an end, with the game due to arrive on HTC Vive and PlayStation VR on November 29th. At the same time, the popular Walking Dead-themed table shuffles its way onto all VR versions of the game.
As one of the launch titles for the Oculus Rift, Pinball FX2 VR was well received, introducing a realistic perspective to the popular 2010 game, Pinball FX2, which originally launched on Xbox 360. The VR version initially included three new table designs, and has since received a DLC pack with five classic tables. The game was particularly suitable for VR, due to simulating a stationary real-world activity, and one that is enhanced by physically standing up. Thanks to its production quality and decent ball physics, Pinball FX2 completed the transition to VR very effectively. And if you’re a pinball enthusiast, building a PinSim for haptic feedback takes the immersion to the next level.
On November 29th, Pinball FX2 VR comes to the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR for $15 (November 30th for PSVR in Europe). Like the Rift version, the DLC with the five classic tables is an additional $25, with more content coming soon. Developer Zen Studios also announced that the Walking Dead table will be available for all three versions on the same day for $7. This popular themed table first came to Pinball FX2 in 2014, with choice-driven gameplay and five ‘episodes’ to play.
Having developed two pinball series (Pinball FX and Zen Pinball) for almost a decade, Zen Studios are renowned for their attention to detail, and this table is a great example. It brings the distinctive hand-drawn visual style of Telltale’s adventure series and dialogue from the original voice actors, and the table and environment design has been updated and optimised for VR.
As the launch of Oculus Touch nears, the company is lifting embargos on a number of Touch titles, including the hotly anticipated Oculus Medium.
Oculus Medium is a digital sculpting tool which leverages Touch’s high quality motion tracking to allow free-form creation that focuses on manipulation of mass, rather than the production of brush strokes (like we find with titles like Tilt Brush and Quill). Medium is very much a tool rather than a game, but its ease of use means even the non-artistic can toy around with it, and maybe discover they’re a little more creative than once thought.
Medium will be available for free at the launch of Touch on December 6th, and to the best of our knowledge it will not work without the controllers.
Functionality
Art by Goro Fujita
Medium is all about adding, subtracting, and manipulating digital mass, much like a clay sculptor. Clay is known as a welcoming medium even for non-artists, hence the popularity of Play-Doh amongst youngsters. But Medium strives to be a tool for serious artists and has a range of advanced functions which, when used in conjunction, make the program surprisingly powerful.
Tools
While Photoshop has ‘brushes’, Medium’s basic element is ‘tools’, which allow you to add or manipulate digital mass in the scene with the pull of the Touch controller’s trigger and a swipe of your arm. Presently, there’s eight tools available:
Clay, the default tool, allows you to add and carve clay in your scene, using brushes of various sizes and shapes.
Paint allows you to spray paint or brush color onto your clay.
Swirl whirls your clay like a whisk, in either a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.
Cut slices your sculpt into pieces you can move around and merge back together.
Inflate lets you inject or extract clay from your sculpt, causing it to expand or contract around your hand.
Flatten helps you trim areas of your sculpt to get fat planes and sharp creases.
Smudge smears the clay in the direction you move your hand, like smudging clay with your thumb.
Smooth polishes your object, softening sharp points and filling in creases
With the ‘Clay’ tool, you can hold down your trigger to draw out an area of mass continuously. Unlike Tilt Brush, these strokes are real volumetric geometry that you can cut, deform, and continue to mold.
The pedestal of this impressive piece was likely created in part with the Swirl tool. | Art by Goro Fujita
Once you have mass in the scene, you can use the other tools to shape it in various ways. You’ll find the tool menu on your main-hand, and find that each works very differently from the basic Clay tool. Swirl will twist the clay like an electric mixer. Smooth will soften and flatten rough places on the clay. Paint will let you spray paint the clay different colors. And still there’s more, each of which has a series of options that can be toggled on your off-hand; such as subtracting mass instead of adding it, locking the placement of new clay to a single plane, or increasing the size of the clay being added. (By the way, there’s a simple menu to switch handedness in Medium).
