Virtual Reality

The game begins with a stunning view. I'm standing on a bridge overlooking a river at sunset as it winds through early 16th-century Florence. I look up and see the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, an ornate white marble statue of a woman, ivy climbing a balcony, and the church tower of the Badia Fiorentina rising majestically above me.

All of this is rendered on a Meta Quest 3 with a level of splendor that I have rarely seen on a standalone headset. This level of visual fidelity continues later in the atmospherically lit and richly decorated interiors and in the small details of the artifacts you interact with throughout the game.

I think it's the relatively static environments and the fact that you can't move around freely that make such visuals possible. But that doesn't change the fact that The House of Da Vinci VR is a feast for the eyes and one of the best-looking VR games for standalone headsets.

If you're looking for a stress-free and immersive VR game that you can play in the comfort of your coach on cold winter evenings, The House of Da Vinci VR is a good choice. I hope that Blue Brain Games will bring the two sequels to virtual reality with the same love and care.

You can purchase The House of Da Vinci VR for $25 from the Horizon Store and on Steam.

Reducing weight and increasing performance are two of the most important factors in pushing standalone XR headsets forward. While Meta has shown off its own Orion AR glasses prototype using a wireless compute unit, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth doesn’t think a similar setup is the magic bullet for standalone VR gaming.

Bosworth, who is also head of the company’s Reality Labs XR team, held another one of his Instagram Q&As earlier this week, where he typically delves into a wide variety of topics—some professional, some personal.

In the latest session, Bosworth expounded on the subject of wireless compute units, and how the company thinks they aren’t the right fit for its standalone VR headsets.

Skydance's Behemoth is an enjoyable new VR action adventure from the Saints and Sinners studio. The combat feels good, this Nordic-inspired fantasy world delivers some mostly impressive visuals on PS VR2, and taking down the Behemoths is rewarding. Unfortunately, the game's biggest problem are those moments in between.

While I enjoyed learning about this world and found myself invested in its story, getting from one Behemoth to the next can become tedious. Repetitive light puzzles, lacking enemy variety and considerable jank notably hamper Skydance's ambitious title. Skydance's Behemoth feels great when you're slaying the titular creatures, but there's ultimately some rough edges.

Alien: Rogue Incursion is the first full-blown VR-native in the storied franchise, serving up hordes of Xenomorphs in an authentically ‘Aliens’ universe. Developed by VR veteran studio Survios (Creed: Rise to Glory, The Walking Dead: Onslaught), Rogue Incursion presents a veritable balancing act of combat and exploration through its dark and gritty cinematic universe, which definitely offers pulse-raising encounters with raptor-like packs of the game’s namesake. It also feels overly encumbered by the sheer repetition of random alien encounters and its equally punishing save system.

So I picked up a facebook quest 3 to get back into PCVR and to have some standalone fun too (also to force Valve's hand to release Deckard sooner than later because that is how things work).

Wouldn't mind getting an actually comfortable headstrap and maybe checking out what games are worth looking at. But it is REALLY hard to figure out which outlets are worth listening to and which are just playing the SEO and "sponsored but not really" bullshit game.

So... any suggestions? Thanks.

OpenXR is an open standard made to improve compatibility between XR software and XR headsets. Google—one of the biggest tech companies in the world—is adopting the standard right out of the gate, joining other major firms like Meta and Microsoft. Other players (like ByteDance recently) also support the standard, cementing it as not just an open standard, but an industry standard. And while the vast majority of major XR companies now support OpenXR, a major holdout remains.

Initially announced in 2017, OpenXR is an open standard that makes it easier for developers to build XR applications that can run on a wide range of XR headsets with little to no modifications. While major players in the space like Meta, Microsoft, Valve, HTC, and plenty more all support OpenXR, the industry’s big holdout is—can you guess? Apple.

Apple is somewhat notorious for rejecting industry standards and forging its own path; sometimes the company sticks to its own proprietary formats and other times ends up adopting the industry standard in the end.

Vision Pro not only doesn’t support OpenXR, but it doesn’t have built-in support for motion-tracked controllers (which most existing XR content requires). If Vision Pro supported OpenXR, it would be significantly less work for developers to bring their XR apps to the headset (though the lack of controllers still poses a major hurdle).

