Grav|Lab is a physics-centric puzzler which has you devising ever more elaborate ways to guide balls from one point to another. A simple premise, but one that lools instantly appealing.
One of the HTC Vive’s most effective showcases early on was the wonderful room-scale application of the classic flash game Fantastic Contraption. It provided the perfect demonstration of how powerful freedom of movement and motion controllers can be in VR and that tactile gameplay executed well enough need not be weighted down with bloated plots to be a captivating experience.
Grav|Lab is a puzzle title which aims to take that tactile ethos and throw some extra physics-based gameplay into the mix. The game has you guiding spheres from a spawn point with your mission simply to get said spheres to the goal by any means necessary. Those ‘means’ take the form of a selection of platforms and tools made available to you and magicked into the world via a very near controller-bound menu system.
You may well have seen standard 2D titles like this before, the Incredible Machine series for example. But leaving aside the obvious appeal and instant gameplay satisfaction motion controls give you, constructing solutions to these physical logic puzzles within a 3D space you’re free to move around in, looks altogether more fun, challenging and rewarding.
As you progress, the solutions required by the game become more elaborate, and as well as platforms with physics-altering properties (downhill becomes uphill), the developer seems to be having great fun devising numerous gizmos to include. Mini launchers that propel the balls greater distances, requiring you to judge elevation and velocity as you build for example.
Grav|Lab is still in development for both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift & Touch and will be available this year via Steam’s Early Access program. No firm release date has been announces just yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as we learn anything.
Rise of the Tomb Raider (2015) launches for PlayStation 4 on October 11th and with it comes an exclusive PSVR experience called ‘Blood Ties’.
While Rise of the Tomb Raider launched on Xbox One in 2015 and PC early this year, the 20 Year Celebration edition of the game is headed to PlayStation 4 in October, featuring all DLC released for the game to date as well as the new Blood Ties mission which can be played on a standard screen or with PlayStation VR, according to the official PlayStation Blog. Blood Ties will have players exploring Croft Manor:
In the wake of her father’s death, Lara’s uncle challenges her ownership of Croft Manor. Lara is determined to reclaim her legacy and prove that she is the rightful heir, but to do that she will need to confront her past head on. Explore Lara’s childhood home in an hour of new Story Mode gameplay, and uncover a family mystery that will change her life forever.
The PlayStation Blog calls the Rise of the Tomb Raider PSVR experience a “purely explorative piece of content.” Unfortunately it sounds that the action-oriented variant called ‘Lara’s Nightmare’, which involves killing supernatural ghouls in the mansion, is not compatible with PlayStation VR.
Rise of the Tomb Raider Blood Ties on PlayStation VR has two different virtual reality control schemes, according to the PlayStation Blog. The first, Free Mode, gives you fairly standard stick-based movement. The second, Comfort Mode, lets you teleport around by placing a figure of Lara where you want to move and then pressing a button to appear there; the Comfort Mode also enables comfort-turning which causes controller rotation to snap in increments, both known techniques for allowing more comfortable virtual rotation and movement.
Both control schemes use the PS4 controller rather than PlayStation Move. Still, thanks to the tracked controller, you can pick up objects inside the Manor and manipulate them by rotating the controller in your hand. In dark places you’ll also be able to wield the PS4 controller like a flashlight, pointing it where you want to look, the blog says.
Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration launches on October 11th with PlayStation VR launching on October 13th.
Crytek’s Robinson: The Journey is the studio’s first PlayStation VR game. A new gameplay video reveals more about the title’s gameplay and interactions.
Robinson: The Journey is shaping up to be an ambitious VR adventure game, and a beautiful one at that.
Crytek has clearly built the game from the ground up for VR. As the new video above shows us, the game is full of small scale interactions between the player and the world: clearing barrels from a stream to unblock a generator, shooting hoops with a basketball for a little rec time, and rebuilding a scarecrow in an effort to ward off the many dinosaurs inhabiting the extrasolar planet that you’ve crashlanded on.
There’s one dino you don’t want to ward off though, a puppy-eyed raptor called Lica who the main character, Robin, befriends as a pet (despite the wishes of HIGS, the boy’s AI companion). We can only hope that over time our little friend will grow into a menacing ally at our command.
