A new update for Wanderer makes a bunch of small improvements and fixes, including a new auto-save and load system, finger tracking support for Index players and changes to the UI and menus.
One of those was issues with the save system, which didn’t have manual saves and therefore resulted in repeating some tasks after returning to the game in between sessions.
While it still doesn’t seem like there are manual saves, this latest update has overhauled the auto-save and load system. The trailer and patch notes don’t give a huge amount of detail, but do say the new system will offer “enhanced save load progression.” Hopefully it addresses some of that repetition we ran into.
The update also refines the menu system for easier navigation, while also adding new features to the watch UI to give the player more information regarding warp count, desync count and currency in the current level.
Players on Valve Index headsets will also now enjoy finger tracking support with the Index controllers – a small but nice touch. There’s a bunch of other smaller changes for all players as well — added sound effects, updated textures and visuals, and a bunch of smaller bug fixes and changes. You can read the full list here.
If you haven’t tried out Wanderer yet, now might be the time. Before you do, check out our review from January, which goes over what the game does really well, even if it does stumble in a few areas along the way.
The About Time update is available now for Wanderer on PSVR and PC VR.
Meta is cutting back or postponing some projects in its Reality Labs division and halting hiring for some positions.
Reuters first reported earlier this week that Meta’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth broke the news to Reality Labs staff in a weekly Q&A session, according to a summary of his comments viewed by Reuters, with more specific changes to be announced within the week. We independently reached out to Meta about the report, and a spokesperson reiterated to UploadVR they’re “evaluating key priorities,” not planning layoffs “at this time,” and “so far, Meta has hired more engineers in Q1 than all of 2021.”
While Meta isn’t alone among platform-building tech companies that seem to be preparing to weather a “market downturn“, Zuckerberg’s investment in realizing VR and AR technology remains significant and we’ll be curious to see how the company focuses its efforts going forward. In June, for example, the poorly rated Venues app will disappear as events move inside Meta’s broader Horizon Worlds effort.
Given the level of polish and detail in Little Cities, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a Quest release developed by quite a large team of people.
But speaking to Purple Yonder’s James Howard last week revealed to me just how small the studio really is. “[My wife] Kelly and I both worked on the design,” he tells me. “I did all the programming for the game, so I ended up working out the technical systems for the code and stuff. And then she works on a lot of the stuff like the UI design and getting the levels just right — thinking what each item could be, the different buildings you can get, working all those things out.”
James and Kelly Howard make up the indie UK studio, which is the driving force behind Little Cities. They were helped along by some contracted artists across the development cycle, as well as an audio designer and a composer. nDreams also came on board later in the process, for publishing support, but for the most part, it was quite a tight-knit group.
Could such a little team be what helped Little Cities expertly deliver on a VR-first approach to a city simulator game?
Starting Small, Expanding Out
Little Cities had a curious launch. Sandwiched next to Cities VR, there was an unavoidable risk of being overshadowed on release, perhaps looking like a simplified version of the former. As it turned out, the underdog came out on top; Cities VR failed to fully deliver on its expansive vision, marred by under-performing visuals and overwhelming VR design decisions. Little Cities, meanwhile, came away with a focused approach to the genre that puts intelligent VR implementation first.
But how did this tiny indie studio go from inception in 2018 to releasing a nDreams-supported title on the biggest VR headset of the moment just a few years later?
Long before the days of VR, James began his game development journey as a kid, making games in BASIC. A few years and a computer science degree later, he went on to cut his teeth with opportunities at some big name studios — EA, Rockstar and then, Ninja Theory.
“I did a lot of cool stuff there [at Ninja Theory], and that was where I really started to get involved with VR,” he said. “We had a really small team. I think there was about two or three of us, depending on when it was. But we were just concentrating on VR and just exploring VR stuff.”
He ended up working on the VR version of Ninja Theory’s 2017 title Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. “I did most of the work for Hellblade VR, and mapping that to VR, which had a lot of challenges,” he said. “And then, Ninja Theory got acquired by Microsoft and they didn’t really have as much of a focus on VR, but that was something I still wanted to do.”
