IRL Studios announced that Gym Class, its popular VR basketball game on Meta Quest App Lab, has raised $8 million in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from Y Combinator.
Practice makes perfect, especially when it comes to life-saving procedures that deal with extreme edge cases like separating conjoined twins. Now a UK-Brazilian team have done just that, which is thanks to detailed planning sessions which allowed the surgical team to model and rehearse the operation in VR from two different continents.
Back in June Meta revealed its latest XR R&D efforts through a handful of different prototypes designed to prove out various concepts. The next step, the company says, is to bring it all together into a single package that could one day reach real users.
EVE: Valkyrie (2016), the sci-fi dogfighter from CCP Games, used to be one of most talked about titles in VR thanks to its cross-platform multiplayer, high visual polish, and position as one of the first games on Oculus Rift and PSVR. Starting August 5th, CCP is shutting down its servers for both EVE: Valkyrie and and sci-fi sports game Sparc (2017), putting a definite end to an era.
Now that August is here, Meta has made good on its promise to raise the price of Quest 2 and its accessories. Here’s a quick look at how the company has increased prices for its most popular VR headset yet.
Chinese tech giant Xiaomi today unveiled a pair of smart glasses that the company is positioning as an addition to an active lifestyle, targeting consumers at 2,499 yuan (~$370).
ByteDance’s Pico Interactive is getting ready to launch a new line of standalone VR headsets soon looking to compete with Meta, dubbed Pico 4 and Pico 4 Pro. Now a leak has allegedly revealed Pico 4’s controllers, and they look to be a significant step forward in terms of ergonomics.
Walkabout Mini Golf (2020) always seems to rank among the top games on Quest, which is no doubt thanks to its uncommonly high degree of polish and consistently fun gameplay. Now developers Mighty Coconut have finally released the long-awaited paid DLC inspired by Jim Henson’s ’80s classic LABYRINTH (1986), letting you dive head first into a course set in a magical world filled with memorable characters and iconic scenes from the fantasy film.
COMPOUND is a roguelite shooter fresh out of Steam Early Access that unabashedly owes a lot of its DNA to classic first-person shooters like Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993). Far from being just a version of those old school games translated to VR, Compound brings its own stylish take to the genre and integrates VR-native mechanics at its core, which makes it feel right at home in the 21st century.
In 2021 Meta announced its intention to acquire Within, the studio behind popular VR fitness app Supernatural; though neither company announced the deal price, reporting indicated a whopping $400 million price tag which may have caught the attention of the US Federal Trade Commission. Today the FTC moved to formally block the deal in what it says is an effort to protect competition.
Sony has fully revealed PlayStation VR 2 at this point, but the company has still kept the PSVR 2 release date under wraps, with many wondering if it will come in 2022 or 2023. Well the company says it’ll finally reveal that info “soon.”
VRChat, one of VR’s most popular social games, released an update this week has struck a nerve with its community.
Meta announced today something that we haven’t previously seen happen in the middle of a VR headset’s lifecycle—a price increase for Quest 2. To soften the blow, the company says it will include a free copy of the headset’s most popular game.
Even though the original PSVR headset is still getting some new game releases, it’s decidedly a last-gen headset… or maybe even a last-last-gen headset depending upon how you look at it. Luckily the forthcoming PSVR 2 is ready to match the latest and greatest headsets with modern features like passthrough view and a system-wide playspace boundary.
