Category: Social Virtual Reality

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‘Rec Room’ is Putting on Its First-ever ‘Rec Rocks’ Music Festival This Weekend

Rec Room, the popular social VR platform, is putting on its first in-game music festival this weekend, suitably dubbed ‘Rec Rocks’.

The immersive concert experience is set to take place this weekend, March 11th & 12th, and feature headliners Tokyo Machine (EDM) and pianist/singer/songwriter Ethan Bortnick.

Check out the full list of artists below:

  • Tokyo Machine – EDM
  • Ethan Bortnick – Alt-Pop
  • Haven – Pop
  • Charlie Curtis Beard -Rap
  • Suzy Shinn – Rock
  • The Royal Foundry – Alt
  • Akintoye – Rap
  • Clinton Kane – Pop

Rec Room says its free two-day music festival will let you explore virtual stages set in the environment of an open canyon, with Tokyo Machine kicking things off on the mainstage on March 11th with his electrifying beat, which will also include some new tracks too.

Image courtesy Rec Room

“The first time I played Rec Room 6 years ago I was blown away by how immersive the games like laser tag and ping-pong could be”, said Tokyo Machine. “I’m super pumped to be a part of Rec Rocks and will be premiering a whole set of unreleased songs with a performance that will be unlike what my fans have seen before!”

Ethan Bortnick will take the main stage on March 12th where he will perform fan-favorite tracks. Bortnick previously hosted an in-game prom for the Rec Room community last spring after he missed out on his in-real-life prom due to COVID-19.

“Rec Room will be the first stop on my 2023 tour,” said Bortnick. “As the technology in Rec Room continues to advance, that allows for even more elaborate lighting, staging and the entire set is crazier and showcases everything I can’t do in a real live setting”, Bortnick said.

The Royal Foundry | Image courtesy Rec Room

The free music festival is set to include exclusive artist merch, and Community Creator Booths where festival-goers can buy in-game inventions and merch from the creator community.

Check out the full schedule of the music festival here to see when performances are set to kick off. To attend Rec Rocks, make sure to download and setup your Rec Room account across your chosen device, which includes iOS, Android, Steam (flstacreen), SteamVR headsets, Meta Quest, Meta PC VR, PlayStation 4/5, PSVR, and Xbox.

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New ‘Rec Room’ Feature Lets Players Design Completely Unique Clothing

Rec Room, the social VR platform, just pushed out an update that lets its Plus members create custom shirts for the first time, allowing you to draw mostly anything with the stroke of a virtual pen and apply the graphic to a t-shirt. The studio says users will also be able to sell those shirts on the marketplace at some point in the future.

In comparison to VRChat, Rec Room offers a decidedly more limited way of customizing avatars since it relies on in-platform tools. Although Rec Room does offer full-body avatar suits now, it’s a far cry from the sort of customization that standard 3D modeling tools allow. Still, the studio is making steps to let their millions of users express themselves in a way that conforms to guidelines. After all, Rec Room is one of the few social platforms with dedicated junior accounts (under 13) that are both COPPA compliant and kidSAFE certified.

Now the studio released a tutorial video on how Plus members can create custom shirts. Here’s a quick explainer, which shows how users can draw and apply the graphic to both the front and back of a shirt:

As you’d imagine, there’s also an explicit warning against inappropriate shirt designs that would breach the platform’s code of conduct. As far as t-shirts go, Rec Room prohibits designs that include stuff that features sexist, racist, discriminatory or harassing language, symbols, or behavior. Like all of its user-created content, it’s relying on the game’s player base to self-police and report content that breaks guidelines.

Making custom shirts is only open to paid ‘Plus’ members, an optional membership program that costs $8 per month. Plus includes a few notable perks beyond free accounts, such as 100 saved outfit slots, token drops each month, discounts on store items, and the ability to earn tokens by selling things like room keys to minigames or digital items such as gadgets. Some members can even sell those items and convert their in-game tokens into real cash—a strong incentive to keep the fresh content flowing from third-party creators.

And there’s no shortage of ready customers either, as Rec Room’s player base has recently grown to 3 million monthly active VR users. That figure is actually a “pretty low percentage” of overall active players, the studio says, as most users access the game through traditional gaming platforms like iOS, Android, PlayStation, and Xbox.

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Rec Room is currently running an art contest, the theme of which is ‘sports’. This includes the new Custom Shirts category. To learn more, check out the art contest rules and submission form to get started.

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ENGAGE Reveals First Look at ‘Link’ Metaverse Platform for Enterprise & Education

ENGAGE, the XR education and enterprise metaverse company, today unveiled its Link social platform which the company calls a “fully featured corporate metaverse.”

