Rejoice! Another hearty dose of VR gaming news, reveals and more is heading your way soon.
That’s right, the Upload VR Showcase is back on December 2nd.
Upload VR Showcase Returns
Hopefully you caught our summer show, in which we announced games like Nerf Ultimate Championship and revealed titles like A Township Tale were coming to Oculus Quest. We’ll have a lot more to share this time around, including some of the titles we spotlighted last summer and, of course, a few surprises for you all too.
This will be our fifth showcase (!) and it couldn’t be happening at a better time. 2022 is going to be a huge year for the VR industry and we’re proud to present some of the titles you can look forward to playing next year.
Make sure to check out our showcase from June below if you want an idea an what to expect.
We’ll have final timing details for you closer to the show but, for now, make a note in your diaries and mark up those calendars – you won’t want to miss this one.
Amazon’s VR-centered show Upload is in production on season 2 but there’s no announced premiere date yet.
The show’s star Robbie Amell posted to Instagram back in January that production was underway and, in recent days, he and his wife Italia Ricci have been posting videos sporting the Quest 2 at home. They appear to have been playing Top Golf with Pro Putt and Pistol Whip on Oculus Quest 2 in a pair of videos posted to Facebook’s Instagram. We reached out to Amazon to see if there was a premiere date to announce, but nothing yet.
The original season premiered in May on Amazon Prime featuring a “middletopian” future where people upload themselves into a kind of afterlife once they are done with the real world. It’s not quite utopian because the trip is one way and these afterlives are run by competing for-profit corporations with varying business models and limits imposed on residents. Overall, the show makes for some pretty good commentary on our current state of technology. The Office creator Greg Daniels came up with the series and we really enjoyed the 10-episode first season.
Amell play’s the show’s lead Nathan and when we talked to him last year he was already familiar with PSVR and Oculus Rift, and he’d even tried a location-based VR experience in Las Vegas. Now it looks like he’s got his hands on the latest Oculus Quest 2 standalones from Facebook. His character spent much of the first season in a simulated place called Lakeview made by a company called “Horizen”, which is pretty fitting considering Facebook’s limited release social platform is called “Horizon.”
You can find Upload’s first season on Amazon Prime and we’ll provide updates as soon as there’s a release date for the second season.
Yup, Cloudhead Games will be returning to the Showcase with yet more news about its ace rhythm shooter, which mashes Superhot, Beat Saber and John Wick into one joyous explosion. You might remember that the game got its big reveal at our E3 VR Showcase this time last year, and Cloudhead will be bringing the heat to mark the occasion. The team will be going over its 2020 roadmap, with some big plans in-store. We’ll leave the guessing up to you from there.
For those that don’t know, Upload VR Showcases are a little like Nintendo Directs, just designed exclusively for VR! We’ll be announcing a bunch of new games, revealing new information about some of your most anticipated upcoming titles and more. This year’s show is just under two weeks away on June 8th and it’s going to be a great event.
Pistol Whip is just one of a bunch of games joining us this year. Let’s take a look at what else you can look forward to.
E3 may be gone but that won’t stop us! The Upload VR Showcase: Summer Edition arrives on your screens on June 8, 2020 (final time TBA). And this year we’re going big.
That’s right, we’ll be back to break more headlines, announce new games and give you deeper looks at upcoming titles next month. For our second summer showcase, we’re proud to be teaming up with IGN. They’ll be carrying the show as part of their Summer of Gaming event this June. Our showcases are all about the VR industry coming together to make a big splash during an exciting time in the gaming calendar and this partnership is a big step towards doing exactly that.
Not familiar with an Upload Showcase? Think of them as Nintendo Direct-style videos, just exclusively for new VR games. We held our first event at E3 last year where we revealed huge games like After The Fall, Pistol Whip and Budget Cuts 2. We’ve been hard at work planning the 2020 edition and we’re looking forward to showing over 20 VR games.
