Google’s directly competing services aren’t on Vision Pro, but that doesn’t mean the company isn’t doing business on Apple’s headset altogether, as it has now brought two of its most influential VR games to Vision Pro.
Google’s XR studio Owlchemy Labs today launched Job Simulator (2016) and its sequel Vacation Simulator (2019) on Vision Pro, respectively priced at $20 and $30 on the App Store.
The tongue-in-cheek simulator games parody both the worlds of work and play as seen through the eyes of robots who have replaced all human jobs—and have taken human vacations too.
To boot, the franchise has been one of VR’s most successful to date, with both games going multi-platinum across all major VR headsets, and regularly showing up in the top most-popular VR game charts since their respective launches.
The Vision Pro releases of both games are in large part thanks to the studio’s early adoption of hand-tracking, as Apple’s headset doesn’t support motion controllers of any sort. Consequently, this has also allowed the studio to bring a hand-tracking mode to the Quest versions too.
“Owlchemy Labs has always been committed to pioneering hand tracking technology and putting our games on the most innovative platforms,” said Andrew Eiche, CEO at Owlchemy Labs. “Bringing Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator to Apple Vision Pro feels like the most natural manifestation of our goals. The fully immersive environments look stunning on Apple Vision Pro, and the games have been optimized for the hand- and eye-tracking capabilities of the platform.”
Acquired by Google in 2017, Owlchemy Labs is also known for the Emmy-nominated title Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017), and its latest VR game Cosmonious High (2022).
This technically makes for the first Google-owned apps to release on Vision Pro. At the time of this writing, notably missing is YouTube, Google Maps, Meet, Drive, and Photos. The company has said however a YouTube app for Vision Pro is on the map, although it’s not certain when that’s set to arrive.
Owlchemy Labs, the Google-owned VR studio, announced it’s bringing the chart-topping VR games Job Simulator (2016) and its sequel Vacation Simulator (2019) to Apple Vision Pro.
The studio’s seminal ‘Simulator’ franchise has had its fair share of success over the years, with both garnering over a million downloads across all major VR headsets. As testament to its staying power, the studio’s successful job place parody Job Simulator regularly shows up in the top most popular VR game charts since its launch on the original HTC Vive in 2016, with both titles making for great beginner VR experiences since they largely focus on family-friendly, room-scale fun that anyone can easily pick up.
Owlchemy Labs says both games—Job Simulator priced at $20 and Vacation Simulator at $30—will include their respective free content updates when they launch on Vision Pro, which are slated to arrive “soon,” the studio says.
Both games were originally designed around VR motion controllers, which the $3,500 Vision Pro notably lacks, which has put many developers in a pickle as they either seek to adapt their existing VR titles to Apple’s controllerless XR platform, or create a new IP entirely.
That said, it’s safe to assume the studio has adapted both titles to use the headset’s hand-tracking capabilities, which will not only be interesting to see since they’re such object-oriented experiences, but also to watch whether other VR studios follow suit to cater to the new platform that deemphasizes immersive gaming in favor of casual content consumption and productivity apps.
Founded in 2010, and later acquired by Google in 2017, Owlchemy is also known for the Emmy-nominated title Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017), and its latest VR game Cosmonious High (2022). We’re still waiting to see what the studio has in store from its GDC 2022 teaser, which promised to be it’s first-ever VR game built from the ground-up for hand-tracking, and first to feature multiplayer. Whatever the case, it’s clear the studio is continuing its mission to release its most popular VR games on every headset possible.
We chronicle a partial history of one of VR’s best-known developers: Owlchemy Lab.
I’m listening back through an interview with Andrew Eiche and Devin Reimer of Owlchemy Labs and we’re talking about the subtle genius of Half-Life: Alyx’s distance-grab mechanic. It’s part of a 90-minute chat that weaves through the recent history of VR and the wide range of attempts by developers to zero in on products with an audience. Our conversation takes a detour into how Crisis VRigade is secretly one of the purest expressions of the VR shooter and the conversation somehow winds back to their belief that hand-tracking is the next big frontier for VR mass adoption, and others just aren’t seeing it yet.
It’s a fascinating talk and equally insightful to listen back to, but it wasn’t exactly what I meant to discuss. Their studio works to make VR software as immersive, comfortable and accessible as possible at a time when VR hardware is often the opposite. It won them immense success with Job Simulator and their subsequent release have recieved positive reviews from critics and fans, as well as charting in top seller lists (though, notably not as highly as Job Sim). Is that a good showing four games on from the launch of the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive?
