Meta’s first-party VR studio Ready at Dawn—the developers of Lone Echo and more—is reportedly being shuttered. This comes after the studio was acquired back in 2020 and has only released one game since.

Ready at Dawn is the studio behind one of PC VR’s most immersive games: Lone Echo (2017), and its popular multiplayer spinoff, Echo VR. Following the release of those two titles, the studio was eventually acquired by Meta in 2020, and then finally launched Lone Echo II on PC in late 2021.

Ready at Dawn was well into the development of Lone Echo II when the studio was acquired by Meta. The impetus for […]

Sony released its long-awaited PC VR adapter for PSVR 2 this week, however early reports maintain some user don’t even need the company’s $60 adapter to start playing PC VR games like Half-Life: Alyx (2020).

A number of early user reviews of the adapter are echoing many of the same points right now: some graphics cards with USB-C ports allow PSVR 2 users to directly hook into their GPUS and play SteamVR games. All you need to do is download the PlayStation VR 2 App on Steam, no adapter required.

It’s not just any old […]

Pico Interactive today announced it’s getting ready to reveal “a new product” this month, promising to boost your “MR/VR experience to the next level.”

The device is slated to get its big reveal on August 20th. An image obtained by Antony Vitillo of Skarred Ghost maintains it will be revealed at 14:00 China Standard Time (local time here).

It seems that the new Pico Headset is coming on August, 20th at 2pm Beijing Time!#VirtualReality #VR #China #technology #metaverse pic.twitter.com/nuuv3On8zq

— TonyVT SkarredGhost (@SkarredGhost) August 7, 2024

The company also teased […]

According to a report from Korean tech outlet The Elec, Microsoft has contracted Samsung to supply micro OLED display panels for what is described as “next-generation mixed reality devices.”

Citing industry sources, the report maintains the order could reach into the “hundreds of thousands” of micro OLED displays, with such a Microsoft XR device reportedly slated to arrive as early as 2026.

Unlike Meta’s current line of Quest headsets, the alleged Microsoft headset will be used for “enjoying or watching content such as games or movies rather than the metaverse,” the report maintains (machine translated from Korean), […]

One of VR’s most senior studios nDreams announced they’re getting ready to announce “what’s next” at the VR Games Showcase next week.

Coming August 15th and presented by industry veteran Jamie Feltham, the inaugural VR Games Showcase will cover titles targeting Quest, PSVR 2 and PC VR—promising 15 titles and announcements from a smorgasbord of XR studios.

Among them will be nDream, which has developed a host of memorable VR games including Phantom: Covert Ops (2020), Fracked (2021), Synapse (2023), and Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord (2023).

Are you ready for what’s next from […]

MixRift, a mixed reality game studio, today announced it’s secured a $1.6 million pre-seed investment round, something the team says will be used to develop more MR games.

The funding round was led by Outsized Ventures, Underline Ventures, and SOSV. According to CrunchBase data, MixRift received an undisclosed round from SOSV in May 2024.

Founded in 2023, the team is led by Bobby Voicu, David Pripas and Andrei Vaduva. Voicu, who is CEO, previously launched mobile games studio Mavenhut; Pripas is an official Meta AR Partner and the company’s CPO, and Vaduva is the company’s CTO.

Known for its […]

HTC has reduced the price of Vive XR Elite, its flagship standalone headset, cutting it from $1,100 to $900.

The deal appears to only be available in the US, as Vive XR Elite is still selling for its launch price across other major regions—€1,449 in Europe and £1,299 in the UK.

Released in February 2023, Vive XR Elite was initially positioned as a Quest Pro competitor, offering up a compact and lightweight standalone design and mixed reality capabilities.

Shortly after its release, Meta closed the price gap, dropping Quest Pro from $1,500 to $1,000, essentially removing one of Vive XR Elite’s headlining […]

Facepunch Studios announced that s&box, its upcoming physics sandbox and game development platform, is now using OpenXR, which will not only allow the studio to expand its VR feature set, but also the range of supported devices.

VR support has been on the table since Facepunch announced in 2015 it was working on a spiritual successor to Gary’s Mod (2006), which will not only include a sandbox as you’d expect, but also an entire development platform for users to make and publish their own third-party games.

