It’s hard to believe it’s been 12 months since we last headed to the epic Koelnmesse Conference venue in Cologne, Germany to attend Europe’s biggest gaming event, Gamescom. Last year’s highlights included witnessing the Oculus Rift HD Prototype, EVE: Valkyrie, and an early Cyberith Virtualizer. Well, we’re doing it all over again this year—what exciting VR news will we see? I’ll be there to find out.
Gamescom 2014 Promises All Time High Virtual Reality Presence
It seems that a year is a long time in the virtual reality industry. In 12 short months since Gamescom 2013, we’ve witnessed Oculus VRs meteoric rise from young startup to Facebook’s billion dollar tech darling, Sony finally announcing Project Morpheus and Oculus’ 2nd development kit ship to developers around the world in huge numbers. VR’s momentum shows no signs of slowing.
This year’s Gamescom promises to demonstrate VR’s continuing maturation from tech curiosity to mainstream gaming platform. As with the E3 Expo back in May, Gamescom will likely feature a heavy focus on virtual reality content rather than hardware. E3 saw Oculus and Sony push the possibilities of their platforms with enticing new experiences. Oculus challenged the view that all VR content must be first person by debuting 
their self-published 3D platformer Lucky’s Tale and showed just how terrifyingly immersive VR gaming could be with the Alien: Isolation demo. Sony likewise pushed boundaries with their innovative Street Luge experience whilst continuing to highlight their commitment to VR as a gaming platform.
This year, Oculus VR has a sizeable presence on the public show floor. Their 2013 booth was inundated with interest and people came away impressed. Its expected that the new DK2 will dominate their booth, providing the first glimpse of Oculus’ new hardware to Euro-gamers not lucky enough to have received one themselves. Oculus like to change it up in terms of content from show to show, but expect Lucky’s Tale to make an appearance. If past form is anything to go by, there’ll be at least a couple of new titles on display, but we won’t know for sure until the doors open. It seems unlikely that Oculus will want to divert attention away from the DK2 or the focus on games so new hardware announcements seem unlikely at this stage.
Project Morpheus, Sony’s VR Headset for the PS4, has impressed at every showing since its unveiling at GDC 2014 in March. It seems Sony is onto a winning combination by reinventing its excellent PlaySation Move controller as a VR input device. Thus far though, with the exception of EVE: Valkyrie, its content has been limited to tech demos, albeit good ones. So perhaps Gamescom 2014 will be the show Sony use to announce some fully-fledged made-for-VR titles at its press conference scheduled for 7pm (CET) on August 12th.
Up to now, Sony have been coy about its intentions for Morpheus, seemingly testing the waters to see if this potentially groundbreaking (and potentially costly should it not pan out) device would be accepted by the general public. No release date has yet been announced for Project Morpheus, in fact Sony have never even stated that it’d see the light of day at all—but given the sheer weight of PR muscle they’ve thrown behind getting the Morpheus ‘out there’, it seems likely it will—and possibly sooner rather than later.
Aside from the big industry hitters, we’re also hoping to catchup with the Cyberith team as they demonstrate their latest prototype omnidirectional treadmill known as the Virtualiser, riding high after their recent Kickstarter success. CCP games will be there with EVE: Valkyrie, now one of the first titles to be demo’d running on both Oculus and Sony’s VR Headsets.
Finally, at the official Gamescom awards, virtual reality related devices dominate the ‘Best Hardware’ category, where it’s a 3-way shootout between the Oculus Rift, Sony’s Morpheus and Cyberith’s Virtualizer—if that’s not an indication that VR has arrived, I don’t know what is.
Showing Something VR Related at Gamescom? We’d Love to Hear From You.
We’re always on the look out for cool new VR related projects, so if you’d like to talk to us about yours while at the show drop us a line to info@roadtovr.com or tweet us at @rtovr and we’ll do our best to line up a meeting.
Gamescom is open to Press on August 13th and for everyone August 14th-17th. Some 350,000 people are expected to attend.
