Apple has finally dropped the ultrawide virtual display for Vision Pro in beta, giving the existing virtual display feature the ability to stretch to wide and ultrawide widths for extra screen real-estate. Out of the box it’s impressive, but default MacOS window management makes it kind of a pain to use. But with the right third-party window manager, it’s even better than I hoped for.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know just how useful the new ultrawide feature would be. I’ve used Vision Pro’s virtual desktop feature many times before. It’s a great way to get some extra screen real-estate out of my MacBook Air (M2). But it was limited in that it could only really act like a single, large 16:9 monitor.

My productivity workhorse is my desktop PC on which I’ve used two side-by-side monitors for years. For a power-user like me, having the extra width to have multiple things on screen at once is great; constantly minimizing and maximizing apps is a pain. I also combine my dual monitors with additional virtual workspaces, meaning I can group applications together on a specific workspace for a specific task.

I’ve yet to make the leap to a single ultrawide monitor over dual monitors. They’re pretty damn expensive and physically take up a lot of space.

But with a little software update, Apple just gave me an ultrawide monitor that I can take with me wherever I take my Vision Pro. The ultrawide setting essentially gives you two 16:9 monitors side-by-side, but without the seam in the middle if you were using dual monitors.

So not only is my little MacBook Air now able to replicate all the screen real estate that I have with the big setup that takes up my whole office desk, it also has the benefit of no seam in the middle of the monitors. I didn’t fully appreciate how much this would increase the flexibility I have with setting up my workspaces. Now it’s easy to span an app seamlessly in the ‘middle’ of the workspace, while less important apps can be on the flanks. It’s great! But…

MacOS window management is simply not ready to handle ultrawide monitors. Even though Apple just added improved window tiling in the latest version of MacOS, it really isn’t very helpful on an ultrawide monitor.

At best you can ask the system to put an app into any quarter of the monitor, but this results in super-wide apps that aren’t useful in that particular shape. You can make a window go to just one half of the screen, but that gives you a maximum of only two apps on the screen at once.

Without window management that’s actually made for ultrawide monitors, you’re stuck doing a lot of resizing of windows to get them into useful arrangements to really take advantage of all the space you have. Or you do the seemingly insane thing Apple always shows in their marketing: just use randomly sized windows that overlap with other windows while also wasting a bunch of screen space. I mean look, this is literally what they showed when promoting this feature:

Being able to quickly get apps into useful size and position is essential to really benefiting from an ultrawide monitor. The more time it takes to size and position apps, the less often you’re going to actually use the extra space to your benefit.

Luckily there’s many third-party window managers out there for MacOS. And I would argue that having one is essential if you’re using the Vision Pro ultrawide virtual display.

For now I’ve landed on a window manager called Rectangle. With it I can easily set up a ‘main’ app in the center 2/4 of the monitor, then stick apps in the remaining 1/4 on the left or 1/4 on the right. Or I can even stack two apps on the sides, taking up 1/8 of the monitor each.

This works great and makes me feel like I have even more room than I did when using two physical 16:9 monitors (again, the lack of gap in the middle is a surprising benefit because you can put your most important app directly in front of you).

Although Rectangle has the features that make this work well, the app itself is overcomplicated; like using a sledgehammer when all you really need is a regular hammer. There still might be a more streamlined solution out there.

There’s really no reason why MacOS itself shouldn’t have similar window-arranging capabilities that actually make sense for ultrawide monitors, especially now that Vision Pro doubles as one.

Anyway… with the window management issue taken care of, I’m finding the ultrawide virtual display feature even more useful than I expected. When combined with MacOS’s built-in Spaces feature—which allows me to slide easily between multiple ultrawide workspaces—my little MacBook Air feels like an absolute productivity powerhouse. It’s wild to me that it can run five ultrawide workspaces worth of apps and still feel nice and smooth.

For me, the ultrawide option (with some third-party help) has changed Vision Pro’s virtual display feature from something that’s nice to have here and there, into an essential capability of the headset.

Now listen, some of you who have made it this far might be thinking to yourself: “to some extent you’re just praising ultrawide monitors in general.”

You’re not wrong. But the thing is, this one fits in my headset, which means I can bring a highly productive workspace with me anywhere that I would take my laptop.

Vision Pro is still too heavy to want to use this setup all day (and it’s still more expensive than an ultrawide monitor itself!). But mark my words: once Apple has an equivalent headset that’s half the size and half the price, people are going to see huge value from this kind of work setup.

Metro Awakening brings the post-apocalyptic tunnel-dwelling franchise to VR for the first time, but is it a good fit? Read on to find out in our full review.

Metro Awakening Details:

Publisher: Vertigo Games
Available On: Quest, PC VR, PSVR 2
Reviewed On: Quest 3
Release Date: November 7th, 2024
Price: $50

Editor’s note: all clips in this review are from the Quest 3 version of the game. Screenshots are from the PC VR version.

Gameplay

Developer Vertigo Games did a fine job of making Metro Awakening feel like a Metro game, but in VR. Although not nearly as broad in scope as the most recent title in the franchise, Metro Exodus (2019), it captures many of the series’ staples: a gritty, post-apocalyptic setting, interesting improvised weaponry, and a gameplay loop based around the pillars of scavenging, sneaking, and shooting.

The game’s weapons and shooting mechanics are its strengths. You start with a fairly basic pistol and AK-47. I particularly like that enemies stagger visibly when taking shots, making the impact of shooting feel much better than the more often seen bullet-sponge enemies. You’re pretty vulnerable yourself, and will find that squeezing off a few AK rounds into a bad guy and then taking cover is more effective than just standing out in the open. Gun fights feel scrappy rather than bombastic.

Later in the game you find a crossbow and a shotgun. While these weapon archetypes have been seen a hundred times before in VR, these two feel right at home among the uniquely cool makeshift weaponry the Metro series is known for.

The crossbow is a revolver with a pop-out cylinder into which you slide sharp metal rods. Cocking the crossbow requires pulling back a huge lever on top. Because of the weapon’s barebones construction, can watch exactly how the mechanism articulates to lift one of the bolts into position. And dang, it’s sure cool to see.

Like any good crossbow, this thing is quiet. And there’s an absolute satisfaction with not only dropping someone silently from the shadows, but then pulling the bolt from your victim, popping out the crossbow’s revolver-style cylinder, and sliding it right back in for the next shot. Retrievable ammo weapons in games always have that extra layer of fun, but there’s something especially unique about doing this in VR when it’s your own hands removing and reloading the bolts.

The next weapon, the shotgun, is for when you’re ready to go loud. Surprisingly, this one isn’t pump action, but it has a unique design all its own that makes it a standout. And you may know that I have a pretty high bar for what constitutes a great feeling shotgun in VR.

The shotgun in Metro Awakening is actually a revolver like the crossbow. But, interestingly, it has an exposed cylinder, which means you can pop shells into any open slot before pulling the charging handle to load a round. Again, the skeletal, makeshift construction of the weapon means you can really see how it operates, which is just extra cool in VR because you can inspect and articulate your gun however you want (rather than being stuck looking at canned animations).

The game’s final weapon is the blowdart gun, and while I love the idea of physically raising it to your mouth to fire, it doesn’t feel like it fits well with the rest of the game’s weapons. Not only does it feel like an inferior version of the crossbow, it’s just less fun and less satisfying to use.

All things considered, the game’s weapons have a great feel—especially the crossbow and shotgun—even if there are only four primary weapons to be found overall.

Scavenging also feels good. The detailed environments generally give me enough to look at to enjoy peeking around corners and down hallways to see if I can spot some extra supplies.

Scavenging goes hand-in-hand with being prepared, which is a must in Metro Awakening. If you jump into a fight without making sure your mags are loaded, knowing which weapons are equipped, and being able to operate your weapons confidently under pressure, you’ll get overwhelmed and overrun quickly.

I enjoyed the feeling of the scavenging and emphasis on preparedness. I found myself regularly picking magazines off of dispatched weapons to steal the ammo, making sure my health syringe was prepared, and pre-selecting my shoulder-slung weapon depending upon which enemies I expected to encounter.

Rather than just finding extra supplies, some kind of ‘currency’ (ie: ‘weapon parts’) that could be applied to upgrade your weapons would have made for a more exciting scavenging reward, and would have fit well into Metro gameplay tropes.

Though there were ample opportunities to fight stealthily instead of going in guns-ablazin’, I didn’t find the stealth opportunities particularly exciting. Knocking people out with a punch to the head doesn’t feel very satisfying, and it seemed to backfire in many cases, with the bad guy just being confused for a moment before blasting.

Enemy AI was good at least, which keeps combat interesting. The enemies frequently communicate and move around the environment, giving them a sense of intelligence. Some enemies, like the rat mutants, can be a bit annoying because they sometimes come up behind you with little time to react to their presence.

But I do appreciate their behaviors like running away after taking some initial damage and peering around corners before popping out for a bite.

The game has a literal arachnophobia warning at the start, and for good reason. There are several sequences with spider enemies, including times where spiders are literally crawling on your head. I appreciate the creepiness of these moments, but found the actual combat with these enemies more annoying than not. Spiders can leap onto your face or hand, and it isn’t exactly clear what the player is supposed to do about it. I imagine a lot of people will end up smacking their headset once or twice while trying to pull the spider off.

Another annoying enemy were the game’s frequent ‘shadow’ figures which made for some boring and poorly telegraphed gameplay. The figures, which blend quite well into the game’s dark tunnels, will kill you if you stand near them for a few seconds. But given they’re hard to see, and that taking damage from them makes your screen even darker, it’s sometimes hard to tell when you’re even being hurt by them. Oh and there’s friendly shadows that look almost the same, but don’t do damage to you….

Even after beating the game, I’m still kind of unsure exactly what was intended with this ‘shadow figure’ gameplay. Waiting for an NPC to move out of the way so you can get to where you’re going just isn’t fun. Maybe there was some way to dispel them? Shooting certainly didn’t do the trick.

While Metro Awakening has strong VR fundamentals and a compelling first half, the latter half of the game unfortunately lacks the variety for a strong finish. From a story that’s nebulous and difficult to care about, to repeating gameplay sequences that aren’t particularly fun on your fourth or fifth go, to just a lot of needless walking, it felt like a great first half of the game gave way to a padded and uninspired second half.

It took me 7.5 hours to finish the game on medium difficulty, but I would have been happy if they had cut out some of the repetitive gameplay segments for a tighter and overall more fun experience.

Immersion

Metro Awakening isn’t high up there in environmental interactivity, but it does have a great sense of atmosphere. Environments are detailed, decrepit, and feel authentic in the way that much of the world looks like it’s been cobbled together from the remnants of a fallen society.

Although the game looks significantly better in its PC and PSVR 2 version (thanks to better textures, models, and much better lighting), I was generally impressed with the visual presentation on Quest 3. Although not as well lit or textured, environments felt equally dense on Quest 3, without any obvious cases of assets being carelessly crushed to meet the performance budget. The game relies heavily on Meta’s Application Spacewarp tech to run as well as it does on the standalone headset—bringing with it some artifacts—but generally I think it’s a good trade for how the game looks on Quest 3. I haven’t had a chance to test Metro Awakening on Quest 2 yet, so the verdict is still out on that.

