Blade & Sorcery, VR’s favorite melee combat sim, is continuing to see steady updates. The game’s next update, U11 (now available in an early beta), looks to be a doozy with the studio adding an expanded magic system, stealth mechanics, a graphical overhaul on PC, and plenty more.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a prototype of the company’s wrist-worn XR controller this week to EssilorLuxottica, the Italian parent company behind the Ray-Ban Stories camera glasses and a host of other conventional luxury eyewear brands. Although outwardly it appears to be similar to what the company revealed last year, it’s definitely a vote of confidence by Meta in the tech’s potential as the basis of a future XR input device.
A team of researchers from NVIDIA Research and Stanford published a new paper demonstrating a pair of thin holographic VR glasses. The displays can show true holographic content, solving for the vergence-accommodation issue. Though the research prototypes demonstrating the principles were much smaller in field-of-view, the researchers claim it would be straightforward to achieve a 120° diagonal field-of-view.
Popular block-slashing rhythm game Beat Saber just got an unexpected drop of 12 new tracks in its Electronic Mixtape paid DLC, which includes content spanning nearly two decades of electronic music.
Google is adding to its portfolio of XR microdisplay designs and talent, as the company announced it’s acquired microLED (µLED) designer Raxium.
Researchers at Meta Reality Labs have created a prototype VR headset with a custom-built accelerator chip specially designed to handle AI processing to make it possible to render the company’s photorealistic Codec Avatars on a standalone headset.
Flirtual is a dating app designed to match VR users together and to facilitate dates in social VR applications. The creators say it’s a codification of a trend that’s already happening—people meeting in VR and going on to form real-world relationships.
Following a report today which claimed Meta’s upcoming Project Cambria headset would be priced at $800, rather than denying the information as a rumor, the company took the curious step of confirming the headset would be much more expensive.
According to a report by The Information, Meta plans to release four new VR headsets by 2024, and that’s purportedly in addition to its AR devices.
Speaking at the IEDM conference late last year, Meta Reality Labs’ Chief Scientist Michael Abrash laid out the company’s analysis of how contemporary compute architectures will need to evolve to make possible the AR glasses of our sci-fi conceptualizations.
Wallace & Gromit, Britain’s iconic stop-motion duo, are getting their own interactive VR experience on Meta Quest 2 next year, developed by series creator Aardman, Meta, and VR pioneers Atlas V.
Bigscreen is putting Meta to shame again, as the VR hangout app just got a serious bump in functionality for Quest users and PC VR users alike. Now VR’s favorite social viewing app includes native YouTube support, so you can watch anything on YouTube with friends and strangers.
After the Fall (2021), the co-op zombie shooter from Vertigo Games, is getting a nice little content bump today in its ‘Shock & Awe’ update, which brings to the game a new arsenal of weapons, a free-for-all deathmatch mode, and a new map.
Varjo today announced the launch of Varjo Reality Cloud, the company’s XR cloud streaming platform that’s aimed at making XR more scalable in enterprise settings by doing the heavy lifting of rendering in the cloud. At the outset the company is targeting the automotive industry, but plans to enable enterprises more broadly with support for Unity & Unreal Engine.
Today during Meta’s Q1 2022 earnings call CEO Mark Zuckerberg told shareholders that they should buckle up for the long haul because the company’s steep investments in XR and metaverse technologies aren’t expected to flourish until the next decade.