While the video shows the sorts of things Robin will do around his makeshift basecamp (including power management from the viewpoint of HIGS), our hands-on time with the game has showed that he will adventure far outside of the camp and find lots more to do, including tree climbing, scanning the environment with his multi-tool, and interacting with more wildlife on the planet.
A prior developer diary video tells us more about how Robin ended up on the planet in the first place, and suggests he’ll probably run into some not-so-friendly dinosaurs throughout his journey.
Robinson: The Journey is set to launch around the time that PlayStation VR launched (on October 13th).
In an age where people rarely buy physical albums anymore, music videos are today’s cover art; they connect memorable imagery to sound, and function as vehicles to spread songs beyond where they would go on their own. As a testament to their power, music videos sometimes becomes as iconic (or even more so) than the music they’re tied to (think Gangnam Style).
The music video genre has always been about spectacle and pushing creative boundaries; in some cases, music videos transcend their role as a marketing vehicle and push into the territory of art.
What better place to engage viewers with powerful and memorable imagery than the immersive medium of VR?
Google, through a collaboration with Queen, has given us an excellent case study in the future of the music video and just how well the genre can work in virtual reality.
The experience, which “offers a journey through frontman Freddie Mercury’s subconscious mind,” is filled with diverse imagery from hand-drawn animation to motion capture to CGI. The changing visuals reflect the song’s distinct stylistic segments, which range from opera to rock. It isn’t just a 360 video either, it’s a fully 3D experience rendered in real-time, with 3D audio, and has subtle interactive elements depending upon where the user is looking.
Google, Queen, and Enosis VR, a production studio heavily involved in the development of the experience, talk about creating the Bohemian Rhapsody Experience:
The impressively crafted visual journey, created in large part by Enosis VR, employs lots of impressive hand-drawn animation. This at first seems out of place (flat, 2D animation in an immersive 3D experience?), but it turns out to be so well executed that the Bohemian Rhapsody Experience serves not just as proof for the future of VR music videos, but secondarily as a showcase for how such animation can not only survive, but thrive in virtual reality.
What’s better than Justin Roiland making a VR game? Justin Roiland making a VR game and releasing it for free. That’s right, newly formed VR studio Squanchtendo’s first game, Accounting, will be completely free.
Road to VR got a brief sneak peak at Accounting while at this year’s PAX West in Seattle, and it is as hilarious as you would expect. Fair warning however, This article contains some minor spoilers from the first 15 minutes of the game, so skip it for now if that’s not for you. Also, despite what you may think about the field of number crunching, Accounting is not safe for work or children.
Accounting starts off in the messy, windowless office of an accounting firm named Smith & Smitherson. The accounting firm has brought you onboard in order to balance the books with the power of virtual reality. Your first task, shouted to you over the phone by your dubiously qualified coworkers, is to use your Windows 95 pointer hands to riffle through the mess and find a virtual reality headset.
After putting the virtual headset on, I was transported to an idyllic forest where a tree-dwelling cloud-person began shouting obscenities at me. It was surprising because not only was it the first time I can recall hearing an F-bomb dropped in a VR game, but it was directed at me with such visceral hatred. This angry little character (voice acted by Justin Roiland), and many others throughout the demo underscored how big of a role dialogue plays in Accounting. The voice acting is so engaging that it got to the point where I would deliberately stop moving the story forward just so I could listen to everything the characters had to say.
I got the chance to got through two additional worlds during my time in Accounting. The first scene was a dungeon occupied by a horribly obese king. Eventually I found a knife and it quickly became clear that the only way to advance was to stab the king, pull another virtual headset out of his entrails, and put it on my face. Everything about it was delightfully absurd, and I wouldn’t expect any less from Squanchtendo and collaborator Crows Crows Crows.
Continuing on the theme of absurdity, the third room of them demo contained a xylophone made out of a human skeleton and two talking skulls. The skulls asked me to play them and to my surprise, their bones seemed to function as a fully capable xylophone. As I played their bones, their pleas to keep going became increasingly salacious. Just as the weirdness of the whole situation came to a crescendo, Justin tapped me out of the game and ended my brief tour of the varied and intricate world of Accounting.
