Hard data on the VR market is often difficult to come by, while broad ‘industry reports’ are often so general that it’s difficult to see what things look like ‘on the ground’. To get a sense of VR’s outlook in 2021, we’ve collected 14 of the most recent and concrete indicators for your perusal.
Oculus today announced that it’s rolling out a small but welcomed change to Quest’s voice commands feature: the ability to activate it with a wake phrase—”Hey Facebook.”
Superhot VR (2016) has long been held up as one of the ‘must-have’ VR games. Now the studio announced it’s just tipped the one million mark for units sold on the Oculus Quest platform.
The latest update to SteamVR, version 1.16, now includes full support for OpenXR 1.0, the widely backed industry standard which aims to make cross-platform VR development easier by allowing developers to build around a single API rather than porting their apps to many different APIs for different headsets. SteamVR’s support for OpenXR 1.0 is a huge step forward for the adoption of the standard.
Ready Play Me, the free avatar maker from Wolf3D, now supports exporting avatars to VRChat, making it quick and easy to get a customizable avatar into one of the most popular social VR applications.
Microsoft is looking to make good use of its social VR platform AltspaceVR next week as it hosts its first Ignite keynote in virtual reality.
Sci-fi anime VR visual novel experience ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos launched on Oculus Quest in December and quickly rose to become one of the best rated titles on the headset. Now the app has launched on SteamVR for PC VR users to enjoy.
The launch of PlayStation 5 brought backwards compatible support for PSVR, but with Sony confirming a new PSVR headset in the works we’d be lying if we said we weren’t most excited by what’s around the corner. A new VR headset is alluring in itself, but even more so given Sony’s confirmation that “key features” from its impressive PS5 DualSense controllers will be part of the next-gen PSVR controllers.
Crytek announced last year that The Climb (2016) would be getting its long-awaited sequel sometime during the holiday season 2020. Although that launch window has come and gone, The Climb 2 is now finally set for a March 4th release date.
Sony today announced that its next-generation VR headset is coming—not in 2021, but it’s definitely a thing. In an interview with GQ, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan says dev kit headsets are close to landing in the hands of developers.
Sony has been awfully quiet about the follow-up to its PSVR headset, which was initially released back in October 2016. Today the company publicly announced it is indeed working on its next-generation VR headset for PS5 consoles. There’s only a few scraps of info for now, but there should be plenty of time to tease out the specifics. In short: it’s looking to be a vastly improved piece of kit.
If you’re developing a VR game, you may be able to strike a deal with one of the most senior VR studios out there. nDreams, a developer and publisher of VR games, announced the creation of a $2 million fund which it will use to co-fund and publish externally developed VR titles.
Qualcomm, maker of chips and technologies for mobile devices, today announced a reference design for a tethered AR headset which is tethered to a phone or PC but also contains its own chips to handle some onboard processing. The company calls the split-processing approach an AR ‘smart viewer’ headset.
If you know your VR history you might recall CRASHLAND, an early VR prototype where players would defend themselves after crash landing on a hostile planet with little more than a radar scanner and a weapon. After the project went dormant for years as the developer focused on Ocean Rift (2016), today we learn that Crashland is about to blast onto Quest after being revived and revamped.
The Shore (2021) is a first-person horror adventure that recently launched on PC, however now developer Ares Dragonis says the game will soon get a VR version too.
