Along its quest to own a sizeable chunk of the XR space, Meta may be getting ready to show off some of its prototype AR hardware at the company’s upcoming Connect developer conference later this year, which up until now has been tightly under wraps.

A report from Business Insider maintains Meta’s AR team has been tapped to get its ‘Orion’ AR glasses ready to unveil at Connect 2024, which typically happens in October. The report cites two people familiar with the matter, whose identities were confirmed by Business Insider.

Orion has been under development for the past nine years, […]

Toast Interactive, the developer behind Richie’s Plank Experience (2017), announced its Astro Bot Rescue Mission (2018) inspired VR platformer Max Mustard is set to launch on Quest later this month.

When it was first announced, we called Max Mustard a “spiritual successor to Astro Bot Rescue Mission,” however the studio says in a Reddit post that’s not entirely accurate, as Nintendo’s Super Mario 3D Land is its “closest refence to gameplay and difficulty.”

“If you do love the challenge, the levels are scattered with what the designers call ‘greed bait’ it’s optional coins and creates that are really […]

Publisher Wired Productions and indie developer Nosebleed Interactive announced that Arcade Paradise VR, the VR port to the popular arcade management sim, is set to release on Quest this Spring.

Based on the original game which launched on Steam in 2022, Arcade Paradise VR takes you back to the heady arcade-fueled days of 1993, this time letting you manage your dad’s failing laundromat and converting it into a successful arcade with your own two hands.

That means ordering new machines, setting high scores to drive profits, but also some of the grunt work to keep the business going. […]

Meta announced it’s finally closing the door on Oculus accounts by the end of the month, which means all users with old Oculus IDs will either need to migrate to a Meta account or lose access to purchased content, achievements, friends list, and more.

Meta initially notified users back in October 2022 that Oculus accounts would be automatically logged out after January 1st, 2023, forcing users who wanted to continue using their Quest and Rift headsets to migrate accounts.

Inactive users who haven’t logged in since then are now at the final ultimatum: migrate by March 29th, 2024, or completely […]

A report from The Information last week alleged Meta and Google held talks in effort to bring Android XR to Quest. Meta CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth has now confirmed this report, stating further that not only were Google’s terms too restrictive, but Google is actively planning to fragment the ecosystem with its Android-based XR operating system.

Here’s the full statement from Bosworth via a Threads post from last Friday:

After years of not focusing on VR or doing anything to support our work in the space, Google has been pitching AndroidXR to partners and suggesting, incredibly, […]

Vision Pro is an impressive headset but it’s not perfect right out of the gate. Luckily, Apple has a great track record of improving products for years through software updates, and Vision Pro isn’t likely to be an exception. But what should the company focus on first? Here’s what I’d like to see.

Apple first announced Vision Pro to the world on June 5th, 2023, at its annual WWDC event. That means the one-year anniversary of that announcement will likely coincide with WWDC 2024. It’s there where we expect the company will reveal details of its first major software […]

Cloudhead Games is one of VR’s most senior and most successful studios. Having not launched a new game since Pistol Whip in 2019, the studio tells Road to VR that two brand new VR games are in development.

Cloudhead Games might be old-school as far as VR studios go, but it has always been forward-looking.

Back in the Oculus Rift DK1 and DK2 days (circa 2014), the studio was already thinking about how to design games for VR motion controllers, despite no headsets on the market shipping with motion controllers until 2016. The studio was also instrumental in establishing several VR locomotion […]

According to a report from The Information, Google and Meta held a meeting late last year wherein the two companies discussed the possibility of bringing Android XR to Meta headsets. While it’s said Meta rejected the partnership, which would potentially allow Quest headsets to run standard Android apps, Google is allegedly still open to the idea.

Quest already runs an open-source version of Android, although Meta’s headsets don’t have the sort of access to standard Android apps built for mobile devices like Apple Vision Pro does with content developed for iPhone, which boasts […]

Beat Saber’s next music pack will bring one of the most influential names in electronic music to the game’s library of downloadable content: Daft Punk.

Go back to some of Daft Punk’s earliest albums and you might find yourself saying “this doesn’t sound so special, I hear stuff like this all the time.” Well, the reason it might not sound so special is because Daft Punk’s works have been so influential to modern electronic music that you can hardly find any that doesn’t include at least some of the group’s essence.

It’s fitting, then, that one of electronic music’s biggest influences […]

Caveman Studio, the developers behind team-based shooter Contractors (2018), today released the open beta of Contractors Showdown, its upcoming battle royale game for Quest and SteamVR headsets.

The 45-player battle royale shooter presents a pretty big battlefield, touting a 16km² island that’s around a quarter the size of Manhattan, albeit including a mix of landscape with the standard array of dilapidated buildings, various landmarks, hills, and other structures to hide around.

Even with great hand-tracking, writing anything more than a quick search on Vision Pro’s virtual floating keyboard leaves something to be desired since you’re basically back at the ‘hunt and peck’ stage of typing. You can opt to use a Bluetooth keyboard, or voice-to-text input, but did you know you can also use the iPhone right in your pocket?

Created by Mathijs Kadijk of Nonstrict B.V., Typos is a free app for Vision Pro that lets you do just that. Granted, it doesn’t provide the sort of system-wide access to text input fields like Apple might […]

Apple announced that it’s bringing a new show to Apple TV+ based on William Gibson’s award-winning cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984), offering another big moment for VR to take the limelight.

According to Apple, the upcoming 10-episode drama series is slated to follow the novel’s narrative of “a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.”

If you haven’t read Gibson’s novel, which coined the term ‘cyberspace’, you may be […]

We may soon be nearing global release for Apple Vision Pro. According to a report from independent tech analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, US demand for the $3,500 mixed reality headset has slowed over the past month, however the company may be ramping production above original estimates thanks to better-than-expected market performance.

According to Kuo, who has been one of the key figures in Apple supply chain analysis, US shipments of Vision Pro are projected to account for 200,000–250,000 units this year, which is better than Apple’s alleged estimate of 150,000–200,000 units in the US.

Kuo maintains that over […]

The Voices of VR Podcast never misses an opportunity to document the ongoing history of the XR space. With Vision Pro now in the hands of many, host Kent Bye recently interviewed two XR insiders that have been part of the industry for more than a decade each.

The launch of Apple Vision Pro is in some ways the most significant event for the XR industry since the acquisition of Oculus by Meta back in 2014. With Apple bringing new ideas to the table, the headset has prompted reflections on the XR industry up to this point and where […]