What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
At The International in Seattle, an AI bot from Elon Musk’s OpenAI venture overwhelmed several of the best pro players in the world at the Dota 2 tournament, showcasing remarkable advances in the development of artificial intelligence.
The post OpenAI bot crushes top players at Dota 2 tournament appeared first on Digital Trends.
3D Generations has announced its debut virtual reality (VR) title, Cosmic Awakening VR, will be launching on Steam later this month. Compatible with both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, Cosmic Awakening VR is a first-person survival exploration videogame set within space station that is notable for the absence of its crew.
In Cosmic Awakening VR, the player begins by docking on a space station. You quickly discover that not everything is as it seems as the crew is nowhere to be found. Soon you’ll have to fight through the terror to uncover the truth about what is going on in this space station.
Cosmic Awakening VR first became an idea around June 2016. 3D Generation was excited about VR and wanted to create a videogame where everything was interactable and those interactions felt good. As such, Cosmic Awakening VR features not only a Story Mode, but also a unique gameplay mode called Eight Pages Mode; here, the videogames clues and items are randomised, resulting in a different experience on every play.
Set to launch on 25th August 2017, Cosmic Awakening VR will be compatible with HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. VRFocus will keep you updated with all the latest details on Cosmic Awakening VR and other VR titles from 3D Generations
Whether you’re an experienced designer, programmer, engineer, or maybe you’ve just been inspired after reading VRFocus articles, the jobs listed here are located worldwide, from major game players to humble indie developers – the one thing they all have in common is that they are all jobs in VR.
View the new listings below for more information:
| Location | Company | Role | Link |
| Manchester, UK | Red Frog Digital Ltd | Mobile App R&D Software Engineer | Click here to apply |
| Bristol, UK | Ultrahaptics | Visual Designer (Contract) | Click here to apply |
| London, UK | Software Engineer, Social VR | Click here to apply | |
| San Francisco, CA | Adobe Research | VR Video Engineer | Click here to apply |
| Amsterdam | Force Field VR | QA Tester | Click here to apply |
| Amsterdam | Force Field VR | Lead Programmer | Click here to apply |
| Amsterdam | Force Field VR | Senior Character Artist | Click here to apply |
As usual, you can check last week’s edition for further job listings. If you are an employer looking for someone to fill a role in a VR, AR or other related areas in the industry and want that position to be featured on next week’s VR Job Hub, please send details to either pgraham@vrfocus.com or keva@vrfocus.com.
Check back with VRFocus next Sunday at 3PM BST and every Sunday for the latest roles in the VR industry.
Looking for something new to refresh your virtual reality (VR) senses on a Sunday morning? VRFocus has scoured the depths of Steam to find you ten of the best discounts for a quick-and-easy fix this weekend. Whether you’re planning on using HTC Vive, Oculus Rift or the OSVR hacker dev kit, below you’ll find some of the best bargains in VR today.
Compatibility: Oculus Rift and HTC Vive
Rez Infinite made its debut on PC earlier this week, and for those yet to jump in there’s still time to grab Enhance Games’ VR masterpiece at the discounted launch price of £15.99 GBP. The typical price of Rez Infinite will be £19.99 when the discount ends on 23rd August 2017, but even then there’s no argument that Rez Infinite will be worth the asking price.
Compatibility: Oculus Rift and HTC Vive
A hugely popular VR title, Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality has a limited time sale for this weekend only. Offering a 25% discount, you can pick up Owlchemy Labs’ second major VR release – following the massively successful Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives – for just £17.24. The typical price of Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality stands at £22.99, so there’s no better time to become a Morty clone.
Compatibility: Oculus Rift and HTC Vive
Another new release, Gal*Gun VR publisher Inti Creates Co. is offering a launch discount of 15%. Priced at £19.54 opposed to the typical price of £22.99, you can ‘live the dream of being surrounded by hordes of cute girls who are madly in love you’ for a reduced price until 16th August 2017.