Stamps
Tools are great for organic shapes, but you’ll want to take advantage of Stamps to quickly achieve a sharper ‘manufactured’ look. | Art by Goro Fujita
While the basic Clay tool draws out a sphere of mass, Stamps allows you to easily paste predefined shapes like numbers, letters, and structural pieces (columns, curves, buttons, plates, etc.). There’s a huge selection of stamps to choose from, and each stamp is virtual clay that’s moldable just like everything else. Stamps can really speed up the creative process by giving you tons of pre-made shapes to incorporate into your work instead of needing to draw and shape each one yourself. You can create and save your own stamps too (which could be a combination of pre-made stamps). For instance I could make a neat signature out of my name and then save it as a stamp to easily paste the design into any of my scenes to sign my work.
You can also use stamps as shapes for continuous strokes. This works much like being able to make your own brush tips in Photoshop, which opens up a range of powerful functions. For instance, I could choose an ‘O’ shape stamp and hold my trigger down to draw out a continuous line, which would give me a hollow tube-like structure instead of just a letter shape.
Stamps are great for repeating patterns. Instead of making 100 individual suction cups on this octopus, just design one and then stamp out the rest in varying sizes. | Art by Goro Fujita
Stamps can be as complex as entire scenes if you want and they’re also a great tool for quickly populating a scene with repeating details (like windows on a building).
If you have a very complex stamp consisting of lots of intricate geometry and try to draw it continuously through the air as a stroke, Medium will gracefully slow down the rendering of the mass (if needed) while maintaining tracking on your head and hands, and will continuously work until it catches up to where you left the end of the stroke. Within reason this slowdown didn’t seem to be a regular issue when sculpting, except when trying to use a complex stamp as a stroke instead of a single placement.
Now, that’s all well and good and makes for a fun bit of playing around with the ability to create and manipulate digital clay in real-time, but if you aren’t an artist you may find yourself wanting some instruction. Luckily, the application has a number of built-in immersive tutorials which walk you through the basics and more advanced parts of Medium. During each tutorial you’ll find an avatar standing next to you in the actual workspace; you’ll be able to see a representation of their head (wearing a Rift) and hands (holding controllers), and hear their voice as they guide you through the ins and outs of Medium with step by step guidance. This is a great way to learn the program, and also a great way to demonstrate and share work, as you have access to capture the same sort of action+voice recording to be played back and shared with others. That means you can record yourself showing off a new technique, or narrate your sculpt as you create it, allowing someone to hear your thoughts as they play back the sculpt after the fact. I’m sure people will find creative uses for this too, perhaps to tell a story based on their work as it unfolds.
Art by Goro Fujita
All of these capabilities start to add up to a fairly powerful toolset, but it’s the ability to use layers in Medium which really opens the door to advanced creations. Layers let you divvy up your work into discrete groups that can be adjusted independently from one another, but still show up in the same scene (layers are one of the most powerful functions of photo manipulation and vector design software). So I could draw the eyes of a smiley face on one layer, and then the mouth on another layer. I would see an entire smiley face together, but then I can go back and manipulate the layers separately; I can temporarily disable a layer from being visible, or I can change the position and scale at any time. For instance, I might want to flip my smiley’s mouth upside down and make it larger so that it turns into a big sad-face instead. You can also toggle the type of material on a per-layer basis, letting you switch between the default matte, a shiny metallic, and a glowing light.
When you’re all done crafting a sculpt, there’s an option to export your creation in a format which Oculus says can be used for 3D printing, or import into other 3D modeling tools or game engines. Oculus also says that the Medium website will be a hub for hosting and sharing content like sculpts, stamps, and screenshots and for sharing to places like Facebook, though we haven’t seen this functionality in action yet.
As someone who isn’t much of a visual artist, it’s hard for me to say for certain how great Medium is or isn’t for artists. However, as someone who is something of a designer (who regularly uses Photoshop and Illustrator), I can definitely appreciate the tools that Medium equips users with, and how those tools interact together to create surprisingly advanced capabilities. Even moreso, the tools present thus far are easy to use while still being powerful; maintaining ease of use will be key going forward as Medium (hopefully) continues to enhance its toolbox.
Medium is an incredibly easy way to make real 3D content in VR, even for people who have never used any 3D modeling tools. Being able to ‘sketch’ in 3D to convey ideas is going to be awesomely helpful in the right contexts; I could easily see concept artists and level designers flocking to the tool to rough out concepts and collaborate on design.
For the artist’s perspective we can look to what serious artists have been able to achieve with the tool, which is nothing short of impressive.