Previously codenamed Oasis when it was first revealed in June 2021, the Ireland-based studio calls Link a “professional metaverse,” as it was designed to host persistent virtual worlds which serve as gateways to individual spaces where employees, students and individual users can interact.

The studio published a six-minute first look at Link today, shown below:

In the video, ENGAGE’s Chris Madsen takes us through the basics of the Link platform starting with ‘Central Plaza’, a jumping off point to other worlds and as well as serving as a meetup location for events. Heading through any one of the portals takes you to what the company dubs a ‘Metaworld’, or virtual persistent locations built specifically for individual businesses.

Madsen then shows off two more hubs, ‘Enterprise Plaza’ and ‘Education Plaza’, which respectively organize portals according to business and educational content.

Link also features an ‘Apartment Plaza’, which hosts configurable personal spaces for anyone who joins the platform, available as a sort of Home space not just for enterprise or education-focused users. The user’s virtual penthouse is what Madsen calls “an opportunity to have friends and family over, to socialize, hangout, watch movies and have a great time.” Besides being able to customize the apartment, Madsen shows off a ‘simulation room’ that lets you launch bespoke experiences.

This follows the studio’s €9 million (~$10.7 million) fund raise last year which spurred the creation of Link, which Engage XR said at the time would be pitched as an “opportunity for corporate users to expand their customer base and provide immersive services at a reasonable price.”

Engage is accessible via SteamVR headsets, Meta Quest 2, Pico headsets, Vive Focus Plus, in addition to desktop and mobile devices. To enquire about pricing and additional features, head over to the company’s website to learn more.

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ENGAGE Reveals First Look at ‘Link’ Metaverse Platform for Enterprise & Education

ENGAGE, the XR education and enterprise metaverse company, today unveiled its Link social platform which the company calls a “fully featured corporate metaverse.”

Previously codenamed Oasis when it was first revealed in June 2021, the Ireland-based studio calls Link a “professional metaverse,” as it was designed to host persistent virtual worlds which serve as gateways to individual spaces where employees, students and individual users can interact.

The studio published a six-minute first look at Link today, shown below:

In the video, ENGAGE’s Chris Madsen takes us through the basics of the Link platform starting with ‘Central Plaza’, a jumping off point to other worlds and as well as serving as a meetup location for events. Heading through any one of the portals takes you to what the company dubs a ‘Metaworld’, or virtual persistent locations built specifically for individual businesses.

Madsen then shows off two more hubs, ‘Enterprise Plaza’ and ‘Education Plaza’, which respectively organize portals according to business and educational content.

Link also features an ‘Apartment Plaza’, which hosts configurable personal spaces for anyone who joins the platform, available as a sort of Home space not just for enterprise or education-focused users. The user’s virtual penthouse is what Madsen calls “an opportunity to have friends and family over, to socialize, hangout, watch movies and have a great time.” Besides being able to customize the apartment, Madsen shows off a ‘simulation room’ that lets you launch bespoke experiences.

This follows the studio’s €9 million (~$10.7 million) fund raise last year which spurred the creation of Link, which Engage XR said at the time would be pitched as an “opportunity for corporate users to expand their customer base and provide immersive services at a reasonable price.”

Engage is accessible via SteamVR headsets, Meta Quest 2, Pico headsets, Vive Focus Plus, in addition to desktop and mobile devices. To enquire about pricing and additional features, head over to the company’s website to learn more.

The post ENGAGE Reveals First Look at ‘Link’ Metaverse Platform for Enterprise & Education appeared first on Road to VR.

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Quest Update to Finally Make Home Space Social, v41 Rollout Starting Next Week

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been taking a personal approach lately to revealing new features coming to Quest 2. Now Zuckerberg has revealed that in the v41 software update coming sometime next week, Quest’s Horizon Home space will finally give you the ability to invite friends and tour content as a party, including 360 videos and games.

The company first announced Horizon Home at Connect late last year, which promised to someday bring to Quest 2 a simple, first-party place to meet up with friends. Over the past few months, the company added an array of social features, including teleport nodes in v38 to Horizon Home so users could more freely move around the virtual room. It was still missing the ability to share that space with a friend though.

In a video posted to Zuckerberg’s Facebook Timeline today, the Meta CEO hashed out a few of the features of v41 as he chatted with legendary free climber Alex Honnold, and watched a 360 video of Honnold breaking down a death-defying session the climber had in the Dolomites. Check out the video below:

Zuckerberg says the new features in Horizon Home will be available “as soon as you put on the headset.”

