VR has been hailed as the next coming of truly ingenious, engrossing, enveloping experiences, and to some extent, it already does offer those. There are still limitations to the technology and the level of realism it can impart (there is a whole slew of senses we need to trigger for truly enveloping experiences, of course), but I feel we sometimes get somewhat limited in the way we look at VR. Of course, we can all imagine video games built in VR - and when we do, we likely imagine them as they were presented to us in Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One.

Then there are other use-cases, such as real-estate experiences that place you right inside your future home and allow you to see the changes you'd make. Architecture design, engineering, game world design, even strolls through museums, your mind a subatomic particle able to instantly travel to foreign countries and explore their marvels. All for this, mind you, without ever leaving the comfort of our home, without the required expenses and no wasted time with travelling or passport checks - all, however, simulated. But what if VR could go even further? What if VR could be used as a coping mechanism? What if you could meet your dead parents, siblings... Or children? This is the story I bring to you today: of how VR was used to reunite a mother with her deceased seven-year-old girl. This is the story of Ji-sung and her daughter Nayeon.

AMD today released the latest version of Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition. Version 20.2.1 beta adds optimization for "Zombie Army 4: Dead War." A handful issues have also been fixed. To begin with, unusually high memory usage with ReLive has been fixed. HDR content becoming excessively dark or bright with DirectX 12 games on RX 5000-series graphics cards, has been fixed. Camera element experiencing stutter with ReLive has been fixed. A missing scroll bar in the "compatibility" tab of Radeon Software application has been fixed. Also addressed is Radeon Software failing to detect VR games when SteamVR is running. Radeon Anti-Lag toggle audible alerts falsely sounding has been fixed. Grab the software from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 20.2.1 beta

Razer had an interesting outing at CES 2020. There were no new PC gaming peripherals, other than Star Wars "storm trooper" co-branded Kraken, Goliathus, and Atheris; but three interesting exhibits. To begin with, Razer Kishi is an adjustable, split game controller for smartphones. The controller's two ends (meant for your left and right hands, wrap around the two ends of your smartphone. You get two analog thumbsticks, a D-pad, four action buttons, and four triggers. The Razer Gamepad app lets you map the controller to your smartphone over Bluetooth, and provides custom button mapping. The company also showed off Arctech line of smartphone sleeves that are designed to dissipate heat.

Having made its mark as a leading gaming notebook vendor, Razer is turning its attention to pre-built gaming desktops, and we saw one of its first creations, the Tomahawk SFF. Much like Apple, Razer has a serious focus on form as much as function, and that's evident with the aluminium CNC precision-milled chassis with tempered glass side-panels, and a size that's fit both for desks and the living room.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the release of the Vulkan 1.2 specification for GPU acceleration. This release integrates 23 proven extensions into the core Vulkan API, bringing significant developer-requested access to new hardware functionality, improved application performance, and enhanced API usability. Multiple GPU vendors have certified conformant implementations, and significant open source tooling is expected during January 2020.

Vulkan continues to evolve by listening to developer needs, shipping new functionality as extensions, and then consolidating extensions that receive positive developer feedback into a unified core API specification. Carefully selected API features are made optional to enable market-focused implementations. Many Vulkan 1.2 features were requested by developers to meet critical needs in their engines and applications, including: timeline semaphores for easily managed synchronization; a formal memory model to precisely define the semantics of synchronization and memory operations in different threads; descriptor indexing to enable reuse of descriptor layouts by multiple shaders; deeper support for shaders written in HLSL, and more.

As standalone wireless headsets such as the Oculus Quest grow strongly in popularity, 3dRudder is preparing full support of the wireless experience. The new 3dRudder Wireless Bridge adds wireless supports to the 3dRudder foot motion controller for PC. This new module enables developers and businesses to create games and applications for wireless headsets that integrate native 3dRudder support, providing users with a natural motion experience. It is especially of great importance as hand tracking becomes the main interaction method.

The release of wireless headsets such as the Oculus Quest paves the way for a massive adoption of VR by consumers and businesses. The objective is an out-of-the-box ready experience, where users do not need powerful PCs and do not have to juggle with complex command schemes found in hand controllers. The hands suddenly become free of controllers and the user can interact naturally with the VR worlds, either bear hands or with gloves offering haptic and force feedback. The feet are used for what they are best at: moving. The 3dRudder foot motion controller is used to handle effortless and hyper intuitive movements at the feet, offering 4 axes that can be combined together to move in the 3 dimensions seamlessly (forward/backward, left/right stafe, left/right turn, up/down) as shown in this video.

