Top 10 Best Oculus Quest Hand Tracking Games & Apps

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One of the biggest post-launch features added to the Oculus Quest so far has been controller-free hand tracking. With more and more games and experiences implementing support either officially or through SideQuest, we’ve narrowed down the best Oculus Quest hand-tracking games so far.

When the Oculus Quest launched last year, your only input option was to use the included Touch controllers. However, more than a year down the line, the headset now also supports controller-free hand tracking. You can use your hands not only to navigate the Quest’s UI and menus, but also as an input method for games and apps that have been updated with hand tracking support.

What Are The Best Oculus Quest Hand Tracking Games?

While support started out slow, more and more games have added hand tracking capabilities since Oculus moved the feature out of beta. If you’re looking to try out the best hand tracking experiences the Quest has to offer, start here.

Honorable Mentions

First Steps with Hand Tracking

This alternate version of the introductory Quest experience is available through App Lab, and provides this same experience but altered to solely use hand tracking instead of controllers. You can read more here.

VRtuos 

This app lets you calibrate its virtual piano to a real keyboard or piano, and uses hand tracking to teach you songs while the notes are visualised above the keys. You can read more here.

Tea for God

It’s a little scrappy, but this experimental FPS uses roomscale navigation and design in an innovative way to keep you fully immersed. It does support hand tracking, but it’s a little buggy. You can read more here.

10. Virtual Desktop

Virtual Desktop recently received an update that allows you to log into your PC on your Quest from anywhere with just your hands, no controllers needed. If you’ve sideloaded the alternate SideQuest version of the app, the feature even extends (in an experimental capacity) to control of PC-based VR games, where your hands act as emulated Touch controllers.

You can read more about the feature and how it works here.

9. Elixir

This game initially debuted at Oculus Connect 6, where attendees could try it out as a demo, after hand tracking was announced at the opening keynote. Once hand tracking moved out of beta and into full release, the game was made available to the public as a free download.

It’s free and a good demo for what you can do with hand tracking, so you’ve got nothing to lose. You can read more here. 

8. The Line

Similar to Gloomy Eyes, The Line is a short immersive experience that follows the story of Pedro, a miniature doll and newspaper delivery man. It only lasts about 15 minutes, but unlike Gloomy Eyes, you’ll actually use your hands to interact with things in The Line. The animation is absolutely superb and the narrative is quite charming. It may be a small package, but it’s definitely worth it.

Read more in our quick review. 

7. The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets

This wholesome VR title released towards the end of last year, but was one of the first games to officially support hand tracking in the Quest store a few months ago. Each level is a diorama-style world with layers of puzzles and collectibles. We had a few nitpicks in our review (written pre-hand tracking) but were still big fans of the game. Unlike some other games on this list, Curious Tale supports hand tracking as a input method for the entire game — it’s not a dedicated or different mode specifically for hand tracking, so you’ll be able to play the game start to finish without controllers if you like.

You can read our review of the game (written before hand tracking support was integrated) here, and watch an interview about hand tracking support with Curious Tale developer Kristoffer Benjaminsson from Fast Travel Games above.

6. Richie’s Plank Experience

Even before hand tracking support, Richie’s Plank Experience was known for producing some of the most immersive moments in VR — you’ve all seen that video of the guy jumping into the TV.

However, with the latest update for the Oculus Quest version of the game, the immersion just got upped even more with the addition of hand tracking support. While the support is only for the main plank sections of the game for now, it’s still a fantastic and terrifying experience. The lack of controllers makes everything feel a little bit more real, just like you’re standing on a plank suspended off the side of a skyscraper.

You can read more of our impressions here. That piece was written when the feature was still in beta, but hand tracking support has now been implemented into the public release of the game on Quest.

5. Vacation Simulator

Vacation Simulator added hand tracking support pretty late in the game compared to some other titles, but it remains one of the most prominent and popular games on this list to have added support. The free Back to Job expansions also adds in several mechanics from the previous game, Job Simulator, so you should have plenty of content to keep you going.

Owlchemy Labs also recently added support for the new High Frequency Hand Tracking mode on Quest 2, so those headsets will benefit from some improvements in performance and latency as well.

4. Waltz of the Wizard

There’s a lot of hand tracking experiences available on the Quest, but one is particularly magical. Waltz of the Wizard’s hand tracking support allows you to use your hands to cast spells and manipulate the environment around you in a multitude of different ways. Like any hand tracking experience, it’s not perfect but it is still one of the most memorable experiences we’ve had with the technology yet.

You can read our full impressions here.

3. Hand Physics Lab

Hand Physics Lab started as a demo available to sideload via SideQuest with a limited amount of environments and interactions design to experiment with the then-new hand tracking support on Quest. 

Now, Hand Physics Lab is available on the official Oculus Store for Quest, supports hand and controller input and presents many of those original interactions (and new ones) as part of a fully-fledged puzzle game campaign. It’s a one-of-a-kind experimental playground that can be both immensely frustrating and satisfying. The Hand Physics Lab is available on the Oculus Store. You can read our review here.

2. Cubism

Cubism is a deceptively simple game. Its puzzles are easy to understand but perfectly challenging to finish. It’s a slow and measured experience, which makes it the absolute perfect fit for hand tracking. 

It’s not that Cubism does anything revolutionary with its hand tracking implementation – all you’re really doing is picking up and placing pieces of its 3D building block puzzles. But that’s all that’s needed to make an absolutely sublime hand tracking game that’s easy to understand while also avoiding some of the friction found in other experiences on this list. 

Not to mention that the game is one of the few (if only) hand tracking experiences to offer 120Hz support on Quest 2 as well. You can read our review of Cubism here (written before hand tracking support was added) and read our impressions of the hand tracking update here.

1. Unplugged

As a hand tracking game, Unplugged showcases a concept and use of the technology that is completely unmatched by anything else on this list.

Where other apps and games use hands in ways that replace controllers, Unplugged uses hand tracking to create an experience that isn’t possible or supported with controllers.

This game has the DNA (and excellent soundtrack curation) of rhythm games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band but ditches the plastic peripherals for just your own two hands, allowing you to shred rock songs on an air guitar brought to life with virtual reality.

