You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
If Valve Software’s Team Fortress 2 is anything, it’s versatile. The company’s demonstrating that versatility once more in porting the game to virtual reality goggles, which could result in some serious psychological trauma. Kidding aside, a Game Developers Conference blurb today revealed the internal project — part of Valve’s ongoing wearable computing efforts — which says the talk, “will describe lessons learned from Valve’s porting experience.” In another talk, Valve hardware man Michael Abrash is diving into the possibilities he sees in the future of VR, as viewed through his own company’s experience.
It isn’t clear whether Valve is using the much-loved Oculus Rift technology (seen above); the notes of the second talk only detail a general exploration of VR’s weaknesses and strengths as they pertain to current technology. One thing is clear: both talks aim to educate game developers on what some Valve employees see as a burgeoning new frontier in game development. We welcome this bizarrely sci-fi future with open arms.
Continue reading Stay seated: Valve’s Team Fortress 2 ported to virtual reality
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, HD
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
Ultra High Definition TV and — surprisingly — gaming took the spotlight at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Who’da thunk it? Certainly not me, Engadget’s resident gaming dude. But here we are, with NVIDIA’s first game console, Razer’s modular PC rig, Valve’s Steambox prototypes and Xi3’s first example of third-party, Valve-backed Steambox hardware and, and … maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s look back to January 3rd, before NVIDIA’s press conference, before Razer’s Project Fiona unveiling and before Valve surprised us with hardware prototypes. Those were simpler times — times when Valve hadn’t yet launched its multi-front attack on what we’re still calling console gaming. It seemed unlikely that we’d see such a concerted effort to move PC games from the exclusionary world of desks and home offices into living rooms this early in the year. Yet, again, here we are.
Continue reading CES 2013: Gaming roundup
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Tablets, HD
Is 2013 the year of the wearable here at CES? It’s certainly shaping up to be one of the bigger trends of the show, thanks in no small part to the folks at Oculus. We’ve already spent some time with the company’s Rift prototype this week, and now we’ll be joined by Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
Update: In lieu of Brendan Iribe, we’ll be speaking to Palmer Luckey and VP Nate Mitchell.
Check out our full CES 2013 stage schedule here!
Filed under: Gaming
Were you one of the many folks to donate your hard-earned cash to the crazy folks developing the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset? Sadly, we’ve got some bad news for ya — you won’t be playing Doom 3: BFG Edition with your new headset any time this year, as the device isn’t shipping to its Kickstarter backers until some time next March. Citing a variety of factors, the folks at Oculus say it’s simply impossible to get the dev kits manufactured and shipped to all 7,500 backers within the previous time frame of “before 2012 ends.” The company hopes to have all dev kit orders fulfilled by mid-April 2013.
Moreover, a handful of tech specs have changed on the OR since we last saw it, including a display change from 5.6-inch LCD to 1280 x 800 7-inch — that’s a lot of screen connected to your face! As such, the whole device is a bit heavier than before (by 30g). Additionally, previously off the shelf motion sensors were replaced with a custom one “that excels in VR-critical areas.” Should you wish to get into all the (extremely) nitty gritty details, Oculus has a detailed Kickstarter update right here.
Filed under: Gaming
Source: Kickstarter
Anyone who’s been wanting to make a game for the Oculus Rift headset, but hemmed and hawed during the Kickstarter run, now has a second chance. Oculus has kicked off its own pre-order campaign that offers the VR developer kit at the same $300 that it cost for the more proactive among us, or $345 for those beyond US borders. As an added incentive, the first 1,000 who pull the trigger still get a copy of Doom 3: BFG Edition to show what the Oculus Rift can do. Twiddling your thumbs will have cost at least a month — these new kits won’t ship until January — but the pre-order still means a head start over competing developers that haven’t yet seen the virtual light.