Steam has revealed the games that sold the most on the platform for this year of 2019. While Steam's own numbers don't represent the entirety of the PC market - considering other digital storefronts such as GOG, EPIC Games Store and publisher-exclusive stores like Origin also have a relevant market share - this does let us take a considered peek at the PC gaming landscape. Steam's top sellers also includes top grossing, where games that have store-bound skins or extras are also taken into account).

Steam's Platinum lineup includes all the hallmarks of PC gaming: online experiences such as Warframe, DOTA 2, PUBG, and the Elder Scrolls Online, through strategy experiences such as Civilization VI and Total War: Three Kingdoms. Considering that Destiny 2 also made it in the platform, many gamers actually enjoy that experience - it is unclear if Steam considers every redeem from the Blizzard store into the Steam Store a sale, but if not, it's mighty impressive that a game that released on October 1st.

Valve has taken the proverbial wraps off the already-teased, and now revealed, Half Life: Alyx. The latest installment in the Half-Life universe, again, isn't a sequel to the narrative that has been left midway with the ending of Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Instead, it's a prequel of sorts, situated in the 20-year time gap between the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2. It's at this point in the timeline that players will accompany Alyx and her father, Elias, in their fight against the Combine.

Engine-wise, the game will make use of the Source 2 engine, and will be released with accompanying Source 2 tools for worldbuilding, allowing players to design and distribute their own worlds set in this universe. The game will be a single-player, story-driven FPS affair, and will make heavy use of Half-Life's physics interactions. The game is being announced as a full-length game release built from the ground-up for VR - it's not just a VR adventure the development team embarked on, though it did start that way. But let that be for a while: go after the break to watch the game's trailer. I dare you to say this doesn't quite look like your Half-Life dream game.

Well, that headline must've been met with both a warm fuzzy feeling of nostalgia, and a sudden, stab-like wound on the back of many readers. The usage of Valve and Half-Life together in the same sentence has been the victim of multiple memes and disappointments over the years, with the studio being seemingly unable to keep up with the mantle of great games it has released before in the Half-Life universe. Half-Life 3 is already so much of a failed expectation that the game could (likely) never live up to the expectations set on it at this point in time. It seems valve is shrugging the game away with a Half-Life set VR game, though, in the form of Half-Life: Alyx.

Valve itself have posted a teaser image on Twitter, announcing it as a flagship VR game available for SteamVR. To be unveiled on November 21st, nothing much is known about the game by now; but it's expected it will be a VR-exclusive experience. The game started out as a single-player exploration experience for VR, and it seems to have found its way developed into a full-fledged game. Apparently, this Half-Life: Alyx game is the first in Valve's plans of releasing more VR games in the future, which may or may not be set in the Half-Life universe. This could actually be an interesting experience for VR, if you can get beyond the usual betrayal of not seeing an announcement for Half-Life 3. Who knows - this could even be the killer app for VR, or an Half-Life renaissance in the minds of gamers and Valve themselves. At the very least, we know it will induce nostalgia.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is another addition in the Zelda universe that its fans enjoyed. Being playable on only on Nintendo Switch, and Wii U, so far its audience has been limited to people with access to one of the Nintendo's consoles. However, that is about to change. There is new port of the Zelda: Breath of the Wild, that runs on PC at 4K resolution, with unlocked framerate giving players possibility of achieving more than 60 frames per second, and is playable in VR.

Thanks to a YouTube channel BSoD Gaming, we have footage of Zelda: Breath of the Wild running in VR mode. With a PC powered by Intel Core i7 8700K and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, this Zelda game is running above 60 FPS at 4K resolution (around 80-100 FPS). VR mode is being handled easily due to the game being not so graphically demanding, so there will be plenty of people who should be able to experience VR mode without too much trouble.

HTC has invested heavily into its VR place in the market, with the company being one of the most prolific in both exploring the market (that's till a relative niche) and developing improvements on their products. The new Vive Cosmos VR headset is another take on the VR world, one with modularity in mind and set with better technical specification than the original Vive - while undercutting the Vive Pro by $200, down to $699.

The Vive Cosmos features a higher 2880 x 1700p combined lens resolution (90Hz refresh rate), up from the original Vive's 2160 x 1200p. Usability improvements include the faceplate, which is now of a flip-up design that keeps the headset resting on your head when you need to actually take a look at the world around you (or your pet, or your staring significant other and the cold food that lays on the table by now).

We knew this was coming, given Valve's own teaser confirmation from March, and then a faux pas that resulted in an incomplete Steam store page ending up public for a short time. Valve had promised more details would come in May, and here we are with a lot of information available about the Valve Index headset, the controllers, the base stations, as well as retail pricing + availability.