It pushes Quest’s hand tracking to the absolute limit, which means that it does require some patience in understanding and learning the conditions under the game operates best. However, it’s absolutely worth it and the technology works better than you probably ever expected it could.

Unplugged uses hand tracking as a way to fulfill a fantasy and bring to life something that previously only existed in your imagination and in doing so surpasses any other hand tracking app on Quest by a country mile. You can read our full review here.

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What’s your favourite hand tracking game or app available on the Oculus Quest? Let us know in the comments.

This article was published in May 2021 and updated in October 2021 to include Unplugged and move Tea for God to honorable mentions.

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Tvori Launches ShapesXR Collaborative Design Tool On Quest In November

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Tvori is bringing collaborative design tool ShapesXR to Quest in November.

The original creation tool from Tvori released in early access on Steam all the way back in 2016 with various iterations over the years adding new features. Now ShapesXR is poised to bring Tvori’s prototyping and concepting tools to official release on the Quest store on November 11, according to its public listing. ShapesXR is listed as “coming soon” with a $9.99 per month Pro subscription mentioned as well for creating up to 50 spaces. The release follows a beta version of the app posted to App Lab for Quest earlier this year.

Here’s ShapesXR’s description from the store:

ShapesXR is a collaborative design tool to prototype AR and VR content and user experience for real-world products. It enables remote product teams with the tool for brainstorming & ideation in 3D, rapid prototyping, instant sharing and real-time co-editing. It’s a platform for live synchronization between all stakeholders, agile iterations on designs and thus accelerated product time-to-market. ShapesXR was born with the mission to democratize 3D content creation allowing product owners, business leaders, and designers to finally start thinking and creating spatially together. In ShapesXR you can pick a premade scene as a canvas for your creation or start from scratch and build the lobby of a VR fitness game. Designers can introduce and manipulate simple shapes at scale, change color and materials, research user flows and pitch scenes in motion with a simple to use staging system (everything stays in low fidelity so that people don’t hang up on details too early in the process).

We’ll be very curious to see what sorts of things people are able to do with fully released Quest version of Tvori’s tools, we and will be sure to dive in with ShapesXR soon.

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Hands-On: Hubris Might Give PC VR Its Graphics Fix After Lone Echo

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Hubris is visually stunning and has promising gameplay mechanics too. Something nedes to be done about that voice acting, though. Read on for our Hubris hands-on!

The release of Lone Echo 2 earlier this month was something of a solemn moment for PC VR fans. The game set a graphical benchmark for VR visuals, but with Meta’s funding now focused on the Oculus Quest 2 and no new announced VR games from Valve, it seemed like it might be a long time before we got another high-fidelity adventure for VR’s most advanced headsets. That’s an especially sour note given the recent news of high-end devices like the Varjo Aero and Pimax Reality Series.

But Hubris suggests that might quite not be the case.

No, this new VR adventure — the first full title for headsets from Belgium-based Cyborn — doesn’t quite match Jack and Liv’s zero-gravity adventures in the graphics department. But, by god, does it give it a good go; set in a far-flung universe, you play as a recruit of the Order of Objectivity (which our review comments section will be dismayed to learn I’m not joining) that crash lands on a mysterious planet.

Yes, there’s a story about… something, but I was too busy taking in the game’s fantastic landscape to pay too much attention. This alien planet is one of gritty rock formations, lush underwater wildlife and dense otherwordly architecture. Even after the impressive debut trailer earlier this year, I was surprised to jump into the experience and discover just how rich it appears. Convincing character animations and detailed enemy designs also go well with the bright color palette. It really is a breath of fresh air.

Hubris isn’t just a visual feast, though. Cyborn seems to have a good grasp on the first-person fundamentals, including climbable surfaces, over-shoulder inventory systems and summoning a pistol with a quick press of a button. The 20-minute demo includes some combat, in which you dive underwater and blast squids before taking their tentacles to craft (weirdly) fleshy ziplines to traverse. In fact, swimming seems to be a crucial part of the game, with a push of your arm in any direction propelling you through the water. It doesn’t feel quite as natural as other control schemes I’ve seen like in Freediver: Triton Down, but it works well.

Not quite as welcome is the focus on trial and error platforming, which includes some sequences in which you’ll have to swim all the way back to the start of a series of jumps should you misjudge a gap. It’s dependable enough that you can avoid too much pain but, still, judging the distances of jumps with no sense of your own momentum or feeling your feet on the ground is a strange feeling that doesn’t really work.

Combat, meanwhile, seems promising in this opening phase. Underwater battles with a rechargeable gun do at least feel different to what’s on offer with other VR shooters, though the only on-foot combat I saw was a very simple shooting gallery against small bugs, so I’ll be interested to see what else Cyborn has in-store here.

We also have to talk about the voice acting which is, to be direct, not very good at all. It’s a shame to see Cyborn build up such an interesting and gorgeous world, only to have it squandered by the cheesy, poorly-delivered lines on offer in the demo. If the developer wants to have its new lore taken seriously, it’ll want to do another pass on this front.

Hubris is no longer coming in 2021, but should touch down on PC and PSVR in 2022. It’s also due on Oculus Quest, though we’ll be waiting to see if Cyborn can keep the title as visually appealing on that platform.

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Oculus Quest 2 Active Pack Includes Controller Grips For VR Fitness

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An Oculus Quest 2 Active Pack is launching in 2022, including new accessories aimed at those using VR for fitness.

The Quest 2 Active Pack was announced at Connect this week and includes grips for your Touch controllers that will help you keep hold of them during intense workouts as well as a facial interface that lets you wipe off sweat. A full release date and price for the kit has not yet been revealed.

Oculus Quest 2 Active Pack Revealed

Other companies have released third-party peripherals for Quest fitness and hygiene. VR Cover, for example, has a set of facial interfaces to help deal with sweat generated while playing in VR and has its own controller grips too. Meta’s new Active Pack seems to be largely based on those offerings.

The Active Pack continues the line of Quest 2 accessories Facebook has been rolling out over the past year, starting with the Elite Headstrap series that launched alongside the device. Fitness has proved to be an unexpected use for VR headsets of late, with players launching apps like Supernatural and FitXR to keep healthy during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

What other accessories do you want to see in the Oculus Quest 2 Active Pack? Let us know in the comments below.

