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Category: virtual reality – Page 38

‘Townscaper’ Developer is Looking into VR, Reveals Early Prototype

Townscaper is a clever little town-building experience that gained notoriety back when it first launched on Steam Early Access in 2020. Now developer Oskar Stålberg has taken interest in VR design, showing a prototype of the pint-sized town creator running in VR.

Stålberg took to Twitter today to ask some design advice from the VR developer community, offering a glimpse at Townscaper’s quaint little models being plopped down and manipulated in VR.

Looking at basic VR design. Current idea is to use a point on a stick for interaction (rather than a raycast) so that you can build in the air. Those points also serve as grabbig points for grab-navigation. Feels tactile. pic.twitter.com/QvqoJzkn9y

HP Announces VR Headset Management Tool for Large-scale Deployments

HP appears to be strengthening its position as a provider of XR software for enterprise companies. Today it announced the release of a mobile device management (MDM) solution that’s designed to make deploying and managing large-scale VR easier.

Called HP ExtendXR, the software as a service (SaaS) was built in collaboration with ArborXR, an AR/VR device management company that came out of the VR arcade space in 2016.

HP says its collaboration with ArborXR is targeting companies who want to more easily scale their VR deployments, but also take advantage of HP’s global support and HP Horizon secure cloud infrastructure.

This ‘Half-Life: Alyx’ Mod is the John Wick VR Game We Always Wanted

Half-Life: Alyx (2020) has been in the wild for a little under two years now, and modders have been busy using it to make cool stuff—just like they did with the original Half-Life (1998). Enter ‘Gunman Contracts’, a multi-chapter mod that scores some serious style points while smartly leveraging Valve’s Source 2 for some John Wick-style action.

Gunman Contracts is set of free mods for Half-Life: Alyx created by Germany-based graphics designer ‘ANB_Seth’.

There’s already two individual chapters available on the Steam, ‘Chapter 1 – The Extraction’, which came out last September, and now ‘Chapter 2 – Art of War’, which released late last month.

VR’s Biggest Ad Yet Pushed ‘Meta Quest’ to a National Audience During the Super Bowl

It’s hard to find a single event with a bigger audience than the Super Bowl, which has made it one of the hottest pieces of advertising real estate anywhere. Meta went big this year with a 60 second ad spot that served to both promote VR to a national audience and solidify its rebranding from Oculus Quest 2 to Meta Quest 2.

If you were watching the Rams and Bengals duke it out during Super Bowl 56 on Sunday, you will also have been introduced to ‘Questy’s’ in an ad during the first quarter. The 60 second spot, which centered around a personified animatronic band that once played at a restaurant called Questy’s, was likely the single most expensive VR-related ad ever shown on TV to date.

The risks and rewards of investing in the metaverse real estate boom

There’s a land rush happening — and it’s not in New York City or Beverly Hills.

Early speculators, professional real estate agents, and celebrities are buying up land that doesn’t even exist in the real world. They are investing in metaverse real estate, a concept mind-boggling to most people.

So, what exactly is the metaverse? Technologists say the metaverse is the next level of the internet. It’s a virtual reality platform where people can play games, connect with friends, attend meetings, and even go to virtual concerts. Ever since Facebook announced it would change its name to Meta and focus on building its own digital world, interest in metaverse real estate skyrocketed.

Report: Microsoft HoloLens 3 is dead as its mixed-reality vision implodes

A report by Business Insider says Microsoft has scrapped plans for its own HoloLens 3 and has instead partnered with Samsung—but that no one really knows what’s going on.

Microsoft has reportedly scrapped its third-generation HoloLens, leaving the company’s “metaverse” plans in disarray.

According to a report from Business Insider, Microsoft killed off the HoloLens 3 in 2021, shifting to a planned device with Samsung instead. The problem? According to the publication, the company’s mixed-reality/augmented reality/virtual-reality division isn’t sure what it plans to do. That’s resulted in employees leaving for Meta and other companies instead.

The company told BI that it remains committed to HoloLens and future HoloLens development. It said the same to PCWorld in a statement. “Microsoft HoloLens remains a critical part of our plans for emerging categories like mixed reality and the metaverse,” the company said. “We remain committed to HoloLens and future HoloLens development.”

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