For better or for worse, the inherent claustrophobia of being stuck in an abandoned metro really lands in a VR headset. Walking through the game’s labyrinthine tunnels and hallways makes you feel like there’s nowhere to run and that every corner could be hiding a threat. Consistently good ambient sound design helps to sell the game’s well measured tension. Though I didn’t appreciate how the game’s music would frequently kick in and spoil an upcoming encounter that would have otherwise been surprising.

I personally enjoyed getting immersed in this tense atmosphere, but some might find it oppressive.

Although the game’s holster system generally works quite well, the complete lack of a body or any indicators as to the location of the inventory volumes are felt like a miss for a VR game of this scope in 2024. All you see is floating hands… it’s up to you to remember where all the invisible inventory locations are. In the midst of combat, for instance, if you can’t remember exactly how to pull out your weapon backpack (reach over your left shoulder with your right hand), you’re going to be scrambling.

Although the affordances for the inventory system aren’t great, I did appreciate the usability. I haven’t seen a VR game use the gesture of ‘reach with your right hand over the opposite shoulder’ before, but it seemed like the game did a great job of detecting this consistently with few false positives.

I also liked the diegetic inventory design. Basically you have two backpacks: one for guns and one for other equipment like grenades, gas mask, and health vials. In both cases, items are generally represented on your backpacks at full size and their actual count, rather than shrinking unrealistically and ‘stacking’ into infinite piles. So if you have three grenades, you’ll see three full-sized grenades on your backpack. And you can’t fit any more, because there’s only enough room for three.

This makes for an immersive way to not only communicate to the player how many supplies they have, but also an immersive way for players to actually retrieve the items. I also like that the game will give the player key items contextually from the chest inventory slot. If you’re holding a pistol and reach to your chest, you’ll pull out a pistol magazine. If you’re holding the health syringe and reach to your chest, you’ll pull out a fresh health vial. It feels very natural in practice and minimizes the cognitive load of frequent actions like reloading—a smart design that also worked great in Half-Life: Alyx (2020).

As a general framework for VR game inventory, this one has legs.

While the game’s atmosphere is compelling, I did find myself wishing there was more environmental interactivity. This is one of those games where some objects are interactive and some just… aren’t, with little rhyme or reason between what you can pick up and what you can’t. Even if there wasn’t any extra gameplay associated with making more of the world’s objects interactive, there’s so much detail visually in the world that it would add to the immersion to know that I could actually grab and look at all the things scattered about.

Comfort

Metro Awakening offers a full set of modern VR comfort options, including teleport movement. However, its particular choice of setting—cramped environments and quite a few steep stairs—is going to be less comfortable to those sensitive to motion discomfort than an equivalent game with more open environments and less frequent stair motion.

There are several moments in the game where the horizon is shifted significantly. For most, these are brief enough to not be problematic, but such moments can be triggering for certain people (and generally speaking, they could have been executed without altering the horizon).

Metro Awakening’ Comfort Settings – November 7th, 2024
Turning
Artificial turning
Snap-turn
Quick-turn
Smooth-turn
Movement
Artificial movement
Teleport-move
Dash-move
Smooth-move
Blinders
Head-based
Controller-based
Swappable movement hand
Posture
Standing mode
Seated mode
Artificial crouch
Real crouch
Accessibility
Subtitles
Languages	English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish (Latin America), Czech, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian
Dialogue audio
Languages	English
Adjustable difficulty
Two hands required
Real crouch required
Hearing required
Adjustable player height

Nature Relaxation

Ocean Rift (Quest, PC VR) – $10

Ocean Rift is like an aquarium where you get to swim around with the fish. You’ll get to see lovingly animated sea creatures up close and you might even learn a thing or two with more than 40 narrated points of interest to find. And if you’re on Quest 3, Ocean Rift has a mixed reality mode that lets you turn your own room into an aquarium.

Real VR Fishing (Quest) – $20

You can probably guess what this one is about… but you might not expect that the app has some rather beautiful environments. So yes, you’ll be fishing and you can take it as fast or as slow as you’d like. Consider putting on some music or even a podcast while you relax and wait for the big one. Real VR Fishing also supports multiplayer so you can fish with friends.

Google Earth VR (PC VR) – Free

Google Earth VR is exactly what it sounds like… its Google Earth, but in VR. Beyond being able to explore essentially the entire globe as if you were a giant towering over it, the app can also be a wonderful way to relax. Find yourself a pretty place (there’s some great ones in the ‘Featured’ section inside the app), bring yourself down to ground level, and simply sit as a giant and take in the scene around you. You can even set the mood by adjusting the time of day. It can also be magical to just ‘wander’ starting from a familiar place and see where you wind up. Considering both the quality of the experience and the fact that its free, this one is an absolute must-try.

EarthQuest (Quest) – $10

EarthQuest aims to not only bring the Google Earth VR experience to Quest, but modernize it too. EarthQuest adds multiplayer so you can explore the globe with friends as well as natural language input allowing you to ask ChatGPT to tell you more about the things you find.

Musical Relaxation

Tetris Effect: Connected (Quest, PC VR, PSVR 2) – $30, $40

Tetris Effect is classic Tetris gameplay wrapped in an audio-visual experience which uniquely accompanies each of the game’s levels. As you maneuver the blocks you’ll hear sounds that fit into the beat. Don’t lose yourself too much in the sights and sounds though as some of the levels will take skill and practice to complete, even on ‘Normal’ difficulty. A post-launch update to the game has brought cross-platform multiplayer to Tetris Effect so you can vibe with friends no matter if they’re playing in VR or on a flat screen.

Sheaf – Together EP (SteamVR) – Free

Ever wish you could cruise down an endless highway, watching as the trees, buildings, and city streets pass you by while a synthwave soundtrack perfectly fits the vibe? Artist and musician Sheaf has created just that—a short VR experience which is hand-crafted to fit a three track synthwave album. For the great price of free, this one is a no-brainer.

Creation & Puzzling

Squingle Mini (Quest, $1) & Squingle (PC VR, $15)

Squingle is one of those games that you can look at and still not entirely understand what you’re actually seeing. But once you get your hands on the game all becomes clear: it’s a clever, trippy, and fun puzzle game that plays to VR’s spatial strengths. To put it simply, the goal of Squingle is to guide a pair of spinning balls through a pipe. Sounds easy enough, right? Well like any good puzzle game, Squingle starts simply enough but introduces more difficult concepts as you go—like a button that reverses the spin of the balls or one that changes the axis of the spin. And the pipe? It’s actually a bit more like a cosmic bowel that undulates with twists, turns, and parallel tunnels.

Read Our Hands-on

Puzzling Places (Quest, PSVR 2*) – $15, $20 (*free demo)

Puzzling Places is a series of 3D puzzles made out of 3D scans of real-life places. Going from flat jigsaw puzzles to 3D puzzles will stretch your brain in satisfying new ways as you use all your 2D jigsaw strategies (like sorting by color, edges, and the like) while leaning into your spatial reasoning sense to find the right connections between pieces. Even more satisfying—when you’re done you have a tiny 3D diorama to explore! Since launch, Puzzling Places has been updated with a multiplayer mode so you can relax and puzzle with friends, and mixed reality mode on Quest 3 so you can solve puzzles right in your room.

*Free Puzzling Places demo on PSVR 2

Vermillion (Quest, PC VR) – $20

Vermillion is a free-form painting app designed to replicate the oil medium. You can do everything from basic paint-by-number to completely freestyle painting with color mixing and the use of various brushes to achieve different effects. With a multiplayer mode up to four players total can paint together. You can also paint in your own space thanks to mixed reality on Quest 3, or even do co-located painting with a friend so you’re both painting in the same physical room.

Gadgeteer (Quest, PC VR) – $15

Have you ever wished you had a whole room and a box full of tracks, balls, and dominos to build the ultimate Rube Goldberg machine? You’re in luck. Gadgeteer will let you finally imagine your childhood dream of filling an entire room with a crazy chain-reaction-machine without the cat knocking everything over. Beyond being able to build whatever you want in ‘Sandbox Mode’, Gadgeteer is a full fledged puzzle game with 60 puzzles to complete and a pleasant soundtrack to boot.

Read Our Review

Cubism (Quest, PC VR) – $10

Cubism is a casual VR puzzle that plays a bit like a 3D version of Tetris. Its sleek, casual design makes it great for relaxing seated play. But fear not, while the puzzle concept is simple, Cubism will have you scratching your head in short order as difficulty increases across 60 stages. The bright, void-like environment makes it easy to forget about the woes of the real world as you focus on finding the right fit for the pieces before you to the backdrop of a beautiful piano soundtrack. Thanks to hand-tracking support, you can even play without needing to pick up your controllers. A post-launch update has added a mixed reality mode on Quest 3 so you can solve puzzles from the comfort of your own room.

Vrkshop (PC VR) – $20

Vrkshop describes itself as a “VR woodworking game” and aims to recreate a hands-on woodshop where you can measure, mark, cut, nail, and much more. With a realistic wood-cutting system, the app challenges you to use the tools at your disposal to create furniture and other objects with no explicit instructions.

Color Space (Quest) – $10

Color Space is a virtual reality coloring book where you get to bring life to a full 3D scene rather than just a flat page. Step into one of 26 environments and start adding color as you see fit. As you color the scene, it will start to come alive with animated elements and ambient sounds.

Musical Creation

Electronauts (Quest, PC VR) – $20

Electronauts is like a VR DJ station with training wheels. Though you can take the training wheels off if you’re especially talented, the training wheels are actually part of the appeal; Electronauts does an incredible job of letting you express your inner musical creativity even if you don’t have instrumental talent. The game serves up some 80 tracks, each which function as a custom sound-kit with unique instruments, backing tracks, and more. And as a huge bonus, PC VR version of the game are multiplayer, meaning you can jam out with a friend. The track list is heavy on the EDM side (though there are some chill songs to be found) so if that’s not your cup of tea you might want to look elsewhere.

Read Our Review

Drops: Rhythm Garden (PC VR) – $7

Drops is a musically focused experience where shapes that you place make different sounds when struck with falling balls. With an endless flow of balls, you can construct a cacophony of sounds on the fly, adding new shapes and creating new paths as you go. Think of it like a Rube Goldberg machine, but for making minimal, meditative music.

Continue on Page 2: Meditation, Reflection, Mindfulness, and Exploration »

Meta continues its reign as the XR industry’s dominant player, with its most recent moves signaling a shift into a new era for the company—and thus the industry at large. This year saw the introduction of the Meta Orion AR glasses prototype and the Quest 3S headset—two pieces of hardware that are not only crucial to Meta’s future but will be pivotal in shaping the industry’s direction as a whole.

