Availability of Quest 2 direct from Meta seems to have dried up, as the company’s last-gen headset is now showing out of stock in nearly all regions—likely making way for what’s next.
It was first discovered years ago that Meta has been testing cloud game streaming to bring PC VR games to Quest, but the feature has yet to see the light of day (or even an official announcement). New evidence suggests the feature, codenamed Avalanche, is still in active development and may support specific games from the Oculus Studios catalog, like Lone Echo (2017).
There are a few great ways to market VR games, but there’s arguably none better than by showing real people immersed in virtual environments thanks to mixed reality capture. While Meta has its own Mixed Reality Capture tool (MRC), the company is taking a step back from development by adopting third-party app LIV as its official solution.
Indie studio Ivory Crow Games have released a new demo for Chrono Weaver, a single player game that lets you make copies of yourself to solve physics-based puzzles.
Meta’s social VR platform Horizon Worlds hasn’t been available to everyone, with the company restricting the app’s use to only a few countries. Now it’s rightfully rolling out to every region where Quest is supported.
The 2D to 3D photo conversion feature coming to Vision Pro in VisionOS 2.0 makes a novel capability meaningful for the first time.
RIVEN (1997), the sequel to iconic point-and-click puzzle-adventure MYST (1993), just got the VR treatment in its new remake. Unlike Myst, which felt a little too game-y and obtuse at times, Riven plays a lot more like a modern title, which thanks to Quest and SteamVR support, is true in every sense of the word now. Granted, you’ll need to look past some VR implementation issues which keep it from feeling like a ground-up VR native, although however you play, you’ll be exploring a fascinating world that’s both puzzle-dense and undeniably beautiful at every turn.
Sony is getting ready to release tethered PC VR support for PSVR 2 this summer, but that may be one of the last meaningful things the company does for its increasingly latchkey VR hardware.
Apple Vision Pro isn’t exactly brimming with XR games yet, although starting next month you’ll be able to jump into a classic city builder that has been updated to include full mixed reality support.
Batman: Arkham Shadow is the next big first-party title from Meta, headed exclusively to Quest 3 later this year. In an interview with the founder of the studio behind the game, we learned more about the origin of the title, the team behind it, and which of the original Batman: Arkham games it’s most closely aligned with.
Meta has released a tool that will allow Quest users the ability to force software updates via a tethered connection.
Maze Theory today announced that its upcoming immersive puzzle-adventure game Infinite Inside is set to arrive next month, coming to all major headsets.
Meta announced a new developer accelerator aimed at kickstarting ‘Lifestyle’ apps for Quest which make use of mixed reality, AI and hand-tracking.
This week at AWE 2024, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey spoke briefly about a new XR headset he’s developing. Though the headset would see Luckey returning to the XR space, this one is being built with military, rather than consumer, uses in mind.
Hugo Swart, previous head of Qualcomm’s XR division, announced he’s joined Google where he’ll lead the company’s XR Ecosystem Strategy and Technology efforts.
