Facebook announced that the v25 software update for its Quest platform is set to include Facebook Messenger, which will be available to anyone who is logged into their Facebook account on either Quest or Quest 2.
Oculus today introduced a program called App Lab, a new effort which will allow developers to distribute their VR apps on Quest without being subject to a quality review ‘curation’ process. Though apps still need to meet Oculus’ technical guidelines, and won’t appear in the Quest store like formally approved apps, they can be independently distributed and even sold without a cumbersome sideloading process.
Beat Saber has officially reached 4 million units sold, Oculus today announced, along with 40 million songs of paid DLC, pushing the app’s estimated revenue to $180 million.
Due to the ongoing pandemic, this year’s Super Bowl is set to be very different. If you have a VR headset though, you can still host that Super Bowl Sunday party with your buddies while staying safe at home. Here’s how you can watch the Super Bowl in VR for free with with your friends using the Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, and all SteamVR-compatible headsets.
Completing your weekly chores can be an absolute drag, but doing repetitive tasks like vacuuming the house might not always be so boring when VR and AR come into the mix.
Google’s VR art creation app Tilt Brush isn’t free, but the company made it open source a few days ago after announcing it has stopped active development, so it was only a matter of time before independent developers got under the hood to publish their own Tilt Brush-derived apps. Now you can play around with the first batch on PC VR and Oculus Quest.
Ultraleap, the company behind the Leap Motion hand-tracking controller, has released a Developer Preview of its hand-tracking engine Gemini. By many accounts, Ultraleap’s latest software overhaul dramatically increases the ability of the company’s camera modules to do more precise and stable two-handed interactions.
Adding to a growing number of data points showing why Facebook has shifted its attention away from Oculus PC is the difference in momentum between the two platforms as revealed by game review counts over time. This month, the number of reviews across all Quest games has exceeded the number of reviews across all Oculus PC games.
GORN (2019), the single-player arcade battle simulator, is finally coming to Oculus Quest today.
Fast Travel Games, the studio behind Apex Construct (2018) and Budget Cuts 2 (2019), are bringing their ‘World of Darkness’ horror game Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife to all major VR platforms this spring. Now the studio has served up a fresh gameplay video featuring the mysterious ‘Shadow’ who guides you.
Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap, is starting on a new path after his departure as CEO of the well-funded augmented reality company last year. Abovitz just unveiled his next project, a startup called Sun and Thunder, which aims to build what he calls “synthetic beings.”
HaptX, the company building high-end haptic VR gloves for enterprises, launched its latest model, DK2, which is now available for purchase. The new version is said to have improved haptics, force-feedback, size, comfort, and manufacturability.
During Facebook’s Q4 2020 earnings call today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Quest 2 is “on track to be the first mainstream virtual reality headset,” noting that the device drove a 156% increase in the company’s non-advertising revenue.
Canon previously announced its next AR/VR headset MREAL S1 back in October. Now, the Japan-based company has shown off the enterprise-focused device in a new video.
Love them or hate them for it, Bethesda’s games offer up a great opportunity for modders to get under the hood of impressively large-scale virtual worlds and summarily fix whatever messes the studio left behind. The same goes for Skyrim VR (2018), which for all its charms, is still obviously in need of tweaks to make it more like the VR-native game it should have been when it was first released on PC VR headsets in 2018. Now there’s a mod for that.
