The expo floor opens today, but this year’s E3 in Los Angeles has already kicked off with some big names in the industry making fresh commitments to VR on both the software and hardware side of things. Here we take a look at the top 5 announcements from Day 0 of E3, ranked in no particular order (because who would agree?):
Razer Earmarks $5 Million to Encourage OSVR Content Development
Yesterday Razer announced a $5 million OSVR development fund which the company will use to incentivize support of its open-source VR platform.
With tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars being invested by Oculus and HTC into content for their respective VR platforms, Razer hopes to offer a similar style of support to encourage developers to build for the OSVR platform.
Oculus Touch Launch Lineup Will Top 30 Games, ‘Oculus Medium’ Bundled
Oculus yesterday announced that over 30 “full, made-for-VR games” are launching with Touch later this year. The company hasn’t made any further comment on the release of Touch outside of their original quote of H2 2016 launch window, however Oculus maintains that there are “hundreds of additional Touch titles in development…”
Oculus teased over 10 of the upcomming Touch launch titles. Click the link above for the full list.
Alienware is Building a Backpack PC for Virtual Reality
Are ‘Backpack PC’ for VR a thing yet? With announcements from HP, MSI, and Zotac earlier this year, now followed by Alienware, we’d say it is.
Revealed by AMD CEO Lisa Su at the E3 PC Gaming Show, the unnamed Alienware Backpack PC was seen with a sleek looking shell packing the AMD Radeon RX 480 video card. It was introduced as a “reference design,” with no launch or pricing details.
Fallout 4 VR Coming to Xbox ‘Project Scorpio’
Microsoft last night released the news that it was indeed joining the VR race and it was developing the console hardware to power its offering, Xbox Scorpio. So what’s heading to Scorpio in terms of content? Fallout 4 VR, according to Bethesda Director and Executive Producer Todd Howard.
Their weapon in the VR race however wasn’t revealed until the end of the event, where the much rumoured Xbox ‘Project Scorpio’ was finally confirmed along with some basic specs and that it would indeed be capable of delivering “High Fidelity VR”. Check out the specs we know about with the link above.
Minecraft Gets Cross-Platform Online Play, Including VR Platforms
At Microsoft’s Pre-E3 event, the Minecraft announced that the title will soon support players playing the game on any platform, including virtual reality devices like Samsung’s Gear VR.
Oculus’ CTO John Carmack, a long time supporter and an instrumental player in bringing Minecraft to virtual reality platforms, joined the Microsoft Minecraft team on stage to demonstrate the latest feature online cross-platform play. Carmack and 2 other players hopped into a Minecraft ‘Realm’ (player created, private servers to share with friends) with the Oculus CTO playing on Samsung’s GearVR, the others on an iPad and Microsoft Surface tablets.