Immersion
Being able to draw out clay right in front of you is satisfying and simple. Each tool that you’ll use has its own unique sound which implies its function. The Clay tool sounds like you’re spraying foam, while the Swirl tool sounds like a whirling electric mixer, and the Cut tool sounds like a buzzing electric wire. Most tools also change sound when you’re drawing in open space compared to inside a volume of mass. The Clay tool for instance will have a muffled foam spraying sound when your tool is inside a mass vs. outside. It’s an effective touch which helps you understand what your tool is doing and where it’s being used audibly in addition to visually.
While at first you’ll probably make random doodles, you might find the urge to spend time making something more detailed. To do so you’ll find that the ability to manipulate your scene is key. Using Touch’s hand-trigger, you can easily reach out and rotate your scene as well as scale it to work on macro and micro details quickly and easily. It’s an easy way to get the right angle and add just the right detail before flipping the scene upright again to its intended viewing position.
While you’re working, a virtual speaker will pump out any audio that’s playing on your desktop. This is great if you like to jam out while you get your creative juices flowing. There’s a special mode you can enter in Medium to adjust the position of the virtual speaker, which is a neat touch because it feels like the sound is actually coming from wherever you put the speaker rather than just having the sound source seem like it’s attached to your head. This makes Medium feel more like a real workspace rather than an abstract canvas.
Medium’s menus feel highly utilitarian, mostly utilizing a look-and-point approach to clicking buttons and selecting tools, but it’s clear that its creators were focusing on usability over polish at this stage. Most menus appear close to you and are easily interactable with a laser cursor on your primary hand, and will disappear automatically when you look away from them, letting you quickly get back to your work without repeatedly closing menus. This takes a while to get used to, since few other VR applications take this approach, but it works well to keep you creating as efficiently as possible.
Medium could do for a visual overhaul across the board to make tools and menus look visually better, but it’s a good idea that its creators chose to get the base functionality right in the first place before spending too much time on polish. Still, we hope Medium will continue to evolve here into something that looks as good as it functions.
Needless to say, we’re already missing a multiplayer function in Medium. Social makes everything better in VR, especially when it comes to being able to collaboratively create and feed off of each other’s ideas in real time. We know for a fact that a multiplayer function in Medium is awesome before Oculus had demo’d it many months ago in an earlier build of the application. We hope that demo may have laid the groundwork for a future multiplayer update to Medium, but for now it seems Oculus wasn’t keen on making it part of the initial release, which is a shame.
Comfort
Medium carefully adheres to VR best practices, and I can’t think of one instance while using the program that I felt a sense of motion sickness. In Medium you’ll always have a grid-like floor at your feet which keeps you visually grounded. If you were to paint and entire scene around you that obscured the floor entirely, and then grabbed the scene and spun it around you, I suppose you could probably make yourself a little dizzy, but it would probably have to be on purpose.
The only critique here for Medium is the interface which feels like it’s branched off a bit on its own evolutionary track compared to other (more game-centric) Touch applications. That makes sense because Medium is designed to be usable for long stretches of time, but it takes some getting used to before you understand the slightly different control paradigm.
One specific quibble (which applies to many VR apps), is that Medium uses a laser-pointer menu approach which asks you to pull the trigger as a selection action. Personally I feel that pressing a button, rather than pulling a trigger, is the better action to indicate a selection, because pulling a trigger requires more movement and often causes the rest of your hand to move slightly (which can easily throw off your laser pointer, especially at longer distances from the menu). Instead, a button press achieves the same input input with much less movement of your finger (and residual movement of the controller), keeping the laser-pointer more accurate.
This isn’t a huge deal in Medium because the menus are kept pretty close to you and their buttons and toggles are fairly large and clickable, but I think a chance from trigger selection to button selection could still improve things (and maybe make the application slightly more intuitive).
Disclosure: Oculus provided Road to VR with Touch controllers for review.
BlazeRush, the 3rd person VR vehicle combat racer, has been a big hit with VR gamers for some time and now developers Targem Games want to take add a new, distinctly Rocket League dimension to the title with their latest add-on BlazeBowl.
There were lots of preconceptions about virtual reality gaming around the dawn of the Oculus Rift DK1. One of the most pervasive was that all VR games must be developed and played in a first person viewpoint. But, as developers and VR gamers discovered, some of the strongest inducers of presence in VR were those opting for a 3rd person viewpoint.
One of the earliest and most successful titles to do just that was BlazeRush – a re-imagining of the top-down Micro Machines style multiplayer racer which had you holding dominion over the action from your celestial, immersive viewpoint above the track. The game was simple yes, but thanks to excellent VR tuning and solid gameplay, it was one of the better launch titles for the Oculus Rift VR headset back in March.
