AR Game

‘laser-dance’-coming-to-quest-in-2024,-from-creator-behind-one-of-quest’s-best-rated-puzzle-games

‘Laser Dance’ Coming to Quest in 2024, From Creator Behind One of Quest’s Best-rated Puzzle Games

Thomas Van Bouwel, the developer behind popular VR puzzle game Cubism (2020), is nearing launch of the long-teased mixed reality game for Quest that turns your living room into a moving grid of lasers straight out of Mission Impossible.

Update (October 3rd, 2023): Van Bouwel announced Laser Dance is coming to Quest sometime next year. There’s no release window yet, however users looking to get early access can become beta testers. The developer hasn’t confirmed precisely which headset the game is coming to, so we’ll just have to stay tuned. We’ve altered the original article to reflect this, and have put the change in bold.

Check out the new teaser below to see Laser Dance in action:

Original Article (October 24th, 2022): Called Laser Dance, the Quest game aims to turn any room of your house into a laser obstacle course—basically recreating the old laser hallway trope you may recognize from a ton of films, TV shows and video games over the years.

There’s no word on release dates yet, although progress is looking good. Check out a work-in-progress level of Laser Dance in action:

Walking through a laser wave 🏄#ar #vr #MetaQuest2 #madewithunity pic.twitter.com/PLQrAkE7Hv

— Thomas Van Bouwel (@tovanbo) September 3, 2022

Van Bouwel came up with the idea over the two-day Global Game Jam 2022 earlier this year, and has since fleshed out the game to include parametrically-generated laser patterns based on room size and layout, meaning the action should dynamically fit to your space and serve up a challenge no matter how big (or cluttered) your space.

Although the game has been shown working with Quest 2’s monochrome passthrough, Laser Dance wouldn’t be out of place on Meta Quest Pro, which is capable of more realistic passthrough AR thanks to its five external sensors, offering a higher resolution color view with improved depth-detection. Van Bouwel however hasn’t confirmed which Quest headset the game will support at this time.

We’re looking forward to learning more about Laser Dance, as Van Bouwel is excellent at creating deceptively simple gameplay that really makes you think—look no further than Cubism, which has also kept lock-step with passthrough and hand-tracking updates on Quest since its initial launch in 2020. If you want to follow along with progress on Laser Dance, check out the game’s official Twitter.

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‘Space Invaders: World Defense’ Will Showcase Google’s Newest AR Tool This Summer

Google has announced an upcoming AR game, Space Invaders: World Defense, which is built as a showcase of the company’s latest AR tool.

Over the last few years Google has been steadily working on its AR developer toolset, ARCore. This week at Google IO 2023, the company added a brand new tool to its kit called Geospatial Creator.

Geospatial Creator gives developers the ability to create world-anchored digital content that will appear in the same location for all users. Built on a foundation of both ARCore and 3D data from Google Maps, it’s competes with Niantic’s Lightship AR platform, and is getting integrations for both Unity and Adobe Aero.

To showcase the latest capabilities of ARCore, Google has teamed up with Taito Corporation, the original developer of arcade hit Space Invaders (1978), to build a brand new city-scale AR game called Space Invaders: World Defense.

Planned to launch later this Summer—fittingly aligned with the 45 year anniversary of the original game—Space Invaders: World Defense will purportedly have players “defend the earth from Space Invaders in their neighborhood,” and will “combine AR and 3D gameplay to deliver a fully contextual and highly engaging immersive experience that connects multi-generations of players.”

Sadly we’ve yet to see a glimpse of any real gameplay, so it isn’t clear just how the game will work, but with any luck we’ll eventually find more information from the game’s official website.

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