‘Robinson: The Journey’ Hits PSVR Today, Here’s the Launch Trailer (and final dev diary)

Robinson: The Journey is the hotly anticipated PSVR exclusive from Crytek that puts players in the shoes of a lone survivor on an alien planet.

If you’re looking for FPS action, you won’t find it here; Robinson: The Journey is all about exploration, and you won’t be wielding any futuristic weaponry (which might a surprise given that the game was developed by the company know for the Crysis series). Instead, you’ll explore the story of Robin, a boy deserted on an alien planet after something went wrong with the ship that brought him and many others.

robinson-the-journey-psvr-2

By the time you start the game, Robin has been on the planet for nearly a year, so you’re stepping into the boots of someone who has already learned to survive, but you’re still alone—save for a pet dinosaur and a caretaking robot—and searching for clues as to what happened to your ship and whether anyone else has survived.

SEE ALSO
New 'Robinson: The Journey' Video Shows 5 Minutes of PSVR Gameplay

In addition to the launch trailer above, Crytek has released the third and final dev diary that explores the creation of the game with the team that made it:

Here the developers talk about the creatures you’ll find thriving on Robin’s alien world, and the exploratory scope of the game.

The post ‘Robinson: The Journey’ Hits PSVR Today, Here’s the Launch Trailer (and final dev diary) appeared first on Road to VR.

‘Trackmania Turbo’ Receives Free VR Update for PlayStation VR, Rift and Vive

Ubisoft today rolled out free VR support for Trackmania Turbo, the latest installment in the online multiplayer arcade racer series. The update is now available for owners of the game on PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

A total of 40 tracks spanning 4 different environments are available today for VR headset users, but if you’re looking to put your pinky toe in the waters to see if the fast-paced, high-flying arcade racer is right for you, a free demo—something that is sorely lacking in the VR marketplace as of late—is available featuring four tracks.

trackmania-turbo-race

The demo is accessible on both Rift and Vive via Steam, and on PlayStation VR via the PlayStation Store. Players on PC should note however that like all Ubisoft titles, you’ll need an Uplay account to run the demo. Since I don’t own the game, I popped into the demo, a ~3 GB download, to see what it was all about.

What I found were four very short tracks, two in the campaign section of the ‘Canyon’ area, and another two in the arcade section of the ‘Lagoon’ area. And while Ubisoft says that with the VR version “players will be able to experience the intense speed, the spectacular jumps, loops and wall-rides … like never before thanks to the VR technology,” they neglect to mention that it is done almost entirely in the third-person with brief interludes that auto-zoom you into the first-person. As far as I can tell, there is no ‘always on’ option for the first-person view.

Admittedly, the tracks are pretty insane, and I don’t know if you’d even want to go down them in first-person for fear of losing your lunch, but I sure would like to try. Verbage inside the game calls it a “VR Experience.”

Trackmania Turbo is also supporting the new PlayStation 4 Pro, which according to Road to VR Executive Editor Ben Lang generally adds a few noticeable improvements to the overall PlayStation VR-playing experience, although are pretty minimal for someone looking to make the upgrade. Take a look at our full comparison between PS4 and PS4 Pro to find out more.

‘TrackMania Turbo’ Demo on Steam

Ubisoft production studio Nadeo first announced VR support for TrackMania Turbo at its E3 2015 unveiling. The full, non-VR game saw a March launch of this year which includes over 200 tracks and holds an agrigated score of 81 on MetaCritic and ‘mixed reviews’ Steam.

The post ‘Trackmania Turbo’ Receives Free VR Update for PlayStation VR, Rift and Vive appeared first on Road to VR.

Acclaimed Oculus Shooter ‘Dead and Buried’ to Come Bundled With Touch

Oculus has announced that the first-party VR game Dead and Buried will come bundled for free with Oculus Touch (for all purchases, not just pre-orders), bringing the Touch bundled content count to three games.

