Derail Valley, the train simulator for VR and PC, launched into Early Access in 2019, positioning itself as the most realistic train sim out there. While Derail Valley is still in early access, indie studio Altfuture says locomotive fans can now jump back into the game and find a ton of new features waiting for them in what it calls an “enormous” update.
The so-called ‘Simulator’ update includes a load of new content, including dynamic VR hands, new locomotives, better world simulation, sandbox mode, and more.
Here’s all of the new and updated bits available in the Simulator update:
The studio says there are still a few things left to do, including adding the S060 locomotive, DE6 slug, Steam Deck input layout, RailDriver support, and “a couple more smaller things,” the studio says in Steam news post. “Rest assured that the mentioned two vehicles will be added very soon, in a couple of weeks.”
If you’ve played Derail Valley before with mods, Altfuture also warns that most, if not all pre-Simulator mods will no longer work, and will have to be updated by the community in the coming weeks and months, to become functional again.
Despite the size of the update, the studio says the game will remain in early access “potentially, for years to come” since they intend on adding more features and content going forward.
“We’ll keep at it for as long as possible, in our mission to make Derail Valley the best train simulator in the world,” Altfuture says.
You can get Derail Valley on Steam and Oculus PC, priced at $40.
Apple has allegedly slashed production targets for Vision Pro due to manufacturing issues related to the mixed reality headset’s complex design, a Financial Timesreport maintains.
Unveiled during Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in early June, the $3,500 Vision Pro represents the first big step into XR for the company. Launching sometime next year, Vision Pro is a high-end headset that combines virtual reality displays with color passthrough cameras, allowing it to do both VR and AR tasks.
Apple’s China-based contract manufacturer Luxshare, allegedly the sole assembler of the device, is now preparing to make fewer than 400,000 units of Vision Pro in 2024, according to the report, which cites “multiple people with direct knowledge of the manufacturing process,” including sources close to Apple and Luxshare.
Supply chain rumors also allege that two of Apple’s China-based component suppliers only have enough parts to produce around 130,000 to 150,000 Vision Pro units in the first year. It was previously thought Apple was operating with an internal 12-month sales target of one million units.
Manufacturing complications apparently hinge on Vision Pro’s micro-OLED displays and outward-facing, curved lenticular display, the latter of which allows a sort of digital passthrough view of the user’s eyes.
In our hands-on, we noted Vision Pro packed top of its class lenses and displays, something Apple says is “more than a 4K TV for each eye.”
The company is reportedly unhappy with supplier productivity. It’s said the most expensive component is its internal displays, and getting enough of those micro-OLEDs to be defect-free has purportedly been a significant hurdle. Additionally, Financial Times reports the micro-OLED displays used in the headsets demoed to press at its June launch were supplied by Sony and the chipmaker TSMC.
Meanwhile, Apple is said to be working with Samsung and LG on a second-gen version of the headset, which will be reportedly cheaper than the first, which is launching sometime in 2024 for $3,500.
There are a few body tracking solutions on the market to help you on your quest to finally transform into a dancing anime girl, and Sony is now releasing its own previously Japan-only device in the US.
Mocopi, which gets its name from motion capture (mocap), was initially announced in late 2022, becoming available exclusively in Japan in early 2023. While a ton of vTubers worldwide already jumped the gun and ordered direct from Japan, now Sony is making it officially available in the US, priced at $450.
Mocopi comes with six small and lightweight inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors that hook into a dedicated smartphone app (iOS and Android), letting you do full-body motion tracking both in and outside of VR.
Image courtesy Sony
And while Mocopi seems to be squarely targeting those would-be vTubers, another use case the company is trumpeting is undoubtably the device’s ability to give avatars better full-body tracking for things like VRChat. Yes, there’s a built-in VRChat integration, which means you can grab your Quest 2 or PC VR headset, hook up Mocopi to your extremities, and get dancing for all to see.
Like many such IMU-based tracking devices, positional drift is a real concern, although it seems Sony is pitching this more as a way to casually jump into body tracking and not get that 100 percent accuracy you’ll need when doing the [fill in a popular dance] on TikTok.
Coming from Sony, you’d think there would be some sort of integration with PSVR 2, although that doesn’t seem to be a possibility. The company hasn’t mentioned any such integration since it initially launched in Japan in January.
