One of the big questions about this year's virtual reality landscape was answered yesterday, when the HTC Vive finally went on sale. Initially playing a distant second fiddle to Oculus' Rift headset, it pulled back a lot of ground thanks to launching with motion controllers and a more room-scale focused …
Read More »Palmer Luckey and Notch spar over Rift quality
Founder of Oculus VR and the original creator of Minecraft, Markus “Notch” Persson, have been going back and forth via Twitter, with the latter suggesting that Oculus has fallen behind its main VR headset rival, HTC with its Vive. While Luckey countered, the back and forth shows the heated landscape …
Read More »Be careful in VR – wife nearly takes a punch from gamer
If anyone remembers the early days of the Nintendo Wii, there were a lot of people posting images and video online of their Wiimotes buried in their TV screens, smashing mirrors and of course hitting other people. That problem is only exacerbated in VR, as you can't even see the …
Read More »Coca Cola design builds cardboard VR viewer from 12 pack
If the price of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift put you off virtual reality, what if all it cost you was the price of a 12 pack of Coke? That's something that Coca Cola has been experimenting with with a new type of packaging that lets you turn a 12 …
Read More »Valve launches SteamVR Portal performance test demo
Remember last year when screenshots and videos of Valve's Aperture Science/Portal virtual reality demo started popping up on the web? Well, now you can download that demo for yourself as Valve has just released it as a SteamVR performance testing tool. The tool is obviously designed to rate your system …
Read More »Sword Art Online virtual reality MMO is in development
Sword Art Online is soon going to be a virtual, reality if IBM has anything to do with it. The longtime technology firm announced that it is sponsoring the development of a VR MMO based around the manga/anime series known as Sword Art Online: The Beginning. It's listed with a …
Read More »DISTREE 2016 will focus on cool consumer tech
Plenty of the technology that will be available in stores across Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) for the rest of this year will depend on the outcome of more than 6,000 meetings that will take place at the DISTREE show in France at the end of February. Ahead of the …
Read More »HTC Vive to ship on 1st April, price to be announced Monday
It looks like HTC and Valve are currently preparing to dish out the last few details on the HTC Vive next week. We already knew that pre-orders were planned to go live on the 29th of February but as it turns out, HTC is apparently planning to announce the price and …
Read More »HTC to announce Vive price tag at MWC
It looks like we could be learning the official price tag of the Valve-backed HTC Vive virtual reality headset very soon. We already know that pre-orders are due to go live at the end of the month but apparently the price tag will be unveiled at the Mobile World Congress …
Read More »Nvidia financial report shows record year, sees growth in GPUs
Nvidia has announced its full-year financial results for the 2015/2016 fiscal year, showing that the GPU business is going strong and seeing growth while also setting company records. Revenue for the fiscal year topped the $5.01 billion mark, with $1.4 billion of that being made per quarter. This is up …
Read More »Chillblast showcase Skylake Fusion Krypton system
For each generation of components, you get the periphery, the mainstream and the sweet spot. According to Chillblast, this Mini-ITX system is perfect for Fallout 4 at maximum detail. Ben also told us that it's VR-ready for HTC and Oculus. We asked him to bring one into the KitGuru studio and …
Read More »Fox Sports signs five year virtual reality TV deal with NextVR
In a world's first, NextVR has just signed a five year contract with Fox Sports in the U.S., to allow for live broadcasting of virtual reality, 360 degree experiences to the public. Sporting events from across the United States will become available in the near future to anyone with a Samsung …
Read More »Leap Motion releases big ‘Orion’ update, finger tracking now possible
Although the big VR makers are working on hand-tracked controllers to allow us to bring our limbs into virtual worlds with us, Leap Motion has been developing a camera based solution and it's had some success over the past couple of years. The recent Orion update could be the biggest …
Read More »PlayStation VR to release in Autumn
Sony is set to bring Virtual Reality to consoles this year with the launch of PlayStation VR and while Sony has been pretty tight-lipped on things like pricing and a release date, GameStop's CEO, Paul Raines has jumped the gun and said that the PS4 headset will be launching in …
Read More »AMD lists its ‘Oculus Ready’ processors
Virtual reality is getting a huge push this year with plenty of VR or Oculus-ready PCs hitting the market over the next few months. While we have known the recommended specification for gaming on an Oculus Rift for a while, most places have been listing Intel CPUs. So now, AMD …
Read More »Oscar goody bags will come with Samsung Gear VRs this year