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Spacefolk City Review: Laying Some Nice Groundwork

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City builders aren’t especially common in VR, but Spacefolk City’s establishing some steady foundations. Read on for our Spacefolk City review!

It’s no secret that some genres better fit virtual reality, but Spacefolk City makes me believe city builders are underutilized in this space. Having assisted on Paper Valley and Down the Rabbit Hole, Spacefolk City marks Moon Mode’s debut solo effort, creating a colourful spacebound experience with first time VR players in mind. It’ll require patience but if you’re willing to commit that time, there’s an enjoyable experience within.

Spacefolk City’s premise sees multiple Spacefolk stranded after their worlds become uninhabitable, as their orbiting star enters supernova and starts letting off deadly flares. Not wanting to hang around for their early demise, these Spacefolk begin seeking out a new home, though unlike most city builders, you aren’t building them a permanent structure. Rather, you’ll be creating new settlements that can safely move themselves to new locations, should this happen again.

Split between eight campaign levels, you’ll need to factor in your city’s needs, though if you just want to build without objectives, there’s a sandbox mode available. Building upon existing rocks in a 3D space, Spacefolk City gives you the freedom to create buildings without gravitational constraint. Providing they’re in range of a power generator that is, so setting that up is your initial priority. Unfortunately, the generator’s range isn’t huge and electric clouds powering them can be sparse, which limits your wider constructions options. 

Spacefolk City Review – The Facts

What is it?: An isometric city-building sim in which you build a new home for cutesy space critters.
Platforms: Oculus Quest
Release Date: Out Now
Price: $39.99

Creating buildings requires scrap for your material, and that’s only available by grabbing asteroids. They’ll fly past your settlement with regular frequency, though it’ll take some time to grab enough. If an asteroid collides with a constructed building then fear not, they just bounce back upon impact, no damage done. Once grabbed, pulling them apart with both motion controllers drops a scrap item to give Spacefolk for construction. Once you’ve handed it over, just pick them up, take them to the required building and they’ll get to work. 

However, Spacefolk aren’t mindless drones. They’ll gradually get fatigued and picking them up displays their status, showing how much energy they’ve got left. If they need sleep, take them back home, wait for about 30 seconds and they’ll soon be refreshed. They’ve also got specific interests that need catering to, no one wants a boring house after all. Getting them to join your settlement requires decorating each home with specific items, all following specific themes like cakes, gardening, bananas and more. 

This silly touch is a big part of Spacefolk City’s charm, offering a vibrant visual presentation that brings some much-needed color to space. You’ll gradually unlock more cosmetics upon progressing, and if you see a rare glowing asteroid, that drops new cosmetic items instead of scrap, so keep an eye out. That’s backed by an electronic-themed soundtrack, which compliments your construction work nicely.

If you wish to boost your workers’ productivity, players can construct three different building types which boost their Speed, Stamina and Skills. Those are available with three separate tiers, allowing you to decorate them with different themes to attract a wider spread of residents. That comes at a cost though, as building one-tier requires significantly less scrap than three, meaning you’ll have to decide what to prioritize. It’s not terribly in-depth but for the intended purpose, this works well.

Spacefolk City Review – Comfort

Spacefolk City doesn’t have an options menu beyond choosing which building to build, though it’s not an experience that needs many comfort options. You can easily play standing up or sitting down, providing you recalibrate your position after. Movement is handled by the Oculus Controllers, using triggers to rotate your settlement for a 360 view.

Unfortunately, those solar flares aren’t just for backstory and sometimes drop into levels, but there are some advanced options to fall back on, like a Defence Beacon to shield yourselves. Refineries obtain more scrap from asteroids, warehouses act as convenient scrap storage and it’s a good set of advanced options. Finally, the Rocket Booster sends away your settlement to complete that stage, but you can’t return back to this world once activated. Inevitably, that makes it tougher to feel invested. 

Spacefolk City Review – Final Impressions

Despite these flaws, there remains plenty to love about Spacefolk City. With some lovely visuals and straightforward mechanics, Moon Mode’s made excellent use of spatial gameplay in a manner only VR could achieve. Creating new settlements is entertaining and while there’s not much here for genre veterans, it’s worth remembering who Spacefolk City’s targeting. If you’re after a city builder with smaller scope, you’d do well to check this out. 

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For more on how we arrived at this rating, read our review guidelines. What did you make of our Spacefolk City review? Let us know in the comments below!

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Oculus Gaming Showcase Returning For 2022 Show

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The Oculus Gaming Showcase will return for a 2022 show in the future.

The Gaming Showcase was introduced earlier this year. It was a video presentation with new game reveals and trailers. In the April 2021 show, we got an in-depth look at Resident Evil 4 VR and Lone Echo II, and saw the announcement of Carve Snowboarding.

Over on Twitter, Meta VP of Play Jason Rubin confirmed that the show would take place in the new year, and not in late 2021. Either way Meta (which is the new corporate name for Facebook) will no doubt have a lot to talk about – the company this week announced that PS2 classic, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is coming to Oculus Quest 2, and After The Fall developer Vertigo Games is producing four new games for the platform too.

There are other lingering question marks, too. Boneworks developer Stress Level Zero is still yet to reveal its new game set in the same universe releasing on SteamVR and Quest, while Ubisoft announced full Splinter Cell and Assassin’s Creed VR games at last year’s Connect. Plus Meta’s own internal studios like Beat Games and Sanzaru Games are no doubt working away on new projects for the future.

Meta says to expect more information on the Oculus Gaming Showcase 2022 soon. Given this week’s news that the Oculus brand is being replaced on the hardware front and the Quest will soon be known as the Meta Quest, it’s quite possible the event will be called the Meta Gaming Showcase by the time it actually airs.

Of course, UploadVR does its own VR gaming showcase too. And we might just have another up our sleeves before the year is out.

What do you want to see out of the new Oculus Gaming Showcase? Let us know in the comments below!