“Invite friends to hang out, watch videos together, or jump into apps right from your virtual home,” Zuckerberg writes. “More options to customize your home space currently in development. Also, check out Alex’s 360 film The Soloist VR where he takes you 1,000 ft up free climbing the Dolomites!”

It’s not exactly clear when we’ll see v41, however a Meta spokesperson told Road to VR we should be expecting it sometime next week.

There’s still plenty of other features that will need clarifying, including the number of users supported for a single Quest home space—voice parties currently support up to eight people—and how joining games and launching 360 videos together will work.

Zuckerberg tends to go light on the details before the Oculus blog tosses out specifics though, so we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled there in the meantime.

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One of VR’s Biggest Social Hangouts is Getting Upgraded Avatars with More Convincing Motion Tracking

Among social VR platforms, VRChat is known for being remarkably flexible thanks to how it lets its users import custom avatars built using standard game development tools. Now the company is releasing an update that makes avatars even more realistic in how they move.

VRChat announced it was bringing a “completely revamped” inverse kinematics (IK) system to the platform, which is used to estimate in-game body positions relative to the user’s physical movement. If you’ve seen an avatar’s elbow bend weirdly, or their legs drag on the floor in a strange shuffle, there’s an IK system there trying to compensate for the lack of sufficient tracking data.

The update has been in beta for a while now, so you might have seen other users sporting some form of the refreshed IK system lately, however this update makes it broadly available to the entire userbase.

The studio says its VRChat IK 2.0 system now includes improved elbow positioning, better motion and pose handling, up to eleven-point tracking, and calibration saving for easier setup for users who have multiple Vive Trackers for more detailed full-body tracking.

New options in the update also include the ability to measure avatars by height, lock-in a viewpoint for better body sizing, knee tracking, chest tracking, and both elbow and shoulder tracking for users with standard two-controller kit and not an array of Vive Tracker pucks. You can check out the entire changelog here for more info on exactly what’s in the new update.

Released on Steam Early Access in 2017, the free social VR app is still going strong, with SteamCharts estimating that around 20,000 players regularly connect per day now via Steam. The platform is also available on Quest and Oculus PC natively, which isn’t accounted for in those estimations.

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Meta to Merge ‘Venues’ Event Space into ‘Horizon Worlds’ Social VR Platform

Horizon Worlds is Meta’s social VR platform for Quest 2 and Rift which includes ways for users to explore together, create their own rooms, and play mini-games. The company is making good on its vision to mold the social platform into more of a monolithic metaverse app by folding its live event app Horizon Venues entirely into Worlds.

The change is slated to take place starting June 6th, the company says in a blog post, which will allow Horizon Worlds users direct access to Venues events, such as live sports, concerts, comedy, and user-created meet-ups.

Horizon Worlds is still in somewhat of a beta, as only 18+ users from the US and Canada have access right now. That means that once the company transitions Venues into Worlds on June 6th, only those users will be able to access it, including minors and Quest 1 users. The company says it’s still publishing highlights and replays of Venues events in Oculus TV.

“We’ve experimented with portals between Horizon Venues and Horizon Worlds over the past few months, and we’ve seen just how powerful it can be when you can seamlessly jump between a game world to a hang out space—then head right into a big show with your friends,” Meta says.

Meta says it will roll out Horizon Worlds in more countries at some point this summer. The company hasn’t intimated any significant event between now and Connect 2022, which typically takes place in Fall. It might suggest the wider rollout of Horizon Worlds won’t feature the sort of fanfare associated with some of its most celebrated platform exclusive features and games—although that’s pure speculation.

Meanwhile, Meta is vying for more third-party developer talent to help build out Worlds by expanding developer programs to include training on how to build games and experiences which ought to help attract more users from competing social apps, such as Rec Room, VR Chat, and Bigscreen.

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Quest Users Can Now Watch YouTube Together Thanks to ‘Bigscreen’ Update

Bigscreen is putting Meta to shame again, as the VR hangout app just got a serious bump in functionality for Quest users and PC VR users alike. Now VR’s favorite social viewing app includes native YouTube support, so you can watch anything on YouTube with friends and strangers.

Bigscreen has now added the version of YouTube you’d expect to find on a console or smart TVs, directly integrated into the VR hangout app. The update is out now for all supported headsets, including Meta Quest and all SteamVR and WindowsMR headsets.

This means you can use all YouTube features you’d expect, including logging in to your standard account or YouTube Premium account for ad-free viewing, watching YouTube TV for live sports and TV, and even renting movies through YouTube. Just like everything on Bigscreen, there aren’t any sharing limitations so you can easily pop on whatever you want: a TV show, rented movie, or live sport for friends and strangers.

