VR's biggest year in history is almost halfway over with freshly announced Batman and Alien games incoming just as developers start finding their footing with mixed reality in Laser Dance and Niantic's Hello, Dot.
The biggest trend in VR gaming of 2024, though, is the blurrying line between flat content and VR.
Aided by the UEVR mod, the ceaseless work of Team Beef and the formal announcement of Flat2VR Studios, an assortment of high-selling Unreal Engine games are basically seeing robust VR support turned on inside the titles many people already own.
Henry Stockdale
Meanwhile, the open source project Delta combined with changing Apple policy finally opened the floodgates to emulator support of classic game systems across Vision Pro and other Apple platforms.
Ian Hamilton
Henry Stockdale and Don Hopper have been following the latest for UploadVR using their headsets at home, of course, but they also travelled to San Francisco earlier this year to meet with studio representatives, interview sources, and check out demos first-hand at the Game Developers Conference, with Don offering us a look at Angry Birds in mixed reality from the conference.
Henry Stockdale
Before flying out to San Francisco, Don hopped in the Dune Ornithopter and flew over Arrakis trying to complete rescue missions in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Unfortunately, he failed to complete the grueling final mission and the desert takes the weak.
Don Hopper
New label Creature teamed with Cubism creator Thomas Van Bouwel for Laser Dance. Henry's hands-on report highlighted the impressive laser-dodging game as mixed reality's most impressive demo to date. Starship Home is on the way from Creature too as one of Quest 3's first exclusives and, now, just a few months after Laser Dance showed us its cool ideas, Niantic's Hello, Dot wows with even the most simplistic interactions paired with Meta's latest dynamic occlusion.
Ian Hamilton
All these changes are set against one of Meta's most significant foundational changes in years. Instead of a separate early access section with hard-to-find listings, Meta's App Lab system is merging with the main Quest store as Horizon OS takes shape.
David Heaney
Major VR & Mixed Reality Games On The Way
Watch Don and I discuss all this and more in our hour-long live recap video embedded above with teaser trailers for some of the games included.
If you don't have time, the takeaway here is that a drought in VR and mixed reality gaming looks to turn into a flood in coming months as developers start finding out what they can with the XR2 Gen 2 processor, hand tracking, dynamic occlusion, and new tools being made available to them with still-in-development operating systems likeHorizon OS and visionOS.
There are more big announcements and reveals planned for June, including at our own UploadVR Showcase late in the month, which is likely to be followed by a quiet period as many professionals take summer vacations. And during that period, we'll start to get a sense of games are likely to anchor VR buying decisions through the end of 2024
For example, we've got one of VR's most experienced studios Survios looking to follow in Alien: Isolation's footsteps with a terrifying new xenomorph experience across most headsets – Alien: Rogue Incursion.
David Heaney
On top of that, Meta's Camouflaj finally revealed the first look at Batman: Arkham Shadow. Expectations are extremely high for the title following outstanding work realizing the superhero fantasy of rocketing through the air as Iron Man.
Henry Stockdale
2024 isn't even half over yet and these headlines tell a single story – VR headsets are about to have their biggest year in history as developers build faster than ever on TestFlight with Apple, App Lab with Meta, and, yes, even Early Access with Steam.
We'll have more throughout the year and, as of this writing, we're still receiving entries for the next UploadVR Showcase. More to come soon and be sure to subscribe to us on YouTube for our live discussions.
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