Expect news from some of the biggest VR developers around like Fast Travel Games and Cloudhead Games as well as highlights on some indie darlings and more. If you’re lucky, we may even introduce you to one or two new studios that have been secretly mining away on new games over the past few months and years.
So mark your calendars and prep your bingo cards; we’ve got a few more weeks to deliver our biggest and best showcase yet. We’ll see you soon!
If you’re looking for something new to watch during social isolation I’ll readily recommend the new show Upload from The Office creator Greg Daniels. The 10 episode season arrives May 1 on Amazon, and it’s got VR right at its heart.
An email about the new show came in from Amazon right at the start of COVID-19 social isolation in March. The message sent to Jamie Feltham titled “Upload – Digital Press Kit” was quickly brought to the attention of our editorial Slack group, and suddenly “several people are typing” all at once. The creator of my favorite television series — a show streaming sometimes in three rooms of my house simultaneously — made a new comedy about VR? Named Upload?
After giving the trailer a look, I requested an interview and received access to the show under embargo. Over the last several weeks I’ve watched Upload in 2-4 episode binges and, now that I’ve finished it, feel the same way I did after the first season of The Office. I just want more.
So what exactly is Upload?
“In talking to all the crew, I would always say that this is not a dystopian future and it’s not a utopian future, it’s like some kind of middletopian future,” Daniels said. “Which to me is the funny take on things because you know when any new technology is introduced it always is introduced as being this wonderful new thing that’s going to transform everything only in positive ways, and then it’s not till later that you realize, oh, there’s actually some pretty unpleasant side effects for this technology.”
I’ll avoid spoilers because the show’s best moments do indeed explore the unpleasant side effects of a host of technologies, and I don’t want to ruin any of those gags. Overall, Upload’s future is wrought with income inequality as businesses like Facebook, Apple and others compete to provide your “best digital afterlife” through an uploading process that rebuilds your consciousness in simulated space. The plot centers around Nathan played by Robbie Amell and Nora played by Andy Allo. Nathan is a new resident of a simulated place called “Lakeview” which is made by a company aptly named “Horizen”. You know, like Facebook’s upcoming VR social network. Allo plays a customer service representative “angel” who helps a number of uploads with their many needs.
Set against the backdrop of a mystery and love triangle, this is a character-driven comedy “about science and love attempting to beat death” with a cast of characters whose personalities are just beginning to be explored after just one season.
In a Zoom call this week, I asked Amell, Allo and Daniels if they’ve tried modern VR headsets and they said Amazon set up a demonstration for the cast with PSVR and Oculus Rift. Allo said she sweated in “Beat Saber” while Daniels recalled memories of encounters with zombies, a whale and trips to other cities. Amell said he also visited the MGM Grand’s Zero Latency attraction in Las Vegas.
While the ground tread by Upload isn’t exactly new, I found the tone of this “middletopian” vision of the future refreshing, funny, and just the kind of safe escape I needed right now. Can we get a few more seasons?
It’s time to get hype; The Upload Holiday VR Showcase is coming your way at 9am PT/12pm ET/5pm BT on November 27 2019.
Yup, we finally have a time to add to the date we announced alongside the VR Download and Culture Show last month. If you’re in the US be sure to be up bright and early or sitting down for your lunch break. If you’re in the UK, get home from work ASAP. Better yet, call in sick. Get your friends to do it too.
This will be our second VR Showcase following the hugely successful launch of the E3 VR Showcase back in June. We were overwhelmed with the response to that show and we couldn’t let 2019 go without doing another one.
So what is The Holiday VR Showcase? Think of it as a Nintendo Direct or State of Play broadcast… exclusively for VR. We’ll be going over a bunch of announcements and fresh looks for games still to come in 2019 (yes there’s still a few!) and some titles set for 2020. We’ve lined up a fun list of titles with some great surprises in store!