Meta Orion AR Glasses Are a Flag in the Ground

The News

One of Meta’s most significant announcements this year was the unveiling of the Meta Orion AR glasses prototype. Meta has long been signaling its ambitions in the AR space, and the Meta Orion prototype represents a major step toward that vision. With a compact form-factor and an impressive 70-degree field of view, Meta is aiming to push the boundaries of what AR hardware can achieve.

Why It Matters

Meta’s Orion AR glasses stand as a benchmark for the state-of-the-art in AR glasses today. Unlike similarly sized AR devices—which suffer from a narrow field-of-view that make content appear constrained—Meta Orion’s 70-degree FoV is just scraping the boundary of ‘wide enough to be useful’. Achieving a compact form-factor and a wide field-of-view in the same package is crucial for making AR feel more seamless and practical in daily use.

It will be years yet before Meta ships something like Orion, but it’s an intentional ‘flag in the ground’ moment for the company.

Quest 3S Speeds the Transition Away from Quest 2

The News

Meta launched Quest 3S, a new addition to the Quest lineup that really should have launched alongside Quest 3 in the first place. Positioned as a more budget-friendly alternative to the flagship Quest 3, the Quest 3S comes with a lower price point but still offers significant improvements in performance and mixed reality capabilities compared to older devices like the Quest 2.

Why It Matters

In its marketing, Meta has been hyping mixed reality for years at this point. But the large population of Quest 2 headsets (which really aren’t great for MR) have undercut the company’s push into MR.

The Quest 3S is finally a new headset from Meta that’s comparable to what Quest 2 was in terms of affordability, while including reasonably good MR capabilities too.

With the Quest 2 becoming increasingly outdated, users and developers alike have been waiting for hardware that can keep up with more demanding VR experiences. The Quest 3S hits the sweet spot for many casual users, offering a balance between affordability and performance.

And finally Meta has a flagship game for its Quest 3 & Quest 3S hardware. Batman: Arkham Shadow (which is exclusive to these newer headsets), is just the thing to get VR gamers that are hanging on to Quest 2 to make the leap to newer hardware.

Ironically, the flagship game for these new “mixed reality” headsets (as Meta now usually refers to them) is a pure VR game. Maybe with the next headset launch the company can properly time a flagship MR app with its launch.

More Immersive and Useful Mixed Reality Apps

The News

This year Meta revealed that it will now grant developers access to camera data for creating mixed reality (MR) content. This change opens up new possibilities for how MR experiences are built and how users can interact with their environments through these experiences.

Why It Matters

For years Meta has held out on giving developers direct access to the headset’s cameras. That made it harder for developers to build interesting MR applications that properly integrate and interact with the world around the user.

In addition to Quest 3S helping to grow the population of Quest headsets with decent MR capabilities, this change also makes building MR applications a more attractive proposition for developers.

Ostensibly Meta had originally blocked direct camera access to preserve user privacy and prevent potential abuse by bad actors. Reversing that decision is risky; another privacy scandal is the last thing Meta wants its headsets to be known for.

New Tools for Developers to Bring ‘Spatial Computing’ to Quest

The News

This year Meta also introduced new tools to make it easier for developers to port both flat-screen and spatial computing applications to Quest devices. These tools are designed to streamline the development process, enabling developers to create more immersive XR content without requiring a steep learning curve.

Why It Matters

Meta’s headsets are great for gaming, but it wants them to be great at ‘spatial computing’ too. But getting developers to bring traditional apps to its platform has been a major hurdle for the company.

One of the biggest challenges traditional app developers face is moving from a flat screen modality to something that inherently exists in 3D. This generally requires a completely different set of tools that’s much more in the realm of game development than app development.

Meta’s new tools aim to simplify this process, allowing developers who are familiar with building flat-screen applications to bring their apps to the Horizon platform with minimal friction. This opens up the Quest platform to a wider range of applications, from 2D games and productivity tools to more immersive spatial experiences.

But Meta still faces an uphill battle with getting a critical mass of everyday apps onto its headset. The company has openly said it would love to bring the Play store (and all of its apps) to the headset, but it seems Google isn’t down to play ball. That’s likely because it’s busy working on its own XR strategy and doesn’t want to give Meta an upper hand.

New Headsets on the Horizon

The News

In a surprising move this year, Meta announced that it was planning to open up the Horizon OS to select partners who will make their own headsets that run the operating system.

Why it Matters

While Meta has made solid general-purpose headsets, the company believes the time is right for more specialized options. But rather than build those options itself, the company is enlisting help from companies that are already familiar with building hardware for someone else’s software.

While this could bring a wider range of headsets to market which retain access to Meta’s leading platform of content, the move shares a striking resemblance to Microsoft’s ill-fated VR play which enlisted major computer OEMs to build a round of VR headsets and then quickly lose interest.

Because Meta owns the Horizon platform, and subsidizes the cost of its own headsets, it’s difficult to understand how announced partners like Asus and Lenovo could hope to build a headset that’s meaningfully better than what Meta is already offering and compete with Meta on price. This has clearly been a struggle for HTC Vive which doesn’t have the money to burn to subsidize its hardware like Meta.

Meta may have already run into trouble with its announced partner LG, which was set to collaborate with Meta on a Horizon OS headset, but reportedly had second thoughts just weeks later.

– – — – –

Meta’s ability to burn billions in its pursuit of owning the XR space (or the “next computing platform” as Zuckerberg often calls it) means the company is the one primarily steering the ship. The moves Meta made this year are the beginning of a new era for the company (while most of the industry remains in tow).

While Apple’s entry into the space has already had notable influence on Meta’s XR trajectory, it won’t be until both companies are competing in the same price-class (and for the same users) that Meta will have to truly fight to maintain control of XR’s near-term future.

Batman: Arkham Shadow stays true to the series formula, but did developer Camouflaj manage to make the game feel truly at home in VR? Read our full review to find out.

Batman: Arkham Shadow Details:

Publisher: Oculus Studios
Developer: Camouflaj
Available On: Meta Horizon (exclusive to Quest 3 & Quest 3S)
Reviewed On: Quest 3
Release Date: October 21st, 2024
Price: $50

Gameplay

Batman: Arkham Shadow is a lot like Half-Life: Alyx. No, not in the gameplay. Or the story. Or the graphics.

It’s a lot like Half-Life: Alyx in the way that the creators managed to completely reimagine how the game actually works, without losing the essence of the series.

For some context: I’m not the world’s biggest ‘Batman’ fan. I’d say I’m a casual enjoyer. I liked the Christopher Nolan trilogy and I enjoyed the Arkham games (though I’ve only played two of the four main line titles). I’ve never read any of the comics, nor do I own a single piece of Batman-related paraphernalia.

Even so, just like the Arkham games I played before it, Batman: Arkham Shadow is a fun game.

And it feels like an Arkham game. The gameplay primarily falls into the buckets of exploration, light puzzling, and combat, and all are done pretty successfully. Let’s start with exploration and puzzling.

Although you don’t have a whole city to roam like in Arkham City, the game does a reasonably good job of having expansive and connected spaces that feel convincingly large. It’s much closer to Arkham Asylum in that sense; for the most part you’re roaming a ‘facility’ sized space.

Aside from just walking around the ground, you’ll also use your grapnel gun which you can use to quickly ascend to balconies and other high places that are great for staying out of sight. Although I would have liked to see a more immersive approach to how the grapnel gun is actually initiated (simply looking at a target and press A doesn’t feel as immersive as it could), the unique way it pulls you through the air feels both fun and surprisingly comfortable.

Another important traversal tool is gliding with your cape, which also feels fun and surprisingly comfortable. As it’s initiated with an immersive gesture (grabbing your cape and pulling your arms up), it feels cool every time you do it. This is aided by the smart detail of seeing the shadow of your outstretched cape cast onto the ground below where you’re flying.

As you’re moving through the game world, there’s at least five different kinds of collectibles to find, most of which unlock some bits of lore. While I normally don’t care about ‘collectibles’ (or off-screen lore), I enjoyed hunting these down because each was either hidden in a clever place that was fun to find, or locked behind a little puzzle. Although the puzzles are light, they’re just the right amount of bite-sized engagement to keep you entertained on your way to primary objectives. For the ‘100%’ people out there, I think you’ll enjoy the hunt.

Part of the puzzling is just figuring out how to get from A to B. You’ll often need to search for ways around obstacles, whether they be locked doors or electrified floors. Sometimes the solution is finding another path, and sometimes it’s figuring out how to unblock the door in front of you.

There’s no major headscratchers—or highly memorable puzzles for that matter—but the game hits a perfect sweet spot of difficulty where you spend 30 seconds or less understanding the logic, and then actually solving the puzzle involves some fun itself (whether that be throwing batarangs to hit buttons, pulling levers at the right time, or using one of your other gadgets to assist the process).

Next we’ve got combat, which plays like a beat-em-up as only VR could do it. The game cleverly uses your punches as your primary means of movement during combat, turning swings into lunges that launch you toward enemies.

Arkham Shadow is about as far from a physics-driven VR melee sim as you could get. Instead the game makes significant use of instructed motion mechanics [a concept I explored in a recent episode of Inside XR Design], which asks players to make specific attacks in specific directions. While this removes a lot of freedom, it means players fight like Batman, which adds to the fantasy of the game.

It also leads to fluid and satisfying combat that allows meta-game elements to be successfully layered on top. Just like the prior Arkham games, that means different enemy types that need to be handled in different ways.

There’s the run-of-the-mill bad guy that just needs a beat down, the armored dude that needs to be dazed with your cape before eating a flurry of blows, the stun-baton wielder that you need to vault off of before the slam down, and the swat-shield holder that needs a combination of the two.

The game really nails the essence of Arkham combat, in which players fluidly tackle these different threats, weaving various gadgets and abilities into the mix to keep enemies busy while you dish out the pain.

Combat does take some getting used to, but the game does a good job of introducing mechanics and new enemies at the right pace to give the player time to improve as the things get more challenging. The game achieves a satisfying arc of combat mastery, making the player feel at first like a novice, but a beast of a brawler by the end.

As you play you’ll earn skill points which you can use to unlock skills and upgrades. The combat skill tree has quite a few new and fun moves to be unlocked, like the ability to use the grapnel hook to pull enemies toward your knuckle sandwich. Although the moves are fun, most need to be activated by not only hitting a certain combo count, but then pressing a button and doing an additional unique gesture.

It can be a lot to juggle mentally in the heat of combat, alongside the ability to use your batarang and explosive gel. I had to consult the game menu several times to remind myself which of these abilities I had and how to use them.

The game doesn’t force you to use most of these extra abilities, but they’re essential to both success in combat and a solid level of combat variety. I’m sure there will be players who forget about these abilities and pretty much just throw basic punches the whole time, which would leave the combat feeling a bit one-note.

While there’s plenty of all-out brawling, there are also enemies with guns who won’t hesitate to put you down if you’re spotted. For these situations you’ll want to stick to the shadows in what the game calls its ‘predator’ gameplay.

