Flat2VR Studios CEO Jasmine Uniza From Trombone Champ To FlatOut 4 In VR

Flat2VR Studios CEO Jasmine Uniza From Trombone Champ To FlatOut 4 In VR

The team at Flat2VR Studios ask themselves “why is this in VR?” When they are able to answer that question CEO Jasmine Uniza says they’ll often make a demo to show a prospective partner why their game should get the full Flat2VR treatment. “Make great games and have fucking fun,” Uniza says is Flat2VR’s motto. “You have to tell me why this deserves a spot in VR and why I should pick it over any other experiences.” She spoke about how Flat2VR started as a modding community and marketing effort to become a multi-faceted studio developing and publishing VR games over the course of about four years, with their most recent release FlatOut 4: Total Insanity carrying a mostly positive rating on Steam with support for racing wheels and pedals. She hints during the Good VR Podcast that more racing games are planned and they are already building games for VR that won’t release until 2028. We spoke for just under an hour on the Riverside recording platform and I cut the conversation to around 40 minutes for audio platforms and 27 minutes for video. This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation [https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800] to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

PROJECT MIX VR Bartending Game On More Than 130,000 Steam Wishlists

In PROJECT MIX the player embodies a bartender making drinks for patrons in an “alternate-history 90s Hong Kong” and after their workday they come home to their apartment, to a cat that can smoke cigarettes, as part of a story that takes place over 12 days. The anime-inspired narrative adventure is made for mature audiences and scheduled for release on Steam in 2027. While many developers building for consumer VR markets are targeting kids on Quest headsets, PROJECT MIX [https://store.steampowered.com/app/2439770/PROJECT_MIX/] has become the most wishlisted game in PC VR by targeting adults instead. “There is strong sexual language, but any sexual content will be implied and not shown explicitly,” the mature content description for PROJECT MIX explains. “Expect lots of suggestive and risque fan service elements though. There is alcohol drinking and bartending in the game. There is also smoking, but that is optional.” New Zealand-based developer Yuewei Zhang at PROJECT MIX studio PLECTRUM SOFT joined the Good VR Podcast for a conversation about the effort. He shared that, like Virtual Desktop developer Guy Godin [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/p/guy-godin-good-vr-podcast], he hasn’t received a Steam Frame developer kit despite more than 130,000 people putting the VR-only game on their Steam wishlists.  “I'm just really drawn to the sort of the romance and the fantasy of the smokiness of going to, say, a late-night underground bar in, like, say, Hong Kong or Tokyo or Shanghai,” Zhang said. “In New Zealand, we're not exactly known for the city of great skylines and tall skyscrapers, but since I grew up in relatively more rural areas, my mind naturally romanticized the idea of these neon lights and these smoky underground bars, the metropolitan life. So I just wanted to put that all in a video game.” We talked for roughly 45 minutes about his inspirations and independent approach on the recording platform Riverside and I cut the conversation to 31 minutes. This publication is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Please consider a donation [https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800] to support our reporting or become a paid subscriber. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Guy Godin After More Than A Decade Of Virtual Desktop

The creator of Virtual Desktop recalls the Tuscany demo as his first VR experience and Senza Peso [http://store.steampowered.com/app/496190/Senza_Peso/] as his favorite moment of presence in a headset. Guy Godin’s recollections are from a different time in the VR industry. Enthusiasts launched their VR experiences by clicking around with their mouse on a PC outside VR instead of selecting from a menu inside. Watching videos of people doing that led him to start work on Virtual Desktop [https://www.vrdesktop.net/]. His work in VR has both been sought by Facebook and also competed with the work Meta built, leading to some tense and frustrating interactions over the years. “There are some good engineers at Meta that care,” Godin says on the Good VR Podcast. “What sucks for them is that they’re not incentivized to ship quality software and fix bugs. I wish they were, because some of them are really good and they’ve done some incredible things.” I spoke with Godin using Riverside for just over 45 minutes and cut the conversation to about 38 minutes recounting his path through VR. Good Virtual Reality is a 100 percent independent, community-supported journalism effort made exclusively by people for people. Donate [https://buy.stripe.com/7sY8wPeTAcnG3eD1vZao800] to support our journalism and help support the expansion of the Certified Good VR Collection [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/s/certified]. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Cirrus Selling Luxury Personal Aircraft Using Apple Vision Pro

