Wireless glove adds touch to VR video games
While Oculus, Valve, Samsung and HTC are all looking to captialize on the resurgence of VR, their solutions all focus on what we can see and hear. That’s more than enough to immerse you in a virtual world, but what if you want to interact with the objects within them? Some companies have already taken on the challenge, but researchers at RICE University have created a new haptic glove that uses air to inflate bladders underneath your fingers to offer a real sense of touch.
Although it’s still in early development, the Hands Omni glove is intended for gamers. In fact, Virtuix, the company behind the crazy Virtuix Omni virtual reality treadmill, is sponsoring the project with a view to making it a widely available gaming peripheral. These agreements mean its developers can’t reveal exactly how the wireless glove works, but its developers are hopeful that developers will be able to implement support for it into games and other VR projects in the future.
Filed under: Gaming, Wearables, HD
Via: Slashgear
Source: RICE University
One of eSports’ biggest stars retires with repetitive strain injury
If you’re into eSports, then it’s highly likely that you would have heard of Hai Lam. He’s best known as the Mid Laner and captain of Cloud9, which is regarded as the best US eSports team for the popular online multiplayer game League of Legends. Nonetheless, just less than a week after his team finished second in the North American Championship Series, Cloud9’s shotcaller has announced he’s getting out of the game. Like football players are forced to retire when their knees give out, a persistent wrist injury means Lam can no longer mix it with other A-list players on the big stage.
In a blog post on the Cloud9 website, Lam explained his reasons for retirement, noting that his wrist injury made it hard to keep up with his teammates and deliver on a tournament level. In the world of eSports, professional gamers are considered athletes, thanks to their crushing training regimens and busy tournament schedules, so to hear of a big-game player being forced to retire due to injury shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
It’s not been a particularly good year for Cloud9. After a poor showing in North America’s fully professional League of Legends league last year and an earlier than expected knockout in the 2014 World Championships in Korea, the team has found it difficult to replicate past successes. Its recent second place finish means the team might not even make the 2015 World Championships this fall. Lam says that teammates also lost confidence in his playing ability during that time, which contributed to his decision.
Although he won’t now figure as one of Cloud9’s major players, Lam isn’t going far. He’ll now enjoy the role of “Chief Gaming Officer,” helping to recruit and mentor new players as well as maintaining the group’s partnerships (which already include HTC).
http://www.gamespot.com/videos/embed/6424574/
Via: Kotaku
Source: Cloud9
Kojima and del Toro’s ‘Silent Hills’ is not going to happen
Silent Hills, at least as it was originally conceived, is no more. The next chapter of the once-popular horror series had built considerable hype off the back of a fantastic playable teaser, P.T., which was released last summer. When solved the teaser offered up a trailer for a new Silent Hill game, revealing that Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus were all on board. According to both del Toro and Reedus, that is no longer the case. At the San Francisco International Film Festival, del Toro was quoted as saying that his collaboration with Kojima is “not gonna happen.” Norman Reedus later tweeted an article reporting the game is canceled, adding he’s “super bummed” about the news, and Konami has confirmed to Eurogamer that its contract period with the actor has “expired.”
The hows and whys of the game’s cancelation are unknown, but Kojima is in the midst of an extremely messy breakup with long-term publisher Konami. The rift between Kojima Productions and Konami (which owns the studio) will apparently lead to the designer exiting the company after the completion of Metal Gear Solid 5. Although Silent Hills looks to be a casualty of the spat, Konami says it will continue the Silent Hill series, just as it pledged to continue developing Metal Gear Solid games without Kojima.
Incidentally, if you own a PS4 and haven’t played P.T., your time to do so is limited. It’s a free download, and a lot fun (so long as your idea of fun involves being terrified), but it’ll be removed from the PlayStation Store on April 29th.
Filed under: Gaming
Source: Konami (Eurogamer)
Interactive exhibit honors women in game development
There’s a new interactive video game exhibit at The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE) in California, and it’s not showing off just any game-related material. No, it’s putting a spotlight on the accomplishments female game developers — eight women who worked on influential titles, in particular. Those include Roberta Williams (King’s Quest), Yoko Shimomura (Street Fighter III) and Kim Swift (Portal). According to the museum’s announcement, the exhibit aims to raise awareness about women’s contributions to the industry, as they can be easy to overlook in a male-dominated field. “Women are not some oddity in the video game industry,” MADE founder Alex Handy told Kill Screen. “We hope this exhibit helps to highlight that fact for the next generation of game developers.” The exhibit has been open since the 12th and will run throughout the summer.