After the demo, I sat down with the dangerously competent trio of Roiland, Pugh, and Tanya Watson, the studio director and co-founder of Squanchtendo, to talk about what they had created. In the interview the team walk about what drove the creation of Accounting and reveals that Squanchtendo’s collaboration with Crows Crows Crows came about through a happy mix of tactical subterfuge and chance.
Squanchtendo is directing those interested in the game to visit the VR accounting web page here. At the time of this writing, the page simply has placeholder text, but Roiland says to watch this page, the Squanchtendo Twitter, and sign up for the Crows Crows Crows mailing list to be the first to know when the game will be released on Steam for the HTC Vive “very soon”.
An environmental artist with a passion for Star Wars has realised the iconic location of Star Wars’ Mos Eisley space port in jaw-dropping detail via Unreal Engine 4. What’s more, it’s coming to VR soon and you can download the demo now.
John Lewis is an Environmental Artist for Obsidian Entertainment, developers behind games such as Neverwinter Nights 2 and Fallout: New Vegas. On a whim and as a Star Wars fan, he decided it’d be cool if he could a virtual build the docking bay (No. 94 as any Star Wars fan should know) located in Mos Eisley, Tatooine, the “hive of scum and villainy” from the original (sorry, ‘fourth’) Star Wars instalment. That’s how it began.
However, Lewis’ his ambitions for the project soon expanded, and eventually he realised that he really wanted to wander beyond the docking bay into the rest of Mos Eisley and visit the other iconic movie set, the Cantina where Luke Skywalker, Obi-wan Kenobi meet the Falcon’s owners, Han Solo and Chewbacca, for the first time. He needed help, so he enlisted his co-workers from Obsidian, quite rightly all Star Wars super-fans too, to the point where up to 17 people have now contributed.
“In addition to myself, the other artists working with me on this project all currently work for Obsidian as well, from additional senior artists, to mid-range and junior artists as well, ” says Lewis, writing for 80.lv, “We even have someone on the QA team contributing some artwork as well. In total there are 17 people contributing to this project in varying capacities. This is a just-for-fun personal project that we are all contributing to for no reason other than we are all a bunch of super Star Wars fans and with all the Star Wars awesomeness going on these days, we all thought it would be a good time to jump in and produce a quality fan art project. In addition to just being a bunch of super Star Wars nerds, several of us have been wanting an excuse to learn Unreal 4 for some time now, so we figured that this was a perfect opportunity.”
The resulting environments, rendered capably using Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, are some of the most detailed and realistic recreations I’ve ever seen. Indeed, Lewis admits that his ambitions were lofty on this front. “… my goal was to build the most highly detailed real-time Falcon that anyone has ever seen, and I think I have pulled it off, except for maybe the Falcon model from the recent ILM X-Labs VR demo …”. Tie fighters, X-Wing fighters and an Imperial Shuttle are all to be found whilst wandering around the environments.
The icing on the cake of course is that, being built in UE4, the demo should be relatively easy to add virtual reality support to, and indeed this is next on the horizon for the team. “We are also working on a VR version as well as several people in the group have been playing around with Occulus and Vive VR kits,” says Lewis, “and we thought it would be cool to have a version that runs in VR, so we are currently trying to get that finished as well.”
The team have made the demo available to the public to download now. Although be quick, this kind of super-high quality work will likely draw the eye of new Lucasfilm (and therefore Star Wars) owners Disney. In the mean time, checking out Lewis’ full blog on the project is highly recommended.
White Lotus Interactive have announced that their made-for-VR adventure title XING: The Land beyond is now coming to the HTC Vive with full motion control support. Here’s a new trailer showing it off as well as some insights from the developers as to why and how they did it.
XING: The Land beyond is a made-for-VR adventure title from White Lotus Interactive which was one of the earliest VR titles born from a successful Kickstarter campaign back in March 2013. We’ve followed the title, created by the then 3 strong development team White Lotus Interactive, ever since. VR support (the game can be played with or without) was pledged for the Oculus Rift (then in DK1 form only) and even after all this time, it’s still one of the most anticipated indie VR titles.
