While the brave new frontier of VR gaming is an exciting prospect that demands a radical rethinking of game design that we’ve not seen since the advent of 3D gaming, the financial reality of most VR platforms is that the buy in cost is too high for a lot of gamers. In what seems to be an effort to expand their audience, Tequila Works and GameTrust are launching an adapted to TV version of their VR murder mystery, The Invisible Hours.

The Invisible Hours is a murder mystery adventure with a supernatural twist, placing players as the observer to the seven suspected of murdering Nikola Tesla at his mansion. Players will have the choice of spending their time anywhere in the mansion, observing the characters, gathering clues and piecing together their real intentions.

You can see the newly released trailer for the game just below. The Invisible Hours launches this version on April 24 for PC, PS4 and for the first time, Xbox One. Are you going to check the game out now that it isn’t exclusive to VR? Let us know in the comments.

In May of 2013 Sony filed a series of patents for gaming technology. These patents centered around an audio system and head mounted display. Since the announcement of these patents, rumors have been flying throughout the gaming community that Sony is making the push to fully incorporate virtual reality gaming into the Sony brand, and integrate it into the concept of accessible household gaming.

The source of the rumors is really based on the specific language contained within these patents.The head mounted display patent apparently called for “motion detectection and image stabilization” which implies that a functional aspect of the headset will be to absorb images from the environment, and adjust the image projected at the viewer according, while adjusting for viewer motion. The logical leap isn’t too far to make here.

More rumors have flown around, comparing Sony’s virtual reality headset to Oculus Rift, and that there was actually a secret preview of the tech at TGS 2013. Time will tell on this one.

Source: Eurogamer

“Assuming accurate, consistent tracking (and that’s a big if, as I’ll explain one of these days), the enemy of virtual registration is latency. If too much time elapses between the time your head starts to turn and the time the image is redrawn to account for the new pose, the virtual image will drift far enough so that it has clearly wobbled (in VR), or so that is obviously no longer aligned with the same real-world features (in AR),” he writes.

“How much latency is too much? Less than you might think. For reference, games generally have latency from mouse movement to screen update of 50 ms or higher (sometimes much higher), although I’ve seen numbers as low as about 30 ms for graphically simple games running with tearing (that is, with vsync off). In contrast, I can tell you from personal experience that more than 20 ms is too much for VR and especially AR, but research indicates that 15 ms might be the threshold, or even 7 ms.

Current latency is estimated to be about 36 ms, which, as Abrash remarks, is “a long way from 20 ms, and light-years away from 7 ms.”

Interestingly, he looks forward to Occulus Rift and has “hope that if the VR market takes off in the wake of the Rift’s launch, the day when display latency comes down will be near at hand.”

Source: GIBiz