Rhythm game Synth Riders is coming out of early access and getting a full release update on PC VR, alongside a release on Oculus Quest. Both the Quest version and the full release update for PC VR will arrive on October 31st.
The game was initially released into early access for PC VR in July last year. Since then, the developers at Kluge Interactive have doubled the number of songs available in the game and introduced an open-source beat map editor. The PC VR version is also one of only a few games that officially support in-game integration of fitness tracking tools from VR fitness company YUR. Given that the game is quite active and can be a good workout, the integration is useful for getting an idea of how many calories you’re burning while playing and measuring your Synth Rider sessions.
The Quest version will benefit from launching with all of the improvements and additions that Synth Riders received over the last year or so in early access. Quest users will have access to 30 songs, 4 difficulty levels and varied game modes, including regular, boxing, endurance and force modes. Kluge Interactive also confirmed that the Quest version will also support the official beat map editor and include an exclusive song for Quest users. However, it sadly won’t launch with multiplayer or global leaderboards.
The Quest version will also be slightly cheaper than the PC VR version of the game, at $16.99 compared to $19.99 on other platforms.
Will you be picking up Synth Riders this Halloween? Let us know in the comments.
YUR, a VR fitness company, today announced it’s secured $1.1 million in pre-seed funding, something the company says will help them to further use VR to address what it considers a ‘worldwide epidemic of sedentary behavior’.
The pre-seed investment round was led by The Venture Reality Fund and BoostVC. A San Francisco-based startup, YUR (pronounced “why you are,”) was founded in early 2019 by Cix Liv and Dilan Shah.
Having launched its pilot program on PC VR earlier this year, YUR is now officially making its software available on Oculus Quest.
The plug-in tracks calories burned while in any VR game or app while using Quest, and also extends to a mobile app that syncs to Apple Health and Google Fit.
Image courtesy YUR
You won’t find YUR on the Oculus Store though, at least not yet. Since it provides an overlay and works in the background while other apps are running, for now the software is only available through Sidequest, the unofficial app store that allows you to side-load unofficially supported games and apps.
“We are building YUR to be the Peloton of the future by making fitness a game,” said Cix Liv, co-founder and CEO of YUR. “Gaming and fitness have always been our biggest passions, and we believe there’s a growing community of people who want to combine these two passions as well.”
In addition to calorie-counting and fitness app integration, YUR is setting its sights on some pretty ambitious future usecases. The company says that, in the future, not only do they want their software tell how a player is moving in games, but to one day be able to provide specific health and fitness recommendations via an AI assistant—of course, all of it in the name of fun.
Harmonix’s Dance Central VR is one of the best ways to stay fit with a headset on. That’s as true as it’s ever been with this week’s free update.
Dance Central VR just got an excellent new addition; a fitness tracker. We first revealed this feature was coming at our E3 VR Showcase in June. The tracker keeps count of all the calories you’ll be burning when strutting your stuff. You turn it on inside the experience and then it sits in clear view during songs.
Players can customize the experience to make sure the game knows their weight (which doesn’t change avatar appearance). It’s a pretty neat way to encourage you to keep going; it’d be great to see games like Beat Saber get a similar feature.
“As we worked on Dance Central, we started to realize that this game is perfect for fitness gaming enthusiasts,” Creative Lead Arthur Inasi told the Oculus Blog. “People who would playtest for us would always comment, “Whew! That’s actually a pretty good workout!” or, “Wow, I got more of a workout than I thought I would!” At the same time, there was more and more interest from the VR community for games that would provide light to moderate workouts.”
Elsewhere, Dance Central is also getting NPC challenges. Accept a challenge and you’ll face off with an AI dancer. Truly, we are in the future.
Elsewhere in Harmonix VR news, the studio’s Beat Saber-esque rhythm shooter, Audica, is due for release on PSVR soon. Dance Central, meanwhile, is available on Rift and Quest.
VirZoom pairs VR with an existing stationary bicycle or bike trainer to create workout experiences. Read our full review of using it with Oculus Quest to find out whether it’s worth a try.
When we first reviewed VirZoom’s exercise-bike VR programs, they had just launched for Rift, Vive, and PSVR. The idea is that you pop on your headset, fire up your stationary bike or load your bike into a bike trainer, and either choose to explore with VZFit Explorer, wandering through Google-Maps-supplied 3D landscapes, or play games in VZFit Play. A sensor tracks your bike’s cadence, the rotations your pedals make in a minute, and uses that to transmit speed to your in-game avatar.