Mocopi is already available for purchase, available exclusively from Sony for $450. Sony says Mocopi orders will ship to customers starting July 14th, 2023. Check out the Sony’s quick start guide below to get see just what you’re signing up for.
Carbon Studio, the developers behind Crimen – Mercenary Tales, The Wizards, and Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall, released a new narrative-driven VR game that’s packed with logic puzzles and what the studio calls “a bizarre story taking place at the very core of your subconscious.”
Called Mindset, the Quest 2 exclusive makes good use of Quest 2’s hand-tracking tech, letting players tackle the game’s complex cubic puzzles either with Touch controllers or with their bare hands. Here, you’ll test your intelligence, dexterity, and deduction skills on an array of cubic puzzles.
Here’s how Carbon Studio describes the head-scratching action:
Each cube has one or more starting gears that spin around from the very beginning of each level. To complete the level, you have to set the last gear in motion. You can achieve this by grabbing other gears from a pool of available parts and slotting them into place. To make things a bit trickier, gears can only be placed on special pins—some of which are dependent on the state of other pins, often placed on the other side of the cube. If you take one out, another may hide and ruin your plan. But with the right sequence, this combination may change. You’ll also be dealing with gravity pins, pins sliding on special rails, and more to keep you on your toes.
Across the game’s three-chapter narrative, you’ll step into the shoes of a brilliant scientist named Jack who must fight to regain consciousness in the game’s otherworldly waking dream. To return to the world of the living, you must delve deep into your subconscious, navigate moral dilemmas, and uncover just what happened to you in the first place.
SPACE BALL is a sports game currently free on Quest that mashes up Gorilla Tag’s movement scheme and the fast-paced gameplay of Rocket League. Indie VR studio 31 Labs announced it’s bringing the game to PC VR headsets next month.
The competitive multiplayer game offers up a number of modes, including Basketball, Soccer and Handball modes, letting players can go 1v1, 2v2 or 3v3 online, or play against bots to practice their skills.
Gorilla Tag and its knuckle-dragging locomotion scheme has definitely influenced Space Ball too, as players move about the field by pushing off the arena floor, also letting you execute boosts mid-air for quicker gameplay.
Space Ball is already available for free on Quest App Lab, but starting July 13th it will be launching for free on Steam Early Access too. It’s still early days for Space Ball, so if you’re looking for a match, you might want to join the game’s Discord (invite link) to find like-minded rocket-gorillas such as yourself.
To see Space Ball in action, check out a full introduction to the game from YouTuber ‘SpookyFairy VR’ for a quick look at gameplay:
It’s a rare treat when we get a VR game with the scope and scale of Horizon Call of the Mountain, let alone to see a much-loved IP reimagined specifically for the medium. Made exclusively for PSVR 2, the game was built collaboratively between studios Guerrilla Games and Firesprite, both part of PlayStation Studios. We sat down to speak with Alex Barnes, Game Director at Firesprite, to learn more about how Horizon Call of the Mountain came to be and how it turned out to be one of our best-rated VR games in recent memory.
Editor’s Note: The exclusive artwork peppered throughout this article is best viewed on a desktop browser with a large screen or in landscape orientation on your phone. All images courtesy Guerrilla Games & Firesprite.
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Moving a Mountain
Horizon Call of the Mountain is, of course, a Horizon game. With that, comes the expectation that it will look, feel, and sound like the other two titles in Guerrilla’s lauded franchise. That meant the two studios had to work in close collaboration to deliver on the vision.
“Call of the Mountain was an incredibly collaborative project, with both Firesprite and Guerrilla working really closely to develop the game, Barnes explains. “The bulk of the content creation and gameplay teams were over with Firesprite, with Guerrilla holding the original vision for the game and helping direct elements, such as the narrative and art, to create a game that was genuinely grounded in the world of Horizon. We had folks from both teams hands-on at different times and were in constant communication with each other throughout development.”
Even though the game would need to be built as a VR native title, the studios wanted to ensure that it represented elements of a Horizon game, without being too attached to every Horizon gameplay trope regardless of whether or not they fit within VR.
“The core of the gameplay was pretty set from the initial idea for the game. We wanted climbing, crafting, exploration, interaction and combat to be the mainstay of everything that we built. That meant freedom of movement and ‘real-feel’ physical interactions like climbing and bow combat were so crucial that we got feeling great for all types of players,” Barnes say. “Early on, we did look into doing some more wide-ranging gameplay elements to descend from the mountaintops, but ultimately these elements really ended up distracting from the overall gameplay experience, so they didn’t make their way into the released game.”
