Jay Peters
Trombone Champ’s VR version comes out in November.
Trombone Champ: Unflattened launches on Meta Quest headsets on November 26th. If you pre-order, you’ll get a ridiculous fish-themed trombone you can use in the game.
Virtual Reality
David Pierce
Verge Staff
Jay Peters
Apple will have more immersive videos to check out soon.
If you’ve already watched Submerged on your Vision Pro, there will be additional Immersive Video content over the course of this year, and you can see the list of what’s coming on 9to5Mac.
Sean Hollister
Google’s wacky VR game studio just dropped a free game for Meta’s headset.
Dimensional Double Shift is a four-player co-op game from Owlchemy Labs, the creators of Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator and Cosmonious High.
Like those games, you’ll be doing hilarious oddball tasks in VR — but now you’re working for an “interdimensional” gas station, diner, and garage, and using your actual tracked hands to manipulate objects.
Jay Peters
Meta is launching new avatars on October 1st.
And later in 2025, users will be able to generate a new avatar with an AI prompt.
Photo by Jay Peters / The Verge
Jay Peters
Meta is touting increased Horizon Worlds usage.
5X usage growth in 2024, and the app is a top five Quest 3 app in terms of weekly users, the company says.
Correction: Horizon Worlds is not a Quest 5 app.
Jay Peters
Meta is releasing a camera passthrough API for Quest developers early next year.
Could be a really big deal for developers — the announcement got huge cheers in the Connect keynote room.
Alex Heath
Meta’s CTO gives developers an apology.
We’re in the developer-focused section of Meta’s Connect keynote. CTO Andrew Bosworth is onstage and starts with an apology: “We have not made it easy to develop for our platforms. I want you to know that we know that, and we’re sorry.”
He goes on to say that the “ground has constantly been shifting under your feet for years now.” Meta just recently killed Spark, its AR effects platform, without warning and has made more changes than I can count to the Quest’s software.
Jay Peters
Mark’s done.
Zuckerberg has wrapped up announcements. We just watched a video made by director Matthew Vaughn filmed on Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
Now Andrew Bosworth is here for the developer keynote.
Wes Davis
Meta says it’s making it easier to beam your Windows desktop to your Quest headset.
At Meta Connect, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Quest VR headset users will be able to connect to Windows 11 PCs just by looking at their keyboard — much the same way Apple’s Vision Pro can do that when you look at a MacBook.
Here’s a gallery of pics from the presentation.
1/4Screenshot: Meta Connect
Jay Peters
YouTube co-watching in Horizon Worlds is rolling out in beta next week.
That could be kind of useful, actually.
Jay Peters
Huge cheers for Horizon Worlds.
I still think it’s pretty bad, but people in the crowd seem to love it.
Jay Peters
A live Quest 3S demo just crashed.
A person in the audience was wearing the Quest 3S to show off the passthrough, but the demo failed pretty quickly.
Jay Peters
Adam Mosseri is here.
He’s on crutches but seems happy!
Jay Peters
Almost time to Connect.
Alex Heath, Kylie Robison, and I are all at Meta’s Connect conference to cover the show.
Ahead of the 1PM ET keynote, you can catch up on what to expect.
Image: Jay Peters / The Verge
Wes Davis
Are Meta Avatars about to get their glow-up?
The Meta app has started teasing improvements to Horizons avatars when users try to edit them, according to an X post spotted by UploadVR.
The slides promise “more expressive, authentic stickers, profile pics, and more,” along with updated editing controls and ways to quickly change your avatar’s look. I’d imagine we’ll learn what that all means this week during Meta Connect.
Umar Shakir
Umar Shakir
Is this really an ad for Meta’s Quest 3S — and will it really cost $299.99?
A Reddit user posted an off-screen video of a certainly real-looking ad for Meta’s leaky Quest 3S VR headset, as reported by UploadVR.
The ad puts a $299.99 price tag on the 128GB model, which seems affordable compared to the Quest 3 that launched at $500.
Sean Hollister
Is Valve cooking up an Arm-powered VR headset?
Or, is it quietly bringing Windows-native VR games to the leaked Meta Quest 3S? Or Windows-native games to Arm, period? Or is this just another experiment?
Either way, this datamining leak from Valve watcher Brad Lynch is an incredibly intriguing hint. (Lynch has been sniffing around Valve’s “Deckard” standalone VR headset project for years.)
Emma Roth
The iPhone 15 Pro will let you take 3D photos soon.
The device already supports spatial video, but the latest iOS 18.1 developer beta brings spatial photos to the iPhone 15 Pro too. This allows for a more immersive experience when viewing photos on Apple’s Vision Pro headset.
The iPhone 16 will also come with support for spatial photos and videos when it launches later this week.
Sean Hollister
TP-Link has a new Bluetooth driver that maybe fixes PSVR2 PC tracking performance.
My biggest problem with Sony’s PSVR2 PC adapter was controllers that kept misbehaving — even though I was using Sony’s first-recommended TP-Link UB500 Bluetooth adapter to pair them.
But TP-Link has now shipped a driver for you to experimentally test — and Sony says it’s fixed some distortion and AMD refresh rate options in the app, too.
UB500 partial incompatibility with PSVR2 controllers - Home Network Community
[community.tp-link.com]