For this showcase, expect to go in-depth with some of the titles we announced back at E3 and get a closer look at gameplay with the help of developers themselves. Keep an eye on Upload in the coming weeks because we’ll be announcing some of the things we’re showcasing in the run up to the big day!
What are you hoping to see at our Showcase? Let us know in the comments below!
Oculus Connect was a bit much, wasn’t it? We don’t know about you, but we’re shattered and we need a break. Well don’t worry, hungry content consumer; we’re not giving ourselves one! Que slightly broken “Hurrah!”
We’ve been cooking up not one but three things we wanted to share with you today. Check out our snazzy trailer for all the info, or read on below.
The Holiday VR Showcase – November 27th (Time TBA)
Firstly; yes, we’re doing another VR Showcase in November! We were blown away by the response to the E3 VR Showcase (I honestly thought like five people were going to watch it), and we couldn’t let 2019 go without a glimpse of what’s to come in the year ahead. Let’s give people some reasons to go out and buy some headsets this Black Friday, right?
So get your turkeys in the oven early and be here for Wednesday November 27 (we’ll let you know the final time closer to the show) where we’ll bring you another rundown of new VR game announcements, first-looks and other exciting news. We’ve already got some great stuff lined up.
The VR Download Podcast – October
Moving on, it’s about time we did a podcast, isn’t it?
We know this is one area we’ve been dragging our feet a bit, so we wanted to go big. So it’s time to meet The VR Download, a podcast about VR… broadcast from VR. Yup, our very own David Heaney built a full virtual studio which team Upload will meet up in every week. We’ll be running down all of the latest news and discussing the big topics, as well as inviting on a special guest or two from time to time.
The first episode is coming later this month via our YouTube channel so keep an eye out for it.
The VR Culture Show – October 8th
Next up is a bit of an experiment. You might have guessed it but, here at Upload, we love gaming. But we also really, REALLY, love all of the great things people are doing with VR outside of games. Balancing our coverage between the two has been a real struggle for the past few years. So we’re changing things up with The VR Culture Show.
This is our new video series in which we highlight things that aren’t games. It might be location-based VR events, new movies or deep dives into VR in the workplace. The thing is, we’re not quite sure how this one’s going to evolve yet. It might be we do it every once in a while, it might be we do it every month, it might be we do it every week. But we won’t find out until we put it out there.
So next week we’ll be doing just that. We’ve been busy shooting a pilot episode based around London’s excellent Raindance Film Festival. We’ll be bringing you a look inside some of the experiences on show there and talking to a range of creators. We’re really looking forward to bringing you closer to the experiences we haven’t covered quite as much in the past.
Get your diaries out, then. That’s The VR Holiday Showcase on November 27 and the first episode of The VR Culture Show next week. Until then, we’re going to catch some much needed slee–zzzZZZzzz.
For the last several months behind the scenes, we’ve been working on a brand new website. When I started with UploadVR back in December, my main goal was to update the site. Both for our readers, and for the team on the backend. Our website was a bit of a nightmare: a search bar bigger than the state of Texas, viewing it on mobile was quite the ordeal, and creating a post was like cracking a safe in a James Bond movie.
Things had to change.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working closely with our web developers at Saritasa to create a solution that works for everyone. With each stage of the development cycle, I worked with everyone on our staff individually to get feedback. We can’t always make everyone happy, but we did our best.
One thing you’ll notice is that the new website is on dark mode by default. Dark mode is all the rage, and if I could have every single app in existence utilize it, I would. Now, not everyone likes it, so to accommodate those who prefer light mode, we’ve given you the ability to switch. Or if you want to go back and forth, you can do that, too.
Renovating the site was a big obstacle to get through. Now that it’s done, we can focus more on our new initiatives, such as communicating with the community through our Discord, streaming more frequently, and bringing you more original content, like our E3VR Showcase.
With any new product comes hours of beta testing. While we all put in as much time as we could during the craziness of E3, we probably missed a few things. If you find something that makes your experience anything less than enjoyable, please let us know by sending us an email to tips@uploadvr.com. Keep in mind some of our older articles may reflect old formatting and not look perfect on the new site. If you could also include what platform (desktop/mobile/tablet) and browser you’re using, that would be a huge help.