As that experience came to a close, he began thinking about pursuing his own VR projects. “Working on something like Hellblade VR was interesting, because people weren’t doing third person VR games, and it works. It works quite well. And it left us with a feeling of like, ‘Well, which other genres could work in VR, which no one’s attempted?'”
He had always been a fan of the city simulator genre — one that, at the time, had yet to be tackled properly in VR — and began thinking about how early inspirations, like the original Sim City and Sim City 2000, might be adapted for VR.
It was at this point, around 2018, that James began work on what would become Little Cities. “I had this prototype that I was working on, and Kelly, my wife, was like, ‘This is something really special here. We should actually take this a bit more seriously. What do you think? What do you want to do with this type of thing?'” They presented the prototype to the UK Games Fund, and the resulting government grant allowed them to kick Purple Yonder, and Little Cities, fully into action.
“We just like went and jumped into the deep end, set up a company. We built [the prototype] up a little bit more and we ended up taking it to nDreams and they loved it too. As soon as they saw the game, they just got it. They just saw what we were trying to do and they were able to give us some support on the publishing side.”
Interaction, Intuition, Innovation
Four years later and Little Cities is available on the Quest platform, a masterclass in made-for-VR design that presents an experience that is equally accessible and enjoyable for newcomers and experts to VR and the city simulator genre alike.
However, early versions of the game weren’t quite as intuitive as the final product. The user interface itself — one of the game’s shining accomplishments — underwent four or five complete redesigns over the course of development. “Really early on, it was just taking concepts like big flat panels, like you’d have in a PC title. It was just like, ‘Well, this isn’t fun. This isn’t really using VR to its best. What else can we do?'”
It wasn’t just clunky PC-to-VR menu translations that were avoided – every traditional aspect of the genre was reassessed and adjusted accordingly for the new medium. “Say you’ve never played VR before and you go buy a Quest and you bought our game,” explains James. “We want you to have a good experience. We don’t want it to be difficult to get into. We wanted it to be really accessible. And the same if maybe you’ve never played a city builder before either [and] you don’t know any of the general rules that you have around these types of games. We just wanted to make it so anyone can pick up and play it.”
Gridlocked Traffic
All vehicles in Little Cities come from seaports or an airport. This includes construction vehicles, which need to arrive at a vacant space of land before construction can begin. “Traditionally in a game like this, you build your road networks, and then if there’s a lot of traffic, you just get like a stat somewhere, like, ‘Oh, the traffic’s bad.’ And you’re like, okay, guess I have to do something about it.”
Little Cities shifts this stat to a visual representation — you can actually see traffic building up and blocking construction vehicles from reaching their destination, slowing your progress. “That’s not affecting the citizens so much as it’s affecting the player. So now they just naturally get that feedback. That’s directly affecting them instead.”
Adapting the simulation language in this way – away from stats and notifications, focusing on a visual-led approach – avoids overwhelming the player with complex menus, budgeting, finance options and the like.
“When you’re building a game based on a simulation, you can go really deep with what you’re simulating — what your citizens are doing and the reasons they’re coming or leaving and stuff like that. But what it comes down to is… If you can’t show the player all those things in the simulation, then it’s sort of wasted.”
Creating Little Moments
When James asked his non-gamer dad if he wanted to try Little Cities, he only expected him to last 10 minutes before taking off the headset and giving some pleasant remarks. “We lost him for like about two and a half hours. He just played until the battery ran out. It was like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s interesting cause he doesn’t play games, so…'”
It’s easy to get lost in Little Cities, and the backbone of its immersion is a plethora of small yet poignant details at every turn. A whale breeching, hot air balloons taking to the sky, or a flock of birds scattering around you – these charming moments add hugely important depth to the experience. “We got traffic in the game, working with the cars driving around. And suddenly that brought a little bit more life to the game. And then from there, the next natural step was police cars, fire engines, stuff like that. The game’s even more alive.”
“And at some point, we were like, ‘Okay, these little details are really cool.’ That sort of became like a bit of a pillar in our development — little stories, little cities. The idea that there’s actually a whole subsystem in the code which is working out like, ‘Okay, what’s another cool thing to show to the player?'”
