San Diego’s Comic-Con always sees a massive fanfare for all things science fiction, so there’s no better place for Alcon Entertainment and Warner Bros Pictures to debut the VR experience for their upcoming film Blade Runner 2049,Riddley Scott’s sequel to the iconic Blade Runner (1982).
Update (7/19/17):Oculus today confirmed that the Blade Runner 2049: Replicant Pursuit VR experience will launch on July 21st on Gear VR. Interestingly, Replicant Pursuit is the first of three installments of Blade Runner 2049 VR experiences—each of which is being produced by a different developer—to be released leading up to the film’s premiere in October. The latter two will be available on both Gear VR and Rift. A trailed for the experience can be see below:
In Replicant Pursuit, developed by Turtle Rock Studios (Face Your Fears, Other Worlds), players will hop in a ‘spinner’ hover car to track down a rogue replicant. As the project is a promotion for the upcoming film, we expect the experiences will launch for free.
Original Article (7/7/19): Theatrical release of the Blade Runner 2049 is still slated for October 6th, but San Diego-based fans will get a chance to pop into the VR representation of the Blade Runner universe starting July 20th-23rd. According to a press release, not only Comic-Con badge holders can attend, but also the general public is invited to try out the VR experience and paw at everything else on display.
image courtesy San Diego Comic-Con
Alcon Entertainment is setting up an physical Blade Runner 2049 experience for fans to attend, including a Blade Runner art gallery, a display of actual vehicles featured in the film, actors dressed in the film’s wardrobe walking around the crowd, and of course the Oculus VR experience itself. The event will take place in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter during the entirety of Comic-Con weekend.
The VR experience is said to feature a walk through the film’s neon-lit setting including an impromptu test to determine if you’re a human or a replicant.
Located across the street from the Comic-Con convention center, the Blade Runner 2049 Experience will be open from 10:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. on Thursday and Friday; 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on Saturday; and 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. on Sunday. Guests can register to enter at a specific appointment time with a same-day appointment, or choose to wait in line. Admission is free.
Japan is an exceedingly normal place when it comes down to daily life, but for some reason the culture’s social norms are—how should we put it—famously elastic. As reported by Vocativ, virtual reality played a big part in a recent marketing campaign for an upcoming sequel to the dating sim series Niizuma Lovely x Cation that saw the non-legal marriage between a number of men and their virtual girlfriends interacting through an HTC Vive headset.
Developed by Japanese adult game studio Hibiki Works, Niizuma Lovely x Cation lets you simulate creating a relationship with an anime girl and come face-to-face with her in VR. While it may seem ridiculous to some, the dating sim genre has a serious following in Japan, and its extension into VR is only logical.
According to Vocativ, between April 28 and May 28, Hibiki Works started collecting applications from its player base to see who wanted to marry one of three lucky brides-to-be: Yuki Isurugi, Aiko Kurihara or Nono Naruse. On June 12th, the lucky grooms received an email on how to dress and what to bring to ‘make the day go smoothly.’
image courtesy Hibiki Works
Reportedly officiated by a real priest, a number of men donned an HTC Vive on June 30th at a chapel in Tokyo and were united in holy matrimony. The marriages were performed privately (besides the one shown in the video above) and lasted around 5 minutes per wedding—of course sealed with a virtual kiss which was simulated by an attendant with a pair of rubber lips on a stick.
While the wedding ceremonies were held as promotional tool for the studios upcoming Niizuma: Lovely x Cation, the fact that VR is already playing a big part in how fans interact with a genre as mind-bending as dating sims tells much about where the next frontier of digital-human interaction is headed. There’s a clear desperation for human interaction that isn’t being fulfilled in a portion of the population, and VR might help bridge those gaps—for better, for worse, for richer, or for poorer. Either way, we’re not here to judge.
20th Century Fox’s Interactive Entertainment and theme park arm FoxNext is building a 2000 sq. ft free-roaming multiplayer VR experience set in the world of the Alien movie franchise.
The Alien movie franchise is among the most enduring in history, with very entry re-imagining a universe that was conceived almost 40 years ago with the latest, Alien: Covenant, in theatres right now. Yes the series has been a mixed bag from a critical perspective, but there’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you grew up loving the 1986 sequel to Ridley Scott’s masterful 1979 original, Aliens, directed by James Cameron. If you’re nodding your head in enthusiastic agreement while reading this, then I’ve got some great news for you.
