Category: PC

Posted on

New Razer Blade Laptop Is Sleek, Ready For VR And Starts At $3,700

New Razer Blade Laptop Is Sleek, Ready For VR And Starts At $3,700

Virtual reality is amazing but, in its most powerful forms, it’s not exactly portable. Sure, there are smartphone powered, mobile VR headsets, but those lack some important features that can only be found in “tethered” headsets like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. These systems are much more sophisticated, but they need to be wired directly into a powerful PC in order to work. Typically, this means you’ll only be going as far as your HDMI cord allows. Today, however, a new VR ready laptop is being announced by Razer that will allow you to move more freely while still enjoying high-quality VR.

The Razer Blade is a thin, stylish VR ready laptop. Other laptops currently exist that are capable of running VR experiences at 90 FPS, but the Razer Blade is able to pack all of that power into a surprisingly compact design.

The Razer Blade is equipped with a 14″ screen, a NVIDIA  GEFORCE, GTX 1060 graphics card, and an Intel Quad-Core i7 processor. The screen comes in both standard HD and QHD+ with up to 1TB of storage capacity. And all of this is fit neatly into a chassis that is only 0.7″ thick.

The Razer Blade also takes advantage of the recently released NVIDIA VR Works software to create more visually powerful immersive experiences. VR Works enables more believable effects, physics and assets to be created in VR. Fire, goo, water, and hair are all components that are rendered with higher fidelity thanks to this software.

VR laptops like the Razer Blade are important for the burgeoning industry as they allow users the freedom to take VR experiences out of their rec-rooms and out into the wider world where they can be seen, enjoyed and understood by more and more people who otherwise would have no idea what VR is all about.

The Razer Blade is available today for $3,700 – $4,500, depending on options.

Posted on

Nolan Bushnell’s Modal VR Launches Virtual Reality Platform For Enterprises

Nolan Bushnell’s Modal VR Launches Virtual Reality Platform For Enterprises

Nolan Bushnell, the cofounder of Atari and father of modern video games, is back with a new startup creating a virtual reality platform for enterprises.

Modal VR enables companies to set up virtual reality experiences that are life-size and large-scale, like setting up a field for a new kind of laser tag game or a shared virtual tourism experience.

Jason Crawford, CEO of Modal VR in Los Angeles, said in an interview that the company is creating hardware and software as part of its platform. Companies across a wide variety of industries can use the platform to create their own immersive experiences to visualize, play, train, create, and collaborate with each other, Bushnell said in an interview.

Nolan Bushnell is cofounder and chairman of Modal VR.

“We think this is the next generation of VR,” Bushnell said. “We want to help enterprises solve problems by looking at them from another point of view.”

Crawford started Modal VR a few years ago because he wanted to create believable experiences in VR. The system is completely wireless, and it comes with various sensors with batteries. Over time, the company hopes to make the wearable technology more invisible and lightweight, Bushnell said. And the way the system is built, there could be large numbers of people who share the same virtual experience.

Bushnell helped kick off the video game industry in the 1970s at Atari, and he has been investing in game companies ever since. He started Chuck E. Cheese and is an inductee of the Video Game Hall of Fame. Crawford is also the founder of a few startups, including Tiny Castle Studios.

I tried out Modal VR in a demo at a big soccer field in Sunnyvale, Calif. Bushnell and Crawford showed me a working system that started with me getting suited up in an outfit that included a VR headset, or visor, and a number of sensors that went on my arms and legs. I had gloves with sensors on my fingers. Those sensors functioned a lot like the sensors in a motion-capture studio. They detected my full body movements, including which direction I was facing and what I was doing with my arms and legs. There were sensor detectors set up across the soccer field.

There were some technical problems at first, but it eventually worked. With the VR headset on, I looked forward and saw a life-size castle — not unlike Cinderella’s castle at Disneyland — that was perhaps 30 feet high. I walked slowly under the archway and looped around. I came to a ferris wheel and other rides. Then I was able to move my hands and pick up the ferris wheel and place it in a different part of the amusement park. I was able to share that experience with one other Modal VR employee, who served as my tour guide in the same VR experience. That was particularly unique.

After that, I walked back and returned to the spot on the soccer field where I started. Anyone watching me would have noticed that I had walked over almost every part of the field.

Jason Crawford is CEO of Modal VR.

Once it’s ready to go, Modal VR will be able to set up its portable system in a matter of minutes. The sensors can track multiple users at once in areas as large as 900,000 square feet. Modal VR system owners can easily download and install Modal VR applications.

Bushnell and Crawford said that the possible uses include themed entertainment, such as interactive attractions or previsualization tools; marketing, with experiential activations and social content creation; and arcades, with large-scale VR experiences, such as group laser tag.

Other applications include group esports competitions and mixed reality entertainment; real estate sales and visualizations; film and TV previsualization for sets, stunts, and visual effects; and training for law enforcement, emergency response, military, astronauts, and athletes. Museums could use the tech for immersive exhibits and virtual walkthroughs. Cities can use them for urban planning visualization or virtual travel.

Modal VR came from an independent software studio, so the founders understand the business challenges most software developers face. As a result, the company plans to place Modal VR Developer Editions directly in the hands of developers, providing the community with countless new opportunities to create amazing experiences and generate revenue in a new way.

“Our team is looking forward to being an active contributor and collaborator within the VR community. We hope Modal VR will help expand our understanding of what’s possible and help push the industry forward in different ways,” Crawford said.

