Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
The upcoming sequel to Star Wars Battlefront will include a campaign mode. The feature was absent from 2015's less-than-impressive release, and was the target of much of the game's criticism.
The post Yes, the ‘Star Wars Battlefront’ sequel will have a campaign mode appeared first on Digital Trends.
I have a difficult time describing Star Wars Battlefront Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission as anything but embarrassingly indulgent.
The PlayStation VR experience opens to a simple menu screen invaded by the descending foot of a massive AT-AT walker. The moment pushes me to crane my neck upward, using the replica to inform users to the magnitude of the space. I watch it slowly tread behind the ‘Settings’ menu option and stomp off into the distance. I start to realize that I’m watching a menu screen far longer than a normal person should.
I hold a button to begin, and the white space is filled with an X-wing. My own X-wing, I gather, by the friendly R2-D2 unit rolling around underneath, beeping and twirling with familiarity. I’m able to teleport to various vantage points around the garage, a feature meant entirely to engorge me in every architectural accuracy and storied ding of the ship. Again, I become awkwardly self aware. I’ve been ogling virtual metal for an objectively strange amount of time.
Perhaps the X-wing VR mission is best measured by how much shameless time I spent silently staring at it. Its vehicles and dogfights are a captivating blend of authenticity and fantasy.
“That is kind of Star Wars,” Criterion art director Kieran Crimmins tells me as I recount my experience to him. “There’s nothing hard to watch in Star Wars.”
“It is this kind of roller coaster ride of spectacle,” adds Criterion designer, John Stanley.
Criterion flourishes in this enchanting space between realism and enjoyment. Their past titles, including Need for Speed and the Burnout series, turn cars into arcade-like experiences they hope will be easy to pick up but difficult to master.
“Criterion are known for doing spectacular vehicle experiences,” says Stanley, “and you definitely don’t get more spectacular than an X-wing.”
Soon it’s time to hop into the cockpit, my R2 loads into the ship exterior just behind me, per protocol. I’m wearing the standard pilot garb and admiring a detailed arrangement of buttons and gauges, able to carelessly fumble with panel controls for the targeting computer and blaster configuration. A push of a button, and I’m in space. The R2 squeaks incoherently, but my character answers in just a way that both translates and responds, and I smile at the familiarity of the series’ dialogue pattern. The robot seems to be confidently doubting my piloting — the droid sass is also familiar.
I’m staring again, this time without care, for ages out of my cockpit as I glide towards my flight team. There’s no inaccessible angle, so I lift myself to peek over the edge of my fighter for a better view at a nearby galaxy. The distant stars and planets aren’t as visually crisp as the exceptional ship interior, but they surround me in a way that only virtual reality can.
The galaxy seems to care about its resolution as little as I do, because the backdrop never struggles to immerse me given the ships in my vicinity. Rebel allies crowd me with X-wings and runners identical to their canon counterparts. In fact, Criterion collaborated so closely with LucasArts that this VR mission is now an official entry in the Star Wars lore, they’ve told me.
Unsurprisingly, the rebels need a small unit of ships to respond to a distress call in Imperial territory. Nobody seems to mind that I’m ceaselessly circling our fleet during the briefing, busy acclimating myself to the simple control scheme. The left stick controls throttle, the right is used for direction. The DualShock’s triggers are relegated to my shields and attacks. Best of all, I am my own camera control. First-person flight’s usual chaos, I found, melts away when you can easily watch it unfold around you.
We warp into an asteroid field and search for our objective, blasting a path through small debris and smoothly weaving through larger rocks with little maneuvering resistance. My charmingly voice-acted teammates banter and poke fun at the inexperience of my character, who’s designed to parallel the player’s own amateur state.
After convening with the target U-wing, a new ship introduced with the Rogue One film, a flock of enemy TIE fighters appear, howling in the distance, to kick off a dogfight at the perfect time. Criterion paces the X-wing Mission carefully, layering experiences in a way that will welcome fresh VR players. I had learned to observe thanks to the walker at the main menu, mastered controls while admiring the Rebel fleet, and found my firing footing while gleefully zooming between space rocks. Without noticing or trying, I’d become comfortable with Battlefront’s VR mode, Criterion using irresistible pieces of Star Wars to bait me through their subtle tutorial.
The seamless structure is a result of Criterion’s almost absurdly shotgun development style. This is the studio’s first released virtual reality game, yet they’ve made nearly 50 VR titles in-house.