Name aside, the Valve Index specs that leaked before end up holding true with the retail product. The headset uses dual 1440x1600 RGB LCDs which Valve claims helps provide 50% more subpixels relative to an OLED display. This in turn should result in higher effective sharpness for the same rendering horsepower, and is further accentuated via a 3x better fill factor to mitigate the dreaded screen-door effect. The headset runs at 120 Hz with full backwards compatibility to 90 Hz to work with VR titles built around that specification and, more interestingly, also supports an experimental 144 Hz mode. PC gamers have long known the benefits of higher framerates, and this is especially valid with VR, but time will tell how the rest of the ecosystem works around this. Equally important to VR gaming is the illumination period, which allows on-screen imagery to remain sharp while you are in motion just as well as when at rest. Valve claims up to a 5x reduction here, with a rated illumination period of 0.33 to 0.53 ms depending on the real time framerate. More to see past the break, so be sure to do so if this interests you!

The headline of this post makes it seem a touch more innocuous than the story may lead to, at least if you believe the rumor mills abound. There has been an ongoing issue with AMD systems using Ryzen CPUs and the HTC Vive wireless adapter (powered by Intel WiGig) to where the systems have frozen or even had a BSOD. HTC acknowledged this as early as Nov, 2018, noting that they have seen this with a subset of Ryzen-based motherboards when the PCIe wireless adapter is installed and running. It took until last week to get a solution of sorts, and unfortunately reports from users indicate this is not a true fix for everyone.

The hotfix update 1.20190410.0 was made available April 25 to attempt to combat this issue, which was garnering a lot of attention in the VR-community on whether there was more Intel could be doing to help AMD customers. This hotfix update is available automatically once an end user with the Vive wireless adapter checks for an update, and HTC acknowledge that they continue to test this, as well as partner with Intel and AMD to help resolve this once and for all. In the meantime, users report mixed success to date, including some we know personally as well, and it remains a thorn in the side of wireless VR to get to the PC successfully.

When we first covered Valve's own teaser about their first-party VR hardware ecosystem under the Valve Index moniker, we were not expecting to hear much more until May. Thanks to an error on their part, product pages for the headset, base stands, and controllers were all published prematurely on Steam for a few hours yesterday, and that was enough time for all the information to be saved online by others. The product pages were not complete, and lacked details that we expect to get sooner than later, but Valve has since confirmed that all information inadvertently leaked are accurate and we now more about the retail package now.

To begin with, May 1 is targeted as the official announcement date which will also bring with it pre-order options for those going this route in PC VR. The complete package will contain the headset itself with integrated headphones, of which we have a better render available now as seen below, a tether cable using DisplayPort 1.2 and USB 3.1 Gen 1 connections (and not the VirtualLink standard we were hoping to see), a region-specific power adapter and plug(s), and two face gaskets (narrow and wide). Interestingly the now-renamed Index Controllers are not included and are an optional, separate purchase. This is also the case with the Index base stations, which all leads us to assume that existing HTC Vive controllers and base stations will be compatible with the headset, or there will be another, more complete package to choose from. No pricing information available yet, and Valve says they are still finalizing this as well as actual shipping detail- with an aim to hit it in June.

PAX East 2019 brought with it some exciting news, and the world of virtual reality no doubt sees this news as the biggest in quite some time. Valve has finally made good on their promises from yesteryear, bringing in personnel to work on both the hardware and software side of the VR market. We first saw a hint of this via a prototype VR HMD late last year, with leaked specs confirming it was Valve's own design going beyond the established competition at the time from HTC Vive and Oculus. Since then, the Vive Pro has come out with an even higher-end version using eye-tracking to target prosumers initially, and also showcasing foveated rendering that will no doubt herald VR getting more mainstream and allowing for a higher graphical fidelity as well.

The so-called Valve Index has been listed on Steam now, with no other information to see than from the image below. We know it is coming in a couple of months, perhaps even during Computex although it is unlikely. It certainly looks similar to the prototype HMD, and presumably retains the 135° field-of-view and 2,880 x 1,600 total resolution. No mention of the Steam Knuckles controller here, but that is no surprise for a teaser. What we can tell is the headset has a physical slider, presumably to assist with pupillary distance calibration, as well as fairly large lenses that extend outwards which may assist with IR-based tracking. There is no mention of HTC anywhere here, and it would be right up Valve's alley to introduce this at a relatively affordable price point to then make up on software and distribution (savings via Steam) instead. Perhaps we will see the long-rumored Half Life VR as a launch title? Time will tell, and this may well be the big boost to gaming VR that is sorely needed.

