Painting VR added new in-game tutorials and an expo mode this week in its latest update.
After launch last month, this minor update adds some new features that help you display your artwork and get new users comfortable with all the mechanics.
The new in-game tutorials run through the basics, allowing you to properly understand the fundamentals like brush settings, mixing colors, using reference images and more.
As you can see in the video above, expo mode is the other big addition, which lets you go through your portfolio and select artworks to hang on the walls around you. You can position your art however you want, and even scale them to be bigger or smaller. Once you’re happy, lock it in place and admire the work hanging in your own personal gallery.
There’s more on the horizon too. Multiplayer support should still be on the way to paint in VR with friends, but hopefully you’ll also be able to give them a tour of your exhibit space and the artwork hanging in your virtual warehouse as well.
First Person Tennis, a tennis simulator, is coming to the Oculus Store for Meta Quest 2 (formerly Oculus Quest) next month.
While First Person Tennis debuted on App Lab last year it’s now been approved for a full release on Quest and listed as coming soon on the store for a June 2 release. For those with PC VR setups, it’s already available on Steam with support for all major headsets.
On the Quest platform, the game will support both the original headset and Quest 2, with arcade and simulation modes and online multiplayer. There’s multiple locomotion options — teleport, run in place, sliding run — and you’ll be able to play across seven different court surfaces and 13 tournaments, competing on global leaderboards. You can check out some gameplay in the mixed reality trailer embedded above.
The expansion is available now and as you can imagine, it looks like true a match made in heaven.
The announcement was accompanied by the trailer embedded above which shows some footage that looks absolutely stunning (although that’s expected with any new Flight Simulator footage at this point).
The blog post also detailed exactly what is included in the expansion. You’ll get a Top Gun livery for the F/A-18E Super Hornet, along with three new training missions for the Hornet that will “allow you to master radical flight maneuvers including unrestricted take-offs, split S maneuvers, and low altitude, high-speed maneuvering through complex terrain.”
There’s also five high-speed, low-level challenges set above mountains and canyons, plus a carrier deck landing challenge.
There’s even a brand new hypersonic aircraft that can go up to Mach 10 speed and climb higher than 150,000 feet, which you’ll use in a new mission that takes you up into the stratosphere.
For a free update it all sounds pretty incredible. Of course, the timing of the update is no coincidence as it’s a direct tie-in with Top Gun: Maverick starring Tom Cruise, now in theaters.
Microsoft Flight Simulator is available for PC and Xbox, with optional VR support for the former. We recently found out that 10% of players exclusively play in VR, which is quite impressive. No doubt those players will be itching to try out the new Top Gun content as soon as possible.
Zenith revealed a new teaser for its next update, promising ‘dozens of hours’ of new content and six instanced dungeons.
Content patch 1.1 will be the first major update for VR MMO Zenith: The Lost City, which launched back in January for PC VR, Quest and PSVR. Since a hugely successful launch, a lot has happened — the studio behind the title Ramen VR raised an additional $35 million in a funding round, while also announcing major plans for ongoing updates that would add new content to the game.
Zenith: The Celestial Throne Update Teaser Trailer
The studio looks set to deliver on the second part of that promise very soon, with six brand new instanced dungeons arriving in update 1.1, which you can catch a glimpse of in the short teaser trailer embedded above.
It’s only a short bit of footage for now, but there’ll hopefully be more to come very soon. A tweet from the Zenith account says the dungeons are “filled with interactive puzzles, adversaries, and of course – lots of LOOT!” If we were Zenith fans looking for more details, we’d be keeping an eye out on any upcoming VR showcases, if you know what we mean…
Beyond the 1.1 update, there’s still more plans and lots to come for Zenith. We know that the upcoming third class, the Cyber Ninja, will be stealth-focused and use a ranged bow as its weapon.
During Sony’s annual investor day event, the company confirmed to investors that it has a lineup of more than 20 games ready for the launch of PSVR 2—despite having not yet confirmed the headset’s release date.
Sony’s 2022 Investor Day presentation gives investors in the company an overview of recent performance and future strategic outlook at the company’s core business segments which include PlayStation, Sony Music, and Sony Pictures.
During the wide ranging presentation, the company briefly highlighted “PSVR 2 launch” as a key part of its ‘commercial expansion’ strategy designed to bring “new growth vectors” to the company.
“PlayStation has, and always will, stand for innovation. And PlayStation VR 2 is the latest manifestation of our commitment in the innovation space,” said PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan. “Our plans are now well advanced, with the most striking aspect being the sheer joy expressed by gamers and developers alike when they have the chance to enjoy virtual reality on the PlayStation VR 2.”
Ryan stopped short of confirming a specific launch date or launch window for the headset, but his presentation slide during the segment confirmed “20+ major first-party and third-party titles confirmed for PSVR 2 at launch.”
