Hasta La Gadget!

Unreal Engine 3, widely known as the driving force behind a plethora of successful PS3 and Xbox 360 games, is going to add support for the upcoming Oculus Rift headset via a development kit update. The Unreal Engine has powered hits such as Gears of War, Mass Effect, Infinity Blade and BioShock. The Oculus ready UDK will be available to all Oculus developers for free, it was added in the press release. They’ve worked with Epic ever since they launched their Kickstarter campaign for Oculus to make the integration for Unreal Engine as high performance as they could. The Oculus ready UDK allows developers to build amazing virtual reality experiences using the Unreal Engine toolset.

The Oculus ready UDK is going to be available from the Oculus Developer Center in early April, no definite date has been given as yet. Oculus will have a booth at GDC this week where they’ll be showing Unreal Engine 3 based demos of Hawken and Epic Citadel. Do check them out if you’re at the conference. On the other hand, Oculus Rift dev kits will begin shipping out to Kickstarter backers this month.

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Earlier this year at CES, the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset made an appearance and for those who are hearing about this for the first time, this is a virtual reality headset designed for gaming and is supposed to immerse the user in a virtual world by filling their field of vision as realistically as possible. While it has yet to make its way to the commercial market, those who own the Oculus Rift Developer Kit will be able to take it for a test drive in Valve’s Team Fortress 2. This was announced by Valve who revealed that they will be releasing a new mode for Team Fortress 2 that will support the virtual reality headset.

According to Joe Ludwig at Valve, “When we first played an early version of Virtual Reality mode in Team Fortress we were blown away by the immersion we experienced […] VR is just getting started, but it is going to have a big impact on gaming. This update will let us share that experience with more of the Team Fortress community.” Players who are able to activate this mode will also be given a unique Oculus Rift in-game hat whose code will be sent out by Oculus. We can only imagine how much fun this will be, although at the same time those prone to motion sickness might not find the experience pleasurable.

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Last year a campaign was started on Kickstarter to fund the Oculus Rift development kit. Only $250,000 in funding was required, but the idea was liked so much that the campaign raised over $2.4 million. The kits that were purchased via Kickstarter were going to ship with a Rift enabled Doom 3 BFG edition. Unfortunately the special Rift enabled Doom 3 edition will not be available by the time the developement kits are to be shipped. (more…)

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It was all bad timing, really. Just ahead of CES 2012, Microsoft announced that year’s event would be its last, blaming product schedules that just didn’t match up with the annual show. There was no question that the tech giant’s absence would be felt the following year, the first time in recent memory the Consumer Electronics Show wasn’t kicked off by a Microsoft keynote. It signaled, perhaps, a slight shift away from the days of huge companies dominating the event’s headlines — a phenomenon helped along by the recent attention-grabbing successes of a number of crowdfunded projects, many of which were present at the show.

The move from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer was one thing, but a CES without Redmond? That was just unheard of, a specter that loomed over the show, even as the CEA happily announced it had sold out the company’s floor space in “record time.” In the end, of course, Microsoft was still at the show, albeit in a less overt form, by way of third-party machines from Sony, Samsung and the like, and in the form of a cameo by none other than Ballmer himself — a sort of spiritual baton-passing to the company’s keynote successor, Qualcomm. Heck, even the Surface Pro reared its head backstage at the show.

Continue reading How hardware startups changed the face of CES

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds, Home Entertainment, Peripherals, Robots, Internet, Software

Comments

[CES 2013] I had heard of that Oculus Rift kickstarter project before, and watching their pitch, I thought that it sounded very promising. I worked for 12 years in the computer graphics industry and tested my share of VR (Virtual Reality) head gear. Pretty much everyone has given up on this, so I wanted to see what these folks could come up to.

For those unfamiliar with Virtual Reality projects, the goal is to create a display that completely immerses the user in a virtual world, by producing an image that fills the field of vision as realistically as possible. Oculus work in stereo 3D and features a wider field of view than competitors, and that’s why it is supposed to be better than previous attempts. (more…)

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