‘Headmaster’ & Why the Physics of Stuff Flying at Your Face is so Compelling in VR

ben-throopWhen Ben Throop went to the Boston VR hackathon in June 2014, he didn’t know that Valve was going to be showing off some prototype VR hardware that had positional tracking. At this point the Oculus DK2 had not shipped yet, and so he was able to build a VR game using his soccer experience to head soccer balls into a goal. He wanted to see how it felt, and was surprised that it was actually a lot of fun. He decided to continue working on it, and last year the game, Headmaster, was first announced at E3 as a PlayStation VR launch title. Frame Interactive was back again this year at E3 showing off the game at PlayStation VR’s booth.

LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST

I had a chance to catch up with Ben at Sony’s GDC press event where I talked to him about the game design principles behind Headmaster, why even non-gamers love to play it, and why the physics of things flying at your face are some compelling in VR.

Here’s the trailer for Headmaster:


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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip

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Killer Raptors and Crash Landings – ‘Robinson: The Journey’ Dev Diary Explores Crytek’s Second VR Title

Robinson: The Journey is Crytek’s second VR game, coming to PSVR, following The Climb which was launched earlier this year for the Oculus Rift. A new development diary explores the game’s premise, design philosophy, and killer raptors.

Crytek has long been known for amazing visuals powered by their own CryEngine; lucky us then that the company has had their attention focused on VR from quite early on and is in development of their second VR title, Robinson: The Journey.

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See Also: Crytek and Basemark Accidentally Made the Most Spectacular Cinematic VR Short I’ve Ever Seen

Due out for PlayStation VR later this year, the game puts players in the boots of a child stranded on an unknown planet that’s anything but devoid of life. Players will encounter incredibly lush terrain and all manner of dinosaurs.

While in demos of the game we’ve seen mostly friendly (if gigantic) creatures, the company’s first development diary of the game (above) suggests we’ll come face to face with raptors who would love nothing more than a quick snack.

If that turns out to be half as frightening as the raptor encounters in Jurassic Park (1993), sign me up.

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‘Envelop’ Launches Open Beta of Immersive Windows Desktop Platform for Vive and Rift

Envelop, the virtual reality desktop platform for Windows, has launched as a public beta for anyone with a Vive or Rift to enjoy.

After announcing a $5.5 million Series A investment at the beginning of 2016, followed by a closed beta at the beginning of July, Envelop has now launched as an open beta for anyone to use their HTC Vive or Oculus Rift to turn their Windows computer into a VR desktop environment.

Envelop essentially takes your standard Windows desktop and blows it up into a sphere around you, allowing you to drag your usual windows and programs anywhere around you—as if you had a giant wrap-around monitor. In concept, it’s pretty much exactly what comes to mind for anyone envisioning the future of VR desktop computing.

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One particularly cool feature of Envelop is the ability to use a webcam to pipe a live view of your keyboard into the virtual desktop environment, making a huge dent in the can’t-see-my-keyboard-while-wearing-a-headset problem. Users can also change the visuals of the surrounding environment on the fly with the click of a button.

In the future, Envelop VR’s SDK will allow developers to extend existing applications out into the Envelop virtual environment, enabling a wide range of uses like on-the-fly data visualization, 3D product views, or even virtual real-estate tours loaded from a web listing.

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‘Wake Up’ is a Surreal, Immersive Vive Puzzler with Killer Sound Design

Wake Up from Austrian developers Black Cell is a new, surreal subversion of the traditional puzzle and exploration genres sporting some beautiful art direction and some arresting sound design.

Many’s the time I’ve waffled on about the importance of sound in VR (as have many others), but I’m here to do it again. Except this time, I’ve an example of how things should be done, in the form of new exploration puzzler Wake Up.

The premise for Wake Up is simple, if a little mysterious. Traverse a surreal dreamscape guided only by an elusive red butterfly, solving motion-controlled, room-scale puzzles and riddles as you go. That’s it! If that seems a little ‘lightweight’ compared with traditional, bloated triple-A gaming fayre, it is and that’s intentional. Black Cell are a small, independent game developer who say they’re focused on “new experiences with a focus on a great mood, through the use of carefully created audio and visual design.” To that end, Wake Up can be viewed as an experimental taste of what Black Cell might have up their creative sleeves – with a playtime of just 20-40 mins.

The title has more than a whiff of one of my favourite VR experiences to date, La Peri from Innerspace VR. But, instead of an experience built around a mostly linear narrative, Wake Up‘s focus errs more towards interactive gameplay than Innerspace VR’s virtual reality ballet, at the same time it attempts to build an immersive, evocative world and does so largely through the use of sound. Wake Up features a pulsating, ambient background theme overlaid with bright directional effects and booming situational and incidental effects that do a great job of enveloping the player – even before you take into account the effective, stark and minimalist visuals.

