VR Funhouse is a collection of mini games developed by NVIDIA. The different contests take classic carnival games and bring them into the VR space, occasionally with unique twists. Players engage in tasks ranging from shooting galleries to whack-a-mole, and VR Funhouse even turns the vintage balloon and dart game on its head, equipping you with two swords as you impale the many balloons that flank you in every direction.
The carnival compilation serves as an introduction to NVIDIA’s 3D rendering for VR, as noted by our writer Joe Durbin during his hands-on, and NVIDIA has just recently introduced a VR Funhouse Mod Kit for developers to tool around with on September 1st. The application has already received over 100,000 downloads. Hot on the heels of that news and the mod kit release, Epic Games has announced a Game Jam in collaboration with NVIDIA, HTC, and Valve.
Pre-selected teams across Europe will be brought onto the MS Bleichen Ship (museum ship) in Hamburg, Germany and given 48 hours to build unique experiences in VR Funhouse on September 24th and 25th. Epic will raffle off prizes to registered attendees at the event, while visitors will also get hands-on time with whatever the teams create during the jam.
If you’re not one of the teams participating, don’t fret: VR Funhouse is available for free on Steam and you can download the Mod Kit and Unreal Engine 4 via the Epic Games launcher at no charge. NVIDIA has taken a significant step forward for realistic physics and graphics in VR and brought it to the hands of consumers.
With tools such as this modkit making VR Funhouse fully editable, NVIDIA also offers developers interested in VR a platform they don’t have to build things mostly from scratch in complex engines such as Unity, Epic’s own Unreal Engine, or CRYEngine. Using the VR Funhouse modkit will require some baseline Unreal Engine knowledge.
Register now on Eventbrite for the showcase event at the VR Funhouse Game Jam in Hamburg, Germany, taking place on Monday, September 26th.