FoxNext is a new division of 20th Century Fox comprising FoxNext Destinations, FoxNext Games and FoxNext VR Studio. FoxNext Destinations (focused on out of home entertainment, theme parks etc.), have shown off a proof of concept virtual reality experience for a large scale multi-player virtual reality experience. According to the Hollywood Reporter who snagged a sneak peek at the POC, this experience is the proving ground for a 2000 sq. ft. attraction including “specially-created prop guns with haptic effects and hand tracking.” And, perhaps inspired by the pioneering work by The Void, the experience will also integrate motion platforms, heat, mist and “physical elements” to bring the virtual headset delivered imagery to life. Although not confirmed, it does sound like the experience may be weapons oriented, with a chance that the experience may veer towards an Aliens (rather then Alien) setting. A prospect which Cameron may not relish given his public criticism of VR in the past.
“FoxNext was created to support our motion pictures and with the view that technology is creating an opportunity for us to really revolutionize the way stories will be told in the future,” FoxNext president Salil Mehta told The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s enormous innovation occurring that allows real interactive storytelling, and we created divisions to focus on games, VR and location-based entertainment. We’re trying to define the best ways to create content for each.”
FoxNext is working with iP2 Entertainment and Pure Imagination Studios to build the technology behind the experience and, at this early stage, it seems that the teams are using Samung Gear VR headsets connected via “iP2’s proprietary wireless VR technology”, presumably with the help of some form large scale (i.e. industrial motion capture) rig for tracking both props and headsets. Whether this would remain the case for the full-developed version of the experience is unknown at this time, but in terms of content the report states that “volumetric capture techniques” were used to produce it, perhaps for scans of the physical set to be brought into VR.
This writer absolutely was one of the aforementioned who did grow up loving Alien and Aliens, and the (albeit tentative) prospect of being able to step into boots of a colonial marine, handed an M41A pulse rifle and taking the fight to the Xenomorph fills me with more childish glee than I’m prepared to own up to.
NASA and Oculus have launched their collaborative project ‘Mission: ISS’ for the Oculus Rift for free and it’s offers a detailed, visually sumptuous virtual reality trip to space that most of us would otherwise never experience.
Virtual Reality’s transportative powers being used to live out experiences most of us will never have in real life is rarely most effective than in the realm of space travel. Given the tiny fraction of Earth’s inhabitants that have (around 500 to date) or ever will venture beyond the planet’s gravitational field, VR can give as what life is like for those brave enough to travel beyond it.
Mission: ISS is the latest VR experience to try to convey what it feels to be an astronaut as the collaborative project between Oculus and NASA attempts to recreate life onboard the International Space Station (ISS) high above Earth’s atmosphere.
According to a blog post from Oculus, the new experience, built for the Rift and Touch motion controllers, uses space station models direct from NASA themselves, while information for enhancing the authenticity of the project were gleaned from conversations with “multiple astronauts and the VR Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.”
This is no Sci-fi action extravaganza though, as the most outrageous tasks you’ll get to fulfil on your virtual extra-terrestrial mission is docking cargo capsules and station maintenance. You do however get to venture beyond ISS itself to experience spacewalks however.
Magnopus are the developers behind Mission:ISS and the team is born from experience in Hollywood visual effects and are now focused on the realms of interactive entertainment.
Mission: ISS is available now on Oculus Home for the Rift and Touch (and I’m sure for HTC Vive via Revive either now or soon) for free. It’s well worth checking out even if you posses just a passing interest in the subject matter.
Deus Ex fans with VR hardware can rejoice as developer Eidos Montreal have launched a new, free VR experience based on their latest title in the series, Mankind Divided, and it’s quite the looker.
Deus Ex has had its problems as a franchise over years. From its incredible, trailblazing debut in 2000, through a questionable sequel in 2003 the first person action RPG has more recently seen a return to form in the hands of developers Eidos Montreal and publishers Square Enix. The latest instalment, Mankind Divided, continues where its predecessor left off – with the human race at war with itself, a rift opening up between those choosing mechanical and electronic augmentations for bodies and those not.
