Up to 15 people using Quest or PC VR headsets can watch YouTube videos together in Bigscreen with all the features of a fully logged in experience.
That means people with Meta Quest, Valve Index, HTC Vive and all other SteamVR and Windows Mixed Reality headsets should be able co-watch any YouTube content via Bigdcreen. According to an email from Bigscreen CEO Darshan Shankar, that includes the ability to “rent movies and watch them on YouTube! The logged-in YouTube experience is exactly like on another YouTube surface.”
That’s a pretty significant addition to Bigdcreen as the feature should make it exceedingly easy to bring a large chunk of the web’s videos into a shared viewing experience in VR. Google also offers its own YouTube VR apps, but the key social feature of co-watching with others has been absent from official channels. Now, however, Bigscreen supports watching “YouTube with friends in your private room, or with random people in our public rooms” in a range of environments including the drive-in theater or a cinema.
Bigscreen has been working to improve its streaming quality and recently added a Remote Desktop feature to use a PC wirelessly while in Quest. The company is planning to add support for bluetooth keyboards and gamepads to the Remote Desktop feature “in the next few months.”
Perhaps one of the most demanded VR mods out there, Firewatch VR, is now complete.
Developer Raicuparta recently moved their mod, named Two Forks VR, to a 1.0 release. This update doesn’t actually add much to the mod over the past release, but the developer says the mod is now in “maintenance mode”, essentially meaning it will just be updated to keep working with any possible future updates to Firewatch itself.
Raicuparta previously made an excellent VR mod for Outer Wilds, and now Two Forks VR features a lot of advanced VR mod features like snap turning and more. If you want to try the mod for yourself you’ll need to subscribe to Raicuparta’s Patreon campaign.
Firewatch was always a great choice for a VR mod thanks to its slow, story-driven pace and incredible environments. The game casts players as a forest lookout in Wyoming that develops an increasingly complex relationship with a colleague as they attempt to figure out their own tangled past.
The game’s original developer, Campo Santo, was eventually acquired by Valve and went on to work on seminal VR shooter, Half-Life: Alyx.
If you own a Quest and haven’t visited the Star Wars universe yet, now might be a good time to grab a lightsaber and check it out.
From now through May 5th Star Wars experiences on Quest are 50% off, covering Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge, Vader Immortal’s 3-part story, as well as Star Wars Pinball VR. The software is discounted in connection with Disney’s “May The Fourth” celebration of the Star Wars franchise, with demos of the standalone Quest headset also being offered with Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge for visitors to Disney Springs at World Disney World in Florida, starting May 2 and continuing through July 21.
In the months ahead we’ll be watching to see if Disney and Meta have anything else in store for the future as the regular release of Star Wars titles has been a major draw for VR platforms, and there’s nothing else new on the horizon at the moment.
Will you be picking up a discounted Star Wars game? Let us know in the comments below.
Snap shared a compilation of what developers have been building with its Spectacles AR glasses.
Spectacles was revealed almost a year ago. It’s a standalone device powered by Qualcomm’s XR1 chip featuring two cameras to perform spatial tracking of the world as well as hand tracking and video capture. A touchpad on the side can be used for precise input, and there are dedicated buttons for area scan & clip capture.
The displays have an impressive 2000 nits of brightness – 4x brighter than HoloLens 2 and 10x brighter than Magic Leap One – making Spectacles one of the only AR devices usable outdoors. However, the field of view is a tiny 26.3 degrees diagonal and the battery lasts just 30 minutes.
Spectacles aren’t a general purpose computer – you don’t build apps for them in a game engine. Instead they integrate directly with Snap’s existing AR platform, which has hundreds of millions of active users on smartphones. Developers build ‘Lenses’ – AR experiences – for both Spectacles & the Snapchat app using the company’s Lens Studio.
Over the past year Lens Studio has added new features, including speech recognition, 3D hand tracking, and (arguably) most importantly colocation- multiple Spectacles users in the same physical space seeing the same virtual objects in the same place, enabling multiplayer. Snap calls this Connected Lenses.
The latest update for co-op FPS game After the Fall is available now, adding new weapons, maps and modes.
This update, titled Shock & Awe, is the latest in a series of content drops as part of the game’s ongoing Frontrunner Season. Available on Quest 2, PSVR and PC VR, it adds four new weapons – the Shockwave Power device, the Rage Booster, the Warhead and a tommy gun, unlockable via floppy disks.
If you want a closer look at the new weapons, Stockpile map and PvP mode, you can check out some footage in the trailer embedded above.
So far, the Frontrunner season has included a new horde mode, a new enemy type, new maps and lots of new weapons. With this drop, the season’s updates are complete. The big question now is what will be included in the game’s second season, and if Vertigo Games will provide it for free or at cost.
Tilt Five CEO Jeri Ellsworth is working with her team to ship their patented AR technology to Kickstarter backers as they build out from a focused vision starting as AR glasses for tabletop gaming.
About a decade ago, however, Ellsworth was developing some of the core of that technology while working at Valve with a small team of hardware engineers doing research on forward-facing ideas like AR and VR. The idea was to invent “novel user interactions that broaden the Steam user base” that also “bring the entire family together in the living room”, as Ellsworth describes on her LinkedIn page.
Then Ellsworth and her colleagues were fired, leaving the engineer to contemplate the value of her voice and ability to speak openly about her time at the company against the amount of money offered in a severance payment packaged with a non-disclosure agreement. Separate to this consideration, what would losing her job at Valve mean for the future of the technology she worked on there? Would she need to work on something else?
Ellsworth made a key decision the day she was fired. In a recent interview with UploadVR, here’s how she describes her memories of what happened during her last day at Valve:
“I feel very fortunate that I made a split second decision the day that Valve did their big layoff. I showed up at the office. I met someone in the elevator and they said, ‘did you hear what happened to Ed? They laid him off today’. And I’m like, ‘that’s my mechanical engineer, working on my project, how could they do that?’ So I stormed upstairs and then it was like a bomb had gone off in the middle of the room. Everyone’s just sitting around moping. I hadn’t even opened my email yet to see the HR request to come see them. And someone’s like, ‘you’re getting fired today.’ I’m like, what? How can that be? That was the strangest layoff I’ve ever been around…they just let us kind of hang out in the building for like eight hours and we were just assigned a time to go talk to HR.