Anyone who has played the other Arkham games will recognize this gameplay loop (for the best reasons). You’ll use high vantage points to stay in the shadows while surveilling the landscape below you with your ‘detective mode’ vision which reveals enemies through walls and highlights useful environmental objects.

And this gameplay loop works just as well in Arkham Shadow too. If you jump in without a plan you’re almost sure to take damage, if not die outright. But if you take time to assess the situation and find the best opportunities to exploit, you’ll steadily whittle away at the group of bad guys until you’re the only one left standing.

Sticking to stealth in these situations is important. It wasn’t until later into the game that I realized I could fly down with my cape and land behind someone while remaining undetected. This allows for a stealth takedown before returning to the shadows. Up until that realization it felt like most of my actions would immediately alert all the guards in the room, causing bullets to fly my way within seconds.

Overall, the combat in Arkham Shadow feels very cohesive, and the different forms of ‘all-out brawl’ and ‘predator’ gameplay gel well together while still feeling varied.

All of the above is largely to say that the developers of Arkham Shadow really took their time to understand what an Arkham game is and what it’s supposed to feel like. It’s the latter part that’s often missed in VR. But they managed to distill the formula and then successfully reconstitute it with thoughtfully designed VR mechanics.

Batman: Arkham Shadow is a rare VR game with a campaign that feels like it has meat on the bones; it took about 10.5 hours to complete the game on medium difficulty. You could get through it faster. I took (and enjoyed) my time to find many of the collectibles along the way. Still, the game says I’ve completed only 84% of everything there is to be found, so I could still go back for some more if I was so inclined. There’s also a handful of ‘challenge’ sequences outside of the main campaign which offer some extra fun for those that want to put their combat skills to the test.

Immersion

While Batman: Arkham Shadows’ gameplay is really solid, the game also has a significant narrative element. This is the only major area where the game isn’t particularly successful, and unfortunately it cut down the immersion for me.

It’s a shame because it’s clear that a lot of time went into the narrative side of things, with solid motion capture, above average voice acting, impressive world-building, and some cleverly presented sequences that used pre-rendered immersive video playback.

The key narrative issue for me is one of pacing and direction. The narrative is largely presented in first-person moments with characters monologuing in your direction.

The way the characters are written makes them feel like caricatures, and the way the scenes are directed makes it feel like you’re watching a theater play rather than listening to a real conversation that’s right in front of you. The pace of delivery was just so painfully slow across the board that I found myself literally twiddling my thumbs (distracted by the impressive procedural finger animation tech) much of the time while characters were delivering their lines.

It doesn’t help that the story covers extremely familiar ground. Like I said, I’m not even a particularly big Batman fan, but even I have probably seen 5 different interpretations of ‘Bruce Wayne’s parents killed in a mugging outside the theater’. A 6th version isn’t really adding anything.

For what it’s worth, you can skip most of the narrative moments by holding B. But the thing is, I don’t want to skip the story. I want to know what’s going on and I want context for what’s happening—I just also want it to be engaging. I need characters that aren’t caricatures… characters I can actually care about.

While many of the narrative moments felt like they could have been played at twice the speed (and still might have been too slow), there were a few that were more successful. These were almost universally the narrative sequences that were mixed with some level of interaction—like when you’re interrogating a bad guy and punch him through a wall before lifting him up by the collar to intimidate him.

I appreciated that the game tried to make use of asking the player to hand things to characters (to create a feeling of real interactivity), but this was unfortunately undercut by both the slow pacing of these moments and the lack of any other kind of player-to-character interactivity.

Characters in the game are 100% unaware of player actions. You can clip your hand through their face while they’re talking to you, or throw a bottle at their head, but they won’t react.

Counterintuitively, when characters don’t react, it doesn’t just make the character feel less believable, it also makes the player feel less convinced that they actually exist in the world. This isn’t always an important detail, but it was notable in this game considering how often you are within arm’s reach of the game’s characters during narrative moments.

With its gesture-based combat, Arkham Shadow might not be the most embodying game [another concept I touched on in an episode of Inside XR Design], but it’s surely immersive. There’s enough to juggle mentally while laying the smackdown on a group of varied enemies that one can easily forget about the outside world. I expect to hear many real-life reports of bruised knuckles and broken TVs as a result. Make sure to wear your wrist straps folks!

The game’s visual presentation is impressive throughout. It’s clearly not modern AAA graphics, but it emulates the Arkham art style very well, and the world feels suitably detailed. There was scarcely anything in the game to overtly remind me that this is all running on a standalone VR headset (except, perhaps, the number of slow opening doors that mask much of the game’s level loading process). This is a strong example of what Quest 3 and 3S can do when backed with the right talent and funding.

While the world is detailed and there are occasionally interactive objects to play with, there’s much in the game that’s completely static. True, the gameplay doesn’t rely much on detailed object interactions, but it’s always a little jarring to find a bookshelf with one book that’s interactive, right next to a row of books that are fused together and completely static.

While the game defaults to directing users to use thumbsticks for a handful of actions (like mantling or climbing out of a grate), I appreciated that there was usually an immersive alternative as well. I found it much more natural to reach up to a ledge and pull myself up rather than hold the stick forward to automatically climb.

Comfort

For all of its movement, I was impressed with how comfortable I felt while playing Batman: Arkham Shadow for sessions stretching an hour or more. I’m not surprised—considering the magic the studio pulled with Iron Man VR’s comfort—but I am suitably impressed.

There’s a lot of thoughtful comfort design throughout. For instance, the game manages to recreate the classic Arkham ‘counter attack’ by quickly snap-turning you into the correct direction to face the off-screen enemy. And you can automatically face forward when grapelling up to a vantage point by holding the A button as you move through the air.

There seems to be some trick to how the game moves the player; a certain intentional smoothness about it. Like the way the grapnel gun pulls you up, or the way you lunge at enemies, or the way you glide through the air with your cape. It all felt more comfortable than I expected.

That’s not to say that everyone will be able to handle the game. There’s a lot of artificial locomotion, and unfortunately no teleport option to speak of. So if you’re someone who can’t tolerate much artificial movement, this one might need to be a pass.

But, as always, don’t forget Meta has a fair refund policy: you can own the game for up to 14 days and play it for up to two hours before refunding it. So don’t be scared to give it a try to find out about the comfort—you can get your money back if it isn’t for you. It’s also free for all new Quest 3 and Quest 3S purchases until April 2025.

Arkham Shadow has an above average selection of comfort and accessibility options. There’s some thoughtful inclusions like the ability to turn off ‘speed lines’ while sprinting, adjusting the color of the game’s critical combat icons, and even changing the way the game interprets your object-grabbing intent.

Batman: Arkham Shadow’ Comfort Settings – October 21st, 2024
Turning
Artificial turning
Snap-turn
Quick-turn
Smooth-turn
Movement
Artificial movement
Teleport-move
Dash-move
Smooth-move
Blinders
Head-based
Controller-based
Swappable movement hand
Posture
Standing mode
Seated mode	(not explicit)
Artificial crouch
Real crouch
Accessibility
Subtitles
Languages	English, French, Spanish (Latin America), Spanish (European), Italian, German, Japanese, Korean
Dialogue audio
Languages	English
Adjustable difficulty
Two hands required
Real crouch required
Hearing required
Adjustable player height

I was asked recently for my thoughts on Meta’s Orion AR glasses, specifically whether or not such glasses stand a chance of becoming as big as (or replacing) the smartphones in the future.

I was asked for my thoughts recently for a Lifewire article about Meta’s Orion AR glasses and the future they may or may not point at. Only a small snippet of my overall response was used, and in a way that supported the article’s (reasonably) skeptical take on the future of AR glasses. However, considering my position is that I do indeed think AR glasses are the inevitable future of the smartphone—becoming the keystone of our daily digital lives—I think it’s worth sharing my full response on the record.

Q: Everyone owning smartphones is a once-ever glitch of the market, because they are subsidized, and replaced cellphones, which everyone had. Do you think most people will actually buy AR glasses?

Q: You can’t type, the battery will never be as good as a bigger phone, and you have to wear glasses. Are [AR glasses] a dead end? Why or why not?

Q: Why is Zuckerberg and Meta so desperate for something that replaces Android and iOS phones?

Quest 3S is here and brings with it an undeniable value considering its price and capabilities. But many longstanding gripes—largely related to Meta’s Horizon OS—apply here just the same.

Quest 3S Review Summary

Quest 3S is the best value you can find in a VR headset today when considering its $300 starting price, content library, and overall capabilities. It’s an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to check out VR for the first time.

Even though Quest 2 also launched at $300, Quest 3S is an even better value because Meta’s headsets have only become more capable, while the range of games and apps has grown and improved since the launch of Quest 2. The Quest ecosystem overall has drawn the focus of the majority of VR developers, meaning most new VR games are available on the ecosystem. And Quest 3S has the same horsepower as Quest 3, meaning you’ll get to see improved graphics compared to what Quest 2 was capable of.

If you’re new to VR and want to find out what it’s all about, it’s hard to imagine recommending anything other than Quest 3S—especially because it doubles as a PC VR headset, meaning if you happen to have a high-end gaming PC you can also get access to some must-play VR games that are exclusive to PC, like Half-Life: Alyx.

If you’re a VR user who has spent a lot of time using a Quest 2, PC VR, or PSVR headset, and are looking to join the modern Quest ecosystem, we still recommend Quest 3 because its higher resolution and class-leading lenses offer a notably sharper image and slightly wider field-of-view. These improvements will be appreciated most by those who have already spent lots of time in VR.

Quest 2, Quest 3S, and Quest 3 have always been good at playing immersive games, but the underlying Horizon OS software that powers them continues to be rough around the edges as Meta has prioritized adding features rather than polish. Using the main Horizon interface for spatial computing tasks like web browsing, finding and installing apps, and adjusting the headset’s settings is almost never without small bugs, inconsistent interface behavior, confusing layouts, and visual stutters.

It might seem like an odd critique considering that Meta definitely has the most comprehensive and capable software stack of any standalone headset on the market. But just being ‘better than the rest’ doesn’t necessarily make the headset’s core software experience good enough. That’s because Quest headsets don’t just compete with other headsets; they also compete with other forms of in-home entertainment like gaming consoles, smart TVs, tablets, and smartphones, which are often significantly easier to use.

Quest 3S Detailed Review

Before we get started, if you’d like to know how Quest 2, Quest 3S, and Quest 3 specs compare for the sake of context, you can find a detailed comparison here.

Visuals

Peering through Quest 3S reminds one very much of Quest 2. That’s no surprise considering Quest 3S has the same lenses and same resolution as Quest 2.

Quest 3S’s clarity (the overall fidelity of the image through the lens) feels decidedly ‘last-gen’, largely owed to the Fresnel lenses that make the display less sharp with added glare. The lenses also have a small sweet-spot, which means the clarity from the center of the lens to the edge drops off quickly. The small sweet-spot doesn’t matter too much for most VR games. But when it comes to doing spatial computing tasks like web browsing or using a virtual desktop, it’s noticeable because you need to move your head more often rather than being able to simply peer toward something at the edges of the lens with your eyes alone.