Compatibility: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and OSVR
Coming to the end of a week long deal, House of the Dying Sun is offering a discount of 50% for just one more day. Now priced at £7.49, instead of the typical pricing of £14.99, House of the Dying Sun is a tactical space shooter that puts you in the cockpit of the Empire’s most deadly interceptor as you hunt down the enemies of your dying empire.
Compatibility: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and OSVR
In support of a recent update for Overkill VR, Game Troopers has begun a special price promotion. Available now for £10.49, a discount of 30% from the typical price of £14.99, Overkill VR is a first-person shooter (FPS) videogame that offers a huge variety of customisable weaponry as it throws you into a heated and deadly warzone.
Compatibility: Oculus Rift and HTC Vive
Contrary to much of the violence and comedy coming to modern VR, Fancy Skiing VR, developed by HashVR Studio, is structured on real skiing. Players use the motion-controllers of the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive as ski poles to get power and lean left or right to control the direction. Fancy Skiing VR is available for just £4.89 until 25th August 2017.
Compatibility: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and OSVR
A tower defence videogame that aimed to make the most of VR early after the consumer launch of the modern hardware, Kittypocalypse undoubtedly feel short. However, it’s less of an ask to invest the title at its current discounted price of £5.49 rather than the typical price of £10.99: a 50% discount lasting just one more day.
Compatibility: Oculus Rift and HTC Vive
Operation Warcade VR launched back in June 2017, and with it brought the promise of an Operation Wolf modernisation in VR. However, now it’s not just about shooting cardboard cutouts of bad guys, but taking to the land, sea and air using everything from throwing knives to missiles to take out anyone who stands in your way. Operation Warcade VR is available for £8.99, a 40% discount from £14.99, for another day.
Compatibility: HTC Vive
A HTC Vive exclusive, DUO is an arcade videogame designed from the ground up for VR. A brick-breaker available for the bargain price of £5.99, developer NiVision has seen fit to encourage more people to experience their second VR release by offering a discounted price of £2.99 for a limited time.
Compatibility: Oculus Rift and HTC Vive
Craft Keep VR launched earlier this year as an intriguing combination of Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives and Minecraft. Set within a fantasy world of dragons, dungeons and foul-mouthed customers, you are an alchemist-blacksmith forging weapons and brewing potions. And now you can jump into the comedic world of Craft Keep VR for the discounted price of £7.36, saving 33% off the typical price of £10.99.
Einen interessanten Ansatz verfolgen die japanischen Entwickler von Psychic VR: Über die Web-App STYLY kann man direkt in modernen Browsern auf PC oder Mac VR-Welten kreieren und veröffentlichen. Das klappt ohne Code-Kenntnisse und ist durch das Baukastensystem bestens für 3D-Einsteiger geeignet. Für die echte Erfahrung in der virtuellen Realität steht ein Client für die HTC Vive zur Verfügung, die Unterstützung weiterer VR-Brillen sollen folgen. In STYLY stehen einem etliche fertige 3D-Modelle zur Verfügung. Es lassen sich aber auch eigene Objekte in verschiedenen Formaten sowie Bilder, Musik, Videos und PDF-Dateien einbinden.
STYLY stellt schon etliche fertige 3D-Modelle sowie Hintergründe zur Verfügung
Eine .obj-Datei in STYLY importiert
Es lassen sich aber auch eigene Objekte hochladen und verwenden. Dabei zeigt sich STYLY überaus flexibel und nimmt Bilder, Musik im MP3-Format und Videos von YouTube an. Sogar PDF-Dateien lassen sich einbinden und anschließend als Buch in der virtuellen Realität lesen. An 3D-Objekten verarbeitet STYLY Dateien in den Formaten SKP, FBX, Blender und OBJ, was bei einem ersten Versuch gut funktionierte. Allerdings benötigte die Web-App etwas Zeit, um die Modelle aufzubereiten. Auch Unity-64-Bit-Dateien lassen sich importieren.