Filed under: Displays, Wearables
Oculus Rift developer kits go up for regular pre-order, catch VR procrastinators originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Sep 2012 16:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The group of folks bent on crafting a real-life version of Star Trek’s “Holodeck” — a virtual playground, essentially — are getting official support from gaming hardware company Razer. That support means not only access to Razer’s hardware but also the company’s staff of trained professionals. The Project Holodeck team have already implemented Razer’s “Hydra” — a PC-based motion controller that originally shipped with Portal 2 — into their work on Holodeck showcase game, “Wild Skies.”
But that’s not the only big news for Project Holodeck, as the team recently swapped Microsoft’s Kinect motion tech for Sony’s PlayStation Move motion tech. Project lead James Iliff told RoadtoVR.com, “The Kinect hardware is extremely lacking in fidelity. Every point the Kinect tracks is filled with unmanageable jitter, rendering the data useless for anything other than the most simple of interactions. We tried very hard to get around this with several software algorithms we wrote, to get multiple Kinects to communicate with each other, however this did not really make anything more accurate unfortunately.” In place of Kinect, the team strapped a PlayStation Move setup to a Pro-Tec skateboard helmet, and combined that tracking with the Hydra’s motion control and Oculus Rift’s head-mounted display. The result is … well, it’s a person standing in a room with a whole bunch of electronics attached to their person. But also, it allows players to interact in a 3D environment — from perception to engagement. The team’s still got plenty of work ahead of them, as evidenced by their latest video (below), but it sounds like things are coming together more cohesively than before.
Continue reading Project Holodeck gets help from Razer, swaps Kinect for Move tracking
Filed under: Gaming
Project Holodeck gets help from Razer, swaps Kinect for Move tracking originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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“This is the latest prototype,” the Oculus guys tell us. That’s great, now strap us in. The team decided to make a sudden stop in Germany ahead of appearances back in the US over the next few weeks — and we’re glad, because it meant we got to call in on them and grab some time with the Oculus Rift. If you didn’t know, the Rift is a Kickstarter-funded VR gaming headset (stay with us) that’s caught the attention of several games developers — most notably John Carmack. He liked it so much, in fact, that he developed a special Rift-ready version of Doom 3 for the headset and Doom 4 will also be heading to the VR peripheral too. We got to play with the earlier game and while there’s a video after the break, we reckon you’ll really need to try this in person to fully grasp how the Oculus Rift plays. Check out our impressions after the break.
Gallery: Oculus Rift prototype hands-on
Oculus Rift’s latest VR headset prototype gets a showing at Gamescom 2012 (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Aug 2012 10:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We heard late last month that the John Carmack-endorsed Oculus Rift VR headset would be hitting Kickstarter any day now, and it turns out today is that day. The project has just launched on the crowd-funding site with a goal of $250,000. To reach that, the team (led by company founder Palmer Lucky) is offering a variety pledge options, starting with posters and t-shirts for $15 and $25 (or $10 for a simple thanks), and of course the headset itself that is initially only being offered as a developer kit. It will set you back $300, which also includes a copy of Doom 3 BFG, and is expected to start shipping in December (signed kits and a complete bundle are available as well). Those that act fast can also snag one of 100 unassembled prototype kits, which run $275 and ship a month earlier in November. Despite that developer-only status, though, the project is already off to an impressive start — it’s raised over $50,000 as of this writing. You can find the usual video overview of the project after the break.
Update: The 100 prototype kits are now sold out, and the project itself has already sailed past the $100,000 $150,000 mark. John Carmack also clarified on Twitter that he’s not “backing” the project in any official capacity, only endorsing it as a “wonderful advancement in VR tech.”
Update 2: And the project has now easily met its goal on the first day. Those interested are still able to make a pledge any time over the next 30 days.
Filed under: Peripherals, Wearables
John Carmack-endorsed Oculus Rift VR project hits Kickstarter, developer kits start at $300 (update: $250k goal met) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Aug 2012 11:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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