Folks that knew they were getting laid off were like angry and sad, and there were just tons of emotions. I was later in the day when I was going to receive the bad news and so I go up and I was like prepared to chew someone’s ass out about it. I walk in the door and Gabe’s there in the room with a lawyer/HR/somebody, and I started off like super aggressive. I was like, well, ‘so this is it?’ You know? And then immediately broke down into tears and I was getting emotional. And I’m like ‘Gabe, you gave me this mission to bring the family together and I can’t believe you’re doing this to me…I was onto something amazing.’ And he said some things like ‘I’m always going to be a fan’, like, oh, okay. And got myself back under like emotional control. And as I was walking out the door, I think my back was even turned to him. And I was like, ‘you should just sell me the technology.’ And I turned around and he was like, ‘okay.’ And that was it.
He made the decision on the spot to let me take this optical technique out of Valve. It was pretty incredible. I could have just walked out the door and just moved on to whatever project after that and never thought back on it…I don’t think folks around Valve understood what we were really onto at the time, like how we could generate this light field and how comfortable and vivid and how it solved all these problems. It was just back in those days there was still this notion that somebody is going to just stumble onto a way to make this perfect AR system. And you won’t need to use anything like a game board and still people are still dreaming and hoping that they’ll stumble onto some way to make that happen. And it’s the laws of physics. It’s really difficult.
The agreement was for $100, Ellsworth said, plus the cost of lawyers to make it legal, and “we basically got everything in our lab dedicated to the retroreflective glasses which included the prototypes, optical components, software, computers, etc.” The agreement would essentially help launch development efforts at CastAR, a company the ex-Valve employees co-founded to continue developing their approach to AR.
“The biggest win was the legal documentation that gave us freedom to operate,” Ellsworth wrote in a direct message.
Years later, Ellsworth and other CastAR veterans would essentially need to buy it all again — now with actual patents backing their retroreflective optical technique — after CastAR went defunct. Now at Tilt Five, Ellsworth is determined to “take on the big players.”
“At castAR and TiltFive we made improvements to the original prototype designs and have about a dozen patents covering the current design,” Ellsworth wrote.
Tilt Five is working on drivers to enable multiple glasses to run from a single PC as well as driving the system from an iOS or Android smartphone, features which — if well supported among developers — could offer an approachable way for AR “to bring the entire family together in the living room.”
Bigscreen is putting Meta to shame again, as the VR hangout app just got a serious bump in functionality for Quest users and PC VR users alike. Now VR’s favorite social viewing app includes native YouTube support, so you can watch anything on YouTube with friends and strangers.
Bigscreen has now added the version of YouTube you’d expect to find on a console or smart TVs, directly integrated into the VR hangout app. The update is out now for all supported headsets, including Meta Quest and all SteamVR and WindowsMR headsets.
This means you can use all YouTube features you’d expect, including logging in to your standard account or YouTube Premium account for ad-free viewing, watching YouTube TV for live sports and TV, and even renting movies through YouTube. Just like everything on Bigscreen, there aren’t any sharing limitations so you can easily pop on whatever you want: a TV show, rented movie, or live sport for friends and strangers.
For PC VR headsets, this also essentially means you don’t need to use the desktop mirroring function since YouTube is now baked in like all of the app’s other channels.
Following an update in December, this also means you’ll be able to share that screen with up to 15 people per room. Previous updates also brought improved spatial audio, new environments, and better remote desktop capability, which allows Quest users to stream their PC into their virtual room to share with friends.
Bigscreen says it has plenty more in the pipeline too. In the next few months, the studio says it’s looking forward to launching “a huge improvement to our Social VR platform with a new friends system, Bluetooth keyboard/gamepad support for Remote Desktop, and more,” Bigscreen CEO Darshan Shankar told Road to VR.
Bigscreen is available for free on all major headsets except for PSVR. There’s still no ETA on when to expect the app on PSVR although the developers have said in the past that its optimizations on Quest have essentially laid the foundation for PSVR in the future.
The Immersive line-up for the 2022 Tribeca Festival (commonly known as the Tribeca Film Festival) has been revealed, and it includes a whole host of new VR movies and experiences.
This year’s selection is split into the Main Competition and the New Voices Competition, with highlights from 2021 also featured in the Best Of Season list. Overall, there are more than 10 new films to see inside VR headsets. You can find the full selection here.
Tribeca’s Immersive Line-Up Revealed
Highlighting the Main category is Evolver, a new project from Marshmallow Laser Feast that also includes music from Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood. It takes viewers on an immersive tour of the body, following the flow of oxygen in the bloodstream and exploring its connection to the world around us. It features Meredith Monk, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Howard Skempton.
A Fisherman’s Tale developer Innerspace is also lending its skills to Kubo Walks The City, a look at Korea under Japanese occupation in 1934. Directed by Hayoun Kwon, the piece explores life around the period.
Also premiering are the next three episodes of Missing Pictures, a series that brings to life unmade films with production from Atlas V. Nonny de la Peña, meanwhile, returns for another immersive study following a woman diagnosed with Lyme Disease in Please, Believe Me.
Over in the New Voices category, you can expect new experiences like the LGBTQ + VR Museum, which features 3D scans of possessions from the LGBTQ community that in turn reveals parts of their stories. Mecasform Hill: The Missing Five, meanwhile, is an animated graphic novel that follows the disappearance of several policemen in an African town.
Tribeca will also feature some AR projects and audio experiences on top of even more VR highlights. The festival runs from June 8 – 19 and will also include flatscreen games, traditional movies and much more.
This week on the VR Gamescast Jamie and Harry are talking Assassin’s Creed VR and Cities: VR!
There’s been a whole heap of VR gaming news over the past seven days. First up, we’re breaking down Little Cities’ post-launch plans, including hand tracking. Can it pull off an ambitious new control scheme?
Elsewhere, there’s new details on Ghostbusters VR. Is it a sequel to the Afterlife movie? And will it come to other platforms?
Perhaps the biggest news of the week for many will be the Assassin’s Creed VR leaks. We might be getting a linear, single-player Assassin’s Creed game. Will that work in VR?
Finally, Cities: VR is out on Quest 2 today. We’re not quite ready to put a final review on it, but Harry has impressions from what he’s played so far. Is it an accurate translation of Cities: Skylines to VR?