This year VZFit moved from those platforms to the Oculus Quest, building in positional awareness of your headset for the first time. It also works on the Oculus Go. In addition, the company announced that it was changing its pricing model, offering VZFit games for free on a rotating basis, one free VZFit Explorer ride, demos of all rides, and reducing annual memberships for premium access to all experiences from $119.95 down to $99.95 per year. (A monthly version for $9.95 remains.) Premium membership includes unlimited multiplayer action.
As of the time of this writing, VZFit is no longer available for any wired headsets.
Both VZFit Explorer and VZFit Play use the headset and a $99 VZFit Sensor Kit, which includes a sensor that attaches snugly to one pedal crank with elastic bands, and a thumb button that clips onto your handlebars for easy controls while riding. If you’re used to using the Oculus UI, navigating menus is a snap. You can opt for an included tutorial or dive right into the games or ride experiences.
VZFit Explorer puts you in the middle of curated rides through Google’s Street View, with some provided by VirZoom and some created by Premium users. Selections ranged from the first couple of Tour de France stages to scenic rides in more than a dozen locations including Arizona, snowy wastelands, and Ireland.
Because this is a dynamic recreation of Google’s sometimes-wonky Street View 360-degree photography, VZFit Explorer contains some artifacts. Stitching between sections of the landscape around you isn’t always fluid, 3D objects are typically rendered as flat when you approach, and the nice trail-of-dots pathing guide that VZFit Explorer puts in to guide you can sometimes seem to lead to a wall right up until the moment you hit that point and everything straightens out.
All that said, this is a surprisingly immersive experience, and it’s easy to lose track of time wandering through cool-looking landscapes. Whether you’re pedaling across icy tundras or red-rock deserts, VZFit Explorer truly does add something to your workout. Pair it up with your favorite tunes and it’s at least as entertaining as those reruns you’ve been binging on Netflix.
The replay value here is nearly infinite, assuming that VirZoom and other users — or you! — continue to supply routes to take. The only major drawback in terms of usability is that tight turns are incredibly hard to do, particularly if you’re using a bike on a bike trainer (where you don’t want to lean too far for fear of torquing your wheels). The positional use of the headset means you lean to turn, and the natural thing to do is to lean your body, not just your head.
This means there’s a little learning curve (and some neck flexibility) required to handle turning in game if you don’t have one of those fancy stationary bikes that lean with you. There was at least one VZFit Explorer map where I gave up midway through because it included a hairpin turn. There was just no way I could turn sharply enough to do more than bump up against the invisible walls at the edges of the encounter without backing up repeatedly.
For more gentle curves, the app does a great job of tracking headset movements, making minor adjustments as you ride. The speed varied with pedal cadence in a way that feels natural, and the overall experience feels easy and fun.
VZFit Play takes this same concept and gamifies it, putting you in nine experiences: for example, in a tank, on horseback in the Wild West, riding a flying Pegasus or helicopter, or driving a race car. These experiences are fun novelties, and crank up the adrenaline of the ride. I especially enjoyed the Pegasus encounter — the horse’s transition between gaits and launches into flight were both smooth and visually entertaining.
The best games, like the Pegasus encounter or “Le Tour” (a fun competitive ride with other virtual bicyclists) don’t require heavy use of the A button. Even with VirZoom’s button clipped to the handlebars, it can be a trial to use for those games where you are required to hold it down for extended periods to aim and shoot lassos or rockets. We especially appreciated the subtle positioning changes made possible by the Quest when doing Le Tour — it made passing or drafting other riders for a speed boost a snap.
Comfort:
VR comfort varied widely between VirZoom’s VZFit Explorer and VZFit Play experiences. Explorer was typically a small challenge, especially since there is no coasting — stop pedaling and you stop immediately on screen, helpful for when disorienting downhills might get the best of you. For VZFit Play games, anything on land (Le Tour for biking, race cars, Wild West horse riding) poses little discomfort, even for VR newbies. Flying games including the Pegasus and helicopter experiences could be more disconcerting, but were still handled appropriately.
Some VZFit Play games are more replayable than others (Le Tour, despite being simple, might be one of the most engaging in the long term for exercise), and they all step up the aerobic challenge. I was sweating happily after just a few minutes of giving these games a go, and hour-long sessions flew by in a snap. And truly, that’s the point of using VR while cycling — to forget that you’re stuck indoors and just enjoy the ride.
Final Say:Worth Trying
The good:
Interesting, varied landscapes and potentially endless replay in VZFit Explorer,
Positional sensors in the Oculus Quest make turning more natural,
A painless, entertaining way to break a sweat.
The bad:
Google Street View stitching can be awkward,
Tight turns are physically difficult or impossible,
Pedal crank sensor batteries die quickly.