The bow is central to the game’s combat, so the teams gave it tons of interesting detail. | View clip
Come One, Come All
Another important goal was building a game that anyone could play—whether experienced with VR or not—and to leave a real impression.
“We knew this could be players’ first experience with PSVR 2 and, in some cases, even with VR. That meant building gameplay systems that people could just pick up, play and quickly understand so that we could fully immerse the player in the world,” Barnes says. “We are also big lovers of VR ourselves, and so it became a goal of everyone to blow new players away to show them how amazing a truly VR experience is, especially on this incredible new hardware.”
Building for experiences and new VR players alike also meant rethinking the options for how people would move in the game. This was also driven by the developers themselves, some of which couldn’t tolerate much traditional stick movement in VR. This pushed the studio to come up with an ‘arm-swinger’ locomotion scheme which I personally felt was both more comfortable and more immersive than pure stick-motion.
“Comfort in VR is an incredibly personal thing, and locomotion is such a big part of that. For some of the team, the stick-based movement was difficult to get comfortable with. So the motion mimetic system of moving the player’s arms was conceptualised as a way to help add a layer of comfort that allowed people who were less familiar with VR to play for longer and stay comfortable whilst they did,” says Barnes.
The players gloves also act as a diegetic health bar thanks to the green leaf-like segments
Apple Vision Pro is about to set a lot of expectations in the industry of what’s ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ about mixed reality, something the fruit company prefers to call spatial computing. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey weighed in on his thoughts, and coming from one of the main figures who kicked off the VR revolution of today, it means something.
Speaking to Peter Diamandis in a nearly two hour-long podcast, Luckey delved into many areas of his work over the years, touching on the role at his defense company Anduril, his role in kickstarting the modern era of VR, and basically everything under the Sun that the tech entrepreneur is doing, or thinks about when it comes to augmented and virtual reality.
Undoubtedly the hottest of hot button issues is whether Apple is doing mixed reality ‘right’ as a newcomer to the space. Luckey is mostly positive about Vision Pro, saying it’s patently Apple.
“I think there were things that I would do differently if I were Apple,” Luckey tells Diamandis. “They did basically everything right—they didn’t do anything terrible. I mean, I think Apple is going after the exact right segment of the market that Apple should be going after.”
Luckey maintains that if Apple went after the low end of the market, it would be “a mistake,” saying the Cupertino tech giant is taking “the exact approach that I had always wanted Apple to take, and really the approach that Oculus had been taking in the early years.”
Apple is admittedly going at XR with little regard for affordability, but that’s not the sticking point you might think it would be. To him, the $3,500 headset packs the best components for the premium segment, including “the highest possible resolution, the highest quality possible displays, the best possible ergonomics.”
In fact, Apple’s first-gen device shouldn’t be about affordability at this point, Luckey says. It’s about “inspiring lust in a much larger group of people, who, as I dreamed all those years ago, see VR as something they desperately want before it becomes something they can afford.”
Image courtesy Apple
In the world of component configurations, there’s very little that catches Luckey off guard, although Vision Pro’s tethered battery ‘puck’ was choice that surprised the Oculus founder a little bit. When it comes to offloading weight from the user’s head, Luckey says shipping a battery puck was the “right way to do things.”
“I was a big advocate of [external pucks] in Oculus, but unfortunately it was a battle that I lost in my waning years, and [Oculus] went all in on putting all batteries, all the processing in actual headset itself. And not just in the headset, but in the front of the headset itself, which hugely increases the weight of the front of the device, the asymmetric torque load… it’s not a good decision.”
One direction Apple has going that Luckey isn’t a fan of: controllers, or rather, the lack thereof. Vision Pro is set to ship without any sort of VR motion controller, which means developers will need to target hand and eye-tracking as the primary input methods.
“It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of VR input, and I think that’s probably one of the things I would have done differently than Apple. On the other hand, they have a plan for VR input that goes beyond just the finger [click] inputs. They’re taking a focused marketing approach, but I think they have a broader vision for the future than everything just being eyes and fingers.”
Luckey supports the company’s decision to split the headset into a puck and head-worn device not only for Vision Pro in the near term, but also for future iterations of the device, which will likely need more batteries, processing, and antennas. Setting those expectations now of a split configuration could help Apple move lighter and thinner on head-worn components, and never even deal with the problems of balancing the girth and weight seen in the all-in-one, standalone headsets of today.