“We’ve got this really amazing hackathon culture in the studio,” Stanley says. These frequent development marathons challenge members to create games within a short period of time, and produce what Crimmins calls a “smorgasbord of experiments.” A similar process led to DEXED from Ninja Theory, earlier this year.
“We love experimenting,” says Crimmins, and you wouldn’t doubt it by the smile on his face. “We put a big emphasis on prototyping and playing our games. We call ourselves game-feel experts, which basically means we don’t believe a feature or anything is worth anything until we’ve played it and see how it feels.” Their own connection with the material is the star of the process.
But back to the dogfighting, because that’s what really matters in an X-wing mission.
Thankfully, I’m happy to report it’s enjoyable. The immersive set and tight controls combine into an iconic battleground of weaving targets. Most memorable of the frenetic shooting is the eventual Star Destroyer, whose ominous appearance stirs the same “we’re screwed” feeling that’s core to the Rebel experience this is looking to recreate.
Helpful indicators point out enemies and objectives in the dauntingly dimensional world of space, and though I spent most of my time chasing after them upside down, I didn’t feel VR sickness creeping on me. Less experienced VR users will definitely want to take it easy on the rolling, but the game’s sitting position and stable cockpit elements manage most of the movement — similar to Call of Duty’s Jackal VR experience, or EVE: Valkyrie.
My biggest gripe is that I wish there were more. The mission feels relatively short, ending after the final moments of this battle, but this fact is remedied slightly by the arcade nature Criterion admires. The end screen hoists into view a scoreboard, your stats, and a list of bonus achievements for the enthusiast pilot. It all challenges you to jump back in and enjoy the experience a number of times.
The brevity is remedied yet again by the fact that once it releases on Dec. 6, Rogue One X-Wing VR will be free for all PS VR users who own Star Wars: Battlefront on PlayStation 4. Criterion assures me it will stay PS VR exclusive and coupled with the full game.
After I relinquish my headset, I question Stanley and Crimmins on their experience with VR development; the response is vividly optimistic, and no doubt Criterion’s belief in virtual reality lends itself to the impactful design of their project.
“There’s a certain rule book of kind of visuals we’ve developed over the years for flat screens,” Crimmins says of developers. “Half of it doesn’t work in VR, so it’s really frustrating for a lot of people, especially experts that are working in the field, and half of their expertise now becomes irrelevant.”
He likens the discord to the uninspiring first wave of mobile games, and emphasizes that creators need to develop a new language that understands what works best with the technology.
“But at Criterion, that’s kind of perfect,” Crimmins continues. Their atypical approach to development is equipped for “rewriting the language of VR.” They pull successful features from their many trial creations, and even find inspiration in the avant garde world of experimental theater. “They’ve [theater groups] been doing that kind of fully immersed experience and directing people’s attention – stuff like that – for a long time,” Crimmins explains. “A lot of the stuff they do is really, really relevant in VR.”
It’s the futility of the standard cinematic language that brings a chuckle from these two. The old paradigm spent years learning to manipulate 2D images and perfect techniques for utilizing screen space and corners.
Crimmins ends his pondering: “You can’t have any of that. You’ve got to rewrite it.”
Star Wars Battlefront Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission is certainly a confident entry in VR’s sprouting lexicon. A headset and the push of a button launches you into the well-crafted dream of virtually every Star Wars enthusiast. It’s a bit brief considering how good it is, but when the experience is as carefully planned and fine tuned as this, the dream is as simple as noticeably tarnished metal, a familiar orange jumpsuit, a series of metallic squeaks ringing from over my shoulder, and a flurry of deadly lasers shooting over the other.
Sharon is a freelance games journalist and Editor-in-Chief of Twinfinite. You can follow her on Twitter: @Sharoogala.
Tagged with: battlefront, playstation, PSVR, sony, Star Wars, vr mission, x wing
Disney’s ILMxLab has been busy of late. In addition to the free Trials on Tatooine virtual reality experience for HTC Vive, the studio released a 360-degree video that serves as a prequel to the upcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The POV experience, available through Verizon, chronicles the first discovery of the Death Star and puts viewers inside the cockpit of an X-Wing pilot. ILMxLab also worked with Electronic Arts and developer DICE to allow PlayStation VR users to pilot those rebel ships in the upcoming Dec. 6 Star Wars Battlefront Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission.