Oculus today announced an improvement to their original Rift headset, the Oculus Rift S. The new headset from oculus builds upon advances in their view of a VR experience, as well as from learnings acquired through the development of the original Rift, the smartphone-only Oculus Go, and the standalone Oculus Quest, to deliver the new, ultimate VR experience in the Oculus field.

The Oculus S features improved panels with a 2560x1440 resolution (just like the Oculus GO), offering 40% more pixels and improving the pixel subsystem with groupings of three instead of two. It also features Oculus Quest's Inside-Out tracking capabilities, with five cameras instead of the Quests' four, alongside redesigned controllers.

Since the release of HoloLens in 2016 we have seen mixed reality transform the way work gets done. We have unlocked super-powers for hundreds of thousands of people who go to work every day. From construction sites to factory floors, from operating rooms to classrooms, HoloLens is changing how we work, learn, communicate and get things done.

We are entering a new era of computing, one in which the digital world goes beyond two-dimensional screens and enters the three-dimensional world. This new collaborative computing era will empower us all to achieve more, break boundaries and work together with greater ease and immediacy in 3D. Today, we are proud to introduce the world to Microsoft HoloLens 2. Our customers asked us to focus on three key areas to make HoloLens even better. They wanted HoloLens 2 to be even more immersive and more comfortable, and to accelerate the time-to-value.

GIGABYTE, the world's leading premium gaming hardware manufacturer, today announced the launch of Radeon VII HBM2 16G, the latest Radeon VII graphics cards built upon the world's first 7nm gaming GPU. Based on the enhanced second-generation AMD 'Vega' architecture, Radeon VII is equipped with 3840 stream processors and 16GB of ultra-fast HBM2 memory (second-generation High-Bandwidth Memory). It is designed to deliver exceptional performance and amazing experiences for the latest AAA, e-sports and Virtual Reality (VR) titles, demanding 3D rendering and video editing applications, and next-generation compute workloads.

According to the AMD official website, the Radeon VII graphics card enables high-performance gaming and ultra-high quality visuals. Ground-breaking 1 TB/s memory bandwidth and a 4,096-bit memory interface paves the way for ultra-high resolution textures, hyper-realistic settings and life-like characters. With the high speeds of today's graphics cards, framerates often exceed the monitor refresh rate, causing stuttering and tearing.

The pace of innovation can't stand still, and if there's one space that needs cost-cutting and new product injection to increase its install base is the VR ecosystem. HTC took to CES 2019 to reveal their new take on the VR, a semi-portable VR headset that has been designed not only for room-scale VR, but also for home use and, cryptically, on-the-go (holy moly, the headset flips up towards your forehead!).

Apparently, the Cosmos will have the ability to be powered by your smartphone and perhaps other devices - not all that surprising when you think of the RAM and computing power that it holds right in the palm of your hands (I'll say. My smartphone is a much better performer than my work PC...). And HTC says the Cosmos will be their sharpest VR headset ever - which should mean that it should feature higher resolution than the Vive Pro's 2880×1600 (1440×1600 per eye) display. A smartphone would likely only be able to power some sort of augmented reality graphics on that resolution, though - but I might be wrong.

Steam, being the most widely used games platform for the PC ecosystem, has proven weight on current hardware employed by gamers. While not wholly representative, let's just say it caters to enough of the PC gaming population that we can infer some broad strokes of the current state of the market. And for all the hailing for a newcoming of VR in 2018, it would seem that happened, with a doubling of the attachment rate for VR headsets on Steam's hardware surveys. If we're only speaking relatively, that is.

More interesting and important than the "doubling" in VR headset attachment rate to Steam's user's is the fact that this only increased said attachment rate to around 0.8% of Steam's user base. Of these 0.8%, 0.37% of Steam users who took part in the December survey carry an Oculus Rift, with HTC Vive close behind at 0.33%. The overall increase in usage for each of these headsets was 85% and 65% throughout 2018, respectively - still definitely a far cry from the kind of market penetration that was expected of this latest generation of VR. As for Windows Mixed Reality products? They make-up 0.07% of the Steam survey's results.

A few weeks ago Valve developers announced a new technology called Motion Smoothing that would enable low-end GPUs to support VR games without problems. The system "looks at the last two delivered frames, estimates motion and animation, and extrapolates a new frame. Synthesizing new frames keeps the current application at full framerate, advances motion forward, and avoids judder".

Motion Smoothing has been available in Beta for some time, but the test phase has come to an end and it seems the technology is ready to enter the final, stable stage. You'll still need an HTC VIVE or HTC VIVE Pro headset -Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality headset have their own display drivers with other tricks to sustain frame rates-, and the lack of AMD GPU support is somewhat disappointing, but hopefully Valve will fix this in future iterations of this technology.