The title is built for the HTC Vive only at present and demonstrates that emerging collection of titles that really only work in VR and which are difficult to categorise in a more traditional gaming context. What’s more, its available for free via Steam, a price hard to argue with. I look forward to more immersive audio visual experiments from Black Cell in the future.

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‘Aerofly FS2′ Brings Ultra Realistic Flight Simulation to Rift and Vive

Aerofly from developers IPACS is a flight simulator which aims to bring realistic visuals to the VR-enabled civilian flight-sim genre, and it looks stunning.

One interesting side effect of virtual reality and its early adoption by the games industry is the chance to give me a reason to return to a genre that previously held no interest to me. With the promise of placing you inside the game-world, titles which left me cold when framed by a flat screen, can suddenly make me sit up and take interest. Flight simulators is one of those genres.

But with VR, the prospect of being sat inside that cockpit, feeling like I was present at the controls of a multi-million dollar aircraft, the attention to the minutiae of recreating that mechanical realism of flight seems a whole lot more appealing.

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Aerofly FS2 is a flight sim which aims to give you the chance to take control of all manner of commercial and civilian aircraft from twin engine jet airliners to one man, engine-less gliders and to let you fly them all over realistically recreated terrain and landmarks. It’s available via Steam’s Early Access platform right and, most importantly, it has early support for both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Early feedback from the game’s supporters on Steam has been very good, with comparisons to seminal examples of the genre like FSX and X-Plane being made. The addition of VR however seems to have elevated the title, despite its pre-release stage of development, to must-have status for enthusiasts. And it certainly has alluring visuals to immerse yourself in, with staggeringly detailed aircraft models and some photo-realistic terrain.

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Currently 16 aircraft come as part of the base package with further paid DLC adding additional high resolution terrain packs for Switzerland. What’s more, the game’s visuals pack a real punch, with height mapped geographic features and modelled structures, and some 150 airports from the bundled ‘map’, letting you gawp at the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz island from the air.

Aerofly FS2 joins the well respected DCS (Digital Combat Simulator) from Eagle Dynamics in a relatively sparsely populated market of VR enabled flight simulators right now, and it seems to be shaping up nicely. Check it out on Steam here.

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Preview: ‘Wands’ is a Magical Steampunk Dueler for Gear VR

Frank He goes hands on with Wands, a new PvP Gear VR title from NUX Studios which pitches you against your opponent in a magical duel to the death.

VRLA’s Summer Expo this year offered up a raft of new VR content, but one of the lesser known titles might be Wands by NUX Studios. It’s a PvP title for Gear VR with a steampunk art style, a spectator application for non-VR users (the first of its kind for a Gear VR game), and of course, magic wands. The title is scheduled for release on August 18 for the Gear VR, with other VR platforms under consideration in addition to motion controller support in the future.

I had the opportunity to try the game, which exhibits looks seemingly too beautiful to be running on a mobile VR platform. From my time with Wands however, the visuals really do impress.

The gameplay however, given it’s mobile VR platform, is perhaps predictably simple, with control options available both gamepad or just with the touch pad alone. You, the player, select different spells that you can carry with you to a duel by switching out components on your wand, and when in the battle. You can press a button or swipe on the touch pad to open up a radial menu for selecting what spell you want to use, then press another button or tap the touchpad in order to use that spell. Teleportation also counted as a selectable spell.

What all of that means is that you can really only do one thing at a time. Either you can be teleporting, or you can be using one of your spells. There are set teleportation points on the map as well, so you don’t quite have complete freedom to walk around yet. The spells themselves are varied and do different kinds of things. Some let you project a magical shield, while others can summon stone turrets. There’s the standard fireball spell too.

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Wands has you battling against one player at a time in a match, so there’s no co-op or team play modes here. When asked, the developers said that they found that the balance for their game mechanics worked best with one-on-one style play. Nevertheless they acknowledged that this could change in the future. They’re also looking at cross platform multiplayer, although balancing concerns may prevent this from happening, given the different potential control options available and the advantages they may present.

There were 3 maps in total, which will be the only ones in the first release of the game until they update with more content. Overall, despite a certain lack of depth in the gameplay and the maps being somewhat small, what I saw, to me, still represented a fun experience – something you might play for an hour or so. Something unique that Wands offers however (for a Gear VR game at least) is the ability to show it off in a social environment, representing a unique advantage of this game.

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That’s because Wands offers a a special spectator feature which allows others to watch what the player is seeing and doing, displayed via a host application on a networked PC. This might be the first Gear VR game to do this in a commercial title. The PC host application works by receiving tracking data and other gameplay events broadcast wirelessly from the Gear VR. This data is then used to render a view of the virtual world mirroring that seen by the player, all in real time.

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On a related note, some might remember that Univrses, a company specializing in mobile positional tracking solutions, had announced Wands would be one of the first titles to feature their technology. This is now not the case, at least not for the title’s launch, although developers NUX Studios point out that a future implementation is not ruled out and that their work with Univrses continues.

Wands launches for Gear VR via the Oculus Store on August 18th.

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