As we reported yesterday, InfinitEye is alive, well and reborn as Star VR, now a 5k, dual panel, 210 degree FOV VR Headset. The headset will be on show at E3 this year and will have a custom ‘The Walking Dead‘ experience produced by parent company Starbreeze.
Yesterday Starbreeze, the Swedish developers behind Payday 2 and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, announced they’d acquired French VR headset startup InfinitEye. The InfinitEye has now been revamped and relaunched as Star VR, a dual QHD panel, 210 degree virtual reality headset that looks to blow other headsets away, at least in terms of numbers.
InfinitEye were acquired by Starbreeze recently for $2M to form a key part of the company’s VR entertainment strategy.
But as we all know, impressive technical specifications are useless without compelling content to showcase the hardware. So Starbreeze have produced a VR specific experience based on the popular zombie franchise The Walking Dead. A video released last night highlights some aspects of the experience as well as revealing more details about the Star VR headset itself.
In the video are members of the InfinitEye team, including CEO Lionel Anton, the original inventor of the panoramic VR headset I got to try back in 2013. He re-iterates here what he told me then; that he felt the current trending VR immersion experience (i.e. the Oculus Rift) was “incomplete” and that 100+ degrees of FOV simply wasn’t enough. InfinitEye was therefore born and Star VR is the culmination of the team’s efforts in this field.
The video features shots of the headset sporting fiducial markers, apparently part of Star VR’s 360 degree positional tracking system. That system is extended to in-game weaponry in The Walking Dead experience, as two markers are seen mounted atop a pump action shotgun, presumably to provide positional information too.
Shots of a player sat in a wheelchair wearing the Star VR headset indicate that this is a seated experience, but apparently no less visceral as a result. “…people say ‘immersive all the time, but they don’t really understand what it means. This is immersive.” says Tyler Sparks, producer at Starbreeze. “When you’re in there, the things you hear and see it’s almost indistinguishable from reality, which is a little intimidating.”
Overkill’s The Walking Dead experience, running on the Star VR headset will be playable at E3 in collaboration with Skybound and 505 Games, E3 visitors will be able to experience the StarVR-powered OVERKILL’s The Walking Dead demo version of the game. Those attending E3 need to head to booth #F5B.
We’re in LA this week for E3 and will be taking a look at Star VR and The Walking Dead experience very soon.