A Strong Foundation, Ripe For Expansion
There’s lots on the horizon for Little Cities. Work has already begun on hand tracking support, set to arrive in June, thanks to requests and feedback from players. The game wasn’t designed with hand tracking in mind, but the existing virtual hand-based menu and watch system feels like it was. “That just naturally translates really well to hand tracking,” says James. “It just fits, it’s great.”
Cosmetic and decorative items, arriving in July, will give players more personalization options with new one or two tile decorative options. “Maybe you can put a statue or a fountain, or there might be things that you can put [like] benches by the roadsides and stuff. Those are the kinds of things we’re thinking. If you ‘re already building a city, but you want to just make it look a bit nicer.”
Purple Yonder has lots of ideas on where else they can take them game, but they’ll also be listening to the community and shaping support around what they hear. “The one thing about Little Cities is that every time someone plays it, they’ve got ideas,” says James. “There’s just so many ways you can build on it and extend it, and we’ve got a whole host of ideas of how we can do that.”
With such a strong foundation, the only way for Little Cities to go is up.
Creepy Jar, the developers behind the original flatscreen release of Green Hell on PC and consoles, signed a contract in 2020 with VR developers Incuvo to bring the game to VR on PC VR and Quest platforms. A new extension of that contract, announced this week, will see Incuvo port, publish and distribute the title on PSVR in 2023, with development starting after they finalise the PC VR release this month.
While that’s great news for PSVR fans, a few things remains unclear. First off, it’s not specified whether the release will be for the original PSVR headset or the upcoming PSVR 2 headset for PS5. The former seems unlikely, but we still don’t have a release date for PSVR 2. This year looks unlikely, with a release sometime next year now a safer bet. If that were the case, releasing on PSVR 2 would make the most sense for Green Hell, especially given Incuvo CEO’s recent bullish comments.
However, it’s also not known which version will come to PSVR. While all VR versions of the game stem from the original flatscreen release, the recently-released Quest version is a slightly abridged, streamlined version of the game, designed to work better on the standalone system. However, the upcoming PC VR release is a complete VR port of the original, with all the bells and whistles. It will be interesting to see which version Incuvo chooses to bring over to PSVR next year. We also know that Incuvo is working on new game modes, including co-op support, so hopefully that makes its way into the PSVR version at launch too.
Resolution Games unveiled a teaser for its next Demeo campaign, titled Curse of the Serpent Lord, which is arriving soon.
The new campaign will arrive on June 16, available as a free update on all platforms. It will be the fourth campaign for the game, following on from the initial launch campaign, The Black Sarcophagus, and subsequent expansions, Realm of the Rat King and Roots of Evil.
There’s no other details available about Curse of the Serpent Lord besides the image above, but safe to say we can expect to hear more across the next few weeks before launch.
The most recent campaign, Roots of Evil, took us to a slightly different enviornment from the first two campaigns and added a new class, the Bard. Here’s an extract from our hands-on:
If you loved what was on offer with Demeo’s base launch and Realm of the Rat King expansion, there’s little reason not to jump into Roots of Evil. There’s enough new twists here to give your party of 4 some welcome new challenges, and it’s great to see the game quite literally branching out (sorry) into new territory. VR’s best social gaming experience just keeps getting better.
The first post-launch Cities VR patch dropped yesterday, addressing several issues that emerged at launch two weeks ago.
The patch doesn’t include any new content, but instead makes changes, fixes and adjustments to various areas of the game to improve the overall experience.
Most notably, the tutorial has been expanded and restructured with new steps and improved text and images. There’s also now a save reminder, which will pop up if you haven’t saved your game in the last 10 minutes. Exiting to the main menu will also prompt you to save as well, ensuring players don’t lose progress accidentally.
• An enhanced tutorial to help players get a good start as mayors • New controls menu • Brightened the darkest part of nights • Added a day/night cycle option to the New Game menu • AND MORE!
The patch also addresses the darkness of the night cycle across all maps, brightening up the darkest points of the nights for further visibility. Plus, you can now turn off the day/night cycle when starting a new map, if you so wish.
In the release version, tunnels weren’t cutting through terrain properly — something I noticed myself, while playing for review — but this has now been fixed. There’s also some changes to the controls, with the bulldoze button moving from Y to X. Helpfully, the Y button will now be used as a back button for navigating menus, in addition to the existing B button option on the right controller.