Now, Russian developer Targem Games have released a new add-on for the game which will likely draw comparisons against the wildly successful vehicle-based future sports title Rocket League. ‘BlazeBowl’ (see the trailer at the top of this page) is the natty title for a new set of features which enhance multiplayer aspects of the game while adding a whole new mode, all provided via a free add-on available to everyone with the game right now.
First up is the addition of a the BlazeBowl football arena, an American Football themed mode in which online teams fight to get the ball across the line to score ‘goals’, all whilst leveraging whatever firepower is at their disposal to prevent their opponents from doing the same. To accompany this new dimension to Blazerush multiplayer, the team have also added in voice chat, so you can also now bark orders at your teammates and hurl expletives down the mic as you see fit.
BlazeRush and the new add-on BlazeBowl is available now via the Oculus Store. For HTC Vive owners there is unofficial support via ReVive, but it’s unclear as to whether all new features work correctly with this in play.
BlazeRush, the 3rd person VR vehicle combat racer, has been a big hit with VR gamers for some time and now developers Targem Games want to take add a new, distinctly Rocket League dimension to the title with their latest add-on BlazeBowl.
There were lots of preconceptions about virtual reality gaming around the dawn of the Oculus Rift DK1. One of the most pervasive was that all VR games must be developed and played in a first person viewpoint. But, as developers and VR gamers discovered, some of the strongest inducers of presence in VR were those opting for a 3rd person viewpoint.
One of the earliest and most successful titles to do just that was BlazeRush – a re-imagining of the top-down Micro Machines style multiplayer racer which had you holding dominion over the action from your celestial, immersive viewpoint above the track. The game was simple yes, but thanks to excellent VR tuning and solid gameplay, it was one of the better launch titles for the Oculus Rift VR headset back in March.
Now, Russian developer Targem Games have released a new add-on for the game which will likely draw comparisons against the wildly successful vehicle-based future sports title Rocket League. ‘BlazeBowl’ (see the trailer at the top of this page) is the natty title for a new set of features which enhance multiplayer aspects of the game while adding a whole new mode, all provided via a free add-on available to everyone with the game right now.
First up is the addition of a the BlazeBowl football arena, an American Football themed mode in which online teams fight to get the ball across the line to score ‘goals’, all whilst leveraging whatever firepower is at their disposal to prevent their opponents from doing the same. To accompany this new dimension to Blazerush multiplayer, the team have also added in voice chat, so you can also now bark orders at your teammates and hurl expletives down the mic as you see fit.
BlazeRush and the new add-on BlazeBowl is available now via the Oculus Store. For HTC Vive owners there is unofficial support via ReVive, but it’s unclear as to whether all new features work correctly with this in play.
Classic 80s Atari arcade game Paperboy is to get a spiritual (albeit commercially unrelated) successor in the form of a new Oculus Touch and HTC Vive title Special Delivery from developers Meerkat Gaming. Here’s what it looks like in action.
An original Paperboy arcade cab, complete with handlebars.
A stalwart of the 80s gaming scene, Paperboy will be fondly remembered those old enough to have frequented the murky world of arcades back in the day. Developed by Atari, Paperboy was an isometric action game which had you play as the titular hero, frantically delivering his payload to customers through an a series of ever more hostile and precarious environments. It was fun, funny and actually pretty tricky to master. It was a huge hit, even featuring a saddle and BMX handlebars on the larger arcade cabinets.
Warp to the future (that’s where we’re living folks) and virtual reality is now promising to push and perhaps redefine the boundaries of traditional gaming. It’s somewhat interesting (if perhaps entirely expected) then that developers are turning to the past for inspiration of what to build in VR. Rebellion recently demonstrated just how well a retro game can be updated and refactored to become compelling (Atari too as it happens) VR gaming prospect and now developer Meerkat Gaming is doing the same with a title which is heavily inspired by Paperboy, called Special Delivery – revealed recently via the company’s twitter feed.
You can see the game in motion in a trailer for the title (at the top of this page) and it’s shaping up nicely. From what we can ascertain, motion controls are used to control both hands which can independently steady and steer the handlebars or lob papers from the bike’s basket at roadside targets. It’ll be interesting to see how motion sick prone people fare with the bike in motion.
