Magic Leap announced new programs that will run across 2020, including two separate Developer Day events and a new program called ‘Access Hardware’ for developers.
Announced in a blog post, Access Hardware is a new program that aims to provide developers with Magic Leap devices to use for development. Magic Leap notes that the program is specifically for “developers who are serious about publishing applications with Magic Leap.” The program will also include support with a developer relations team, with the resulting app receiving priority status when it is ready for publishing.
Developers who want to be considered for the Access Hardware program can apply online. Magic Leap said it is looking at “technical experience, project feasibility, and the overall quality of your submission” in applications, with a focus on “ideas that solve problems and create opportunities for enterprise markets and customers.”
Magic Leap also announced LEAP Developer Days, which will run at Magic Leap headquarters in Florida in May. The events will be two separate two-day events, running May 19-20 and 21-22 respectively. Developers will meet face-to-face with Magic Leap’s staff and talk to engineers and designers about the Magic Leap platform and development of AR applications. You can read more specifics about what’s on offer at the dev days on the Magic Leap blog. Applications will open later this month.
Oculus Quest users are now able to select their own home environments from a small selection of options provided by Facebook. Some users, however, also found a way to install custom environments in place of the officially available ones.
While the new Oculus Rift home and Winter Lodge home environments for the Oculus Quest are pleasant, you might have also seen some amazing custom environments, such as the Simpson’s lounge room or the throne room from Game of Thrones.
Here’s our step-by-step guide on installing custom home environments on your Oculus Quest, using SideQuest.
Before You Start
Perhaps the most important step before proceeding involves checking that the additional environments are available on your Oculus Quest. The custom environments installed below only work because they essentially install themselves over the additional two environment options provided by Oculus, Classic Home and Winter Lodge. However, the environments feature, while introduced last year, is still being gradually rolled out to users. This means that you might not have the feature yet, and will not be able to install custom environments.
If you’re not sure if you have custom environments on your device yet, simply go to Settings on your Quest, select “See All” and then look for a tab reading “Virtual Environment,” as pictured below. If this tab is present and you’re able to change to Classic Home or Winter Lodge, then you’re all set.
If you can’t see the Virtual Environments tab, then you haven’t received the feature yet. This means that you just have to wait until Oculus rolls out the feature to your device, which could happen whenever.
Some users online reported methods of forcing the feature to enable, however, upon trying to verify these methods ourselves, we couldn’t recreate them and the “Virtual Environment” tab remained missing. If you don’t have Virtual Environments, you will likely just have to wait until you can install custom ones.
Before proceeding, you’ll also need to switch to both the Classic Home and Winter Lodge environments at least once, if you haven’t already, to ensure they’re downloaded onto your Quest before the following steps.
A word of caution…
When sideloading and installing modified content onto your Quest, you do need to keep in mind that you are putting content onto your device that has not been approved by Facebook and could potentially damage your device or be malicious in nature, even if it doesn’t appear so at first.
It is also important to be aware of the Oculus Content Guidelines, to ensure you’re not violating anything with the content you’re sideloading or modifying on your device. You might want to give our report on Oculus’ Content Guidelines and sideloading a read before you jump into the thick of it.
SideQuest
This guide uses SideQuest, a third-party tool that allows you to perform a whole bunch of tasks and modifications on your Quest from your computer. So, to install custom environments, you will need to be familiar with sideloading content on your Quest and you’ll need to make sure your Quest is in developer mode. If you’ve sideloaded content or used SideQuest before, then you can move onto the next section.
If you haven’t sideloaded anything before, or don’t even know what that means, check out our guide on how to sideload content on the Oculus Quest. To move on with installing custom environments, you’ll want to follow the sideloading guide right up until the “Sideloading content from the SideQuest store page” section.
If you’ve followed everything up until that point, you can move on with the guide below.
The Quest Homes Discord Server
The Quest Homes Discord server is the biggest community that we know of for custom Quest environments. There’s a channel specifically for linking new environments for download from creators, along with FAQ and Help channels as well.
In some cases, you’ll have the option to download the environment as a Classic Home or Winter Lodge version. This means that it will replace either the Classic Home or Winter Lodge environment, so if you want to have two custom environments installed, you’ll need to make sure you download one as the latter and the other as the former.
Once you have your custom environment apk downloaded to your computer, you can move to the next step.
For a few examples of some custom environments we downloaded from the server, check out the video below:
Removing Existing Environments, Installing New Ones
Once you have your custom environments downloaded and ready to be install, follow these steps:
1. Plug your Quest into your computer and open SideQuest
Navigate to the “Currently Installed Apps” section on the top right of the navigation bar (the square grid icon).