We weren’t the biggest fans of Cities VR in our review a few weeks ago. While it does bring the core Skylines experience over to VR, it doesn’t feel as satisfying to play as it should and really misses the mark with its visuals. You can read our full review here.
On Reddit, the developers also teased a content update coming in June — the “Metro and Traffic Routing Update”, for which you can see some key art embedded above.
Accessory company Kiwi announced its take on a Quest 2 battery strap, available soon.
Since the launch of the original Quest, we’ve seen a bunch of official and third party takes on battery straps that extend the playing time of standalone headsets in various ways.
Just like other options, this strap from Kiwi will not only extend the time you can spend in Quest 2 in one session, but should also act as a counter-weight to balance the weight of the headset more effectively.
Kiwi says it is using a battery from Amprius, a California-based company that claims to ship batteries that are “the industry’s highest energy density cells”. Looking at the tweet above, it seems this 6400MAh Amprius battery will be located right at the back of the strap, similar to Meta’s official battery-clad Elite Strap option. In our testing, Meta’s Elite Strap provided about “double” the playtime to Quest 2.
Wanadev Studio announced its second piece of Ragnarock DLC this week — a collaboration with Hellfest Summer Open Air festival coming to the game in June 2022.
Following on from the first DLC pack, the Gloryhammer RAID in March, the Hellfest RAID pack will be a collaboration with the French heavy metal festival, featuring news songs and a new environment.
Hellfest is an annual open-air festival held in Clisson, France and one of the biggest metal festivals in all of Europe.
Arriving next month, the Ragnarock x Hellfest collaboration DLC will include songs taken from this year’s lineup at Hellfest. There’s no details on the exact tracks to be included yet, but the 2022 lineup includes some massive rock and metal bands — Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Nine Inch Nails and Deftones, just to name a few.
Bringing some iconic tracks from a few of those bands would be a huge boon for Ragnarock. I’m personally holding out for Enter Sandman and Sweet Child O’ Mine, though that’s probably dreaming pretty big.
Alongside the new songs, the Hellfest DLC will also include a new environment, presumably a visual tie-in with the festival itself, and a new hammer.
Quest’s latest fitness app Liteboxer has added a new free tier to its subscription model, giving users unlimited access to a selection of workouts without committing to the premium paid tier.
Liteboxer launched two months ago as another paid fitness subscription service on Quest, following in the footsteps of similar offerings from Supernatural and FitXR, available for $18.99/month with a seven-day trial period. Two months on, the service is now offering a free tier as well. While Supernatural and FitXR both offer seven-day trials, Liteboxer is the first to offer a tier for unlimited free access. It includes unlimited access to over 65 workouts, including some with real trainers and music from “chart-topping artists.”
That being said, the service’s Universal Music partnership featuring tracks from high-profile artists like Lady Gaga, Ariane Grande and more is exclusive to the paid $18.99/month subscription. Alongside premium music, the paid subscription grants access to 300+ workouts, daily content and extra workout environments.
While most VR fitness apps feature some form of virtual boxing, the Liteboxer service is actually a virtual adaptation of a physical product. Ironically, the physical Liteboxer works similar to a VR rhythm game – you punch a circular arrangement of six targets as they light up to the beat of music tracks.
Liteboxer VR brings this full circle, allowing you to box against a virtual version of machine, set to a variety of music tracks. The app supports hand tracking as well, so you can put the controllers down and gets as close to the real thing as possible. Support for Hand Tracking 2.0 has also been implemented, so your punches should be tracked more reliably than ever.
A team of researchers from NVIDIA Research and Stanford published a new paper demonstrating a pair of thin holographic VR glasses. The displays can show true holographic content, solving for the vergence-accommodation issue. Though the research prototypes demonstrating the principles were much smaller in field-of-view, the researchers claim it would be straightforward to achieve a 120° diagonal field-of-view.
Published ahead of this year’s upcoming SIGGRAPH 2022 conference, a team of researchers from NVIDIA Research and Stanford demonstrated a near-eye VR display that can be used to display flat images or holograms in a compact form-factor. The paper also explores the interconnected variables in the system that impact key display factors like field-of-view, eye-box, and eye-relief. Further, the researchers explore different algorithms for optimally rendering the image for the best visual quality.
