One of the finest virtual reality experiences around has just got a whole lot cheaper as Frontier Developments joins the holiday sale madness and slashes the price of it’s space epic Elite:Dangerous by 67% to just £9.99 ($15).
Matthew Terndrup is a virtual reality journalist and content creator who’s interested in exploring how the combination of psychedelics & virtual reality can help the process of self-discovery. Matt traces the influence that psychedelics have had in helping to shape key technological innovators including the inventor of the mouse Douglas Engelbart as well as Steve Jobs. Matt has been investigating the history of VR and psychedelics, and has found that there are indeed some interesting connections. He talks about some of the VR experiments by psychonauts Terrence McKenna and Timothy Leary, as well as some of the potentials for using psychedelics for creative inspiration and the amplification of psychedelic experiences.
Two up-and-coming VR development teams behind two extremely promising made-for-VR games have relvealed they are to team up. Psytec Games, makers of Crystal Rift, has announced that the duo behind Windlands, a first person VR grappling hook action title, are to join the company.
If you’ve gotten a hold of a Gear VR recently, then you’ve probably already downloaded near everything in the store on your visual buffet through the first consumer-ready virtual reality headset. If you’re celebrating Thanksgiving with a family get-together, the right set of apps and a few hard-won tactics will let you show everyone why you’ve gone crazy for VR—and why they should too.
Domna Banakou is a Ph.D. student studying with Mel Slater at the Event Lab in Barcelona, Spain. She’s been researching different aspects of the virtual body ownership illusion in order to investigate the short-term and long-term impacts of embodying virtual avatars which have different qualities than your physical body. Specifically, she found that embodying the avatar with childlike proportions can result in an overestimation of the sizes of virtual objects. She also has found that it’s possible to create the illusion of attributing things that appear to be coming from your avatar, but that you hadn’t actually said. There are a number of potential implications for how the virtual body ownership illusion through VR can alter our sense of self and identity, and Mel Slater’s Event Lab is on the forefront of investigating these questions.
Most of my regular listeners know that I have recently taken a job in the architectural visualization world. I have moved to Seattle to work for a company called Studio 216, and am very thankful for the opportunities provided to me. In this Thanksgiving episode, I talk to my boss, Boaz Ashkenazy, about how Studio 216 is using VR to lead the arch vis world into the future.
Whilst all of geekdom simmers with hot anticipation awaiting a brand new entry in the Star Wars movie franchise, ILMxLabs and Google are about to drive the hype further with a new virtual reality experience, based on Star Wars:The Force Awakens – and it’s out soon!
Here we go again. A decade ago, it was online video that changed everything. Now virtual reality is set to change the world once more. As we approach the Q1 2016 Oculus Rift release date, you can literally see and feel the excitement build on a weekly basis.
Meso VR, an educational project created by Dallas based studio Eightfold VR, introduces you to the world of the Maya by taking you back to 900AD to see one of the ruins brought to life.
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson has a bold vision for CCP with the mission statement “To create virtual worlds more meaningful that real life.” He believes that after someone’s basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are met, then humans will always be searching for ways to bring more meaning and self-actualization in their lives. A lot of those current methods are through consuming physical objects that require a lot of natural resources to produce. Hilmar’s long-term vision is for virtual world’s like CCP’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game of EVE Online to be able to satisfy this human search for meaning through virtual objects and experiences that are more sustainable in the long-run.
Figment VR, a virtual reality smartphone adapter created by Quantum Bakery LLC, has passed its $75,000 Kickstarter funding goal in just 7 days.
Nick Ochoa is a co-founder of UploadVR, and he was recently at the VRX Virtual Reality Intelligence conference hosting a panel on social VR. Nick talks about of his open questions about social VR such as what does it mean to be a social VR app, and where is social VR going when there could hundreds of applications that have a social aspect to them. He’s found some of the lightweight social VR experiences like Oculus Social Alpha to be some of the most compelling, but that there hasn’t been an experience that he feels really motivated to have with his friends yet beyond sharing some entertainment of movie experiences together. He talks about the importance of audio in social VR, as well as how avatars are used as well as whether the experience will be hosted on a private servers or be open and distributed on the open web like an approach that High Fidelity and JanusVR are taking. Finally, he sees that part of the ultimate potential of virtual reality is to be able to cultivate experiences of empathy, and he highly recommends checking out the work of Chris Milk and VRSE in that realm.
With Samsung’s mobile Gear VR headset hitting stores in time for the holidays, a deluge of new VR users is on the way. If you’re among them, here’s three quick warnings you should heed.
Tyler Hurd, creator of the infamous BUTTS: The VR Experience, is working on a new project in collaboration with VR production studio WEVR, Road to VR has learned.