A stationary bike is by definition a restricted experience. But the addition of positional awareness means that steering can often be a more natural endeavor with the updated VirZoom apps, and skipping the wires makes the rides feel more real.
VirZoom’s VZFit Play and VZExplorer Explorer are available for Oculus Quest and Go. They require the purchase of a $99 VZFit Sensor Kit. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
We know, we know; another day, another Beat Saber wannabe. But OnShape from Odders Lab does have a few interesting twists and turns that raised our eyebrows.
Specifically, the game looks like a cross between Beat Games’ smash hit and, oddly enough, Tetris. In the eye-catching teaser trailer below an animated player first dodges incoming walls just like they would in Beat Saber. Then they box their way through a solid wall. Finally, they throw shapes to fit through human-sized holes. All of this happens to, you guessed it, a backdrop of incredibly catching electronic dance music.
Over on Steam, Odders is promising a “steady flux of songs” to arrive post-release on top of the existing soundtrack. Songs will have three difficulty levels and you’ll be able to challenge friends via leaderboards. It’s not clear how the trailer’s individual elements would mesh into one level, but it does look like this one could be a pretty good way of keeping fit in VR.
This isn’t the first take on human Tetris we’ve seen in VR. Last year we wrote about Fit It, a game that used the HTC Vive trackers to bring your full body into VR. It doesn’t look like OnShape will be able to track leg movements etc, but moving your head and arms should still give you a workout.
We can’t find too much more information about the game, but it is coming to PSVR, SteamVR (Index/Vive/Rift) and ‘Oculus’ this summer. Based on the end of the trailer, we’d guess the latter covers both Rift and Quest.
Looking for another stylish way to test your hand-eye coordination and stamina? Game studio PlatformaVR is gearing up to release its new VR rhythm game Wave Circles on May 23, pushing players to bust a move to the beat in a dance space dripping with neon colors.
Wave Circles differs from Beat Saber, a wildly popular virtual reality rhythm game, in a handful of ways. Instead of slicing through boxes on beat and dodging walls, Wave Circles aims for more flowing movement in longer sustained inputs through the game’s waves. There are also pads that you punch or hit and the different songs mix these elements up while throwing in some sharp hazards for you to dodge occasionally as well.
At launch, Wave Circles will feature 17 songs and 51 different beatmaps crafted by the development team to work through. These beatmaps vary in difficulty, so you can engage in some comfortable gameplay or heighten the intensity with a group and friends to see who performs best on the toughest tracks and beatmaps. If you or your friends feel so inclined, Wave Circles will also launch with a beatmap creation system. Create, play the creations of local friends, or grab some online and keep the experience fresh for as long as you want.
If you’re interested in using VR gaming as a workout, the Beyond mode is your ticket. This mode is tailored for fitness and will get your heart rate up with specific songs and beatmaps. Additional features are planned for future updates, as well.
Wave Circles will be available on May 23 for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows Mixed Reality VR via Steam for $9.99. The team plans to continue to support the game with five new songs released each month and, eventually, a campaign mode with daily objectives.
BoxVR by FitXR has been around for nearly two years in the PC VR scene offering a dedicated VR exercise experience that’s focused on emulating the cardio benefits of boxing. It uses a rhythm-based boxing mechanic similar to Audioshield or Sound Boxing, but nowadays the main comparison will naturally be Beat Saber.
The main benefit of BoxVR is that instead of just being an active music game that has ancillary fitness benefits, it’s entirely focused on helping you get fit. During the experience you’ll not only hit objects as they approach but also parry, dodge, and deflect them as well to really simulate that feeling of fighting and moving constantly.
BoxVR is also designed by a team of fitness instructors that have offered their expertise to craft a variety of specifically choreographed workout routines just for BoxVR. The game also includes calories burned over time tracking.
With the latest release of BoxVR on PSVR there are over 50 new music tracks from the previous Early Access PC VR version bringing it to 110 total of all styles with 11 total new routines rounding that out to 45 total that have each been scripted just for BoxVR. You can also make custom playlists now with the “MyWorkouts” feature and a more polished UI. As a PSVR game it also naturally includes trophies.
Sequels don’t come much more by-the-numbers than Holopoint Chronicle. But then, for a game so matter-of-fact as ‘shoot arrows, get fit’, you don’t really need much else, do you? The original Holopoint helped people lose weight and the sequel looks like it will do the same.
This is evolution over revolution, with incremental improvements and additions leading to an overall better, more robust experience. The core of the game is the same; holographic projections appear around you and you have to shoot them with a bow and arrow as quickly as possible. When hit, targets fire a projectile back at you and you need to lean out of the way.