Commercially available VR headsets haven’t improved in size much over the years largely because of an optical constraint. Most VR headsets use a single display and a simple lens. In order to focus the light from the display into your eye, the lens must be a certain distance from the display; any closer and the image will be out of focus.
Eliminating that gap between the lens and the display would unlock previously impossible form-factors for VR headsets; understandably there’s been a lot of R&D exploring how this can be done.
In NVIDIA-Stanford’s newly published paper, Holographic Glasses for Virtual Reality, the team shows that it built a holographic display using a spatial light modulator combined with a waveguide rather than a traditional lens.
The team built both a large benchtop model—to demonstrate core methods and experiment with different algorithms for rending the image for optimal display quality—and a compact wearable model to demonstrate the form-factor. The images you see of the compact glasses-like form-factor don’t include the electronics to drive the display (as the size of that part of the system is out of scope for the research).
You may recall a little while back that Meta Reality Labs published its own work on a compact glasses-size VR headset. Although that work involves holograms (to form the system’s lenses), it is not a ‘holographic display’, which means it doesn’t solve the vergence-accommodation issue that’s common in many VR displays.
On the other hand, the Nvidia-Stanford researchers write that their Holographic Glasses system is in fact a holographic display (thanks to the use of a spatial light modulator), which they tout as a unique advantage of their approach. However, the team also writes that it’s possible to display typical flat images on the display as well (which, like contemporary VR headsets, can converge for a stereoscopic view).
Image courtesy NVIDIA Research
Not only that, but the Holographic Glasses project touts a mere 2.5mm thickness for the entire display, significantly thinner than the 9mm thickness of the Reality Labs project (which was already impressively thin!).
As with any good paper though, the Nvidia-Stanford team is quick to point out the limitations of their work.
For one, their wearable system has a tiny 22.8° diagonal field-of-view with an equally tiny 2.3mm eye-box. Both of which are way too small to be viable for a practical VR headset.
Image courtesy NVIDIA Research
However, the researchers write that the limited field-of-view is largely due to their experimental combination of novel components that aren’t optimized to work together. Drastically expanding the field-of-view, they explain, is largely a matter of choosing complementary components.
“[…] the [system’s field-of-view] was mainly limited by the size of the available [spatial light modulator] and the focal length of the GP lens, both of which could be improved with different components. For example, the focal length can be halved without significantly increasing the total thickness by stacking two identical GP lenses and a circular polarizer [Moon et al. 2020]. With a 2-inch SLM and a 15mm focal length GP lens, we could achieve a monocular FOV of up to 120°”
As for the 2.3mm eye-box (the volume in which the rendered image can be seen), it’s way too small for practical use. However, the researchers write that they experimented with a straightforward way to expand it.
With the addition of eye-tracking, they show, the eye-box could be dynamically expanded up to 8mm by changing the angle of the light that’s sent into the waveguide. Granted, 8mm is still a very tight eye-box, and might be too small for practical use due to variations in eye-relief distance and how the glasses rest on the head, from one user to the next.
But, there’s variables in the system that can be adjusted to change key display factors, like the eye-box. Through their work, the researchers established the relationship between these variables, giving a clear look at what tradeoffs would need to be made to achieve different outcomes.
Image courtesy NVIDIA Research
As they show, eye-box size is directly related to the pixel pitch (distance between pixels) of the spatial light modulator, while field-of-view is related to the overall size of the spatial light modulator. Limitations on eye-relief and converging angle are also shown, relative to a sub-20mm eye-relief (which the researchers consider the upper limit of a true ‘glasses’ form-factor).
An analysis of this “design trade space,” as they call it, was a key part of the paper.
“With our design and experimental prototypes, we hope to stimulate new research and engineering directions toward ultra-thin all-day-wearable VR displays with form-factors comparable to conventional eyeglasses,” they write.
The paper is credited to researchers Jonghyun Kim, Manu Gopakumar, Suyeon Choi, Yifan Peng, Ward Lopes, and Gordon Wetzstein.
The first patch for 
