In his latest video, YouTuber ‘Gamertag VR’ maintains Skydance Games, the makers of Skydance’s Behemoth (2024), was working on an official Harry Potter title set to be exclusive to Quest. At least, that was before Meta ostensibly pulled funding to a number of third-party studios earlier this week.

Orion Drift will open early access next Tuesday, February 25.

Orion Drift is the next game from Another Axiom, the studio behind Gorilla Tag, one of VR gaming's biggest hits of all time. It's a zero-gravity sci-fi sports game reminiscent of Echo VR, which Meta shut down last year.

Seven months after the shutdown, Ready At Dawn co-founder Andrea Pessino gave a two hour interview with MinnMax about the studio's history, including its time under Meta.

When I paste this url, the autofill isn’t producing the article title:

https://www.roadtovr.com/behemoth-update-combat-rebalance-patch-notes

I‘m using voyager, but according to the dev it’s not a client issue:

Yes, its lemmy api. Here's an example with vger.social where it is working. I can confirm it is not working for lemmy.world. Could be because lemmy.world is using an outdated lemmy version, or some network config for that instance.

So between Meta and Google, we have two XR platforms:

• Meta’s Horizon OS has the largest and best library of immersive apps.
• Google’s Android XR has the largest and best library of flat apps.

To dominate XR, both need what the other has. But who faces a bigger challenge?

Meta, it seems, is in a tougher spot.

Immersive app developers are hungry for growth. If a popular game can gain 25% more users by porting to Android XR, the decision is obvious.

By contrast, major flat apps (like Spotify, TikTok, Snapchat, and Discord) stand to gain relatively little growth from porting to Horizon OS. They’d be lucky to gain even 0.25% more users than they already have on the entirety of Android.

Currently in closed early access, Orion Drift packages in Gorilla Tag’s immersive movement mechanic with some of the action of the now-defunct sports game Echo VR, promising to serve up an activity-packed social VR space for up to 200 players.

Now, Another Axiom says it’s opening Orion Drift to Quest users for a server scalability test that’s set to last two days: November 20th – 21st. Doors open at 10AM PST on November 20th—check your local time here. […]

In the meantime, you can already grab Orion Drift on the Horizon Store, which supports Quest 2 headsets and above.

A few months ago, Blade and Sorcery's PC version received its 1.0 update, with no launch date for the standalone Nomad in sight. After months of hard work, developer Warpfrog is bringing the 1.0 content to Blade and Sorcery: Nomad, alongside the launch of Citadel, which has been a PC-exclusive map for years.

The 1.0 update adds Crystal Hunt, a progression game mode for those seeking a campaign-based mode. There's also the introduction of skill trees, more spell combinations, and plenty of exciting skills to use for the first time.

Presumably, the company is making this change to stop Apple from taking a cut of new subscription revenues for Disney Plus and Hulu. However, if you already subscribe to those services through Apple, Disney says you’ll still be billed through Apple.

Stress Level Zero's Brandon J Laatsch described inside-out body tracking as "the most game changing feature of VR hardware since tracked controllers in 2016", and said "Other hardware players either need to step up and develop it or concede the space to those who do because it will create an insurmountable divide." […]

IOBT shipped in December. However, almost a year later it's still only used by a tiny handful of standalone apps, including Swordsman VR, Drunkn Bar Fight, XRWorkout, and FastHands. In fact Meta's own new avatar system doesn't even use IOBT.

But until recently, the only way to build XR apps for Meta's headsets was with a game engine, such as Unity or Unreal, and Meta didn't provide any kind of UI framework for either. This is why many apps on your iPhone use the system design language, while every app on Quest, even the most basic experiences, the UI feels completely different, often custom-made by the developer or imported from the Unity Asset Store.

Meta has finally released a solution to this. It's called the Horizon OS UI Set, part of v69 of the Meta XR Interaction SDK for Unity, and provides Unity developers with the components to build interfaces that feel cohesive with Horizon OS.

The selloff came just weeks after Shiftall announced a new headset, MeganeX superlight, after failing to deliver the original MeganeX it teased in 2022 and said it would ship in 2023.

And as unbelievable as it may sound, Shiftall is doing it again. It won't actually be shipping the MeganeX superlight it announced earlier this year, and instead opened preorders for a new "MeganeX superlight 8K".

We've seen free apps like Rec Room achieve a large install base outside VR, but Walkabout Mini Golf may be one of the first to make the leap from VR to iPhone as a paid app featuring private rooms for multiplayer connecting to all major VR headsets.

While many of these studios continue to deliver content, outside of Batman: Arkham Shadow, we’re still largely waiting to see what’s next. And although you’d expect Meta to keep the exclusive games coming at a regular pace, there are a few factors at play that suggest Meta may actually be slowing down, rather than speeding up its push for VR content.

Firstly, the games industry as a whole is feeling the effects of the economic downturn, partially spurred by rapid post-COVID inflation and war-driven energy disruptions. Layoffs are a regular occurrence, and we don’t expect the headlines to change any time soon. Notably, Meta hasn’t acquired any VR studio since 2022.

In a previous emailed statement, a spokesperson clarified that photos and videos captured on Ray-Ban Meta are not used by Meta for training as long as the user doesn’t submit them to AI. However, once you ask Meta AI to analyze them, those photos fall under a completely different set of policies.

In other words, the company is using its first consumer AI device to create a massive stockpile of data that could be used to create ever-more powerful generations of AI models. The only way to “opt out” is to simply not use Meta’s multimodal AI features in the first place.

By the time AR glasses with the field of view of Orion ship to consumers, passthrough headsets will be sleek, light, and powerful, with passthrough quality that may rival transparent optics, and virtual object quality that far exceeds them.

To put it simply: incredible mixed reality headsets will arrive before acceptable AR glasses. […]

The future is AR glasses, yes. But it's mixed reality headsets too. And unlike AR glasses, mixed reality headsets are here right now, and both the hardware and software is getting better every year.

Quest users can cast their in-game view to a TV, a mobile phone, and even to their friends and family on Facebook Messenger now. According to a recent marketing image uncovered by serial leaker and data miner Luna, it may soon also include support for WhatsApp too.