Rob Bredow, the chief technology officer at Lucasfilm, has overseen the company’s R&D division, ILMxLab, since its inception. Bredow was recently in Milan, Italy for the VIEW Conference. He’s currently living in London and working on the new Han Solo movie with directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller at Pinewood Studios. He told UploadVR that virtual reality is now part of the production process for the Star Wars films, something that commenced with Rogue One and director Gareth Edwards.
“One of my favorite quotes that Gareth said was after he’d been in VR like two or three minutes, ‘This looks way better in real life,’” Bredow said. “And I leaned over to Doug Chiang and asked him if his guys had already built one of these, and he’s like, ‘No, he’s talking about virtual reality right now, being inside the ship is way better than having to look at the drawings or 2D printouts or those kinds of things.’”
Bredow said that his team at ILMxLab is constantly learning as they experiment with different experiences across emerging platforms.
“There were so many things we learned from Trials on Tatooine,” Bredow said. “That was a great learning experience because we really did build that experience up as we were learning different things. We learned hundreds of things; probably thousands of things. One specific takeaway was in the sound design area. We walked away after Trials of Tatooine saying we need this close collaboration between the sound designers and the experience creators and the best situation is that that’s going on hand-in-hand, so that we can teach other things as we go through the process of making these experiences.”
Several of the early VR projects from ILMxLab, including Trials on Tatooine and the Magic Leap mixed reality droid experience, were built using Epic Games Unreal Engine 4 technology.
“We really are at the early stages of game engine technology for VR, and there are a whole bunch of challenges that come along with 90 frames per second and these very high frame rates, and of course everything being in stereo,” Bredow said. “But there are a whole bunch of opportunities that creates, as well. What we’re seeing right now is a lot of people taking the tools that happen to be available at the time that VR got this resurgence in popularity and retrofitting them into the best fit for VR.”
Although his team is working with game engine technology, they’re not focusing on game-length experiences. Bredow promised that new VR experiences like the one featuring Darth Vader that was recently announced, will be longer than Trials on Tatooine.
“Right now the kind of things we’re looking at are still nowhere near as long as something like Skyrim, and some of that is actually driven by our desire to really make very high quality content,” Bredow said. “And there’s certain economics that come with that. You have to be able to have enough time to put into those experiences to really warrant a many hour experience, and right now honestly virtual reality is in its early days so you don’t get to make that same sort of investment, so the experience length is going to be a little bit shorter as a result.”
ILMxLab is very familiar with PS VR thanks to its work with EA and DICE. Bredow said he’s excited about Sony’s new platform because it allows gamers to plug into a box they probably already have in their living room, and it’s dramatically less expensive than HTC Vive and Oculus Rift if you already have the existing components.
“The living room is a really great way to experience VR and a lot of people are going to have really good experiences and we’re going to see a much bigger user base,” Bredow said. “So today we’re in a ‘chicken and the egg’ situation where everyone’s wondering how big is that user base going to be, how much time can I invest in these experiences to be able to sell them from a financial sense. After these holidays and into next year we’ll see an audience that is growing and more interested in virtual reality.”
At the same time the home VR scene is expanding, a new wave of virtual reality arcades and experiences are popping up around the world. That includes established companies like IMAX, which has partnered with Starbreeze, as well as startups like The Void, which launched Ghostbusters: Dimenion earlier this year at Madame Tussaud’s.
“We’re really interested at ILMxLab in location-based entertainment as it relates to virtual reality,” Bredow said. “We think there are things we can do in that space where you really control the environment and you can put a higher-quality headset on someone’s head and power it with a machine that might be five times as powerful as the one you have at home. The haptics and other things you can do in those environments can be very unique and very fun and give people a different kind of experience. The home VR experience is going to be very interesting and there’s a ton to explore there, but then when you add other elements of haptics and environment and things you can do in a location that you can’t do at your house that starts to get really interesting.”
Tagged with: Darth Vader, ilmxlab, rob bredow, Star Wars
If you’ve ever had to waiting at an airport for an inordinate amount of time you will be aware it is one of the most tedious and soul-crushing endeavours. Sitting, if you’re lucky enough to be able to do such, waiting for a deadline that may not even be definite. Waiting for your journey to begin, be it away for work or play or simply to get back home. There’s only so many ways an airport lounge can hope to distract you, between fending off the man wanting you to enter a raffle for a sports car and peering intently at the arrivals and departures board. If only you could get away.