However effective you feel Deus Ex‘s latest episodes have been as games, there’s little argument that Eidos have managed to instil their take on a dystopian future with a unique and at times beautiful production art style. And it’s into these visually sumptuous, oppressive and brooding environments Eidos’ new free virtual reality experience thrusts you to impressive effect.
The VR experience does not require you to own any prior Deus Ex title and can be grabbed from Steam for free right here. I stepped into the experience for a brief look around and found that, having already played through Mankind Divided, the ability to move around a selection of digital sets from the title inside VR an eye opener. This has been written before of course (not least of all by us), but the differences between witnessing digital creations like these separated by a screen and being encompassed within it is a starkly different experience.
The experience allows you to walk through a selection of scenes from the full game, with exit points taking you to the next scene highlighted with white markers. It’s a sort of digital tourist experience if you like, and I really like the format. As you wander through each scene, you’ll use full locomotion to navigate. That is, there’s no teleportation in this experience whether you play with motion controllers or not. Instead, comfort options are provided via yaw snap turns actioned via controller buttons (triggers on the Xbox gamepad for example). I enjoyed the default focus on a more fluid, natural form of movement through the VR world, but some may find things uncomfortable with the default settings.
Speaking of settings, Eidos have spent some time giving those who like to tweak their experience the ability to ramp up visual settings as their hardware allows, from Anisotropic filtering through optional FXAA and a selection of visual quality levels. It’s worth ramping everything up if you can, and in my case, running with a NVIDIA GTX 1080, things ran very well on the Oculus Rift. Eidos has thoughtfully included notes for both VR platforms to improve performance too with helpful warnings on comfort before you begin the experience. All in all, the whole thing feels remarkably polished and Eidos should be praised for not just throwing this out the door as a quick, cheap and cynical marketing exercise.
In summary, the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided VR Experience feels like an opportunity to witness the attention to detail lavished upon a world by its talented artists. I lost count of the “Oh wow, I’d not seen that!” moments I had whilst wandering through scenes that, prior to thi, I believed I was extremely familiar with. And on that front, the experience works on different levels for those having played the game and those coming to the world cold. It’s a great example of a VR accompaniment done right and Eidos Montreal should be congratulated for both only bothering with the project but taking the time to do it properly. What’s more, I’d heartily encourage other developers wanting to show off the artistry present in their games look at this digital tourist format as I think they are eminently worthwhile.
Virtual world Second Life creator Linden Lab from has revealed what its like to create worlds within their new multi-user creative VR platform Sansar in this new video which follows Second Life veteran content creator Loz Hyde as he builds an elaborate virtual space using Sansar‘s toolset.
Sansar is Linden Lab’s shot at recapturing the success they enjoyed with their pioneering virtual online world platform Second Life, this time in virtual reality. The application is designed from the ground up for use in VR and is angled to allow anyone to create virtual worlds with the minimum of technical trouble or fuss while facilitating beautiful results.
A new video released by Linden Lab shows for the first time a user creating their own experiences within Sansar in real-time using the tools you’ll use yourself should you join the platform. Loz Hyde is a veteran of Linden Lab’s Second Life platform, having become one of the leading creative lights within the community whilst also building a nice financial niche for himself as one of the early pioneers of the system’s digital economy. Hyde created objects for purchase by citizens of Second Life, a virtual business that proved remarkably successful. The results of Hyde’s work can be viewed in the video embedded at the top of this page and some more examples of what has been achieved by others with early access to the platform can be seen below. It’s impressive looking stuff.
In addition, and reflective of Second Life‘s previous progressive angle on a virtual, digital economy, Linden Lab is announcing the currency Sansar residents will use to pay for things. The ‘Sansar Dollar’ will have an exchange rate of 100 Sansar dollars to 1 US dollar. We had some more specific questions about how Sansar’s digital economy and how it will all work which a Linden Lab representative was kind enough to answer. See these below:
Road to VR: What the digital exchange rate for Sansar dollars? Is it equivalent to the Linden dollar?
Linden Lab: The exchange rate between USD and Sansar dollars will be floating and will vary according to supply and demand. The rate will not necessarily be equal to the exchange rate between USD and Linden dollars in Second Life (which is also floating).