Dead and Buried joins the Touch bundle alongside VR Sports Challenge and The Unspoken (the latter two are bundled with pre-orders only), and other content like Oculus Medium and Robo Recall will be free for all users. Extra software like this may make the $200 price of Oculus Touch a more attractive investment for customers who already spent $600 on the headset.

dead-and-buried-12 dead-and-buried-6 dead-and-burried

Though unreleased, Dead and Buried has been widely acclaimed, and the value it specifically adds to the Touch prospect may be quite large. The game was developed in-house by Oculus, and has single player, multiplayer, and co-op modes with wild west shootouts as the main theme. It makes sense that Oculus would provide it free since they made it, but also because it would benefit the multiplayer experience in having as many people on as possible, since the overall install base of VR is still relatively small. This logic applies even more to The Unspoken being bundled with pre-orders, as that game is very focused on multiplayer.

SEE ALSO
Preview: 'Dead & Buried' Action Packed Multiplayer Could be the Killer App Oculus Touch Needs

While it’s hard to pinpoint what Dead and Buried might have been priced at if it wasn’t bundled, it’s easy to imagine that it could easily rank among the higher priced games in the market. I had a chance to try the latest demos for this game at Oculus Connect 3, and it proved to be one of the most exhilarating experiences at the show. Meeting and high-fiving your partner right before the match where you’re frantically trying to shoot over cover at the enemy team and duck for cover at the same time is one of the most fun experiences I’ve had in VR in general, not to mention working with a team of four to defeat a zombie queen in the newly revealed co-op mode, which I also had the pleasure of trying.

The decision to make this game free might be even more worthwhile because of how it could provide one of the defining moments of VR for players, letting them see the potential of the technology.

Along with Dead and Buried, all the free bonus content coming to Touch could make the launch of the product one to be very looked forward to, and one that will indulge much playing time before anyone has to worry about buying another game to make the platform worth their while.

The post Acclaimed Oculus Shooter ‘Dead and Buried’ to Come Bundled With Touch appeared first on Road to VR.

Hands-on: ‘Lone Echo’ Multiplayer is a Totally Surprising Triumph for Competitive Zero-G Locomotion

Flying through an obstacle-filled arena in zero gravity like in the Battle Room scenes of Ender’s Game, catching and throwing a disk to score in an opposing team’s goal, all while in a Tron-looking virtual reality, is probably about the best way I can describe Lone Echo’s surprisingly successful multiplayer mode in one sentence.

At Oculus Connect 3, I was able to try a singleplayer demo of Lone Echo, an Oculus Touch exclusive by developer Ready at Dawn that lets you grab, pull, and push yourself around in zero gravity as a robot, but I didn’t know what to expect when I was told that I’d get to try out a multiplayer demo as well, since the singleplayer didn’t really have any activities that I could imagine doing with someone else in a meaningful way, much less in a competitively.

Nonetheless, while it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the single player, aside from the robot you inhabit in both modes, and the zero-g movement style, it was a very different and fresh taste of what could be done with zero gravity sporting in VR. From the outside, this floating, zero-g movement seems like a prime candidate for causing nausea in VR, and yet it managed to be an incredibly effective way of getting around that didn’t seem to cause me or other people I played with any dizziness.

I played in a match of five vs. five. Our team captain—a real person playing in another room—taught us not only how to play the game, but also how to navigate in the 3D, zerg-g arena. We would move around in zero gravity either with thrusters, or by grabbing, pulling, or pushing ourselves on our way with the help of walls or floating geometry (or even teammates or enemy characters). We’d be vying for a glowing disc in the middle of the Ender’s Game Battle Room-style arena (though it wasn’t nearly as big). Then we’d have to grab the disc and throw it into the holographic goal at the end of other team’s side.

Photo courtesy Ready at Dawn
Photo courtesy Ready at Dawn

A final piece of the puzzle was a punch you could do only to opponents’ heads to briefly stun them, preventing them from being able to move and hold the disc. You could also grab and climb onto bodies, so a common maneuver would be to grab onto a limb, clambor up, punch them in the face, and snatch the disk right from their hands, then give yourself a shove off of their stunned body to head toward the goal.