For PC VR headsets, this also essentially means you don’t need to use the desktop mirroring function since YouTube is now baked in like all of the app’s other channels.

Following an update in December, this also means you’ll be able to share that screen with up to 15 people per room. Previous updates also brought improved spatial audio, new environments, and better remote desktop capability, which allows Quest users to stream their PC into their virtual room to share with friends.

Bigscreen says it has plenty more in the pipeline too. In the next few months, the studio says it’s looking forward to launching “a huge improvement to our Social VR platform with a new friends system, Bluetooth keyboard/gamepad support for Remote Desktop, and more,” Bigscreen CEO Darshan Shankar told Road to VR.

Bigscreen is available for free on all major headsets except for PSVR. There’s still no ETA on when to expect the app on PSVR although the developers have said in the past that its optimizations on Quest have essentially laid the foundation for PSVR in the future.

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Meta Planning Web-based Version of ‘Horizon Worlds’ With Lower Creator Fees Than Its VR Platform

Meta announced earlier this week it would eventually allow creators to sell items on its social VR platform, Horizon Worlds, adding that the company would take around 50% of revenue as its cut. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth now says however Horizon Worlds is also getting a web-based version at some point which will feature lower creator fees.

Horizon Worlds is currently only available to Quest users in the US and Canada, although the company seems to be gearing up to expand with the announcement of a web-based version of the metaverse platform. For now, Horizon Worlds lets Quest users to chat and play mini-games, but the company is also nudging developers to build their own games, experiences, and items—all of it sellable on a future marketplace.

According to Bosworth, the platform fee for the web-based version of Horizon Worlds will only be 25%, which is a significant difference from the 47.5% fee previously announced for the VR version.

Speaking to The Verge, Meta VP of Horizon Vivek Sharma revealed its also working on bringing Horizon to mobile phones at some point later this year, and is currently in talks around releasing on game consoles too—two big steps in growing its userbase beyond the Quest platform.

Bosworth says the 25% platform fee will also be applied to other platforms beyond the web-based version, albeit after Apple/Google/Whoever takes their cut. Like on the Meta platform for Quest, that works out to (depending on the platform) more or less an effective rate of 47.5% of anything sold on Horizon Worlds to Meta, leaving 52.5% to the creator.

Meta’s Horizon Worlds is undoubtedly headed into competition with Roblox, but it’s clearly eyeing other successful VR social platforms such as VRChat and Rec Room too, the latter of which announced last week that it had hit three million monthly active VR users—yes, VR users.

Granted, Rec Room, which is available on basically every console and mobile platform now, says its VR userbase is a “pretty low percentage” of overall active players—something that Meta likely also suspects as it marches ever closer to its goal of establishing its post-Facebook metaverse presence.

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Wendy’s is Opening a Metaverse Hamburger Shop in ‘Horizon Worlds’

Wendy’s is more than a chain restaurant that serves square-shaped burgers. It’s also a marketing powerhouse that’s known for kicking off the trend of companies openly roasting their competitors (and other people) on Twitter. Now Wendy’s is taking a big first step into VR April 2nd with its upcoming ‘Wendyverse’, which will be hosted on Meta’s Horizon Worlds.

Horizon Worlds is Meta’s social platform for its VR headsets, Quest 2 and Oculus PC. Worlds still in a pretty early state—it’s only currently open to 18+ users in the US & Canada—however it’s already demonstrated its role as a brand engagement vehicle in the short few months after exiting invite-only beta.

Last month, Meta opened a virtual version of the arcade depicted in its Super Bowl Questy advert, which offered up VR users a host of mini-games and avatar costumes to mess around in. Granted, Questy’s was a fictional brand, but it must have been an intentionally appealing usecase of how brands could use Meta’s social VR platform to promote their wares.

The Wendyverse hype video shows off a very Questy-inspired space that includes its fair share of costumes and mini-games: a type of shuffleboard using a burger, a basketball court with a hamburger-shaped basketball, and a carnival-style darts game using straws and Frosties.

This comes amid Meta’s greater push to incentivize third-party developers to create for Horizon Worlds via a new program that’s offering training and over $500,000 in funding and cash prizes. Much like established social VR platforms like VRChat and Rec Room, Horizon Worlds emphasizes user-generated rooms as a big attraction.

If you’re interested in getting a crack at the Wendyverse, download Horizon Worlds on Quest 2 or Oculus PC and follows these instructions:

  1. Turn over your left wrist and select the Three Line icon from the Personal Menu, and then select the Pin icon (towards the bottom)
  2. Select the Magnifying Glass icon (in the upper right-hand corner)
  3. Use the virtual keyboard to search for “Wendyverse”
  4. Click the picture to travel to the world

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