I had a chance to catch up with founder Darshan Shankar at Oculus Connect 3 last October to talk about his founding story, and how he’s designed Bigscreen with privacy in mind through encrypted peer-to-peer networking technology that he developed. It’s a formula that seems to be working since he reports that “power users spend 20–30 hours each week in Bigscreen,” making it what Shankar calls, “one of the most widely used ‘killer apps’ in the industry.”
Those are astounding numbers for any social VR application, and the key to Bigscreen VR’s success is that they’ve been providing a more immersive and social experience of 2D content ranging from games to movies, and pretty much anything else you can do on your home computer.
The latest release of Bigscreen enables you to have up to three monitors in VR, which could provide an even better experience of working on your computer than in real life. You can stream Netflix or YouTube on a giant movie screen while playing a video game, designing an electrical circuit, browsing Reddit, or creating a 3D model in Maya. In Bigscreen, you can basically do anything that you can do on your computer screen, but in VR.
The limited resolution of today’s headsets for comfortably reading text is the biggest constraint for now, but there are plenty of other tasks that people have found are more enjoyable in VR than in real life. It’s not just the immersive nature, improved focus, and unlocking the spatial thinking potential of your brain, but in Bigscreen you can do it with friends.
Adding a social dimension to computing in a private way is one of the keys to Bigscreen’s success. You can use Bigscreen by yourself without anyone else; you can create a private room using peer-to-peer technology such that what you’re actually doing in Bigscreen isn’t even being passed through any servers on Bigscreen’s side. And if you want to have a public cafe experience and connect with hardcore VR enthusiasts from around the world, then create a public room and see who comes through. It’s a wide range of people looking to do everything from connect socially and casually to recreating the cafe experience of increased focus that can come from working in public spaces away from the private context of your home.
Taking that all into account and based upon my own direct experiences of using Bigscreen over the last couple of weeks I can say that Bigscreen VR is definitely the leading contender to becoming one of the first killer applications of VR. It’s a social utility with the potential to connect you to friends, family, romantic, and business partners, as well as complete strangers who spend a considerable amount of time living in the early days of the metaverse.
New footage from upcoming racing simulator Project CARS 2 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One has surfaced on YouTube. Slightly Mad Studios’ new game is expected to launch later this year with support for virtual reality like its predecessor, and hopes to address the criticisms of the 2015 original.
We’ve known about Project CARS 2 since its controversial early announcement in June 2015, just a few weeks after the launch of the first game, which arrived in a state of inconsistent quality. Visually stunning, with an interesting career mode and plenty of content, it hoped to bridge the gap between PC and console racing sims. It received mainly positive reviews, but drew criticism from enthusiasts due to its bugs and questionable physics.
Although Slightly Mad Studios improved the game over the following months with several major patches, it never really reached its full potential as a sim, but eventual support for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and OSVR headsets was very welcome, and well-implemented.
If you have suitably high-end hardware to match its demanding engine, it remains one of the most visually-impressive VR titles available.
Project CARS 2 is expected to enhance VR support on PC, but a potential PSVR mode for the PS4 version has not been confirmed at this stage. The original game was once due to support the headset, but the chances of it happening diminished over time.
Once again, Slightly Mad Studios had used their crowdfunding platform to assist the development of the sequel, meaning that leaks are inevitable, despite the more secretive development process this time around. A ‘trailer’ (above) recently surfaced on YouTube, which revealed a chunk of new, in-game footage. This turned out to be a placeholder intro for the game used for internal presentations, and does not represent the final quality of the game, according to the developers, evidenced by the variable framerate and placehold user of music from Pirates of the Caribbean.
However, it does include some interesting looks at new cars, such as the Ferrari 288 GTO, Lamborghini Huracán Super Trofeo, Porsche 935/80, and Jaguar XJ220S (manufacturers that were absent from the first game), along with footage of new tracks like Long Beach, the rallycross track in Hell, Norway and a Canadian ice track. It also demonstrates some of the upgraded technology, with a significantly-improved dynamic time of day and weather system. With all of this footage coming from out-of-date builds, the final product should look even more spectacular.