Filed under: Gaming
Via: Kill Screen
‘Gears of War’ looks like the next game to get an Xbox One remaster
Like it or not, ports of classic games to the latest consoles are still all the rage… and Microsoft appears eager to cash in on the trend. Both Kotaku and Polygon report that Microsoft, Black Tusk Studios and Dirty Bomb‘s Splash Damage are working on a remastered Xbox One version of at least the first Gears of War game. It’s not certain just how far this update to the cover-based shooter will go, but it supposedly includes both improved in-game graphics (such as sharper textures and improved lighting) and “reworked cutscenes” courtesy of animation studio Plastic Wax. This sadly wouldn’t be a genuinely new game, then, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the leaks are on the mark. Gears of War was one of the big money-makers for the Xbox 360 in the console’s heyday, and it’d likely attract plenty of gamers with fond memories of blasting Locust drones.
‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 3’ is fast, frantic and adds a co-op campaign
Developer Treyarch has a good record of keeping things fresh in Call of Duty. The company started working on the franchise back in 2005. With World at War it added zombies, Black Ops went to Vietnam, Black Ops 2 traversed time and added branching narratives. For its next installment, Treyarch is, once again, trying something new. Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 (set to arrive November 6 on PC, Xbox One and PS4) brings campaign co-op to the franchise for the first time. The entire campaign will be playable co-operatively by up to four players online (or two players locally). The addition of up to three campaign players meant building bigger combat arenas, better AI, and adding social features for showing off medals and achievements.
“This Call of Duty campaign is all about choice. Your investment in your character is going to mean something more than it ever has before in any Call of Duty game,” Studio Head Mark Lamia says. He hopes that with upgradeable abilities and the opportunity to play campaign missions with friends will lead to more replayability in the game’s narrative-driven mode. “Narratively? It’s just mind fuckery,” Lamia laughs, saying he wants to keep a shroud of mystery around the story in Black Ops 3. What is known is the campaign will continue the story of Black Ops 2, in a near-future war where soldiers have begun to augment their bodies to become more lethal killing machines.
For the first time in the franchise’s history, the campaign’s protagonist is fully customizable. In addition to upgrading abilities, changing your character’s appearance and tweaking weapons, players can pick the gender of their Call of Duty hero. “It’s not just a female head on a male body. It’s a different set of animations for the entire game,” Lamia says. Character interaction will even differ based on the protagonist’s gender. “We knew we were going to do fully unique male, fully unique female for all scenes and all the customization that goes for both. Thank God for Blu-ray, right?” Campaign Director and Senior Executive Producer, Jason Blundell, jokes, adding the game’s protagonist is fully voiced regardless of gender.
There are more tricks up Treyarch’s sleeve for its sixth Call of Duty title. While much of the game is still “classified,” Lamia was quick to tease the game’s core features during a day-long reveal meeting at its Santa Monica studio. For example, the return of Zombies mode, which will include a dedicated progression system and be more accessible to players that found previous iterations too difficult.
Game Design Director, David Vonderhaar, says there is renewed focus on “winding the combat loop extremely tight” for the multiplayer mode in Black Ops 3. The loop, as he calls it, refers to continuous combat action. Anything that slows down the pace of action has been deleted, Vonderhaar says.
The first major shift is the removal of sprint limitations. While unlimited sprint had been a special elite upgrade in the past, it is now the norm for all. Jumping over objects has been overhauled as well, as a player moves toward cover they will now automatically mantle over it regardless of the angle (whether the cover be in front, behind or to the side) without relinquishing weapon control. You can aim down sights as you move over objects now. Traversal, Vonderhaar says, can cut into what he calls “Call of Duty time.” You don’t have time to run up to a piece of cover, look down, press a button to vault and make it to the other side. In game, that motion takes split seconds, but it only takes split seconds to be killed.
“Thrust-assisted jump” is the second major change in Treyarch’s Call of Duty multiplayer overhaul. A slow-burning meter tracks Black Ops 3’s thruster, which allows players to gain altitude and boost in any direction. The thrusters here feel more natural than the sudden momentum changes found in Advanced Warfare.
Power sliding is another new addition. The slide’s boost of speed makes movement far faster than before, while never taking weapon or equipment control away from the player. You could, for example, slide around the corner staring down the sights of a sniper rifle for a devious trick shot.
Following the lead of other recent shooters, such as Titanfall, Black Ops 3 adds wall running. It too maintains the game’s philosophy of never taking control away from players. As you run across walls you still have full access to your weapons (hip-fire or aiming down the sights) and equipment (you can plant explosives on the wall as you run across them).
