December VR/AR News #2: Oculus Touch, Vive Studios and VR trends in 2017

Storyboard VR is a new product from Artefact that according to Wired, makes creating VR experiences easier and accessible to a larger audience. “It doesn’t require any developer skills. The real pain point in the whole VR workflow is getting content positioned, spatialized, and sized correctly around you in multiple frames,” Paul Hoover, head of user experience design at Artefact, told Wired. Users can upload pre-made visuals into Storyboard VR and manipulate them, but so far, the software doesn’t support programing interactions into a scene, making it most useful to organize or “storyboard” VR ideas.

Wired has the story behind the Oculus Touch, Oculus’s hand controllers that came out last week. While there are other VR hand controllers out there, such as those that go along with the HTC Vive and Playstation VR, the Oculus Touch “is much more than a set of controllers—they are, in effect, your hands. And by being your hands, they provide the first glimpse of what virtual reality is fast becoming: a social universe.” Watch Oculus co-founder and CEO Brendan Iribe on “CBS This Morning” discussing the Oculus Touch.

HTC is launching its own VR development and publishing studio called Vive Studios. It will release games created by HTC as well as external studios. According to The Verge, it is comparable to Oculus Studios, but the scope of Vive Studios appears to be broader. “Oculus has a separate group (called Oculus Story Studio) for cinematic virtual reality, but Vive Studios is supposedly working in a very wide range of fields, including “games, education, cinematic, design, social, real estate, and sports.”