2. Use the search function to search for “environment”
This should bring up two results — a package for the Classic Home (Rift Home), and one for the Winter Lodge. Click on the cog next to the one you want to replace, and press “Uninstall App” on the pop-up window.
Which environment you want to replace will depend on what your downloaded custom environment supports. Some environment downloads allow you to choose a Winter Lodge or Classic Home download, while others don’t and force you to replace one or the other with the custom environment. Most download links will indicate this clearly, with a title like “Custom Simpsons Home – Living Room (Winter Lodge).”
Make sure you uninstall the right environment for the .apk file you’ve downloaded.
In the instance that you are replacing both, with two different custom environments, you can uninstall both packages in SideQuest.
3. Locate your custom environment .apk
Once you’ve uninstalled the existing environments, as per step 2, simply drag and drop your custom environment .apk file onto the SideQuest window. It will then install the custom environment in place of the old one. You can check the install progress in SideQuest’s tasks tab in the top right of the navigation bar.
Switching Environments
Once installed, you can switch environments in the Virtual Environments tab in your settings.
However, note that the settings icons won’t change to your custom environment — if you replace the Winter Lodge environment with the Simpsons living room, it will still show up as the Winter Lodge in settings. When you switch to that environment, however, your new custom environment should display.
If you want to install other custom environments in the future, simply follow the same steps above to uninstall your current environments and replace them with new ones.
Restoring Old Environments
To restore the default Classic Home and Winter Lodge environments, simply follow steps 1-2 above to uninstall any custom environments from your Quest, using SideQuest. Then, if you go back to the Virtual Environments tab in your Quest and switch to one of the default homes, your Quest will redownload the default environments once again.
Before doing this, we recommend switching back to the uninstallable, default ‘Quest Dome’ environment to avoid any complications. If you encounter any problems with your home environment disappearing completely while switching or uninstalling environments, try restarting your Quest.
Some Notes
When installing a custom environment, it will retain the ambient noises of the default environment it replaces. For example, you might still be able to faintly hear the crackle of the Classic Home’s hearth when using the Simpsons Living Room environment.
Some custom environment downloads also offer audio replacements, with music that often matches the theme of the environment. The process for installation for these variant environments should stay roughly the same, but we would urge users to proceed with caution. While we haven’t tested custom audio in environments ourselves, we have seen reports of custom audio persisting in environments even after switching environments or uninstalling the environment in question.
That should cover everything you need to know on how to install custom Oculus Quest home environments. Any questions? Let us know in the comments below and we’ll try to help out where possible.
This article was originally published on the February 11 ,2020 and was updated to indicate that the ‘Virtual Environments’ tab disappeared from users’ Settings menu on February 12, 2020. The article was updated and republished on February 20, 2020 to indicate that the tab is now available to users once more and that the disappearance was not intended on Facebook’s part.
Facebook acquired a visual-based positional tracking company called Scape Technologies, according to Techcrunch.
Scape Technologies was based in London and founded in 2016. It was working on a technology that could pinpoint location with better accuracy than just GPS. The company called this a “Visual Positioning Service,” which worked on computer vision and would allow developers to take advantage of highly accurate location data when building apps. On the website, Scape says that it was “harnessing AI to allow camera devices to recognize their surroundings, outdoors and at an infinite scale.”
The technology was initially developed with augmented reality apps in mind as well as other areas such as robotics. The end goal was to provide any camera-equipped machine the ability to interpret and understand its surroundings. When considered in that context, you might be able to guess why Facebook was interested in an acquisition.
Two Facebook representatives have now replaced Scape’s previous venture capital representatives on the board, with Facebook now owning more than 75% of the company, a majority control. Techcrunch pinned the price of the acquisition at “about $40 million.” Given the nature of the technology, Facebook could intend on integrating Scape Technologies’ SDK and engines into their own existing VR and AR technology, in some way or form. If Scape’s visual position service is as accurate as they claim, it could prove useful in Facebook’s headsets that use cameras to provide inside-out tracking to determine the player’s position.
The acquisition is the latest in a long line of purchases by Facebook to strengthen its position in VR and AR.
Everything you do on your Oculus Quest starts in the home environment – you can change your settings, purchase apps and launch yourself into virtual worlds. Users now have a way to create custom home environments, including locations from The Simpsons and other popular movies and TV shows.