After forming a partnership back in May of this year, HTC and McLaren are now seeing their cooperation pay off with the launch of a Limited-Edition HTC VIVE Pro headset ahead of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix that takes place this weekend. The overall goal for this launch is to give fans a "unique experience that can't be had watching on television" according to Alvin Wang Graylin, HTC's China president. The racing simulation released with the headset is rFactor 2 Mclaren Edition, which is based on rFactor 2 and was produced by Studio 397. This particular version allows users to race classic cars from the British team's history. As expected it sports a full day-night cycle along with dynamically varying weather, which pairs well with the "real-road" technology that changes grip characteristics as more cars drive on the track. The most prominent new feature to be added with this release is the inclusion of mixed class road racing. The game is available now but requires a Viveport subscription.

MSI's most recent addition to their NVIDIA GeForce based line up has appeared. The newly minted RTX 2070 AERO ITX is as you may have guessed a graphics card that targets the mini-ITX market. It is currently the smallest RTX series graphics card to be spotted thus far, with it being perfect for this form factor as it lacks a few features seen on the higher end RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti that add complexity. Essentially the lack of NVlink on all RTX 2070 offerings allows for a simpler PCB design that is better suited for this design. There is also the fact anyone wanting SLI would not be looking at ITX focused cards anyway.

The other feature removed likely for cost savings is the VirtualLink (USB-C) connector that delivers power, video, and data for virtual reality headsets. While not entirely a deal breaker it still makes using it for a small form factor VR system a bit more difficult going forward. That said, considering the slow adoption of VR its removal is still a relatively safe bet for MSI for now. Taking a closer look at the packaging shows no indication of a pre-applied overclock, meaning MSI's RTX 2070 AERO ITX should come with NVIDIA reference clock speeds of 1410 MHz base / 1620 MHz boost on the core. The 8 GB of GDDR6 memory should have clocks of 1750 MHz (14000 MHz effective). As for the graphics card's TDP, it should also keep to the reference specification of 175-watts. Currently, pricing and availability are still unknown.

NVIDIA today introduced the Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card - the company's first midrange professional GPU powered by the NVIDIA Turing architecture and the NVIDIA RTX platform. Unveiled at the annual Autodesk University Conference in Las Vegas, the Quadro RTX 4000 puts real-time ray tracing within reach of a wider range of developers, designers and artists worldwide.

Professionals from the manufacturing, architecture, engineering and media creation industries witnessed a seismic shift in computer graphics with the launch of Turing in August. The field's greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006, Turing features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and next-gen Tensor Cores for AI inferencing which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible.

In June 2016 Valve announced 'Destinations', a Steam workshop not easy to find anymore, that allowed the end user to enter real and fictitious scenarios through the magic of virtual reality. The idea was intriguing, but the media was not completely sold and judged Valve's proposal as both "the best and the worst of VR". From all this, however, came a singular discovery: those who reverse-engineered its code discovered in it the HLVR acronym, which initiated a wide debate about the potential appearance of a Half Life VR (HLVR) version specifically developed for VR headsets.

Lending further credence to this hypothesis was Gabe Newell's announcement in February 2017 that Valve was preparing three big titles for virtual reality- two of them based on Source 2, and one of them based on Unity. More such signs appeared in the summer of 2018, and everything was pointing towards this project being indeed real, that it would likely be based on Source 2, and that it would offer a full-fledged blockbuster title that this generation of VR has been desperately seeking. We now have more data courtesy a "leaked email" to Reddit user 2flock that suggests Valve's work is apparently going beyond just VR game development, as images of a prototype device seen below confirm that Valve is also working on its own VR head-mounted display (HMD), one whose development would also be more advanced than initially suspected.

ZOTAC Technology, a global manufacturer of innovation, is excited to officially announce the VR GO 2.0, the world's first VR Backpack PC refreshed from the ground up. The VR GO 2.0 improves the untethered VR experience with high-end performance repackaged into a more compact, ergonomic chassis.

UNLEASH NEW REALITY
The VR GO 2.0 is designed for unlocking the potential of VR across industries and businesses in entertainment, product development, medical practice, design, education, customer service, eSports, and much more. Integrating mobility and high-performance hardware, the revamped backpack solution empowers life-like immersion with zero compromises to latency and reduction in visual quality with today's leading VR headsets.

The system comes with the powerful and efficient NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics with 8GB memory while an Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB DDR4 memory provides the horsepower and bandwidth to sail through intensive tasks, delivering an ultra-smooth experience. The VR GO 2.0 is further equipped with centralized ports and top mounted I/O ports dedicated for easy VR HMD connectivity.