Several announcements were made at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), which is running March 17â21 in San Francisco. Here are the ones that interested me:
New VR Headsets
Oculus VR has a demo of their latest VR headset for developers: Developers Kit 2 (DK2). There’s a video about it on the Oculus website. The cost is $350 USD and will ship around July. There’s still no word on when a consumer version will ship. I’m thinking 2015.
Sony announced their competitor to the Oculus Rift, called Project Morpheus. Apparently it doesn’t suck.
Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4 Games on the Web
It will be possible to publish games made with Unity 5 or Unreal Engine 4 directly to the web (so players won’t need a browser plugin like Flash). The games published to the web will use technologies like WebGL and asm.js. Mozilla is helping out.
WebGL graphics are quite primitive compared to what’s possible, but if you’re more interested in reach, then it’s hard to beat the web.
Real-Time Ray Tracing
There’s also some neat real-time ray-tracing stuff coming out, both hardware and software. Example: the latest tech from Imagination Technologies.
Troy McConaghy 