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Meta Plans to Reverse Controversial Facebook Account Requirement for Oculus Headsets

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Meta (formerly Facebook) created quite a stir in the VR industry when it announced last year that it planned to require Facebook account logins for new users. The move didn’t go over well in the VR space or among critics at large. This week the company said it plans to roll-out a non-Facebook option for logging into its headsets starting next year.

Last year Meta announced that new users logging into its VR headsets would be required to use a Facebook account starting later that year, while existing users would be required to use a Facebook account starting in 2023 to retain full functionality of their headsets.

Between being called out for having previously promised not to require a Facebook login, getting in hot water with German regulators, and an ongoing undercurrent of disdain among some customers and potential customers, the move didn’t go over too well.

The company seems to have finally appreciated the negative sentiment generated by the Facebook account requirement, and this week it announced plans to reverse course.

During the Facebook Connect keynote, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he understood the negative feedback and confirmed the company plans to offer other options.

[…] as we’ve focused more on [productivity in VR], and, frankly, as we’ve heard your feedback more broadly, we’re working on making it so you can log into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account. We’re starting to test support for work accounts soon, and we’re working on making a broader shift [away from the Facebook account requirement] within the next year. I know this is a big deal for a lot of people. Not everyone wants their social media profile linked to all these other experiences, and I get that. Especially as the metaverse expands.

In a Facebook post about the company’s rebrand to Meta, VP of XR Andrew “Boz” Bosworth mirrored the same sentiment.

“As we’ve focused more on work, and as we’ve heard feedback from the VR community more broadly, we’re working on new ways to log into Quest that won’t require a Facebook account, landing sometime next year. This is one of our highest priority areas of work internally.”

For those who have already merged their Facebook and Oculus accounts, Meta indicates you won’t be assimilated for long. Fellow VR reporter Ian Hamilton asked on Twitter, “I’m still kinda unclear here, will I be able to unlink my Facebook account and delete it and keep and use my purchased VR content with Quest 2?” to which Bosworth simply replied, “Yup.”

So far there’s no detail on what the alternative account arrangement will be, though one potential path would be to create a separate ‘Meta account’ that’s unaware of the user’s Facebook account, while leaving it to the user to decide if they want to link the two. We’ll have to wait and see.

The post Meta Plans to Reverse Controversial Facebook Account Requirement for Oculus Headsets appeared first on Road to VR.

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Meta Buys Dev Behind VR Fitness App ‘Supernatural’, Its Sixth VR Studio Acquisition in Two Years

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Meta (formerly Facebook) today announced its sixth VR studio acquisition. This time it’s Within, the studio behind the popular Quest exclusive VR fitness app Supernatural.

Meta announced the acquisition of Within on the Oculus blog saying that the studio will be run under Meta Reality Labs, the company’s XR organization. The price of the acquisition was not announced. Like previous VR studio acquisitions, Meta says the studio will “continue to be operated independently.”

Within has had a winding path to this moment. The company was founded back in 2014, originally called Vrse, two years before the first consumer VR headsets hit the market. At first the company was producing 360 VR video content, including some seminal 360 short films like Evolution of Verse and Clouds Over Sidra. Eventually the company expanded beyond producing its own content and built a streaming content library of immersive films, and raised tens of millions of dollars along the way. Like most VR video streaming platforms, the app struggled to find strong traction, though it remains available today on all major platforms.

The company made a hard pivot into the VR fitness space with the release of the Quest-exclusive Supernatural in 2020. Structurally the app plays a lot like Beat Saber (which was also acquired by Meta), but with a much clearer focus on fitness and coaching.

Supernatural has been something of a darling for Meta since its launch. It was one of the first Quest apps to be built around a subscription pricing model, and though it’s been criticized for its relatively high monthly price, it seems to have found real traction with Meta regularly holding it up as the posterchild for VR fitness on Quest.

Meta says that Within will continue to focus on “fitness, wellness, and social experiences in VR, [and] helping people achieve their goals in the most joyful and connected way possible.” Specifically for Supernatural the company says it will “more music, creative ways to workout, features, and social experiences” in the future.

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Today’s acquisition marks the sixth VR studio that Meta has bought in an effort to have greater control over the destiny of killer VR apps and the talent behind them. Facebook has also acquired Beat Games (Beat Saber), Sanzaru Games (Asgard’s Wrath and others), Ready at Dawn (Lone Echo and others), Downpour Interactive (Onward), BigBox VR (Population: One), and now Within, all in just under two years.

The post Meta Buys Dev Behind VR Fitness App ‘Supernatural’, Its Sixth VR Studio Acquisition in Two Years appeared first on Road to VR.

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Meta Acquires Quest-Exclusive Fitness Service Supernatural

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Meta is doubling down on VR fitness with the acquisition of the Quest-exclusive Supernatural fitness service.

Chris Milk’s startup Within is the team behind Supernatural, which launched exclusively on Oculus Quest in 2020. While on the surface Supernatural appears to be just another rhythm game like Beat Saber, the startup leaned into Quest’s wireless features with a wider library of music which supported moving in 360 degrees to songs. Sweat-soaked workouts are available on a subscription basis and driven partially by supportive coaches who offer commentary in your ears. The service’s coaches are led by Head of Fitness Leanne Pedante and she’s become a bit of a VR celebrity to the rapidly growing Supernatural Facebook group where people share their fitness journeys and share support.

Pedante recently joined me in our virtual studio for a discussion about VR fitness and discussed how the technology might help people achieve their exercise or fitness goals without leaving the house.

“I think if you had asked me in 2019 my answer would be so different than what I think now,” Pedante said. ” I think we are just probably only seeing the beginning because things like accessibility to Wi-Fi, price points of the hardware dropping, and really there’s so many people who don’t want to go into a gym, they don’t want to have to drive somewhere to do their workout. There’s just so many reasons to bring it inside. So yeah, I think we’re probably only kind of seeing the beginning of this.”

Supernatural recently added boxing to the service and Meta VP Jason Rubin wrote in a blog post “Supernatural will continue to be operated independently as part of Reality Labs, and will continue to create fitness, wellness and social experiences in VR.”  Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed in the announcement and the transaction is subject “to customary closing conditions and regulatory approval.”