Owlchemy certainly isn’t out to make VR’s most explosive shooter or epic sword-swinging RPG, with the studio instead focusing its work carefully around existing constraints to craft experiences within current limits. Its been a bit of an experimental research and development lab even while, in recent years, the studio pursued this work operating under the umbrella of one of the world’s largest tech companies. Even today, Job Simulator sits on top sellers lists as one of VR’s most recognized and successful titles, not to mention being followed by multiple successors that each pushed VR design further down this very specific line of thinking.
“We’ve got to remember that today,” Eiche once said to me, “we’re getting more new players into VR than we are getting former players.”
While the studio’s leaders are famously practiced at smiling through questions aimed at uncovering their future plans, looking back at the unique studio’s path and focused design efforts, we can still find hints pointing to Owlchemy and VR’s future.
Owlchemy’s Origins
Owlchemy started in 2010 just when market fatigue and saturation were settling into the mobile gaming market.
“Mobile just kept going downhill and our games were continuously doing better, but we were following that trajectory down,” Reimer says.
They were working on titles like Jack Lumber which, as Reimer explained it, is all about being “a supernatural lumberjack out for vengeance on the forest because the evil tree killed his granny.” While the slapstick humor in their work continues today, gone are the days of keeping the lights on by developing for dozens of platforms fueld by hardware maker partnerships, like a specific port for a Blackberry phone that Eiche says “maybe a hundred humans ever bought” and an HP laptop with a Leap Motion hand-tracking sensor built into it.
“That’s how we survived,” Reimer says.”When people talk about like startup companies and stuff like that, they always like paint over it as this like perfect genesis…That’s always the way that it works, but that’s not the way that real companies ever start.”
The company attempted an approach where they would pursue a project under contract for someone else and then return to their own intellectual property. They even did a Kickstarter for a game called Dyscourse, to which Reimer says they learned to “never, ever” do crowdfunding again. They also started giving talks about surviving in the harsh wilderness that is indie development.
In retrospect, this period didn’t just help them survive, it also helped prepare for VR’s multi-platform consumer origins on console, PCs, and phones.
“It was like: ‘We’ve been training for this our whole lives,’” Reimer says.
Still, like any skeptical developer protecting their time, when the Oculus Rift’s Kickstarter launched in 2012 Reimer says he made a list – specifically, a list about why VR would fail. Or fail again, even. He blocked out a week of his time for the investigation and got started.
“It was like ‘headsets are too heavy on the head,'” he recalls. “Okay, mobile phones are starting to solve some of that. ‘The optics are bad.’ There are [now] advances in optics. And I went through that list and then I ended up calling Alex [Schwartz, Owlchemy co-founder] and I was like ‘This is going to happen. This is going to happen this time.'”
The studio started with a vehicle for its earliest tests being one of Owlchemy’s contract jobs, a superheroic jumping game called Aaaaa! for the Awesome!, in which you…jumped. You jumped very high, in fact. And then you fell.
“It was early days for VR,” Reimer recalls. “It’s first person. It’s just falling. I think this could work in VR.”
Owlchemy pitched a VR version, openly admitting it wouldn’t make money and that this was only for research purposes.
“It took us two days to get it up and running and then an entire month to make it not suck,” Reimer says.
Owlchemy had to figure out not only how to get a game running in VR for the first time but also some of the things we now take for granted, like VR menus and how to make it playable end-to-end without asking users to leave a headset. Owlchemy fumbled around just enough to release its work on Oculus Share, the now-extinct portal for early VR experiments and experiences.The reaction to the game was positive enough to get Owlchemy noticed. Not just by the VR enthusiasts checking for new experiences on a daily basis, but also by the companies busily plotting the next stages for consumer VR.
A Job Offer From Valve
By early 2014, VR was gaining steam.
Two years prior, the Oculus Rift had become one of the most talked-about Kickstarter projects of all time, raising nearly $2.5 million. ~$350 DK1 headsets were adding countless more loops of cables to developer studies and enthusiasts were sampling the first PC VR content via Oculus Share. But, slowly but surely, it was becoming clear Oculus wouldn’t be the only name in VR.
“Valve had been working on some of this early prototype stuff, and we knew a little bit of what they were working on and they decided to do the Steam Dev Days and they were gonna show a bunch of VR,” Reimer says.
