We knew a PC adapter for PlayStation’s VR2 headset was on the way, and it looked to be fairly soon - and we were right! Sony’s shiniest virtual reality offering is now confirmed to be adding official PC support via a nifty wired adapter at the start of August. It’ll cost £50/$60 - but whether it’s worth the price given a number of key features will be missing is another question entirely...
]]>Valve have launched the SteamVR 1.23 update, and to mark the occasion, they’re letting you… look at high-quality scanned models of genuinely deceased insects? That they found? I guess???
Key technical improvements to SteamVR include multiple crash fixes, smoother controller animations and new extension support for the OpenXR platform; the full patch notes are on Steam. But the update also adds a new SteamVR Home setting that – and I quote, with emphasis Valve’s - "showcases CT scans of actual dead bugs we found lying on the ground outside our office." See? The Valve Index isn’t just for playing Half-Life Alyx, eh.
]]>Valve are staging their first Steam VR Fest starting on July 18th. Gabe and friends don’t seem to have made much song and dance about the event yet, with details emerging today via the company’s Steamworks site. The festival promises discounts, demos and details of upcoming releases from the giddy world of virtual reality.
]]>If you bought a VR kit for your Mac and planned on using SteamVR, then you are out of luck. Valve are ending VR support for MacOS, so they can "focus on Windows and Linux". Mackers can still access legacy builds, but this means no more improvements, and no more bug-quashing.
There are ways to jack in without using SteamVR, but still. Ain't that a kick in the teeth.
]]>Half-Life: Alyx is so close I've started rearranging furniture in my house so I'll have more space to play it. I don't need to wait any longer if I want to visit a couple of the game's environments with my headset, however. Last night, Valve released two areas from HL: Alyx for use in SteamVR Home - that's the staging area you appear inside when you first load SteamVR, before you choose what game you're going to play. I've had a wander around a City 17 backalley, gazed up at the unfinished Citadel, and am more ready for the game than ever.
]]>At least half of the joy of No Man's Sky is soaking in its strange alien landscapes that its algorithms have generated for you. I reckon that sightseeing should be all the more impressive in virtual reality. During a Sony live-stream, Hello Games unveiled one more feature of their upcoming free expansion, Beyond - full VR support. Players with existing saves can put on a pair of space-goggles and immediately go virtual, and even play with other people online whether or not they have expensive headsets, too. Take a look at the new VR mode with its new, tactile controls below.
]]>It's a little-known fact that when Justin Timberlake told Mark Zuckerberg "A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars," he was talking about how expensive a good VR PC should be. Just jokes, there, some laugharoonies. But for plain ol' millionaires whose VR experiences are bumpy, a little more help is coming. Valve have introduced a 'Motion Smoothing' beta feature to SteamVR, which should let slower PCs jack in with less trouble. Similar to Oculus's Asynchronous Spacewarp tech and SteamVR's own Asynchronous Reprojection, it works by sometimes estimating new frames rather than properly rendering them. Estimates aren't as pretty, but are smoother than the alternative.
]]>VR treadmills are possibly one of the daftest things on the planet. Yes, they sort of avoid that classic virtual reality hazard of tripping over headset cables and falling flat on your face, offering a way for TRUE VR immersion seekers to feel like they're really 'in the game', so to speak, but a) they're crazy expensive, b) take up mountains of room, and c) you still look like an utter numpty running about on a treadmill with a pair of VR goggles strapped to your forehead.
Cybershoes' eponymous VR sandals, on the other hand, will still make you look like a bit of a numpty, but at least these let you run around virtual environments from the comfort of your own spinny chair, and are set to cost a heck of a lost less than their big, bulky rivals when they eventually launch in early 2019. Here's how I got on after trying out a pair for myself at Gamescom last month.
]]>With every mega-corporation and their mega-dog throwing fat sacks of cash at Virtual Reality right now, and a multitude of headsets available, it's easy to forget that nobody really has any idea what they're doing right now. While consensus on how to advance headset technology seems to be fairly universal, every company seems to have their own idea of how to control things in virtual space. Valve's stopgap solution until folks can agree on stuff is SteamVR Input, a unified control-binding system for (quelle surprise) SteamVR.
]]>Valve's new game Artifact has a vague release window of 2018, but thanks to a bit of jealousy on Gabe Newell's part it won't be the only Valve game we can look forward to in the next few years. Who do we have to thank for this? Nintendo.
]]>A short while ago, I got to stick my sweaty face into HTC's second generation PC VR headset, the Vive Pro, which was on show in the UK for the first time. The headset boasts a higher resolution and OLED displays, among other upgrades, and so the question is whether or not this can overcome VR's visual shortcomings and give the medium a much-needed second wind.
Well, it's definitely a big improvement - but that's also something of a double-edged sword.
]]>Arriving late to virtual reality, Microsoft have rebranded it Windows Mixed Reality et voila, the revolution will begin anew on October 17th. Microsoft have announced that Mixed Reality support will hit Windows 10 in the Fall Creators Update on that day, launching their VR initiative alongside headsets from several companies. Windows Mixed Reality is a term that supposedly will one day encompass both virtual reality and augmented reality (where cyberbits interact with the real world before our eyes), but the launch lineup is all VR headsets starting around £250. They're not regular cybergoggs, mind, bearing lower system requirements and including built-in sensors that mean you don't need to set up external sensors for motion controllers. And it's named Mixed Reality, so it's clearly different.
]]>As Adult Swim gears up for the third season of Rick and Morty, characters from Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s anarchic sci-fi cartoon will be appearing in a slew of games, including Rocket League [official site].