“I think VR is opening the door to everybody who doesn’t want to go to a gym because they’re afraid of being judged, there’s mirrors, they don’t want to see what their body looks like working out in the mirror,” Supernatural superfan Chesney Mariani recently told us. “There’s nobody around. The only person that’s around is you, maybe a partner, your animals. And it makes it a lot easier to exercise when you’re in there. You can’t see anybody when you’ve got the headset on. So you’re in there, you’re quote ‘alone.’ Nobody’s judging you now.

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3 Key Things Meta Executives Said About Building The Metaverse

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Lots of people are talking about “the metaverse” after some tech companies laid claim to the term in recent months. Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew Bosworth, and John Carmack have to say about the “metaverse” and their place in making it a reality.

The term “metaverse” originates from the 1993 novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson where it is described as “a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.”

And then:

“Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Élysées of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down it. The dimensions of the Street are fixed by a protocol, hammered out by the computer-graphics ninja overlords of the Association for Computing Machinery: Global Multimedia Protocol Group.”

Nearly 30 years after those words were published we see Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, Rec Room, VRChat, and others building out systems very much resembling Stephenson’s description of this “metaverse.” And since 2014, with the acquisition of Oculus VR for billions of dollars, Mark Zuckerberg has been continually sharpening his vision of building a company that could play a major part in the next generation of personal computing. Zuckerberg and soon-to-be chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth think a lot of people will be wearing computerized goggles and glasses before the end of the decade, and they want Meta to play a role in shaping its use.

This year, with more than 68,000 employees, he expects the investment in this specific vision to cost them $10 billion in profits, an amount that’s likely to increase annually for the next several years. Meanwhile, socially aware apps like Horizon Home, Horizon Worlds, and Horizon Workrooms are the organization’s latest efforts to realize “distance defying” technology not just on headsets, but eventually across a wide range of devices.

Here are recent comments Zuckerberg and Bosworth made in a call with journalists ahead of Connect which summarize just how significant a change society is in for when these technologies become commonplace. Plus, there’s a bonus comment below from John Carmack, Independent AI Researcher and “Consulting” guide to “Oculus VR”.

What Is The Metaverse?

Mark Zuckerberg, October 2021:

“We see the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet…the kind of differentiating and defining factor of it is that it can help deliver a sense of presence…being able to be present at work no matter where you want to live without a commute, being able to go to a concert with a friend instantaneously, being able to teleport as a hologram into your parents’ living room to catch up with them…it’s like an embodied internet. Today, I think we look at the internet, but I think in the future, you’re going to be in the experiences…we view our role here as helping to stitch together some of these things.

Andrew Bosworth, October 2021:

The watch word of the metaverse is continuity. The feeling that when you go from one place to another place, there’s some things that… identity come with you. So avatars is important… your digital goods come with you…Can your friends come with you? Can you travel together? Can you stay in communication while you move from place to place?

The Metaverse Will Be Synchronous

Andrew Bosworth, October 2021:

The metaverse will be a largely synchronous experience. Whereas most of the technology being built today in content moderation is focused on asynchronous experiences. I think there’s real societal questions here. To what extent do we want anybody, companies or governments, to be supervising our synchronous conversations in the digital equivalent of the city park?

Muting Harassment And Always-On Body-Worn Cameras?

Andrew Bosworth, October 2021:

Can we keep a buffer of the last 10 or 15 seconds of interaction? And if you report that you are choosing basically to share that recording with an authority who can review it, that obviously has privacy implications for both parties. And so that’s something as an idea that we have, but… we have to have a conversation as a society. What are the privacy and integrity trade-offs we want to make? And I do think they end up feeling very different than the ones we’ve made historically because so many of these experiences are going to be real time. The degree to which we want surveillance is probably low but that also means the number of guarantees we can make are limited, but I do feel very confident that we can give very strong controls to each individual to control their environment, to control their ability to feel safe and secure in their own experience by virtue of just the power of things like muting, which are disproportionately useful in these environments.

For some context here check out a recent conversation with ITIF policy analyst Ellysse Dick:

John Carmack And Architecture Astronauts

Now John Carmack, who these days describes himself as an Independent AI Researcher as well as a “Consulting” guide to “Oculus VR”, doesn’t actual have an actual say in Meta’s strategy. Still, Carmack has been contributing to the VR efforts at Oculus for a very long time and he does, on occasion, openly speak his mind. This week during his annual a stream of consciousness talk Carmack shared some thoughts about Facebook and Oculus attempting to build the Metaverse:

 

“I was quoted all the way back in the nineties as saying that building the metaverse is a moral imperative. And even back then, most people miss that I was actually making a movie reference, but I was still at least partially serious about that. I really do care about it and I buy into the vision, but that leaves many people surprised to find out that I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times. You know, I want it to exist, but I have pretty good reasons to believe that go setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse. And my primary thinking about that is a line that I’ve been saying for years now, in general relation to my arguing against these efforts, is that the metaverse is a honeypot trap for architecture astronauts and. Architecture astronaut is a kind of chidingly pejorative term for a class of programmers or designers that want to only look at things from the very highest levels, that don’t want to talk about GPU, micro architectures or merging network streams, you know, or dealing with any of the architecture asset packing, any of the nuts and bolts details, but they just want to talk in high abstract terms about how well we’ll have generic objects that can contain other objects that could have references to these and entitlements to that and we can atomically pass control from one to the other. And I just want to tear my hair out at that because that’s just so not the things that are actually important when you’re building something. But, um, you know, but here we are, Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse. So enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing and the efforts definitely going to be made. So the big challenge now is to try to take all of this energy and make sure it goes to something positive and we’re able to build something that has real near-term user value because my worry is that we could spend years and thousands of people possibly and wind up with things that didn’t contribute all that much to the ways that people are actually using the devices and hardware today. So my biggest advice is that we need to concentrate on actual product rather than technology architecture or initiatives.”

If you missed anything from Connect 2021 you can catch up with this video supercut:

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Leaked Facebook MR Headset Confirmed as Project Cambria, a “High-end” Device Coming Next Year

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Facebook today confirmed Project Cambria, the MR headset which was spotted in a recent leak. The company says it’s a high-end headset designed to roll out more advanced technology before being able to bring it down to the price point of the Quest line. Project Cambria is said to be launching sometime next year.

