In the decade that I've spent studying and reporting on VR I've had the fortune of experiencing a wide range of VR game design—a craft which is still far from 'figured out'. And while I have no intention of...

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...

Long-time Valve VR programmer Joe Ludwig, working in his own capacity, is building an open-source platform to bring AR-like utilities into virtual reality. The project, called Aardvark, is something of an evolution of an extension of VR dashboards as...

The latest version of the Oculus Integration for Unity, v23, adds experimental OpenXR support for Quest and Quest 2 application development. A new technique for reducing positional latency called 'Phase Sync' has been added to both the Unity and...

Facebook announced back in June that it planned to offer developers a way to distribute Oculus Quest apps outside of the official, curated, Quest store. Now the company indicates it has "high confidence" that the feature will be deployed...

Recently released on the Quest store, Cubism is a spatial puzzle game with a slick minimal presentation. Designed by a solo indie developer Thomas Van Bouwel as a side project, the game impressively holds the highest user rating among all Quest...

Half-Life: Alyx is likely soon to see an update which would add in-game developer commentary similar to previous Valve games. Fans of Valve games will likely recall the optional in-game developer commentary first added to Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and in...

Unity has long been a public supporter of OpenXR—an industry standard designed to streamline VR development by making it easier for apps to support a wide range of headsets—but the company has yet to deploy support for the standard....

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...

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...

It was big news back in 2017 when Valve announced that it was working on "three full games, not experiments." It wouldn't be until late 2019 that one of the three was revealed as Half-Life: Alyx. But what of...

Oculus has updated its UE4 Quest development tools so that developers can spend less time waiting and more time testing and iterating on their VR applications. The changes are similar in scope to recent improvements to Unity Quest development. Because...

Blender, a popular free open-source modeling and animation tool, just launched its 2.83 update, which brings basic VR support via the OpenXR API. The recent release lets users step into their 3D scenes to see them up close and...

An update to Oculus developer tools has brought a handful of updates, including support for Quest hand-tracking in Unreal Engine 4. Oculus released controllerless hand-tracking on Oculus Quest as a beta feature back in late 2019. At the time, the...

With the recent news that Unreal Engine was permanently waiving engine royalties for the first $1 million in app revenue, we were reminded of a similar program for VR apps based on Unreal Engine 4 that Oculus established back...