John Carmack, legendary game designer, rocket guy and VR enthusiast, has announced that he is leaving both Meta/Facebook, and the virtual reality business itself, behind after a decade as one of its most prominent champions.
Carmack’s position was as an executive consultant. Having initially sent his farewell message to colleagues in an internal memo, when that was leaked in part to the media he decided to post the whole thing—including some clarifications—on his Facebook page instead.
Here it is in full:
This is the end of my decade in VR.
I have mixed feelings.
Quest 2 is almost exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning – mobile hardware, inside out tracking, optional PC streaming, 4k (ish) screen, cost effective. Despite all the complaints I have about our software, millions of people are still getting value out of it. We have a good product. It is successful, and successful products make the world a better place. It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.
The issue is our efficiency.
Some will ask why I care how the progress is happening, as long as it is happening?
If I am trying to sway others, I would say that an org that has only known inefficiency is ill prepared for the inevitable competition and/or belt tightening, but really, it is the more personal pain of seeing a 5% GPU utilization number in production. I am offended by it.
[edit: I was being overly poetic here, as several people have missed the intention. As a systems optimization person, I care deeply about efficiency. When you work hard at optimization for most of your life, seeing something that is grossly inefficient hurts your soul. I was likening observing our organization’s performance to seeing a tragically low number on a profiling tool.]
We have a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort. There is no way to sugar coat this; I think our organization is operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy. Some may scoff and contend we are doing just fine, but others will laugh and say “Half? Ha! I’m at quarter efficiency!”
It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.
This was admittedly self-inflicted – I could have moved to Menlo Park after the Oculus acquisition and tried to wage battles with generations of leadership, but I was busy programming, and I assumed I would hate it, be bad at it, and probably lose anyway.
Enough complaining. I wearied of the fight and have my own startup to run, but the fight is still winnable! VR can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta. Maybe it actually is possible to get there by just plowing ahead with current practices, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
Make better decisions and fill your products with “Give a Damn”!
As his clarification states, while his comments may seem damning, they’re not necessarily related to any individual people he worked with, or decisions made above him. They’re more about his clear passion for the idea of optimisation itself, a structural and systemic issue that, at a company as big as Meta, might have been maddening for a guy used to writing code and firing rockets into space.
This would normally be the part of a story where I would drop some conjecture, maybe how such a high-profile departure might spell trouble for Meta’s efforts in the space, but lol, I think Meta are doing a good enough job of shouting that from the rooftops themselves.
Video game pioneer John Carmack is resigning from his consulting position at Meta with “mixed feelings” about the “end of his decade in VR,” he announced in a Facebook post Friday.
Carmack stuck around through the company’s more than $10 billion investment into virtual reality technology. And although he still believes in the potential value of VR, he questioned Meta’s efficiency, saying in his post that the company has a “ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort.”
“It has been a struggle for me,” Carmack wrote. “I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough.”
Carmack was celebrated for his work developing Wolfenstein 3D, Quake and Doom, and co-founded video game company id Software. He was an early advocate for virtual reality, thought it was not uncommon for him to criticize Meta.
Carmack became CTO of Oculus in 2013. Meta bought Oculus VR in 2014 for $2 billion, and now sells the Meta Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets. Cormack has stood by the headset, calling it a “good product” despite his “complaints” about the software.
“Successful products make the world a better place,” Cormack said. “It all could have happened a bit faster and been going better if different decisions had been made, but we built something pretty close to The Right Thing.”
Carmack still believes Meta is the company best positioned to integrate VR technology into the mainstream. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in October 2021 that he would take the company beyond social media and go all in on building the so-called metaverse -— but at a hefty cost.
“I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover,” Carmack said.
When asked for comment, Meta pointed to Carmack’s post and a tweet from CTO Andrew Bosworth.
“It is impossible to overstate the impact you’ve had on our work and the industry as a whole,” Bosworth tweeted. “Your technical prowess is widely known, but it is your relentless focus on creating value for people that we will remember most. Thank you and see you in VR.”