Image courtesy Sony
Ok so hear me out.
While there have been rumors that PSVR 2’s launch could land in 2023, it does seem oddly premature to be counting the number of launch titles for a headset that isn’t launching for another 12 months, or possibly even longer (ie: Holiday 2023).
Surely in another year from now the company could court many more launch titles, and that bigger number would be the one they’d want to share with investors. It’s also worth noting that in last year’s Sony Investor Day presentation, the company didn’t say anything about the number of launch titles for PSVR 2, despite mentioning the headset.
On a similar note, it would be strange for the company to reveal the final version of its upcoming headset more than a year before bringing it to market… but as we know, Sony revealed PSVR 2 in full early this year.
Image courtesy Sony
Major consumer electronics products like consoles don’t often launch in Q1, let alone Q2. Case-in-point: every PlayStation console since PS1 has launched in Q3 or Q4… and the same goes for PSVR 1 which launched in Q4.
So a good bet for the release of PSVR 2 is Q4… but the big question is which year?
Again, if we figure Q4 2023, that would mean Sony revealed the final version of PSVR 2 one year and eight months minimum before actually launching the headset… which would be pretty strange for this this kind of product. And that would also mean the company is counting the headset’s launch titles—as it did in this year’s investor day presentation—almost one and a half years ahead of time.
If we figure a Q4 2022 launch… the timing of the headset’s reveal, and the fact that Sony is already counting launch titles, start to make a lot more sense.
But there’s a wildcard, of course; it’s been an unprecedented couple of years with the pandemic changing how organizations do business, not to mention significant disruptions to the global supply chain which has directly impacted Sony’s ability to keep its PS5 in stock.
Turbulence in the global supply chain has shifted even the best laid product launch strategies, so it may simply not be up to Sony if the headset’s launch gets pushed to 2023. For what it’s worth, the company told investors during the presentation that it has “mitigation measures in progress,” when it comes to dealing with supply chain disruptions, including “sourcing multiple suppliers for greater agility in unstable market conditions.”
With regular updates, DLC releases and changes to the game since launch, Beat Saber remains VR’s poster child. Read on for our updated Beat Saber review for Quest 2, PSVR and PC VR.
Years of Dominance
It’s hard to understate Beat Saber’s influence on the VR industry. It was one of the earliest success stories in VR gaming and became a catalyst for the now-oversaturated market of VR rhythm games. After launch in 2018, it catapulted itself into the spotlight as the must-have VR game for any headset owner and became one of the only VR-exclusive titles to gain brand recognition in the wider gaming industry. As starting points go, it was a good place to be in.
Perhaps more amazing is that in 2022, four years post-release, Beat Saber remains dominant as ever and has never properly faded from the zeitgeist. Meta acquired the studio behind the game, Beat Games, in 2018, but Beat Saber remains available on almost every major VR headset – Meta-owned or otherwise. It consistently holds a near-unbeatable position around the top of most VR store charts, as it has done for several consecutive years now. With consistent free updates and paid DLC releases, there’s now a wealth of content to work through as well.
Beat Saber 2022 Review – The Facts
Platforms: Oculus Quest, Quest 2, PC VR, PSVR Release Date: Out Now Developer: Beat Games, Meta Price: $29.99
Even the skeptics would have to admit that Beat Saber is still the biggestVR game in terms of availability, omnipresence and recognition, especially with more casual audiences. But a lot has changed since 2018 – not just advancements in hardware, but also our understanding of solid VR design principles.
The standard is higher than ever, so how well does Beat Saber hold up?
Surprisingly well, is the answer. But before getting into the nitty gritty, let’s cover the basics.
Easy to Understand, Hard to Master
Beat Saber is a VR rhythm game with an easily-understood core concept. Set to music, the player will use two ‘lightsabers’ – one red and one blue, by default – to slice through blocks as they fly through space towards the player. The colour of the blocks – red or blue – correspond to which lightsaber to use, while directional arrows on each indicate whether you should slice up, down, left, right or even diagonally. If you’re confused, think Fruit Ninja… but with music. In VR.
The blocks are aligned to the rhythm of the music – the more on-time and accurately you slice, the higher your score. Slicing consecutive blocks without mistakes builds combos. Missing blocks or making mistakes resets your combo and can stack up to result in a level failure.
There’s other twists as well – walls you have to avoid, bombs you can’t hit, double blocks or cross-armed slices – but overall it’s a conceptually simple game with a very high skill ceiling. Even though the upper echelon of players compete at an insanely high level, everyone can play Beat Saber – the large variety of music, modes and difficulty levels means it’s enjoyable for newcomers and experts alike.
Old Genre, New Platform, Same Feeling
Rhythm games are a popular gaming genre, no matter the platform. But not only does Beat Saber execute the rhythm game tropes well, it also exhibits an expert understanding of what makes a fantastic VR experience – especially impressive for 2018.
