HACKING XR

This past weekend I attended PAX East, a large video game convention located at the Boston Convention Center. VR is being increasingly popular at PAX and as a result the wait to play them grows as well, knowing this I sought to play at least 1 VR game. On Friday, on the Oculus Rift I played Robot Recall. Set in a future where robot and human coexist, however not all robot are flawless and run a rampage through the city. It’s your job to eliminate the defective bots. Overall t

Year: 2018 Directed by: David Liu and Rob Ruffler Featuring: Billy Corgan Developed by: Isobar, ViacomNEXT Platform: Tilt Brush, Unity Viewing System: Oculus Rift Aeronaut debuted at SXSW 2018, featuring the work of directors David Liu and Rob Ruffler. The experience featured a hologram of Billy Corgan's piano performance captured with Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture. A ghost-like figure of him sits at a grand piano playing while a 3D world created in Tilt Brush morphs alongs

Creators: Owlchemy Labs, Inc. Year of production: 2015 Viewing system: Playstation VR Job Simulator was the first VR “game” I have ever played . I only was exposed to VR projects that were still in the development phase through various science fairs and events, and all those experiences lasted less than a minute. I was also only exposed to non-interactive VR experiences, therefore Job Simulator was very exciting to play and interact with. I really liked the idea of using the

Creator: WEVR, Jake Rowell Year of production: April 5th, 2016 Platform: Oculus Rift Viewing System: Oculus Rift TheBlu is a room-scale VR experience that enables viewers to travel to a tropical coral reef, the wreckage of a ship and the depths of the ocean’s deepest caverns. The experience opens in the clear, blue water of a shallow ocean floor. I reach out, wondering if I can swim, but the scene isn’t navigable. Three images float before me, each representing one of the pro

Created by : Baobab Studio Year of production 2015 bservant/passive VR Viewing System: Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear Invasion is a short VR animation about the cutest and most benign creature, bunny, trying to prevent two aliens from taking over the world. It is produced by Eric Darnell, the director of Madagascar, on Oculus platform, and got selected to be presented in Cannes Le Marché du Film and Tribeca Film Festival in 2016. The story begins with space view narration by Ethan

Developed by: VirtualSpeech Year of Update: 2018 Platform: Oculus Gear VR Viewing System: Google Cardboard, Gear, Rift “VR is an excellent educational tool;” I’ve hear this say multiple times, but I have never had the chance to view it in action. VirtualSpeech- Public Speaking VR was my first in experiencing how VR can significantly help people in their lives. Typically, educational tools help you to learn a topic or to help memorize information but VirtualSpeech is a tool th

Creator: Penrose Studios Year of production 2016 Platform: Oculus Rift Viewing System: Oculus Rift Allumette is currently the longest fully animated VR experience, totalling 20 minutes. Penrose Studios, a company of “artists, engineers, and story-tellers” based in San Francisco that is “pushing the boundaries of virtual and augmented reality”, created this experience in 2016 and Eugene Chung, who used to work at Oculus VR, directed it. Allumette starts off in a totally dark e