Meta recently announced it is laying off 11,000 employees, the most significant job cuts in the tech giant’s history amid high inflation, rising interest rates and recession fears. Meta lost $9.4 billion in the first nine months of 2022 on its metaverse efforts and expects losses from the unit to “grow significantly year-over-year” in 2023.
– CNN’s Clare Duffy and Rachel Metz contributed to this report.
According to The Verge, which was provided with a render of the new hardware, HTC is planning to reveal yet another consumer-focused virtual reality and augmented reality headset at CES 2023 next month, with features that will potentially rival the recently-announced Meta Quest Pro, including full-color passthrough video.
Although the full announcement and reveal is still a few weeks away, HTC teased some early details about the unannounced hardware to The Verge. Like the Meta Quest Pro and older Quest models, the headset will be a self-contained, all-in-one unit (unlike most of HTC’s other offerings, which requires a permanent connection to a gaming PC) with roughly two hours of battery life and support for controllers with six-degrees of detected motion, plus hand-tracking.
The unnamed headset will also include front-facing and side-facing cameras, allowing the wearer to still see their surroundings in full color, facilitating augmented reality and mixed reality experiences. That was arguably the most compelling reason to splurge on the recently announced, $1,500 Quest Pro, as Meta’s older headsets only provide a grainy, black and white video feed of a user’s surroundings to help ensure they don’t crash into anything (or anyone). However, the new HTC headset will potentially outperform the competition, with HTC promising enough detail to allow users to still read text on computers and smartphones through the passthrough video, while the addition of a depth sensor will also make it much better at accurately mapping a user’s surroundings and inserting virtual content into it.
The render of the new headset doesn’t provide too many additional details, although it doesn’t look substantially different to the recent HTC Vive Flow, which looked like an over-sized pair of safety glasses. That goes with hints HTC posted this October that its next big product will be compact and lightweight.
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HTC will also reveal details about the new headset’s pricing at CES, but Shen Ye, the company’s global head of product, told The Verge that it doesn’t plan to subsidize the hardware by collecting and selling users’ data, and as a result the new hardware will probably be considerably more expensive than the $400 Meta Quest 2. That’s good news for those who value their privacy, but it could make the new headset a tough sell for most consumers, who seem happy to trade privacy for heavily discounted hardware.”
Update 12/16/22 at 2:05 PM:
This article originally stated that the Vive Focus 3 required a PC connection, which is not the case. We regret the error.
It’s an old trope in a lot of dumb sci-fi movies that involve virtual reality: you die in the game, you die in real life. In said movies, characters get trapped in a video game and must play for their lives. If their avatar perishes, so do they.
Well, it appears that someone has actually willed this trope into reality. That is, someone created a VR headset that literally kills you if you lose a video game. Fun, right?
The creator is not just any ol’ someone, but Palmer Luckey, the 30-year-old virtual reality wunderkind, defense contractor, Trump-funder, and co-founder of Oculus, the VR firm Facebook bought in 2014 for a cool $3 billion.
Luckey dropped a blog post on Sunday, explaining his weird new headset—which he claims is mostly a “piece of office art” for now—and included a picture of it as well.
For reference, it looks like this:
Photo: Palmer Luckey
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*lightsaber hum*
SabersPro
For the Star Wars fan with everything. These lightsabers powered by Neopixels, LED strips that run inside the blade shape that allow for adjustable colors, interactive sounds, and changing animation effects when dueling.
Yes, this thing will actually end your life. More specifically, it is rigged with bombs so that your head will explode.
In his blog post, Luckey explains how his lethal new contraption is supposed to work:
I used three of the explosive charge modules I usually use for a different project, tying them to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency, making game-over integration on the part of the developer very easy. When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user.
Jesus.
