Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey have buried the hatchet after Zuckerberg fired Luckey in 2017, so they can build virtual and augmented reality gear for the military. Oculus made, of course, the most successful VR headset and was also a tremendous flop for Meta. Anyway, here’s the WSJ story about their new team-up. Time and money heal all wounds, I guess?
Android XR didn’t get a lot of screen time at today’s Android Show — apart from confirmation that it’s going to get Gemini AI support — but Google promises that there’s more to come at the full Google I/O event next week.
Android president Sameer Samat even broke out the company’s prototype XR shades to promise some “really cool Android demos” to come. And as you can see, this is a man who knows what’s cool.
Apple’s new ad launching days before Mother’s Day (this Sunday!) pitches the Vision Pro as a one-of-a-kind memories headset that will put mom to tears as they watch Spatial Videos of baby in VR. It includes a heartfelt closeup shot, which is giving us Verge folks déjà vu.
Star Wars: Beyond Victory - A Mixed Reality Playset is a new podracing-focused experience for Meta’s Quest headsets that will be shown at Star Wars Celebration 2025.
You won’t actually race from the cockpit of a podracer, but that’s probably a good thing to prevent the game from being a “puke factory,” as one of my colleagues eloquently put it.
The company is working on two follow-ups to the Vision Pro, according to Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg. The goal for one is a cheaper Vision Pro. The other would tether to Macs for use as a wired display or for “high-end enterprise applications.”
That’s different from its canceled transparent-lens AR glasses that would have worked the same way, Gurman writes.
“Apple Immersive Video Utility” is available now for Macs and Vision Pros, though only in US English, as MacRumors notes. With the Mac version, you can “import, organize, package, and review Apple Immersive Video,” Apple’s immersive video format. You can stream the videos, synchronized, to one or more headsets with the visionOS version installed.
That could make it easier to share in-person experiences. If you can find another Vision Pro owner, that is.
Verge emigrant Cameron Faulkner has a fitting paean to Half-Life: Alyx, on its fifth anniversary still one of VR’s best games:
“It was a huge gamble to release the long-awaited prequel to one of the most influential games in virtual reality, requiring hardware that very few had then, and still very few have today. To that end, every developer making VR games is knowingly making a huge gamble that may not pan out in their favor.”
If The Weeknd wasn’t enough to convince you to pick up Apple’s $3,499 headset (or at least stop by an Apple Store to try one out), now the company will offer a 25-minute virtual trip to the Mexico City finale of Metallica’s M72 World Tour, which will also be available as an EP on Apple Music.
Filmed on 14 cameras in “ultra-high-resolution 180-degree video and Spatial Audio to give viewers unprecedented access to James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, and Robert Trujillo,” it will be available as an extended preview in Apple Store demos beginning Friday.
Vision Pro owners should see the app if they install the visionOS 2.4 developer beta today. Last month, Apple described Spatial Gallery as containing a curated selection of spatial videos, photos, and panoramas, including things like behind-the-scenes clips from Apple TV Plus shows like Severance and Shrinking.
iOS 18.4’s second developer beta, which is also out now, adds the iOS Apple Vision Pro app, which lets you browse and remotely install Vision Pro apps.
Niantic’s ambitious 3D scanning tool Scaniverse is now available as a free app for the Meta Quest 3. Previously you could use the service — which features more than 50,000 real-world 3D scenes, according to Niantic — in VR via a browser, but the app should make the process a little more streamlined.
Details are slim, but UploadVR reports it’s being developed by Korean studio Pixelity Inc, and is expected to release next year as the first in a trilogy based on the original 1995 anime series. Platform support hasn’t yet been confirmed.
While Neon Genesis Evangelion has been turned into XR experiences before for theme park attractions, it’s not a franchise that’s had many videogame adaptations of late.
The company is launching a $50 million fund and early access to a desktop editor for Horizon Worlds, its 3D social platform for mobile and VR.
“Each month, we’ll pay out bonuses from the Creator Fund to the makers of fun and engaging mobile and [mixed reality] worlds,” Meta says. “Bonuses will be tied to worlds’ contributions to the overall ecosystem across time spent, retention, and in-world purchases.”
[developers.meta.com]
Yes, it does look a lot like Apple’s Vision Pro, but that is actually Project Moohan, the Samsung / Google project we tried out last month and saw again recently at Samsung Unpacked.
In this YouTube video, Marques Brownlee shows some views you may not have seen yet of the hardware and what the Android UI looks like for the wearer.
The $250 million deal — announced after Samsung’s extended reality headset made its public debut yesterday — includes parts of HTC’s XR headsets and glasses unit, with some of the VIVE engineering team relocating to Google.
Google had previously purchased most of HTC’s smartphone business for $1.1 billion in 2017. HTC Vice President Lu Chia-te says the XR deal isn’t “a buyout nor an exclusive license.”
TikTok’s native visionOS app still works, at least for me, after the company cut off access for millions of US users of its smartphone app.
Gaussian splatting, a new way of capturing 3D content, is taking the AR / VR industry by storm — and could one day allow anyone to create photorealistic 3D worlds.
8
Verge Score
The Quest 3S has its flaws, but it’s a great first VR headset.
