It’s the beginning of the end for Oculus Quest and the start of the beginning for Meta Quest, as Meta (formerly Facebook) moves to erase the Oculus brand in order to bring its XR division more in line with its fresh brand identity.
Ultraleap, a leading company focused on hand-tracking interfaces, this week announced it has secured a £60 million (~$82 million) Series D investment, with the goal of expanding its hand-tracking and mid-air haptic tech in the XR space and beyond.
Qualcomm held an investor event earlier this week where the company claimed that its partnership with Meta (formerly Facebook) had seen over 10 million Oculus Quest 2 units shipped since its launch in October 2020. Not so fast though: Qualcomm now says the 10 million unit figure was a third-party estimate and “wasn’t meant as an official disclosure of sales numbers by Meta or Qualcomm.”
Resolution Games, the studio behind Demeo, Blaston, and Cook-Out: A Sandwich Tale, announced its next title coming to “major VR platforms” starting next year. Called Ultimechs, the game put you aboard a mech to play some sort of futuristic multiplayer sport.
Warhammer: Age of Sigmar – Tempestfall is the latest and most ambitious title from Carbon Studio which cut its teeth building VR spellcasting game The Wizards. In Tempestfall, the studio attempts to bring melee into the mix, alongside a dark fantasy story set in the vast Warhammer universe, but ultimately falls well short of what it set out to achieve.
HTC launched Vive Focus 3 back in late June, a high-end VR standalone with a price tag to match its ambitions as a device meant for businesses. The company recently announced updates to the software experience that will bring a host of improvements, such as support for the new WiFi 6E standard, larger tracking areas, a shared map for easier playspace calibration, and more.
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual apps are performing across its VR storefronts, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the top 20 Oculus Quest games and apps as of November 2021.
Japanese social VR startup HIKKY announced today that it has raised ¥6.5 billion (~$57 million), led by Japanese mobile network operator NTT Docomo. The startup says it will use the funds to expand its web-based metaverse platform.
Varjo’s XR-3 headset has perhaps the best passthrough view of any MR headset on the market thanks to color cameras that offer a fairly high resolution and a wide field-of-view. But rather than just using the passthrough view for AR (bringing virtual objects into the real world) Varjo has developed a new tool to do the reverse (bringing real objects into the virtual world).
At Connect 2021 last week, Meta revealed a new Quest rendering technology called Application Spacewarp which it says can increase the performance of Quest apps by a whopping 70%. While similar to the Asynchronous Spacewarp tech available to Oculus PC apps, Meta says Application Spacewarp will produce even better results.
Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall, Carbon Studio’s upcoming action-adventure game, just got an extended gameplay video to show off some of its combat, puzzles, and rich environments before its November 17th release on PC VR headsets.
Google is shaking things up with the reorganization of its AR/VR efforts, Project Starline, and Area 120 in-house incubator, dubbing the internal team ‘Google Labs’.
Resolution Games, which has been making VR games since 2016, estimates that the VR industry currently has around 5 million active VR users.
Out-of-home VR destination Sandbox VR today announced an additional $37 million funding round that the company is using to support its continued expansion. In addition to its dozen worldwide locations, Sandbox VR says it’s working to nearly doubling that.
Meta (formerly Facebook) is not only building its next generation of AR and VR headsets, but it’s looking to jumpstart a sort of immersive internet the company believes will one day be the future of human interaction—that’s the ‘metaverse’ everyone’s talking about. And to sell that idea to the masses, the company has allegedly discussed rolling out physical stores.