The VR Gamescast goes live every Thursday. Make sure to join us for all the latest goings-on in the world of VR gaming!
We chronicle a partial history of one of VR’s best-known developers: Owlchemy Lab.
I’m listening back through an interview with Andrew Eiche and Devin Reimer of Owlchemy Labs and we’re talking about the subtle genius of Half-Life: Alyx’s distance-grab mechanic. It’s part of a 90-minute chat that weaves through the recent history of VR and the wide range of attempts by developers to zero in on products with an audience. Our conversation takes a detour into how Crisis VRigade is secretly one of the purest expressions of the VR shooter and the conversation somehow winds back to their belief that hand-tracking is the next big frontier for VR mass adoption, and others just aren’t seeing it yet.
It’s a fascinating talk and equally insightful to listen back to, but it wasn’t exactly what I meant to discuss. Their studio works to make VR software as immersive, comfortable and accessible as possible at a time when VR hardware is often the opposite. It won them immense success with Job Simulator and their subsequent release have recieved positive reviews from critics and fans, as well as charting in top seller lists (though, notably not as highly as Job Sim). Is that a good showing four games on from the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive?
Owlchemy certainly isn’t out to make VR’s most explosive shooter or epic sword-swinging RPG, with the studio instead focusing its work carefully around existing constraints to craft experiences within current limits. Its been a bit of an experimental research and development lab even while, in recent years, the studio pursued this work operating under the umbrella of one of the world’s largest tech companies. Even today, Job Simulator sits on top sellers lists as one of VR’s most recognized and successful titles, not to mention being followed by multiple successors that each pushed VR design further down this very specific line of thinking.
“We’ve got to remember that today,” Eiche once said to me, “we’re getting more new players into VR than we are getting former players.”
While the studio’s leaders are famously practiced at smiling through questions aimed at uncovering their future plans, looking back at the unique studio’s path and focused design efforts, we can still find hints pointing to Owlchemy and VR’s future.
Owlchemy’s Origins
Owlchemy started in 2010 just when market fatigue and saturation were settling into the mobile gaming market.
“Mobile just kept going downhill and our games were continuously doing better, but we were following that trajectory down,” Reimer says.
They were working on titles like Jack Lumber which, as Reimer explained it, is all about being “a supernatural lumberjack out for vengeance on the forest because the evil tree killed his granny.” While the slapstick humor in their work continues today, gone are the days of keeping the lights on by developing for dozens of platforms fueld by hardware maker partnerships, like a specific port for a Blackberry phone that Eiche says “maybe a hundred humans ever bought” and an HP laptop with a Leap Motion hand-tracking sensor built into it.
“That’s how we survived,” Reimer says.”When people talk about like startup companies and stuff like that, they always like paint over it as this like perfect genesis…That’s always the way that it works, but that’s not the way that real companies ever start.”
The company attempted an approach where they would pursue a project under contract for someone else and then return to their own intellectual property. They even did a Kickstarter for a game called Dyscourse, to which Reimer says they learned to “never, ever” do crowdfunding again. They also started giving talks about surviving in the harsh wilderness that is indie development.
In retrospect, this period didn’t just help them survive, it also helped prepare for VR’s multi-platform consumer origins on console, PCs, and phones.
“It was like: ‘We’ve been training for this our whole lives,’” Reimer says.
Still, like any skeptical developer protecting their time, when the Oculus Rift’s Kickstarter launched in 2012 Reimer says he made a list – specifically, a list about why VR would fail. Or fail again, even. He blocked out a week of his time for the investigation and got started.
“It was like ‘headsets are too heavy on the head,'” he recalls. “Okay, mobile phones are starting to solve some of that. ‘The optics are bad.’ There are [now] advances in optics. And I went through that list and then I ended up calling Alex [Schwartz, Owlchemy co-founder] and I was like ‘This is going to happen. This is going to happen this time.'”
The studio started with a vehicle for its earliest tests being one of Owlchemy’s contract jobs, a superheroic jumping game called Aaaaa! for the Awesome!, in which you…jumped. You jumped very high, in fact. And then you fell.
“It was early days for VR,” Reimer recalls. “It’s first person. It’s just falling. I think this could work in VR.”
Owlchemy pitched a VR version, openly admitting it wouldn’t make money and that this was only for research purposes.
“It took us two days to get it up and running and then an entire month to make it not suck,” Reimer says.
Owlchemy had to figure out not only how to get a game running in VR for the first time but also some of the things we now take for granted, like VR menus and how to make it playable end-to-end without asking users to leave a headset. Owlchemy fumbled around just enough to release its work on Oculus Share, the now-extinct portal for early VR experiments and experiences.The reaction to the game was positive enough to get Owlchemy noticed. Not just by the VR enthusiasts checking for new experiences on a daily basis, but also by the companies busily plotting the next stages for consumer VR.
A Job Offer From Valve
By early 2014, VR was gaining steam.
Two years prior, the Oculus Rift had become one of the most talked-about Kickstarter projects of all time, raising nearly $2.5 million. ~$350 DK1 headsets were adding countless more loops of cables to developer studies and enthusiasts were sampling the first PC VR content via Oculus Share. But, slowly but surely, it was becoming clear Oculus wouldn’t be the only name in VR.
“Valve had been working on some of this early prototype stuff, and we knew a little bit of what they were working on and they decided to do the Steam Dev Days and they were gonna show a bunch of VR,” Reimer says.
Owlchemy was invited to host one of three talks on VR that February, the others being handled by Luckey and Michael Abrash, then of Valve and now heading research at Meta’s Reality Labs. From that, Reimer and colleagues were treated to Valve’s fabled VR room demo, which featured a crude VR headset that was positionally tracked using dozens of markers plastered all over a room. There were no controllers and the headset was incredibly bulky, but it represented the next step toward immersive consumer VR over the DK1, which could only track the direction of your gaze and not the position of your head.
You’ve probably heard at least one major VR figurehead describe that demo as a lightbulb moment for VR. Reimer isn’t one of them.
“I came out of that demo so depressed,” he says. “Because I realized that this is where VR was going and I could not see how in the short term we could bridge the gap on the technology side. We had this whole giant tracking problem that was like, how are we ever going to solve this in the short term? And then also what’s the input side of this equation? That is a whole other thing.”