Die Möglichkeiten in STYLY selbst sind begrenzt, was aber gerade Einsteigern hilft, da sie nicht mit Funktionen und Parametereinstellungen überrollt werden. Letztlich ist die Web.-App eine Art Baukasten, in dem man die gewünschten Elemente einfügt, platziert, rotiert und skaliert. Ein direktionales Licht ist vorgegeben, es lassen sich weitere Lichter hinzufügen – allerdings keine weiteren Sorten. Auch ergänzende Parameter wie beispielsweise Lichtfarbe oder Schattenwurf sucht man vergeblich. Dafür gibt es Filter, sodass sich am Ende Effekte wie „Himmel“, „Tropen“ oder „starke Schatten“ hinzufügen lassen.
Ist der Künstler mit seiner erschaffenen Welt zufrieden, kann man sie direkt aus dem Editor heraus veröffentlichen. Der Anwender erhält einen Link, mit dem sich die Szene aufrufen lässt und den man auch anderen zur Verfügung stellen kann. Die Ladezeiten können je nach Komplexität der Welt allerdings erheblich sein. Eine Möglichkeit, die Veröffentlichung rückgängig zu machen, habe ich nicht gefunden.
Für die HTC Vive steht auf der Webseite ein 184 MB schwerer Download bereit, um die 3D-Welten in der virtuellen Realität zu betrachten. Weitere Viewer sollen demnächst für die Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR und Google Daydream folgen.
Der Beitrag STYLY öffnet Beta-Phase: VR-Welten im Webbrowser selbst erstellen zuerst gesehen auf VR∙Nerds. VR·Nerds am Werk!
Since the announcement of Apple’s augmented reality (AR) app ARKit more and more developers have been showcasing their creations. Earlier this week Luden.io revealed the first alpha footage of its project ARrived, a god like simulator. Now VRFocus has some concept art for you to look at, detailing the some of the environments and characters.
Most of the artwork can be seen in the alpha footage, with the various tribes people who’ll look up to players for guidance when building their civilisation.
From bearded guys with clubs and shamans, to levels with waterfalls a nighttime scenes with fireflies dancing around, these concept ideas give a good understanding of how the videogame has grown and progressed.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Luden.io and ARrived, reporting back with further updates.
There are plenty of ways to get creative in virtual reality (VR) from apps like Google Tilt Brush or Oculus’ Quill to full on professional software like Unity or Unreal Engine 4. For those that want to create VR content but don’t have a headset or the time to learn the intricacies of videogame development software Japanese company Psychic VR Lab has created STYLY, an online platform to build and share the virtual spaces.
STYLY is cloud-based service which can be operated on modern web browsers in both Mac and Windows – you don’t need a powerful VR-ready PC to create content.
Launched in beta form this month, STYLY’s web-based format means there’s nothing to download. It features a drag and drop interface for ease of use whilst allowing content to be imported from over ten different platforms such as Maya, Blender, YouTube, Instagram, Sketchfab, 3D Warehouse, Unity Asset Store, SoundCloud, SketchUp and Google Tilt Brush / Blocks.
If you do have access to a VR PC and a HTC Vive then you can check your creations. At present the STYLY beta only supports HTC Vive, with support in the works for Oculus rift, Gear VR and Google Daydream.
STYLY is free to start using now. For any further updates keep reading VRFocus.
Oculus has added new documentation to their developer knowledge base detailing the ‘buffered haptics’ feature of the Oculus SDK, a method for programming more advanced haptic feedback from the company’s Touch controllers.
Oculus Touch uses linear actuators to provide feedback, a haptic technology which has been increasingly replacing the simple ‘rumble’ feedback common console gamepads. Linear actuators can move very quickly compared to the rotating mass motors of yore, allowing a broader variety of haptic effects, faster response time, and better control. The newly documented ‘Buffered Haptics’ feature gives developers fine grain control of the controller’s haptic feedback.
