Creative Technology makes first move into virtual reality in fight to regain relevance

Photo credit: Nan Palmero

Creative Technology was once the toast of Singapore. Its audio processing chips were found in many PCs around the world. But industry shifts and a series of missteps relegated Creative to the sidelines, and the company missed out on the smartphone revolution.

It’s determined not to let that happen again. Today, Creative gave us a glimpse of what it’s been up to, and it involves virtual reality.

The product is BlasterZone (Android app, iOS pending approval), and it’s a service for viewing mobile game replays that are far more immersive and high-resolution than what’s on YouTube and Twitch.

It enables people to “view the same recording on any device, at any resolution, on any display ranging from mobile devices, to large 4k or higher resolution screens, to virtual reality headsets with full stereo display,” says the press release.

Here’s the cool thing: if you’re watching a BlasterZone video of a 3D game, you can actually move around in the recording, almost as if you’re playing the game itself. And the company has developed an app that can record such videos on a mobile device, which it says is easy enough for YouTube content creators to use.

Here’s a video showing BlasterZone in action. Note that what you’re seeing is me moving around within the recording. It’s not the actual game:

This special feature works with 2D games too. However, instead of flying around in-video like a ghost, you can only zoom in and out, or pan around the incredibly high-resolution footage.

Virtual reality support is not available yet, but will launch at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2016. It will also release its own virtual reality headset, called the BlasterX. It comes with a wireless controller, and will sell for US$49.99.

So in the future, you could potentially watch a replay of Minecraft on the headset, and move around in it. Pretty neat.

Right now though, the technology appears nascent. A video takes minutes to fully load on my 1Gbps wifi connection. The app crashed a few times in one sitting. You’d need a well-spec’ed phone with plenty of RAM and storage space to use this. But it’s a matter of time before technology catches up.

Twitch for virtual reality