Despite the reservations, Owlchemy pushed on with its next VR project. The Oculus Rift DK2 was on the horizon and would introduce its own positional tracking, albeit in a limited fashion with a camera facing you.
“We like sat down and started building all these pitches and we hated them all,” Reimer says. “Why don’t we like anything that we’re building? This should clearly be the future.”
Then the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.
Owlchemy was again treated to a new demo from Valve, this time for a device it was building with HTC. It represented yet another major step for VR, this time introducing fully-tracked controllers – and Valve wanted Owlchemy to build something for it.
“They were like: ‘We’ve made two. You can have one.'”
“We were like: ‘Cool.'”
And so the headset — along with the rest of Owlchemy — went to Reimer in Winnepeg, Canada. Or at at least most of it did; some parts of the setup they had to 3D print themselves.
“Valve at the time had the most 3D printers per capita or some crazy statistic,” Eiche points out. “And so they just sent us an STL file and it was like… what are we supposed to do with it?”
So they figured that bit out, and how to stitch it all together, and how to use the controllers with two USB wires. They then had a week to build a demo in what Reimer describes as the “most pivitol” seven days in the history of the company.
“The four of us just sat in my basement and programmed and drank and played video games for a week straight without sleeping. And Job Simulator is what popped up the other end of that thing,” he said. “The first thing we built was this little table with cubes on it.”
He put it low enough on the ground so he could sit on the floor and spent the next 20 minutes stacking cubes. He then removed the headset and made a proclamation about where VR was going:
“It’s physics!” he said.
Back To Job
By “physics”, Reimer meant a sense of agency unlike anything else felt in a virtual world before.
With two motion controllers reaching into environments there were direct consequences for your physical actions. What’s one of the most common places where your physical actions can have interesting consequences? Jobs, of course. And so Owlchemy started prototyping different jobs.
Reimer notes it was often “extreme things” that the team expected to be incredibly fun in VR. But the extremes didn’t always work. Things like juggling weren’t as compelling as the team thought they might be, whilst ideas like window washing ended up being incredibly uncomfortable to experience.
“We ended up having this kitchen […] and it was interesting because immediately it was like: ‘I understand what I need to do,'” Reimer explains.
“And that was another big learning was that, early in VR, there was this tendency to be like ‘I can do anything, it’s all virtual, so just whatever.’ And what we learned was that by leveraging people’s previous experience, you can side hop so much of the tutorialization or learning or anything like that. And then let people just do what they want into the world.”
The more it honed in on this idea, the more Owlchemy started to see its work validated. Reimer recalls one player putting an egg down, noticing it start to roll off the side of the table and then instinctively catching it. “All of a sudden it clicked,” he says. “This is probably one of the most complex human computer interactions that has ever taken place. It was such low, low lizard brain of solving this entire complex loop. But it just happened because we could leverage so much of what humans are good at to begin with.”
It’s around now that Eiche came onboard, having worked on some VR for a consultancy firm (he recalls one demo to a senior partner who proclaimed: “I wouldn’t be caught dead with that s**t on my face.”)
Full development on Job Simulator took place in a rented house in Austin, Texas. Reimer and Eiche recall a house full of VR developers and equipment chipping away at what made the game tick. This was not exactly a safe process. Reimer wrote on Twitter recently about prototype controllers that would give him electric shocks and making the house sound a little like a testing field for VR crash dummies.
“I’ve never had a controller that made me bleed and gave me high voltage shocks as much as that one,” he says. “I winced when I went to grab it.”
For a developer obsessed with VR comfort and safety, its notable one particularly treacherous area at the office was the loft.
“At the time you could only make square [VR] spaces because it was so early,” Eiche explains. “You couldn’t do polygons or anything like we do now. And part of the loft extended out over an open balcony, like over the second floor. So it’d be like, ‘Hey, if you feel the banister hitting, just don’t lean too far. It’s a one story drop on two other developers.'”
Owlchemy’s leaders were starting to feel pretty confident about where they had gotten with Job Simulator. The game was shaping up to be one of the best examples of what separated VR from flastscreen media and it would appear in the launch window for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PSVR. But, come release, the developers realized even the most optimistic projections for their own work had been modest.
“In my wildest dreams, I never could have imagined the reach of that game,” Reimer says.
This, it turns out, was something of a paradox. Job Simualtor has indeed been fantastically successful, still topping charts today. But consumer VR — at the time — was not. It’s usually this point in a developer retrospective that I’d tell you how the studio in question weathered the coming storm as VR’s install base limped out of the gates in the face of high prices and complicated setups. But Job Simulator’s continued success — itstillranks in the top 10 selling PSVR games on a monthly basis six years on — makes Owlchemy an oddity in the VR space.
Owlchemy’s leaders attribute success only partially to those sales, but also to their pacing and refusal to undergo explosive growth as investment in VR reached dramatic highs. Should they have gone and made a flatscreen PC game after Job Simulator? A mobile phone game? Heck, the controller grips resemble the grip of a gun and its one of gaming’s most popular genres, they could’ve gone the route Stress Level Zero went down and honed first-person shooter mechanics in VR.
“Everything is risky, right?” Reimer explains. “[So] why not bet on the thing where we can see this trend line? We don’t know how long it’s gonna take for this trend line to find success. But PC is going to get harder. Mobile’s going to get harder. This one is on the other trajectory. And so we can build something where we’re scaling with it.”
As far as the prospect of a shooter game goes, Eiche has some thoughts.
“Aiming is actually incredibly difficult and most people don’t realize like shooting sports are an Olympic sport,” Eiche explains. “So it’s an actual difficult thing. And one of my favorite things to watch is people who are really good at first person shooters try to play shooting games in VR because they’re not good.”
Just because you’re good at something on a gamepad, doesn’t mean you’re good at it in VR and while shooters are a popular form of videogame, Owlchemy sees VR as reaching much wider than that.
“The two things that we like really focused on there was can we build something that works for anybody? Anybody can pick up and play and have a good time,” Eiche says. “And also an important point of that is to not make people sick. Because the VR of that era, damn near a hundred percent of the titles you play would make you sick…assuming your users have all this back knowledge [on sickness] is just not a good way to build human computer interactions.”