As much as the Oscars might have the occasional host that lampoons attending actors on yet another night of back-patting and hero worship, the goody bags must always be worth the effort. Often containing tens of thousands of pounds worth of freebies, the bags are legendary for their nauseas over-indulgence. …
Read More »Gabe Newell wins over developers with free HTC Vives
Valve founder Gabe Newell made a brief speech at this year's Vision Summit 2016 organised by Unity, in which he broke down some of the exciting announcements coming at the event. However he seemed particularly pumped about what he called his “Oprah moment,” in the latter half of the speech, …
Read More »Google working on a proper VR headset
Google has some success bringing cheap Virtual Reality to the intrigued masses last year with the DIY Google Cardboard but now it seems that the company wants to take the next step with a proper VR headset of its own set to launch sometime this year. Much like Cardboard and …
Read More »LiveLike shows the future of watching football in VR
We've seen what it would look like watching sports in augmented reality, but virtual reality is much closer to an affordable reality. That's why LiveLike has been putting its efforts into making watching football in VR a reality and it already looks fantastic, with your own personal box-seat, alternative camera …
Read More »Ant Simulator developer partners are in damage control mode
Yesterday the story broke that the Ant Simulator game would no longer be completed, because, according to the main developer of the game, his business partners spent all of the Kickstarter money for it on ‘liquor and strippers.' Now those partners have hit back, countering Eric Tereshinski's claims and suggesting …
Read More »Nintendo is also looking in to VR
If you have been following VR development over the years, then you may know that back in the 90's Nintendo tried to bring virtual reality to the masses with the Virtual Boy. The console didn't take off and things on the VR front went quiet for many years. However, the …
Read More »‘Adult’ VR controller appears on IndieGoGo – NSFW
Cover your mother's eyes before starting the video on this one ladies and gents, it's a little racy. The VirtuaDolls adult VR game controller is now available to pre-order on IndieGoGo, offering a touchable, feelable, real-world controller for certain adult ‘games' that will be available for virtual reality headsets when they …
Read More »NASA is working on a Mars VR experience with ex-Irrational staff
There are quite a few different games and experiences in the works that put the player or protagonist on Mars. You might credit The Martian with that, but I backed Lacuna Package back in 2013, so being interested in the red world is nothing new. Still, NASA hopes to continue …
Read More »HTC shows off how far the Vive has come during development
From duct tape prototype, right through the developer versions to the final product, we've seen the Oculus Rift from its inception through to its consumer version, but not so with rival VR headset, the HTC Vive. Fortunately though we have VR Product Specialist at HTC, Shen Ye, tweeting out images of …
Read More »Nvidia and AMD both show off prototype hardware at VRLA
VRLA kicked off over the weekend and it seems that both AMD and Nvidia showed up with prototype hardware. Nvidia went to the event armed with a Light Field Display headset while AMD and PC builder Falcon Northwest came to the event with PCs featuring the long-awaited dual-Fiji GPU. Nvidia's …
Read More »Elite: Dangerous won’t have official Oculus Rift support, will focus on SteamVR
Frontier, the studio behind the space sim, Elite: Dangerous, has confirmed that the game won't include official Oculus Rift support. However, the team will be focussing on supporting Steam VR and the HTC Vive headset. In a statement sent out to Eurogamer, Frontier said: “we've supported VR for years now …
Read More »Ubisoft partners with Elijah Wood studio for VR content
Ubisoft has big plans for virtual reality, with a number of games in the works that will be compatible with both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets. However it isn't stopping there, as it's just announced a partnership with Elijah Wood's production company, SpectreVision, most known for horror films …
Read More »Court rules lawsuit against Oculus founder to go ahead
Today a US judge ruled that a lawsuit filed against Oculus co-founder, Palmer Luckey, will go ahead. The lawsuit comes from a company known as Total Recall Technologies, which employed Luckey in 2011 to build a head-mounted display, prior to the Oculus Rift Kickstarter in 2012. Total Recall Technologies claims …
Read More »Derren Browne’s VR Thorpe Parke ride uses the HTC Vive
Although virtual reality has a lot of potential for giving us amazing gaming experiences in the home, there's also huge potential for more advanced entertainment at bespoke locations. Take the upcoming re-imagining of the ghost train in a partnership between Thorpe Park and Derren Brown, utilising virtual reality to enhance …
Read More »Google is now getting serious about VR
Google is looking to get involved in the Virtual Reality space as well, following on from the likes of Facebook/Oculus, Sony and HTC/Valve, Google will now be stepping up its efforts with a dedicated VR division, headed by the boss behind the Google Cardboard headset, which was the company's first …
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