Far, far away…
Well, if you’re set to be travelling out of London Gatwick we might well have some good news for you. As part of the promotion for upcoming film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the war between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance is being brought to Gatwick and virtual reality (VR) is going to be a part of it.
Combining a marketing takeover that will see passengers be able to take in a branded locations in and outside the airport, come across costumes from the film as well as the towering figure of droid K-2SO. A new Star Wars experience called Rogue One: Recon will be sweeping you off into space as an X-Wing pilot on a regular patrol. A totally regular, nothing-at-all happening patrol. We suspect it will not stay that way for long.
VRFocus will bring you more information about Rogue One: Recon as we get it.
Next month, Star Wars Battlefront players will be able to take the fight to the planet of Scarif in content based on Rogue One — and PlayStation VR owners will get an exclusive mission, too.
The post ‘Star Wars Battlefront’ gets PlayStation VR treatment, ‘Rogue One’ content appeared first on Digital Trends.
It’s just a few weeks now until the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in theaters on December 15th, but the anticipated tie-in VR experience from DICE is even closer than that.
Star Wars Battlefront Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission, as the piece is rather clumsily called, will be releasing on PlayStation VR on December 6th, according to a new blog from publisher EA. It will be free to anyone that owns a PlayStation 4 copy of last year’s Star Wars: Battlefront, which you can currently pick up for around $15 – $20 at online retailers, though the jury’s still out on if the experience alone will be worth that price. We’ve reached out to EA to ask if there might be any way for those that don’t own the game to see the experience.
As the name suggests, Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission puts you in the cockpit of the iconic spacecraft for the first time in VR (officially, at least). You’ll undergo an “important mission” for the Rebellion, heading into battle. From the looks of concept art, the piece will feature the new U-Wing ship, seen in the upcoming movie. There are no lightsabers or laser battles here; fans looking for that will have to check out Trials on Tatooine, another free experience from ILMxLAB available on the HTC Vive.
It’s looking like it will be another short experience, similar to the Call of Duty Infinite Warfare: Jackal Assault VR piece that launched on PS VR for free a few weeks back. Hopefully we won’t be left underwhelmed by this one, though. More Rogue One-themed content will also be launching for Star Wars: Battlefront on the same day.
This isn’t all that’s going on in the world of Star Wars and VR right now. Also recently revealed was Rogue One: Recon, a short 360 degree movie, again telling the story of an X-Wing pilot, produced by ILMxLAB. The studio is also working on a fully VR interactive experience, telling a story starring iconic Star Wars villain, Darth Vader.
Tagged with: Dice, EA, rogue one, sci-fi, Star Wars, star wars battlefront: x-wing mission
When Disney, one of the largest entertainment brands on the planet, made their $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm, the company behind small little film franchises like Star Wars, it was essentially a foregone conclusion that the sci-fi franchise would soon be enjoying a more pronounced presence at The Happiest Place On Earth. As it turns out Star Tours was already a popular attraction, so it was only a matter of time before that concept expanded further.
In the summer of last year, Disney announced that a Star Wars-themed Land would be added to both Disneyland and Disney World resorts and the company even debuted a 360-photo of the construction site, giving people a small tease at the future possibilities.
Then most recently we learned that the upcoming Star Wars Land would even employ the use of our new medium of VR to enhance many of the location’s attractions. Nokia and Disney are already working on VR projects together, we know that ILMxLAB created the brief Trials on Tatooine experience and are currently working on a more interactive Darth Vader story as well. You can safely add whatever VR implementations exist at Star Wars Land to our list of most highly-anticipated new developments at a theme park in quite some time.
By way of Nearmap, a company that specializes in high-quality aerial photography, we can see what approximately one year of progress looks like when building a new region for an upcoming Disneyland location. In the above embedded image, you can slide from the left to the right to see what the progress has been like. The image on the left is from November 15th, 2015, prior to construction starting, and the image on the right is from September 22nd, 2016, just about two months ago.
Maybe by this time next year we can start to get a glimpse of a work-in-progress Death Star — hopefully it won’t be mistaken for a moon this time.
Tagged with: amusement park, Disneyland, resort, Star Wars, theme park. disney
When Disney, one of the largest entertainment brands on the planet, made their $4 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm, the company behind small little film franchises like Star Wars, it was essentially a foregone conclusion that the sci-fi franchise would soon be enjoying a more pronounced presence at The Happiest Place On Earth. As it turns out Star Tours was already a popular attraction, so it was only a matter of time before that concept expanded further.