Owlchemy was invited to host one of three talks on VR that February, the others being handled by Luckey and Michael Abrash, then of Valve and now heading research at Meta’s Reality Labs. From that, Reimer and colleagues were treated to Valve’s fabled VR room demo, which featured a crude VR headset that was positionally tracked using dozens of markers plastered all over a room. There were no controllers and the headset was incredibly bulky, but it represented the next step toward immersive consumer VR over the DK1, which could only track the direction of your gaze and not the position of your head.
You’ve probably heard at least one major VR figurehead describe that demo as a lightbulb moment for VR. Reimer isn’t one of them.
“I came out of that demo so depressed,” he says. “Because I realized that this is where VR was going and I could not see how in the short term we could bridge the gap on the technology side. We had this whole giant tracking problem that was like, how are we ever going to solve this in the short term? And then also what’s the input side of this equation? That is a whole other thing.”
Despite the reservations, Owlchemy pushed on with its next VR project. The Oculus Rift DK2 was on the horizon and would introduce its own positional tracking, albeit in a limited fashion with a camera facing you.
“We like sat down and started building all these pitches and we hated them all,” Reimer says. “Why don’t we like anything that we’re building? This should clearly be the future.”
Then the final piece of the puzzle fell into place.
Owlchemy was again treated to a new demo from Valve, this time for a device it was building with HTC. It represented yet another major step for VR, this time introducing fully-tracked controllers – and Valve wanted Owlchemy to build something for it.
“They were like: ‘We’ve made two. You can have one.'”
“We were like: ‘Cool.'”
And so the headset — along with the rest of Owlchemy — went to Reimer in Winnepeg, Canada. Or at at least most of it did; some parts of the setup they had to 3D print themselves.
“Valve at the time had the most 3D printers per capita or some crazy statistic,” Eiche points out. “And so they just sent us an STL file and it was like… what are we supposed to do with it?”
So they figured that bit out, and how to stitch it all together, and how to use the controllers with two USB wires. They then had a week to build a demo in what Reimer describes as the “most pivitol” seven days in the history of the company.
“The four of us just sat in my basement and programmed and drank and played video games for a week straight without sleeping. And Job Simulator is what popped up the other end of that thing,” he said. “The first thing we built was this little table with cubes on it.”
He put it low enough on the ground so he could sit on the floor and spent the next 20 minutes stacking cubes. He then removed the headset and made a proclamation about where VR was going:
“It’s physics!” he said.
Back To Job
By “physics”, Reimer meant a sense of agency unlike anything else felt in a virtual world before.
With two motion controllers reaching into environments there were direct consequences for your physical actions. What’s one of the most common places where your physical actions can have interesting consequences? Jobs, of course. And so Owlchemy started prototyping different jobs.
Reimer notes it was often “extreme things” that the team expected to be incredibly fun in VR. But the extremes didn’t always work. Things like juggling weren’t as compelling as the team thought they might be, whilst ideas like window washing ended up being incredibly uncomfortable to experience.
“We ended up having this kitchen […] and it was interesting because immediately it was like: ‘I understand what I need to do,'” Reimer explains.
“And that was another big learning was that, early in VR, there was this tendency to be like ‘I can do anything, it’s all virtual, so just whatever.’ And what we learned was that by leveraging people’s previous experience, you can side hop so much of the tutorialization or learning or anything like that. And then let people just do what they want into the world.”
The more it honed in on this idea, the more Owlchemy started to see its work validated. Reimer recalls one player putting an egg down, noticing it start to roll off the side of the table and then instinctively catching it. “All of a sudden it clicked,” he says. “This is probably one of the most complex human computer interactions that has ever taken place. It was such low, low lizard brain of solving this entire complex loop. But it just happened because we could leverage so much of what humans are good at to begin with.”
It’s around now that Eiche came onboard, having worked on some VR for a consultancy firm (he recalls one demo to a senior partner who proclaimed: “I wouldn’t be caught dead with that s**t on my face.”)
Full development on Job Simulator took place in a rented house in Austin, Texas. Reimer and Eiche recall a house full of VR developers and equipment chipping away at what made the game tick. This was not exactly a safe process. Reimer wrote on Twitter recently about prototype controllers that would give him electric shocks and making the house sound a little like a testing field for VR crash dummies.
“I’ve never had a controller that made me bleed and gave me high voltage shocks as much as that one,” he says. “I winced when I went to grab it.”
For a developer obsessed with VR comfort and safety, its notable one particularly treacherous area at the office was the loft.