Beat Saber’s gameplay isn’t just addictive, it’s tactile. Every move you make lines up perfectly with your expectation for how that action should feel. In other games, actions don’t always align with the virtual world, like putting your hand up against a virtual wall only to realize that your physical hand falls through it.
There’s no such disconnect in Beat Saber. There’s cohesion and responsiveness between your actions in real life and VR, because slicing blocks is designed as an inherently weightless action. Your brain never expects feedback from your actions, so everything just feels right.
This unsolved hardware problem – generating realistic feedback and resistance against actions – is likely to stick around for quite a while. By avoiding the problem entirely, Beat Saber has positioned itself as a timeless experience, at least for the foreseeable future. Even across generations of different hardware, Beat Saber feels incredibly satisfying to play – just as much now as it did in 2018.
Games Modes, Accessibility, Modifiers
Compared to launch, there’s now a lot more on offer in Beat Saber as well. The music library has been massively expanded (more on that later), but there’s also several different game modes to keep you entertained.
The classic mode is Solo, the stock-standard high score mode that lets you play through any track you like, with many optional modifier options. There’s also now a multiplayer mode, which lets up to five players compete against each other for a high score, either in public or private lobbies.
A campaign mode does technically exist, but feels neglected and overdue for a complete overhaul – it’s not worth your time over Solo mode. An upgraded campaign with better structure and some form of progression might be interesting (and perhaps is on the way), but the fairly neglected state of the existing campaign isn’t exactly a huge loss.
Accessibility options and gameplay modifiers are abound in Beat Saber, which let you tailor the game to your needs and wants. You can enable different options to make the game easier, more accessible, harder or just completely different, adding a lot of depth for people who want to mix up gameplay or cater to specific needs.
There’s also special 360 and 90 degree levels that see you turn on the spot as blocks come from different directions – a fun gimmick, but nothing mind-blowing.
An Expansive Library
Given how big the library has grown since launch, Beat Saber’s music selection should have something for everyone by now, provided you’re willing to pay extra.
Humble beginnings saw only a few original electronic tracks included at launch, composed by Beat Games Co-Founder Jaroslav Beck. New free tracks and additional original music from Beck still arrive in updates from time to time, but it’s the paid DLC releases that offer the most exciting selections, featuring some prominent and legendary artists – Linkin Park, Fall Out Boy, BTS, Green Day, Lady Gaga, Panic! At The Disco, Billie Eilish, Imagine Dragons and Skrillex, to name a few.
Each pack brings with it a unique feel, perfectly crafted to capture the spirit of the featured artist. It makes each pack feel truly hand-crafted and brings much-needed variety across the library. The only downside for new players will be the cost – when you add DLC to the cost of the base game, things could start to get a bit pricey.
However, the expansion of Beat Saber’s music selection has also had an effect on consistency. The skill ceiling of Beat Saber players has increased dramatically in the last few years, as has the style and variety of track mapping. While the developers have evolved the game’s mapping, it’s now clear that the difficult labels – Easy, Normal, Hard, Expert, Expert+ – can mean completely different things from one track to another. What was considered Expert in 2018, for example, feels like a walk in the park compared to an Expert map released in 2022.
Room for Improvement
Outside of the actual gameplay, parts of Beat Saber’s user experience are starting to show their age. The entire menu system – large, flat and floating panels, with a point-and-click cursor attached to each controller – might have been serviceable in 2018, but now feels clunky and unintuitive. There’s been lots of innovation in intuitive user experience in virtual reality, but Beat Saber has not kept pace.
The same can be said for the game’s visuals. While overall the game looks great on most platforms, it also doesn’t feel like the best possible visual presentation, especially on Quest hardware. Other releases have really pushed Quest’s standalone hardware to the limit, delivering stunning visuals. It’s hard to believe Beat Saber couldn’t do a bit more to impress in this day and age.
Admittedly, the newer DLC and OST releases feature environments that are way more visually interesting. But if anything, this only contributes to the aforementioned feeling of consistency – some levels look breathtaking, while others now look incredibly dated and barebones.
All of these minor issues are a result of the piecemeal approach taken by Beat Games, adding and changing elements slowly but consistently, bit by bit. While it’s an approach that has served Beat Saber well until now, it’s also segmenting the game and beginning to make it feel less like one cohesive package.
It would be nice to see this addressed, preferably in one big drastic update. Even a full on sequel – Beat Saber 2 – might be the best option, providing a polished and ground-up rework of the core game, while introducing some new elements and transitioning existing players over with legacy map and DLC support.
Beat Saber Review 2022 – Final Verdict
For any new headset owner, Beat Saber remains an essential purchase. Even if the genre is not traditionally your style, the game holds such an esteemed place in VR history and remains completely relevant to modern audiences, exemplifying sublime gameplay that puts intelligent VR design first.