An app called Let’s Go Fly is available free today as part of Cirrus Aircraft’s pitch to sell personal airplanes starting with Apple Vision Pro demos. The sales team at Cirrus now carry Vision Pro headsets to show potential buyers the short immersive film made with Blackmagic immersive cameras, with the project representing a new sales tool to help in selling luxury personal aircraft. Cirrus’ sales personnel are all pilots themselves and will fly to local airports to meet with potential buyers and show off planes, which can cost over a million dollars to buy [https://cirrusaircraft.com/price-list/]. Potential customers and aviation fans can now wear the headset to get a good look at the aircraft in 3D as it appears on the ground, in the cockpit and in flight from the outside with views captured by the immersive cameras. “If you can actually give somebody a real experience that creates an emotional impact, they start to understand…[this] is a thing that people do every single day,” said Cirrus Media Development Director Anthony Bottini on the Good VR Podcast. “We have this huge amount of people out there in the world that could afford to and do have the right mission to be able to do this, but they’ve just never been inspired. Or we’ve never contacted them the right way. And so where we’re coming from as an airplane sales organization, is we’re kind of limited to the airport, many times the first point of contact that a potential customer will have with our aircraft, or with our experience, is looking through a barbed wire fence on the edge of an airport, and that’s not a great way to start a conversation. And so what we’ve done here is we’ve deployed Vision Pros across our global sales team with this app that includes an immersive film and everything else. And we’re hoping what we’ve just given them is the ability to bring a strong, impactful, emotional flying experience outside of the airport for the first time ever.” Bottini spoke with me for about 20 minutes for the podcast about their early attempts to move people to have that emotional experience. I’ve tried the Let’s Go Fly [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lets-go-fly/id6757612693] app and the immersive film delivers an experience reminiscent of Soarin’ Over California while conveying the vibe of flying a Cirrus plane. Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Devin Reimer Explores VR Input From Hands In Job Simulator To Voice In Stellar Cafe

AstroBeam’s Stellar Cafe [https://www.meta.com/experiences/stellar-cafe/23951924494476537/] is buried in Meta’s Quest ecosystem underneath the Horizon Worlds slop and a whole bunch of casual shooters, but it does something new and innovative with virtual reality that demands attention. It’s a game that can be played entirely with voice input. Across three days of interactions with more than half a dozen robots, you’ll find yourself feeling a lot of emotions because, as AstroBeam founder Devin Reimer says on the Good VR Podcast, “it triggers different parts of your brain, the speech part of things that we just haven’t had a chance to experience in interactive media before.” Reimer is one of the founders of Owlchemy Labs as well, so our discussion covers his path from being electrocuted by early wired Vive controllers to forgetting where he was physically located. He spent so much time developing a VR game in one spot before jumping on a plane and picking up the work elsewhere that he connected VR to the physical realm tethered to a specific locale. From putting work up on Oculus Share and adding hand tracking to Job Simulator to back at the cutting edge of development with voice input, Reimer’s conversation with me was just over an hour recorded and edited to 54 minutes with Riverside for the Good VR Podcast. “We built so many tools over like two plus years to actually allow you to make games with this because it is so difficult,” Reimer says. “We can’t be like, if the user says this, then do this….We can’t do that at all. So we have to think through what the character’s motivations are, what their goals are, all of that stuff, and then test a whole bunch. We learned all a whole bunch of stuff about how to build good characters….That very first character took us five months to build. It was like so hard to build. And then some of the ones in day three, I built one in four days because it was like, okay, I understand all the gotchas. We had built all the tech and stuff like that. And so with the next game, that we’re working on now, it’s like, okay, we have all that. Now, how do we bring this up and make this something bigger and more dynamic?” Get full access to Good Virtual Reality at www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe [https://www.goodvirtualreality.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]