In the end, whether the average person will wear such things in the future will ultimately come down to clever marketing, Luckey maintains, as it’s entirely possible to slim down to thinner form factors, but devices may not be nearly as functional at sizes smaller than “chunky sunglasses”. To Luckey, companies like Apple have their work cut out for them when it comes to normalizing these AR/VR headsets of the near future, and Apple will most definitely be seeding their devices on the heads of “the right celebrities, the right influencers” in the meantime.
You can check out the full 15-minute clip where Luckey talks about his thoughts on Apple Vision Pro below:
Synapse is the latest action game from veteran VR studio nDreams, built exclusively for PSVR 2. While you’ll do plenty of shooting, players are also equipped with a telekinetic superpower that feels great as a core mechanic. But does the rest of the game live up to it? Read on to find out.
Synapse Details:
Available On: PSVR 2 (exclusive) Release Date: July 4th, 2023 Price: $35 Developer: nDreams
Gameplay
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Synapse is a roguelite shooter where you’ll be blasting baddies with a weapon in one hand and controlling a telekinetic force power with the other. The game’s telekinesis ability is finely tuned, relying on PSVR 2’s eye-tracking to target whichever item you’re looking at. Look at a box and pull the trigger and suddenly you’re controlling its movements from afar. Look at an exploding barrel and pull the trigger and now you can toss it over to some enemies before pulling the trigger even harder to make it explode. Oh, and when you eventually get the ability to pick up enemies with your power, you’ll really enjoy launching them into the sky or send them crashing into the ground.
Over many years I’ve wondered why we haven’t seen a major VR game built around a ‘gravity gun’ like mechanic. It seems so natural to want to interact with virtual worlds using interesting physics mechanics rather than just shooting.
Well Synapse definitely proves out the mechanic with a strong core implementation that feels a little bit like magic thanks to the eye-tracking targeting which generally works well (just don’t forget to recalibrate your eye-tracking). It’s undeniably fun to look at an enemy, pick them up, and send them flying to a timely demise.
I also enjoyed the use of a two-stage trigger when it comes to manipulating explosive barrels—a light trigger pull lets you lift the barrel, while a full trigger pull makes it explode. It feels very intuitive while at the same time challenging you to think more carefully in the heat of battle about which object you’re controlling. It can feel effortless to see a barrel on the other side of the room, pick it up, then quickly hover it over to a group of enemies before crushing it to blow them away.
While I was hoping that there would be an increasing number of ways to interact with the environment using telekinesis, there’s little evolution on that front. You can control boxes, barrels, platforms, and (with later unlocks) enemies and grenades. But that’s about it. While the core mechanic feels great, it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t evolve into something more.
In your other hand you’ll start with a pistol which is about as standard as you’d expect, though nDreams adapted the great reloading system from Fracked to give Synapse an even quicker and easier reloading system that works great for the game’s combat pace.
When you’re out of ammo the mag will eject just a few inches out of the gun and then stay there. To reload all you have to do is push it back into the gun. It sounds a little silly, but makes sense in the context of the game’s mind-bending subject matter. And another nice detail (which I can’t recall if the game even explicitly teaches you) is that your hand doesn’t need to be the thing that pushes the mag back into your weapon to reload… you can shove your gun against a wall or a rock to slide it back in too—a clever way to allow for an improvised one-handed reload.
Reloading by pushing your mag against a wall works especially well considering the game’s hand-based cover system (also carried over from Fracked), which allows you to reach out to grab any cover and then use your hand to peek yourself in and out of said cover. It feels really natural and way more immersive than using the thumbstick to slide in and out of cover while crouched behind a wall.
As a roguelite there’s also unlocks to earn; some are temporary buffs that only last for your current run, while others are permanent and will make you better and stronger over time.
Everything I’ve said about the game so far is pretty positive, and warranted. But the game follows a strangely familiar pattern of flaws.
The thing about Synapse is that while the core mechanics (like telekinesis, reloading, and cover) work well, the rest of the game is a largely average wave shooter in the form of a roguelite. Quite unfortunately, many of the same core critiques of Synapse were equally true of nDreams’ last two big games: Fracked (2021) and Phantom: Covert Ops (2020).
It is a classic prognosis for the studio’s big action games at this point—not enough weapon, enemy, and encounter variety to really make the game sing.
