Mixed Reality Gaming Studio MixRift Secures $1.6M Funding to Make the ‘Angry Birds’ of MR

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

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

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

Known for its indie XR titles Hell Horde (2024) on Quest and Fractured (2024) on both Quest and Apple Vision Pro, MixRift says it’s working to create the Angry Birds of mixed reality—something that’s easy to pick up but hard to put down.

“We’re at the very beginning of what mixed reality could do for gamers,” Voicu says. “We know there is a huge untapped market, and our founding team knows what it takes to create the games that hook those players in. This puts us in a unique position to capitalise on the opportunity.”

MixRift says it will use the investment to continue its development and plans to release further titles later in 2024, noting that it’s focusing on sticky game mechanics over “specific titles” to best identify what resonates with audiences.

“We are committed to rapidly prototyping games, getting them into the market, and gathering real user feedback as quickly as possible,” Voicu says. “We use those insights to improve titles that connect with audiences and replace those that don’t. This investment gives us the support we need to take that approach and demonstrates experienced, knowledgeable backers’ buy-in to our philosophy.”

The post Mixed Reality Gaming Studio MixRift Secures $1.6M Funding to Make the ‘Angry Birds’ of MR appeared first on Road to VR.

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HTC Cuts Vive XR Elite Price Ahead of New Headset Reveal

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

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

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

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

Photo by Road to VR

Now, at $900, it appears HTC is hoping to move Vive XR Elite stock in the US, or what has been the XR segment’s most performant market for consumer devices.

Additionally, the company is also holding two promotions for Vive XR Elite and Vive Ultimate Tracker bundles in the US, which end on August 31st. You’ll find both available on Vive.com.

• VIVE XR Elite + Ultimate Tracker 3 trackers + 1 dongle for $1,398
•  VIVE XR Elite + Ultimate Tracker 5 trackers + 1 dongle for $1,696

Meanwhile, HTC released a video late last month promising something “coming soon,” teasing what promises to be the next XR headset from the company.

While the company hasn’t revealed anything beyond that video, seen above, a supposed leak reported by tech analyst Brad Lynch suggests the headset may be more of an iterative design on Vive Focus 3—delivering what may be Vive Focus 4.

The reported leak maintains the next HTC headset will contain the same displays and optics as Vive Focus 3, however integrate the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 chipset used in Vive XR Elite, and also include built-in eye-tracking, USB-C DisplayPort Alt Mode, and work with Vive Focus 3’s accessories—all of which is unconfirmed.

Provided that leak is true, the company may be in danger of undercutting Vive XR Elite’s functionality, becoming a veritable Quest Pro to Meta’s Quest 3, which has a majority of the former’s functionality at  nearly half the price.

The post HTC Cuts Vive XR Elite Price Ahead of New Headset Reveal appeared first on Road to VR.

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‘Garry’s Mod’ Sequel Adopts OpenXR to ‘Expand VR Feature Set’ and Support More Devices

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

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

Fast-forward to late last month, and the studio has opened its developer preview to the public, which until recently included VR support thanks to integration with SteamVR. Now the studio says its unplugged SteamVR from its backend, and adopted OpenXR support.

While Facepunch mentions in an update that it comes with “no major changes to functionality” to the user, in reality the switch to OpenXR gives s&box—and creators using the platform—more latitude to exist independently from Steam.

“The main benefits to this are that we get loads of control over everything, we can expand our feature set much further, and we’re able to support a much wider range of devices,” programmer Alex Guthrie says.

Whereas SteamVR apps are necessarily tied to the Steam platform, OpenXR is a more open cross-platform API standard aimed at maximizing compatibility and reducing fragmentation in the XR space—also making for a dizzying number of XR devices and peripherals supported by OpenXR.

You can technically dive into s&box today via the developer preview, however it still has a ways to go before its heads into a 1.0 consumer-ready version.

When it does launch on Steam at some point, Facepunch is no doubt hoping it has a stock of first and third-party content at the ready, which we’re hoping also comes with a healthy glut of unique VR games. To boot, the studio is now running a game jam open to all, which features £40,000 in prize money.

We’ll be keeping our eyes on the platform’s Discord (invite link) and its news portal for more info as it arrives.

The post ‘Garry’s Mod’ Sequel Adopts OpenXR to ‘Expand VR Feature Set’ and Support More Devices appeared first on Road to VR.

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VR Port Studio Joins Andreessen Horowitz Accelerator, Earning Investment and Validation

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

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

In a post on X, Flat2VR says the accelerator “should help open some doors to porting more of those absolute dream titles officially into VR!”

We’re so honored to have been accepted into the @a16z speed run program which should help open some doors to porting more of those absolute dream titles officially into VR! https://t.co/s5NPJQfy88

Can’t wait to give you a little sneak peek at what we’ve been up to in the… pic.twitter.com/U8i3RwI2sK

— Flat2VR Studios Gamescom (@Flat2VRStudios) August 1, 2024

Flat2VR Studios co-founder Elliot Tate reveals that only 30 of around 4.000 applicants were chosen for the accelerator, putting the studio in the company of Speedrun veterans such as Oculus, Gym Class VR, and Sandbox VR.

Earlier this year, VR publishing and marketing firm Impact Reality founded Flat2VR Studios with the aim of engaging leading developers from the VR modding scene to create officially licensed VR adaptations of popular flatscreen games.