The SDK supports two approaches to controller haptics, Buffered and Non-buffered. Oculus advises they not be used together to avoid unpredictable haptic behavior.
Non-buffered Haptics is more simple to conceptualize and control, and amounts to simply switching vibrations on and off with a specific frequency (160Hz or 320Hz) and amplitude (0 to 255). Oculus writes that Non-buffered Haptics is “designed for simple effects that don’t have tight latency requirements since the controller requires 33ms to respond to the API call that modifies the haptics settings.”
Buffered Haptics is not only faster to respond (10ms), but allows for a wider and more complex set of haptic effects, “such as patterning vibrational amplitudes around sine wave or tangent functions, panning the vibrations across controllers, generating a variety of low-frequency carrier waves, and more,” Oculus writes. The feature allows developers to queue up a string of bytes representing desired amplitudes which are then played back in sequence at 320Hz, allowing developers to finely adjust the amplitude between 0 (min) and 255 (max) once every 3.125ms.
A haptics sample app is provided with the Oculus SDK and gives an example of some of the haptic effects that can be achieved with Buffered Haptics:
- Smooth sine wave vibration with a “buzz down” effect at the end of each wave cycle
- Vibrational panning across the left and right controllers, again with a “buzz down” effect at the end of the panning cycle
- Ultra low-frequency buzz, essentially a series of ticks at 64Hz
- A “messed up” low frequency vibration based on a chaotic formula that utilizes a trigonometric tangent wave function
The documentation goes into additional detail about how the feature works, which involves queuing up the buffer with the desired haptic instructions before sending it to the controllers:
A buffer consists of a series of bytes with values from 0 to 255, where 0 represents no amplitude (i.e no vibration), and 255 represents the maximum amplitude (or intensity) of vibration that is allowed by the SDK. After your code fills in the values within a buffer, you send the buffer to one or both Touch controllers via ovr_SubmitControllerVibration. Each byte in the buffer is then “played” in sequence at a rate of 320Hz. The maximum buffer size (i.e. the maximum number of bytes that can be sent to a controller at one time, and also the maximum size of the controller’s internal buffer) is 256 bytes. The length of time that it takes to “play” a single 256 byte buffer is 0.8 seconds (256 bytes played at a rate of 320Hz). So, you have full control over the amplitude of the vibrational effects down to a resolution of 3.125ms (which equates to 320Hz). However, the frequency can only be 320Hz or some integral quotient of 320Hz, such as 320/2=160Hz, 320/3=106.7Hz, 320/4=80Hz, 320/5=64Hz, etc. You can achieve these lower frequencies by sending bytes that are zero filled, interspersed with bytes that have amplitude values that are greater than zero. Here are some examples:
- 320Hz, full amplitude – [255, 255, 255, 255, …]
- 160Hz, full amplitude – [255, 0, 255, 0, 255, 0, 255, 0, …]
- 320Hz, half amplitude – [127, 127, 127, …, 127, …]
- 160Hz, half amplitude – [127, 0, 127, 0, 127, 0, …, 127, 0, …]
- Single sharp tick (320Hz) – [0, 0, 255, 255, 255, 0, 0] [delay x ms] [0, 0, 255, 255, 255, 0, 0]
- Single blunt tick (160Hz) – [0, 255, 0, 255, 0, 255, 0] [delay x ms] [0, 255, 0, 255, 0, 255, 0]
In general, use the 320Hz resonant mode for lighter, sharper actions and the 160Hz mode for heavier, blunter actions.
Oculus also notes that developers can “vary the vibrational effects based on input streams, such as controller movement or position,” and pre-mix multiple input streams ahead of passing the information to the buffer, which could potentially allow for some interesting dynamic haptics which depend upon what the player is doing in the virtual world.
As you can see, filling up the instruction buffer to achieve the type of haptic effect you want could be quite challenging if the interface for doing so is literally a string of numbers. That’s something which the folks at Immersion Corp hope to fix to help developers more easily make better haptic effects.