It sounds simple enough, but the mechanics seem like they could allow complex strategy as you might expect in a real sport. Of course, there was nothing to enforce any ‘rules’ or positions (like a goalie or reciever), but smart players would naturally fall into such roles to beat the opposing team (who were most likely playing the game for the first time and didn’t have any strategies other than to all flock for the disc like it was second grade soccer at recess).

Photo courtesy Ready at Dawn Photo courtesy Ready at Dawn

Speaking of soccer, passing is a huge part of the game, especially when your teammates are careening across the area in zero-g. It’s fun not only to be the thrower, needing to skillfully lead the disk to where your teammate is headed on their trajectory, but equally as much to be the receiver who has to launch themselves in the right direction at the right time to intercept the disk. More advanced players will see opportunities for bouncing the disc off the arena’s angular walls to send it around opponents land it in a key position in front of the opposing goal.

You can defend the goal, and (in the demo version we were playing) you might be really good at end the game there because the other team couldn’t organize well enough in the short time frame of the demo to score. My time playing Lone Echo’s multiplayer was a fun, heated battle for the disc, that didn’t leave me nauseous despite flying around in every which direction unhindered by gravity.

SEE ALSO
Physicality & Spectatorship in 'Project Arena' Could Blur the Line Between E-sport and Actual Sport

Every direction indeed; while playing the demo I was constantly spinning around in real life, reaching out with my touch controllers to try to grab a passing disc or tossing it to a teammate while shoving off of a wall to avoid an enemy. Based on what I saw, the game will almost certainly require the two-camera ‘opposing’ setup for the Rift (cameras opposite each other), or the three-camera setup for full 360 coverage. Otherwise it seems like it would be extremely difficult to keep yourself facing forward for the two-camera ‘front-facing’ setup (as you’d lose tracking on your hands regularly when turned away from the cameras).

Lone Echo’s surprisingly successful multiplayer feels like it could be a major addition to the game. Despite not yet having an official released date, what I played seemed very polished and fun already, with huge potential to become something even greater than what we’ve seen from the still burgeoning VR e-sports sector. 

The post Hands-on: ‘Lone Echo’ Multiplayer is a Totally Surprising Triumph for Competitive Zero-G Locomotion appeared first on Road to VR.

‘Alice VR’ Review

Virtual reality is a fitting medium for adventure games. When the atmosphere is right and the scene is set, you start to think about the world in a way that taps deep into your reptilian brain, the same one that thinks “I exist here. Everything here is important to me.” When done right, you’re just there. This is where I took issue with Alice VR. At moments I easily snapped into the game’s mysterious adaptation of Alice in Wonderland with all the requisite futuristic set pieces of any sci-fi adventure worth its salt, and at other times felt stuck inside of a conventional PC game that didn’t respect me as a VR player.


Alice VR Details:

Developer: Carbon Studio
Publisher: Klabater
Available On: Oculus Rift (Home), Vive and PC (Steam)
Reviewed on: Oculus Rift
Release Date: October 27th, 2016


Note: I was given access to both the Rift and Vive version of the game via Steam, but was told that only the Oculus version would be playable for review purposes at the time of this writing.

Gameplay

Due to an unexpected malfunction, you’re awoken from cryosleep by your spaceship’s AI and told that you have to go to an uninhabited planet below to retrieve fuel, liquid graphene, and get the ship back on course. On your travels through the ship’s various compartments to reach the bridge, you run into a number of tutorial-level puzzles.

alice-vr-screen-3

This is where you first encounter the game’s matching puzzles and even a gravity-bending maze that shifts the whole world around you—only a preview of what’s to come.

Dropped off on the planet’s surface, you’re faced with a dilemma: find enough liquid graphene in the uninhabited city, or never leave. Just outside of the city, your adventure begins.

alice-vr-screen-5
driving a dune buggy to the deserted city

The story is a loose adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), and although there’s no White Rabbit character to follow, AliceVR invokes Carrollian interludes of surrealness with the help of a mysterious green gas that you pass through on your way to the city center.