“At the time you could only make square [VR] spaces because it was so early,” Eiche explains. “You couldn’t do polygons or anything like we do now. And part of the loft extended out over an open balcony, like over the second floor. So it’d be like, ‘Hey, if you feel the banister hitting, just don’t lean too far. It’s a one story drop on two other developers.'”
Owlchemy’s leaders were starting to feel pretty confident about where they had gotten with Job Simulator. The game was shaping up to be one of the best examples of what separated VR from flastscreen media and it would appear in the launch window for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PSVR. But, come release, the developers realized even the most optimistic projections for their own work had been modest.
“In my wildest dreams, I never could have imagined the reach of that game,” Reimer says.
This, it turns out, was something of a paradox. Job Simualtor has indeed been fantastically successful, still topping charts today. But consumer VR — at the time — was not. It’s usually this point in a developer retrospective that I’d tell you how the studio in question weathered the coming storm as VR’s install base limped out of the gates in the face of high prices and complicated setups. But Job Simulator’s continued success — it still ranks in the top 10 selling PSVR games on a monthly basis six years on — makes Owlchemy an oddity in the VR space.
Owlchemy’s leaders attribute success only partially to those sales, but also to their pacing and refusal to undergo explosive growth as investment in VR reached dramatic highs. Should they have gone and made a flatscreen PC game after Job Simulator? A mobile phone game? Heck, the controller grips resemble the grip of a gun and its one of gaming’s most popular genres, they could’ve gone the route Stress Level Zero went down and honed first-person shooter mechanics in VR.
“Everything is risky, right?” Reimer explains. “[So] why not bet on the thing where we can see this trend line? We don’t know how long it’s gonna take for this trend line to find success. But PC is going to get harder. Mobile’s going to get harder. This one is on the other trajectory. And so we can build something where we’re scaling with it.”
As far as the prospect of a shooter game goes, Eiche has some thoughts.
“Aiming is actually incredibly difficult and most people don’t realize like shooting sports are an Olympic sport,” Eiche explains. “So it’s an actual difficult thing. And one of my favorite things to watch is people who are really good at first person shooters try to play shooting games in VR because they’re not good.”
Just because you’re good at something on a gamepad, doesn’t mean you’re good at it in VR and while shooters are a popular form of videogame, Owlchemy sees VR as reaching much wider than that.
“The two things that we like really focused on there was can we build something that works for anybody? Anybody can pick up and play and have a good time,” Eiche says. “And also an important point of that is to not make people sick. Because the VR of that era, damn near a hundred percent of the titles you play would make you sick…assuming your users have all this back knowledge [on sickness] is just not a good way to build human computer interactions.”
From Rick & Morty To Google
Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-Ality was something of a continutation of Owlchemy’s alternating development cycle – something original followed by something under contract.
Early on, they had no idea if Job Simulator would take off, let alone the wider VR market, and the deal with Adult Swim Games to make Virtual Rick-ality gave them a security that, as it turns out, they wouldn’t end up needing.
“Essentially for us, it was the thing that was going to make sure that, if the previous game wasn’t successful, we can continue to make the next original thing,” Reimer says. “And so from a strictly business and financial standpoint, Job Simulator ended up being that thing. It gave us the confidence to be able to not worry about that success.”
That’s not to say there’s any regret about working on Rick & Morty. It’s an enormously popular property, for one thing, and it enabled Owlchemy to build out yet more tools and learn more lessons it could take into future projects.
“That was very in our minds with Rick & Morty,” Reimer says. “What cool stuff can we build that’s going to make this awesome game, but also will allow us to R&D and also build these things that we can utilize after?”
“It allowed us to break out of Job Sim for a little bit,” Eiche adds, “and do something fun. Originally we did bots [in Job Sim] because we didn’t want to have bipedal characters. So that helped. A lot of what you see in Cosmonious High today are lessons that we had learned in Rick & Morty, like we had to high five a character, and that was impossible back in the day. Now every character can be high-fived at any time in Cosmonious. I know that sounds like such a silly small thing, but you high-five Rick and that broke so many times. We had to put so many patches out to fix it.”
It also gave Owlchemy the opportunity to work on some more traditional game elements like implementing voice acting and performance work.
“We got to try a lot of different things in that IP that ended up being kind of case studies on how to, and how not to do things going forward,” Reimer adds.
Development for Rick & Morty also took place during that cold VR winter, years before the release of the Quest headset. But as the industry reckoned with what type of content was going to help VR take off and more shooters and traditional gaming genres started to enter the scene, Owlchemy noticed a curious lack of Job Simulator imitators.