In the summer of last year, Disney announced that a Star Wars-themed Land would be added to both Disneyland and Disney World resorts and the company even debuted a 360-photo of the construction site, giving people a small tease at the future possibilities.
Then most recently we learned that the upcoming Star Wars Land would even employ the use of our new medium of VR to enhance many of the location’s attractions. Nokia and Disney are already working on VR projects together, we know that ILMxLAB created the brief Trials on Tatooine experience and are currently working on a more interactive Darth Vader story as well. You can safely add whatever VR implementations exist at Star Wars Land to our list of most highly-anticipated new developments at a theme park in quite some time.
By way of Nearmap, a company that specializes in high-quality aerial photography, we can see what approximately one year of progress looks like when building a new region for an upcoming Disneyland location. In the above embedded image, you can slide from the left to the right to see what the progress has been like. The image on the left is from November 15th, 2015, prior to construction starting, and the image on the right is from September 22nd, 2016, just about two months ago.
Maybe by this time next year we can start to get a glimpse of a work-in-progress Death Star — hopefully it won’t be mistaken for a moon this time.
Tagged with: amusement park, Disneyland, resort, Star Wars, theme park. disney
Auch wenn es Virtual Reality in diesem Jahr noch nicht in alle Haushalte geschafft hat, so ist das Interesse von vielen Unternehmen aktuell immens. Viele Unternehmen möchten sich mit und in VR präsentieren und das neue Medium für Werbezwecke verwenden. Wenn es eine Marke gibt, die keine Möglichkeit der Vermarktung auslässt, dann ist es wohl Star Wars. Lucasfilms presst das Format in jedes erdenkliche Spielzeug und Zubehör. Außerdem wurde bereits eine Star Wars Erfahrung auf Steam veröffentlicht, die mit der HTC Vive erlebt werden kann. Doch nun macht eine weitere Erfahrung von sich Reden, die den Titel Rogue One: Recon trägt.
Rogue One: Recon wird keine animierte Erfahrung, in der ihr euch frei bewegen könnt. Es handelt sich um ein 360 Grad Video, indem ihr zum reinen Beobachter werdet. Der Inhalt wurde auch von dem ILMxLAB erstellt, welches auch für Trials on Tatooine auf Steam verantwortlich ist. Im Video werdet ihr zu einem X-Wing Scout, der gerade in die Nähe des Todessterns kommt und sich auf Ärger gefasst machen muss. Die Erfahrung wird noch bis zum 13. November exklusiv bei Verizon gezeigt, doch am 14. November wird das Video auch auf der Facebook-Seite von Verizon verfügbar sein und dann kann sich jeder die 360 Grad Erfahrung anschauen.
Der Beitrag Rogue One: Recon – 360 Grad Star Wars Erfahrung zuerst gesehen auf VR∙Nerds. VR·Nerds am Werk!
Various industries are tapping virtual reality when trying to innovate within their marketing departments. Though it hasn’t hit the majority of homes just yet, VR is something that can make in-store and event venue displays stand out. Previously we’ve reported on just this type of promo, including Adidas’ VR sport boot launch in London. Various films have even taken advantage of VR promos with experiences like The Martian. The Star Wars franchise has the benefit of having permeated nearly every facet of entertainment you can imagine, from toys to comics to entire expos, but the powers-that-be aren’t shy about utilizing VR, and Verizon has partnered with Lucasfilm for an experience that’s available in their stores exclusively from November 10th -13th: Rogue One: Recon – A Star Wars 360 experience. If you miss out, it’ll be made available on the Verizon Facebook page on the 14th.
Rogue One: Recon, developed by ILMxLAB, is a 360-degree video from the perspective of an X-Wing scout that just happens to come across the infamous Death Star along with another pilot. The two make a jump into dangerous territory and attempt to warn the rebels about what they find. The Rogue One film’s plot gets moving when the Rebels intercept a coded imperial message about a weapons test that ends up being the Death Star, so it seems the two scouts from Recon failed to make contact. Although brief, Recon is a cool way drop fans of Star Wars into the story in anticipation of Rogue One.
The first viewing will have focused on the action, but second and third viewings let you appreciate a lot of details including the many instruments within the X-Wing’s cockpit. Rogue One: Recon is a snack sized feature with high production values, a signal that developers are putting their best foot forward with VR. The few minutes fly by and leave you wanting more at their conclusion, which is exactly what it’s supposed to do. Head into a Verizon store until Nov. 25 to see it for yourself.
