Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
The PlayStation 4 has, until this point, been unable to use external hard drives to increase storage capacity. That changes today with the beta release of system software 4.50, which allows for drives up to 8TB in size.
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Teachers and students of the world rejoice, as Minecraft Education Edition now has all of the features added in the 1.0 update. That means you can visit The End, but it also adds a number of educator specific tools that should come in handy.
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In a stroke of luck for our collective bank accounts and wallets, but bad luck for developers and those wishing to empty their wallets, it seems like Steam went down for a while today during their massive Winter Sale. Steam sales have become major events within the gaming community and VR consumers were likely looking forward to padding their virtual reality experience library, but everyone will have to wait a little while until things are completely in order again. Even developers themselves had to take a break as it seems the dev back end went down as well.
Yesterday, we wrote up some of the highlights of the Steam Winter Sale and declared that there were discounts for more VR games than you could ever play, though I’m sure many of you would challenge that notion. There are over 400 experiences discounted on the Steam store and there are some specific highlights that the UploadVR family think you should try. DiRT Rally ($23.99, which comes in a great deal cheaper than the Oculus sale), Project CARS ($9.89), and Tilt Brush ($20.99) all got discounts. ARK: Survival Evolved also received a 60% discount down to $11.99 and is one of the most intriguing Early Access VR prospects currently.
Steam is back up for the most part now it looks like, but some of the pages are still having trouble loading. It will likely be improving intermittently throughout the day unless a swath of people open up their gifted Steam cards and crash things again. We should all fully expect that to happen over the holiday weekend.
For the time being, feel free to jump on over to the Oculus Winter Sale and check out some of the bundles in addition to the individual price cuts including The Climb, Chronos, SUPERHOT VR, and a handful more. You can see all of the 400+ VR deals here. Let us know your favorite steals from both sales, share the wealth with your fellow VR gamers, and stay tuned to UploadVR for more sale updates as they come in.
Within virtual worlds, the Oculus Touch allows players to use their hands in a more realistic manner than a gamepad allows you to manipulate their environment and different tools or weapons. The hands of a mage are some of the most powerful weapons across many different works of fiction and The Unspoken by Insomniac Games puts you into that role as you learn the ways of spellcasting.
With their upcoming Arcane updates, Insomniac will be adding more magic to your arsenal throughout 2017 as announced on their website.
The Unspoken is a multiplayer driven action game where you choose your class, equip different artifacts, and brawl. The Arcane updates will be adding new artifacts, new classes, new modes, and even the option to change your mage’s cloaks. There are few details on the new additions all across the board, but we do know the new classes come with new gesture and primal spells to go along with a shift in play styles for each and the new artifacts are guaranteed to change the balance of battle in big ways. A few concept images for new cloaks are available on the post page and more info for all of these things including the new modes of play will likely be revealed as we get closer to their launch.
We reviewed The Unspoken here at UploadVR and the “addicting urban magic fight club” received one of our highest scores with a 9 out of 10. While it produces no true single player experience outside of a practice mode, we loved how effective it was as a showcase for the impressive Oculus Touch controllers, which we consider to be the best VR controllers available.
If you don’t own the game already, it can be purchased on the Oculus store for $29.99. If you do, you have a wealth of content for one of the best games on Oculus flowing in throughout next year.
Tagged with: combat, dlc, Mage, magic, oculus rift, oculus touch, The Unspoken, update
Painting in VR can be an amazingly freeing experience for an artist. You dance, and 3D art appears. But, if you only need to paint on a two-dimensional virtual wall, it doesn’t make sense to move your brush in three dimensions. You could try, but the brush would either go through the wall, or there’d be an awkward space between the wall and where your painting actually ends up. Up until now, this has been very frustrating. However, with Tilt Brush 8.0, this two-dimensional problem is no longer an issue.
In this update, Google introduces Guides, a new object library containing three-dimensional rulers which allow you to draw on flat surfaces. The update also enables advanced users to render 360-degree videos of their sketches by following these instructions. Below is an example of how the 360-degree videos look:
Think of Guides like magnetic objects that you can scale non-uniformly. You have the option to use either a square, sphere, or capsule guide, and place or pin them anywhere in your scene. You’re allowed to use as many as you want at once, and can scale them up to be much larger than regular objects or images. Guides can be found in your Settings window next to the Media Library icon.
Once you have placed your first Guide into a scene, your brush tip will automatically magnetize to whichever side of the Guide that you’re closest to. When you pull the trigger to start painting, your brush will then lock to that Guide and allow you to draw on its two-dimensional surface. Every stroke you make from then on is layered on top of the other strokes placed before.
If you don’t want your brush to automatically snap to the Guides when you’re working on the rest of your sketch, you don’t have to throw it away. Instead hide all of the Guides by toggling the Eyeball Button in the floating Guides menu.
Guides unlocks a lot of doors for artists — and makes it easier to draw doors too! One way to use the square Guide is by stretching it out like a canvas; that way, you could potentially draw an entire piece of art in just 2D. Or, if you’re building a scene in an alleyway, you can now set up a square Guide as a wall, draw some bricks, and then make a graffiti painting, all on the same plane. This allows you to make art that was only possible with computer software like Adobe Illustrator, since each stroke can be scaled up and down like a vector graphic
Before this release, the Teleport tool didn’t always work because the floor could easily be drawn at the incorrect height. But now you can scale out one massive square Guide and place it on the floor so that your ground textures will always snap to the same plane. You can create some interesting flat textures this way, like a stone path, a hardwood floor, or dirt. With this, you can now accurately map out an entire self-contained VR experience which people can explore without losing a sense of presence; no more legs being cut off by the floor. Here’s an example of one of the self-contained experiences that I’m working on now.