The last addition is some what puzzling: Swimming. Nobody was clamoring for the ability to backstroke through a round of Call of Duty, but it does add another layer to the complex game world. Movement underwater is slightly slower, but you still maintain complete control of your weapons and other equipment. Since only one of the maps available during our demo had an underwater component, it’s tough to judge whether it will drastically affect gameplay.
Timing of the new traversal options — chaining an unlimited sprint, into a power slide around a corner, into a thrust jump toward a wall, and then zigzagging through structures — took less time to get used to than you’d think. These are fundamental changes to the speed and pacing of way Call of Duty matches progress, adding a new sense of complexity to both strategy and danger. Vonderhaar says the new features allowed Treyarch to reexamine how it creates multiplayer maps. Now there are elevated plateaus to reach with boosts, underground canals to fight over while swimming, dangerous paths to wall run in between.
There are still a handful of familiar features found within Black Ops 3’s multiplayer. Player and weapon progression is still the driving force behind multiplayer replayability. Black Ops 3 attempts a few new wrinkles, including a gunsmith mode, which allows players to build unique-looking weapons in an attempt to give some identity to the inanimate objects.
Treyarch is also introducing Specialists. Black Ops 3 Specialists are pre-set characters in multiplayer with a unique name and backstory. Of the nine that will be available in the game, Treyarch revealed four. Each character offers a unique play style and has a devastating special weapon, such as the Outrider’s compound bow, and an ability, like Ruin’s speed boost. However, players can only bring either the weapon or special ability into combat.
“I think one of the things that makes Call of Duty, year after year, interesting and exciting is [each game in the franchise is] not the same. I mean, there could be things that are the same but each team has the ability to drive its own vision,” Lamia says. Even though Lamia emphatically proclaims Black Ops 3 is “the deepest and richest Call of Duty ever,” Treyarch is eager to prove it. For the first time since 2008’s World at War, Activision will give players an opportunity to beta test Call of Duty. The publisher says the beta will be available to pre-order customers on PC, Xbox One and PS4 — though it wouldn’t confirm any timed exclusivity for Xbox One owners, which is generally how franchise content is distributed.
“This being our third Black Ops game, we like to look at this as ‘the best of everything’ we’ve had, going back even a decade,” Lamia says. “That’s what Black Ops 3 is all about.”
Filed under: Gaming
The Early Word On Apple Watch Gaming
Apple Watch is available and selling like crazy, and we’ve already revealed a list of must-have apps for the device, compiled by Apple itself. The list featured some fairly standard utilities and a few apps specifically useful for the small wearable device, but curiously absent was the mention of any sort of gaming on Apple Watch.
For those who never expected game developers to bother adapting titles to fit on the Apple Watch’s tiny screen, this probably isn’t a surprise. However, the exclusion of games from the list of essential apps wasn’t actually due to the fact that there aren’t any. There just isn’t a huge selection just yet. The fact is, developers are making efforts to come up with new ideas and shrunken versions of existing games that users will want to play on the watch. In a matter of time, there will likely be hundreds of gaming titles to choose from.
But for now, here’s a look at some of the most interesting gaming concepts we’re reading about for the Apple Watch.
Probably the most interesting game to have been announced is Runeblade, an upcoming title from Everywear Games that’s making a bold effort to define RPG gaming for wearable tech devices. It looks to be a fairly standard RPG, set in a fantasy world and putting players in the role of the “High Priestess” out to save the land from various evil characters. But according to Touch Arcade, the game is designed to be played only in 10-15 second bursts. From the sound of things, attacks require recharging time. Delays of this nature will cause players to open up the game, make a move, and then simply wait a while before playing the game again. Whether or not this will work with gamers remains to be seen, but it’s certainly an interesting way to adapt an RPG for a watch.
There have also been some light mentions of potential casino gaming (for fake money of course), with an article in Mac World claiming that Robot 5 Studios is working on a Blackjack Mini experience for the watch. This is a good idea in that it would reach an extremely large market of card and casino gamers. However, one wonders how much the experience has to be cut down in order to work for a phone, particularly given that online casinos have made the experience bigger—not smaller—in recent years. Many digital blackjack games involve player graphics and background settings. At the InterCasino platform, players can actually join blackjack games with live video dealers. Even the simpler options at this site show graphics of entire card tables with chip stacks, opponent positions, dealer cards. This contrast presents an interesting question with regard to casino games on the Apple Watch, and likely other genres as well: will players accept simplified versions of games when online sites and mobile apps have been seeking to make more involved versions?