In other words, Luckey has basically brought to life the plot of the nerdy anime web comic from the mid-2000s, Sword Art Online. Indeed, Luckey says this comic was the major inspiration behind his project. In the comic, characters don a thing called “NerveGear,” which is an “incredible device that perfectly recreates reality using a direct neural interface that is also capable of killing the user.” They are then dropped into a matrix-like world by a mad scientist and forced to endure a “death game” where the stakes of the gameplay are pegged to their own mortality. To Luckey, this is an exciting idea:
The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me – you instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it. Pumped up graphics might make a game look more real, but only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game.
Righttttt…well, that’s certainly an interesting idea, though some might argue that the pleasure of gaming actually derives from being able to experience death-defying scenarios and not have your head explode. Some people might argue that.
Anyway, whether its a good idea or not, Luckey seems to have plans to make his fun new hat even more horrifying than it currently is by adding “anti-tamper” tech to it:
This isn’t a perfect system, of course. I have plans for an anti-tamper mechanism that, like the NerveGear, will make it impossible to remove or destroy the headset.
So the ultimate goal here is to create a murder-helmet that you literally can’t take off. Once it’s been clamped to your noggin the only two scenarios in which you’ll be able to remove it are A) the one where you win the game or B) the one where your decapitated corpse is dragged out of a pile of gore-strewn rubble by whatever unfortunate soul happens to stumble by. This is probably why Luckey hasn’t actually used the thing himself yet. He says:
… there are a huge variety of failures that could occur and kill the user at the wrong time. This is why I have not worked up the balls to actually use it myself, and also why I am convinced that, like in SAO, the final triggering should really be tied to a high-intelligence agent that can readily determine if conditions for termination are actually correct.
…At this point, it is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design.
Some will doubtlessly find this an exciting idea while others (actually, let’s be honest, most people) will probably be dissuaded from participation after reading the phrase “kill the user at the wrong time.” I, unfortunately, fall in the latter camp, though a grim cocktail of curiosity and schadenfreude are definitely going to keep me monitoring this project’s progress for the foreseeable future.
Image: Meta / Kotaku / Oleg Krugliak (Shutterstock)
Meta’s Facebook is (was?) one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with billions of users. However, its failing virtual reality metaverse project, Horizon Worlds, isn’t doing nearly as well. In fact, a new report shows that barely anyone is spending much time in Horizon Worlds at all, with most user-created worlds going completely unvisited. Meanwhile, Second Life and VRChat have more concurrent users, according to folks at Meta.
According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, internal documents and employees at Meta paint a picture that nobody is really playing Horizon Worlds, its free-to-play virtual reality metaverse that lets users create and visit “worlds” with friends or strangers. Think Roblox, but more cold and heartless. The company initially hoped to have 500,000 monthly active users visiting these various virtual worlds. Now that number has been revised to around 200,000.
Internal stats show that most players don’t stick around after their first month in Horizon Worlds and Meta has seen a steady decline in active users since spring. WSJ reports that of all the user-created worlds in the game, only about nine percent are visited by more than 50 players. The majority of the rest are never visited by anyone besides the initial creator. The end result is a lot of empty, barren digital lands. Even Questy’s—-a world created by Meta as part of a larger Super Bowl marketing push—-is a giant flop, with very few users visiting.
“An empty world is a sad world,” said one document seen by the WSJ.
And while theQuest 2 headset has sold very well, a lot of the customers aren’t returning to play anything. It’s reported that more than half of all Quest headsets stop being used by players after only six months.
Read More: The Metaverse Is Already Here For Cows And Its Very Sad
As for why people aren’t flocking to the expensive metaverse that Facebook has created, a survey run by Meta researchers found users mostly complained about being unable to find worlds they liked and rarely found others to interact with. Other complaints included in-game people not looking “real” enough. Some even had issues with the lack of Horizon World avatar legs. I guess that explains all the fanfare around legs being added to the game earlier this month, even if the announcement was a lie.
