Initially bundled with the Oculus Rift on launch day, EVE: Valkyrie was one of the most compelling experiences available for early VR adopters. It was the ideal fit for the headset, as the Rift promoted seated VR, using the included Xbox One gamepad, which is exactly how Valkyrie is designed to be played.
Based on the epic, persistent sci-fi universe that is Eve Online, Valkyrie takes a more accessible, arcade-action approach, using Eve’s lore and aesthetic to create a cockpit-based dogfighting space shooter. Fast-paced, first-person movement in VR can cause problems with user comfort, and being surrounded by a cockpit as a point of reference is a successful way of reducing the chances of nausea. Simulating the sensation of sitting in a cockpit (while also being seated in reality) is the logical way of achieving comfortable freeform movement within a VR environment, and Valkyrie is one of the best titles to demonstrate this.
CCP Games have quickly gained recognition for their expertise in VR and their AAA approach, having embraced and experimented with the medium for several years. The attention to detail and level of polish within Valkyrie is a match for the very best VR experiences, and it continues to be a stand-out title.
The game also launched with PlayStation VR last month, achieving a successful transition to the console platform. The game is ideal for Sony’s device, as every PlayStation user has a gamepad, and the headset is even more focused on seated VR experiences than the Rift, due to its limited tracking volume.
As a game that’s primarily focused on multiplayer gameplay, a healthy player population for Valkyrie is key. Cross platform play among the top three headsets is a major boon for the game and its players, as a larger population means the possibility of faster matchups and fairer ones too.
While it has been possible to play the Rift version on Vive using the Revive hack, accessing an online game such as Valkyrie via Oculus Home (or indeed setting up an Oculus account just to buy Valkyrie) isn’t ideal, so Vive owners will be pleased to hear the wait is almost over for a native version to appear on Steam. While the game will remain optimised for gamepad, we’re interested to see whether CCP will enable any unique support for the Vive’s motion controllers.
Exact date and timing of the launch is still TBD, but it won’t be long now until Vive owners can test their Valkyrie mettle against the likes of Rift and PSVR players.
Robin Hunicke, executive producer on Journey (2012) and now co-founder of game studio Funomena, is creating a visually rich new Oculus Touch title that wants to be played by anyone and everyone.
Journey is one of those games that you know you have to play as soon as you see it. It’s one of those games that oozes with unique style, and backs it up with novel gameplay. The game launched in 2012 as a PS3 exclusive and went on to set the record as the fastest selling game released on the PlayStation Store. Though I didn’t own a PS3 at the time, just seeing it in a video stuck in my mind as a game that I needed to play whenever I might find the chance. In late 2015 I was staying in the guest house of a friend for a few weeks and fired up a long dormant PS3 that just happened to have the game sitting on its menu. It was then that I finally got to experience Journey for myself after being enticed by the trailer three years prior. When I heard that some of the core people behind the game were cooking something up for VR, I was immediately excited.
Journey’s executive producer, Robin Hunicke, and engine programmer, Martin Middleton, met at game studio Thatgamecompany (which developed Journey), and afterward came together to found Funomena in 2013 with the underlying idea that “games can have a positive impact on the world.”
The studio has four games currently in the works, one of which is Luna for Oculus Touch. I got to see it in person last month and I’m incredibly happy to report that Journey’s sense of rich style and aesthetic in Journey’s DNA have carried over into Funomena and Luna; the game has a completely unique papercraft look that’s beautiful up close and its sound design is front and center.
Luna has been in development since at least 2014, but seems to have taken on new life recently thanks to the immersive power of VR (and a small grant from Oculus), which Hunicke says is not only an exciting new medium, but also one that makes games potentially much more accessible thanks to intuitive motion controls.
Accessibility is at the heart of Luna, which the studio describes as a “uniquely tactile VR puzzle game, where players are encouraged to observe, listen, customize and interact with a beautiful storybook world.” The game casts a wide net, and hopes to appeal to gamers and non-gamers alike.