Another interesting idea making the rounds in conversations about Apple Watch gaming is Spy_Watch, a brilliant idea that got a brief write-up from Kotaku. Developed by Bossa Studios, the game seeks to capitalize on the basic gadget appeal of a smart watch as it relates to spy films like those in the James Bond franchise. Its objective is to basically use your watch to control a secret agent, as if you’re the boss running missions from your wrist. We’ll have to wait and see how well the game performs, but it’s a fascinating concept that could open the door to a whole new genre if it’s successful.
And finally, there’s puzzle gaming, which appears to be the main focus of developers delving into Apple Watch entertainment. USA Today did a write-up of early gaming titles to expect for the device, and the majority of them can be classified in the puzzle genre: LetterPad (a letter-based puzzle game), Rules! (a memory game), BoxPop (something USA Today compares to chess), Trivia Crack (a smartphone trivia game being adapted to the watch), and Peak (a brain training game), just to name a few. At this stage, it appears developers have decided that these sorts of games may be the easiest to produce for the watch’s small screen.
That’s about it, for now. There are a few other titles that have been announced, but these are the ones that should define the early stages of game development for the Apple Watch. Seeing which games stick, and where developers go from here, should be fascinating.
Only selfies can kill the bad guys in this game
Okay, “bad guys” is a bit of an exaggeration: The green boxes you have to kill in Selfie Assault don’t really do anything but stay perfectly still. You’d have to eliminate them all to conquer the game, though — as its tag line says: “Only cameras can see them. Only selfies can kill them. No filter. No mercy.” In Selfie Assault, developed by mint for the Ludum Dare 32 game jam, you go around in a white room, finding enemy green boxes through a virtual phone screen. To make them go away, you’d have to take a selfie with them in the picture. The photo’s angle and your position in the selfies don’t matter, so you can think up of crazy poses and be creative.
It’s not exactly a heart-thumping shooting game, but you have to give the devs props for both making fun of selfies and letting those fond of taking them practice while playing. As for those harmless “enemies,” well, just imagine they’re silently waiting for a chance to conquer the world if that makes you feel better.
Via: Kill Screen
Source: Ludum Dare
How cheap VR helped a Stanford professor bring his dream to Tribeca
Last year, the Tribeca Film Festival began highlighting new mediums being used in storytelling, and that trend has translated over to 2015. Virtual reality is, naturally, a big part of this movement, as filmmakers start creating more content for consumer-grade devices like the Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard. This is why the current edition of the event is hosting Stanford’s Virtual Human Virtual Interaction Lab, a venture started in 2003 by Jeremy Bailenson, who’s a professor at the university and has been working on digital human representation since 1999. It features a set of VR experiences that attendees can check out, all with the same goal of transporting you into another reality.
Nowadays, that mission is simplified by the myriad companies investing in the space — including Facebook with Oculus VR, Google, Samsung and, most recently, HTC and Valve. “We used to have a $40,000 headset that couldn’t leave the lab, with thousands of wires on it,” Bailenson says, emphasizing how much easier it is to use Oculus hardware as part of the workflow. The fact that he no longer has to rely on a stationary, ridiculously expensive headset is extremely valuable. If he did, bringing his latest work to the Tribeca Film Festival, roughly 3,000 miles away from home, simply wouldn’t have been possible.
Jeremy Bailenson during a Tribeca Film Festival panel.
So you can not only be the Stanford University quarterback in a training session, but also travel as a marine biologist to the bottom of the sea and even fly like a superhero. Or you can walk in someone else’s shoes, which is slightly similar to The Machine to be Another experience, though not nearly as immersive. While these projects are fun and interesting in their current state, Bailenson believes he’s just scratching the surface, noting that there’s still the need for better technologies, such as improved tracking, to get the most out of VR. (For reference, a DK2 was powering the demos I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival.)
“In the last year, there’s been more change [in virtual reality] than in the previous 18 years,” he says. “What we want right now is to tell people about VR.” Beyond that, Bailenson tells me there are many other projects in the works at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab — which, by the way, happens to be funded by none other than tech titan Google.
[Image credit: Getty Images]
JXE Training Day: How to play your first ‘League of Legends’ match
We covered the League of Legends basics during our very first episode Training Day. Loc Tran, he of San Jose State University’s rising League team, gave us the lowdown on just what mobile online battle arena (MOBA) games actually are, what it’s like to play them and which ones are right for beginners. This week, we dive into matches against live players. What do you need to know the first time you play League of Legends? What class of character is good for you? We’ll answer those questions and more on today’s Training Day.
Our second episode of Training Day will go live at 3:30PM ET today on Twitch.tv/Joystiq, Engadget.com/gaming and right here in this post.
Dig Training Day and all of our streams? Follow us on Twitch.tv/Joystiq. You can also follow Loc on Twitter, Twitch, and Facebook.
AIVAnet 