Cybershoes For Oculus Quest Now Available On Amazon US

The Cybershoes for Oculus Quest are now available to purchase on Amazon in the United States after running successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, alongside announcements of increased game integration from Quest developers.

The Cybershoes will be available to purchase on Amazon US for $349, with compatibility with the original Oculus Quest and Oculus Quest 2. The device lets a seated player move their feet on the spot to move themselves in-game in Quest apps and games. Essentially, the shoes attach to your feet and allow you to control artificial movement in VR by rubbing your feet along the ground or moving your legs on the spot.

Cybershoes ran successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns with over 600 collective backers. The kits promised to crowdfunders began shipping earlier this month, and now the Cybershoes are available to the public in the United States via Amazon.

cybershoes quest

In addition to the Amazon launch, Cybershoes announced additional native support and integration with more Quest games. Both In Death: Unchained and The Wizards – Dark Times now support native Cybershoes integration, while App Lab title Ancient Dungeon will add support when it launches in Early Access later this year.

Some of the popular Team Beef classic game Quest ports will also receive support – Return to Castle Wolfenstein Quest and QuestZDoom will add Cybershoes integration on SideQuest “in the next few weeks.”

That being said, the Cybershoes are designed to work with any game that uses artificial stick movement on Quest, even if it hasn’t yet received native integration from the developers yet.

We tried the Cybershoes at the end of last year and found them to be an effective way to translate real movement into artificial VR movement when seated. We noted that it might help increase immersion or combat nausea for those who are affected by it. Likewise, it could be equally useful as an accessibility option for people who are unable to stand for long period of time or move around in a roomscale environment easily.

Long story short – the Cybershoes work well and exactly as intended, but your mileage may vary in terms of usefulness, depending on your personal preferences or situation. You can read our full impressions here.

The Cybershoes for Oculus Quest are available now on Amazon US for $349.

Update: Oculus Quest 2 Disappeared From Amazon All Over Europe

Update May 18: Facebook says “Amazon has temporarily paused selling Quest 2 in Europe, in response to an EU Commission filing this week regarding the foam interface. We shared back in April that the foam interface issue has been resolved, and we’re working closely with Amazon to have Quest 2 back on sale as soon as possible.”

Original story published May 17 appears below:

Oculus Quest 2’s listing disappeared on Amazon UK, Amazon France, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, and more.

Over the weekend if you searched for the product on any European Amazon store you’d only find a few unofficial accessories. Facebook’s official listings for the headset disappeared since late last week. By Monday, May 17,  the page now exists again in the United Kingdom but without the images, price, description, or reviews. At the time of this writing if you bought a Quest 2 from any of these Amazon stores, clicking it in your order history brings you to a blank page.

The listing is still up on the United States Amazon.com site, with no apparent changes.

Why’d this happen? We don’t know exactly, we reached out to Facebook to ask if this was an intentional decision, an action by Amazon, or related to regulatory concerns. We heard from a Facebook representative on May 17 that Amazon was “fixing the issue and the pages will be up soon.” Some folks on Reddit noticed the pages had disappeared and we’ve been seeking comment from Facebook since late last week. Amazon is one of the largest sales channels for VR’s largest selling headset right now, so we wanted to make sure we noted the situation for our readers who were curious what was happening.

Quest 2 was never listed on Amazon Germany, likely due to regulatory concerns surrounding the requirement for a Facebook account, and the data sharing implications.

We’ll update this post when the listing reappears for the affected countries.

NVIDIA CloudXR is Launching on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and AWS

NVIDIA is continuing the rollout of its CloudXR technology on the three leading cloud computing platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. With the tech readily available from these providers, companies building products and services on these cloud providers will be able to offer real-time XR streaming right off the shelf.

Today during the company’s GTC 2021 developer conference, Nvidia announced that its CloudXR tech is now available on Amazon Web Services, and it’s coming soon to both Microsoft’s Azure cloud and Google Cloud. That means the service will be available across the three leading cloud computing platforms, massively expanding access to cloud rendered AR and VR capabilities for companies building cloud applications. Nvidia also says it’s working to bring CloudXR to Tencent Cloud.

The hope of XR streaming is to remove the high-end hardware barrier by rendering immersive visuals in the cloud and streaming them to a host device which itself doesn’t need particularly beefy or expensive hardware; the host device could be a PC, smartphone, or standalone headset.

Nvidia has long offered a very similar streaming service called GeForce Now, but it’s for traditional games rather than XR. CloudXR is a specialized solution for the unique latency and performance requirements of VR and AR streaming.

Image courtesy NVIDIA

Nvidia says the CloudXR system can stream any SteamVR content to end users on Windows or Android systems without any special modification to the streamed application. That could be game and entertainment content or enterprise and productivity content like high-end 3D visualization or immersive design applications; whatever the operator wants to offer to its employees or customers.

Nvidia offers CloudXR client applications for PC, HoloLens 2, Android VR devices (including Oculus Quest), and Android AR devices. Today Nvidia also said it will soon launch CloudXR 2.1 which will support iOS, allowing iPhones and iPads to stream high-quality AR content from the cloud.

In addition to rolling out CloudXR on major cloud computing platforms, Nvidia also offers an SDK for the service which allows companies to run the capabilities on their own servers if desired.

While the idea of streaming AR and VR content from the cloud has been around for many years now, Nvidia’s CloudXR is by far the most mature and scalable solution available to date, and furthers its lead with today’s news of its off-the-shelf availability heading to the largest cloud computing providers.

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Amazon’s Upload Season 2 In Production As Star Plays Quest 2

Amazon’s VR-centered show Upload is in production on season 2 but there’s no announced premiere date yet.

The show’s star Robbie Amell posted to Instagram back in January that production was underway and, in recent days, he and his wife Italia Ricci have been posting videos sporting the Quest 2 at home. They appear to have been playing Top Golf with Pro Putt and Pistol Whip on Oculus Quest 2 in a pair of videos posted to Facebook’s Instagram. We reached out to Amazon to see if there was a premiere date to announce, but nothing yet.

The original season premiered in May on Amazon Prime featuring a “middletopian” future where people upload themselves into a kind of afterlife once they are done with the real world. It’s not quite utopian because the trip is one way and these afterlives are run by competing for-profit corporations with varying business models and limits imposed on residents. Overall, the show makes for some pretty good commentary on our current state of technology. The Office creator Greg Daniels came up with the series and we really enjoyed the 10-episode first season.

Amell play’s the show’s lead Nathan and when we talked to him last year he was already familiar with PSVR and Oculus Rift, and he’d even tried a location-based VR experience in Las Vegas. Now it looks like he’s got his hands on the latest Oculus Quest 2 standalones from Facebook. His character spent much of the first season in a simulated place called Lakeview made by a company called “Horizen”, which is pretty fitting considering Facebook’s limited release social platform is called “Horizon.”

You can find Upload’s first season on Amazon Prime and we’ll provide updates as soon as there’s a release date for the second season.