“We’ve worked especially hard to make the experience accessible to people who have never used a VR headset & controllers, and to people from all ages and walks of life—so that regardless of their prior experience, players can place, customize and interact with a miniature, musical forest while uncovering [the] enchanting interactive score,” says the studio.
I played a 10 minute demo of the game with Oculus Touch that had me guiding an adorable bird around little platforms floating in a vast starfield (see video of the demo in action at the top of this article). As I progressed through the demo, I helped my bird friend unlock memories by unscrambling some mixed up constellations using the Touch controllers to reach out and rearrange the stars.
These simple puzzles grew only slightly more complicated in the short demo, and eventually I was presented with a small terrarium which allowed me to place natural objects like trees, flowers, and reeds, all of which could be modified in size and shape and, one placed, brushed with the controller to elicit some sort of musical note or sound. Once I decorated the scene sufficiently, an adorable turtle emerged from the water to greet the little bird character. Despite the casual puzzle element, Luna didn’t feel very game-like, instead seeming more like an interactive VR storybook.
I enjoyed the visual and sound design, and liked the slightly creative and interactive musical elements in the terrarium at the end, however, I didn’t get a sense of what the broader gameplay might look like once fleshed out into a full game, and for the time being I didn’t feel a strong hook that made me eager to experience more of Luna’s world. I wanted to care about the adorable critters before me, or be enchanted by the gameplay, but at least the brief 10 minutes I spent with the game, I didn’t see hints of where that hook might emerge.
Hunicke says that some of the core design elements of the game (like the aesthetic and animation style) have been largely locked in, but now there’s much work to be done to develop the narrative (which would have been entirely abstract to me, had she not explained what was happening as I went through the demo), and other aspects of the game.
Luna is much different than most of what else is being created for VR right now, which is a good thing, but as the title continues development it seems like it could benefit from a more firm direction toward the ‘game’ or ‘experience’ categories, as sticking to the middle of the road could leave both camps unsatisfied.
Ubisoft today rolled out free VR support for Trackmania Turbo, the latest installment in the online multiplayer arcade racer series. The update is now available for owners of the game on PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
A total of 40 tracks spanning 4 different environments are available today for VR headset users, but if you’re looking to put your pinky toe in the waters to see if the fast-paced, high-flying arcade racer is right for you, a free demo—something that is sorely lacking in the VR marketplace as of late—is available featuring four tracks.
The demo is accessible on both Rift and Vive via Steam, and on PlayStation VR via the PlayStation Store. Players on PC should note however that like all Ubisoft titles, you’ll need an Uplay account to run the demo. Since I don’t own the game, I popped into the demo, a ~3 GB download, to see what it was all about.
What I found were four very short tracks, two in the campaign section of the ‘Canyon’ area, and another two in the arcade section of the ‘Lagoon’ area. And while Ubisoft says that with the VR version “players will be able to experience the intense speed, the spectacular jumps, loops and wall-rides … like never before thanks to the VR technology,” they neglect to mention that it is done almost entirely in the third-person with brief interludes that auto-zoom you into the first-person. As far as I can tell, there is no ‘always on’ option for the first-person view.
Admittedly, the tracks are pretty insane, and I don’t know if you’d even want to go down them in first-person for fear of losing your lunch, but I sure would like to try. Verbage inside the game calls it a “VR Experience.”
Trackmania Turbo is also supporting the new PlayStation 4 Pro, which according to Road to VR Executive Editor Ben Lang generally adds a few noticeable improvements to the overall PlayStation VR-playing experience, although are pretty minimal for someone looking to make the upgrade. Take a look at our full comparison between PS4 and PS4 Pro to find out more.
Ubisoft production studio Nadeo first announced VR support for TrackMania Turbo at its E3 2015 unveiling. The full, non-VR game saw a March launch of this year which includes over 200 tracks and holds an agrigated score of 81 on MetaCritic and ‘mixed reviews’ Steam.
Oculus has announced that the first-party VR game Dead and Buried will come bundled for free with Oculus Touch (for all purchases, not just pre-orders), bringing the Touch bundled content count to three games.