No word yet on a release for the title, but the developer says it is being built for both Oculus Rift (with Touch support) and HTC Vive. We’ll let you know when we hear more.
Oculus in a blog post has announced that Quill, their VR illustration software used for Dear Angelica, is going to launch as a free beta with the launch of their Touch controllers next month. This adds yet another free application to the lineup Oculus has prepared. Among those, there is also Oculus Medium, which, rather than painting or drawing in 3D, lets users sculpt and model. Both of these free programs look to enable a wide variety of artistic styles.
Speaking of style, Oculus also talked about the design goals for Quill and how it originated. From the blog post: “Quill was born out of the creative needs of Dear Angelica’s Writer/Director Saschka Unseld and Art Director Wesley Allsbrook.” And to get the exact look they wanted, the programmers had to work with artists to make sure the tool itself didn’t impose unnecessary biases in the art. According to Oculus, “it was important that Quill not add anything to an artist’s strokes, unless fully controllable and shapeable by the artist.”
While they haven’t yet the public try Quill for themselves to see its full potential as a tool, Oculus has videos and pictures of a few scenes that artists have created. Most are, and have been, from Dear Angelica, but there’s also some art from Carlos León, which reveals a more
realistic painted style in comparison. We may have yet to see just how far this tool can go in the hands of other artists.
The beta will be free, but there has been no confirmation yet if the full release in early 2017 will be priced or not.
V is a universal dashboard for virtual reality experiences which lets you load websites and webapps like Slack, Spotify, and Soundcloud inside of your favorite VR games. Today the software launches as a free open beta for the Rift.
A universal web dashboard that spans every VR experience is an awesome idea on paper, but convincing every developer to integrate some newfangled app is an unlikely proposition. The beauty of V is that it doesn’t need platform or developer buy-in; the app smartly injects itself into most VR games, with no special integration needed from the developer.
V works like a web dashboard that can be called up at any time inside of VR. You can use it to watch videos, listen to music, and do pretty much anything else you might do on the web from within your favorite VR app. We first got a good look at V back in May, and today it launched as a free open beta for the Oculus Rift.
You can imagine you’re playing Elite Dangerous and want to look up a tutorial for a quest you’ve never done before. Well, why not do it from the comfort of your spaceship’s cockpit? V makes that possible.
Looking forward to listening to music while you spend hours sculpting virtual models in Medium? With V, you can have your Spotify playlist at your side without ever taking off the headset.
V is an unobtrusive little app that sits quietly in your computer’s taskbar out the outset, and injects itself automatically into recognized VR experiences. Even then, V won’t bother you until you need it. When the time comes, give your headset a firm double-tap with your finger (or press Shift on the keyboard), then find the white dot at the top left of your view. Staring at the dot will invoke V, and bring it seamlessly into the VR world around you. Now you can choose from a number of predefined bookmarks or type your own URL, and you can easily move and resize the floating browser window, as well as scroll and click it as you’d expect. Normally the dashboard will vanish when you’re done with it, but if you want to keep your web page open you can pin it in place so that it remains there when you return to your present VR application:
While today’s open beta supports just one browser window at a time, the ultimate vision for V is to be a helpful dashboard of webpages, web apps, and native widgets that let you do useful stuff without leaving virtual reality. The one browser window restriction is for now a performance limitation; the browser is built on Chromium, and it turns out that web browsing can actually take a decent chunk of system resources to do its job, especially if trying to play high-quality flash video while running on top of a VR app that needs to maintain 90 FPS. As computers get more powerful, and as V finds ways to continue to optimize its lurking presence, the dashboard will be able to open up more fully, says V co-founder Tyler Andersen. He explained that V tries to keep itself within a small performance envelope to minimize impact on the foreground VR application which will always have priorty over V, which will go so far as to freeze itself if it finds the VR app’s framerate dropping under 90 FPS.
The V open beta supports the Xbox gamepad as well as keyboard and mouse, though Andersen tells me that Touch support is in the works, and teases that it makes interactions with the dashboard much easier. Today’s open beta only supports the Rift, but Andersen says that the obvious next step is Vive support, and that it will be released in a future update which will also bring support for Touch and Vive controllers.
The application was a big hit and after HTC’s Vive made its debut at GDC earlier that same year, sporting their extremely impressive room-scale tracking and incredibly precise SteamVR motion controllers, it felt like the wait for Oculus’ own answer to the question of hand presence in VR had been well worth the wait.