This is where the game begins to play tricks on you. Is the reality you’re inhabiting genuine? Does anything you do matter in these bizarre waking dreams, or are they just temporary bouts of madness? Yes and no. No and yes. These moments are by far my favorite in the game, which tops out at around 4-5 hours of gameplay if you go straight through and forget all the collectibles and aren’t too fastidious with the game’s many audio logs.

SEE ALSO
'Batman: Arkham VR' Review

The story isn’t just a scene-by-scene adaptation of Alice though, and there are plenty of surprises to encounter as you meet some, (but not all) of the universe’s iconic characters like a robotic Cheshire Cat, a Mad Hatter AI, all the while following signs emblazoned with a White Rabbit symbol.

alice-vr-screen-4

While sometimes circuitous, level design is fairly straight forward, and mostly tends to lay out obvious tracks for you to follow. Find a shrinking machine, shrink, go through a tunnel, return to normal size and pull a lever to open a door. Presto! You’ve opened a door to the next level.

You almost don’t have to listen to your companion AI, or care about the constant flashes of ‘NEW PRIMARY OBJECTIVE’ that haunt you every time you enter a room. If you do forget where you’re going though, you can look at the last primary and secondary objective on the menu screen.

Puzzles vary between extremely easy to medium difficulty.

Immersion

The game’s use of Unreal Engine is mostly competent, however outdoor scenes can sometimes be rough around the edges. In a VR headset, you get an up-close look at a game’s art assets, and set design can really fall flat on its face if you reuse too many of the same plant, or get lazy with how a rock wall appears or disappears. This is sadly the case in AliceVR, although it’s redeemed somewhat by the game’s well polished indoor spaces.

alice-vr-screen-6

I still couldn’t shake the feeling of an inconsistency in the world of AliceVR. Scale, while seemingly correct on the PC-version, feels random in the VR-version—and to be clear, this is taking the shrinking and growing mechanic into full consideration, as you spend most of the game interacting with the world in a 1:1 size ratio. Like Goldilocks, set objects in AliceVR like chairs or a the occasional skeleton are either way too big, or too small, and it leaves you feeling like some parts of the game were designed outside of a VR headset.

That said, at times visuals can sweep you off your feet, but it’s hard to reconcile the clear disparity in the game.

SEE ALSO
PlayStation VR Search Interest Blows Past Rift and Vive Amid Launch

Voice acting tends to be melodramatic, but in a game that prides itself on its reality-shifting storyline, somehow the weirdness of the audio logs fits. Of course, your companion AI is flat and robotic, and like all robot protagonists (I call them nanny-bots), you have to listen to her to find out what to do next, where to go, etc.

Comfort

And I should say that I’m not a delicate person in terms of simulator-induced motion sickness. I, like many seasoned VR enthusiasts, have ‘VR legs’. But that doesn’t make me bullet proof, so this is where the review (and the game) gets a little uncomfortable.

Remember that gravity-bending maze I mentioned earlier? Yeah. I’m not a fan. Plain and simple, I wish it weren’t in the game at all.

alice-vr-screen-7

Walking up a wall in VR, i.e. abruptly changing what your reptilian brain considers the fixed horizon, is nothing short of stomach churning. Oculus’ own Best Practice Guide state:

Avoid visuals that upset the user’s sense of stability in their environment. Rotating or moving the horizon line or other large components of the user’s environment in conflict with the user’s real-world self-motion (or lack thereof) can be discomforting.

This of course isn’t a law, and Oculus isn’t a ruling body, but the observation stands.

gravity-bend-alicevr
no escape from the gravity bends!

If the mechanic were ancillary to game’s puzzles, I wouldn’t be nearly so miffed, but why a VR game would want to punish its players with a whole room of wall-walking pathways—making it a primary mechanic in the later half of the game—I just can’t understand. To be brutally honest, I had to get out of the headset and finish the level in PC mode. And that’s something I’ve never done.

My last grievance comfort-wise with AliceVR is the lack of ‘VR comfort mode’, or snap-turning, with the only three options being either play standing up, in a swivel chair, or use yaw stick-turning. Some people don’t like snap-turning, but if you’re playing the Oculus version, you’re likely to be sitting down at a desk, and full 360 swiveling with a cable isn’t the most comfortable.