From late last year, Facebook started to gradually roll out new environments to Oculus Quest users. While not everyone received the new environments immediately (and some still may not have received them), the feature allows Quest users to choose between the default Oculus Home environment and two new official Oculus environments, including a classic home location from the original Rift and a winter lodge.
However, users also found a way to use custom 3D environments in place of the new Oculus environments. While this method is not officially sanctioned by Oculus and is facilitated by third-party tools such as SideQuest, users created some amazing new environments based on famous settings from pop culture movies and TV shows.
As you can see, we tried out a bunch of custom environments such as the house from the Simpsons, the throne room from Game of Thrones, the garage from Rick and Morty and a version of Oculus’ winter lodge environment that replaces the standard skyline with a skyline of Gotham City.
The environments are impressive and surprisingly detailed. The video doesn’t do the environments justice either – while the default Quest homes are quite small, I maxed out the allowed guardian boundaries for the throne room and still didn’t have enough room to walk around the entire environment. Likewise, there is something very surreal about standing in the iconic Simpsons living room that you don’t quite get from the video.
We recommend trying the environments out for yourself. We’ll be writing up a proper how-to article on the process of installing custom environments, but until then, you can join the Quest Custom Home’s Discord server, where you can find some basic instructions and links to the custom environments.
Have you tried out some custom environments on your Quest already? Let us know your favorites in the comments below and keep an eye out for our how-to guide in the coming days.
Sketchfab’s platform surpassed 3 million members last week.
The platform allows creators to host 3D content and make it available for sale and download to others. Sketchfab’s online library features 3D content and models created on a variety of different platforms, including content that was created with immersive VR creation tools such as Tilt Brush, Oculus Quill and others.
The platform was founded almost eight years ago, “on the idea that both the creation and consumption of 3D content will become an ever-increasing part of our digital lives.” The company said that reaching 3,000,000 users was “a huge validation of this assumption.” Sketchfab reached 2 million users in November 2018.
According to the company, the Sketchfab team consists of 30 people. The team detailed some of the most popular uses of the Sketchfab store and platform in their announcement blog post, which you can read about here.
Sketchfab said that back in November 2018 the platform also reached 1 billion views of its 3D models. Now, they say their library includes 300,000 models available entirely for free, in addition to the paid models also available. You can apply to sell your 3D models on the site here.
While Tilt Brush and Oculus Quill are perhaps two of the most well-known VR tools for 3D model creation, we also recently tried the revamped MasterpieceVR Studio Suite. The Suite not only includes Masterpiece Creator, allowing you to create exportable 3D models, but also Masterpiece Motion, which allows you to import and animate 3D models.
In a 2019 Year in Review post, Valve detailed an overview of SteamVR improvements in the last year and announced that the team is working on SteamVR 2.0, with an eye on a release during this year.
In the ‘Looking Ahead to 2020’ section of the post, Valve wrote, “The team is hard at work on SteamVR 2.0, which will feature a number of customer experience improvements.” No further details were given on the what specific improvements the update might include, however, we reached out to Valve for comment and will update the post if we receive a response.
Valve also stated that they’re looking to expand the Steam PC Cafe Program, which supports VR arcades and launched in beta in 2019. The team is working on expanding the platform to also support schools and libraries.
With regards to SteamVR improvements in 2019, Valve highlighted the launch of their own headset, the Valve Index, while also noting that SteamVR supported almost two-dozen different headsets in 2019. SteamVR received over 100 beta updates last year, which Valve noted was mostly “a year of stability fixes” for the platform.
It’s going to be a big year for Valve’s VR efforts — not only do we now have confirmation that the team working on SteamVR 2.0, but the even bigger release is Valve’s flagship VR game, Half-Life: Alyx. Valve noted in their post that the team is “pushing towards a March 2020 release,” after the game’s reveal in November last year.
There’s also a bunch of SteamVR and Valve Index games scheduled for release this year that we’re looking forward to playing, which you can read about here.
An upcoming asymmetrical VR game, SMUSH.TV, will allow VR players to compete in a frantic and competitive environment against up to 5 non-VR players. If you imagine playing VR inside a game of Tetris — except that the blocks are also being sent at you in real time by your friends — then you’re probably on the right track.
Asymmetrical VR is the term used when a VR games involves one player in VR while one or more players can interact with, or influence, the player in VR through non-VR devices, such as mobiles phones, consoles, or a computer. There have been some great examples of asymmetrical VR games over the years, such as Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Acron: Attack of the Squirrels, Reiko’s Fragments, and Eye in the Sky.