There are some visual improvements over Quest 2 though. Because Quest 3S has the same processor and power as Quest 3, it generally renders the view in the headset at a higher resolution which improves sharpness a bit. That extra power also means games can run higher graphics settings, often meaning more detailed textures, models, and improved lighting.

Even though Quest 3S can run the same graphical settings as Quest 3, the image through Quest 3—which has both better lenses and a higher resolution—is clearly the winner.

Quest 3S has one other big visual improvement over Quest 2: its mixed reality view. Although they share the same lenses and same display, the cameras on Quest 3S—which show the outside world through the headset—are now color and significantly higher resolution. Quest 2’s cameras were very low resolution, black & white, and didn’t offer a very pleasant view of the world. Because of this, using mixed reality on Quest 2 felt more like a hack than a proper feature.

With better cameras, mixed reality feels like a real benefit on Quest 3S. The resolution of the mixed reality view is still far from what your eyes see in real life, but it’s just good enough to want to use. By default you’ll be greeted with the view of your own room when you put on the headset (rather than being whisked away to a fully virtual environment). This makes for a much more pleasant transition into and out of VR, a nicer way to do basic spatial computing activities (like web browsing and movie watching), and makes mixed reality games feel much more viable.

Overall the visuals in Quest 3S look… fine. It’s perfectly capable for the games the headset can run, but still lower sharpness than you’d want if you planned to use the headset primarily for spatial computing tasks like web browsing, movie watching, and virtual desktop. Quest 3 gets closer to being ideal for those things, but even it still falls a bit short of ideal.

Audio

Quest 3S lacks a 3.5mm jack, unlike Quest 2 and Quest 3. Luckily it shares effectively the same audio quality as Quest 3, which we find is better than Quest 2 and good enough that most people won’t feel the need to add their own headphones. Though, if you want to, you can use your own headphones via USB-C.

We’d still love to see an ‘elite audio strap’ added to Meta’s official Quest accessory lineup, which would ideally combine high-quality off-ear headphones with existing ‘elite strap’ designs.

Tracking & Controllers

When it comes to headset tracking, Meta consistently has the best inside-out tracking in its class. Aside from annoying software-related stutters, Quest 3S tracking is robust and handles low light situations well enough.

Unlike every Meta headset that has come before it, Quest 3S lacks a proximity sensor inside the headset, which means the screen doesn’t automatically turn on or off when you put on or remove the headset. It feels a little weird coming from other headsets, but it’s not a major inconvenience to just press the little standby button on the side when you pick it up.

Quest 3S uses the same Touch Plus controllers as Quest 3 which are also class-leading in terms of inside-out controller tracking. They’re compact, reasonably high-quality, have decent haptics, capacitive sensing on the thumbsticks and buttons, and excellent battery life. Overall there’s little to complain about regarding the controllers—they do their job well.

However, one downside of the Touch Plus controllers continues to be that they use replaceable batteries rather than rechargeables. Ostensibly this is a cost reducing measure, as Meta solves that problem itself with an official Quest Compact Charging Dock which includes custom rechargeable batteries that enable wireless charging when placed in the dock (the headset still needs to be plugged in). Note that Meta’s previously available Quest 3 Charging Dock also charges the Touch Plus controllers, but will not charge Quest 3S because the headset lacks special contact points on the bottom which are unique to Quest 3.

The controllers offer impressive tracking which feels equivalent to how they operate on Quest 3. While it’s possible for the controllers to lose tracking when put into blind spots for extended periods (like behind your head or back), the controllers do a good job of compensating if they’re only briefly out of view of the headset. Most VR games today also account for (or outright avoid) interactions that would put the controllers in tracking blind spots for long periods.

Hand-tracking on Quest headsets has gotten better over the years. On Quest 3S it’s a ‘nice-to-have’ feature when you want to do something quick in the headset like click a button, or want to consume media—where only simple inputs like play, pause, and seek are needed—without bothering with the controllers.

But hand-tracking on Quest 3S (and Quest 3 for that matter) can still be frustratingly inaccurate at times. The design of Horizon OS doesn’t help the matter with its poor input affordances, feedback, and targets that are often insufficiently sized given the limited accuracy. This undercuts the headset’s usability when using hand-tracking for basic spatial computing tasks.

Quest 3S improves hand-tracking in at least one meaningful way however. New IR LED lights on the front can invisibly illuminate your hands in front of the headset, improving hand-tracking in low-light scenarios. This makes hand-tracking more usable in dimly lit rooms and at night. Hand-tracking even works well in a pitch black room, which is not the case for Quest 3; this is perhaps the only notable scenario where Quest 3S outperforms Quest 3.

Ergonomics

Quest 3S is essentially the same size and weight of Quest 2 and Quest 3. Ergonomically speaking, it’s nearly identical too.

Unfortunately that means Meta has paired it with a soft strap out of the box. Everyone has a different head shape, so mileage varies, but we’ve just never found the soft straps of Quest 2, Quest 3, and now Quest 3S, particularly comfortable for long-term use.

In particular, the strap tends to graze the ears instead of going around them, which can be annoying for long sessions. Without any counterweight on the back of the strap, the headset also starts to feel front-heavy pretty quickly. This can be alleviated somewhat by being cautious about how much you tighten the rear strap (instead let the top strap do as much of the lifting as possible, with the rear strap as minimally tightened as possible while still keeping the headset on your face). This is made more challenging by the odd tightening mechanism on the soft strap which makes it difficult to make small adjustments.

As with its siblings, an improved headstrap is the very first thing we recommend to anyone thinking about getting accessories to improve their experience. A rigid strap with some counterweight on the back and a dial for tightening means significantly greater comfort.

Fortunately Meta was careful to make the Quest 3S strap attachment point largely identical to the one on Quest 3, which means the vast majority of third-party Quest 3 straps are equally compatible with Quest 3S. And that means there’s already huge variety to choose from—you can find our top Quest 3 (and now 3S) headstrap picks (and other accessories) here.

If you’re coming from Quest 2, you’ll find that the headset inherently feels a little less taxing to use simply because the improved passthrough view of Quest 3S eases the transition into and out of VR. And a new button on the bottom of the headset makes for a convenient shortcut to turn passthrough on and off. On Quest 3 you can activate the same shortcut by double-tapping on the side of the headset, but many people are unaware of the feature, so having a dedicated button is an improvement.

Continue on Page 2: Games, Apps, and Horizon OS »

Games & Apps

Although it can do more, playing fully immersive games and experiences is definitely the main use-case for Quest 3S and what it’s best at.

While there remains some older PC VR gems that the headset can’t access (unless you have a high-end gaming PC to pair it to), the vast majority of VR games today are released either exclusively on the Quest platform (called the Horizon Store), or concurrently with other platforms. That means Quest 3S has access to a large and growing library of the biggest VR games and experiences being made today.

Compared to the launch of Quest 2, the Horizon Store has only grown in both breadth and depth. You can find viral indie hits like Gorilla Tag or jump into big-named platform exclusives like Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR or Asgard’s Wrath 2.  And between a wide range of games in Early Access or built inside of Meta’s Horizon Worlds social platform, there’s a lot to explore.

Because Quest 3S shares the same performance specs as Quest 3, it can play the same games at the same graphical settings. That means it not only has access to the newest games (like the upcoming Batman: Arkham Shadow) but you can also be confident that it will be supported for as long as Quest 3.

With some exceptions, the vast majority of Quest games on the Horizon Store unfortunately don’t have the scope or polish that you might expect from games on any of the big three game consoles. So if you’re looking for polished experiences, you’ll need to do some research to sort through the huge library to find the content that scratches that itch.

We’ve got our own recommendations for the first Quest games you should consider buying, and for the best free Quest games you can find.

The Horizon Store is also home to many interesting non-game apps that span the gamut from education to travel to meditation, and much more. If you’re the creative type, you can find a number of interesting tools for creative endeavors like sculpting, painting, and animating in VR.

Horizon OS

Horizon OS is the name Meta uses for the core Quest software—the interface and features you use when not inside of an immersive app.

The company has been rapidly adding to the Horizon OS feature set. You’ll find a full-blown web browser, a virtual desktop for using your headset as a display for your Mac or Windows computer, a media player for viewing side-loaded content like photos and spatial videos, and more.

Recent changes enable free-form window management, allowing you to, say, open a web browser to pull up a YouTube video and maximize it like a huge TV, then open another browser window and pull it into your lap to browse twitter like a tablet.

On paper, Horizon OS has a lot of built-in capabilities. In reality, the OS continues to feel overtly clunky. Using it often feels like using a bolted-on smart TV interface rather than the streamlined interfaces you’d expect from a smartphone or tablet.

Issues with Horizon OS are broad, generally falling into three categories: poor design, inconsistent behavior, and bugs. It would take an entire series of articles to dig into the details, so here I’ll just say that Horizon OS continues to have poor usability. It does more today than it ever has, but cramming more features into the OS doesn’t always mean a better user experience if the features aren’t actually polished and easy to use.

This is a real shame because these issues are largely software and design based—things that aren’t constrained by the headset’s hardware. And the clunk of the user-facing software layer really diminishes the incredible things the headset is actually doing under the hood (the invisible stuff like head tracking, world tracking, passthrough, rendering games and apps with incredibly low latency, etc).

If Meta can figure out how to make real usability improvements to Horizon OS, it could greatly increase the value of Quest 3S over time. But, having seen these issues persist since Quest 2, we aren’t holding our breath.

Disclosure: Meta provided Road to VR with a Quest 3S headset.

So you’re interested in buying one of Meta’s standalone VR headsets. But Quest 3S and Quest 3 look very similar, so which one should you buy? Read on for our no-nonsense recommendation.

Let’s make this real easy:

If you’ve never owned a VR headset before (Google Cardboard and Gear VR don’t count in this case): Buy Quest 3S.

Why: Not everybody who buys a VR headset continues to use it for the long term. Many people don’t find something that keeps them coming back, and within six months their headset is sitting in a drawer somewhere. Quest 3S is the most affordable option to find out if you’re someone who will use VR for the long term. It looks a bit worse visually than Quest 3, but has the same power so it plays all the same games and will be supported for just as long.

If you’ve previously owned a PC VR, PSVR, or Quest 2 headset: Buy Quest 3

Why: If you already know you like VR and use it regularly, you’re going to appreciate the sharper image, slightly wider field-of-view, larger sweet spot, and increased storage size of Quest 3 compared to Quest 3S. Especially if you’re coming from Quest 2, Quest 3S isn’t going to look that much better because it has the same screen and same lenses, which means it isn’t going to feel like as much of an upgrade.

If you want to dig into more detail, check out our full specs comparison of Quest 2, Quest 3S, and Quest 3 here.

That’s it. That’s the whole article.

The unassuming early access Quest game I Am Cat has taken off in a matter of months, spreading virally through social media with videos of its feline antics. We reached out to the developer New Folder Games to learn more about its recipe for success.

