Just like we did with CES 2015, I will be joined by members of the Road to VR team each night for a recap of the days events at GDC 2015. In this first recap episode, I am joined by Ben Lang and Scott Hayden to talk about their experiences and findings.

Rev VR Podcast: GDC 2015 Recap – Day 1

Unreal comes out yesterday to reveal that it is now a free engine, which made several people exclaim, “Your move, Unity.” Today, Unity made their move and announced Unity 5 is free as well, making indie devs all around the world squeal in excitement. With both major engines free and offering native support for VR, there is no longer an excuse for not dabbling in the dev world.

Scott attended a talk about “Game Narrative in VR” given by Rob Morgan which touched on AI, and interaction. We need to give our NPCs a new life and generate a social environment that our brain will appreciate.

Next up is Sony’s 2015 Morpheus prototype. They announced a 1080p RGB OLED display, running up to 120hZ, and a release date in Q2 2016. Loads of big news. Ben had a chance to try out their latest prototype and had good things to say about it. Be sure to look for his full write up on Road to VR.

Playful Corp’s Lucky’s Tale was showing off the latest iteration of their heavily anticipated title. They seemed to be disappointed that Oculus has not gotten their consumer product out, and that may be a contributing factor to the absence of Lucky’s Tale from the VR space. I’m sure many devs in the VR community can appreciate that feeling.

Scott attended the launch party for Perception Neuron today. Launch meaning that shipping is going to take place in a few weeks, so VR Kickstarter backers everywhere can start anticipating the arrival of at least one of their many investments.

Nvidia announced… nothing for VR. After a long, dry presentation that had nothing to do with virtual reality, Ben finally left the event, having live blogged the entire thing. Rumors of an Nvidia VR device ended up simply being bad info. Oh well.

Another big day coming Wednesday, and our boys will hit the showroom floor to bring us all of the biggest news in the VR space.

Stay tuned for more recaps from GDC 2015.

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Reverend Kyle
  • Vern_S

    You were slightly mistaken on the royalties and licensing for Unreal and Unity. Here are the tearms to clarify for everyone.

    For Unreal Engine 4 it’s free with this caveat;
    “When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter.”

    For Unity 5 it is free with the following caveats;
    “Unity Personal (including the iOS and Android platform deployment options) may not be used by:

    a Commercial Entity that has either: (a) reached annual gross revenues in excess of US$100,000, or (b) raised funds (including but not limited to crowdfunding) in excess of US$100,000, in each case during the most recently completed fiscal year;
    a Non-Commercial Entity with a total annual budget in excess of US$100,000 (for the entire Non-Commercial Entity (not just a department)) for the most recently completed fiscal year; or
    an individual (not acting on behalf of a Legal Entity) or a Sole Proprietor that has reached annual gross revenues in excess of US$100,000 from its use of the Software during the most recently completed fiscal year, which does not include any income earned by that individual which is unrelated to its use of the Software.”

    So if you hit the $100k mark they require you to buy Unity Pro along with iOS and/or Android Pro if that is your market.

  • AJ@VRSFX

    I wasn’t able to get to GDC until tomorrow, but I ran into a Unity team member yesterday morning at Peet’s Coffee and he told me the news. Full-featured PBR-ready engines at our fingertips at no cost? Christmas ain’t got nothin’ on GDC.