Rec Room, the social VR platform, announced it has secured a $100 million financing round, bringing the company’s valuation to $1.25 billion. This makes it one of the most valuable VR companies outside of platform holders Facebook, Valve, and HTC.
Now through March 31st you can pick up Half-Life: Alyx on sale at a 40% discount in celebration of the game’s one year anniversary.
Nintendo and Niantic have announced a partnership to jointly develop new AR games based on Nintendo franchises. The first game will be based on the Pikmin series, and be “built on Niantic’s real-world AR technology,” which has most famously been used for Pokémon Go.
WarpAR is a free iOS app from developer Matt Bierner which lets you use Photoshop-like liquify tools to dynamically modify the world through AR. More than just a cool tech demo, it also helps us imagine what the future might be like when our physical reality becomes increasingly subject to digital whims.
Like a majority of in-person events, Gamescom was cancelled last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, or rather held entirely online—however you want to slice it. Now event organizers say it will be held as a “hybrid event” this August, offering up its massive halls to press, industry and even private visitors.
Despite being among the early supporters of the OpenXR consortium—the industry group building the open standard for XR devices—Sony so far seems to have avoided making a specific commitment to implement OpenXR on PSVR or its next-gen headset.
A newly published patent granted to Valve envisions new Index headsets that could be wireless or standalone, and include new head-mounts for improved ergonomics.
At the all-digital version of SXSW 2021 today, Facebook’s Mark Rabkin, VP of Oculus, showed off an upcoming new version of its avatar system on Quest.
Beat Saber, the block-slashing rhythm game, is getting its fourth original sound track (OST) installation today, coming to all supported platforms for free.
Pimax’s top of the line offering, the “8K” X headset, originally shipped with a max refresh rate of 75Hz for its native resolution mode. Today the company is releasing a beta update which pushes that up to 90Hz. The company says it worked with NVIDIA to overcome prior “bandwidth limitations” to enable the higher refresh rate on most GeForce RTX 30-series GPUs.
Facebook today revealed some of its latest research and vision for a wrist-worn input device that the company expects to form the basis of AR and VR interactions and haptics in the future. The device, still in a research prototype phase, senses electrical signals in the user’s arm to detect intentional inputs. In addition to functioning as a simple ‘button’ input, the company says the device can even enable accurate, keyboard-less typing, and more.
In preparation for the reveal of its next VR headset, Sony today gave a first look at its next-gen VR controller for use with PS5, something that appears very similar to Oculus’ Touch controller.
Speaking on a panel at the online GDC Showcase today, Facebook’s VP of Play, Jason Rubin, and Facebook Reality Labs’ VP of Content, Mike Verdu, furthered the company’s bullish outlook on Quest. The duo claimed that the platform is very near to being a sustainable developer ecosystem, and that the data shows a clear trajectory in which VR will eventually reach ‘AAA’ scale.