I Am Cat, developed by New Folder Games, is a Quest game that’s found significant success despite still being in Early Access (formerly ‘App Lab’). After just a year in development and less than five months of availability in Early Access, the $15 game has amassed nearly 40,000 user reviews with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars.

That puts it far ahead—in both number of ratings and review score—of big budget releases like Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR (3.9K reviews, 4.3 score), Resident Evil 4 VR (12K reviews, 4.7 score), Asgard’s Wrath II (4.8K reviews, 4.2 score), and plenty more.

The game’s rapid growth is seemingly thanks to strong viral momentum driven by its novel and somewhat comedic role-play gameplay. You can easily find individual videos of the game with millions or tens of millions of views on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. The game is also another example of the growing trend (and apparent demand) for VR games with arm-based locomotion.

I Am Cat isn’t the studio’s only successful project. Its two other notable games, both released within months of I Am Cat, have also found reasonably strong traction and high scores.

I Am Security (also in Early Access) boasts 12K reviews and a score of 4.8 out of 5, while Titans Clinic has a respectable 5K reviews and a score of 4.8.

Having one highly successful and two reasonably successful Quest games released in the same year is a strong argument that I Am Cat’s allure is more than just a fluke—this studio has a clear insight into what a chunk of Quest users are looking for and has created a repeatable strategy for delivering it.

But it took a lot of experimentation to get there. If there’s one thing that clearly defines New Folder Games up to this point, it’s the studio’s ability to rapidly experiment. The aforementioned titles are just three of nine (yes nine) Quest games the studio has released in the last year… many in the same month:

• Never Down – Only Up (October 2023)
• Playroom (October 2023)
• King of Magic (January 2024)
• Titans Clinic (February 2024)
• Toy Master (February 2024)
• Fruit Salon (May 2024)
• Headshot Master (May 2024)
• I Am Cat (May 2024)
• I Am Security (June 2024)

Most of the games from the studio are built around fairly ‘wacky’ premises that run counter to what you might think VR gamers would be looking for. But it seems I Am Cat—the only one of the bunch that has players playing from an explicitly non-human perspective—is the one that’s resonated the most. Perhaps because players are familiar with how cats behave, but are uniquely intrigued by the opportunity to see and interact with the world through their eyes—in a comedic, slapstick kind of way, anyway.

So how did New Folder Games get here and where is it headed?

The studio tells Road to VR that New Folder Games was founded in Cyprus in 2019 and employs around 15 people, many working remotely.

“The idea for I Am Cat came from our love for pets, especially cats—each team member owns a cat. During a call, one of our team members said, ‘What if I were a cat in VR? And instead of a hand, it would be a paw’—and boom, everything came together,” the studio says.

Development on I Am Cat started in Q1 2023. Just about a year later, the game was launched in Early Access. Five months after the launch, the game has amassed more reviews than the vast majority of other Quest titles.

“We believe the key to I Am Cat’s popularity is people’s love for pets, particularly cats. Additionally, there aren’t many fun VR games, which makes it stand out,” the studio said matter-of-factly.

As for the future of the game? The studio plans to add more content ahead of its full launch at the end of 2024.

“We plan to release the full game around December 2024, with additional locations, mechanics, quests, and characters. We will continue to support the game with new content and some exciting stuff. Our vision for the 1.0 release is a highly polished game packed with rich content for players to enjoy.”

Right now I Am Cat is only available on Quest, but the studio says it plans to release the game on Steam, PSVR 2, and Vision Pro as well.

Although I Am Cat seems to be the studio’s highest priority, the subsequently launched I Am Security is also gaining traction and the studio says it’s continuing development on that game, in addition to work on a “new secret project.”

While those two titles and the unannounced project have the studio’s attention for now, New Folder Games tells Road to VR we may not have seen the last of its rapid prototyping strategy.

“Right now, almost everyone is working on the I Am Cat title. However, there’s still a chance we might split up [into groups] and release another nine titles in one year!” the studio says.

Here’s a deal that should be on your radar if you’re in the market for a PC VR headset. For the next two days Amazon Prime members can get Vive Pro 2 at its steepest discount yet.

Vive Pro 2 ‘full kit’ is currently available on Amazon for $800 (a 33% discount off its usual $1,200 price).

Or if you already have controllers and base stations, you can get the Vive Pro 2 headset by itself for $500 (a 28% discount over the usual $700 price).

Both deals are available only to Prime members during Amazon Prime Big Deal Days, currently running from October 8th through 9th.

Despite being released more than three years ago, Vive Pro 2’s resolution of 2,448 x 2,448 (6.0MP) per-eye is still greater than most contemporary headsets like Quest 3 at 2,064 × 2,208 (4.5MP) or PSVR 2 at 2,000 x 2,040 (4.1MP).

As a dedicated PC VR headset, Vive Pro 2 uses SteamVR Tracking base stations for rock solid tracking. It supports the full SteamVR content catalog and uses a tethered cable for sharp visuals without noticeable compression or worries about wireless stability or battery life.

When we reviewed Vive Pro 2 back at release there was a lot to like, but it was difficult to justify the whopping $1,400 launch price. A deal like this makes it much more interesting, especially considering its nearest direct competitor—HP’s Reverb G2—is no longer supported in the latest versions of Windows.

Granted, unless you’re dead-set on tethered PC VR headset, Quest 3 still makes a very good PC VR headset at an attractive price, but only if you have an optimal wireless setup with a hard-wired PC and a modern Wi-Fi 5 (or later) router.

Meta’s biggest reveal at last week’s Connect conference was definitely the Orion prototype AR glasses, which the company says it’s been working on for nearly five years. It’s a big deal not only because of how compact it is, but because Meta says it wants to eventually turn the prototype into a consumer product.

You may have caught our high-level coverage of the Orion headset here, but our friend Norman Chan from Tested got to sit down with Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth to try out the glasses and learn about the Orion project. In typical form, he digs deep into the intriguing technical details of the headset. You can check out his full video below, or scroll further down to get a summary of the technical details Chan learned from his demo and conversation:

Although Orion isn’t ready for mass production, Meta says it’s planning to build around 1,000 units for internal testing. At a purported cost of $10,000 for each prototype, that’s a cool $10 million worth of hardware the company will be shelling out to get enough devices that it can do testing and development at a reasonable scale.

The Orion glasses weigh just 98 grams, which is right under the 100 grams threshold that Meta believes is important for making something that actually looks and feels like glasses rather than goggles. For comparison, the classic Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses weigh around 30 grams, and Meta’s own Ray-Ban smartglasses weigh around 50 grams. So the Orion AR glasses might be reasonably called glasses, but they’re still chunky bois.

Still, 100 grams is incredibly lightweight if you consider that Orion is packing most of the same fundamental capabilities as Meta’s own Quest 3 headset, which is more than five times heavier at 515 grams.

In addition to the novel silicon carbide lenses we heard about, which help the glasses reach a large (for their size) 70° diagonal field-of-view, Orion also employs MicroLED projectors which are not only tiny, but super bright. Meta says they can output hundreds of thousands of nits of brightness. It’s essential to start with such a bright light source because it’s a complex optical path that loses lots of light along the way. By the time it reaches your eyes, you’ll be seeing just 300–400 nits.

That’s a bit brighter than your average VR headset, but still a long way from bright enough to use outside on a bright day. You’d need around 3,000 nits for reasonable outdoor usability. That means Meta will need to find a brighter light source, or reduce inefficiency in the optical path, if it wants Orion to be something people will wear outside of their homes.

As for resolution, Chan says the main Orion demo has a resolution of 13 pixels-per-degree, which is a bit of a surprise. Because AR glasses often have a smaller field-of-view than their VR counterparts, usually they get an advantage on PPD because the available pixels are spread over a smaller area. But even with a 70° field-of-view, Orion has only about half of the PPD of Quest 3 (25PPD).

However, Meta was apparently also demoing a similar Orion prototype that was 26 PPD, but that came at the cost of image brightness. The company told Chan that its goal is to reach a resolution of 30 PPD by the time Orion becomes a proper product. That’s still far from a ‘retina’ resolution of 60 PPD, but should be enough to make the headset useful for text-based work.

One of the most interesting details from Chan’s interview was the way Orion glasses implement eye-tracking.

Like other headsets, the technique involves illuminating the eye with a series of infrared LEDs, then point a camera at the eye to reverse-engineer the position of the eye based on the visible reflection of the IR LEDs. Usually the IR LEDs are placed in a ring around the lens, but Chan noted that Orion places absolutely tiny LEDs directly in the user’s field-of-view—right on the lens.

In order to make it all invisible to the wearer, the wires that power the LEDs are arranged in a nearly randomized pattern that you could easily mistake as a bit of hair on the lens.

A random pattern is less eye-catching than a clearly defined pattern (the basis of many optical illusions). Between the random pattern, minuscule thinness of the wires, and nearness to the eye, Chan said it was all but invisible when looking through the lens.

It was also mentioned that the ‘compute puck’, which offloads much of the processing work from the glasses, uses a custom Wi-Fi 6 protocol to communicate, with a range of 10 or so feet.

The custom protocol purportedly focuses on ‘pulsing’ data from the puck (rather than continuously streaming it) to reduce both heat production and power consumption. We can imagine this being a packet-like approach where instead of communicating constantly from the puck to the glasses, outgoing information is gathered over the course of a discrete time period before being packaged and transmitted.

While the puck is plenty large and is said to be capable of “all day” battery life, the glasses themselves can currently run for up to three hours—essentially the same battery life you’d expect from a standalone VR headset.

Compared to research prototypes shown by Meta in the past, Orion isn’t just made to give people a look at the experience the company wants to eventually deliver. Orion is more of a preview of a product that Meta is actively building.

The company says it still plans to make the glasses smaller, higher resolution, and affordable. And so far Meta says it expects the eventual consumer version of Orion should become available before 2030 and cost somewhere around $1,500.

There’s even more details packed into Chan’s video than we covered here! If you want to hear it all, check out the full video.

Our series Inside XR Design highlights examples of great XR design. Today we’re looking at shotguns in several different VR games to learn what makes them feel great in the player’s hand. In doing so, we’ll uncover the secret to making anything feel great in VR.

You can find the complete video below, or continue reading for an adapted text version.

Ok, we’re jumping right into this… if I asked you ‘what’s your favorite shotgun in VR?’ you can probably picture it in your head pretty quickly. But could you tell me exactly what makes that shotgun feel so great?

Well, that’s kind of a trick question, because the answer is like 50 different little details that all add up to how a shotgun ultimately feels in the player’s hands.

So today we’re going to look at some of my favorite shotguns in VR and dissect all those little details to talk about how they contribute to that feeling. And by the end of this… I’m going to make the case that if we can understand what makes a shotgun feel great in VR, we can figure out how to make anything feel great in VR.

Arizona Sunshine 2 – Sunshine Shorty

Let’s kick things off with one of my favorite shotguns in all of VR. That would be the sawed-off pump-action shotgun in Arizona Sunshine 2—lets call it the Sunshine Shorty.

Just look at this thing go. It’s incredibly satisfying to use. But why?