As ever, Apple is the odd one out.

Meanwhile, Google wasted no time confirming its newly announced Android XR platform will support OpenXR, making it easier for developers to port content that was built XR apps for headsets like Quest.

Google says Android XR is already compatible with OpenXR 1.1, and the company has built out some of its own ‘vendor extensions’ which are new capabilities that extend what OpenXR can do on specific devices. Vendor extensions sometimes go on to become part of future versions of OpenXR.

VR technology is good at fooling visual and auditory perception, and has made great strides in these areas over the past decade. But when it comes to tactile perception, it's still largely limited to vibrating controllers, which is a decades old idea. There are VR vests and treadmills, but they are technically quite primitive and not worth the effort for most people.

Ready Player One gives the impression that the OASIS is a parallel world in which you physically participate similarly to the natural world. But the book and the movie don't explain how this is done technically. Even if we had sophisticated haptic suits and treadmills like in the movie, interacting with virtual worlds would not seem as natural as it does for the protagonists in the OASIS.

Something like this could only be possible with a sophisticated brain-computer interface that somehow enables sensory hallucinations. But this is a dystopian idea more reminiscent of The Matrix than Ready Player One, and infinitely further away in terms of feasibility than archaic technologies like haptic suits and treadmills.

Virtual reality as a gateway to a hyper-realistic parallel world: this is an effective sales concept, but it has little to do with reality. Most people are aware that they are wearing VR headsets when they play games. They are consciously using their real bodies and enjoying it. And they are happy to return to reality after a while. After all, it's still the best place to cuddle or have a pizza.

I think the term "virtual reality" promises more than it can deliver and may even be based on a misunderstanding. Humanity has developed a wide variety of immersive techniques throughout its history: from the art of storytelling and the cave paintings of Lascaux to film and virtual reality. I believe the latter is just another point in this evolution, not its conclusion.

Just because virtual reality can deceive our visual and auditory senses even more than before, it is not necessarily predestined to become a fully immersive technology. In fact, I believe that in the future, virtual reality will be just one of many, and by no means the most common, application of face computers. And that's perfectly fine.

Although Android XR isn’t properly open-source for the time being, Google hopes the OS will run on multiple partner headsets. While Samsung is said to be the first to launch an Android XR headset, Sony, Lynx, and XREAL are also planning to use the operating system.

Meta announced earlier this year that it intends to open its Quest’s Horizon OS operating system to third-parties, but now Android XR presents another choice for headset makers.

According to Google, Sony, Lynx, and XREAL are on board with Android XR.

Previously launched on Steam in September, we previously praised Subside for its breathtaking scenes as you explore these shallow water environments. While we've known for several months that a PlayStation VR2 version is in development, developer Khena B confirmed it's now reaching Sony's headset on December 20.

Speaking on social media, the developer revealed that the PlayStation VR2 has higher resolution compared to PC VR thanks to using dynamic foveated rendering. On PS5 Pro, Subside features dynamic shadows, an edge blur effect and a slight resolution increase through foveated rendering. Both versions of the PS5 console will run the game at 90hz with no reprojection.

Subside launches on December 20 for $25 on PlayStation VR2, and a free PS VR2 demo is out now. Elsewhere, it's also on PC VR with a free Steam demo.

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.

The XR operating system was teased yesterday, along with the first headset based on it: Samsung's Project Moohan.

The first games and apps from third-party developers have already been announced for the device. How easy or difficult it will be to port Quest games to the new system will play an important role. Here's what developers say about Android XR.

Tommy Palm, the CEO of Resolution Games (Demeo, Spatial Ops, Home Sports), writes:

"While we are looking to bring existing games like Demeo to Android XR, the platform also opens us up to develop entirely new ideas. Android XR's open nature, developer friendly approach and unique innovations makes it not only viable, but allows us to consider new and novel ways to use mixed reality for storytelling. For instance, the natural language interface of ChatBots could be a very potent extension for XR and games. And the pairing of support for Unity makes it much simpler for developers like us to bring our experiences to even more headsets and expand the audience for XR."

Google just unveiled Android XR, a new operating system for Virtual, Mixed Reality and Spatial computing in this demo running on the upcoming Samsung XR Headset, Project Moohan, powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipse that will feature state-of-the-art displays, eye tracking and hand tracking.