“Let’s say, hypothetically, you build a word guessing game,” Eiche suggests. “Then a million clones appear. And there’s all sorts of reasons why our game is a little too complex to clone, but […] we actually assumed many times that ‘Okay, we’re going to release Job Sim — once we realized it was going to be big — we’re going to see a lot of bright and colorful games with hands and kind of adventure style-y and performative like our games are.’ And then we’re like ‘Hey, nobody’s doing that. Okay, we’ll release Rick & Morty.'”
“I was starting to get to the point of paranoia right before launch,” Reimer adds. “Everyone’s loving this. Everyone’s going to want to do this. And at the time I just didn’t give us, being so inside that bubble, enough credit of the complexity of what we had pulled off.”
Job Simulator’s success had eliminated the anxiety of surviving from game to game. But it also made the developer a very lucrative target for acquisitions, and that’s exactly what happened. In May 2017, a month after the launch of Rick & Morty, Google announced its intention to acquire Owlchemy, long before Meta had started buying up VR development teams.
“We had this unique situation where our worlds were aligning,” Reimer says of the move. “We had kept pushing on VR for everyone and Google was like ‘Yes, that’s how we’re successful, when VR can be for everyone.'”
Interestingly, Owlchemy never did the things you’d expect a content studio to do when it gets bought by a giant corporation. It hasn’t made exclusive titles for Google platforms, for example, and it hasn’t avoided other platforms as a result. In fact, even if the team did want to do something exclusive to Google it’d be tough. After all, the company pulled out of VR hardware and services years ago after failing to get the Daydream mobile platform to take off.
Isn’t it a bit strange for a company that doesn’t make games and doesn’t provide any VR services or hardware to own a VR game developer? Reimer says the continued success of Owlchemy’s titles means that relationship hasn’t felt under threat.
“They wanted to set things up was to be this wholly-owned subsidiary,” he explains. “At Google, we don’t make games internally, this is not something we’re good at.”
Google’s leadership recognized, instead, that Owlchemy is good at releasing VR games to platforms with tracked hands.
“Let’s let you do that,” Reimer explained of Google’s direction to them.
The Quest In Lieu Of A Daydream
It’s at this point my coversation with Reimer and Eiche stopped being so much documentative as it was philosophical. A hit title under your belt and an acquisition by one of the world’s biggest technology companies sort of takes the wind out of the scrappy indie narrative, and both Vacation Simulator and Cosmonious High are still fresh in everyone’s memory.
Vacation Sim was the studio’s first shot at a sequel, and looked to further expand Owlchemy’s understanding of interaction and exploration. Last month’s release of Cosmonious High, meanwhile, returned to a lot of the character work first established in Rick & Morty, and was also Owlchemy’s first game to allow for free teleportation to explore any part of a map.
Perhaps what was most interesting about the development of each, however, was that Owlchemy had to work out how to get them — along with Job Simulator — on standalone hardware.
“Oculus runs a lot of experiments,” Eiche recalls of learning about the Quest for the first time. “So to be perfectly honest, we were like ‘Oh, this is another experiment. That’s going to be very expensive. It’s great. We’re really happy that they’re pushing in this direction because we think that’s what [VR] is going to be.’ But I think Devin even said we’re still five years out, this is just them monkeying around with some experiment.”
Reimer specifically believed 6DOF tracking on a mobile headset within this timeframe was a pretty unrealistic expectation. But, once Owlchemy had a clearer view of where Meta (then Facebook) was heading with Quest, it knew it had to change gear. The pair wanted Job Simulator on Quest as soon as possible and at the same level of fidelity you could experience on other platforms. No small order, as any Quest developer will tell you, but the developer’s work porting to PSVR in the past helped them cram it in, with Vacation Simulator following soon after.
Cosmonious, as I learned in an interview last month, was another tricky task. In fact, the team nearly cut the paint system it had implemented into the game. Nonetheless, all three of Owlchemy’s original games are now running on Quest and ready to introduce new players to VR.
So, where does Owlchemy go from here?
The Future
“The next thing that we’re seeing going forward is hand tracking,” Reimer says with confidence. “We are all-in on that. I’m treating it very much like the early days when we were like, ‘No, Job Simulator is going to be two tracked controllers’ and some platforms that I will not name said, ‘No, that’s got to work with a [gamepad] controller.'”