Dead and Buried joins the Touch bundle alongside VR Sports Challenge and The Unspoken (the latter two are bundled with pre-orders only), and other content like Oculus Medium and Robo Recall will be free for all users. Extra software like this may make the $200 price of Oculus Touch a more attractive investment for customers who already spent $600 on the headset.
Though unreleased, Dead and Buried has been widely acclaimed, and the value it specifically adds to the Touch prospect may be quite large. The game was developed in-house by Oculus, and has single player, multiplayer, and co-op modes with wild west shootouts as the main theme. It makes sense that Oculus would provide it free since they made it, but also because it would benefit the multiplayer experience in having as many people on as possible, since the overall install base of VR is still relatively small. This logic applies even more to The Unspoken being bundled with pre-orders, as that game is very focused on multiplayer.
While it’s hard to pinpoint what Dead and Buried might have been priced at if it wasn’t bundled, it’s easy to imagine that it could easily rank among the higher priced games in the market. I had a chance to try the latest demos for this game at Oculus Connect 3, and it proved to be one of the most exhilarating experiences at the show. Meeting and high-fiving your partner right before the match where you’re frantically trying to shoot over cover at the enemy team and duck for cover at the same time is one of the most fun experiences I’ve had in VR in general, not to mention working with a team of four to defeat a zombie queen in the newly revealed co-op mode, which I also had the pleasure of trying.
The decision to make this game free might be even more worthwhile because of how it could provide one of the defining moments of VR for players, letting them see the potential of the technology.
Along with Dead and Buried, all the free bonus content coming to Touch could make the launch of the product one to be very looked forward to, and one that will indulge much playing time before anyone has to worry about buying another game to make the platform worth their while.
Flying through an obstacle-filled arena in zero gravity like in the Battle Room scenes of Ender’s Game, catching and throwing a disk to score in an opposing team’s goal, all while in a Tron-looking virtual reality, is probably about the best way I can describe Lone Echo’s surprisingly successful multiplayer mode in one sentence.
At Oculus Connect 3, I was able to try a singleplayer demo of Lone Echo, an Oculus Touch exclusive by developer Ready at Dawn that lets you grab, pull, and push yourself around in zero gravity as a robot, but I didn’t know what to expect when I was told that I’d get to try out a multiplayer demo as well, since the singleplayer didn’t really have any activities that I could imagine doing with someone else in a meaningful way, much less in a competitively.
Nonetheless, while it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the single player, aside from the robot you inhabit in both modes, and the zero-g movement style, it was a very different and fresh taste of what could be done with zero gravity sporting in VR. From the outside, this floating, zero-g movement seems like a prime candidate for causing nausea in VR, and yet it managed to be an incredibly effective way of getting around that didn’t seem to cause me or other people I played with any dizziness.
I played in a match of five vs. five. Our team captain—a real person playing in another room—taught us not only how to play the game, but also how to navigate in the 3D, zerg-g arena. We would move around in zero gravity either with thrusters, or by grabbing, pulling, or pushing ourselves on our way with the help of walls or floating geometry (or even teammates or enemy characters). We’d be vying for a glowing disc in the middle of the Ender’s Game Battle Room-style arena (though it wasn’t nearly as big). Then we’d have to grab the disc and throw it into the holographic goal at the end of other team’s side.
Photo courtesy Ready at Dawn
A final piece of the puzzle was a punch you could do only to opponents’ heads to briefly stun them, preventing them from being able to move and hold the disc. You could also grab and climb onto bodies, so a common maneuver would be to grab onto a limb, clambor up, punch them in the face, and snatch the disk right from their hands, then give yourself a shove off of their stunned body to head toward the goal.
It sounds simple enough, but the mechanics seem like they could allow complex strategy as you might expect in a real sport. Of course, there was nothing to enforce any ‘rules’ or positions (like a goalie or reciever), but smart players would naturally fall into such roles to beat the opposing team (who were most likely playing the game for the first time and didn’t have any strategies other than to all flock for the disc like it was second grade soccer at recess).