If you followed along earlier this week you’ll already be at least a little bit familiar with Project Cambria; the headset’s look was revealed in leaked videos, but there were few details to be gleaned from it otherwise.

Today during Facebook Connect the company confirmed the headset, which is codenamed Project Cambria. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the headset “isn’t the next Quest,” though it will be compatible with the Quest platform.

Image courtesy Facebook

The way Zuckerberg explains it, Cambria is a high-end headset (and will be “at the higher end of the price spectrum”) which will include advanced technology that the company wants to experiment with before considering bringing it to the more affordable Quest product line.

Project Cambria Specs and Features

We don’t know a whole lot of specifics about Cambria yet, but the company did confirm a handful of things.

For one, the headset will include “high-res color mixed reality passthrough,” which will make it better for mixed reality applications. It will also use pancake optics to reduce the headset’s bulk.

Image courtesy Facebook

Eye-and face tracking will be included to provide a more realistic representation of the user within the virtual world.

From the leak and teaser photos we can also see that the controllers are ditching the tracking rings and are likely tracked with on-board cameras.

Project Cambria looks like it will lean much more into its mixed reality capabilities than Quest 2 is currently capable of.

Project Cambria Release Date

Facebook said that the Project Cambria headset will launch “next year,” but offered no additional details on timing or price, though the company says it’s already working with developers to begin building experiences for the headset.

The post Leaked Facebook MR Headset Confirmed as Project Cambria, a “High-end” Device Coming Next Year appeared first on Road to VR.

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‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ in Development for Oculus Quest 2

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Facebook today announced that it’s working with Rockstar Games to bring Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) exclusively to the Oculus Quest 2 headset.

The company said in its Facebook keynote today at Facebook Connect 2021 that it has been working “for years” to bring the game to VR.

“This new version of what I think is one of the greatest games ever made will offer players an entirely new way to experience this iconic open world in virtual reality,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.

Rockstar Games previously announced it had started production on an “AAA open world title in VR” back in July 2020, which came on the heels of its VR port of L.A. Noire (2011) to the medium. This follows a trend of established studios reformatting older games, such as Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 (2005), for the Oculus Quest 2 hardware.

There’s no release date on the books yet, as Facebook and Rockstar have only just tipped their collective hats by saying it’s currently in development. We’re sure to learn more at the Oculus 2022 Gaming Showcase.

The post ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ in Development for Oculus Quest 2 appeared first on Road to VR.

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Facebook’s Metaverse Takes a Baby Step with Customizable ‘Horizon Workrooms’ Environments

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Facebook launched Horizon Workrooms back in summer, bringing to Quest a new enterprise-focused virtual collaboration platform that connects both VR and video chat users in the same place. Soon the app will let you choose from different environments which will be customizable to some degree—a prescient step on the way to Facebook’s vision of its metaverse.

“Later this year we’ll introduce customizable rooms in Workrooms, giving you the ability to choose from a wide variety of different environments to get work done, and place your own company logos or team posters in your rooms,” the company said today during its annual Connect dev conference. “This will let people adapt their virtual workspaces to match individual company styles, cultures, and branding guidelines.”

So far Horizon Workrooms has only offered a few standard boardroom spaces. That isn’t changing terribly much with the ability to do things like modify colors, decorations, and import company logos and posters, however the ostensibly conservative update coming to the app later this year is definitely another bid to make Facebook and its VR hardware more attractive to companies looking to stay distanced and distributed. You know, the ‘new normal’.

Facebook surprise-launched Horizon Workrooms back in August, which lets VR and video chat users work and physically collaborate in the same virtual space. Since then it’s included support for things like Zoom Meeting and Zoom Whiteboard for better cross-platform collaboration, and also included more intuitive whiteboards, instant Remote Desktop connection, and AR keyboard labels in its v1.1 release.

And customizable Workrooms environments aren’t the only thing on the agenda this year either, as Facebook continues to refine its expansion into enterprise VR to make it cheaper and more attractive. It’s building towards the 2023 release of dedicated ‘Work Accounts’ which will essentially let companies adopt the consumer Quest hardware instead of having to buy the more expensive Quest for Business kit for $800.

This comes on the tails of a Facebook hiring spree that will see an additional 10,000 people added to its ranks in effort to build its version of the metaverse, or what you might define as a connect platform of virtual experiences and worlds that share some level of connectivity, interoperability, and identity.

The post Facebook’s Metaverse Takes a Baby Step with Customizable ‘Horizon Workrooms’ Environments appeared first on Road to VR.

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Facebook Rebooting VR Enterprise Offering, Bringing Business Tools to Consumer Quest Headsets

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At Facebook Connect 2021 today, the company announced it will be releasing a new Quest for Business program that’s rebooting its enterprise-focused VR software by bringing its growing suite of business tools to the consumer version of Quest 2, which you can buy from anywhere.

Facebook will be allowing what it calls ‘Work Accounts’ for Quest 2, which will be selectable alongside personal Facebook accounts for standard VR gameplay.

The Work Account login is said to be a “business-only login” that lets work-focused Quest 2 users collaborate with coworkers and access productivity apps like the recently released Horizon Workrooms, Spatial, ENGAGE, Gravity Sketch and more from the Oculus Store—all without using personal Facebook account details or avatars.

Image courtesy Facebook

Quest for Business is slated to let companies access dedicated platform functions like account management, mobile device management (MDM) solutions, SSO integration, and will also work with thing like Facebook Business Manager and Portal later this year.

The new program heads into closed beta later this year, and will expand to select businesses in 2022. The company says it hopes to launch Quest for Business to all interested companies sometime in 2023.

It’s not clear whether it will be offered under a subscription pricing model. Whatever the case may be, it at least seems the startup cost for hardware will be greatly reduced, as the Quest 2 base model (128GB) only costs $300.

In the meantime, Facebook says it will be winding down its previous Quest for Business program later this year. The original Quest for Business hardware was physically identical to the consumer headset, however it was priced at $800 and didn’t have access to the consumer Oculus Store. Under the old system, the Oculus Quest 2 enterprise SKU arrived with an extended two-year warranty, one year of the Oculus for Business software platform, and premium support.