This is a bullish perspective on a method of input that’s still finding its, well, hands. Still, big advances in hand tracking are being made seemingly by the month; Meta just updated its hand tracking solution on Quest 2 and its Project Cambria headset could stand to improve things further still. Reimer and Eiche, meanwhile, aren’t ready to confirm that their next game will be hand tracking-only just yet (the pair say they’re still in R&D for what’s next), but the Owlchemy team already uses the technology in its own workflows. If it does go in that direction then they’ll be figuring out what’s best for the control scheme all over again.
“We’re not going to do karate Beat Saber,” Eiche jokes.
But what about the haptics of physical controller buttons?
“There’s always going to be a place for controls, right?” Reimer replies. “Because just there’s always a place for kind of the flat games, there’s always going to be a group. We still use a mouse. We have touch screens and I’m sitting in front of two monitors and still typing on a keyboard and a mouse. So that’s not going away, but I think what we’re trying to focus on is like the extreme mainstream adoption area.”
“We need to continue to engage the mass [market]. To make sure this stuff is working for everyone. Because we are all going to be using VR at some point here in the not too distant future.”
Job and Vacation Simulator developer Owlchemy Labs has revealed its next VR project, Cosmonious High.
Due for release on Oculus Quest and PC VR headsets in 2022, Cosmonious High casts players as a student at the titular high school for aliens. You’ll meet a weird and wacky cast of characters and work with them to solve problems as an unexplained series of malfunctions plague the school.
Check out the reveal trailer below. This being an Owlchemy game, expect the developer’s trademark sense of humor and vibrant visual palette.
As you can see in the trailer, Cosmonious High will include typically unique VR interactions from Owlchemy. The player seems to gain specific powers under pressure, like firing water and ice out of their hands to put out fires or freeze things in place. It looks like the game also has a communication system in which players select emojis to talk with other students and teachers. The developer also notes that this will be its largest game world yet and give players the choice of where to travel.
There’s no mention of a PSVR version yet but, with the PS5 VR headset expected to release in 2022, it’s always possible we see it there.
The game will be Owlchemy’s first brand new VR IP since the launch of Job Simulator in 2016. That game got a follow-up in 2019’s Vacation Simulator, and the team also worked on Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality. Owlchemy itself was acquired by Google in 2017.
What do you make of Cosmonious High? Are you going to be picking the game up? Let us know in the comments below!
A new Vacation Simulator update adds support for the Quest 2’s new High Frequency Hand Tracking mode, increasing performance and decreasing latency.
The update is available now and improves the reliability and performance when using hand tracking, thanks to an increase in the rate of tracking. The feature is only available to Oculus Quest 2 players – the original Quest still supports hand tracking, but without the high frequency tracking mode.
Human! Today we released the High Frequency Hand Tracking update for Vacation Simulator on Oculus Quest 2.
This update brings improved tracking and lower latency to deliver a more immersive experience. Explore Vacation Island with just your human hands from start to finish! pic.twitter.com/J5jyknRPCV
Overall, the new mode is meant to be more effective for tracking fast hand movements. It does possess a slight increase in jitter in low-light situations, but Facebook says this will be fixed in a future update.
Vacation Simulator is one of very few games that has added support for the new 60Hz hand tracking mode. Hand Physics Simulator is another, which rolled out support fairly quickly after Facebook announced the feature. In our anecdotal tests, we found that the high frequency tracking really improved the hand tracking experience in Hand Physics Lab.
It’s uncertain whether all or most games that support hand tracking support will be able to include support for the new high frequency tracking mode. It does come with an increased performance cost, which means that some games with less performance overhead might have to stick with the standard 30Hz rate.
What do you think of the new High Frequency Hand Tracking mode? Let us know what you think in the comments.
The last few months have seen Google wind down a lot of its VR work, but the developer of Job and Vacation Simulator says it isn’t going anywhere.
Yesterday brought news that Google was making its VR creation platform, Tilt Brush, open-source. Hidden inside the announcement was the snippet that Google itself will no longer be updating the platform. Paired with the recent news that Poly is also shutting down, not to mention the gradual death of the Daydream mobile VR platform, and it looks like Google’s interest in VR is growing thin.
We had wondered what this might mean for Owlchemy Labs, the creator of celebrated VR titles that was acquired by Google in 2017. The Simulator series — particularly Job Simulator — continues to rank highly on games sales charts. Yesterday, CEO Devin Reimer took to Twitter to confirm that the team is still building new VR games.
“With Tilt Brush’s announcement some folks have asked if this changes anything at Owlchemy,” Reimer wrote. “It does not, we are continuing to grow, build awesome games for everyone, innovate and push VR forward! We also can’t wait to announce our next big thing!”