Currently known as "Project Moohan", the headset will feature "state-of-the-art displays", eye tracking and hand tracking. Beyond this, Samsung isn't yet sharing specifications. I went hands-on with an early headset developer kit showcasing Google's software and Samsung's hardware. You can pull up a location in Maps and pinch your way in and out of locales, almost exactly as Google Earth VR offered from 2016 on PCs with Steam and the Vive controllers.

From 2025, Google Maps runs with full immersion and hand tracking in a standalone headset from Samsung. Go inside a spot and look around, go out to street view or head back up above to look at the city, and zoom all the way out to Earth scale.

Android XR doesn't require eye tracking even though Samsung includes it. Meta HorizonOS works without eye tracking being necessary, and neither Quest 3 nor 3S include eye or face tracking sensors. Meanwhile, eye tracking is a core part of its pinch selection interface in Apple Vision Pro.

The Samsung headset's lens separation adjusted mechanically for my interpupillary distance after a few seconds of keeping my head still. The bright low latency passthrough was nice in both open periphery and a small magnetic light shield that did a nice job sealing off the scene. I preferred the light shield on and noted the hard strap would rule out bed use, where Vision Pro and Quest 3S work well with soft straps.

Google is taking another run at making headsets work. The company just announced Android XR, a new operating system designed specifically for what Google calls “extended reality” devices like headsets and glasses. It’s working with Samsung and lots of other hardware manufacturers to develop those headsets and glasses, is making the new version of Android available to developers now, and hopes to start shipping XR stuff next year.

We don’t yet have a ton of details on exactly how Android XR will work or how it might differ from the Android on your phone. (The Verge’s Victoria Song got to try a few demos and prototypes — make sure you read her story.) Google is making immersive XR versions of apps like Maps, Photos, and YouTube and says it’s developing a version of Chrome that lets you do multiwindow multitasking in your browser. It will also support existing phone and tablet apps from the Play Store, much in the same way Apple supports iPad apps in the Vision Pro.

Google’s Gemini AI, of course, is at the very center of the whole experience. Google has been trying to crack headsets for more than a decade — there was Glass and Cardboard and Daydream, all of which had good ideas but none of which turned into much — and the company thinks AI is the key to making the user experience work. “We believe a digital assistant integrated with your XR experience is the killer app for the form factor, like what email or texting was for the smartphone,” said Sameer Samat, who oversees the Android ecosystem at Google, in a press briefing ahead of the launch. As Gemini becomes more multimodal, too, able to both capture and create audio and video, glasses and headsets suddenly make much more sense.

This is a broadly substance free post. But I assume most VR headset owners have at this point at least tried Half Life: Alyx.

It therefore follows that most of you are familiar with this dumb popup you get the first time you run it:

Fair enough, on my old PC I only had a Sandy Bridge i7 2600K and a GTX1080Ti. Maybe I was below the recommended requirement even though I played through the entire campaign just fine.

Well, I just built a new PC containing a Ryzen 9 9900X, a Radeon RX 7900 XTX with 24 gigs of VRAM, and 64 gigs of system RAM.

And I still get that dumb "low memory" popup.

This game came out four years ago, Valve. What the hell did you expect people to play it on? A Cray EX254?

Here are my 15 predictions:

1. I don't expect any major technological breakthroughs in the next five years, especially ones that fundamentally change the way we use headsets. In 2030, we will still be wearing bulky headsets rather than sleek visors on our faces. I expect the industry to experiment with slimmer form factors that move components into a compute pack, but these will come with other trade-offs.

2. By 2030, eye tracking and some form of face tracking will be standard and supported by most headsets, as will mixed reality.

3. The biggest technological development will be in mixed reality, both on the hardware and software side. However, even in 2030, the passthrough quality will not be good enough to be mistaken for natural vision.

4. The market will continue to grow linearly rather than exponentially over the next five years. By then, I expect to see less than 50 million devices in circulation across all platforms.

5. We will see an emerging trend of using headsets for local multiplayer and outdoor, often in combination.

6. Volumetric content will mature and become another VR-specific content category. It will be possible to capture objects and entire rooms in near photorealistic quality with a smartphone and view them in VR.