While traditionally the work of hobbyists and distributed modding groups, Flat2VR Studios works directly with developers to create official VR versions of their titles. Among their ranks the studio counts VR porting veterans ‘Cabalistic’ and ‘Raicuparta’, renowned for their VR adaptations of games like Half-Life 2 and Outer Wilds respectively.

The studio is currently working on an official VR port of a still undisclosed game, which is slated to release in late 2024 or early 2025 on major VR platforms. We’re looking forward to learning more at the VR Games Showcase on August 15th to learn more.

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Microsoft and Sony Join Other Industry Giants in Support of OpenUSD Standard

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

Now two more heavyweights, Microsoft and Sony, have joined the Alliance for OpenUSD in support of Universal Scene Description (USD) as the future of authoring and packaging complex 3D content. The idea is to have a single file format that contains geometry, lighting, animations and more—which can be portably used between 3D authoring tools like Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, Substance Painter, and collaborative workflows.

In addition to Apple, Microsoft and Sony join other members of the group with significant ties to the XR industry, like Meta and Epic Games.

For Apple’s part, the company sees USD as an important building stone for the XR space.

“OpenUSD will help accelerate the next generation of AR experiences, from artistic creation to content delivery, and produce an ever-widening array of spatial computing applications,” said Apple’s VP of the Vision Products Group at the time the Alliance for OpenUSD was announced. “Apple has been an active contributor to the development of USD, and it is an essential technology for the groundbreaking visionOS platform, as well as the new Reality Composer Pro developer tool. We look forward to fostering its growth into a broadly adopted standard.”

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Global Hackathon for Vision Pro Development, Vision Hack, Kicks Off Next Month

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

Guest Article by Cosmo Scharf

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

Imagine building the first iPhone apps in 2008. That’s where we are with visionOS today. Vision Hack is your launchpad into the new frontier of spatial computing.

Over the past decade, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the virtual reality industry evolve from a niche technology to a transformative medium. From the early days of clunky prototypes to the sleek, powerful devices we have today, the journey has been nothing short of extraordinary. Now, with the introduction of Apple Vision Pro, we’re standing at the threshold of a new era.

As one of the organizers of Vision Hack, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of the first global visionOS hackathon. Scheduled for September 13–15th, this event represents a significant milestone in our industry’s progression. It’s an opportunity to explore and shape the future of spatial computing as Apple Vision Pro continues its global rollout.

Vision Hack is designed to be a truly immersive experience. We’re encouraging teams to communicate in Vision Pro itself using spatial Personas, in addition to Discord. This approach not only showcases the device’s capabilities but also provides participants with authentic, hands-on experience in visionOS development.

Our three-day program caters to both seasoned spatial computing developers and newcomers:

• Day 1: Workshops and team formation
• Day 2: Intensive development with mentorship from industry experts
• Day 3: Development, project presentations, and awards

To foster collaboration while ensuring focused development, we’ve capped team sizes at 5 people each. Understanding the global nature of our community, we’re organizing local meetups in various cities so developers can connect in person.

While we highly recommend access to a Vision Pro for the full experience, it’s not a strict requirement for participation. However, developers will need a Mac with an Apple chip to run the visionOS simulator. This setup will enable meaningful participation even without the physical device.

The organizing team brings extensive experience from major VR expos (VRLA), Metaverse hackathons, and XR startups.

As spatial computing evolves, we believe early developer engagement is crucial in building a robust ecosystem. Vision Hack aims to play a key role in nurturing the visionOS developer community, potentially influencing the trajectory of spatial computing applications.

For developers keen on exploring visionOS, Vision Hack offers a unique opportunity to dive into this emerging platform. There’s a $25 registration fee, which helps us cover some of the event costs and ensures committed participation.

For companies interested in being at the forefront of spatial computing development, we offer various sponsorship opportunities. These partnerships not only support the event but also provide sponsors with direct access to a pool of talented developers working on cutting-edge spatial computing applications.

More details, registration information, and sponsorship opportunities can be found at visionoshackathon.com. We’re excited to see the innovative projects and ideas that will emerge from this event, and we look forward to welcoming you to the next chapter of spatial computing development.

The post Global Hackathon for Vision Pro Development, Vision Hack, Kicks Off Next Month appeared first on Road to VR.

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Indie VR Gem ‘COMPOUND’ Releases on PSVR 2 This Month

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

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

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

Originally created by one-man indie developer Bevan “NotDead” McKechnie, Compound has celebrated its fair share of success since it initially launched in early access on SteamVR headsets in 2018, later arriving on Quest headsets in 2022.

At the time of this writing, Compound sits at the 6th best-rated VR game according to Steam and the 9th best-rated according to Steam250. On Quest, it sports a nearly five-star user rating.

If you want to know more about Compound, check out our full review of the SteamVR version. In it, we highlighted Compound’s overt love for the classics while taking on the single-player shooter genre with its own pixel art flair. Its focus on slowing down the action by making default gun handling a very deliberate experience felt clever, making the drip of progressive weapon unlocks really feel well-earned. We liked it so much, we gave it a resounding [9/10].

While you wait for the big day, you can also wishlist Compound on PSVR 2 here ahead of its August 13th release.

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