Well first of all, it’s pump action. You just can’t beat a pump-action shotgun in VR. Two-handed interactions in VR are always interesting, and making the player perform such a visceral and well-recognized gesture is always gonna make them feel like a bad-ass. Pumping a shotgun to load the next round is a clear extension of the ‘Instructed Motion’ concept I introduced in the previous episode, and an example of how such movements can infuse players with emotion.

The way the Sunshine Shorty reloads has a great little detail too. In many VR games you can reload a weapon just by touching the magazine or shell to the right place on a gun, but in Arizona Sunshine, you need to actually slide the shell into the weapon. The developers made this feel great by adding a custom hand-pose to show the player pushing the shell into the gun.

This little detail adds a lot to the feel of the weapon, because it changes reloading from just touching one thing to another into performing a gesture that captures more of the fantasy of sliding rounds into a shotgun. And importantly, it’s still feels good without being tedious. You might say the interaction is generous to the player… you don’t need to get the motion or position perfectly right in order for it to work.

But the motions themselves are only part of what makes using the shotgun satisfying. Providing feedback to the player intention is critical as well, and the easiest way to do this is with great sound and haptics.

And getting the sounds right is everything.

Let’s listen to how much less satisfying it is to use the Sunshine Shorty with weak sounds vs. strong ones:

View post on imgur.com

Unmute for sound

Sounds make such a difference.

For a shotgun, getting the pump-action sound just right is crucial. As someone who’s fired real shotguns, I wouldn’t say the Sunshine Shorty’s pumping sound is particularly realistic, but remember, the goal is to convey the feeling of pumping a shotgun, not simply playing back a perfect replication of a sound. In the case of this shotgun, its got just the right amount of crunch, clack, and metallic sounds to give a very satisfying feeling every time you pump it.

View post on imgur.com

Unmute for sound

And though I can’t show you haptics on video, haptics can be almost as beneficial as audio itself, because it ties specific weapon sound effects to different locations on the weapon. For instance, when you pump the gun you should feel a haptic rumble in the pump hand, but not the trigger hand.

And again, both sounds and haptics are about giving the player feedback when they do something. When a player pumps the gun you’re conveying that they did something right by giving them the feedback of a sound effect and a haptic rumble.

Another piece of feedback is seeing the shotgun shell ejected from the gun after pumping it. This further reiterates the player has interacted with the shotgun in a valid way.

And there’s a great little detail the developers added here. On most real-life shotguns, the shell ejection port is on the side of the weapon so the shell is ejected away from the wielder. But the Sunshine Shorty has an ejection port on the top of the shotgun, just to make the feedback of ejecting the shell even more visible for players. I love it.

There’s one huge thing we haven’t talked about yet about what makes this shotgun feel great in VR. That would be the things the player actually shoots the gun at. You could do literally everything perfectly about the gun itself—the sounds, effects, tuning etc—but if the player pulls the trigger and the enemy just slowly lays down, that’s absolutely not gonna feel good.

Arizona Sunshine 2 might even go a bit over the top with the visual impact and sound effects when shooting zombies, but damn it feels great. The key is that the effect on the target correctly matches the sound and recoil of the weapon. Since the shotgun sounds powerful when it shoots, to deliver the feedback of that expectation, the target you’re shooting at needs to be satisfyingly impacted.

So the Sunshine Shorty feels great for all the reasons we talked about. But we can also learn a lot by noticing where things could be better. If I could just snap my fingers and make it so, these are the improvements I’d wanna to see with this gun:

First: Having an animated transition in hand poses between holding the shell and sliding it into the gun would make reloading look smoother visually.

Second: While the gun operates realistically in terms of pumping and loading, visually if we look into the chamber we can see the next shell from the gun isn’t actually loaded into the barrel. It just sits there until the chamber closes and then essentially appears in the barrel to be ejected after the shot.

And Third: Unless you’re counting while reloading, there’s no clear way to know when the shotgun is completely full of shells. That often means you’ll go to put another shell in the gun but end up throwing it on the ground instead because it can’t fit. This happened to me all the time when playing the game. Giving players an audio cue to indicate when the gun is almost full and then completely full is a subtle way to avoid this—and you’ll see exactly that with the next shotgun we talk about.

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Meta is widely expected to reveal the Quest 3S headset next week during the Meta Connect event. The company aims to introduce a new headset with mixed reality capabilities similar to Quest 3, but at a cheaper price. An apparent leak suggests the headset could be its most affordable yet.

According to Reddit user Vast_Front259, an Amazon ad seen on the Peacock streaming service shows the Quest 3S with 128GB of storage priced at just $300. This comes before the headset has been formally announced, which would mean the ad aired ahead of schedule.

While the ad looks legitimate, the Reddit user in question does not have a strong account history. The video that plays before the price is a previously released ad that only shows the Quest 3 in the video itself. So we remain somewhat skeptical, but nothing about this leak is fundamentally implausible.

If Quest 3S is priced at $300, it would be the most affordable Quest headset yet.

The original Quest headset was launched in 2019 for $400.

And while Quest 2 actually launched at $300, Quest 3S is expected to run on a newer processor and have mixed reality capabilities that are much closer to Quest 3—and it should run upcoming Quest 3 ‘exclusive’ content that Quest 2 cannot. So Meta has never offered a headset with such capabilities and performance at this price.

And let’s not forget about inflation. Quest 2 launched in late 2020 at $300. If Quest 3S is indeed priced at $300 in 2024, that would be just $250 in 2020.

Quest 3 launched in late 2023 for $500. And while it’s clearly Meta’s best Quest headset yet, the price and lack of killer apps for its mixed reality capabilities gave it less traction than it might have had otherwise. As far as we know, Quest 3 still hasn’t outsold the much more affordable Quest 2.

At $300, Quest 3S could finally hit the price point needed to bring Meta’s mixed reality features to the majority of Quest users—finally giving developers more incentive to build rich mixed reality content.

Today Snap Inc, the company behind Snapchat, announced the latest version of its Spectacles AR Glasses which the company is calling Spectacles ’24. The new device makes notable improvements to field-of-view, resolution, and hand-tracking, and overhauls its software stack. But it’s limited enough to remain targeted at developers. Spectacles ’24 is available starting today, and the company is selling it to developers for $100 per month on a one-year commitment (ultimately totalling $1,200).

More than three years after releasing Spectacles 4—the first in the Spectacles lineup to include displays and real AR capabilities—Snap Inc is doubling down with a new generation of AR glasses. Spectacles ’24 makes key improvements as it inches its way toward a consumer-ready version of such a device.

Spectacles ’24 Specs and Pricing

Spectacles ’24 is a pair of standalone AR glasses. That means everything that powers the device is built directly into the glasses with nothing needing to be tethered to the device. Here’s a look at the Spectacles ’24 specs side-by-side with the prior generation.

While we can see considerable improvements like a near-doubling of the field-of-view, more cameras for improved head and hand tracking, and increased battery life, this has come at the cost of the device’s overall weight. Spectacles ’24 weighs 226g while its predecessor weighs just 134g. The new Spectacles aren’t just heavier, they’re a bit bulkier too, still looking more like ‘goggles’ than ‘glasses’.

Spectacles ’24 inches closer to something that would be acceptable to consumers (in both specs and size), but isn’t there yet.

For now the company is focused on getting the device into the hands of developers to start building compelling applications. To that end, the company is offering an interesting pricing model: Spectacles ’24 is priced at $100 per month, over a one-year commitment—starting today. So while the company is ultimately asking $1,200 for the device, it hopes the monthly approach will lower the barrier to entry.

Software Overhaul & Social Focus

While the hardware is inching slowly toward consumer-readiness, Snap Inc is making larger strides on the software side. Spectacles ’24 is paired with a huge overhaul of the software layer.

The new ‘SnapOS’ effectively guts and replaces the software stack of the previous Spectacles, now with a common interface and interactions built around hand-tracking.

The company is trying to infuse SnapOS with social capabilities, including the ability for Spectacles ’24 to recognize other nearby glasses and seamlessly join their session for a co-located AR experience.

The glasses also support a ‘spectator’ mode which allows someone with a smartphone to look into your AR session to see what’s happening. Unlike spectator views on headsets like Quest and Vision Pro, the smartphone viewer actually sees the AR content from their own perspective, rather than just seeing a first-person view from the headset. However, that basic ‘see what I see’ mode of other headsets is also supported.

There’s some other interesting tie-ins for your smartphone too. Like the ability to use it as either a motion controller, virtual gamepad, or to mirror apps from your phone into Spectacles so you can have a floating (but non-interactive) view of the app inside the headset.

Of course these social and smartphone-extensible functions will only work for apps and experiences that are specifically designed with them in mind, but having these capabilities supported at the OS/SDK level opens up some interesting possibilities.

Lens Studio is the tool developers use to build AR experiences for both Snapchat and Spectacles, and today the company also just revealed the latest version.

The modern foundation of Lens Studio 5.0 supports even more complex, robust Lenses with TypeScript, JavaScript, and improved version control tools for team-based development. Additionally, SnapML makes it easy for developers to use custom ML models directly in Lenses to identify, track, and augment objects. We’re also excited to bring the power of cloud-hosted multimodal AI models to Spectacles through a new partnership with OpenAI. Soon, this will help developers bring new models to their Spectacles experiences to provide more context about what you see, say, or hear.

Snap Inc says the Spectacles software platform has “no developer tax,” meaning the company won’t take a cut of revenue from developers making money on the platform. Considering there’s currently no way to sell software on Spectacles (and no audience to speak of), that announcement might seem a little strange, but clearly the company is hoping to set developer expectations for what it eventually hopes will become a consumer product platform.

Revealed back in May, the first official Warhammer VR game for out-of-home VR attractions is now set to launch next week, coming to Zero Latency locations worldwide.

Update (September 16th, 2024): Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine VR – Warriors of Avarax is officially coming to Zero Latency September 25th, with pre-bookings now available.

Based on Space Marines 2, in 30-minute Warhammer VR experience lets you and up to seven others take the fight to Tyranid forces, promising plenty of co-op exploration and combat.

The original article detailing the initial announcement follows below:

Original Article (May 23rd, 2024): We knew as of 2022 that a Warhammer 40K experience was in development for VR attraction Zero Latency. It was initially expected in 2023, but it seems we’ll have to wait until October this year to jump into our very own Power Armour.

The teaser for Warhammer 40K: Space Marine VR reveals very little, save for Space Marines, Tyranids, and an October release date (see update).

But we know that Zero Latency is a VR attraction with experiences that are typically designed to last around 30 minutes. So while this won’t be a full-blown Warhammer 40K VR game in the traditional sense, it’s likely to be a fun time (with you and up to 7 of your friends!). Here’s the text teaser for now:

In Space Marine VR: Defenders of Avarax, you will play as a Space Marine, a genetically enhanced super-soldier. Exploring the Hive City of Fervastium, players will delve deep into a vault on an important mission that could turn the tide and help beat back the Tyranids, an all-consuming alien swarm from beyond the known galaxy. Using a wide range of weapons from the Space Marine arsenal, players will fight off voracious swarms of Tyranids as they step into the shoes of these highly disciplined and indomitable warriors.