From Rick & Morty To Google
Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-Ality was something of a continutation of Owlchemy’s alternating development cycle – something original followed by something under contract.
Early on, they had no idea if Job Simulator would take off, let alone the wider VR market, and the deal with Adult Swim Games to make Virtual Rick-ality gave them a security that, as it turns out, they wouldn’t end up needing.
“Essentially for us, it was the thing that was going to make sure that, if the previous game wasn’t successful, we can continue to make the next original thing,” Reimer says. “And so from a strictly business and financial standpoint, Job Simulator ended up being that thing. It gave us the confidence to be able to not worry about that success.”
That’s not to say there’s any regret about working on Rick & Morty. It’s an enormously popular property, for one thing, and it enabled Owlchemy to build out yet more tools and learn more lessons it could take into future projects.
“That was very in our minds with Rick & Morty,” Reimer says. “What cool stuff can we build that’s going to make this awesome game, but also will allow us to R&D and also build these things that we can utilize after?”
“It allowed us to break out of Job Sim for a little bit,” Eiche adds, “and do something fun. Originally we did bots [in Job Sim] because we didn’t want to have bipedal characters. So that helped. A lot of what you see in Cosmonious High today are lessons that we had learned in Rick & Morty, like we had to high five a character, and that was impossible back in the day. Now every character can be high-fived at any time in Cosmonious. I know that sounds like such a silly small thing, but you high-five Rick and that broke so many times. We had to put so many patches out to fix it.”
It also gave Owlchemy the opportunity to work on some more traditional game elements like implementing voice acting and performance work.
“We got to try a lot of different things in that IP that ended up being kind of case studies on how to, and how not to do things going forward,” Reimer adds.
Development for Rick & Morty also took place during that cold VR winter, years before the release of the Quest headset. But as the industry reckoned with what type of content was going to help VR take off and more shooters and traditional gaming genres started to enter the scene, Owlchemy noticed a curious lack of Job Simulator imitators.
“Let’s say, hypothetically, you build a word guessing game,” Eiche suggests. “Then a million clones appear. And there’s all sorts of reasons why our game is a little too complex to clone, but […] we actually assumed many times that ‘Okay, we’re going to release Job Sim — once we realized it was going to be big — we’re going to see a lot of bright and colorful games with hands and kind of adventure style-y and performative like our games are.’ And then we’re like ‘Hey, nobody’s doing that. Okay, we’ll release Rick & Morty.'”
“I was starting to get to the point of paranoia right before launch,” Reimer adds. “Everyone’s loving this. Everyone’s going to want to do this. And at the time I just didn’t give us, being so inside that bubble, enough credit of the complexity of what we had pulled off.”
Job Simulator’s success had eliminated the anxiety of surviving from game to game. But it also made the developer a very lucrative target for acquisitions, and that’s exactly what happened. In May 2017, a month after the launch of Rick & Morty, Google announced its intention to acquire Owlchemy, long before Meta had started buying up VR development teams.
“We had this unique situation where our worlds were aligning,” Reimer says of the move. “We had kept pushing on VR for everyone and Google was like ‘Yes, that’s how we’re successful, when VR can be for everyone.'”
Interestingly, Owlchemy never did the things you’d expect a content studio to do when it gets bought by a giant corporation. It hasn’t made exclusive titles for Google platforms, for example, and it hasn’t avoided other platforms as a result. In fact, even if the team did want to do something exclusive to Google it’d be tough. After all, the company pulled out of VR hardware and services years ago after failing to get the Daydream mobile platform to take off.
Isn’t it a bit strange for a company that doesn’t make games and doesn’t provide any VR services or hardware to own a VR game developer? Reimer says the continued success of Owlchemy’s titles means that relationship hasn’t felt under threat.
“They wanted to set things up was to be this wholly-owned subsidiary,” he explains. “At Google, we don’t make games internally, this is not something we’re good at.”
Google’s leadership recognized, instead, that Owlchemy is good at releasing VR games to platforms with tracked hands.
“Let’s let you do that,” Reimer explained of Google’s direction to them.
The Quest In Lieu Of A Daydream
It’s at this point my coversation with Reimer and Eiche stopped being so much documentative as it was philosophical. A hit title under your belt and an acquisition by one of the world’s biggest technology companies sort of takes the wind out of the scrappy indie narrative, and both Vacation Simulator and Cosmonious High are still fresh in everyone’s memory.
Vacation Sim was the studio’s first shot at a sequel, and looked to further expand Owlchemy’s understanding of interaction and exploration. Last month’s release of Cosmonious High, meanwhile, returned to a lot of the character work first established in Rick & Morty, and was also Owlchemy’s first game to allow for free teleportation to explore any part of a map.
Perhaps what was most interesting about the development of each, however, was that Owlchemy had to work out how to get them — along with Job Simulator — on standalone hardware.
“Oculus runs a lot of experiments,” Eiche recalls of learning about the Quest for the first time. “So to be perfectly honest, we were like ‘Oh, this is another experiment. That’s going to be very expensive. It’s great. We’re really happy that they’re pushing in this direction because we think that’s what [VR] is going to be.’ But I think Devin even said we’re still five years out, this is just them monkeying around with some experiment.”
Reimer specifically believed 6DOF tracking on a mobile headset within this timeframe was a pretty unrealistic expectation. But, once Owlchemy had a clearer view of where Meta (then Facebook) was heading with Quest, it knew it had to change gear. The pair wanted Job Simulator on Quest as soon as possible and at the same level of fidelity you could experience on other platforms. No small order, as any Quest developer will tell you, but the developer’s work porting to PSVR in the past helped them cram it in, with Vacation Simulator following soon after.
Cosmonious, as I learned in an interview last month, was another tricky task. In fact, the team nearly cut the paint system it had implemented into the game. Nonetheless, all three of Owlchemy’s original games are now running on Quest and ready to introduce new players to VR.
So, where does Owlchemy go from here?
The Future
“The next thing that we’re seeing going forward is hand tracking,” Reimer says with confidence. “We are all-in on that. I’m treating it very much like the early days when we were like, ‘No, Job Simulator is going to be two tracked controllers’ and some platforms that I will not name said, ‘No, that’s got to work with a [gamepad] controller.'”