Slightly Mad Studios CEO Ian Bell recently hinted at a September 2017 release date, and while it could slip like the first game, it sounds like they’re readying a marketing push very soon, with the real trailer due early this month. Bell has boldly stated that the title, which is still in development, has already ‘raised the bar for simulation’, with new rendering, physics, force feedback, drivetrain, differential and tyre modelling systems. Fingers crossed it can deliver, and continues with support for multiple VR headsets.
Launched as part of Basemark’s VRScore benchmarking software, the Crytek developed VR tech demo Codename: Sky Harbor, is one of the most visually impressive examples of VR cinema around.
Direct from our time with Basemark’s promising virtual reality benchmarking suite, VRScore, here’s a full play-through of the included Crytek developed demo Codename: Sky Harbor, a sci-fi fantasy mini-epic that demonstrates what high production values and a keen sense of design can bring to an immersive experience. The VR short film puts you in the body of a lowly maintenance droid as he’s flown through the chaos of a hectic sky battle, before crash landing, becoming trapped – witnessing a series of impressive set pieces before he’s freed.
It’s a reminder that Crytek, and its Cryengine, have been behind some of the best looking VR out there. From the company’s early VR experiments with tech demo Back to Dinosaur Island through to Robinson: The Journeythey certainly have a way of building virtual environments with scale and presence. It also makes me long for more short, cinematic experiences like Sky Harbour, a genre of VR which feels shamefully underpopulated right now.
As of now, Sky Harbor is only available as part of Basemark’s VRScore benchmarking software, which is available to corporate customers now but will arrive in its free and professional guises in Q2 2017.
Elite Dangerous, the interstellar space trading, fighting, and exploration simulator, has been teasing support for co-piloted ships for some time. Today the Commanders 2.3 update launches with the Multi-Crew feature, allowing up to four friends to fly together in VR.
Update (4/11/17, 9:51AM):Following a series of beta releases, Elite Dangerous: The Commanders (2.3) launches today on PC, bringing the Multi-Crew co-pilot feature along with other major improvements. A trailer showing off the new update heads this article.
Photo courtesy Frontier Developments
According to developer Frontier Developments, the Elite Dangerous servers will be unavailable from around 9.30am BST until the new updates are live (expected around 6PM BST). The studio highlights some of the major new features:
Multi-Crew has been added with three new roles: Gunner, Fighter, or Helm. Matchmaking has been added for different session types and there are also separate stats included.
Commander Creator: with the new in-game Holo-Me feature lets you create your own commander using a variety of customisation options!
Welcome the new passenger ship called the Dolphin.
With the all-new Camera Suite you can view your commander and ship from a variety of interior and exterior angles, using a range of new camera controls. Perfect for all the videomakers out there… can’t wait to see what you make with the new tools!
Aside from bug and stability fixes, we’ve also added a host of new mysterious things, asteroid bases, 100 new tourist beacons, and more!
And a few VR fixes:
Made the schematics render in stereo
Added dithering support to tackle banding in VR
Fixes to some of the cockpit VR cameras
Fixed some incorrect scale assumptions when fitting the left eye image to the monitor window. The view should feel a little less stretched. In addition there will be a significant memory saving moving from 2160×1200 to 1280×768
Original Article (1/28/17): Elite Dangerous is not a VR-only title, but with support for both the Vive and Rift, and its focus on simulator-like mechanics, it does an impressive job of making you feel like a lone pilot somewhere out in a vast and lonely galaxy.
But that feeling of lonely awe isn’t quite as fun when you look around your single-pilot ship and have only glowing instruments and flight controls to share it with.
Thankfully, the Elite Dangerous: The Commanders (2.3) update, due to launch in beta by February 26th, will bring what’s being called the Multi-crew feature, allowing multiple players (in or out of VR) to cooperatively pilot ships across different roles. Everyone with access to the Horizon Beta will be able to access the 2.3 beta.
Zac Antonaci, the game’s Head of Community, said in an update on the official forums, that the studio would be sharing more details about how the feature will work, including the new ‘Commander Creator’, which promises to allow players to customize their avatar.