Comfort-wise your mileage may vary, but I would definitely rate AliceVR as ‘Intense’, and for a walking simulator, that’s a shame.

The post ‘Alice VR’ Review appeared first on Road to VR.

Ubisoft Pushes ‘Star Trek: Bridge Crew’ Release to March 2017

Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Ubisoft’s upcoming collaborative space adventure, sadly won’t be here for the November 29th launch date as promised, so if you wanted to give that special someone a Trek-themed Christmas present, you may need to rethink your options. The game is now slated to release on March 14th, 2017.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew puts you on the bridge of a U.S.S. Aegis (NX-1787), a newly created star ship built on the aesthetic of J.J. Abrams directed franchise reboot, and lets you team up with a crew of friends, strangers, or bots to go on missions throughout the Alpha quadrant. Giving you choice of Captain, Helm, Tactical or Engineering, collaboration is the key to any successful mission in Bridge Crew—something we found out in our hands-on with the demo.

Ubisoft recently released Eagle Flight exclusively on Oculus Rift from their Montreal studio, with Werewolves Within and Star Trek: Bridge Crew to follow from their North Carolina-based subsidiary Red Storm Entertainment.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew is slated for a simultaneous release on Rift, Vive and PSVR.

Ubisoft hasn’t cited any specifics surrounding the delay outside of a general statement on their blog:

In order to deliver the best game experience possible at launch, we have decided to push the release of Star Trek: Bridge Crew to March 14, 2017.

The post Ubisoft Pushes ‘Star Trek: Bridge Crew’ Release to March 2017 appeared first on Road to VR.

The VR Version of ‘Obduction’ is Coming to Rift on Halloween

Obduction, the highly rated first-person adventure game from Cyan, the makers of Riven (1997) and Myst (1993), has been available on traditional monitors for quite some time now, but what virtual reality enthusiasts have been salivating over is the pre-release VR version we got our hands on back in late August. Now you can rest easy, because Cyan has just announced on their Kickstarter page that the Oculus Rift version of the game is coming on the 31st of October, the 19th anniversary of the release of Riven.

High marks went to Obduction (8.5/10) for injecting the game with its familiar brand of visually stunning environments, and brilliant mix of cerebral, and often times impossible puzzles. Although we wished we could have given it a higher score for its immersive gameplay, some object interaction in the VR version was clearly still in need of TLC. Considering the game hinges on object manipulation like dialing phones and other fine movements, 100 percent reliable clicks are a must if you don’t want to tear your hair out of your head after incorrectly inputting a 15-digit code into some arcane number pad and missing by a single number.

This is however something Cyan said would be fixed for the upcoming VR version’s release, which if true, will leave many in shock at just how good of a game Obduction really is.

Cyan maintains the VR version will give you the choice of playing either in VR or on traditional monitor. There is still no official word on whether a SteamVR-compatible version or Oculus Touch support are to follow.

The studio will start sending out Oculus Store codes early on Friday, October 28th for Kickstarter backers, delivered via Humble store. While the PC version of the game is currently available for $29.99 on both Steam and Humble Store, it’s unclear at this time if Oculus Store codes will arrive alongside versions of the game purchased from outside the Oculus app ecosystem.

SEE ALSO
'Obduction' VR Review

After a resounding success on Kickstarter in 2013, amounting to $1.3 in backer funds, Cyan issued its first delay of Obduction from its initial June 2016 launch to July citing Unreal Engine updates and some Oculus Rift support polishing requirements. The game was then pushed back to late August, and with the caveat that the VR version would be “coming soon.”

The bright side to the delay? At least there’s plenty of strategy guides out now if (read: when) you get stuck.

The post The VR Version of ‘Obduction’ is Coming to Rift on Halloween appeared first on Road to VR.

‘ABE VR’ Creators Are Making Survival Horror Game ‘Syren’ – Teaser Trailer Here

Hammerhead VR, the creators of the splendidly creepy ABE VR, a short VR film that puts you at the mercy of a robot gone awry, today revealed a first-person horror game called Syren.