The WSJ notes that the researchers at Meta only spoke to 514 people because of how few folks are playing, calling the current active playerbase “small and precious.” It’s not surprising to hear that, according to those familiar with Horizon Worlds, the app has fewer concurrent users than VRChat and 2003’s Second Life.
The rest of the report isn’t much better and is further evidence that the VR metaverse future that so many companies and tech bros are trying to peddle is likely not going to stick with folks. Hell, the people who work at Meta don’t want to use Horizon Worlds. And Meta seems to get how unpopular all this shit is with your average consumer, as it’s now begun to pivot its new VR headsets toward big companies that can be tricked into making their employees wear a VR headset for eight hours a day at work. But at least folks will always have the Walmart Metaverse to hang out in between breaks, right?
Earlier this week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to demonstrate that, having spent billions of dollars to create a virtual reality universe (Horizon Worlds) that looked like it was from 2004, his company was working on improving that universe to make it look like it was from 2009 instead. Integral to this upgrade was the fact that avatars would no longer be mere floating torsos, but would soon have legs.
It was a very weird video existing in a very weird space, as Ethan wrote at the time:
Today’s model is clearly an extension of that early rendering, and finally brings the VR platform past the likes of Fire Emblem: Awakening on the Nintendo 3DS, another game that lacked legs. And that was with Meta only spending $10 billion this year on the technology. Who knows what another small fortune will bring? If anything can catapult the Oculus storefront into the green, it’s a burgeoning market for VR feet pics. It might seem like we’re being ridiculous here, but do know that the live chat alongside the virtual audience watching all of this unfold absolutely exploded when Zuckerberg started talking about feet.
While the updates expecting to bring full-body avatars aren’t expected until 2023, Zuckerberg was clearly seen jumping around in the video, giving everyone an early look at the tech. Or was he?
Anyone who has ever been around *checks the culture* any piece of marketing ever made should know by now that not everything is as it seems when a company is trying to sell you something. And in this case, the video Meta showed off was made with some help.
As UploadVR’s Ian Hamilton has since reported, Meta has issued a follow-up statement, which says “To enable this preview of what’s to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture.”
Deep down, of course, you all knew this. From vertical slices at E3 to photo tricks shown at Apple events, there are always grains of salt we need to chew on every time a company trying to sell us something that isn’t out yet.
But there’s something especially funny about this in particular, that a project that has spent billions of dollars to look like a Kinect demo—a piece of hardware first shown off in 2009—has ended up with its own dumb feet-related moment.
Who knows, maybe when it’s eventually released the tech will looks exactly like this! Maybe it won’t. Maybe none of us will ever actually use Horizon Worlds and it will remain a mystery forever.
A Northeastern University employee who told police last month he was injured by an exploding package fabricated the story and now faces charges in the hoax, according to a criminal complaint.
Jason Duhaime, who was the New Technology Manager and Director of the Immersive Media Lab at Northeastern University, has been charged by complaint with conveying false information and hoaxes related to an explosive device and making materially false and fictitious statements to a US Government agency, according to the complaint.
“Throughout the course of the investigation, we believe he repeatedly lied to us about what happened inside the lab, faked his injuries, and wrote a rambling letter directed at the lab threatening more violence,” Joseph Bonavolonta, FBI special agent in charge, said Tuesday.
Duhaime was arrested in Texas on Tuesday morning and will appear before a magistrate judge in the afternoon, US Attorney Rachael Rollins said.
CNN has reached out to his defense attorney for comment.
The report of an explosion September 13 led to an evacuation of the Northeastern campus in Boston, diverted law enforcement resources and caused panic, Rollins said Tuesday.
“His alleged actions diverted significant law enforcement resources away from essential public safety matters and caused fear and panic not only on campus but also in the homes of the families, friends and loved ones of Northeastern students, faculty and staff as well as the people who live and work near Northeastern’s campus,” she said.
According to the complaint, Duhaime, 45, called 911 to report he was injured by very sharp objects expelled from a plastic case he had collected from the mail room and opened in Northeastern’s virtual reality lab. Officials at the time said he suffered minor hand injuries.