Far away things don’t have to be three dimensional, which make Guides great for drawing assets like mountains, since you can paint them with a high amount of detail now. You could even import images that you have taken in Google Earth VR, and then trace on top of them. I’m planning to write more about this in the future, so stay tuned. Here’s what one of my flat backdrops looks like from the front.
From the side, you can see that everything is flat. Notice that everything isn’t on one Guide either; I actually use five flat Guides for this one image, which causes the mountains to parallax around each other when the viewer moves their head. To make skies before 8.0, I would design gradients in Photoshop, and then import them into Tilt Brush, but I was able to create the sky in image above with a Guide too. Now, achieving any kind of shading like this is more feasible in Tilt Brush.
It’s simple now to block out a building with Guides, which you can then draw walls and details on top of. You won’t have to worry about your lines being angled wrong. This is great for 3D design outside of Tilt Brush, because this new level of accuracy will make it more feasible to use Tilt Brush exports as reference models. Modelers won’t have to guess how you meant to draw something anymore. And since your floor will be level, you can teleport around your building to get a sense for how it will actually feel if you plan on making the building, or porting it into a VR experience.
Before, writing text was frustrating in Tilt Brush, but now you can write words that could pass as typed text. This could open up new story telling possibilities, and would allow for signs and logos to be more realistic. This also means that it’ll be easier for you to handwrite notes to remind yourself about things that you want to add later. Here’s a quick example that I made.
Right now, there isn’t a Guide layer system, so every time you draw a stroke, it will always go on top of the strokes made before. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make your own layers by placing several Guides on top of each other. This idea is a little tricky to explain, so check out this video of me setting up this system.
You’ll notice that when your brush is close to multiple Guides at once, it tends to jump around. This will make skinning the walls of a house impossible since you can’t actually start the wall in a corner. So, the best practice is to always make your Guides larger than they need to be so you can start drawing on a section that isn’t too close to another Guide.
That’s what I’ve discovered about Guides so far, but if you come up with a new trick, you should share it in the Tilt brush Artists Facebook group, where you might find advice from other artists as well. I’m excited to see what these new features will allow us to create!
If you want more epic space battles in No Man's Sky, better audio and far fewer bugs, the latest update for Hello Game's expansive space explorathon is going to be right up your alley.
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Electronic Arts introduced a map, Giant's Shadow, for free in Battlefield 1. The map is first available to season pass and pre-order purchasers, and will be available to everyone next week.
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Today, Crytek is revealing details for the brand new mountain it will be releasing as part of next week’s free Oculus Touch update for The Climb.
We are less than a week away from the release of Oculus Touch. On December 6 the $199 controller add-on for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset will begin shipping to a horde of ravenous consumers. In advance of this launch, developers are beginning to announce the new VR content that they have been working on to go along with Touch. Crytek is one of those studios and its free Oculus Touch update for The Climb will feature a brand new peak for players to summit.
This new mountain has been dubbed “North.” To my surprise, and slight disappointment, this was not a tease that the new slope is being voiced by the legendary Nolan North, but is instead a reference to the new level’s frigid, polar setting. According to Crytek:
“The extensive game update will be free to everyone who owns The Climb, and also includes an expansive new setting inspired by the landscapes of Iceland. The wintry “North” location features snow-capped peaks, distant volcanoes, and a host of fresh challenges for players to get to grips with as they scale new heights, immerse themselves in the environment, or compete to set the best times in the world. In addition, the update introduces new player-customization options and a range of accessories designed specifically for the North setting.”
In addition to the new level, The Climb’s big update next week will also, “Integrate support for the new Touch controllers when they launch next week – giving players the freedom to scale VR cliffs with instinctive hand movements that mirror real-world climbing.”
The Climb is clearly one of the games Oculus believes will attract new players towards Touch. It is one of the few games featured in the system’s in-store demonstrations and also scored one of the coveted three “featured-game-images” slots on the back of the Touch box itself.
The free update for The Climb will become available to all players on December 6 and will be downloadable through Oculus Home.
Tagged with: free, mountain, new, north, oculus touch, The Climb, touch, update
Well it’s that time again. Time for Oculus to launch a commercial product.
The company’s first foray into a worldwide release began on March 28 when it began shipping its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset via its own store and third party vendors such as Best Buy and Amazon. That launch was plagued by a mysterious component shortage that pushed orders back weeks, and sometimes even months. Early adopters were understandably frustrated and now the young organization once again stands on the precipice of a product release.
Oculus Touch — the company’s new, $200, hand-tracked controller platform — is slated to release on December 6. Memories of the March 28 debacle are still fresh in the industry’s mind, but so far all signs point to a healthy release for the new device.
A number of Touch customers have taken to Reddit and posted images of confirmation emails and status reports on their respective orders. Many of the postings are screengrabs of Amazon order trackers leading some in the community to wonder if the online retail giant will be shipping its product before the manufacturer itself. During the original Rift shipping delay many users became upset when third party sellers were receiving stock while pre-order customers remained without a headset.
Also worth noting, newly placed Touch orders may not ship until Christmas week from Oculus so if you’re looking to get a pair this year keep that in mind. Oculus says it is planning 50 titles for the launch day of the controllers, most likely representing a number of titles already released that are getting Touch upgrades, some titles that first appeared on Steam as well as some new titles funded by Oculus. We’ve already reviewed launch titles Medium, VR Sports Challenge and The Unspoken, three marquee titles coming to the new controllers.
Tagged with: Amazon, oculus touch, release, rift, shipping, touch, update
Nvidia has updated its GeForce Game Ready Drivers with expanded support for EA's Battlefield 1 and 2K's Civilization VI, enabling faster framerates and improved performance for players on PC platforms.
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