Epic Games Partner with NVIDIA for VR Funhouse Game Jam

Virtual reality (VR) game jams have been incredibly popular and useful for building VR communities and sharing development knowledge. VRFocus had its first game jam – Virtual Reality Challenge (VRC) – last weekend and today Epic Games has announced another in partnership with NVIDIA, Valve and HTC called VR Funhouse Game Jam.

Based on NVIDIA’s recently released free carnival game for the HTC Vive head-mounted display (HMD) – VR Funhouse – the game jam will be taking place in Hamburg, Germany on the MS Bleichen ship from 24th – 26th September 2016.

Nvidia VR Funhouse Game Jam

The companies have pre-selected teams from across Europe to participate. For the game jam they’ll be using the VR Funhouse Mod Kit to build a new minigame experience within the first two days. On the third day their creations will then be put on public display, where consumers who’ve registered to attend will be able to board MS Bleichen and demo the projects. After which Epic Games, Valve and NVIDIA will raffle off prizes for attendees to win.

If you’re interested in attending the consumer day on Monday 26th September, then head to vrfunhousegamejam.eventbrite.com to register.

VR Funhouse is the first VR videogame from NVIDIA, a company synonymous with manufacturing computer hardware – especially graphic cards. Originally designed to showcase NVIDIA’s graphics technology, such as NVIDIA FleX, NVIDIA Flow, NVIDIA HairWorks, NVIDIA PhysX Destruction and NVIDIA VRWorks’ Multi-Res Shading, VR Funhouse was released for free on HTC Vive back in July.

Featuring seven mini-games set inside a carnival, these included Mole Boxing, Whack-A-Mole, Balloon Knight, a shooting range and a skeet cannon. It was only a few days ago that NVIDIA announced the launch of the VR Funhouse Mod Kit in conjunction with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of NVIDIA and the VR Funhouse Game Jam, reporting back with any further announcements.

Quark VR Comments On Development of its Wireless HTC Vive Prototype

Last week VRFocus reported on the emergence of a wireless HTC Vive in development by the company Quark VR, makers of a platform where virtual reality (VR) applications can be used multiplatform. There were quite a few points that were ambiguous, but after getting in contact with the company a few questions have been answered.

The first question that was asked was whether or not Quark VR was in an official partnership with Valve or HTC, and if they were making it together. Krasi Nikolov, CEO of Quark VR, replied: “We don’t have an official partnership with Valve. They are advising us on the OpenVR integration, and supported us with hardware. They are very open and supportive to all Vive developers.”

quark VR Valve

Nikolov went on to explain whether or not this would result in a new model of HTC Vive, to which he replied that for now it will only be a prototype, as it is too early to talk about anything else.

The next thing that posed a rather big question was how this would work practically, whether or not the HTC Vive is modded. “They way it works is the Vive is connected to a Single Board Computer, and a battery. The SBC is running Quark VR, which is the VR streaming software we are developing. We’ve come up with a low latency streaming solution that meets the demands of VR.”

The prototype is something that Nikolov is particularly interested by, and hopes to irradicate limitations in VR: “The idea for the project came along as a way to show off the capabilities of Quark VR. So far we have a version for Gear VR and Google Cardboard, but as you know, those are limited to 60 fps and don’t have positional tracking. However, applying our software to the HTC Vive would circumvent these limitations, which makes us very excited!”

For anyone who is particularly intrigued by this idea, Quark VR will be taking the prototype to VRDC this November, as well as SVVR and SFVR.

For more on the latest in the VR industry, make sure to check back with VRFocus.