He also told investigators he found a threatening note with the case that accused the lab of secretly working for Facebook and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg in a US government plot to take over society through virtual reality, according to the complaint.
However, investigators found the case and the letter had no signs of damage, and they discovered a document on Duhaime’s computer that was “word-for-word” the same as the threatening letter, the complaint states.
Authorities also said when Duhaime showed his “several small, superficial marks or bruises” on his forearms to the responding officer, he rolled up long sleeves that did not appear to have damage.
Further, a student who was in the lab during the purported explosion told investigators he did not hear any noises aside from Duhaime’s voice, the complaint states.
“Given the lack of any physical evidence and the fact that the Letter was found on a Computer in Duhaime’s office, the significant inconsistencies between Duhaime’s story and Student #1’s recollection of events support a finding that Duhaime is not being truthful,” the affidavit states.
Northeastern University issued a statement Tuesday saying Duhaime is no longer employed by the university.
“Northeastern would like to thank the professionals in the FBI, the US Attorney’s Office, and Boston Police Department for bringing this investigation to a close,” the university said. “Knowing what we know now about this incident, we would like to make it clear that there was never any danger to the Northeastern community. As always, the safety of our students, faculty, and staff is our highest priority.”
An online bio for Duhaime on Northeastern’s website says he is a “new technology manager” who managed the Virtual / Augmented Reality and 360 immersive technology for the university.
As of last week, a long-held dream of playing Valve’s landmark 2004 shooter Half-Life 2 in virtual reality has finally come to fruition. The journey began nearly 10 years ago, when a man named Nathan Andrews managed to hack together a functioning version of the all-time classic in VR. This was before any Vives, Indexes, Quests, or Oculi. With a primitive Sony HMZ-T1 and specialized motion-tracking gear, Andrews risked a resonance cascade scenario to splice together a working foundation for a full Half-Life 2 VR mod. Over the next decade, dozens of volunteers would contribute to the off-then-on-again project, all in hopes of one day bashing enemies with a crowbar in semi-lifelike virtual reality.
And now Half Life 2: VR Mod is ready to play, thanks to the hard work of the Source VR Mod Team and their free, open beta available on Steam. There’s more work to be done for sure—a public roadmap shows what’s to come—but the entire main campaign is already up and running, and pretty surreal to experience. Sharp corners and all, Half-Life 2: VR Mod is well worth checking out right now if you can.
The differences are quite immediate. The G-Man’s opening scene grants a whole other sense of scale since you have active depth perception. Images flash and appear inside of him as fully realized 3D spaces, which you can actually peer inside of and see with greater depth and dimension. This new presentation grants more weight to the whole scene.
Gif: Valve / Source VR Mod Team / Kotaku
As a video game graphics experience in VR, it’s super cool. Your eyes can track flying debris and exploding barrels with the ease and speed of just turning your head. The violence and realistic physics of Half-Life 2 are no longer just simulations appearing on a screen in front of you; they’re happening in a 3D space you feel a sense of presence and dimension in. It all feels so natural that it’s easy to forget this is the end result of a decade of hacked tech created by enthusiastic fans.
And while there’s still more work to be done on the weapons, it is a thrill to be able to virtually hold, examine, and fight with these classic video game armaments. Smashing the aggressive, flying manhacks with a crowbar in VR is so obscenely fun that I want a mini spin-off mod of this alone. And my Fitbit tells me I’m earning “Zone Minutes” by whacking these things. The 9mm pistol feels fun to aim and shoot (and yes, I am only aiming with one hand). More modern VR games tend to have smoother reload mechanics, so this mod’s feel a bit clunky sometimes, but the action remains just as hectic and fun.
Half-Life 2 VR Mod Brings City 17 To Life
In a way it feels like Half-Life 2 was always supposed to be this way. It is very easy to lose yourself in this mod, both as a VR experience and a Half-Life one. It easily pushes past the status of “tech demo” or “mod,” feeling like it’s shaping up to be a solid VR game in its own right.
