Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls: Blades back at E3 2018, promising that the free-to-play title would support VR headsets all the way from standalone to high-end PC. It’s been nearly two years since that announcement, but Bethesda has “no update” on the VR version of the game.
Pistol Whip (2019), the VR rhythm-shooter from Cloudhead Games, just got a new dielselpunk-inspired update, available now on Oculus Quest and SteamVR-compatible headsets.
Half-Life: Alyx (2020) is already inspiring modders to strip Valve’s flagship VR title of assets and character models for their own strange and wonderful devices. Exhibit A: you can now play some Wolfenstein 3D in VR, replete with HLA’s guns, grenades, and enemies.
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While we’ve talked plenty about the power of WebXR—a standard which makes it possible to deliver VR experiences directly from web browsers—there hasn’t been a centralized destination to discover WebXR apps as users would expect from other content platforms. XR Swim is a new portal that aims to deliver just that.
Lies Beneath (2020), the Oculus-exclusive survival horror VR game from Gunheart (2018) creators Drifter Entertainment, launched late last month on Oculus Quest. Now Rift users can get into the fun too, if you can call being slightly traumatized “fun”.
Microsoft started shipping HoloLens 2 back in November 2019, but it’s been a slow rollout to select customers. While the company says it has shipped “tens of thousands” of HoloLens 2 headset to “hundreds” of enterprise customers, it hasn’t been easy to get hands on one as a smaller company or individual. Now, Microsoft says, that’s changing.
With a successful holiday season under its belt, Facebook was no doubt looking forward to resupplying its retail partners with more Oculus Quest & Rift S stock. However in a perfect storm of high demand, low supply, and on-going supply chain disruptions due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), both headsets have been largely unavailable for purchase.
The secret to Half-Life: Alyx’s near-universal acclaim is… well, not as secret as you might think. Yes, the game surely had a budget much larger than any other VR game to date, but it’s far more than money that makes a great game.
Etee, the finger-tracking VR controller with SteamVR Tracking, has nearly reached its Kickstarter goal with plenty of time to spare. Though the controller is designed to be free of buttons, sticks, and triggers (relying instead on finger tracking), its creators say it can adapt to existing VR games. TG0, the company behind Etee, has shared Half-Life: Alyx gameplay with the controllers and a Q&A which speaks to the decisions underlying the controller’s design.
WebXR is an open standard which allows VR apps to run directly from web browsers. While the tools for building WebXR apps are designed to be familiar to web developers, many VR developers use game engine tools like Unity to build their apps. With the Unity WebXR Exporter, developers now have the option of targeting browsers as their publishing platform, making their app easily accessible on the web.
A new Boneworks patch, Update 1.4, has been released with a handful of additions and tweaks.
Universe Sandbox, the physics-based space simulator from Giant Army, made a splash on PC back in 2015, later getting VR support so you could physically smash the Moon into the Earth with your own two hands. Now Giant Army has released a version of its galactic physics sandbox on Magic Leap 1, bringing what the studio says an “undiluted” experience.
Beat Saber (2018) is a great tool if you’re stuck indoors and want to stay fit. To keep you up and moving, Beat Games today released their latest free track, called ‘FitBeat’, which aims to get your heart pumping to its high BMP, obstacle-laden track.