Hammerhead is a VR production studio that’s worked with VR game development, real-time visualization, and 360 degree video, but they’re probably most well known for their work on cinematic focused VR experiences like Abduction, Star Wars VR and Thunderhead—all intensely atmospheric and high on polish.

The studio maintains Syren, a horror-themed puzzler, will be coming soon to PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, and SteamVR.

SEE ALSO
'ABE VR' is Now Available for Free, Becomes BBFC's First Rated VR Title

Here’s a blurb that Hammerhead put out today:

A scientist obsessed with eugenics builds an underwater research facility above an ancient lost city, in which he conducts horrific experiments in an attempt to recreate the lost species of ‘Syrens’ – the legendary inhabitants of the civilisation, that once existed in the ruins below.

You awaken into chaos. The lab in ruins; creaking under the immense pressure of the sea. With the station reactor about to go critical, you have limited time to navigate out of the lab and evacuate the facility.

With death everywhere, you soon learn that you are not alone. Some of the experiments have gotten loose. In this stealth and survival game, you must solve puzzles to progress through a series of room scale scenes and always remain alert for the deadly Syrens who are hiding in the shadows.

The post ‘ABE VR’ Creators Are Making Survival Horror Game ‘Syren’ – Teaser Trailer Here appeared first on Road to VR.

4 Virtual Reality Desktops for Vive, Rift, and Windows VR Compared

While it’s all too easy to lose ourselves in the countless VR worlds at our fingertips, sometimes we just need to access the desktop and get things done in Windows. Thanks to a few innovative apps, this is possible without removing your headset.

With the beta launch of Oculus Rift Core 2.0, which introduces ‘Dash’, a new universal menu with a new way to access your Windows desktop, it’s time to take a fresh look at the current virtual desktop solutions available for Vive and Rift.

As explained in our hands-on with Rift Core 2.0, the original Rift menu system has been completely overhauled, resulting in a more capable interface with powerful functionality. Oculus Home has become a customisable living space with obvious similarities to SteamVR Home, and will eventually support social interaction. Oculus Dash is a replacement for the old Universal Menu, but feels considerably more integrated, as it is no longer a separate blank space, but rather a three-dimensional, transparent overlay that can run inside any Oculus app.

Oculus Desktop (built into ‘Dash’)

Supported Platforms: Oculus (Rift – in beta via ‘Public Test Channel‘)

Part of the new Dash interface is Oculus Desktop, which allows direct access to your Windows Desktop. Unlike SteamVR’s Desktop shortcut, which still feels like an afterthought (it continues to exhibit poor performance and is confused by my secondary display connections that aren’t even enabled), Oculus Desktop feels pretty seamless, with crisp image quality and smooth performance. The most impressive feature is the ability to grab any window or app on the main desktop view and pull it into the virtual space, repositioning and resizing it as you see fit. This was a key feature of the now-defunct Envelop, but Oculus Desktop does it even better, as in their own words, they’ve “built true virtual displays at the hardware level” meaning that performance is maintained even when surrounded by desktop apps. YouTube 60fps videos, for example, play flawlessly in these virtual displays, as do non-VR PC games.

Accessing the Dash while in Oculus Home makes it appear as if Dash is part of the Home space, but this is not the case—Dash can be brought up anywhere, while using any VR app (although developers need to make some tweaks to allow it to pop up inside of their app, rather than taking users to a blank room).

Image courtesy Oculus

If you start repositioning desktop windows in interesting ways while Home is active, it can appear similar to Microsoft’s ‘Cliff House’ for Windows Mixed Reality, whose apps lock to the virtual environment—Microsoft’s solution is positioned as a place to get work done, allowing apps to float in completely different areas of the virtual environment, but this is limited to ‘Universal Windows Platform’ apps. Oculus Desktop is potentially more powerful, as it supports the repositioning of any desktop PC app, but it doesn’t allow apps to lock to the environment, instead always appearing relative to the user’s central position.