This is a bullish perspective on a method of input that’s still finding its, well, hands. Still, big advances in hand tracking are being made seemingly by the month; Meta just updated its hand tracking solution on Quest 2 and its Project Cambria headset could stand to improve things further still. Reimer and Eiche, meanwhile, aren’t ready to confirm that their next game will be hand tracking-only just yet (the pair say they’re still in R&D for what’s next), but the Owlchemy team already uses the technology in its own workflows. If it does go in that direction then they’ll be figuring out what’s best for the control scheme all over again.
“We’re not going to do karate Beat Saber,” Eiche jokes.
But what about the haptics of physical controller buttons?
“There’s always going to be a place for controls, right?” Reimer replies. “Because just there’s always a place for kind of the flat games, there’s always going to be a group. We still use a mouse. We have touch screens and I’m sitting in front of two monitors and still typing on a keyboard and a mouse. So that’s not going away, but I think what we’re trying to focus on is like the extreme mainstream adoption area.”
“We need to continue to engage the mass [market]. To make sure this stuff is working for everyone. Because we are all going to be using VR at some point here in the not too distant future.”
Varjo today announced the launch of Varjo Reality Cloud, the company’s XR cloud streaming platform that’s aimed at making XR more scalable in enterprise settings by doing the heavy lifting of rendering in the cloud. At the outset the company is targeting the automotive industry, but plans to enable enterprises more broadly with support for Unity & Unreal Engine.
Enterprise & enthusiast headset maker Varjo announced its XR streaming platform earlier this year; now the company says the service is officially launched. At the outset, the service supports Autodesk VRED, an industry standard application for automotive design and visualization.
One-click Cloud Sessions
With Varjo Reality Cloud, the company says auto makers will be able to spin up a session of VRED in the cloud and then send a simple link to colleagues who will be able to join the session with just a click. Using a Varjo headset, the user will be able to get an immersive and collaborative look at a vehicle’s design.
The goal, the company says, is to make it easier for stakeholders to be part of the design review earlier in the process—expanding the use of XR beyond just the engineers and designers and into the realm of marketers, executives, and the like.
Varjo Reality Cloud achieves this by drastically lowering the hardware specs needed to render the VR session (since all the heavy lifting is done in the cloud) and eliminating the need for any local software installation or large file downloads (beyond the basic software needed to connect a Varjo headset). You’ll still need a medium-spec laptop, but that’s more portable and less expensive than professional workstations that you’d find in the design department of many enterprises.
Image courtesy Varjo
Varjo says the cloud rendering delivers the same retina resolution quality that users would see through their headsets when rendered locally. This is achieved, the company claims, with a foveated compression algorithm that compresses the data at a 1,000:1 ratio. That is to say that the company is making use of the eye-tracking tech in its headsets to more smartly decide where to trade quality for compression to reduce the bandwidth required.
Indeed, the recommended bandwidth for Varjo Reality Cloud is quite reasonable at 35 Mbps. And rom my exclusive preview of an early version of the service, the rendering quality is no joke. What I saw easily stood up to the company’s high bar for image quality in their headsets and in a blind test it would be difficult to tell if it was being rendered locally or not based on image quality alone.
Unity & Unreal On the Way
Varjo is starting with out-of-the-box support for Autodesk VRED because the company says it has identified a clear need among those using its headsets in the automotive industry.
But Varjo says it plans to widen the appeal of its Reality Cloud service to enterprises more broadly; later this year the company plans to add support for Unreal Engine and Unity so arbitrary XR projects can be delivered from its cloud platform. To demonstrate the capability the company showed a demo of Epic’s MetaHuman streamed from the cloud.
To Varjo and Beyond
Building an XR cloud streaming service is a huge undertaking to increase the scalability of XR headsets in enterprise settings, but the company seems dead set on tackling ease-of-use to make that happen. To that end, while Varjo Reality Cloud is only available on the company’s own headsets today, it isn’t drawing the line there. Varjo says it plans to open the platform up to other XR headsets in the future, as well as non-XR devices like PCs and smartphones.
While lowering the hardware requirements from a beefy desktop to a slim laptop is nice… the reality is that Varjo’s headsets need base stations for tracking, which is still a pretty high barrier. In the future, the company says Varjo Reality Cloud may also support standalone headsets which would be an even larger step up in ease-of-use.
As for the company’s more ambitious plans for Varjo Reality Cloud… it seems those are further off still. For the time being—if you happen to be looking to stream VRED from the cloud for automotive design reviews—Varjo is charging $1,495 per month for the service, which includes up to five concurrent users.
Today during Meta’s Q1 2022 earnings call CEO Mark Zuckerberg told shareholders that they should buckle up for the long haul because the company’s steep investments in XR and metaverse technologies aren’t expected to flourish until the next decade.
Today Meta gave its shareholders a quarterly update, in which the company overviewed its latest earnings and expenses.
For Reality Labs, the company’s XR and metaverse division, revenue was up 30% year-over-year, from $534 million in Q1 2021 to $695 million in Q1 2022.
However, costs associated with running the Reality Labs division rose even more, up by 62% year-over-year, from $1.83 billion in Q1 2021 to $2.96 billion in Q2 2022.
This growth in costs wasn’t unexpected. Meta told investors last year they should expect the company’s XR investments in 2021 to total $10 billion… and to grow even more from there.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been asking for investor patience in his vision for XR and metaverse technologies for years. Back in 2017 he was already prepping investors for a long haul, saying that in order to reach mainstream tracition, XR would need a 10 year trajectory from the year the company acquired Oculus—a timeline that pushed out to 2024.
But in Zuckerberg’s eyes that timeline may have slipped considerably.
Today during Meta’s Q1 2022 earnings call, during a lengthy, unscripted response to a shareholder question, Zuckerberg said that he didn’t expect the company’s metaverse and XR investments to really flourish until the 2030s.
So we have multiple teams in parallel that we’ve sort of now spun up [to build XR and metaverse tech]. This goes for VR as well as augmented reality and the other work that we’re doing and is sort of driven by the success that we feel like we’re seeing in the markets and the technology is starting to be ready to really ramp up.
So those [operating losses for Reality Labs], we’re experiencing today. I mean, having those teams operating is something that you see weigh on the results and is one of the reasons why I think the growth rates and expenses have been so high, and I think we’ll continue investing more over some period. But at some point, we will have all those product teams fully staffed for a few versions into the future and then the growth rates there will come down.