Speaking of soccer, passing is a huge part of the game, especially when your teammates are careening across the area in zero-g. It’s fun not only to be the thrower, needing to skillfully lead the disk to where your teammate is headed on their trajectory, but equally as much to be the receiver who has to launch themselves in the right direction at the right time to intercept the disk. More advanced players will see opportunities for bouncing the disc off the arena’s angular walls to send it around opponents land it in a key position in front of the opposing goal.
You can defend the goal, and (in the demo version we were playing) you might be really good at end the game there because the other team couldn’t organize well enough in the short time frame of the demo to score. My time playing Lone Echo’s multiplayer was a fun, heated battle for the disc, that didn’t leave me nauseous despite flying around in every which direction unhindered by gravity.
Every direction indeed; while playing the demo I was constantly spinning around in real life, reaching out with my touch controllers to try to grab a passing disc or tossing it to a teammate while shoving off of a wall to avoid an enemy. Based on what I saw, the game will almost certainly require the two-camera ‘opposing’ setup for the Rift (cameras opposite each other), or the three-camera setup for full 360 coverage. Otherwise it seems like it would be extremely difficult to keep yourself facing forward for the two-camera ‘front-facing’ setup (as you’d lose tracking on your hands regularly when turned away from the cameras).
Lone Echo’s surprisingly successful multiplayer feels like it could be a major addition to the game. Despite not yet having an official released date, what I played seemed very polished and fun already, with huge potential to become something even greater than what we’ve seen from the still burgeoning VR e-sports sector.
Virtual reality is a fitting medium for adventure games. When the atmosphere is right and the scene is set, you start to think about the world in a way that taps deep into your reptilian brain, the same one that thinks “I exist here. Everything here is important to me.” When done right, you’re just there. This is where I took issue with Alice VR. At moments I easily snapped into the game’s mysterious adaptation of Alice in Wonderland with all the requisite futuristic set pieces of any sci-fi adventure worth its salt, and at other times felt stuck inside of a conventional PC game that didn’t respect me as a VR player.
Alice VR Details:
Developer: Carbon Studio Publisher:Klabater Available On: Oculus Rift (Home), Vive and PC (Steam) Reviewed on: Oculus Rift Release Date: October 27th, 2016
Note: I was given access to both the Rift and Vive version of the game via Steam, but was told that only the Oculus version would be playable for review purposes at the time of this writing.
Gameplay
Due to an unexpected malfunction, you’re awoken from cryosleep by your spaceship’s AI and told that you have to go to an uninhabited planet below to retrieve fuel, liquid graphene, and get the ship back on course. On your travels through the ship’s various compartments to reach the bridge, you run into a number of tutorial-level puzzles.
This is where you first encounter the game’s matching puzzles and even a gravity-bending maze that shifts the whole world around you—only a preview of what’s to come.
Dropped off on the planet’s surface, you’re faced with a dilemma: find enough liquid graphene in the uninhabited city, or never leave. Just outside of the city, your adventure begins.
driving a dune buggy to the deserted city
The story is a loose adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and although there’s no White Rabbit character to follow, AliceVR invokes Carrollian interludes of surrealness with the help of a mysterious green gas that you pass through on your way to the city center.
This is where the game begins to play tricks on you. Is the reality you’re inhabiting genuine? Does anything you do matter in these bizarre waking dreams, or are they just temporary bouts of madness? Yes and no. No and yes. These moments are by far my favorite in the game, which tops out at around 4-5 hours of gameplay if you go straight through and forget all the collectibles and aren’t too fastidious with the game’s many audio logs.
The story isn’t just a scene-by-scene adaptation of Alice though, and there are plenty of surprises to encounter as you meet some, (but not all) of the universe’s iconic characters like a robotic Cheshire Cat, a Mad Hatter AI, all the while following signs emblazoned with a White Rabbit symbol.
While sometimes circuitous, level design is fairly straight forward, and mostly tends to lay out obvious tracks for you to follow. Find a shrinking machine, shrink, go through a tunnel, return to normal size and pull a lever to open a door. Presto! You’ve opened a door to the next level.
