Khronos Group, the consortium behind the OpenXR industry standard, today announced that it has begun officially certifying products that correctly implement the OpenXR standard. Additionally, the group has added new extensions to the standard to support hand-tracking and eye-tracking.
Facebook Reality Labs, the company’s R&D department, previously revealed its ‘Half Dome’ prototype headsets which demonstrated functional varifocal optics small enough for a consumer VR headset. At a conference earlier this year, the Lab’s Director of Display Systems Research said the latest system is “almost ready for primetime,” and also detailed the Lab’s research into HDR (high-dynamic range) and pupil-steering displays for XR headsets.
OpenXR is a widely supported open 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. Today the company announced that developers can submit OpenXR applications to be published on the Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift stores.
The Toronto-based AR/VR developer Dark Slope today announced it’s closed a bridge funding round with multiple investors which brings the company’s total funding to $2.75 million. This coincides with a pivot away from location-based VR entertainment towards immersive VR learning.
Pixel Ripped 1995 (2020), the ’90s nostalgia-soaked sequel to VR adventure Pixel Ripped 1989 (2018), just got a free update that’s bringing a bunch of new content to the game.
Enterprise-focused headset startup LYNX introduced its MR headset—designed for both VR and pass-through AR—in early 2020. Today the company revealed a redesign which makes the headset even more compact, and aims to maximize the user’s peripheral view for pass-through AR. Production units of the headset are expected to start shipping in September.
A number of unverified photos of an apparently unreleased Quest headset appeared online. The rendered photos show the front portion of an apparent future Quest headset (possibly a ‘Quest 2’) which Oculus is expected to reveal later this year. A second rendered photo, which was released today from the same source, shows an interior look at the face gasket and lenses, appended with a mysterious September 15th date. Now someone has thrown out four physical photos of what appears to be the very same Oculus headset.
With a few caveats, In Death: Unchained is basically the same experience you can have on SteamVR headsets and PSVR with its forebear In Death (2018), which we gave a respectable [8/10] for the PC VR platform. Two years have passed since it launched out of Early Access on PC, and most of the positives are reflected in the new, Quest-exclusive version of the game. It would be a sin to say it’s the exact same game though. While Unchained inevitably bucks against inside-out tracking capabilities of Quest, you’re still sure to have a fun time experiencing the roguelike bow-shooter’s specific flavor of abject failure.
Well that didn’t take long. Dreams, the game-within-a-game-maker, has had its newly updated VR feature for hardly more than 24 hours, but someone has already made a fully functional Beat Saber clone.
Vertigo (2016) proved to be an ambitious room-scale VR title that pioneered the medium alongside the best of them back in 2016. Now ostensibly overhauled completely, Vertigo Remastered (2020) refreshes the VR shooter’s threadbare low-poly aesthetic with a richer, more immersive art style that, among other apparent tune-ups, puts a fresh coat of paint onto this plucky indie title. At its core, it’s still very much a fun and unique VR game that seems to have aged pretty well, warts and all.
We love seeing unique takes on VR games and Steady certainly fits the bill. Launched last week, the game challenges you to move a ring along a path without touching the path or the increasingly difficult obstacles surrounding it.
A newly released update for the Oculus Browser on Quest includes full-finger hand-tracking support for WebXR projects.
Researchers from Facebook’s R&D department, Facebook Reality Labs, and the University of California, Berkeley have published new research which demonstrates a method for expanding the field-of-view of holographic displays.
In an interesting bit of news which shows Valve’s SteamVR Tracking technology used in a non-VR application, robotics company Wandelbots has raised a $30 million Series B investment around their TracePen tool, a motion-tracked stylus which makes it easy to program the complex movements of industrial robots.
The big PSVR update to Media Molecule’s creation game Dreams (2020) is coming tomorrow, July 22nd. If you’re counting the seconds though, you can catch an insider look right now as Media Molecule is going hands-on with the ‘Inside the Box’ starting experience and a number of the game’s new VR creation features.