• Players will work together to control the different functions of a ship. One player could fly the ship whilst others would handle the sub-systems and weapons. Or a Multicrew ship landing on a planet’s surface could have one player stay with the main vessel, another patrol in a ship-launched fighter, and another explore in their SRV.
• Multicrew uses the Wing system and has four roles:
• Helm (piloting) • Fire control (turrets/weapons + limpet control) • Tactical (sensors, shields, countermeasures) • Engineer (power distribution, repairs)
• Roles are balanced so that a fully-crewed ship is on par with four commanders in a Wing.
• The crew limit of four may be increased in a future Season. We don’t know how high we would go. Current instancing issues likely make more than 4 unfeasible for the immediate future.
• Enormous range of faces and features available using the Commander Creation “slider tool”. This option will be selected via the game’s interface. In combination with Multicrew players will at last be able to see each other, in game. Although dev-demo shows baldness, hair is confirmed.
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While it’s very exciting that players will soon be able to co-pilot ships together with friends, we’ve yet to see if there will be any issues with nausea if you’re using a VR headset while inside a ship flown by another player. Presently, the cockpit-nature of Elite Dangerous is an effective way of mitigating nausea in VR despite lots of movement, but when the movement of the vehicle isn’t under your direct control, it may not provide the same protection. We’ll have to wait and see once the Commanders 2.3 update launches.
Tabletop Simulator (2015) and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (2015) are the two virtual reality-enabled games nominated for the very first Steam Awards. The winners will be announced on New Year’s Eve after a period of public voting.
Introduced during the Steam Autumn Sale, Valve invited the community to nominate their favourite games for the first ever Steam Awards, a rather eccentric initiative that seems to be more about keeping Steam Sales fresh than being a serious new award program, with categories such as the “I Thought This Game Was Cool Before It Won An Award” Award, and the “Best Use Of A Farm Animal” Award.
The full list of finalists were recently announced on Steam. As the entries weren’t limited to this year’s releases, it’s pleasing to see two VR-enabled titles make the shortlist, alongside classics such as Age of Empires II (1999) HD (2013).
It’s fairly self-explanatory why Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is nominated for the “Boom Boom” Award—which aims to recognize the game that makes the best use of explosions—and with a vast number of tabletop games available via Steam Workshop, from the thousands of board and card games through to traditional role playing games, Tabletop Simulator is a worthy nominee for the “Game Within A Game” Award. Neither are VR-only games, but both support the HTC Vive, while Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes also lists Oculus Rift and OSVR support.
Public voting begins on December 22nd and continues until the 29th, with each category open for 24 hours. The four community-titled categories open together on the 30th, with the winners announced on New Year’s Eve.
Pinball FX2 VR arrives tomorrow on Vive and PlayStation VR along with a popular new The Walking Dead themed machine. Originally a launch title for the Oculus Rift, the game will now be available on all three major VR platforms. We take a look at Pinball FX2 VR on the HTC Vive.
Pinball FX2 VR Details:
Official Site
Developer:Zen Studios Available On:Oculus Home (Rift), SteamVR (Vive, OSVR HDK), PlayStation VR Reviewed On:HTC Vive Release Date: March 28th, 2016 (Rift), November 29th (Vive, PlayStation VR)
Having developed pinball games for almost a decade, with Pinball FX and Zen Pinball appearing on multiple previous and current-gen consoles, several mobile platforms and PC, developer Zen Studios was in an ideal position to bring their particular brand of pinball to virtual reality. Pinball FX2 originally launched on Xbox 360 in 2010, saw major improvements on Xbox One, and made the jump to VR in the form of Pinball FX2 VR on the Oculus Rift in March. No longer exclusive to Oculus, the game moves to the Vive on SteamVR and to PSVR, along with the first DLC pack of five extra tables, and introduces a new table based on Telltale’s The Walking Dead series (first seen in 2014).