Fast forward 3 years, multiple Oculus Rift prototypes and 2 consumer VR headset launches, and the developers are still hard at work refining their labour of love, a VR adventure puzzler in a similar vein as the PC classic Myst (a title which received a spiritual successor recently), but in this case set in the after life. Other inspirations cited by the developer include The Legend of Zelda and Portal – all worth muses indeed. You can see some of those influences at work in the new Vive reveal trailer below,
Up until now, the development of XING has focused on Oculus Rift support, but today the team have revealed that they’ve been working on reworking the title for the HTC Vive and SteamVR motion controllers. No mean feat, as their latest blog update states: “Bringing XING to Vive has been challenging, but also insanely fun. Supporting both VR and non-VR styles of playing has offered an interesting design dilemma.”
As to when we can finally expect to see the title up for sale, no specific word as yet, although the team do sound like they’re closing in on a launch soon, with time spent “working on marketing” an optimistic sign.
Until Dawn: Rush of Blood is a literal ‘rail shooter’ for PlayStation VR.
Launching soon for PlayStation VR, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood puts players on a horror ride rollercoaster with guns in their hands. A new developer video and trailer shows some of the gameplay players can expect.
Photo courtesy Supermassive Games / Sony
The PSVR gameplay recalls classic rail shooters like The House of the Dead series, except now players are fully immersive in the frightening horror show thanks to virtual reality. The developers of Rush of Blood have taken advantage of this fact and it appears they’ve added dodging mechanics to some sections of the gameplay, requiring that players physically dodge out of the way of obstacles with their heads.
The game has players moving through the level as though they’re sitting on a rollercoaster. Rollercoasters in VR were popular in the early days of Rift development kits, before it became apparent that they tended to make people dizzy. Until Dawn: Rush of Blood Executive Producer Simon Harris says that the development team spent a lot of time finding out how to make rollercoasters in VR work well so that they don’t cause nausea. We’ll have to wait and see how well they managed to pull that off, but we will say that we’ve seen PSVR experiences like PlayStation VR Worlds: Street Luge which seemed like they would clearly make someone dizzy but surprisingly managed not to.
Photo courtesy Supermassive Games / Sony
Aside from shooting enemies and dodging, it looks also like there will be obstacles which block the player’s path forward which will need to be blasted out of the way before the player crashes into them.
Sony’s PlayStation VR headset launches on October 13th.
Announced alongside the new Galaxy Note 7 smartphone last month, the 2016 Gear VR headset is new and improved, with thoughtful backward compatibility with prior Gear VR phones. Our pal Ritchie Djamhur explores the differences compared to the 2015 model.
Comparing the 2016 Gear VR to the 2015 version, Ritchie highlights notable improvements in the video above.
For one, the lenses are noticeably wider in the new model, translating to an improved 101 degree field of view compared to 96 degrees of prior models. While not a huge upgrade, Ritchie says the increase is definitely noticeable.
Also on the vision front, the perplexing white inside (around the lenses) of the old model has been replaced with black. Formerly with the white, it was easy to notice in your peripheral vision due to increased light reflection, only serving to highlight the tight field of view of the headset. The black backing of the new model is less distracting and compounds with the improved field of view.
Ritchie also shows how the USB-C and MicroUSB adapters work to make the headset compatible with the widest range of Samsung phones yet: the Note 5, S6 Edge+, S6, S6 Edge, S7, S7 Edge, and Note 7. Just snap the USB-C tip off and slap on the included MicroUSB adapter depending upon your phone. For the phones of varying sizes, you can slide the connector forward or backward for a secure fit. Samsung also thoughtfully included a USB-C to MicroUSB adapter for the charging port on the bottom of the headset in case you need to keep your phone juiced for extended VR sessions. See our full list of Gear VR phone compatibility for all Gear VR models.
One thing that still feels missing from the new Gear VR, Ritchie says, is an IPD adjustment to change the distance between the lenses and a lens-to-eye adjustment to maximize field of view and make more room for glasses wearers.
The 2016 Gear VR runs $100 and remains a well-priced add-on for anyone that already owns one of the compatible Samsung phones.
The Last Moments immerses users in the discussion about euthanasia with a VR film that reveals the process of an assisted death.