In theory, independent virtual displays is a neat idea, but in practice it can be awkward at times. Oculus’ implementation, while slick, isn’t fundamentally more intuitive than what we’ve seen before, and I still find myself stumbling over simple tasks. This is partly because moving windows independently in space while still seeing them in the main desktop display is confusing, partly because it’s a beta and certain things don’t work quite right (the ‘show hidden icons’ of the system tray didn’t seem to function, certain dialog boxes are problematic, mouse support isn’t the best, etc.), and partly because we’re still limited by first-generation headset resolution. Oculus Desktop produces the clearest image I’ve seen from a virtual desktop solution, but it is still not practical as a monitor replacement, requiring excessively large virtual windows to comfortably read text, or to effectively use creative apps that require high precision input

Virtual Desktop

Supported Platforms: Steam (Vive, Rift, Windows VR), Oculus (Rift)

Experimenting with desktop interaction since 2014, Virtual Desktop has established itself as one of the leading apps in this category. Today, it is a polished product, offering smooth performance, excellent image quality and some useful extra features. As a means of using your PC desktop inside of a VR headset, it is lightweight and straightforward, simply representing your monitor resolution (or multiple monitors if you have them) in a floating frame. It offers voice activation for certain commands, and support for multiple 3D video formats. Unlike Oculus Desktop or Bigscreen, it also features an effective 360 degree photo and 360/180/90 degree video viewer (which also supports YouTube 360 video URLs).

Image courtesy Virtual Desktop

As you’d hope from a paid app, it continues to be well-supported by the developer, and has received several useful updates over the past year. Its motion control support includes an alternative ‘touch screen’ style intended to be less tiring and more precise compared to the common ‘laser pointer’ mode. It includes an HDR-optimised cinema room for watching movies, and has seen various video improvements, including a software decoding fallback, playback speed settings, and more accurate fisheye projection. It can also function as an excellent replacement for the standard SteamVR desktop mode, adding a new shortcut to the SteamVR launcher.

A recent update to Virtual Desktop adds support for Cylindrical Timewarp Layers, a feature which improves screen clarity for Rift users, meaning visual fidelity should be about on-par with what you’d get in Oculus Dash.

Continued on Page 2: BigscreenWindows Cliff House »

The post 4 Virtual Reality Desktops for Vive, Rift, and Windows VR Compared appeared first on Road to VR.

Battlezone PSVR Dev Diary #3: The Art of Battlezone

In our final developer diary from the team behind Rebellion’s PlayStation VR launch title Battlezone, Lead Artist on Sun He reflects on how they developed and executed on the artistic ethos behind the game.

Guest Article by Sun He, Lead artist on Battlezone – performing magic in 3D!
Guest Article by Sun He, Lead artist on Battlezone – performing magic in 3D!

As an art team beginning work on our very first VR game, we knew we were undertaking a challenge with Battlezone, but our goals were always crystal clear. We wanted to fashion an art style that not only wowed in VR, but also retained a strong visual connection to the original 1980s arcade game. A simple goal to understand then, but very complex to deliver! Here’s how we approached it, and the lessons we learned along the way:

1. Rethink the workflow

battleszone_07_1k

At the earliest stages of production we conceptualized the game’s look the traditional way.

Metaphorically, we knew we weren’t about to paint on canvas, but we still tried sketching out ideas on paper. Sure enough, this traditional approach produced results that looked rather different in VR compared to how we imagined.

It quickly became clear just how important it was to consider the scale and spacing in VR as early as possible. In VR, artists are working in a truly digital world. In other words, that meant conceptualizing in 3D and indeed in VR right from the off.

The best allegory for this shift I can come up with is that whereas before VR we were artists making nice paintings of houses, we are now actually building the houses and designing their interiors! It’s quite a jump.

We’d take 3D concept models into VR and scale them, move them around in the 3D space and test them again in again in as many different scenarios as possible, essentially trying to break them! Once an outline was set, we could then finally add detail and texturing.

Special effects were a particularly good example of this. In a traditional approach we would simply generate effects with 2D sprites, but in VR this led to effects that lacked an inherent sense of depth and volume. This, interestingly, was particularly noticeable with larger particles.

