From all of us at Rival Theory, we want to send out a giant thank you to the Unity community! Our RAIN AI engine is now used in over 40,000 projects worldwide. Our technology has been used to power thousands of game, entertainment, and interactive media projects. Now we want to take that success and apply it to the incredible emerging industry that is Virtual Reality.

The general theme of today’s offerings in Virtual Reality is to put you, the viewer, in a place and time that you’ve always wanted to experience. Who hasn’t wanted to explore the many-mooned worlds of Star Wars, run with the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, glide on a gryphon over the land of Azeroth, or fly a mission from the cockpit of a space fighter. Of course, this is something video games have been doing almost since their inception - games have always been our ticket to interacting with our favorite fantasy worlds. However, the difference between VR and regular gaming is like the difference between going on vacation vs getting a post card. Sometimes you just have to be there. What’s the real purpose of VR then? In its truest form, we’re talking about the Holodeck - the ability to make the experience as absolutely real as possible, so that you can’t distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and, well… virtual.

Here’s what we’ve noticed though. As great as the worlds are that we’ve already been able to experience on Oculus and Gear VR, there’s something glaringly missing: life. VR worlds are largely empty, devoid of characters that support the sense of realism and provide an interactive experience to match the environments. Here at Rival Theory, we see this as a giant opportunity. Through technologies like RAIN and Sentio, we’ve been consistently building a platform for adding life to digital worlds. Now we’re working to merge our technology with content. We want to drive the future of entertainment through interactive characters, and to fill VR story worlds with real, emotionally relevant, personal and meaningful experiences with characters you can care about. If you’d like to learn more about that future and how Rival Theory is giving life to VR, please contact us.

In the meantime, we want to share some of our favorite immersive experiences available today. These represent some of the best developers in VR and their take on storytelling, characters, user experience, and interaction. Enjoy!

Colosse (featured) - Group of Devs including Nick Pittom (RedOfPaw)

I Expect You To Die - Schell Games

InsurgentVR - Kite and Lightning

Luna Station - HORN & IVRY