For one, the game’s ‘levels’ feel completely homogenous. Combat isn’t meaningfully different from one to the next, which means every level feels essentially the same. Some destructible elements mix things up just a bit, but not enough to make levels feel dynamic and interesting.
And then there’s the mere four enemies: regular soldier dudes, kamikazes, hefty bois™, and one rather annoying flying enemy.
Some of the AI is actually pretty good. Soldier dudes will move around, use cover, flank you, and throw some suspiciously accurate grenades at your feet. Hefty bois will keep you pinned down behind cover, throw objects at you, and charge at you.
Image courtesy nDreams
On the other hand, the exploding kamikaze enemies feel consistently more unfair than anything, considering they usually explode at your feet even after you killed them, thanks to momentum carrying their corpses right into you.
And then there’s the flying enemies which are much more of a nuisance than an interesting threat… and animate so poorly (making them difficult to hit) that I’m not sure if they’re bugged or not.
Luckily my hatred for them made it that much more satisfying when I realized I could use my telekinesis to drop them into searing hot lava for an instant death.
Minimal enemy variety is backed by a lack of encounter and scenario variety. Every level is beaten by killing all enemies on the map; they all seem to spawn fairly randomly and tend to come from all sides, making it feel like a wave shooter most of the time. Not only does the level’s objective never vary, but there’s a real lack of meaningful encounter design, making most fights feel the same.
That’s not to say that Synapse isn’t fun. I enjoyed my first full run through the game, which took about three hours to complete. But from then on out the game asks you to continue doing the same things against the same enemies with the same weapon and abilities—but now at a harder difficulty.
That’s usually how roguelites go, but there just isn’t enough variety in the gameplay or build options in Synapse to reach that engaging feeling of ‘just one more run’ after you’ve completed your first. Even the promise of unlocking more narrative through during subsequent runs isn’t enough considering the narrative is a paper-thin radio drama. nDreams says players can expect to take around 12 hours to complete three runs, each at increasing difficulty, which will reveal all of the narrative. But I have to say that I wasn’t compelled to complete all three. All-in, I probably spent about five hours with the game before feeling like I’d seen it all.
Synapse has a really unique art style that I think they executed very well. The game runs well and generally sounds good too.
There’s no doubt the telekinesis is a more interesting and immersive way to interact with the game than shooting enemies at a distance. Being able to grip enemies with an invisible force, then toss them toward you while firing a flurry of bullets at them mid-air gives a strong feeling of direct control over the game’s virtual world, which helps anchor you to it.
Similarly, using your hand to pull yourself in and out of cover, then slapping your mag against a rock to load it into your gun, feel very ‘hands-on’.
Image courtesy nDreams
Aside from these elements, most of the game is fairly run-and-gun and there’s almost no other up-close interactions (which are the kind that tend to drive high levels of immersion). While the setting is neat (battling inside of someone’s brain, à la Inception), the story had zero intrigue, and served only as a rough premise for the action that unfolds in the game.
Comfort
Synapse is a run-and-gun game that doesn’t offer teleport. Aside from that, the essential comfort options are available, though I’m irked by the game’s implementation of snap turning, which is actually just a quick turn rather than a true snap turn (which tends to be more comfortable); Fracked had the very same issue.
Without teleport and with the expected pace of combat, Fracked might be a challenge for anyone that’s very sensitive to motion in VR, but otherwise feels largely average for comfort in a VR shooter.
One miscellaneous item worth noting here is that the game’s pistol tends to consistently shoot up and to one side, seemingly due to a lack of filtering on the weapon’s movement and the particular way the PSVR 2 controller tends to move in your hand when pulling the trigger in its ‘stiff’ state. This makes the pistol much less accurate than it seems it’s supposed to be.
Meta announced the high-flying superhero game Marvel’s Iron Man VR (2020) has a new permanent price, bringing it to $30.
Once a PSVR exclusive, Iron Man VR on Quest 2 and Quest Pro lets you suit up as Tony Stark and take to the sky to fight evil. The action-adventure game is now available at a new price of $30, or 25% off the original $40 purchase price.
When it launched on PSVR in July 2020, we gave it a rating of ‘Great’ in our full review, calling it VR’s “first great superhero game.” We liked it so much at the time, we later awarded it with the PSVR Game of the Year in 2020.
