We'd like to extend a special welcome to all the new visitors who've come to check out VirZOOM since our appearance on The View! For those of you who might have missed "Fall's Hottest Gadgets," please feel free to check out this clip on ABC's site. (Those of you already familiar with VirZOOM will recognize the moment that someone learns to fly a Pegasus by the excited shouting.) And if you really can't get enough VirZOOM in your TV viewing schedule, our May appearance on Chronicle gets an updated segment on today's episode.
Meanwhile, here at VirZOOM headquarters, we've been hard at work making sure that everything's all set for the upcoming PlayStation VR launch – but we haven't forgotten about all you Vive and Oculus players out there. We're still kicking around new game designs (including the much-requested bicycling game!), fixing any glitches that made their way into the wild, and making performance and optimization improvements. Our next updated build, including those fixes and optimization tweaks, will be available on Steam next week.
In the meantime, we'd like to highlight a couple other things about VirZOOM that might not be obvious even to the early adopters already pedaling away on their own bikes...
VirZOOM is more than just a pretty bike and a single collection of games. While we design our own exercise games for VirZOOM Arcade to be fun and endlessly replayable in their own right, we've always wanted to let you work out while playing your own favorite games, whatever they may be. To that end, we offer the VirZOOM Gamepad Emulator, now available on Steam, which allows you to play other VR and PC games using your bike in place of a traditional controller.
The VZ Gamepad Emulator is still a young product, but we're eager to build on it with your help. Before you can use your VirZOOM bike with another game, the emulator needs a special configuration file to define what different inputs mean – pedal to move forward, right trigger to switch gears, and so on. And those configuration files take time to get right! We've uploaded a few ourselves so far and have more in the pipeline, allowing you to play Project Cars, Radial-G, Time Machine VR, and Eve: Valkyrie – with an alternate configuration featuring head-tracking on the way soon!
We're especially looking forward to seeing what kinds of configurations our community comes up with, both for VR games and 2D games on PC. Thinking you might want to give it a try? Drop by the VZGE Steam Forum to let folks know what you're working on. We've got a bunch of sweat-wicking VirZOOM t-shirts here we'd love to send out to top contributors!
Have you been enjoying VirZOOM Arcade, but feel like your car race, helicopter ride, or Pegasus flight could use a bit more something? Do you enjoy the pleasant jingle of virtual coins well-earned, but wish you had someplace to spend them? Well, we'd love to draw your attention to a little-known feature we plan to expand upon in the future: avatar upgrades!
When you select an avatar in the main menu, you might notice that you can press both triggers for "Options." Here, you'll find a super-fast neon car, a high-flying golden Pegasus, and a chopper with multi-target homing missiles. They cost some of those hard-earned coins with each use, but you can expect to earn extra from faster laps and quicker scoring. You'll find that they also introduce different kinds of gameplay than what you're used to: When your Chopper can take out turrets with ease, River Run becomes more about dodging and long-term endurance. Check them out – and let us know what other kinds of avatar upgrades you'd like to see!
Got any feedback for us? Please share! Drop me an email at [email protected] or visit this forum thread to let us know what you think! We take your input (and your game suggestions) very seriously.
Have any questions, concerns, or technical problems? Check out our manual at My VirZOOM for instructions and troubleshooting tips, or drop by the VirZOOM Forums to ask questions of our staff and community.
Thanks for your support, and see you online!