Gameplay
Believe it or not, it’s pretty much pinball. This involves smacking a steel ball around with a pair of flippers, trying to score as many points as possible, avoiding the drain at the bottom. You get three balls, plus the chance to earn more during the game. Each machine has a unique design, with combinations of ramps, bumpers, additional flippers, and so on. You score points by hitting targets, rolling across ramps, or completing combinations of targets and routes. For any hope of a high score, you’ll need to become proficient at hitting specific targets repeatedly in order to advance the ‘mode’. With just three machines provided with the base game, the expectation is to become intimately familiar with each, through hours of practice. Everyone should find some immediate satisfaction from randomly keeping the ball ‘alive’, but as with the real thing, it’s only through learning a machine’s layout and quirks over time that the game becomes truly rewarding.
While Pinball FX2 VR is considered to have very realistic ball physics in terms of impacts and inertia, the design of the tables (for instance the generous angle of the flippers and the positioning of the ‘outlanes’) is such that each round tends to be more forgiving than a real machine and lasts longer; you’re less likely to drain the ball compared to the real thing. In addition, game is not afraid to introduce supernatural or unrealistic elements to the tables to enhance the fun. The result is a pinball simulation that leans towards accessibility, while remaining rewarding in the hands of an expert.
You’ll quickly find a table that suits you best, and it’s easy to become hooked to Pinball FX2 VR. But from a studio renowned for its licensed pinball machine designs, it’s disappointing that The Walking Dead table is the only licensed table available right now. With the three standard tables, five from the first DLC pack and The Walking Dead table, this is still significantly short of the 70+ tables available for the non-VR version of Pinball FX2. Understandable to some extent, as each table isn’t just optimised for VR, it is re-worked and enhanced, but there’s a big discrepancy here.
Immersion
As with most conversions, bringing Pinball FX2 VR into VR delivers a truckload of additional immersion over the original game. Developers effectively get this for ‘free’ due to the nature of virtual reality, but it is a measure of a good VR implementation that extra steps were taken to enhance the experience further. For Pinball FX2 VR, that includes creating an attractive living space, reworking some of the table elements and surrounding the player with themed visual effects in a spectacular manner that can only be achieved in VR.
You’ll find the game’s tables inside a ‘beachside mansion’, a semi-futuristic, semi-retro interior that is intelligently laid-out, although it’s a shame that a freeform teleportation system isn’t available, and you’re stuck moving between fixed nodes. As you launch a game, the mood of the space adjusts to suit the design of the particular machine you’ve picked, but it remains apparent that you haven’t left the living space entirely, which creates a more cohesive experience as you switch tables. I’d like to see some customisation of the room beyond choosing between three machines, or perhaps even several alternative play areas, for instance a ‘retro arcade’ environment.
The Walking Dead table (launching on the 29th as DLC for all versions of the game) in particular impresses with a convincingly spooky atmosphere of a zombie adventure, using the same ‘hand-drawn’ art style and original voice actors from Telltale’s popular series, with a chapter-based progression that is surprisingly effective, all contained within a pinball game.
Every table has a few visual tricks that extend beyond reality, which can become jarring at times. In the case of the ‘Paranormal’ table, the passenger plane passing inches from your nose as it crash-lands just becomes irritating after several games. Pinball is a ‘just one more go’ type of game, and the last thing you want is a repeated irritation. In general however, the balance between visual flourishes and clean design is well balanced. The game could, perhaps, offer an option to disable the external animations for those who just want to concentrate on the machine.
The original game introduced the each table’s detail with fly-by camera views; you won’t find that here in the Vive version, instead you can do your up close inspection by walking around the table and leaning towards it. As with most high-quality VR experiences, you’ll feel like you really need to walk around the machine as if it’s a physical object, and you’ll want to lean on the machine to take a closer look, when there’s nothing physically preventing you from simply clipping straight through it. And if you do, even though it feels odd, it’s a really neat way of seeing the table detail up close.
The best way to take immersion to the next level is with haptic feedback. Construct yourself a PinSim, and if you’re lined up just right, it will really feel like you’re interacting with a physical table. To reproduce some of the sensation, strapping Vive controllers (the triggers activate the flippers) either side of a table with the correct height and width can also deliver a pretty convincing feeling without much effort.