But it’s not going to be until those products really hit the market and scale in a meaningful way and this market ends up being big that this will be a big revenue or profit contributor to the business. So that’s why I’ve given the color on past calls that I expect [substantial revenue from Reality Labs] to be later this decade, right?
Maybe primarily, this is laying the groundwork for what I expect to be a very exciting 2030s when this is like—when this is sort of more established as the primary computing platform at that point. I think that there will be results along the way for that, too. But I do think that this is going to be a longer cycle.
To be fair, the company’s initial ’10 year trajectory’ included only a vague idea of the metaverse—something that, despite still being somewhat nebulous—has come into clearer focus in the eight years since Meta acquired Oculus and set out to build ‘the next computing platform’.
Meta arguably didn’t take its first stab at trying to figure out what the metaverse might look like until 2016 when it began seriously experimenting with social VR in what would ultimately become Facebook Spaces, the company’s first social VR app which launched in 2017.
Even so, progress has been slow. Facebook Spaces was shut down in 2019, to be superseded by Horizon. But Horizon—which was first announced in 2019—didn’t launch until the far end 2021… and it’s still only available to a limited audience.
For shareholders seeing Meta spend $2–$3 billion on Reality Labs per quarter… it makes sense why the company is being regularly questioned about its steep spending. Zuckerberg’s suggestion that the investments won’t really flourish until the 2030s surely isn’t going to help matters.
To that end, Zuckerberg said during the earnings call that the company’s plan is to use revenue from its non-XR businesses (Facebook, Instagram, and the like) to fund its aggressive and forward-looking spending. For investors to stick around for the long haul, Zuckerberg is going to need to continue to emphatically sell his belief that XR is the next computing platform and explain why shareholders should stick around for the ride.
Meta’s Reality Labs revenue grew 35% year-on-year in Q1 2022 – but costs grew 55%.
Reality Labs is the division of Meta responsible for Quest VR hardware & software, Portal video calling appliances, and the Ray-Ban Stories camera glasses – as well as researching and developing AR glasses and other future AR and VR devices.
The division brought in $695 million revenue in Q1 2022, up from $534 in Q1 2021. But the cost of this division was a whopping $3.6 billion, up from $2.36 billion in Q1 2021. The result is a loss of $2.96 billion, up from a loss of $1.83 billion in Q1 2021.
Meta’s CFO said the Reality Labs revenue growth was “driven by sales of Quest 2”. While costs are growing significantly, revenue is clearly growing too – Quest 2’s success shows no signs of slowing down:
This increase in costs isn’t unexpected however – Mark Zuckerberg warned investors in October that investments in AR & VR would reduce Meta’s overall 2021 profit by $10 billion, and said “I expect this investment to grow even further for each of the next several years”.
Zuckerberg today told investors he intends to spend tens of billions of dollars over this decade “laying the groundwork for what I expect to be a very exciting 2030’s when this is established as the primary computing platform”, saying he’s even prepared to trade off short term profits for the long term opportunities AR and VR present if it comes down to that. This could turn out to be the largest bet in the history of the tech industry – but will it work?
The recently-announced Ghostbusters VR isn’t a sequel to Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
Sony Pictures VR’s Jake Zim confirmed as much to IGN’s Taylor Lyles. “It is not a sequel to Afterlife,” he said. “It does not go deeper directly into the stories. It is a new story, it’s a new concept, but it ties closely back into lots of things that people loved from Afterlife and the broader Ghostbusters world itself.”
We may see plenty of easter eggs calling back to older movies, then, but Zim confirmed there likely wouldn’t be any returning characters. Instead, Ghostbusters VR will feature a brand new story set in San Francisco, with a new team of budding Ghostbusters setting up shop.
Providing more quotes on her Twitter feed, Lyles also noted that character customization looked to be included in the game. “[C]haracter customization is a safe assumption to make right now,” Zim said. Given the game’s focus on cooperative multiplayer (though it can also be played in solo modes), this definitely seems like a great opportunity for some personalized outfits.
Currently we know that Ghostbusters VR is on the way to Quest 2. Last week we confirmed that it’ll be a launch exclusive for the platform, but nDreams says it will talk about coming to other headsets at a later date. Zim also reiterated that it was in VR’s interests to be on many platforms, adding: “[I]f you look at the larger ecosystem of how important the whole space is in terms of all the platforms and all the channels and growing the space, there’s so much room to grow, I think that’s really important for [Sony Pics VR], as a company, to consider.”
A launch window hasn’t been confirmed at this time.
A new mode is coming to Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever, more than a year since the game first launched.
It arrives tomorrow in the Arcade Attack update, adding a roguelike arcade mode that is designed to be much more approachable and instant compared to Story Mode.
In each arcade run, you’ll play through five randomly-selected levels, compete for a high score and search for hidden TP — a currency that can be spent in between levels. In the store, you’ll be able to use your TP to purchase new guns, med kits and perks, such as the Big Head perk pictured below. You’ll find weapons and upgrades throughout each run as well.
This update is the latest in a series of additions and fixes since launch in March 2021, including optimization for Quest 2, improved collision models, reworked gun vfx, new gun skins and 12 new levels.
On release, we had mixed feelings about Zombieland VR. In our review, we found it didn’t reinvent the well-tread ground of zombies in VR, but still offered some enjoyable elements:
The action is fast and enjoyable, level design encourages replaying, and you’re never short of something to upgrade or the means to upgrade it. Some finicky reloading, less than stellar character models, and skimpy tutorials keep it from being an essential game, but if you can look beyond that, you’re in for a much more entertaining light-gun game than meets the eye.
Green Hell VR developer Incuvo sounds bullish on PSVR 2.
Speaking to Gamerant, CEO Andrzej Wychowaniec touched on the subject of Sony’s new headset and the features he was looking forward to. Particularly, Wychowaniec said he was looking forward to what the new Sense controllers could offer along with new features like eye tracking.
“These solutions will be crucial to the progress of VR gaming, as they will allow developers to invent entirely new kinds of experiences,” the developer said, adding that PS5’s Tempest 3D audio tech could also deliver much more immersive experiences.