To begin with, the exchange rate is about USD1 to S$100.
Road to VR: Can owners of Second Life currency transfer it to Sansar for use there?
Linden Lab: For now at least, not directly. At this time, Second Life users can sell Linden dollars for USD on the LindeX, and then can use those USD to purchase Sansar dollars.
In the future, we could potentially allow Second Life users to buy and sell Sansar dollars for Linden dollars, but because the two platforms will have different business models, fee structures, and exchange rates, we’d want to be careful not to set up a system that could be exploited.
Road to VR: What commission does Linden Lab take from in-world digital transactions?
Linden Lab: The rate of commission we take from user-to-user Sansar transactions has not yet been finalized.
Sansar released their ‘Creator Preview’ last year and you can sign up to take a look right here and users of both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift can enjoy it. As it stands right now, there is no set release date for Sansar, but we’re excited to see where this next generation social and immersive creativity platform goes.
The minds behind the well-executed-but-a-little-too-expensive The Martian VR Experience are working on a new immersive tie in for the next entry in the Alien movie franchise, Alien: Covenant.
Movie tie-ins, once reviled in the gaming community often as worthless, lazy cash-ins, may see a renaissance with the advent of consumer virtual reality technology. There have been a handful of genuinely interesting, worthwhile immersive experiences launched over the last couple of years to lend credence to this assertion too – the most recent and notable being Fox Innovation Lab’s The Martian VR Experience. It’s an example of a thoughtful, immersive extension to the original movie experience and, although it was too short and perhaps a wee bit too expensive for many to consider as a purchase, it nevertheless sits as a high watermark of what can be achieved in the space.
Now comes news from the team behind The Martian VR Experience that they’re working on a similar virtual reality tie-in for the incoming and highly anticipated Ridley Scott directed Alien: Covenant, the latest installment in the Alien franchise and direct sequel to the 2012 Scott-helmed Prometheus. A new trailer for the film was released over the holiday period and it’s garnered much interest, especially from those (myself included) who felt that the original had a tad too little actual Alien in it (among many other issues which I’ll not anger myself or bore you by going into here).
Off the back of that trailer comes news from Fox Innovation Lab that a new VR experience is in the works and will arrive after the film’s release in May this year. Unfortunately the press release has scant information on exactly what form this new VR experience will take (and when we say scant, we mean none) but, as with The Martian VR Experience, Ridley Scott takes the Executive Producer credit.
We’re hoping that the same level of polish, creativity and immersion seen in The Martian VR Experience transfers to this new project. Those who had the chance to dabble in the hidden VR functionality and play the excellent Alien: Isolation immersively will likely attest to the terror VR can induce when your senses are thrust into such a well known horror universe as Alien. We’ll leave you with the teaser paragraph taken directly from the press release, and we’ll of course let you know once we learn more.
The VR Experience for ALIEN: COVENANT is a dread-inducing journey into the depths of the Alien universe.
Viewers will discover the true meaning of terror as they navigate through horrifying alien environments and a story where every decision could mean the difference between life and death.
We check back in with Blade Runner 9732, a stunningly detailed fan developed VR recreation of Deckard’s iconic flat from the original film. The project was recently updated showing some incredible progress, but despite its near final status, there’s one snag which is holding up its completion.
It’s been a little while since we last checked in on Blade Runner 9732, a one-man project that started as a technical exercise and blossomed into a quest to recreate one of sci-fi’s most iconic movie locations. With the sequel to the 1982 original, Blade Runner 2049, now confirmed for release this year, we thought we’d check in on a project we first covered over 2 years ago.
Blade Runner (1982) director Ridley Scott’s obsessive attention to detail when it came to set dressing made for dense, layered scenes littered with carefully placed, hand picked objects which may only appear fleetingly (if at all) in the movie, but were instrumental in bringing to life his vision of a dystopian future. It also means the film is rich pickings for those wishing to go about recreating that world. In Creative Software Engineer Quentin Lengele‘s case, Blade Runner 9732 began as an exercise in sharpening his 3D modelling skills, specifically 3DS Max height maps, specifically wall tiles found in Blade Runner protagonist Deckard’s apartment. “It was just a height map test on wall tiles in 3D Studio Max. It quickly turns into a modelling challenge to reproduce all the assets of Deckard’s apartment and a view on Los Angeles streets,” said Lengele of the project’s origins.