You almost don’t have to listen to your companion AI, or care about the constant flashes of ‘NEW PRIMARY OBJECTIVE’ that haunt you every time you enter a room. If you do forget where you’re going though, you can look at the last primary and secondary objective on the menu screen.
Puzzles vary between extremely easy to medium difficulty.
Immersion
The game’s use of Unreal Engine is mostly competent, however outdoor scenes can sometimes be rough around the edges. In a VR headset, you get an up-close look at a game’s art assets, and set design can really fall flat on its face if you reuse too many of the same plant, or get lazy with how a rock wall appears or disappears. This is sadly the case in AliceVR, although it’s redeemed somewhat by the game’s well polished indoor spaces.
I still couldn’t shake the feeling of an inconsistency in the world of AliceVR. Scale, while seemingly correct on the PC-version, feels random in the VR-version—and to be clear, this is taking the shrinking and growing mechanic into full consideration, as you spend most of the game interacting with the world in a 1:1 size ratio. Like Goldilocks, set objects in AliceVR like chairs or a the occasional skeleton are either way too big, or too small, and it leaves you feeling like some parts of the game were designed outside of a VR headset.
That said, at times visuals can sweep you off your feet, but it’s hard to reconcile the clear disparity in the game.
Voice acting tends to be melodramatic, but in a game that prides itself on its reality-shifting storyline, somehow the weirdness of the audio logs fits. Of course, your companion AI is flat and robotic, and like all robot protagonists (I call them nanny-bots), you have to listen to her to find out what to do next, where to go, etc.
Comfort
And I should say that I’m not a delicate person in terms of simulator-induced motion sickness. I, like many seasoned VR enthusiasts, have ‘VR legs’. But that doesn’t make me bullet proof, so this is where the review (and the game) gets a little uncomfortable.
Remember that gravity-bending maze I mentioned earlier? Yeah. I’m not a fan. Plain and simple, I wish it weren’t in the game at all.
Walking up a wall in VR, i.e. abruptly changing what your reptilian brain considers the fixed horizon, is nothing short of stomach churning. Oculus’ own Best Practice Guide state:
“Avoid visuals that upset the user’s sense of stability in their environment. Rotating or moving the horizon line or other large components of the user’s environment in conflict with the user’s real-world self-motion (or lack thereof) can be discomforting.”
This of course isn’t a law, and Oculus isn’t a ruling body, but the observation stands.
no escape from the gravity bends!
If the mechanic were ancillary to game’s puzzles, I wouldn’t be nearly so miffed, but why a VR game would want to punish its players with a whole room of wall-walking pathways—making it a primary mechanic in the later half of the game—I just can’t understand. To be brutally honest, I had to get out of the headset and finish the level in PC mode. And that’s something I’ve never done.
My last grievance comfort-wise with AliceVR is the lack of ‘VR comfort mode’, or snap-turning, with the only three options being either play standing up, in a swivel chair, or use yaw stick-turning. Some people don’t like snap-turning, but if you’re playing the Oculus version, you’re likely to be sitting down at a desk, and full 360 swiveling with a cable isn’t the most comfortable.
Comfort-wise your mileage may vary, but I would definitely rate AliceVR as ‘Intense’, and for a walking simulator, that’s a shame.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Ubisoft’s upcoming collaborative space adventure, sadly won’t be here for the November 29th launch date as promised, so if you wanted to give that special someone a Trek-themed Christmas present, you may need to rethink your options. The game is now slated to release on March 14th, 2017.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew puts you on the bridge of a U.S.S. Aegis (NX-1787), a newly created star ship built on the aesthetic of J.J. Abrams directed franchise reboot, and lets you team up with a crew of friends, strangers, or bots to go on missions throughout the Alpha quadrant. Giving you choice of Captain, Helm, Tactical or Engineering, collaboration is the key to any successful mission in Bridge Crew—something we found out in our hands-on with the demo.
Ubisoft recently released Eagle Flight exclusively on Oculus Rift from their Montreal studio, with Werewolves Within and Star Trek:Bridge Crew to follow from their North Carolina-based subsidiary Red Storm Entertainment.