Zero Latency is one of the leading VR attractions with 93 locations across 26 countries. We’ve been impressed previously with the company’s internal development talent, and hope to see their work taken to the next level with Warhammer 40K: Space Marine VR. Designing experiences for VR attractions is a surprisingly unique challenge compared to building in-home VR applications—especially with multiple players in the same physical playspace.

“The Warhammer 40,000 universe and Space Marine in particular has such awesome lore and history, we just couldn’t wait to dive into it,” says Tim Ruse, CEO at Zero Latency. “With Space Marine VR: Defenders of Avarax, we are pushing our technology to the limits, and our talented development team is creating our most immersive and thrilling experience yet. We can’t wait for players to step into the Warhammer 40,000 setting and take on the Tyranids in this epic adventure.”

While it’s a shame this experience can’t also be enjoyed on in-home VR headsets like Quest, luckily there’s already a few ways to dive into the Warhammer universe from the comfort of your own VR headset with the likes of Warhammer 40,000: Battle Sister (2020) and Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall (2021).

The Unity Cube is an objectively terrible game that was built to test the limits of what Quest content Meta would allow into its uncurated App Lab program. The experiment continues to prove its worth; now that Meta has dissolved App Lab, The Unity Cube has moved to the main Quest store and shown that Meta is truly hands-off when it comes to the scope or quality of what can get listed in its VR game store.

For a long time the only official way to distribute an app on Quest was to submit it to Meta for manual review. But Meta would only accept applications which met opaque quality criteria, like how much content the app offered and whether it was appropriately polished. This made it difficult for developers to get smaller or experimental apps in front of the Quest audience, leading to significant developer outcry for a more open process.

That prompted the creation of ‘App Lab’, an alternative distribution approach for Quest which allowed developers to submit applications for distribution without any judgement on quality or scope. But it came with the caveat that App Lab apps wouldn’t be shown in the main Quest store, leaving it up to developers to point their audience to the app’s page.

To test whether Meta was going truly hands-off when it came to the quality of App Lab apps, developer Tony “SkarredGhost” Vitillo created The Unity Cube.

As the name implies, the app is simply a blank Unity environment with a grey cube—that you can’t even interact with. Even at the great price of free, this app would have never stood a chance of making it onto the main Quest store. But could it make it onto App Lab?

Indeed, Meta allowed The Unity Cube into App Lab, proving it would let just about anything into the program, as long as technical requirements were met and content guidelines were respected (ie: no adult or illegal content).

It was good news that developers could submit any app to App Lab for distribution on Quest without worrying that Meta would block an app on the grounds that it wasn’t complete or polished enough. But sentiment remained that having this ‘unlisted’ Quest store made it unnecessarily difficult for developers to find customers.

After several years of App Lab, developer pressure finally pushed Meta to dissolve the program, ultimately merging the App Lab store with the main Quest store. This meant anyone could submit an app of any quality to the main Quest store where it would be visible to customers through browsing and searching.

Last week The Unity Cube completed its journey and became listed on the main Quest store, along with other App Lab apps, again proving that Meta would be truly hands-off on curation.

And though it’s still possible for developers to mark their Quest apps as “Early Access”—to tell customers to expect something experimental or incomplete—The Unity Cube’s creator joked that “it’s not even in Early Access because it is perfect as it is!”

The developer of Gorilla Tag, one of VR’s most popular and commercially successful games, has revealed the first clear look at its next game. Previously codenamed ‘Project A2’, the title has been officially dubbed Orion Drift, and aims to take Gorilla Tag’s social structure to the next level.

Another Axion is the indie studio behind Gorilla Tag, the viral VR game that’s taken on a life of its own and earned more than $100 million in revenue—making it one of VR’s most successful titles.

And while most studios would be reluctant to disrupt such a massive success with their own new title, that looks like exactly what Another Axiom is up to with Orion Drift. A newly released teaser shows how it will work.

Orion Drift is built atop Gorilla Tag’s signature arm-based locomotion system, but players will inhabit robot bodies rather than gorillas. But that simple change of avatar is far from the disruptive part. The game is taking Gorilla Tag’s seamless social lobby navigation and ‘playground’ gameplay and turning it up to 11.

Orion Drift is promised to feature space stations upon which up to 200 players can roam simultaneously. The space stations consist of multiple large arena spaces where players can play a wide variety of different games, from something that looks not far from ‘Gorilla Tag’ itself to ‘Tackleball’, which looks a lot like soccer or Rocket Race, but of course using your hands for movement and controlling the ball.

We also get a glimpse of another part of the station which includes something that looks like a golf course and pickleball courts. And still another area hosting an event called ‘Scrap Run’ which looks like an obstacle race.

Although this would already be plenty of space for activities, the cylindrical space station has at least seven additional huge modules that are shown as being ‘under construction’—the implication is that these will all fill out to support more unique activities and game modes.

And it might even be players that build out the rest of the station. Another Axiom previously said about the game that “[…] players can run their own servers, control their own stations, host their own rule sets, moderate and customize the look and feel of activities, posters, game modes and more,” and also mentioned plans for a level editor which would allow players to build their own maps and activities.

And if that wasn’t enough, at the end of the trailer the camera pulls way back and reveals not just the one floating station, but nearly 20 floating through space together.

It’s an ambitious concept that’s clearly inspired by the seamless social structure of Gorilla Tag, where game lobbies are ‘places’ and changing game modes is as natural as walking between rooms.

In Orion Drift, however, the idea isn’t just to wander down the hall into a new room, but traverse a whole space station full of people—and maybe even jump from station to station to find new game modes and people.

For now Another Axiom is calling this first look a “development snapshot” comprised of “early gameplay footage.” There aren’t yet hard plans for a release, but the studio is taking sign-ups for a closed early access period on its official Discord.

Behemoth from Skydance and Alien: Rogue Incursion from Survios are two of the most anticipated VR games coming in 2024, and both are headed for release on Quest, PSVR 2, and PC VR. And now we know when we’ll first be able to get our hands on them.

Behemoth Release Date on Quest

Starting off with Behemoth, the highly anticipated VR title from Skydance Interactive is set to debut on November 14, 2024, on Quest. Although the game is also planned for release on PSVR 2 and PC VR, release dates for those platforms have not yet been confirmed and may come at a later date.

Skydance, the studio behind the critically acclaimed The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, has shown Behemoth to have a dark fantasy setting with intense combat mechanics.

Alien: Rogue Incursion Release Date

Next up is Alien: Rogue Incursion, which is now set to launch on December 19, 2024, simultaneously on PSVR 2, PC VR, and, among Quest headsets, exclusively on Quest 3.

The game is being developed by Survios, a longtime VR studio known for their work on Creed: Rise to Glory and The Walking Dead Onslaught, and a range of other early VR titles.

Alien: Rogue Incursion promises to immerse players in the terrifying world of the Alien franchise, and the recent pre-order and release date trailer shows us a clear look at the game’s shooting gameplay and Xenomorph enemies.

Bonus – Batman: Arkham Shadows Release Window

One more game on our list of the most anticipated VR games of 2024, Batman: Arkham Shadow, doesn’t have an exact release date yet. But this week we got a pretty specific release window: October 2024.

Batman: Arkham Shadow is a Quest 3 headset and platform exclusive, meaning it will only run on Quest 3 or later, and isn’t planned for release on other VR platforms.

First released eight years ago, SUPERHOT VR is not just a notable VR classic—it’s still a great game. Although it never got a sequel, it left enough of a mark for not just one but several spiritual successors. The upcoming Quest game Action Hero from Fast Travel Games revisits SUPERHOT’s innovative mechanic with a smart premise. But to meet or surpass its predecessor, Action Hero will need to take it to the next level.

If you’ve never played Superhot, it’s built around a core mechanic where time only moves forward when you are physically moving. So if you stay completely still, the game more-or-less freezes. That means if there’s a bullet heading for your face and you freeze in place, the bullet freezes too. That gives you time to observe the situation and make a calculated decision about what to do next. It’s basically ‘bullet time’ from The Matrix, but you’re in control of it.

Action Hero isn’t exactly trying to hide its inspiration… in fact I’d say the unique ‘time moves when you move’ mechanic from Superhot is the really the heart of the game and the main reason to play it. After playing Action Hero for myself I can confirm that dodging a bullet as it wizzes inches from your face—while its path through time is directly related to your movements—is still an incredibly unique and engaging VR experience.

But where SUPERHOT had an intentionally low-poly look and consisted of a setting that was little more than a vague backdrop for the game to exist, Action Hero is built around the idea that you’re an action movie stunt person doing all these crazy moves because you’re being filmed for a movie.

It’s a clever idea. Levels are packaged as ‘movies’ which consist of a series of scenes strung together under one umbrella. For instance, there’s a level that’s roughly in the vain of Indiana Jones, where you’re in an ancient temple-like environment shooting baddies. Each ‘scene’ within the ‘movie’ is a moment of gameplay where you’re tasked with dodging, shooting, etc.

When you complete a scene, you move forward to the next one, and so on, with a logical progression that follows a basic movie narrative (ie: hero enters temple, kills goons, stops bad guys from stealing the important thing, then escapes).

This structure not only increases the cohesion of the scenes, but also allows for a bunch of different settings, enemies, weapons, etc., by letting players jump from one ‘movie’ to another.

The basic ‘time moves when you move’ mechanic is executed well, and generally feels as awesome as it does in Superhot.

But to really deliver something that feels like a next-gen version of Superhot, Action Hero needs to seriously bump up the variety and polish—otherwise, why not just play Superhot instead?

The whole premise of Action Hero is that you’re a stunt person acting out spectacular action scenes in movies. But spectacle is lacking. The game doesn’t feel particularly polished visually or audibly.

Of course this is an unfinished build of the game and hopefully more polish comes later. But if the marketing tells us this game is supposed to be a “blockbuster VR FPS with explosive set pieces and cinematic design,” then those elements should really be in place before showing off the game. With Action Hero planned for launch by the end of this year… there’s only four months, at most, for that to fall into place.

It’s not just visual and audio polish either. SUPERHOT succeeded not just because it had a really cool fundamental mechanic, but also because the level design—the specific scenarios the player has to conquer—were very well crafted. They were challenging and varied throughout.

Action Hero has proven that it can nail the fundamental mechanic, but it’s going to need to tighten up its level design and bring more variety—in weapons, enemies, and scenarios—into the mix if it wants to have a genuine value proposition when put next to Superhot itself.

I, for one, would love to see Fast Travel Games pull this off. Conceptually, Action Hero is genius. It revives a truly unique mechanic and builds it atop a framework that allows for unlimited creativity in what kinds of scenarios the player could be put in—be that contemporary action, horror, sci-fi, western, and a million other possibilities. But when it comes right down to it, quantity isn’t quality. The studio needs to nail the depth of gameplay before it’s worth leveraging the breadth of gameplay.