In SMUSH.TV, the VR player will attempt to avoid being squashed by blocks sent to crush them by the non-VR players, while also attempting to reach the top of the tower. It’s also got some rhythm elements to the gameplay and will allow for custom songs to be used in-game. SMUSH.TV also supports Steam’s Remote Play Anywhere feature, meaning you can join up to play the game online as well with friends.
The developers commented that they “went into development with the goal of evoking the same feelings that playing games like Super Smash Brothers or Street Fighter locally with friends/at tournaments do.” However, on that note, they did warn that the game isn’t easy and has a significant learning curve when you consider all the different levels, songs, and power-ups.
SMUSH.TV launches into early access on February 27th for PC VR. You can find more info on the game’s Steam page.
A controller-enabled crouch via a button press was initially the only option for Saints & Sinners players, which meant that the virtual world moved with you in a 3-DoF-esque fashion if you tried to physically crouch while playing.
Here’s a full list of the fixes and updates in the latest 2020.02.0-158143 version of the game:
While the game was met with a generally positive, if not pleasantly surprised, reception upon launch, the bizarre lack of physical crouch support was noted by many online, as well as in our own review. However, developers Skydance Interactive were quick to respond to the community and added in an alpha version for physical crouching support in a hotfix patch just days after the game’s launch.
However, the alpha version was not enabled by default and actually had to be enabled outside of the game, by editing the game’s setting files on your computer. So while the fix was there in an early stage for those who knew about it, there were no doubt many who still weren’t aware of the option. As of the latest update, Saints & Sinners’s physical crouching support has progressed to beta and is now enabled for all players by default.
The Walking Dead was perhaps one of the franchises we least expected to produce an amazing VR game, however we were really impressed with Saints & Sinners in our review. Have you been enjoying the game? Let us know what you think down in the comments below.
The latest 8.0 update to Oculus Browser adds experimental support for the Oculus Quest’s hand tracking feature. That means you can use your hands in WebXR apps, which are VR experiences that run natively on a browser page, without the need to download anything.
The feature won’t work in all WebXR apps natively and is not true hand tracking support just yet — it only enables hand tracking to work as an emulated controller. The update arrives just as Facebook adds enhanced support for hand tracking on Quest.
While the experimental feature is not listed in the Oculus Browser 8.0 release notes, a member of the Oculus WebVR/XR team, Artem Bolgar, tweeted about the addition earlier today. As noted by Artem, the support works by emulating controllers and doesn’t yet support tracking a full hand model like you would use in Oculus Home yet.
In the example app linked by Bolgar, the feature tracks your hands to move the in-game controller models in 6DoF. You can then point at objects using the cursor and pinch to make a selection, which will change the color of the cubes. Although you can see this displayed in the video below, it doesn’t show the pinching motion of my fingers, as there’s no in-game representation of the action (as the hand tracking is simply emulating controllers).
The new feature is not enabled by default and needs to be enabled first. You can enable it by navigating to chrome://flags in Oculus Browser and turning on the WebVR hand tracking option. There are a couple of different input methods, but the one we used in the video and the one that worked best is “hands and pointers.”
While the feature is only very experimental for now, and clearly not a proper implementation of full controller-free hand tracking in WebXR applications, it is the first step towards full support. This would open up a wealth of possibility, such as using your own hands to shoot webs as Spider-Man in a WebXR app that runs entirely through the Oculus Browser.
Golf Pool VR does pretty much exactly what you would expect from the title. That’s right, you’ll able to play 8-ball pool games, but with a golf club in VR.
Golf Pool VR is set in five different environments across 10 single player levels, while also featuring a 2-player competitive mode. The trailer, embedded above, shows one of these environments – a rainy cyberpunk-esque city that sees you adopt an armor-clad avatar playing pool on the side of the road. In the game’s Steam description, the developer mentions “the solitude of the moon or the adrenaline rush of a game or two on top of a skyscraper” as other settings, along with screenshots that include a garden environment.
The project has been a solo development project over the last 1.3 years, according to the developer on Reddit. There is currently no set release date, however, the developer noted that if everything “goes smoothly“, the game should release on Steam in around two months time.
Golf Pool VR is certainly putting a spin on the VR golf genre and it caught our eye when we saw it. We’ve had some other notable, more traditional VR golf titles over the years, such as Everybody’s Golf VR on PSVR, which we found to be a solid VR adaptation of the series. Meanwhile, on Oculus Quest, Cloudlands 2 launched in August of last year. We’ll be curious to see what comes of this idea and we’ll provide updates as they are available.
While the game was met with a generally positive, if not pleasantly surprised, reception upon launch, the bizarre lack of physical crouch support was noted by many online,