What makes Iron Man VR so great? It’s packed with unique mechanics and a full course of fun and engaging content—not to mention an actually worthwhile story.
Here’s how developers Camoflaj describe it:
Tap into your inner Super Hero as you step into Iron Man’s armor and blast into the skies. Explore Tony’s garage to customize and upgrade an arsenal of gear, gadgets, and weapons. Hit the afterburners and feel the rush of flying hundreds of miles an hour. Use all of Tony Stark’s resources to find the mysterious villain Ghost and her army of hacked Stark drones. Experience this action-packed immersive Iron Man adventure now.
Brilliant Labs, an AR startup working to integrate AI into daily life, announced that it has raised $3 million in seed funding which it will use to expand its team and invest in R&D for its open-source, AI-powered smartglasses.
The funding round was led by Brendan Iribe, co-founder of Oculus, Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Siri, Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, and Plug & Play Ventures, among others.
Founded in 2019, Brilliant Labs describes its design approach as “embodied intelligence.” Its one-eyed ‘Monocle’ smartglasses dev kit is an open-source device which began shipping in February 2023, offering up a single-lens design that’s supposed to clip onto existing eyewear. For now, Monocle boasts a six-hour battery life with a charging case, which includes fast charging technology.
Monocle | Image courtesy Brilliant Labs
Similar to Google Glass, Brilliant Labs’ Monocle serves up text via a single waveguide, doing things like letting you see important information while remaining present in the moment. Monocle also includes an embedded microphone, computer vision-ready camera, and hackable FPGA accelerator chip.
In addition to the latest funding round, Brilliant Labs also announced the launch of arGPT, the company’s first ChatGPT integration for Monocle, letting developers directly use the generative AI as well as build apps on top of arGPT.
“We believe that Generative AI is the key enabler for AR, so at Brilliant Labs, we’re building an open-source ecosystem to support developers and creatives reimagining the future, and Monocle is just the beginning. We’re excited to see what developers create with it,” said Bobak Tavangar, Founder and CEO of Brilliant Labs. “We’re thrilled to have the support of our investors as we usher in a new era of embodied intelligence – the intersection of AI and AR.”
Other investors in its seed funding round include Steve Sarowitz, founder of Paylocity and Chairman of Wayfarer Studios, Nirav Patel, former core team member at Oculus and founder of Framework, Francisco Tolmasky, member of the original iPhone team, and Moveon Technologies.
Google has reportedly shelved a multi-year project that sought to commercialize an AR headset, known as Project Iris. Provided the report is true, it appears Google will now need to rely on Samsung to compete with Meta and Apple in XR.
According to Business Insider, Google shut down Project Iris earlier this year following mass restructuring, which included layoffs, reshuffles, and the departure of Clay Bavor, Google’s head of AR and VR. The report, which hasn’t been substantiated by Google, cites “three people familiar with the matter.”
According to a report from The Vergeearlier this year that first mentioned Project Iris, around 300 people were purportedly working on the headset, which was said to expand by “hundreds more” as production ramped up.
At the time, the prototype was said to be a standalone, ski goggle-like headset providing onboard power, computing, and outward-facing cameras for world sensing capabilities—similar in description and function to headsets like HoloLens or Magic Leap. Project Iris was said to ship as early as 2024.
Two unnamed Google employees told Business Insider the company could actually resurrect Project Iris at some point, as teams experimenting with AR tech haven’t been completely disbanded. Still, it seems its Samsung XR headset partnership and AR software development has become the main focus.
Samsung Future, Daydream Past
With its own in-house hardware allegedly no longer in the picture, moving forward Google is set to focus on the software side of AR, which also includes an Android XR platform it could license to OEM partners. Google is now developing such a platform for Samsung’s upcoming XR headset announced in February, as well as an alleged “micro XR” platform for XR glasses, which is said to use a prototyping platform known internally as “Betty.”
Google is pretty well known for shelving projects all the time for a variety of reasons, so it’s not a big surprise that an expensive hardware project is getting iced during an economic downturn. It’s also possible the company saw the writing on the wall from its earlier VR hardware projects, which were early to the competition, but not persistent enough to stick around.
In 2016, the company’s Daydream VR platform was positioned to compete with Meta’s (then Facebook’s) own mobile VR offering, Samsung Gear VR. Headed by Bavor, the company looked to replicate Samsung/Meta’s strategy of certifying smartphones to work with a dedicated Daydream View headset shell and controller. Google certified a wide swath of smartphones to work on Daydream, including Pixel, LG, Asus, Huawei, and even a number of Gear VR-compatible Samsung phones.