Comfort
I assumed this was going to be one of the less demanding scenarios for VR rendering, but Pinball FX2 VR turned out to be one of the clearest illustrations of the importance of high performance for VR gaming. The low hardware resolution of today’s VR headsets means that there is a significant difference in clarity even across the short distance from the front to the back of the table; it’s such a challenge to resolve the detail with this limited number of pixels.
Stand at a typical viewing distance, and you’ll be missing much of the detail towards the back. As such, the difference between the multiple resolution options (with the very high settings performing super-sampling) is very obvious, and combined with up to 8x MSAA, the image quality that can be achieved with enough performance overhead is remarkable. Pinball seems to be one of the best illustrations of an image quality difference, as the table is full of intricate geometry (the wire ramps show aliasing severely) but it is very demanding. You’ll need a serious GPU in order to hold 90 FPS on high settings, which again is particularly significant in pinball.
Thanks to asynchronous reprojection, the Vive seemed smooth as I scanned around the table on the highest settings, but the ball movement had become a juddering mess, which was affecting the all-important physics and timing. In fact, it was only at very low settings that the motion appeared to hold 90 FPS in all situations, so if you want the very best experience you’ll need a top-end GPU.
The intention is to play standing up, as you would in front of a real table. It’s very convincing, and hard to play it any other way once you’ve tried it, but the problem is that you’re constantly tilting your head down. And in order to get the best image from your VR headset, it’s best to look through the centre of the lenses, so you’re likely to have a slightly more tilted head compared to playing on a real table, which can move the lenses out of their sweet spot. On top of that, you’re wearing a headset, and the case of the Vive, a particularly front-heavy one, which adds a considerable strain on your neck. I began to feel some discomfort after just half an hour, which admittedly is longer than I’ve ever stared at a pinball table in reality.
It’s not all bad news on the comfort front. If you hit the ‘recenter’ button, it assumes you are standing and positions the table at a sensible distance below you. This means that unlike the real thing, players of any height can enjoy the game to its full potential. You can also use the ‘recenter’ button to force a different perspective, hitting the button from one position and then moving to play it in another, so that the table ends up closer to you if you’d prefer.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
The Steam Autumn sale is once again upon us, and this time around this time Valve have flagged close to a whopping 300 VR titles for discounts, including games that support both the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and OSVR.
It’s amazing how big the market has already become, especially given how niche VR still is. It seems Valve has done a good job in attracting everyone, from big to small developers, to publish on Steam, and to grow the customer base with huge sales. We can now even say that there are hundreds of VR titles being discounted at once.
In total, the Steam Sale includes 277 titles which claim VR support, 263 of those sport HTC Vive compatibility, 116 are Oculus Rift ready and 95 playable via an OSVR headset. Most of the titles included are of course built on SteamVR’s platform, powered by OpenVR. This means that Oculus Rift owners soon to take the plunge on Oculus Touch (out on December 6th) may well consider an investment in titles which support or indeed require the SteamVR motion controllers – titles which were previously not playable for Rift owners. That said, with the Oculus Touch yet to reach homes, some considerations might be important before taking the plunge, such as if the game has been built with other motion controllers in mind as opposed to generic support via the OpenVR API. Important too is whether or not the game is (or soon will be) available on Oculus Home, as Rift users may find it more convenient to launch software from.
For HTC Vive owners of course, the Steam Sale is a smorgasbord of the best and worst the platform has to offer. Just a few examples include the excellent Pool Nation VR is currently 25% off, the classic Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes 50% off, Raw Data at 20% off and Firebird – La Peri 30% off and many, many more. Check out the full list over at Steam here.
The Steam sale is now running and is due to finish on November 29th at 10am PST.
Bigscreen VR announced that they raised $3 million dollars for their “social utility” VR application. Bigscreen gives you access to your computer screen in VR, which is a deceptively simple idea but one that is unlocking new ways of working on your computer and enabling collaborative social environments that range from virtual 2D video game LAN parties to productive work meetings.
The limited resolution of today’s headsets for comfortably reading text is the biggest constraint for now, but there are plenty of other tasks that people have found are more enjoyable in VR than in real life. It’s not just the immersive nature, improved focus, and unlocking the spatial thinking potential of your brain, but in Bigscreen you can do it with friends.