Yes, parts of the experience are starting to feel ever so slightly outdated, but those are very minor gripes for what is otherwise a seminal VR game. Nothing has yet to penetrate the virtual reality zeitgeist quite like Beat Saber. If you have a headset, you have to try it. It’s as simple as that.
UploadVR recently changed its review guidelines, and this is one of our new Essential review labels. You can read more about our review guidelines here.
This review was conducted primarily on the Quest 2 version of the game, but applies to all platforms. What did you make of our Beat Saber review? Let us know in the comments below!
However, the Quest 2 and PC VR version also differ from each other. While both stem from the original flatscreen version, the Quest 2 release is a slightly abridged, streamlined version of the game, designed to work better on the standalone system.
This upcoming PC VR version, however, is a complete port of the original game. According to Incuvo, this includes “a wider terrain to explore, higher graphic fidelity, and different UI and mechanics yielding an even more immersive survival experience”
You can watch a new story trailer for the PC VR release embedded above.
“After two years of work we are thrilled to launch our game on Steam. The decision to split the PCVR and Quest launches was right, over these few extra weeks, we managed to polish important elements in the game to make it worth the wait,” said Incuvo CEO Andrzej Wychowaniec in a prepared statement.
Horizon: Call of the Mountain is pictured on the page, which is one of the only confirmed titles for PSVR 2 so far. The headset’s launch date is still unconfirmed, but this year looks increasingly unlikely — 2023 could be the current target.
Beyond that, we only know of studios working on PSVR 2 content, but few specific titles or release windows. Nonetheless, we can start to speculate on what games and studios might make up the remaining launch titles.
Truant Pixel’s Runner will also release on PSVR 2, but the release window is currently unconfirmed. Samurai Slaughter House is confirmed for PSVR 2 as well, along with Iris VR’s upcoming title Low-Fi.
There’s a bunch of rumored and unconfirmed games that could fill out the list as well — Resident Evil 8, Gran Turismo 7, Farpoint 2 and more — but you can read about those here.
Lynx says it raised $4 million in a funding round ahead of delivery of its R-1 mixed reality headset.
Lynx creator Stan Larroque posted on Twitter about the funding, writing that “after our successful Kickstarter we’re now able to secure our supply chain completely and fulfill the insane demand we’re facing.” The highly anticipated system is based on the same XR2 chipset powering Quest 2 while providing full color passthrough for mixed reality/AR with an open air view of your surroundings. The sides can also be closed off for a VR viewing experience as well.
Lynx recently showed off the hardware at GDC in San Francisco and confirmed to UploadVR Correspondents that backers could “expect the first headsets to come between June and July,” instead of the original April delivery target. The headset is also listed on the Lynx website for $599 with “delivery starting June 2022” listed.
The $4 million Series A funding round was led by Somnium Space and its CEO Artur Sychov is joining Lynx’ board. Somnium Space describes itself as an “open, social & persistent VR platform powered by blockchain” and, in a prepared statement, Sychov praised Lynx’ “openness” and potential to “revolutionize the way we all think and interact with this market category.” Larroque wrote the “new investors are top of the line and from the AR/VR world” and said there’d be more updates in a video scheduled for May 31, embedded below.
We’re excited to see more detailed looks at the final device Lynx ships to backers and will have updates on the company in the months to come.
The latest SteamVR update adds a new photogrammetry environment for users, captured in the village of Fornalutx in Mallorca.
Mallorca is an island located in the western Mediterranean sea, off the coast of Spain and part of the Balearic Islands. It’s home to an ancient village called Fornalutx and, as described in this post, Valve has processed a bunch of photogrammetric data to create a SteamVR home environment featuring a path running through the village.
The data was originally captured in October 2019, but it seems Valve employees only just got around to processing and converting it now. The scene is made up of over 640 photos, which were taken handheld with a Canon EOS 5D Mk IV using an EF 16-35mm f/4L IS USM lens.
To process the photos into a photogrammetry scene and clean up the results, Valve used Reality Capture, Agisoft Metashape, Agisoft PhotoScan, Modo, Substance Painter and Photoshop.
You can subscribe to the Mallorca envionrment here on Steam. Valve encourages anyone with questions on capturing and processing a scene to post them in the comments section of the Workshop listing.
The update also brings a bunch of bug fixes for SteamVR, OpenXR and Windows Mixed Reality support. You can read the full list here.
In last month’s SteamVR hardware survey, Quest 2 reached 47.92% of VR headset usage on the platform, creeping its way toward 50%. The Valve Index, meanwhile, climbed slightly up to 15.35% while the Oculus Rift S continued to fall, now at just 11.07%. You can read more about last month’s SteamVR hardware results here.