The Half-Life 2: VR Mod project is currently being worked on by users from the Flatscreen to VR Discord server, led by WormSlayer, whose involvement goes back to the earliest days of the project. Back then, WormSlayer caught sight of Andrews’ early prototypes and offered his talents, starting with work on the gun models.
WormSlayer’s description of the mod’s early days sounds like something you’d need to slap together to survive City 17 itself. The assemblage of tech included a “Sony head-mounted TV, a gun controller for a console, and a professional 3D tracking system [Andrews] had access to,” WormSlayer told Kotaku. That headset in question was the Sony HMZ-T1, which sported “an eye-watering resolution of 640×720 per eye, and a 45-degree field of view,” WormSlayer said. That headset would be left behind in favor of the Oculus DK1, the first hardware the just-incorporated Oculus (now Meta) ever released. You can see footage from those early days in a 2013 YouTube video.
Nathan Andrews
As such an early consumer VR experiment, the project was destined for some roadbumps as new tech hit the scene, quickly aging out existing standards. “Valve and Oculus both abandoned the idea of treating a VR headset as just another monitor,” WormSlayer said. “This was a sound idea for many reasons, but it effectively broke VR support in Half-Life 2.”
After that switch up, the team gave up for a while. Andrews retired from the project entirely. Eager VR community members, however, persuaded WormSlayer to reconsider dropping it all together. “[They] were confident they could hack OpenVR support into the old project,” WormSlayer said. And so the project sparked to life again, making great progress before once again resuming its slumber as essential contributors moved on.
Thankfully, the nascent Half-Life 2: VR Mod would indeed see a second resurgence when the Flatscreen to VR community mustered up a new team. Now that the public beta is out and playable, they’re focusing their efforts on bringing the project to a fully polished and finalized state.
As playable and fun as it is right now, Half-Life 2: VR Mod still has some issues, primarily regarding performance. “The old engine is very single-threaded and only supports DirectX 9, so even with our hacked-together DXVK implementation, we’ve been fighting to hit FPS targets in some places,” WormSlayer said. While I’ve yet to get to some of the more chaotic scenes of the game’s latter half, I’ve found performance so far to be quite good. Given that there’s no teleport-style movement option, however, this mod might be tough on the stomach if you’re new to VR.
Ultimately, the physics and tech of Half-Life 2 are still a joy to play with 18 years later. VR only amplifies the physicality of its world, with the ability to virtually pick up and manipulate objects. Half-Life 2: VR Mod is no Half-Life: Alyx in terms of the sheer amount of interactable objects, but it fits in well as a VR-worthy prequel. And with the addition of the crowbar and a head-mounted flashlight, it has more than a few features and comforts of its own. Being able to virtually manipulate objects in the world is a refreshing way to revisit many of the game’s puzzles.
The most surprising thing for me, however, was how this experience is affecting my perception of the game’s characters, especially the silent protagonist himself.
Gif: Valve / Source VR Mod Team / Kotaku
Gordon Freeman is a quiet guy even when he’s frantically destroying shit. But even just being able to nod at an NPC marks a 100% increase in inter-character interaction. Playing Half-Life 2 and being able to wave at Dr. Kleiner as he shouts with excitement upon seeing you makes me wonder: Is Gordon Freeman even a waver? Does he give a thumbs up to indicate he understands? Does he shake or nod his head when people talk to him? How have I never thought about this for all these years?
NPCs also look at you at eye level in a very eerie way. This feeling exists in other, more modern VR games, but it’s surprising to find it so present in a game from 2004. The simplicity of the models, with gentle head animations and eyes that give a hint of personality and awareness, just barely inches the game out of the uncanny valley into something that starts to feel realistic.