]]>Lately there's been no small amount of worry that folk who pre-ordered Valve & HTC's future-goggles weren't likely to get them at the predicted time - which, for the first-wave of adopters, should be any day now. With reports of payments being automatically cancelled, deliveries being delayed and express shipping add-ons defaulting back to economy, folk were getting shaky - especially as the more definite delays to Oculus Rift shipments had set something of a precedent. The future might be here, but getting it into a cardboard box and onto a lorry is another matter entirely, it seems.
HTC have now broken cover about the problems, attempting to clear things up and reassure people that they're not looking at major delays.
]]>Today marks the release of the HTC Vive [official site] virtual reality headset and associated games. That means headsets are starting to be shipped and should arrive with pre-order-ers soon. We have imprisoned Alec in virtual reality to play everything and see what happens/write reviews but while he does that I would like to point out a glaring inaccuracy on the dedicated Vive website before pointing you to all of our Helpful Insights and so forth.
The cat.
Look at this cat:
]]>We already knew that Valve was planning something called Steam Desktop Theater, in which non-VR games could be used within their Vive headset (and, indeed, any other headsets which end up supporting the SteamVR APIs), but I wasn't expecting to see it until the first giant boxes full of matte-black hardware arrived at pre-orderers' houses.
Turns out that Valve snuck out a beta update to Steam over the weekend, part of which was an early version of Desktop Theater. In like Flynn, me. The good news: it works. The bad news: I'm now more certain than ever that the hardware needs another generation or two before it's truly ready for the world.
]]>Are you sold on VR yet? While there are a few upcoming games I think look spectacular - such as Universe Sandbox 2 - not to mention a few that I've played and have enjoyed, I'm not completely there yet myself. Valve's in-development SteamVR Desktop Theatre Mode isn't quite the golden ticket to bypassing my skepticism, however it does seem pretty interesting. Essentially, it's a virtual theater that lets you play standard, non-VR games on an enlarged, encompassing display.
]]>2016 is the year when the wealthy shall ascend into virtual reality, leaving the rest of us behind to refill their tubes of nutrient paste, massage their feet, and empty their buckets. The Oculus Rift is launching in March for $600/£500, while the HTC Vive coming in April for $800 (plus, probably, tax and shipping), and they demand a hefty PC to power 'em too. Our lad Jeremy has talked about the hardware needed for cybergoggles but now there's a simple way to test if your hogbox is up to it.
Valve have released the SteamVR Performance Test, a program which shows some Portal-y scenes to rate your performance.
]]>It wasn't that many months ago that I had fondly but confidently dreamed I would be spending Christmas in a VR wonderland. Those tykes at Valve seem always able to convince me that this time, this time they're going to meet a mooted release date. Of course they're not going to! It is completely, absolutely their thing to not do it! Would they even still be Valve if they did?
In fairness, their Steam VR headset, the Vive, is a partnership with HTC, who are doing the heavy lifting in terms of manufacturing, and it's them who've finally broken cover and admitted that the thing definitely won't be with us until next year. DAMMIT.
]]>Alec and Graham have both had a go on SteamVR, aka the HTC Vive (as described here and here). Yes, aren't they glorious, beautiful, shining examples of humanity? You can touch them if you like. No, not there. And not for that long. What are you.. ew, no, no, get off.
Actually, just stand over there and avert your eyes while they have a big old natter about what worked best, what might go wrong in practice, where this might all lead to, whether this is basically MAGIC, Valve vs Oculus and whether the hell we should let children use this thing.
]]>Through a series of fortunate events, I found myself in a backroom at EGX Rezzed last week, wearing a plastic box on my face, clutching a wand-shaped controller in each hand and walking around digital worlds. I was trying out SteamVR, aka the HTC Vive, and it was... well, in the longer term I need to go and have a hard think about how to meaningfully convey experiences* with essentially involve perceiving new realities. For now, I'll be merely practical.
]]>I've used the Oculus Rift DK1, HD and DK2 for hours and hours and enjoyed my time with each of them immensely, but on each occasion, I'd feel some sense of relief upon taking the headset off. Relief that my head could cool down, relief my eyes could relax, relief that I hadn't thrown up.
When my twenty minutes with Valve and HTC's Vive came to an end, I felt no relief. Instead, I only felt disappointed that I couldn't continue exploring the 3D painting demo or playing with the specially-designed Portal 2 vignette.
]]>"There were once places beyond reach," explains the chap hired to provide grandiose gravelly vocals on the overblown launch video for Valve's virtual reality system, Vive.
"Sights unseen," he adds as some guy dramatically takes an entire cosmic dustcloud to the face. "They called to us and let us hear. A world within ours - wild and without end. Welcome to a new reality."
That new reality involves a slightly farty-sounding bottle of hot sauce being shaken over a virtual reality steak.
]]>...Please don't do these sorts of things on a weekend, big companies. My heart can't take it.
So: the 'Vive!' The first time Steam VR has broken cover! A hardware partnership between Valve and HTC! Dual 1200 x 1080 displays with a 90 frames per second refresh rate! All kinds of apparently super-precise head-tracking with no jitter! But that's not the half of it. Add in a couple of 'Steam VR Base Stations' and you get to walk around, with the setup tracking your location. I.e. in theory you get to actually walk around a pretend world.
And out by this Christmas. Good lord. Trailer thingy below.
]]>Good news for people who like strapping things to their faces: Valve are bringing a new piece of virtual reality hardware to GDC next week.
]]>Years of only seeing the "VR" suffix in fiction has made it feel futuristic and unreal, but now it's popping up everywhere. Valve have just quietly slipped support for virtual reality into Steam, letting you use their Big Picture interface while wearing a headset. It's called SteamVR of course, and it's in beta.
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