We originally wrote about the project back in 2014, with the project already showing huge promise with the sort of attention to detail that virtual reality fans crave. Now, over 2 years on, the project is looking better than ever. In a new dev blog Lengele gives us a real-time video look at the project (see embedded video at the top of this page)
New lighting setup. No more Direction Specular Ligh[t]map, only Directional.
New Reflection Probes setup. Less probe instances, high quality only when needed.
New Post-Processing beta4 implementation
Finetune particle systems
City mod & texturing enhancement (Substance Painter)
New Police Spinner animation & textures
Better Global Fog settings
Finetune Lens Flares
Reduce Volumetric Lights quality
Move all assets into Resources folder
Reduce scales in lightmaps on several objects
Finetune glass rendering
Finetune some PBR materials
Fix apartment walls, floors and roof meshes
Add new unmounted Blaster gun
After years of painstaking work, it now appears Lengele is approaching completion of the project. In a response to a comment on his dev blog, the developer says he’s very nearly there. “I have 3 things to do before releasing this experience: 1. Improve the bathroom
2. Add a few more details on buffets.” But one crucial final step may have to wait, the final up to date VR port of the experience. Lengele doesn’t possess a current generation VR headset, just a now obsolete Oculus Rift DK1.
Considering the potential for this incredible digital homage to a bonafide sci-fi movie classic, surely there’s someone out there who can help Lengele get his hands on the latest VR hardware? To be clear, Lengele is certainly not asking for a hand out, but if Oculus, HTC or Valve are reading this, can you could throw some hardware at this guy? From my perspective, projects like these (and we’ve seen a few over the years) present an to highlight forms of creativity which VR can truly bring to life. Lets see if someone can help make it happen!
Dating Lessons is an interactive dating course created by VR developers Cerevrum Inc. and self-styled seduction coach Manish “Magic” Leone. Supposedly tailored for heterosexual men with low self-esteem or shyness with the opposite sex, the dating course offers 11 lessons and 7 practical interactive sessions that promise to “give men tools to enhance their power of attraction and develop behavior patterns to handle stress and anxiety.”
‘Dating Lessons’ Details:
Official Site
Developer:Cerevrum Inc. Publisher: Cerevrum Inc Available On: Gear VR, Oculus Rift, Steam (Rift and Vive), Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, Gear VR Release Date: December 17th, 2016
Before diving into the review, I should first start off with an advisory message: I don’t need dating lessons because I’ve been in a stable relationship with my partner for the better part of a decade, so I’m simply not in a position to put seduction extraordinaire Magic Leone’s pick-up artist (PUA) theories and practices to the test. What I am able to do however is show you exactly what sort of content you can expect from Dating Lessons, which hopefully will help you determine if its right for you. As in all reviews, the thoughts that follow are my own.
Secondly, before the review begins, how do you introduce someone who calls themselves Magic? Straight out of the gate, Magic. Anyway, here’s what he has to say about himself on The Gotham Dating Club blog, one of the regular outlets for his articles such as ‘My Power Pose to Show Her You’re a Superior Man’ and ‘How To Project Dominant Body Language The “Right” Way’:
Manish “Magic” Leone
Magic Leone is an unusual dating coach. He came to the U.S. from India after his failed attempt at suicide when he discovered that his fiancé of 7 years was cheating on him.
Magic studied the deep emotional and physical needs that fuel women’s sexual desires while counseling them on sexual health. Working with women, Magic developed an understanding of how most women want to be seduced. This knowledge led him to sexual encounters with more than 400 women, and ultimately to marry the woman of his dreams.
Magic is known to be a tough coach who runs military-style workshops that force men to evolve overnight, but you may not know that he is actually a softy who craves chocolate 5 times a day. In fact there was a time Magic’s clients brought him chocolate to workshops as part of his compensation, and sometimes even as a form of bribe to make him go easy on them. Magic is also a movie buff. In his spare time (after he is done indulging in women), he secretly works on the screenplay that is his dream project.
