Verge emigrant Cameron Faulkner has a fitting paean to Half-Life: Alyx, on its fifth anniversary still one of VR’s best games:
“It was a huge gamble to release the long-awaited prequel to one of the most influential games in virtual reality, requiring hardware that very few had then, and still very few have today. To that end, every developer making VR games is knowingly making a huge gamble that may not pan out in their favor.”
If The Weeknd wasn’t enough to convince you to pick up Apple’s $3,499 headset (or at least stop by an Apple Store to try one out), now the company will offer a 25-minute virtual trip to the Mexico City finale of Metallica’s M72 World Tour, which will also be available as an EP on Apple Music.
Filmed on 14 cameras in “ultra-high-resolution 180-degree video and Spatial Audio to give viewers unprecedented access to James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, and Robert Trujillo,” it will be available as an extended preview in Apple Store demos beginning Friday.
Vision Pro owners should see the app if they install the visionOS 2.4 developer beta today. Last month, Apple described Spatial Gallery as containing a curated selection of spatial videos, photos, and panoramas, including things like behind-the-scenes clips from Apple TV Plus shows like Severance and Shrinking.
iOS 18.4’s second developer beta, which is also out now, adds the iOS Apple Vision Pro app, which lets you browse and remotely install Vision Pro apps.
Niantic’s ambitious 3D scanning tool Scaniverse is now available as a free app for the Meta Quest 3. Previously you could use the service — which features more than 50,000 real-world 3D scenes, according to Niantic — in VR via a browser, but the app should make the process a little more streamlined.
Details are slim, but UploadVR reports it’s being developed by Korean studio Pixelity Inc, and is expected to release next year as the first in a trilogy based on the original 1995 anime series. Platform support hasn’t yet been confirmed.
While Neon Genesis Evangelion has been turned into XR experiences before for theme park attractions, it’s not a franchise that’s had many videogame adaptations of late.
The company is launching a $50 million fund and early access to a desktop editor for Horizon Worlds, its 3D social platform for mobile and VR.
“Each month, we’ll pay out bonuses from the Creator Fund to the makers of fun and engaging mobile and [mixed reality] worlds,” Meta says. “Bonuses will be tied to worlds’ contributions to the overall ecosystem across time spent, retention, and in-world purchases.”
[developers.meta.com]
Yes, it does look a lot like Apple’s Vision Pro, but that is actually Project Moohan, the Samsung / Google project we tried out last month and saw again recently at Samsung Unpacked.
In this YouTube video, Marques Brownlee shows some views you may not have seen yet of the hardware and what the Android UI looks like for the wearer.
The $250 million deal — announced after Samsung’s extended reality headset made its public debut yesterday — includes parts of HTC’s XR headsets and glasses unit, with some of the VIVE engineering team relocating to Google.
Google had previously purchased most of HTC’s smartphone business for $1.1 billion in 2017. HTC Vice President Lu Chia-te says the XR deal isn’t “a buyout nor an exclusive license.”
TikTok’s native visionOS app still works, at least for me, after the company cut off access for millions of US users of its smartphone app.
Gaussian splatting, a new way of capturing 3D content, is taking the AR / VR industry by storm — and could one day allow anyone to create photorealistic 3D worlds.
8
Verge Score
The Quest 3S has its flaws, but it’s a great first VR headset.
Glasses may be more promising as the head-worn computers of the future — and there’s a chance Apple might be looking in that direction.
Both @evleaks and @sondesix are saying that’s the date for Samsung’s next Unpacked event, with the former sharing a leaked Italian marketing image as confirmation. In addition to the company’s much leaked Galaxy S25 series of phones we’re expecting to hear more about Samsung’s “Project Moohan“ XR headset we recently previewed.
It’s called Project Moohan — and if you’re wondering what the heck is a moohan, it means infinity in Korean. Because there are “infinite possibilities” in XR.
Naming aside, I demoed the headset earlier this week and got a sneak peek at Android XR, Google’s new OS for mixed-reality devices. It’s for devs only right now, but a consumer launch is planned for 2025.
Google’s prototype smart glasses made me feel like Tony Stark. Can Android XR make it happen outside of a demo?
Meta and Lightstorm Vision’s partnership will help “scale the creation of world-class 3D entertainment experiences spanning live sports and concerts, feature films, and TV series featuring big-name IP on Meta Quest — which will be Lightstorm Vision’s exclusive MR hardware platform,” according to a Meta blog post. Cameron says it’s a multi-year partnership.