Star Trek: Bridge Crew is slated for a simultaneous release on Rift, Vive and PSVR.
Ubisoft hasn’t cited any specifics surrounding the delay outside of a general statement on their blog:
In order to deliver the best game experience possible at launch, we have decided to push the release of Star Trek: Bridge Crew to March 14, 2017.
Obduction, the highly rated first-person adventure game from Cyan, the makers of Riven (1997) and Myst (1993), has been available on traditional monitors for quite some time now, but what virtual reality enthusiasts have been salivating over is the pre-release VR version we got our hands on back in late August. Now you can rest easy, because Cyan has just announced on their Kickstarter page that the Oculus Rift version of the game is coming on the 31st of October, the 19th anniversary of the release of Riven.
High marks went to Obduction (8.5/10) for injecting the game with its familiar brand of visually stunning environments, and brilliant mix of cerebral, and often times impossible puzzles. Although we wished we could have given it a higher score for its immersive gameplay, some object interaction in the VR version was clearly still in need of TLC. Considering the game hinges on object manipulation like dialing phones and other fine movements, 100 percent reliable clicks are a must if you don’t want to tear your hair out of your head after incorrectly inputting a 15-digit code into some arcane number pad and missing by a single number.
This is however something Cyan said would be fixed for the upcoming VR version’s release, which if true, will leave many in shock at just how good of a game Obduction really is.
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Cyan maintains the VR version will give you the choice of playing either in VR or on traditional monitor. There is still no official word on whether a SteamVR-compatible version or Oculus Touch support are to follow.
The studio will start sending out Oculus Store codes early on Friday, October 28th for Kickstarter backers, delivered via Humble store. While the PC version of the game is currently available for $29.99 on both Steam and Humble Store, it’s unclear at this time if Oculus Store codes will arrive alongside versions of the game purchased from outside the Oculus app ecosystem.
After a resounding success on Kickstarter in 2013, amounting to $1.3 in backer funds, Cyan issued its first delay of Obduction from its initial June 2016 launch to July citing Unreal Engine updates and some Oculus Rift support polishing requirements. The game was then pushed back to late August, and with the caveat that the VR version would be “coming soon.”
The bright side to the delay? At least there’s plenty of strategy guides out now if (read: when) you get stuck.
Hammerhead VR, the creators of the splendidly creepy ABE VR, a short VR film that puts you at the mercy of a robot gone awry, today revealed a first-person horror game called Syren.
Hammerhead is a VR production studio that’s worked with VR game development, real-time visualization, and 360 degree video, but they’re probably most well known for their work on cinematic focused VR experiences like Abduction,Star Wars VRand Thunderhead—all intensely atmospheric and high on polish.
The studio maintains Syren, a horror-themed puzzler, will be coming soon to PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, and SteamVR.
A scientist obsessed with eugenics builds an underwater research facility above an ancient lost city, in which he conducts horrific experiments in an attempt to recreate the lost species of ‘Syrens’ – the legendary inhabitants of the civilisation, that once existed in the ruins below.
You awaken into chaos. The lab in ruins; creaking under the immense pressure of the sea. With the station reactor about to go critical, you have limited time to navigate out of the lab and evacuate the facility.
With death everywhere, you soon learn that you are not alone. Some of the experiments have gotten loose. In this stealth and survival game, you must solve puzzles to progress through a series of room scale scenes and always remain alert for the deadly Syrens who are hiding in the shadows.
While it’s all too easy to lose ourselves in the countless VR worlds at our fingertips, sometimes we just need to access the desktop and get things done in Windows. Thanks to a few innovative apps, this is possible without removing your headset.
With the beta launch of Oculus Rift Core 2.0, which introduces ‘Dash’, a new universal menu with a new way to access your Windows desktop, it’s time to take a fresh look at the current virtual desktop solutions available for Vive and Rift.