Owlchemy hasn’t revealed its next project after last year’s release of DLC for Vacation Simulator, but did assure us it was working on a new title during our 2020 Summer Showcase. Hopefully the team will have more on what’s next at some point later this year.
What do you think Owlchemy Labs is working on next? Let us know in the comments below!
A new teaser video suggests that hand tracking support could be added to Vacation Simulator on Oculus Quest.
Devin Reimer, CEO of Google-owned developer Owlchemy Labs, posted a video to Twitter showing a scene from Vacation Simulator, except with the player using hand tracking to make a peace and thumbs up sign. In a reply, Reimer mentioned that this was definitely not the Valve Index hand tracking at work. While there’s no indication of any release date, overall this looks like a pretty strong indication that Vacation Simulator on Quest and Quest 2 might receive an update that adds in hand tracking as an input method.
We’ll of course need to see details on exactly how much of the game is transferable to controller-free hand tracking. Owlchemy’s games are so familiar and any quality loss to the stability of gesture recognition would likely be instantly recognizable. Not a lot of games have added hand tracking support since the feature’s launch, with Richie’s Plank Experience, Waltz of the Wizard, Virtual Desktop and others being some of the exceptions.
Both of Owlchemy’s ‘Simulator’ games are now available on Oculus Quest and they were recently enhanced for Oculus Quest 2. Improvements for both titles include some visual upgrades, removing foveated rendering and support for 90Hz on Quest 2, which is rolling out now as part of the v23 update.
Vacation Simulator also recently received the free Back to Job expansion, which adds in several mechanics from the original Job Simulator game into Vacation Simulator.
Two more enhanced Oculus Quest 2 games to add to the list – Owlchemy Labs’ Vacation Simulator and Job Simulator now run better on the headset.
The developer confirmed on its blog that both titles are now updated to take advantage of the standalone headset’s new features. Improvements include some visual upgrades, removing foveated rendering and support for 90Hz once Facebook finally enables the feature. We haven’t been able to dive in and see the differences for ourselves yet, but the lack of FFR is always an appreciated bonus.
Vacation Simulator and Job Simulator are two of VR’s most popular titles. The latter launched alongside the HTC Vive back in 2016 before following on on Oculus Rift once Touch arrived and then PSVR and, last year, Oculus Quest. The game envisions a future in which human jobs have been rendered obsolete, but robots recreate mundane versions of them for recreational purposes. It was a landmark title, focusing heavily on interactivity and immersion and has been a consistent top seller on PSVR.
Its sequel, Vacation Simulator expanded on the concept. The game also got some DLC a month back that brought the worlds of the first and second titles together somewhat.
Quest 2, meanwhile, offers more powerful hardware than its predecessor and a better display, too. Plenty of games are being updated to take advantage of the new specs – we’ve been compiling a list of them right here.
Will you be checking out the Vacation Simulator and Job Simulator Quest 2 enhancements? Let us know in the comments below!
Family game night? We’ve got you covered with our list of the best family VR games.
We wanted to make this a varied list to give you a lot of choice. As such, when we say a family VR game, we don’t necessarily mean just multiplayer titles and, while we’ve kept violent games off of the list, some of the games do have action elements and mechanics you might deem unsuitable for the youngest audiences. We’ll point those out where applicable.
Dreams is a glorious VR playroom, a sort of do-it-yourself creation platform where, after a bit of onboarding, you can make your own content and share it with others. You’ll be amazed at the scale of the creations possible in Dreams. It’s easy to lose hours with others hopping from one bright idea to the next.
We’ve put Dreams higher in the list for two reasons. Firstly, it takes a bit of dedication to get to grips with, which will make the creative aspect too mature for some younger audiences. Plus, this is an online hub of user-made content, which comes with the usual caveats. If you want to show younger audiences, it might be an idea to curate a list of levels beforehand.
9. Puppet Fever
Type: Local multiplayer Platforms: Quest, PC VR
This ingenious family VR game needs just one headset to be enjoyed by anyone in the room. The VR player uses a huge range of 2D props to put on their own puppet show. They find themselves behind a stage, while on a connected screen you can view their show from the front. Different game modes can give you the freedom to make up your own stories, or you can generate word cards for a virtual game of charades. A brilliant little idea, and free to play on Quest (with in-app purchases, mind you).