If you play Battlezone, you’ll notice a lot of the game has a polygonal feel, from the hexes of the campaign map and the in-game surfaces to the polyhedral pieces of data that spawn from defeated enemies. This is certainly part of the game’s retro-futuristic feel. But with our effects, using a polygonal design allowed us to create effects in 3D meshes. By this I mean instead of drawing a 3D sphere, for example, as a texture to put on 2D particle sprites to create what looks like a sphere in-game, you’re actually using a 3D sphere. And you can see that particularly in the explosions: Bright yellow and orange dynamic polygons that look like lots of smaller shapes combined together. It’s a striking look that really resonates with the retro style but is also very well suited for VR art design.

SEE ALSO
Battlezone PSVR Dev Diary #1: The Importance of Feedback in Uncharted Territory

2. Exaggerate the scale

battleszone_11_1k

Creating a game for VR, we of course wanted to create a world that people would naturally look around. One of the ways we tried to achieve this is something we’ve mentioned in a previous post: Using very tall, imposing structures in the vertical space that really hammer home the sense of scale. These work both as visual landmarks and orientation tools in VR, much like you’d use the tallest building as a point of reference in a busy metropolis.

In addition to this, we used a combination of “vanishing points” in scenery to make perspectives feel more exaggerated. A vanishing point is, essentially, the point in your perspective where two parallel lines appear to converge. Try imagining a picture of a road leading to the horizon. At some point you see the two sides of the road meet towards the horizon, essentially disappearing. That’s a simple example of a vanishing point, though it can comprise more than just lines, and it’s often used to simulate 3D in 2D art.

By using multiple vanishing points in the Battlezone scenery, we were able to make our 3D perspectives feel more exaggerated in scale; structures would feel taller and environments even bigger. For instance, during the opening launch sequence, the hangar feels incredibly spacious in VR because we’ve exaggerated the draw distance. And then as the tank lifts you out of the level, your eyes are drawn upwards towards that epic landmark in the sky.

SEE ALSO
Battlezone PSVR Dev Diary #2: Building Levels in VR That Welcome Players Into the World

3. Design a VR-friendly art style

battleszone_09_1k

I’d probably describe Battlezone’s look as a retro-futuristic style with very neon, chunky and blocky shapes. We wanted to inherit some of the classic elements from the original Battlezone, like the colour, the neon wireframe and the polygonal look, but at the same time give it the kind of makeover players would expect from a next-gen VR experience

In early development, Battlezone had a litany of thin neon lines and very, very detailed environments. However, it started to look noisy, with elements a little indistinctive in the mid-to-far distance. As artists, we found we needed to be a little bit more restrained in VR.

With that in mind, we began to sculpt the buildings and vehicles into big, blocky shapes at first, and then balance things like the level of detail and the thickness of lines. Once again, we were testing assets early and regularly in VR, so we could have a much clearer idea of how much additional detail we could add.

Battlezone’s chunky neon polygons became the basis around which we chose the colour palette. We tinted environmental themes around it – the volcanic theme has primary and secondary colours of brown and grey, which really contrasted against the neon orange and yellow of things like effects to make everything more pronounced in VR. And placing our player in the cockpit meant we could bring back the game’s classic green look into the displays and user interface right at the front of the view. The end result is something that harkens back to the original arcade game and yet feels undeniably modern, digital and virtual – retro-futuristic, classic but modern, familiar and yet in VR.

Buy Battlezone from Amazon
Buy Battlezone for PSVR

It’s been so exciting to be a part of this VR journey, and I’m looking forward to further exploring this new area of gaming and finding more solutions for future development. We are really lucky to be one of the few teams to create art content for a brand new platform in such uncharted territory. I really hope you’ll enjoy Battlezone and appreciate the work that has gone into its art style.


Our thanks to Sun He and the rest of the Rebellion team for putting together these developer diaries. Battlezone is out now on PlayStation VR.

The post Battlezone PSVR Dev Diary #3: The Art of Battlezone appeared first on Road to VR.