THE EMPIRE
At CES 2017 this year Lenovo introduced their new gaming brand, Legion By Lenovo.
The key announcement for me from Legion By Lenovo was the introduction of the ‘Lenovo Entertainment Hub’, a virtual reality media and gaming platform developed by Australian based Beyond Media.
The Lenovo Entertainment Hub provides virtual reality compatibility for your existing media, and also ‘VR Upscaling’ for non VR games within your game library.
The media component of the Lenovo Entertainment Hub felt much like Plex or any other media organisational tool. It allows you to select existing media from your computer, then provides you with an incredibly immersive virtual reality environment to watch within.
During my demonstration, I was provided a virtual reality empty movie theater to watch the Angry Birds movie. This was with an HTC Vive headset.
As an owner of the HTC Vive myself, I was impressed with the fluidity of the experience.
I also use the Gear VR to watch movies and Netflix when travelling. The additional head tracking of the HTC made for a more comfortable and natural feeling experience.
I could easily see myself watching entire movies in this fashion.
The second component of the Lenovo Entertainment Hub is what really has me excited. They call it ‘VR Upscaling’. This will allow you to have a virtual reality experience within games that are not currently built for virtual reality.
The demonstration I experienced was with Duex Ex. This is a first person shooter with no current virtual reality functionality, however the Lenovo Entertainment Hub VR Upscaling ensured the game loaded within a virtual reality environment and was fully playable.
This game does not support motion controllers, so my guns cross hairs were locked to my direct line of sight. I play a Quake VR mod on the Gear VR in a similar fashion, so felt comfortable with this limitation.
Whilst not as immersive as full fledged virtual reality game, it was still a buzz to play a standard games within a virtual reality enviroment.
Lenovo have stated that up to 200 games will be compatible with the Entertainment Hub VR Upscaling, with continuous updates and additions from Beyond Media.
I’m looking forward to revisiting my standard game library and replaying from a completely brand new perspective.
Ross McDougall attended CES 2017 as a guest of Lenovo Australia & New Zealand
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