According to Magic’s website, with his help you can become “The #1 Choice Of Every Woman. They’ll Choose You Over All Other Men Resulting In Ultimate Power To Have Sex With Any Woman You Choose!”
You can also take solace in the fact that with Magic’s guidance you’ll finally say goodbye to “Feeling Like A Desperate Loser Who Fears Rejection And Does Not Know What To Say To Women. Good Looking Women Will Chase You And Do All The Work – Even Your Female Friends Will Compete To Get In Bed with You!”
Furthermore, Magic promises that anyone can “Attain High Status Among Men And Every Man Would Want To Be Friends With You Hoping To Get A Little Piece of The Action By Getting In Your Good Books!”
That may be illustrative enough for you to understand what sort of person is behind Cerevrum’s Dating Lessons. Now for the proper review.
Gameplay
Dating Lessons is an app that combines 360 video with interactive elements. Video quality is actually quite good. In fact, I wasn’t even aware that I didn’t have positional tracking for the first lesson or two because of how well interactive elements and 2D video was interlaced. Saint Petersburg-based VR studio Cerevrum has also produced a number of educational VR games including Speech Center VR, House of Meditation, and eponymous brain training game Cerevrum, all of which are available on Gear VR.
Lesson topics run the gamut from subjects such as What Triggers Attraction,Eye Contact, Energy, Self Deprecating Humor and also more sexually-charged themes like Body Language, and Touching. Despite this, everything is pretty much PG-13 in Dating Lessons.
In the first lesson What Triggers Attraction, Magic tells us he’s going to teach us the building blocks of getting the girl:
“How do you approach her? What are those kind of things you can say that makes her want to stop and continue the conversation with you? What is it you need to tell her during the interaction so she continues not only to enjoy your interaction, but also feels more and more interest for you, more and more desire for you? And then I’m going to teach you how to position yourself, how to walk up to her, the right tonality, the right body language, how to make eye contact, how to touch her. Basically, these building blocks will teach you every single thing you need to know that next time you see a woman you know exactly how to charm her, you know exactly how to get her so excited that she gets eager, she gets desperate to be with you.”
Then Magic has me set goals, telling me to choose an arbitrary max of 3. He reassures me that this is “even something I do with my very high-end customers when they come to my program.”
This is all well and good, but these goals that I’ve set have zero bearing on how the rest of the course goes, and offer no tailoring to my individual needs as a paying customer who just wants to simultaneously find out how to date multiple women, attract one special woman and get my ex girlfriend back. (I wonder why she left me in the first place?)
Going through all the lessons and interactive interludes takes about 2 hours. Most lessons start out with some common sense tactics that more or less culminate in a generally understood dating maxim: Thou shalt not be an unpleasant weirdo. That includes staring for too long, not smiling enough, talking too quietly, hitting on her while she’s clearly doing something else, initiating an uncomfortable, albeit entirely innocent touch; basically not having a clear grasp on basic social interaction cues.
But then each lesson takes a brief turn for the frighteningly manipulative, leaving me with some serious questions.
Why do I have to drop fake hints that I’m actually constantly talking to models, and “it’s refreshing to finally meet a girl that is so down to earth”? Why do all of my questions directed toward a woman necessarily have to be self-referential and long-winded? Why do I have to pretend I’m so much more important than I really am? I can’t help but think that these tactics aren’t really about breaking the ice, but actually reveal Magic’s true intent of teaching the user to build a quick report based on artifice and deception. He never tells you the advice “talk about your hobby and maybe you’ll find out she likes it too.” It’s always based on a meticulous extraction of data about her that you’re then supposed to leverage so you can build immediate trust.
Here’s a quick bit on how Magic uses self-deprecating humor to his ultimate advantage.
In the interlaced on-location shots, I found Magic at points somewhat unrehearsed, and even at times a bit incoherent, almost as if he was making up his points on the fly. Outdoor scenes sometimes suffer from bad audio due to the constant wind blowing into his lapel mic.
The virtual visual aides presented during the video were helpful in illustrating some of Magic’s more concise points however, and were well used throughout the entire 11 lesson course to good effect.
