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Here’s a surprise – an upcoming VR game from one of Sony’s experimental divisions is in development for HTC Vive.
UploadVR reports that Sony’s Wow Factory, which is a set of projects from the company’s innovation labs, unveiled a title called Gold Rush VR at the SXSW festival. Innovation lab projects are said by Sony to be developed with a spirit of open-minded and unbridled experimentation”.
As good as PlayStation VR is, it wouldn’t be able to offer the sort of room scale tech needed for Gold Rush. However, when teamed up with backpacks PCs, HTC Vive can.
The game is an installation project that’s sees four players exploring different environments together. The use of backpack PCs eliminates any concerns about tripping over one another’s wires, and also increases the freedom of movement and immersion.
The physical set in which the game takes place mimics the virtual environment of the player, too.
Here’s a video giving you an idea of how it all works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12S_C5AIxxc
The spirit of cross-platform cooperation echoes the sentiments of HTC’s VP of global VR Joel Breton who yesterday said that his company was actively helping developers bring their titles to platforms aside from the Vive, for the benefit of both the studios and the wider VR market.
At Vive Studios, we’re platform agnostic, and we encourage developers to be the same,” he said. What I mean by that is [developers should] develop for all VR platforms that make sense. We create first party content, second party content, and support third party developers. And we encourage all of those, including our own internal studios, to put their content on all platforms because that gives them the best opportunity for two things which are critical.
One, to make more money, to generate more revenue, but also to build a community, because beyond money, the most important thing for a developers is to build a community around the game. So by having their content only on one platform, say Vive, they’re going to be blocking out a bunch of the market. So if it’s possible to port your game [to other VR platforms]… then we encourage developers to do that.”
