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.
ILMxLAB today announced that its upcoming VR experience Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge is getting a ‘first look’ next week, July 28th, which should hopefully demystify the studio’s next built-for-VR original story.
Oculus has introduced new party features which allow groups of players to launch into the same app together and to move from one app to another. Players can now also create Public Parties to discover players beyond their friends list.
Grabbing objects in VR may be one of the medium’s most fundamental interactions, but making it work well isn’t as easy as you might think. Developers often need to spend time hand animating the hand model so that it appears to hold each object in a realistic way. Developer Luca Mefisto has built a smart tool which uses Quest’s hand-tracking to enable developers to motion-capture hand-poses, making the whole ordeal quicker, more realistic, and ultimately more immersive for players.
Racket: Nx, a virtual reality fusion of tennis and Breakout, is soon to get a major update with new features like co-op, avatar customization, and in-game tournaments. The studio has also teased that the game is heading to “another VR platform,” very likely PSVR.