Welcome to the new UploadVR. We hope you like it as much as we do.
I love E3. It’s a heck of a lot of work, incredibly stressful and relentlessly tiring, but nothing beats the big moments. You know the ones I’m talking about; the surprise reveals and unexpected trailers. They keep me coming back for more.
It’s time VR got in on that action.
VR has struggled to find a home at E3 in the past few years. Sony’s had some amazing reveals, but it’s skipping this year and PC VR developers haven’t really had anywhere to turn. There are plenty of amazing VR games that deserve just as much of a spotlight as many of today’s popular console titles and they’re just not getting it.
We’re planning to change that.
So we’re making the Upload E3 VR Showcase. The simplest way to explain it is like a Nintendo Direct or PlayStation State of Play show, but for VR. It’ll be a pre-recorded presentation with a BUNCH of new game reveals, trailers and more. We’re going to be jetting off around the globe to meet VR devs of all shapes and sizes, talk to them about their latest projects and reveal them to you. Expect faces old and new as well as some guest stars from the VR community and beyond.
This is our chance to show the world what the future holds for VR. We want to produce something that will excite not just the Rift, Vive, PSVR, Quest and Windows VR owners of the world today but also those that haven’t yet bought a headset. We’ve been talking with developers about this since last year and, trust me, some of these reveals are going to be big.
With a lot more work, your support (and a bit of luck), we might just pull this thing off. Be back here on June 10th, 9am PST/12pm EST/6pm CEST for an action-packed presentation of all things VR. You’re not going to want to miss this.
Das amerikanische VR-Start-up Upload hat seine Büros in San Francisco geschlossen, in denen Co-Working-Plätze für andere VR-Enthusiasten angeboten wurde. Da sich das Projekt anscheinend nicht selbst trug und keine neuen Investoren gefunden wurden, ist der Traum auf knapp 2000 qm geplatzt.
Alle Angestellten der Büros wurden gestern entlassen, doch UploadVR, die eigenes Webseite des Unternehmens, sei derzeit nicht von den Veränderungen betroffen. Laut TechCrunch hatte Uploadseit dem Skandal um sexuelle Belästigung in den eigenen Räumen schlechte Karten bei den Investoren. Lediglich Palmer Luckey hätte in letzter Zeit zu Taylor Freeman und Will Mason gehalten. Der Oculus-Gründer investierte angeblich rund 2,5 Millionen US-Dollar in das Geschäftsmodell von Upload. Einem Blog-Post des Start-ups nach sei dies jedoch eine falsche Information und es gäbe weiterhin große Investoren, die Upload auf neuen Wegen begleiten möchten.
Die Geschichte zeigt dennoch, wie schnell ein Geschäft den Bach runter gehen kann, wenn das Image nicht mehr passt. Besonders makaber: 2017 waren Taylor Freeman und Will Mason noch in der Forbes Liste der „30 unter 30“, also der erfolgreichsten 30 Personen unter 30 Jahren.
Was tatsächlich damals in den Büros abgelaufen ist, werden wohl nur die Betroffenen selbst wissen und darüber möchten wir uns kein Urteil erlauben. Fernab davon darf man sich natürlich auch die Frage stellen, wann Upload mit dem Space Geld verdienen wollte, wenn es innerhalb der letzten Jahre nicht geklappt hat. Bleibt zu hoffen, dass uns UploadVR erhalten bleibt, denn die Webseite war stets eine zuverlässige Quelle für Virtual Reality News.
One thing you’ll notice is that the new website is on dark mode by default. Dark mode is all the rage, and if I could have every single app in existence utilize it, I would. Now, not everyone likes it, so to accommodate those who prefer light mode, we’ve given you the ability to switch. Or if you want to go back and forth, you can do that, too.