I’m not saying nodding, gesturing, and looking people in the eyes are the hot features you list on the back of the box (that’s saved for viciously beating the shit out of metal manhacks with a crowbar and seeing this classic game in true 3D), but it sure does change the tone of Half-Life 2. One nitpick here: It’s a shame you can’t see your hands while piloting the airboat. Not only did my eyes never leave the G-Man as I blazed past him in my escape from the Combine, I would’ve loved to stare and point dead at him, as if to say “I see you motherfucker. I see you.”
I’m looking forward to playing through the rest of Half-Life 2: VR Mod, spotting the unique changes the new format adds and inspires. There’s still work to be done by WormSlayer and the team, including more improvements to the weapons, tweaks to make the game a bit easier for folks prone to motion sickness, and even some AI-upscaled textures to give the more aged aspects of the graphics a bit of a facelift. Those changes will be very welcome, but for now this first playable version makes for a great way to jump back into this classic game. If you like Half-Life and own a PCVR headset, you should download this yesterday.
Sony’s PSVR for PlayStation 4, the first serious VR add-on for a console, did pretty darn well for itself. It was reasonably affordable, well received by players and critics alike, and got a lot more post-launch support than many prior PlayStation hardware efforts (RIP, dear Vita). Now, various outlets have gotten their first hands-on sessions with an early version of Sony’s upcoming PSVR2 for PlayStation 5. The anticipated new VR hardware doesn’t yet have an official price or launch date (just “early 2023”), but based on these impressions, it’s already making waves with critics.
A variety of outlets that got these hands-on demos describe the experience as being on par with presumably more powerful PC VR offerings from Valve or Meta. That said, it’s still going to be on Sony and other developers to create compelling games, and right now the new platform’s only exclusive experiences are a Horizon spin-off and a VR version of last year’s Resident Evil Village. The latter is playable for the first time in VR on Sony’s headset. There’s also a Walking Dead game and a Star Wars VR experience, both ports of prior PC/Quest VR games.
Overall, critics sound impressed, even wowed, by the experience. Among the qualities cited are the overall build quality and comfort, which seem to compete well with already-existing headsets. It’s still tethered, but the cable length sounds suitable enough. The graphical quality and overall “immersion,” in particular, are grabbing a lot of attention. One of the most bleeding edge features is the headset’s eye tracking, which allows the unit to optimize rendering based on where you’re looking, or in the future, lock gazes with other players. There’s also haptic feedback in the headset itself. Polygon notes that both features are used in Horizon, which is the most advanced showcase of the hardware so far.
Basically, it just needs some killer apps, and the quartet of existing demos sound like a solid start. Here are some highlights from each outlet’s hands-on impressions:
“Last week, I tried Sony’s new headset for the first time and was caught off guard by how stunning two of its marquee games, Horizon Call of the Mountain and Resident Evil Village, looked. They didn’t rely on particles or stylized art direction; they looked like AAA console games that just happened to be in VR. The past few years of playing Quest had recalibrated my expectations for how VR games should appear, and it was great to see games pushing forward visually once again without requiring an elaborate setup.”
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$663 Total Value
Humble Bundle 2K Megahits Game Bundle for Covenant House
Provide housing and supportive services to youth facing homelessness An array of games from 2K have been bundled together. You can pay what you want to support the cause, but if you want access to some of the big hits like Borderlands 3, The Bioshock Collection, XCOM: The Ultimate Collection, and Sid Meier’s Civilizatrion VI, you’ll have to pay at least $16. But hey, that’s hardly anything compared to the $663 value you’re getting from all 18 games combined.
“But what does it feel like to actually play games on the PSVR2, with all of its new bells and whistles? The actual PSVR2 hardware was a joy to use. Like most modern VR headsets, it lets you adjust the head strap to make sure everything rests comfortably on your noggin, and you can tweak the inter-pupillary distance (IPD) so that the actual lenses inside the headset are the right distance for you. The screens looked great, though things sometimes felt just a little bit hazy at the edges, which could also happen with the first PSVR.”