And Google’s ambitions were, let’s say, very big. At its I/O 2016 unveiling, senior product manager Brahim Elbouchikhi said on stage that Google intended to capture “hundreds of millions of users using Daydream devices.” No modern VR headset platform has reached that number of users even today, with Meta likely leading with the sale of nearly 20 million Quest headsets between 2019 and early 2023.
Lenovo Mirage Solo | Photo by Road to VR
Despite big ambitions to own the space early on, Gear VR became the clear winner in the nascent mobile VR market. Undeterred, Google broadened its horizons in 2017 to open its Daydream platform to one of the first truly standalone VR headsets—or rather a single standalone headset—the Lenovo Mirage Solo standalone, which awkwardly mashed up 6DOF positional tracking with a single 3DOF controller. Lenovo Mirage Solo was a real head-scratcher, as its room-scale content was hobbled by a single remote-style controller, which critically wasn’t tracked in 3D space.
In the end, Google shuttered the entire Daydream platform in 2019 because it couldn’t attract enough developer support. On the outside, that makes it seem like Google lost the VR race entirely, but a majority of standalone headsets on the market today run on top of a modified version of Android. Granted, that standalone VR content revenue isn’t flowing into Google’s coffers since it doesn’t control the individual storefronts like it might with a VR version of Google Play.
But that could change with its new Samsung/Qualcomm partnership, representing a fresh opportunity for Google to finally stake a claim in the mounting mixed reality (MR) race.
MR Headsets Walk, AR Headsets Run
MR headsets are virtual reality headsets that use color passthrough cameras to offer up an augmented reality view, letting you do VR things like play games in a fully immersive environment in addition to using passthrough to shoot zombies in your living room, or watch a giant virtual TV in your real-life bathroom (for optimal user comfort).
It’s still early days for MR headsets. While devices like Meta Quest Pro ($1,000) and Apple’s recently unveiled Vision Pro ($3,500) are likely to appeal to prosumers and enterprise due to their high price points, there’s a mounting battle for consumer eyeballs too. Provided that still-under-wraps Samsung XR headset can land at a digestible price for consumers, its brand name cache and patented global reach may serve up strong competition to Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 MR headset, due in September at $500.
Apple Vision Pro | Image courtesy Apple
Price speculation aside, the companies that launch MR headsets today will be better positioned to launch all-day AR headsets in the future. Platform holders like Meta are using their MR headsets today as test beds to see what AR content consumers find most compelling. Apple will be doing just that when it launches Vision Pro in 2024 at arguably an even deeper level, as the Cupertino tech giant seems to be deemphasizing VR stuff entirely.
Whatever the case, Google’s decision to reportedly shelve Project Iris means it’ll be more reliant on OEMs in the near term, and its first volley with that Android-supported Samsung XR headset will reveal the size of its ambitions. It’s a strategy that could work out in its favor as it critically gauges when, if ever to resurrect its own Google-built AR glasses. With Apple and Meta both staking serious claims though, it needs to solidify that strategy sooner rather than later.
Resolution Games, the studio behind Demeo (2021), Blaston (2020), and Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs (2019), shared more info on how it’s engineering a new sport for its upcoming game Racket Club.
The studio released a new behind-the-scenes video that goes into detail about how Racket Club is played, where it came from, and what sets it apart from other racket sport experiences in VR.
In the video, chief creative officer Mathieu Castelli explains how Racket Club was built with realism in mind, offering up a sort of gameplay that could easily translate to real courts.
Castelli says that a big step in the project was modeling the “right feeling of impact” of when the ball hits the racket, something that is fairly mathematically complex. Another was defining the space so users could play naturally at home, and not need in-game locomotion stuff like teleportation. In the end, it comes down to body positioning and swing accuracy, something that is a 1:1 translation from physical racket sports.
While the basic physicality of Racket Club could translate to a real-world court, there’s a few things that VR simply does better, Castelli explains. As players gain expertise, the glass enclosures lower, increasing the chance of knocking the ball out of the court. Impressively long rallies, or the classic back and forth shots between players, can also give you more points, which can turn around a match in one go.
Racket Club is set to release on the Quest platform and PC VR headsets sometime in 2023. In the meantime, you can wishlist the game on Steam and the Meta Quest Store.