8. Racoon Lagoon
Type: Single or online multiplayer Platforms: Quest, Rift
A cutesy little island lifestyle game – perhaps the closest VR has yet gotten to its own Animal Crossing. You explore a tropical destination, meeting a friendly cast of critters that you can carry out tasks for. Earn more hearts, make more friends and unlock new areas. The game has multiplayer and cross-play between Rift and Quest so, if you have another headset handy, you can adventure together.
7. A Fisherman’s Tale
Type: Single-player Platforms: PSVR, Quest, PC VR
VR gaming doesn’t get much more wholesome than A Fisherman’s Tale, a puzzle game that’s equal parts charming and brain-bending. You take on the role of the titular fisherman, awakening one day to find themselves living in his own model replica of his lighthouse. But, get this, that same model sits in the middle of the room, and you can take the roof off to interact with a tiny version of yourself, or open the window to see a larger version too. It’s incredibly clever but still very approachable, and a VR must-play.
6. Fuji
Type: Single-player Platforms: PSVR, Quest, PC VR
There’s a lot of great VR meditation apps out there but, for our money, you won’t find many virtual destinations more tranquil or more soothing than Fuji’s vibrant fields of alien vegetation. In this relaxing trip, you reawaken wildlife and can also grow your own virtual garden. It’s the perfect choice for those looking for a less demanding VR experience.
5. Spaceteam VR
Type: Local and online multiplayer Platforms: Quest, PC VR
If you’re looking for a bit of a team-building exercise with the family, then you can consider Spaceteam VR a one-stop-shop. In this adaptation of a mobile classic, you work together with friends to fix a spaceship, shouting out ridiculous orders to each other while making sure to listen out for your own.
4. Cook-Out: A Sandwich Tale
Type: Online multiplayer Platforms: Quest, Rift
VR tries its hand at Overcooked with Michellin Star results. Cook-Out has you cooking for a fairytale cast in a full campaign for up to four players (with cross-play!). You’ll need to work with each other to slice up ingredients, clean dishes and cook up tasty treats before customers get too inpatient.
3. Curious Tale Of The Stolen Pets
Type: Single-player Platforms: PSVR, Quest, PC VR
Curious Tale makes for a whistful story of summers spent away and sibling rivalries. It’s an adorable puzzler ideal for casting to a screen and collaborating on, and the stop-motion art style is something to really behold inside a headset. Curious Tale is a perfect first destination for getting to grips with VR, too.
2. Vacation Simulator/Job Simulator
Type: Single-Player Platforms: PSVR, Quest, PC VR
Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator remain hallmarks for the VR industry because they prioritize unique interactions only possible inside VR alongside user comfort first and foremost. They’re chock full of engaging activities that really take advantage of the platform. For many people, this should be your first stop when picking up a VR headset.
1. Astro Bot/Playroom VR
Type: Single-player (Astrobot) Local multiplayer (Playroom VR) Platforms: PSVR
Astro Bot was born out of the Playroom VR, which is available for free, so we thought it only fair we bundled the two together. The latter includes some of the best local multiplayer in VR, with other players joining in on a TV screen to play family-friendly games of cat and mouse and more. Astro Bot, meanwhile, is a genuinely Mario-level platform bursting with fresh ideas that will constantly delight. It remains our top ranking for the best PSVR games and now we crown it one of the best family VR games too.
Vacation Simulator will see its free Back To Job expansion arrive on September 10th on SteamVR and Oculus Quest. The update is scheduled to launch on PlayStation VR in October.
The new update merges some of the game mechanics from the original Job Simulator with the expanded world of Vacation Simulator. The VR games from Google-owned Owlchemy Labs are among the most well known VR titles because they serve as fairly straight-forward playgrounds to introduce people to the mechanics of VR headsets with tracked hand controllers. Vacation Simulator features a range of activities divided into zones you can visit centered in beach, mountain, and forest environments. The original Job Simulator featured four jobs including office worker, auto mechanic, chef, and convenience store clerk with a number of activities and challenges faced within each job. With Back To Job, the “gig economy” has now made its way to Vacation Simulator because “all bots have gone on vacation and no one is left to job, so it’s time for the human to enter the on-demand workforce to make the perfect vacation for bots. Time to job, again.”
We’re looking forward to seeing what Back To Job brings to Vacation Simulator. We’ll have gameplay and impressions for you soon so check back on UploadVR.com for the latest. Also, if you haven’t played Owlchemy’s VR games yet, Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator are bundled together in a sale on Oculus Quest through September 11th. The pack discounts the games by 30%.
