Holy Toledo, the social VR apps are coming in fast and furious lately! Another new entrant to the social VR arena is called ForeVR (which I assume is pronounced “forever” and not “for-vee-are”). The company’s first release is a bowling app, ForeVR Bowl, for the Oculus Quest, both versions 1 and 2. Here’s the teaser trailer:
The studio says it plans to use the new funding to focus on building more social VR games, growing its development team, expanding to more platforms, and continuing to improve ForeVR Bowl over time.
ForeVR Bowl launched back in May on Quest and the studio has now confirmed that it’s due to release on Steam “soon.”
ScienceVR is a Palo Alto, California-based startup which describes itself as follows:
ScienceVR is an indie VR studio in its early days. We are passionate about visualizing human knowledge and abstract ideas by turning them into immersive and delightful experiences. We are a team of XR prototypers, educators, and storytellers working on a metaverse build on top of distributing human knowledge.
ScienceVR offers two different products: a series of web-based social VR events, and a line of virtual reality apps for various VR headsets including the Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive. Here’s a quick promo video, with ScienceVR founder and CEO Jackie Lee:
The immersive lesson apps include (all descriptions were taken verbatim from the website):
Ada’s Engines: With Ada’s Engines, travel back in time to Charles Babbage’s salon to witness the Difference Engines in action. Then, find yourself transported to an Industrial Age workshop. Compile and execute a piece of music on a programmable Analytic Engine, as envisioned by Ada Lovelace. In Lovelace’s Notes, she wrote, “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” (for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive)
Carroll’s Riddles: Carroll’s Riddles: The Game of Logic is a fantastical and puzzling world based on the works of British logician and writer Lewis Carroll (1832-1898). You are invited on a journey to become immersed in the idiosyncrasies of Carroll’s mental landscape. Upon entering the virtual world, you meet with Alice and a talking rabbit. Aided with an interactive Carroll Diagram, you make your way out of the tree hole by tackling logic riddles. This immersive journey is unlike any other, pushing the limits of your imagination and challenging you to find logic in a nonsensical world. (for Oculus Quest)
Curie’s Radiance: Curie’s stories and scientific discoveries. This is an interactive adventure through the discovery of radioactive elements – Radium and Polonium, inviting users to engage with science in unexpected and memorable ways. (for Oculus Quest, and there’s even a version for the Magic Leap One!)
Faraday’s Magnets: What if we can visualize invisible forces around magnets? Step into a virtual and interactive laboratory built based on historical materials related to Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. This experience enables your learners to see the “invisible forces” around magnets. (for Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest)
Shelley’s Creation: Shelley’s Creation (work-in-progress) is a special sci-fi VR experience built based on biology, history, and sci-fi stories around Mary Shelley’s book – Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. We start by re-creating the scene from 1816 so that our users can answer Mary Shelley’s question:
“Would life be given? Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; Galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”
Our users will follow these thinkers’ inspirations including traveling to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, meeting Lucia and Luigi Galvani when they discover Galvanism, competing in Lord Byron’s ghost story contest, and solving the mystery of electricity and biology. (for Oculus Quest)
Rec Con 2021 is coming SOON™! We’re back and can’t wait to have you join us at Rec Con on September 24th, 25th and 26th, 2021. We’ve done a bunch of work to make sure Rec Con is even bigger and better this year!
Grab a friend, party up, and let’s get together to explore the Rec Room community and beyond!
Rec Con is a free community event where players from all around the world meet up for various activities, Q&As, exhibit halls, panels, special events, and more!
We’re planning special events, panels, and afterparties featuring Rec Room developers, game devs and industry speakers, YouTubers, and musical guests. This year we have exciting new technology that allows special events to be broadcasted live to hundreds of rooms – events will no longer have to be limited to 40 people!
This event is free and you don’t need to register; just look for the special ^RecCon room in Rec Room. The programming schedule and special events will be announced later in September. Some events will also be livestreamed on their YouTube channel.
In the early days of my blog, I used to have to hunt out social VR platforms to write about. But now that my blog has been around for a little over four years, I am sometimes approached by metaverse companies who wish me to visit and/or write about their platforms. REMIO is one such company.
REMIO is a YARTVRA (Yet Another Remote Teamwork Virtual Reality Application), but it’s a little bit different from the social VR platforms which I have covered to date on this blog.
REMIO actually offers a full-service concierge-style package to businesses, including shipping standalone VR headsets to each member of the work team that you want to bring together in virtual reality:
We help distributed teams maintain a great culture with immersive team-building activities and collaboration tools. All in VR.
• Pre-configured standalone VR headsets. • Delivered to each team member. • Hosted fun team events in VR. • Immersive collaboration & productivity tools. • We take care of all the scheduling, logistics, and shipping.
Actually, I’m a little surprised that nobody has come up with this idea before!
If you don’t want to join in using a VR headset, you can also connect via a web browser on your desktop computer (you can check it out for yourself here; it takes a few seconds to load).
There’s a handy menu on the right-hand side of the REMIO web client to take you to various prebuilt environments, including a conference room, a paintball arena, even a yoga room!
Here’s a one-minute YouTube video showing some of these environments:
To have a company offer a service where they take care of all the scheduling, logistics, shipping, and onboarding, so that companies can simply focus on corporate events and teambuilding exercises, is actually a pretty genius idea! Here’s a look at their pricing page, which offers one-off, monthly, and annual prices for the service:
And, if you already have headsets, there are more cost-effective options (including a free one for up to 20 users on a public server):