“Wow. Wow, wow, wow. That’s the word that keeps springing to mind when I try to sum up my time with PlayStation VR2. As a fervent fan of VR for many years now, it’s safe to say that my first hands-on experience with Sony’s upcoming headset wowed my VR-loving socks off. This sleek and stylish unit was all I could have wanted for an upgraded PSVR headset and much, much more.
In terms of technological and visual quality, this feels like one of the more memorable generational console leaps. Experiencing the difference in visuals between the PSVR1 and the PSVR2 brought back memories of graduating to the sparkly, sharp, high-definition games of a PS3 after spending years playing games on the PS2 in standard definition.”
“Sony has touted much higher visual fidelity for PSVR2, which, for the tech-spec obsessed people out there, amounts to an OLED display that offers a resolution of 2000×2040 per eye, HDR, refresh rates of 90Hz and 120Hz, and a 110-degree field of view. This is all impressive on paper, but when you experience it with the headset on, it’s a bit of magic.
The level of detail on display was genuinely overwhelming, mostly because I didn’t expect it from a VR game. I know how dismissive that sounds of all the VR games out there, of which there are certainly more than a few impressive-looking ones. However, there’s a clear line between the way a VR game and a non-VR game look—there’s a level of richness, detail, and polish that separates the two. Horizon Call of the Mountain blurs that line on PSVR2.”
“PlayStation VR2 thankfully feels like a modern entry into the VR landscape, with top-notch visual fidelity and comfortable ergonomics. Its haptics and adaptive triggers, if implemented well, will be a welcome addition to the immersive experience. As with all new pieces of hardware, the question now falls to whether there will be enough games to make the investment worth it. First-party games like Horizon Call of the Mountain certainly help assuage those fears, and while nothing has been announced yet, I would be shocked if the outstanding Half-Life: Alyx didn’t make its way to the platform.”
It’s always worth rooting around down the side of the bed, or in the drawers, when you stay in a hotel room. Who knows what exciting items may have been forgotten by the previous guest? Like, for instance, a top-secret Oculus VR headset. That’s what happened to hotel worker Ramiro Cardenas, who claims to have discovered and revealed to the world that Project Cambria is most likely due to be called the Meta Quest Pro. Then he made an unboxing video.
The headset was originally teased last October, with the Project Cambria moniker, when Mark Zuckerberg said it would be sold at the “high end of the price spectrum.” At the time, we learned that it would possess cameras that send high-res full-color video to its screens, alongside face and eye-tracking, and all manner of exciting algorithms.
OCULUS QUEST PRO!!!!
Now, a full month before its intended announcement date, the new device is available for all to see thanks to one especially forgetful hotel guest. A very excited Ramiro Cardenas, who posted the video as Zectariuz Gaming, pulls the new headset and handheld controllers from their box, while whispering in delight.
This new-look Meta Quest Pro headset looks like something a mad inventor would wear in a 1980s Disney live-action movie about a man who accidentally invents time travel. The controllers, meanwhile, seem to have dropped the hollow hoop design of the Meta Quest 2 and gone for a much simpler, neater form-factor.
While covering up identifying details, the pictures accompanying the video do include one that reveals the legend, “NOT FOR RESALE – ENGINEERING SAMPLE.” It’s in pretty swish packaging considering! But it does suggest the product may be close to release.
Project Cambria
The Verge reports that Cardenas told them he was able to reunite the headset with the person who had stayed in the hotel room, but not before—you know—uploading photos and a video of the device to Facebook to blow up Meta’s plan to reveal it during October’s Meta Connect.
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It’s quite the coincidence that Cardenas, and his Zectariuz Gaming page, had already taken a keen interest in the various forms of the Oculus. We have reached out to him to ask how this serendipitous event occurred.
We have of course also reached out to Meta to ask if they’ll bring forward the Pro’s announcement now, and indeed whether they’ll be mounting the engineer’s head on a pike outside their HQ. (We might not have phrased it exactly like that.)