A Facebook spokesperson told Road to VR that current Oculus for Business customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) have “several options” once the company entirely replaces it with the rebooted version.

Business customers will be able to migrate their headsets to the consumer version if they’re interested to take part in the upcoming Quest for Business beta periods. There’s also the option to simply continue using Oculus for Business without any changes, including enterprise-level support and warranties for Oculus for Business in accordance with the company’s Enterprise Use Agreement. An expanded FAQ will be published on the company’s business-facing website which should give deeper explanation.

The post Facebook Rebooting VR Enterprise Offering, Bringing Business Tools to Consumer Quest Headsets appeared first on Road to VR.

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New Cloud Save System for Quest Will Work with Every App Automatically

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Facebook announced at its Connect 2021 AR/VR developer conference today that Oculus is finally replacing its janky cloud save system for one that will work with every Quest app automatically.

If you’re a hardcore Quest user you may already be used to saying goodbye to game progress as you inevitably make room for a new app and delete the old—it’s certainly been the bane of VR journos everywhere.

That’s supposed to change here later this year, Facebook says, as it’s offering an overhauled Cloud Backup system that should be applied to the entire catalogue of games and apps on the Store.

It’s slated to let Quest users back up all device data such as game progress or settings, something the company says works “at the filesystem level, with no coding required.”

Many games currently on the Store don’t support cloud saves, but those that do have encountered issues recently.

In August, multiple developers noted that Quest’s cloud save system was malfunctioning. Soon after, Oculus released a statement in its developer forums advising app devs to “not use the Oculus platform’s current Cloud Storage service (v2) as it is causing some applications to not launch.”

The post New Cloud Save System for Quest Will Work with Every App Automatically appeared first on Road to VR.

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New Oculus Avatars Available To All Unity Developers In December

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Unity developers will be able to integrate the new Oculus Avatars 2.0 from December, with Unreal Engine support coming next year.

Announced at last year’s Connect in September 2020, Avatars 2.0 replaces the legacy Oculus Avatar SDK first launched with the Oculus Touch controllers in late 2016. Back then avatars had an basic monochromic style with the eyes always hidden by a virtual headset or sunglasses. A major update released alongside Oculus Go in 2018 added skin tones, and another just before Oculus Quest in 2019 added lipsync, microexpressions, and simulated eye movement.

The new avatar system is a total replacement for the old system, not an update. It trades the semi-realistic aesthetic for a more playful cartoonish style. In April Facebook added an editor for the new avatars to the Quest and Rift system menus and launched a private beta for the new SDK. The beta included PokerStars, Topgolf with Pro Putt, Epic Roller Coasters.

While the editor lets you create a full body avatar, but in apps you’ll only see from the torso up. While a VR system with head and hand tracking can make a reasonable guess as to your elbow position, it’s not really possible to do the same for legs.

Facebook is using the new avatars across its entire Horizon suite of social VR apps. That will include Horizon Home, the coming update to Quest’s Home software adding social features. As part of its “metaverse” push, Facebook hopes as many third party apps as possible leverage the SDK so users have a consistent virtual identity across a wide range of apps. However, there’s no word yet on whether the SDK supports other VR platforms such as SteamVR. Multi-platform developers will be unlikely to be enticed if they have to integrate a different avatar SDK for each system.

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After The Fall Release Date Revealed For December

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At long last, the After The Fall release date has been revealed, and it’s not too far away.

Vertigo Games’ long-awaited follow-up to Arizona Sunshine lands on the Oculus Quest 2, PSVR and PC VR headsets on December 9 with full cross-play support between all devices. As previously revealed, a port to the original Quest headset will follow in 2022.

Check out the release teaser trailer for the game with a few snippets of gameplay below.

After The Fall Release Date Revealed

After The Fall is positioning itself to be VR’s take on Left 4 Dead or, for a more recent reference, Back 4 Blood. It’s a co-op first-person shooter (FPS) for up to four players in which you’ll tackle a frozen LA wasteland overrun with monsters. Missions are designed as short sharp bursts in which you’ll fight for survival and come up against boss battles.

This release date has been a long time coming; we first announced After The Fall at the UploadVR Showcase in 2019. We had originally expected the game to launch in 2020, but it was delayed towards the end of the year. Another delay saw it slip from a summer 2021 window to its current date. Rest assured that Vertigo Games is still planning a closed beta for the game ahead of launch, which you can sign up to take part in over on an official website.

We’re currently shining a spotlight on the game as part of our Upload Access coverage. Check out a brand new interview with Vertigo Games just below. We’ll have more coverage of the game in the coming weeks.

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Facebook: ‘More Options’ For Oculus Quest Login Within The Next Year

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg signaled the company will be “making it so you can login into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account.”

Here’s the full comment from Zuckerberg in the Connect keynote:

“As we’ve focused more on work, and frankly as we’ve heard your feedback more broadly, we’re working on making it so you can login into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account. We’re starting to test support for work accounts soon, and we’re working on making a broader shift here, within the next year. I know this is a big deal for a lot of people. Not everyone wants their social media profile linked to all these other experiences and I get that, especially as the metaverse expands.”

While not exactly detailed about the path forward the comment does indicate Facebook is at least listening to feedback since it imposed a Facebook account requirement last year.

This news is breaking, updates to come.

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Oculus Store Apps Can Soon Use Mixed Reality – Spatial Anchors & Scene Capture Coming Later

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Developers can ship Oculus Quest apps or updates with mixed reality from the next SDK version. Spatial Anchors are coming soon, and Scene Capture will arrive next year. Facebook calls these  capabilities the Insight SDK.

Basic mixed reality functionality has been available to developers as the Experimental Passthrough API since August. But apps on the Oculus Store or App Lab weren’t allowed to use it, restricting distribution to third party methods like SideQuest. With the next SDK update the Passthrough API will no longer be experimental and will be permitted on the Store and App Lab.

The API lets developers use passthrough – the view from the Quest’s greyscale tracking cameras – as a layer (eg. the background) or on a custom mesh (eg. a desk in front of you). Since black & white isn’t particularly appealing, passthrough can be stylized with edge rendering, a color overlay, or posterization.