The 7 interactive modules were at times painfully ineffective, and left me questioning if there was any point at all to the exercise. In a few trials, you’re asked to talk to a prospective woman with the goal of introducing yourself, chatting her up, etc. The problem is the resultant grades given have no basis in reality. As far as I could tell, the only thing measured was the volume of my voice, which I verified by repeating the phrase “turd-flavored soup” in a constantly descending volume. Jessica, my new female prospect from California with a heavy Russian accent, was pleased to meet me even though I kept whispering “hamburger hamburger hamburger.” Who knows, maybe she just likes hamburgers.
Hamburger-fan Jessica
I wasn’t expecting to have a realistic conversation with an advanced AI, but I’m not sure how Dating Lessons wants me to practice having a conversation with a cardboard cut-out of a woman either.
Immersion & Comfort
There’s only a single environment in the app, a beach-side bungalow filled with projection screens that Magic pops in and out of for his on-location lessons. There’s not much of reason why this couldn’t be executed on traditional monitors, and I fail to see how virtual reality makes this content any more compelling.
Another annoying bit is the omnipresent gaze reticle. Despite the fact that you only need it for cursory selections and some minor button pushing, it quickly becomes a big distraction personally and I wish it would disappear so I could focus better on the content.
Since the Dating Lessons is entirely based on 360 videos and no positional tracking is afforded to the user regardless of you choice of headset, the same caveats apply as with all non-positionally tracked experiences, i.e. extended use can be mildly uncomfortable and make you feel removed from reality.
Pretty much how I felt through the entirety of Magic’s PUA dating course.
The Fox Innovation Lab are all set to finally release their virtual reality tie-in with last year’s sci-fi blockbuster The Martian starring Matt Damon to a VR headset near you as the title launches tomorrow on both PlayStation VR and SteamVR platforms.
I was lucky enough to go hands-on with The Martian VR Experience at CES at the beginning of the year and came away impressed, entitling the article on the experience “A Triumph in Motion.” At the time, the platforms I trialed it on (HTC Vive and Oculus Rift with Touch) were still months from release and as a result, despite the high level of finish and polish evident in what I saw, Fox Innovation Lab (the VR-focused division at 20th century fox tasked with building the title) have waited until now to launch.
The Martian VR Experience represented at the time the best experience of its kind I’d yet seen, that is, an application that designed as an accompaniment an original film – a good old fashioned movie tie-in. Unlike many other examples of primarily marketing-lead immersive attempts that we’ve seen since VR’s renaissance began, The Martian VR Experience represents an offering that works as standalone entertainment and at the same time, it manages to push expectations of visual fidelity and polish for applications of these types up a notch or two.
Executive produced by Ridley Scott and directed by Robert Stromberg, The Martian VR Experience is described as “an interactive, immersive adventure with viewers participating from astronaut Mark Watney’s perspective, performing tasks that will facilitate his chances for survival.” Players get to fly through the Mars atmosphere in zero gravity, grapple with Watney’s all-terrain rover, there’s also snippets of the film thrown into the mix to remind you of the original inspiration behind the experience.
“I’ve always tried to approach film-making from the standpoint of creating an immersive experience. Now with the tools that are available to us in virtual reality, we can raise the bar even higher. The audience can experience storytelling in ways we previously could only imagine,” said Ridley Scott, Executive Producer of The Martian VR Experience and co-founder of RSA Films. “Mars has never been closer to being within our grasp and I’m so thrilled that we can invite people into The Martian VR Experience.” Scott himself narrates the new launch video for the experience too, which you can watch embedded above.
Director of The Martian VR Experience and co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of The Virtual Reality Company said “With The Martian VR Experience, we were able to take Ridley’s cinematic vision and create an immersive VR experience that gives people the ability to be Mark Watney, to face his struggles, experience his successes, as if they were part of the film.”
The Martian VR Experience will be available from November 15th on PlayStation VR and on SteamVR for the HTC Vive. No mention of support for the Oculus Rift, but given the reliance on motion controls it’s likely this will appear later once Oculus Touch has found its way into users homes next month. The experience will be priced at $19.99 on release, which may present a high price for those looking for hours and hours of gameplay in return for their money. We’ll have impressions on the final release version of the experience and on whether we believe it’s worth the cash soon.