Fast-forward to late last month, and the studio has opened […]

Taking a dance course can be intimidating, not to mention time consuming—but it doesn’t have to be. At least not when you can do it in VR (and MR).

Led by instructors Rodrigo Cortazar and Asya Sonina, The New Salsa Academy launched recently, guiding you through each step of an entire beginner salsa course.

Exclusively available on Quest, The New Salsa Academy comes with a few unique features to get you up and salsa-ing, making for a much more immersive experience than simply following dance tutorials on YouTube.

Boasting a AI-powered virtual dance partner that follows you as you dance, the app is […]

Flat2VR Studios has been accepted into the SPEEDRUN accelerator, not only giving the studio a financial boost on its mission to bring VR support to non-VR games, but a good measure of validation too.

Hosted by A16Z Games, a games-focused investment arm of Andreessen Horowitz, Speedrun is early-stage accelerator for startups that includes $750,000 as well as “a highly curated set of industry coaches, mentors, and a community of ambitious founders,” the VC firm says.

In a post on X, Flat2VR says the accelerator “should help open some doors to porting more of those absolute dream titles […]

Last year, Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA announced the Alliance for OpenUSD, an organization to advance and proliferate the USD file format as the future standard for creating and distributing 3D content. The standard, which is a framework for constructing and packaging complex 3D scenes, was called the “HTML of the metaverse” by NVIDIA, and expected to “help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences,” by Apple.

Now two more heavyweights, Microsoft and Sony, have joined the Alliance for OpenUSD in support of Universal Scene Description (USD) as the future of authoring and packaging complex 3D […]

Virtuix’s latest VR treadmill, Omni One, is finally set to launch next month. The company has updated its launch roster of VR games that will natively support the treadmill, now including Sniper Elite VR.

Virtuix is pitching Omni One as an all-in-one system for immersing yourself in VR with full body locomotion. Rather than being merely an accessory to a headset, the treadmill is actually packaged with a headset of its own (Pico 4), customized to make the experience of using the VR treadmill seamless.

That includes fostering a store of VR games that natively support the treadmill. Virtuix says there’s […]

Vision Hack is a forthcoming remote hackathon for developers building apps for visionOS. Open to all skill levels, the event is set to take place September 13–15th.

Guest Article by Cosmo Scharf

Cosmo Scharf is an Emmy-nominated product designer and entrepreneur with a decade of experience in XR. He co-founded Vision Hack and visionOS Dev Partners to support visionOS developers. Previously, Scharf created MovieBot, an AI-powered 3D animation app, and Mindshow, a VR platform for animated content creation. His also started VRLA, one of the world’s largest immersive technology expos.

Imagine building the first iPhone apps in […]

Roguelite shooter COMPOUND is finally coming to PSVR 2, bringing its retro pixel art style and arsenal of fun weapons to the platform starting this month.

Originally hoping to launch on PSVR 2 sometime in early 2024, Compound has done a bit of a back and forth with Sony’s quality assurance (QA) over the past few months, resulting in what notdead games described back in June as “an obscene number of dramas and delays.”

Now the studio, which has taken on an additional programmer to port to PSVR 2, says Compound is coming to the platform on August 13th.

Originally created by one-man indie […]

In this edition of XR News Bits we see a newly released Walkabout Mini Golf DLC course, a big update to Contractors Showdown, game director Hideo Kojima exploring Vision Pro, the release of VR action-arcade game Thrasher, and signs of life from cooperative WWII VR bomber game The Mighty Eighth.

XR News Bits

An incredible amount of exciting XR news comes our way every day. Very often we see news come across our desk that’s worth highlighting, but we don’t always have the bandwidth for a full article on every one of them. XR News Bits is our occasional roundup of stories we think […]

Following Meta’s big v67’s multitasking update earlier this month, the company announced it’s now rolling out its v68 software update for Quest, which features experimental access to Meta AI, a new utility app centered on home improvement, and some performance boosts too.

Previously only available on Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses, Meta AI lets you do your standard assortment of AI voice chat stuff through Bing, but it also taps into the headset’s camera sensors so you can ask it questions about what it sees.

It’s now launching on v68 in experimental mode on Quest 3, although […]