The post Oculus Details ‘Buffered Haptics’ for Advanced Haptics on Touch Controllers appeared first on Road to VR.
If you’ve yet to hop on the VR train, here’s a shot at scoring a free HTC Vive system and some swag from the 2017 International Dota 2 Championships. This giveaway is open to those in North America, Europe, and Taiwan.
HTC Esports is a sponsor of Esports teams Cloud 9 and Team Liquid, both of which were competing at last week’s International Dota 2 Championships, with Team Liquid yesterday taking home the $10.8 million grand prize and world champion title.
To celebrate the championship, HTC is giving away an HTC Vive system and a Cloud 9 and Team Liquid shirt to one lucky winner. All you have to do to enter is head over to this page where you can gain multiple entries for following related Twitter accounts, retweeting a tweet from the @htcesports account, and visiting the Dota VR Hub page (which explains how you can spectate Dota 2 in VR).
The post HTC is Giving Away a Vive to Celebrate The International Dota 2 Championships appeared first on Road to VR.
ARKTIKA.1, an Oculus exclusive due to launch later this year, is shaping up to be one of VR’s best looking games to date. You’ll take it as no surprise that the title is being developed by 4A Games, the developer behind the Metro series (and its stunning next installment, Metro Exodus). One important part of making a game look great is skilled use of effects—dynamic elements like particles, smoke, muzzle flashes, explosions, and lighting. But the methods for making great looking effects for traditional games take on new challenges when it comes to VR, especially when teetering on the edge of visual fidelity and the high performance required for smooth VR rendering. In this guest article, 4A Games explores their approach to making effects in Arktika.1.
Guest Article by Nikita Shilkin
Nikita Shilkin is a Senior VFX Artist at 4A Games. Before that, he worked on films and ads as a Generalist Artist, and then as a VFX/Onset Supervisor on sci-fi and other types of films.
Update (2/22/18): Following the launch of Arktika.1, Shilkin has published a new video further detailing the effects he created for the game.
Since this article was initially published, we’ve also published our Arktika.1 Review and a behind-the-scenes article exploring the artwork and insights behind the game’s development.
Original Article (8/13/17): To get an idea of my prior work, here’s some of the scenes I’ve worked on:
At the moment, I am working on effects for the ARKTIKA.1 project. This is a sci-fi VR shooter with a—traditional for the company—focus on immersing audience through story and high-quality visuals that make it possible to talk about it as an AAA product.
To begin with, I would like to note that making effects for VR is essentially no different from producing them for ordinary games, with the exception of few nuances that I have noticed during the production.
Based on these three rules, we can start analyzing the production. So, let’s begin with some core things.
Since we are talking about VR, we don’t have fixed camera, animations, timings or other constant values, which means we can never know how the player will shoot and from which side he sees the weapon. And the only way out is to make the effect work beautifully from all sides.
And the first standard mistake is trying to make one mind-blowing sequence, which unfortunately will work only with a classic fixed camera, becoming ridiculous when turning the weapon.
The solution is quite simple – no matter how complex the effect is, break it into simple fixed parts using all three directions. So you get not only volume, but also a visual randomness that will make a shot unique.
Above: (left) a muzzle flash made with volume in all directions, (right) a typical ‘first person’ muzzle flash looks great from a static camera angle behind the weapon, but breaks down if seen from other directions.
Since the VR does not feature a classic gun sight, nor the center of the screen, and aiming with a foresight or a scope is not a common thing, the projectiles of the weapon should be clearly visible. Most of the players will rely on this factor, making corrections for the bullets and their impacts.
In this regard, there are several tips:
And finally, a little piece of advice, if you have any firearms (or any other weapons with smoke particles), put them into a separate system, away from the flame and set free in the world, that looks interesting.
The post Lead FX Artist on ‘ARKTIKA.1’ Shares Strategies for Great Effects in VR appeared first on Road to VR.
Rez Infinite
House of the Dying Sun
Overkill VR
Fancy Skiing VR
Kittypocalypse