7. At some point, Meta will launch a service that allows you to stream PC VR games from the cloud to Meta Quest. This type of use will be limited to larger cities and will still be a niche application by 2030.

8. Generative AI will become increasingly important for the metaverse, assisting users in the creation of virtual worlds.

9. Meta will still be investing in VR five years from now, and Meta Horizon OS will be the leading mixed reality OS. Meta's monopoly will be maintained or even strengthened.

10. There will be first specialized OEM headsets based on Horizon OS, but there is no thriving hardware ecosystem yet. Meta Quest remains the best-selling headset by far.

11. Google and Samsung will fail to challenge Meta. Samsung will abandon its own hardware efforts and release a Horizon OS headset by 2030. Google will shrug its shoulders and scrap its VR plans once again, bowing to Meta's market power and launching the Google Play Store in some form on Meta Quest.

12. Apple will launch at least one more headset, but will only be able to take market share from Meta in the productivity space.

13. Sony will launch a wireless Playstation VR 3 for the next generation of its Playstation, but as before, will invest in software only to a limited extent and wait to see how the market reacts. The device will not be standalone and will require a PS6.

14. Valve will release a standalone mixed reality headset that will allow you to play a large part of the Steam library (2D and VR) without a PC.

15. The market for true augmented reality glasses will still be tiny five years from now, while AI glasses (with or without displays) will mature as a device category.

I hope I've given you an idea of how I envision the next five years of VR development.--

Apple and Sony are working to bring support for PlayStation VR2's controllers to Vision Pro, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports. Gurman has a strong track record when it comes to reporting Apple's moves in advance, and he even revealed many details of Vision Pro itself before it was officially revealed or even acknowledged to exist by Apple. Apple Vision Pro's gaze-and-pinch interaction system is ideal for interface interaction, and its hand tracking is suitable for casual gaming. But many VR and mixed reality games and interactive experiences on other platforms require physical controllers.

To bring this kind of content to visionOS, Apple approached Sony earlier this year to bring support for PlayStation VR2's Sense controllers to Vision Pro, Gurman reports. This would also include support for navigating the visionOS interfaces.

Sony currently doesn't sell the PS VR2 Sense controllers separately, not even for replacements, but when this support launches it would start to, including at Apple Stores and from Apple's website.

Vertigo 2 from Zach Tsiakalis-Brown will go Into The Aether with a paid DLC add-on scheduled for release on March 30, 2025.

Zulubo.com is selling a limited Collector's Edition physical SteamVR game box with a key to access the DLC on Steam (base game not included) alongside an autographed illustrated short story. Tsiakalis-Brown said he only made 100 in a limited run to start, so if it sells out "I may print more." The collector's edition is $29.99 while the digital DLC is $9.99 on its own on Steam, and there is no "solid plan" to release the Into The Aether DLC for PlayStation 5.

"The first batch should ship by the end of 2024," the dev noted.

Into The Aether promises "The Void Grappler" grappling hook that can attach to most surfaces for free swinging as well as "The Void Deflector" which will let you deflect attacks and accumulate energy for counterattacks.

From Tsiakalis-Brown:

"In Vertigo 2, Brian unknowingly helped the Void Delegation's attempt
to invade earth. Now, he's fighting against them at the side of the rogue
realmwalker Kauboi. With the Delegation in disarray, Kauboi wants to
attempt a rescue mission that would have been impossible before. Will
Brian be able to pull it off?"

Tsiakalis-Brown premiered his new trailer alongside a series of announcements and updates during the UploadVR Showcase, following earlier reveals with us for Vertigo Remastered in 2020 as well as Vertigo 2. Vertigo 2 was our game of the year in 2023 and carries "overwhelmingly positive" lifetime reviews on Steam.

Skydance's Behemoth combines satisfying physics-based combat, immersive visuals, and dynamic mechanics to deliver a standout VR action-adventure experience, though its predictable story and occasionally artificial-feeling AI detract slightly from its otherwise polished execution. The game's intense Behemoth battles and well-woven locomotion mechanics combine for an impressive showcase of how a deft hand at VR-native design can elevate even mediocre narratives to monstrous heights.

When batteries in my VR controllers died, refusing to charge, I had to come up with a simple hack to bring them back to life, on a budget.