It’s a rhythm that keeps you alert, engaged and, most importantly, active. Holopoint is all about keeping on your toes and spinning in circles at all times in search of targets. Enemies will disappear if you don’t shoot them in time so you won’t have much opportunity for a breather. Were it less intense of an exercise it would surely lose its edge.
For context, I’m a regular runner. After my first 20 minute session with Holopoint Chronicle my heart was beating hastily and I was working up a sweat. The next day the muscles around my waist. Clearly it was the first time I’d used them in a while. This was all from some of the game’s earliest missions, where things are introduced at a pretty sturdy pace. If you’re looking for a VR game to keep you fit, this is definitely one to bear in mind, with one caveat.
Intensity comes at the cost of comfort. I’d love to be able to spend an hour or more working out in Holopoint but the constant spinning left me feeling dizzy and nauseous pretty quickly. Again, I’m not someone that suffers from VR sim sickness often, so make of that what you will.
But some of Chronicle’s additions do take some of that strain away. New projector objects give you hints as to the next target’s location, for example. That eases the frustration of suddenly being shot in the back and keeps you from being overwhelmed for just a little longer. You can now also notch up arrows without having to reach into your quill, a somewhat bothersome step in the first game.
But there’s still room for improvement. For starters, there’s still absolutely no introduction to what Holopoint is, how it works and how you progress. You sort of just have to stumble your way through it. I had no idea how to unlock later levels in the campaign, which discouraged me from actually doing so. Holopoint is a game that gets by on the strength of its core mechanics, but with a little spit n’ shine it could really inspire VR gamers to take their fitness to the next level.
Final Score: 7/10 – Good
Holopoint Chronicle is a fitting follow-up to a VR fitness gem with some welcome additions. This remains one of VR’s most engaging active games even if it requires a strong stomach (in more ways than one). But developer Alzan Studios could definitely push things a step further to encourage more people to keep playing. The Holopoint series has the foundations of active VR gaming down. With a little more structure, it could be one of its most essential experiences.
BOXVR (2017), a VR boxing rhythm game from fitness game studioFitXR, is hosting a free access period for Rift players this weekend.
BoxVR’s free access weekend takes place between May 3rd and May 7th, ending at 3:00 AM ET (local end time here). Simply download the game via the Oculus Store and get punching, ducking, and dodging to the beat.
The game, which pits you against a variety of incoming punching targets and barriers, features some pretty high BPM music, resulting in a calorie-burning workout that will get you squatting and shadow boxing until you can’t take any more.
With all of the limelight on Beat Saber (2018) following its spectacular release, which saw it shoot to the number one spot on Steam, BoxVR is determined to not be overlooked, as it just updated to add a new futuristic environment, new punching cues that are “more natural to hit,” and two new beginner workouts.
The game currently boasts a 4/5 star rating on the Oculus Store, and a 98% positive review rate on Steam.
Although punching cues have changes somewhat since launch, check out VR Fitness Insider’smixed reality video below to see what’s in store:
VirZOOM, makers of VR arcade exercise games and the VirZOOM Bike Controller, announced the successful closure of a $5.5 million seed funding round which the company says will help expand its commercial business worldwide with a second generation of its VZ Module and VZ Sensor, a retrofitting kit for stationary bikes that turns them into VR controllers.
Investors include Skywood Capital, with personal investments from partners at Eastham Capital, Fairhaven Capital, and Equity Resource Investments. Co-Founder and CEO Eric Janszen is the largest single investor. New investors include Greycroft partner Jon Goldman through his GC VR Gaming Tracker Fund. The Tracker fund is focused on VR, AR, eSports, and game start-ups.
in-home VirZoom bike (2017), image courtesy VirZoom
VirZOOM (pronounced ver-ZOOM) started selling its VZ Arcade fitness games in June 2016. After expanding into China with the help of Chinese VR headset manufacturer 3Glasses, VirZOOM later announced in summer 2017 an expansion into the commercial gym market worldwide in a partnership with Life Fitness, the fitness equipment company.
“VirZOOM is skipping past the early adopters to bring VR to mass market customers through cardio exercise motivation. The company is making actual sales, shipping products commercially for a year and a half and forming commercial partnerships with major fitness equipment companies like Life Fitness, who can help VirZOOM scale,” said Jon Goldman, investor and founder of the GC VR Gaming Tracker Fund.
VirZOOM’s game suite supports Gear VR, Rift, Vive, PSVR and Windows VR headsets. Games include bespoke multiplayer games like traditional cycling, horse racing, F1 racing, tank battles, and even flying on the back of a pegasus. Competitive and cooperative matches can be played by up to 8 players, including head-to-head challenges and time attacks.