“We have been working to bring ambitious mixed reality content to our fans, and Modal VR is well beyond the limitations we thought possible,” said Shaun Novak, senior director of production at Machinima, in a statement. “The wireless portability, full-body tracking, and massive play area really allow for compelling experience in and out of the headset. Modal VR has been a great partner in showing the fun of VR.”

This post by Dean Takahashi originally appeared on Venturebeat.

Posted on

‘Dragon Front’ Goes Mobile: Gear VR Hands On And Rift Crossplay Impressions

‘Dragon Front’ Goes Mobile: Gear VR Hands On And Rift Crossplay Impressions

Dragon Front is a collectible card battling game that is played entirely in virtual reality. It carries similar DNA to other online trading card games such as Hearthstone, and it is currently in an open beta for the Oculus Rift and Gear VR. We’ve previously covered the general rules of the game and provided a detailed hands on with the PC version. But at Oculus Connect 3 we had the chance to try out the mobile Gear VR version to see how it compares and how multi-platform crossplay functions between the two headsets.

Upon booting up Dragon Front on your Samsung Gear VR the first thing you’ll notice is that it looks remarkably similar to the full Rift release. No significant assets were stripped out or lost in the translation process and this applies to the card battles themselves as well.

Battles in Dragon Front were designed from the beginning to be playable on both systems easily, according to representatives from creator High Voltage Studios.

Anyone who has tried the game on PC will know that it can be played fully with just the Oculus remote and its limited number of buttons. This streamlined gameplay design means that the Gear VR’s built in headset touchpad is more than sufficient to control a game that on the surface may seem mechanically complex.

The only real inputs you will need on Dragon Front for Gear VR are gaze aiming, tap selection, and a simple up-swipe on the pad if you wish to bring up a specific cards stats and abilities. Almost every action in this very strategic system can be accomplished using just those basic inputs. This makes Gear VR feel like Dragon Front‘s true home. The short games and pick up and play mentality fit naturally on a mobile platform and even the online matchmaking doesn’t skip a beat.

While on the show floor, two of our writers were able to play a complete match of Dragon Front online with one on the Rift and the other on a Gear VR. The experience flowed beautifully with no loss in performance, frame drops, or other forms of lag on either end. The game’s ancillary functions, such as the head avatars that reflect each player’s movements, also remained intact.

There are some notable losses in graphical fidelity on Dragon Front for Gear VR. The most notable of these is the absence of parallax for the card art. On Gear VR the card illustrations are flat whereas on the Rift they are given a pleasing sense of depth.

According to High Voltage, “parallax was the first thing to go but the entire process was a constant battle for performance. We’ve done everything we can and explored every possible creative solution to get Dragon Front running on Gear VR with as little drop off from the Rift as possible.”

The inclusion of this additional platform should mean for quicker matchmaking and more varied play styles, which is important for a title that depends so heavily on multiplayer.

Bot the Gear VR and the Oculus Rift versions of Dragon Front are currently in an open beta that you can sign up for today.

Are you in the beta? Let us know what you think of Dragon Front so far in the comments below.

Posted on

Oculus Finally Reveals Minimum Specification For Oculus Rift, New $499 Oculus Ready PC

Oculus Finally Reveals Minimum Specification For Oculus Rift, New $499 Oculus Ready PC

We’ve never actually seen the minimum specifications for the Oculus Rift. Oculus has only revealed a recommended spec in the past. That changed today.

During the 2016 Oculus Connect keynote speech, company CEO Brendan Iribe pulled back the curtain on a minimum spec for VR capable machines. The list includes an Nvidia 960 graphics card, Intel i3-6100/AMD FX4350 processor, 8GB+ RAM, and the usual HDMI and USB requirements along with Windows 8 OS. True, that’s lower than the previously provided set of specs, which included an Nvidia 970 or AMD 290 card and Intel i5-4590 processor, but those are the recommended specs, not minimum.

The wording is different but the bottom line is the same: less expensive PCs can now support the Oculus Rift. To that end, Iribe announced some new additions to the VR ready PC line. Cyber Power revealed a new machine that meets the minimum spec on AMD-based hardware for $499. That means you can now get everything needed to play an Oculus Rift for around $1,100. When it comes to Oculus’ own line of Oculus Ready PCs, the company is adding laptops from Asus, Alienware, Lenovo and Aorus.

So how is this possible? According to Iribe, it’s thanks to the introduction of several predictive techniques that can help lower powered hardware mainstain solid framerates. He spoke of asynchroncus timewarp, a technique that many developers will already be used to. It’s essentially a method of predicting where the user is going to look next to assist with renedering and other intensive processes.

Timewarp only adresses the direction you’re looking in, however, and not the actual position of your head. To address this factor, Iribe introduced what Oculus calls asynchronus spacewarp, something he claimed no one had ever done before which aims to fix positional juddering and ghosting. This process takes the two previous frames in an app the user is inside, analyses the difference between them, and then predicts and generates a new synthetic frame.

In other words, it calculates where your head was in previous frames to project a synthetic image every other frame. This allows an app to run at 45 real frames per second, with synethic frames being used to then bring it back to the Oculus minimum standard of 90fps. It reminds us in a way of 120fps reprojection on PlayStation VR, but only so far as Oculus is artificially manipulating a framerate to free up a machine’s bandwidth.

Techniques like this are constantly helping to lessen the demand that VR puts on PCs. This time next year the barrier to entry for VR could be lower than ever.