Virtual reality and empathy go hand in hand. The very nature of being closed off to the world, void of all peripheral distractions, is an effective aid to focussing on powerful subject matter. Directors are realising that putting you in the shoes of those having to make life or death choices can have a profound effect on the viewer.
One such director is Avril Furness whose short 360 degree film The Last Moments I watched at Grand Central Recording Studios (GCRS) in London. Doning the Samsung Gear VR headset, I found myself in a very ordinary room, bed bound with my emotional wife sitting at the end, trying to offer comfort through tears and jokes, as she was about to become a widow.
A mentor from Dignitas—the Swiss based not-for-profit organisation that offers assisted dying services—robotically described how the cocktail I would drink would put me into a sleep I would never wake up from.
My choice was to continue to live or take the cocktail and die. Out of curiousity I chose the latter, but was surprised to then learn that 86% of real Dignitas volunteers don’t go through to the ultimate end stage.
Furness based the thought provoking film on a script she had penned exploring an overpopulated dystopian future where salesmen sold euthanasia packages door to door, as if some innocuous household product.
During her research, she visited an exhibition called Death: The Human Experience at the Bristol museum which housed a replica of a ward from Dignitas. Sitting in the very ordinary room, Furness described having a profound emotional experience, which she felt could be transferred to others as a 360 degree short film.
Furness studied video documentation of approximately fifteen assisted dying procedures, transcribing the script into one narrative.
“It is not always as bleak as you might think” she said. “In the videos there were lots of nervous jokes and agitation to keep it light hearted for the volunteer. I wanted to bring that out in the script.”
The Last Moments was premiered at a euthanasia conference in Amsterdam, attended by specialists, volunteers and pro right-to-die campaigners. The presentation moved many to tears with one gentlemen not able to watch to the end such was its intensity.
Initially, The Last Moments struggled to get off the ground.
“It was a really difficult relationship with Dignitas at first” admitted Furness. “They were very sceptical and negative. As the conversation developed, they were quite specific about filming in the replica room in Bristol rather than at their premises to ensure this was a tasteful artistic representation of what happens.”
Such was the turnaround, at one point Dignitas even proposed putting a 360 degree rig on a real volunteer to die on camera but Furness wanted to avoid anything that could cross into morbid voyeurism.
The result is a powerful 360 short that stays in your head long after you take the Gear VR off. It is the ordinariness of the environment and the procedure that is at odds with the gravitas of the situation. The contrast of the emotion of your loved one and the clinical nature of the Dignitas mentor is just as difficult to process.
Looking at the experience from a production standpoint, I really appreciated how passionate and supportive the companies involved in the project were. The Last Moments was a collaboration between Framestore, VISYON 360, Grand Central Recording Studios and theatre company Punchdrunk, which would have had a fraction of the budget of the productions they would typically be involved with.
With just three hours to shoot the entire sequence, a GoPro 360 rig was placed on a mannequin with an ambisonic microphone. The 3D audio was vital for the realism of the experience led by Steve Lane and George Castle of GCRS. This was their first commercial foray into virtual reality, having traditionally worked on sound design for high end movies and commercials.
Looking back Castle reflected “It was relatively early into our foray into the VR world and a great learning experience. What excites me is what is possible now compared to 6 months ago is massive.”
Lane is equally excited to work on sound design for VR projects, appealing for a more standardised process. “Spatial audio is great but there isn’t a defined format. We can chose from four or five delivery methods so that is going to have to become a more streamlined process. With The Last Moments we only had to consider the Samsung Gear VR but in the future I would love to see software coming to market that makes this possible. We are having to use an older Oculus Rift development kit headset because Pro Tools is only Mac compatible but the new Oculus is only PC compatible. It’s just all over the place at the moment.”
Framestore were bought in to do the post production under the guidance of Executive Producer David Hay and VISYON 360 did the final stitching for the piece that was painstakingly as close to the real procedure as possible, right down to the labels on the bottles.
There was genuine altruism behind the project and a reminder that virtual reality can excite and bring out the best of pioneers keen to showcase the power of the medium.
The Last Moments is currently touring festivals and will be made available on YouTube 360 once the tour is over.