As for how he thinks the headset might perform in the market, Wychowaniec was optimistic that PSVR 2 could match the original PSVR’s 5 million units and then some.
“I certainly hope that the new headset will repeat the success and will accelerate the market growth and bring new possibilities in terms of features, user experience, and a fresh dose of competitiveness which always stimulates technological innovation,” he said. “It’ll also be good for developers. New platforms mean new sources of income, as well as the opportunity to raise the quality standards. So basically better games. I believe that Sony will succeed again, and NGVR [next-gen VR, a codename cited by PSVR Without Parole last year] will bring millions of new VR enthusiasts to the community.”
Currently Incuvo is working on two different versions of Green Hell VR. The first is a Quest release that launched earlier this month as a streamlined version of the game designed specifically for the mobile headset. The full Green Hell experience is also coming to PC VR, with launch planned in the near future. Currently, though, Incuvo hasn’t confirmed if the game might also come to PSVR 2. We thought the Quest version was great, giving us high hopes for future editions.
Currently we know about the specs and design of Sony’s new VR headset, but still don’t have an idea of when it might launch. Rumors and speculation have been pointing to a Q1 2023 release due to the stresses of the component shortage. You can keep track of everything we know about the headset right now over here.
MyDearest, developer of the Chronos series, wants you to choose its next VR project.
The Tokyo-based studio this week announced Project: Gathering, an initiative that asks fans to vote on one of three concepts for its next game. Each title is a multiplayer game but the ideas range from camping to a VR MOBA. Those interested will need to share their thoughts over on the developer’s official Discord server. The titles would likely come to Quest 2.
MyDearest has even gone to the effort of making concept trailers for each game. The three projects are as follows.
Code: Camp
This would be a multiplayer adventure game that lets you explore a fantasy world with friends. Activities would include cooking and dragon riding.
Code: Gauntlet
A VR action game in which you play as a ninja with the powers of kinesis. You’d throw objects at opponents in 3 vs 3 battles.
Code: Bell
Similar to Dead by Daylight, this is a 4 v 1 multiplayer game in which teams are hunted by a gruesome executioner.
Casting your vote will secure you access to the winning idea’s closed beta program, and MyDearest also says it’s offering up limited rewards like a Quest 2 for taking part.
MyDearest aims to release the chosen project in 2023 but, currently, the studio is still working on the latest installment in the Chronos series, Dyschronia: Chronos Alternate. That’s due for release sometime this summer.
Which of the three concepts for Project: Gathering would you like to see get made? Let us know in the comments below!
Moon VR Player lets you watch regular and 180° videos in passthrough on Quest 2.
Moon VR was around years ago on the Samsung Gear VR, developed by a full team. In 2017 they ran out of funding and had to suspend development – though the app was maintained voluntarily and ported to Oculus Go. With the success of Quest 2 the Moon team is now back together, and the app is now available on App Lab with a unique feature: passthrough support.
The Quest 2 Passthrough API launched in August last year. It lets developers use the view from the headset’s greyscale tracking cameras as a layer (eg. the background) or on a custom mesh (eg. a desk in front of you).
In Moon VR that means you can position videos in your real room and keep awareness of your surroundings. This can either be standard flat videos where most of your view is your real surroundings, or immersive 180° videos so you can just look behind you.
The player also claims the following features:
Moon Link: wirelessly watch vr videos from your Windows PC, Mac or other local devices
Fix ghosting: remove faulty ghosting in the video
Gaze-based control: head tracking and effortless hands-free control
Screen adjustments: Brightness, distance, zoom, and curved display
Rotate, mirror and single-eye viewing: watch videos from the perspective you like
Background environments: galaxy, sea view and more other options to be released
Advanced antialiasing to smooth shaking: Multisampling Antialiasing, Supersampling Antialiasing, and Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing
Axon, the company best known for its Taser stun guns, has announced the acquisition of VR studio Foundry 45 which it says will bolster its VR training offerings.
Founded in 1993, Axon is the company behind the well known Taser stun guns which are employed by police and military forces around the world. In modern times the company has also focused on body cams and software for administration and management of public safety organizations. This month Axon announced the acquisition of the VR studio Foundry 45.
Formed in 2015, Foundry 45 has focused on combining VR with training and marketing. The company says it has built VR experiences for the likes of Delta Air Lines, The Weather Channel, AT&T, and others.
Axon, which has previously offered VR training, says the Foundry 45 team will merge with the existing Axon VR team to bolster the company’s ability to offer VR-based training solutions.
“Virtual reality is rapidly becoming a game-changing training tool across many industries, and the acquisition of Foundry 45 will help accelerate Axon to deliver innovative skills- and scenario-based training in public safety, and will catalyze Axon’s expansion into new growth markets globally,” the company said in its announcement of the acquisition.
Axon says its goal is to use “new immersive technologies to better prepare officers for real-life situations in the field. Axon’s VR products provide virtual reality content that helps officers develop critical thinking, de-escalation techniques and tactical skills across a diverse set of highly realistic scenarios.”
The acquisition appears to have been an all-stock deal, with Axon saying that 29,507 restricted stock units (valued around $3.87 million) were “granted to two individuals in connection with the acquisition,” with a vesting schedule of three years. Axon says the deal also includes up to an additional 15,249 restricted stock units (valued around $2 million) if the company’s VR unit achieves certain performance-based goals.
Axon—which calls its stun guns “non-lethal”—understandably has a vested interest in making sure the users of its Taser products are well trained. Not just for the safety of users and targets but also for liability and the company’s image, which hinges on claims that its weapons result in no serious injury in the vast majority of cases where they are deployed.
One unfortunate incident that recently brought the Taser into the public eye was the 2021 killing of Daunte Wright in Minnesota, in which an officer claimed to have accidentally pulled out and fired her firearm instead of her Taser.
And that isn’t the only time that mistaking a gun for a Taser. According to the Star Tribune there have been at least 16 cases in the US where officers mistook the two weapons, four of which resulted in deaths.
The promise of VR training is not only that it can feel more real—which has studied benefits to lasting recall—but also that it can be cheaper and easier for public safety organizations to deploy, allowing for more training time with a broader range of scenarios and less overhead.
Whether or not VR training could have helped avert the tragic situations mentioned above isn’t clear, but one can surely hope.
This increase in costs isn’t unexpected however – 