Coming soon, Insight SDK will get experimental support for Spatial Anchors. These world-locked reference frames will let apps place content in a specific position users mark in their room, and the headset will remember these anchor positions between sessions.

Next year, Facebook plans to add Scene Understanding as an experimental feature. Don’t be fooled by that name though, this isn’t an automatic system. Users will be prompted to mark out their walls and furniture, and to enter their ceiling height – a process called Scene Capture. This needs to be done for each room but the headset should remember the Scene Model between sessions.

With Spatial Anchors and Scene Understanding, Facebook says developers will be able to attach a virtual screen to a specific place on your wall, show your real furniture in VR, or have a character walk around your room with realistic occlusion. In the short term however mixed reality functionality will be much more basic, and future hardware with color cameras will be needed to make the experience truly compelling.

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Oculus Quest Devs Will Get Speech Recognition, Tracked Keyboard, Hand Interaction Library

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Oculus Quest developers will get speech recognition with the next SDK release. Tracked keyboard support and a Unity hand interaction library are planned for next year.

Called Voice SDK Experimental, speech recognition will be powered by Wit.ai, a voice interface company Facebook acquired in 2015. The company says this will enable searching for in-app content and “voice driven gameplay” such as verbal magic spells or a conversation with a virtual character. Facebook says Voice SDK is “free to sign up and get started”, which may suggest using it in a full app will incur a fee.

Tracked Keyboard support will arrive next year. Oculus Quest already supports a tracked keyboard – specifically the Logitech K830 Bluetooth model – but it currently only works in Oculus Home, for 2D apps like Oculus Browser. Allowing developers to bring a tracked keyboard into their apps could open up new productivity use cases. In the mean time, Immersed built their own manual system for showing your keyboard in VR.

Adding hand interactions such as grabbing and pushing is still a challenge in VR development. While there are a number of interaction frameworks available, each has its shortcomings and some require importing a heavy library developers may not need. Facebook says its Interaction SDK Experimental Unity library, slated for next year, “can be used together, independently, or even integrated into other interaction frameworks”. It will support both controllers and hand tracking, and include “a set of ready to use, robust interaction components like grab, poke, target and select”.

Developers will also be able to ship mixed reality apps on App Lab and the Oculus Store, with Spatial Anchors coming soon and Scene Capture coming next year. You can read more about the mixed reality developer features here.

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Oculus Expanding Quest Mixed Reality Capabilities With Enhanced Developer Tools

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Oculus plans to further open up the mixed reality capabilities of Quest with new tools that will allow developers to build apps which more intelligently integrate with the user’s real room. In the near future developers will also be permitted to distribute mixed reality apps to customers via the Quest store or Oculus App Lab for the first time.

Oculus first began unlocking Quest’s mixed reality capabilities with the Passthrough API which allowed developers to tap into the headset’s pass-through video view for the first time earlier this year. Now the company is announcing a more advanced set of tools, which it calls the Presence Platform, which will allow developers to build more advanced mixed reality applications.

The Presence Platform includes the Insight SDK, Interaction SDK, and Voice SDK.

Insight SDK

The main building block of the insight SDK is the Passthrough feature, which developers previously had access to in an experimental form. That feature is moving out of its experimental form and into general availability starting with the next developer update.

Additionally, the Insight SDK includes Spatial Anchors which gives developers the ability to place virtual objects in the scene and allow them to persist between sessions. For instance, a piano learning app could allow you mark the location of your piano, and the app could then remember where the piano is any time you open it.

The Insight SDK further includes Scene Understanding, which Oculus says allows developers to build “scene-aware experiences that have rich interactions with the user’s environment.” This includes geometric and semantic representation of the user’s space, meaning developers can see the shape of the room and get a useful idea of what’s in it. For instance, the Scene Understanding feature will allow developers to know what parts of the scene are walls, ceilings, floors, furniture, etc all of which can be used as a surface on which virtual content can be naturally placed.

Oculus says the developer will see a “single, comprehensive, up-to-date representation of the physical world that is indexable and queryable.” You can think of this like the headset building a map of the space around you that developers can use as a guide upon which to build a virtual experience that understand your physical space.

However, users will need to do some work on their end in order to generate this map for apps that need it, including marking their walls and tracing over their furniture.

Crucially Oculus says that the Insight SDK will enable developers to build feature-rich mixed reality apps “without needing access to the raw images or videos from your Quest sensors.” We’ve reached out to the company to further clarify if Oculus itself will send the raw sensor footage off of the headset for any processing, or if it will all happen on-device.

The Scene Understanding portion of the Insight SDK will launch in an experimental form early next year, according to the company.

Interaction SDK

Another part of the Presence Platform is the Interaction SDK which will give Unity developers a ready-made set of simple interactions for hands & controllers, like poking buttons, grabbing objects, targeting, and selecting. This saves developers time in building their own versions of these commonly used interactions in their apps.

Oculus says the goal of the Interaction SDK is to “offer standardized interaction patterns, and prevent regressions [in tracking performance of specific interactions] as the technology evolves,” and further says that the system will make it easier for developers to build their own interactions and gestures.

The company says that the Interaction SDK (and the previously announced Tracked Keyboard SDK) will become available early next year.

Voice SDK

The Voice SDK portion of the Presence Platform will open up voice-control to Quest developers, which Oculus says can drive both simple navigation functions (like quickly launching your favorite Beat Saber song with your voice) and gameplay (like casting a voice-activated spell).

The system is based on Facebook’s Wit.ai natural language platform which is free to use. Oculus says the Voice SDK will arrive in an experimental form in the next developer release.

Mixed Reality Apps on the Quest Store and App Lab

While not all of the Presence Platform SDKs will arrive at the same time, as of the next Quest developer release, devs will be allowed to ship mixed reality apps via the Quest store or App Lab. That release is expected next month.

The World Beyond Sample App

Early next year Oculus says it will make available a sample project called The World Beyond which developers can use as a starting point for building atop the Presence Platform features. The app will also be made available to users.

The post Oculus Expanding Quest Mixed Reality Capabilities With Enhanced Developer Tools appeared first on Road to VR.

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