As explained in our hands-on with Rift Core 2.0, the original Rift menu system has been completely overhauled, resulting in a more capable interface with powerful functionality. Oculus Home has become a customisable living space with obvious similarities to SteamVR Home, and will eventually support social interaction. Oculus Dash is a replacement for the old Universal Menu, but feels considerably more integrated, as it is no longer a separate blank space, but rather a three-dimensional, transparent overlay that can run inside any Oculus app.
Part of the new Dash interface is Oculus Desktop, which allows direct access to your Windows Desktop. Unlike SteamVR’s Desktop shortcut, which still feels like an afterthought (it continues to exhibit poor performance and is confused by my secondary display connections that aren’t even enabled), Oculus Desktop feels pretty seamless, with crisp image quality and smooth performance. The most impressive feature is the ability to grab any window or app on the main desktop view and pull it into the virtual space, repositioning and resizing it as you see fit. This was a key feature of the now-defunct Envelop, but Oculus Desktop does it even better, as in their own words, they’ve “built true virtual displays at the hardware level” meaning that performance is maintained even when surrounded by desktop apps. YouTube 60fps videos, for example, play flawlessly in these virtual displays, as do non-VR PC games.
Accessing the Dash while in Oculus Home makes it appear as if Dash is part of the Home space, but this is not the case—Dash can be brought up anywhere, while using any VR app (although developers need to make some tweaks to allow it to pop up inside of their app, rather than taking users to a blank room).
Image courtesy Oculus
If you start repositioning desktop windows in interesting ways while Home is active, it can appear similar to Microsoft’s ‘Cliff House’ for Windows Mixed Reality, whose apps lock to the virtual environment—Microsoft’s solution is positioned as a place to get work done, allowing apps to float in completely different areas of the virtual environment, but this is limited to ‘Universal Windows Platform’ apps. Oculus Desktop is potentially more powerful, as it supports the repositioning of any desktop PC app, but it doesn’t allow apps to lock to the environment, instead always appearing relative to the user’s central position.
In theory, independent virtual displays is a neat idea, but in practice it can be awkward at times. Oculus’ implementation, while slick, isn’t fundamentally more intuitive than what we’ve seen before, and I still find myself stumbling over simple tasks. This is partly because moving windows independently in space while still seeing them in the main desktop display is confusing, partly because it’s a beta and certain things don’t work quite right (the ‘show hidden icons’ of the system tray didn’t seem to function, certain dialog boxes are problematic, mouse support isn’t the best, etc.), and partly because we’re still limited by first-generation headset resolution. Oculus Desktop produces the clearest image I’ve seen from a virtual desktop solution, but it is still not practical as a monitor replacement, requiring excessively large virtual windows to comfortably read text, or to effectively use creative apps that require high precision input
Virtual Desktop
Supported Platforms:Steam (Vive, Rift, Windows VR), Oculus (Rift)
Experimenting with desktop interaction since 2014, Virtual Desktop has established itself as one of the leading apps in this category. Today, it is a polished product, offering smooth performance, excellent image quality and some useful extra features. As a means of using your PC desktop inside of a VR headset, it is lightweight and straightforward, simply representing your monitor resolution (or multiple monitors if you have them) in a floating frame. It offers voice activation for certain commands, and support for multiple 3D video formats. Unlike Oculus Desktop or Bigscreen, it also features an effective 360 degree photo and 360/180/90 degree video viewer (which also supports YouTube 360 video URLs).
Image courtesy Virtual Desktop
As you’d hope from a paid app, it continues to be well-supported by the developer, and has received several useful updates over the past year. Its motion control support includes an alternative ‘touch screen’ style intended to be less tiring and more precise compared to the common ‘laser pointer’ mode. It includes an HDR-optimised cinema room for watching movies, and has seen various video improvements, including a software decoding fallback, playback speed settings, and more accurate fisheye projection. It can also function as an excellent replacement for the standard SteamVR desktop mode, adding a new shortcut to the SteamVR launcher.
A recent update to Virtual Desktop adds support for Cylindrical Timewarp Layers, a feature which improves screen clarity for Rift users, meaning visual fidelity should be about on-par with what you’d get in Oculus Dash.
