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- Vision Pro Gaming Weekly #11 - VisionOS 2 is Here!
Vision Pro Gaming Weekly #11 - VisionOS 2 is Here!
Spatial Escape, Sky Dominators, MatchUp Tile Game, Vision Air Rumors
VisionProGamingGuy
September 17, 2024
šPress Start - VisionOS 2 is finally HERE!
Finally itās release time for all the new Apple OSās. And with that we finally have our first full VisionOS 2 release! Itās only been about 7 and a half months since Vision Pro has been released and Appleās made quite a lot of improvements since launch! Most users are already on VisionOS 2 but if you havenāt been yet, you are in for a treat! Lots of the features in VisionOS 2 seem to be predominantly implemented to improve gaming!
VisionOS 2ā¦What it means for gaming. (Apple)
VisionOS 2 is finally fully released! That means app developers can finally submit apps to the App Store built using its new features. Some nice things that will help improve the gaming experience are:
Guest Mode
youāll be able to more easily share your Vision Pro with a guest and they wonāt have to keep calibrating their eyes and hands each time they take off the headset or the headset moves too much.
Persona
thereās improvements to skin tones and clothing color, and smoother more natural hand movement. This will just make SharePlay games that much more enjoyable!
Metal Rendering with passthrough
with metal rendering with passthrough it means Unity and Unreal will be able to use all their materials and shaders and render them in PASSTHROUGH as well! Previously VisionOS 1 only supported their own materialX rendering in PASSTHROUGH so it was a lot of extra work for devs to convert their games to passthrough as theyād have to convert all their materials to material X. Now this means weāll hopefully get more VR ports and more games as developers can use their existing materials and shaders even in passthrough! passthrough games will start to look better too!
Immersive WebXR now ON for all users
this means web developers can now deliver fully immersive experiences directly through safari. we should see some fun little games popup via webXR that can be played without going through the more restrictive filter of the App Store Guidelines.
AirPlay Receiver
this means youāll be able to easily stream your iPad and iOS screens along with your Mac screens to a window in Vision Pro now! Hereās me playing Asphalt Legends Unite on my iPhone 15 Pro Max streaming to AVP over Airplay!
HandTracking predictive model
As I showed in my YouTube Video thereās a predictive Hand Tracking feature for developers to use in VisionOS2 now. Finally developers will be able to update their apps and use this. It will be better for games where we want the hand tracking to feel like itās less laggy at the trade off of smoothness. Games like fruit ninja that require fast action or games like Synth Riders where you want to feel like the digital object is locked to your hand this will be an improvement for. Ask the devās of your favorite games if theyāve tried it out!
Table of Contents
š New Games!
Spatial Escape | Distress Call (App Store)
This is a full PASSTHROUGH espcaie room mystery game. Really cool to see someone working on a PASSTHROUGH game experience. Looks very inventive too! I havenāt tried it yet so please let me know if you have and what you think!
Sky Dominators (App Store)
Very exciting and cool looking SCHMUP type shooter? Love the vibe. Only concern is that you canāt see very far ahead of your jet so how playable is it? Havenāt tried this one yet either so if anyone has let me know how it is!
Phazr (App Store)
Not a game, but rather a music visualization app with 3d graphics and haptics. I just thought itās a bit inspiring for rhythm games to create such dynamic spatial effects in the future!
MatchUp Tile Game (App Store)
Really neat game! I can recommend this one as I got to play it. Very simple clean polished game. Not to mention the developer is also a former Cal Berkeley graduate. Go Bears! Worth a try if this is the type of game that you would enjoy.
Beautiful Things 2.0 Updated (App Store)
I was excited to see there was an update for this App as itās a really neat app and a nice place for users to explore what interacting with 3d objects in Spatial Computing can be like. Very inspirational in many ways. The UI has now been updated for Vision Pro to be much more Spatially powerful, but honestly itās all a bit quirky still. Highly recommend everyone check it out and give the dev feedback though as I feel with iteration this is going to be really cool.
šļøNews
Iām on Mount Rushmore (Reddit)
Big thanks to Redditor jbaker318 for mentioning me as one of his Vision Pro sub top contributors š Iām really touched and really believe in the futurte of Vision Pro especially in gaming. Letās all build this community together!
Xiaomi Su7 Experience in TaoBao App (App Store)
Unfortunately I wasnāt able to access the content from San Francisco, but will try it next month when Iām back in Hong Kong again. Looks like a really cool and high fidelity passthrough experience! Imagine a Forza or Need for Speed in Vision Pro. Apple pleas hit up the Asphalt Legends Unite developer Gameloft to make a Vision Pro racing game!
A Couple cool games from Vision Hack 2024 Concepts (Vision Hack 2024)
Very cool work all! Canāt wait to see more of the work that came out of this hackathon!
People are a bit salty that this isnāt a real AI + Vision Pro Slam, but I think itās a neat concept video anyways. Iāve been trying to tell a lot of people AI and Vision Pro are going to SLAM together to produce some really cool use cases. Iāll need to write an article about it sometime š But because of Vision Proās passthrough abilty, it can replace every pixel/photon of the real world being sent ot your eyes with digital world and selectively. This means in the future youāll be able to on the fly dynamically produce some stunning skins on the real world using generative AI! If you can get this concept you can get why Mark Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta!
Shopping on Vision Pro (Apple.com)
get a glimpse into what Spatial Computing will mean for buying Apple products in the future. Check out the iPhone 16 and AirPods 4 pages to get a button to view the 3D model of the products in your space! They look pretty darn good and realistic eh! Imagine your game item stores in Spatial Computing now! Destiny 2 weapon vendor?
āļø Hardware Zone
Apple Vision Air rumors! Lower resolution displays (Apple Insider)
Rumors are flying in that Apple is going to go with significantly lower resolution displays for Vision Air to help bring the price down. The current rumored DPI of around 1500 (compared to 3400 for AVP) will still be above what the Quest3 offers but it much much closer to Quest3 quality than Vision Pro.
My perspective is this is a GOOD thing as for gaming to grow Apple really needs a lower end headset that can be more accessible to a broad spectrum of consumers. This will help grow the user base and make development for the platform make sense for many more developers. Gamers are used to getting differing qualities of gaming experience depending on their budget so this wonāt be an issue.
TechInsights Teardown: Apple Vision Pro (Electronics360)
I love seeing detailed hardware teardown in the Hardware Zone. This is the best teardown out there with some cool estimates of some of the Major component costs. Totally nerd out and go check this article out :)
š§āš»Developer Corner
Part 2 of a fantastic tutorial series on building a dinosaur app (YouTube)
Sarang is really killing it with this latest series. Go check it out and learn about making great 3d apps and games for Vision Pro!
Unreal Engine 5.5 now supporting passthrough mode (LinkedIn)
Some great news for gaming. With VisionOS 2 metal rendering can now work with PassThrough. Loos like people have unreal 5.5 working with passthrough now! This means more games and higher fidelity unreal engine games for passthrough! Keep going all!
Bola pet (Reddit) (TestFlight)
Another cute little virtual pet game. Looks like the dev is using very high quality shaders for more slick pets look. Try it out and give the dev some good feedback!
Was excited to see this and am hopeful Iāll get to try it soon! If you didnāt know I also am CoFounding an AI startup and we extensively use LLMās so excited to see devās trying to figure out how the modern generation will work in games! Side note I also worked as an AI game programmer at one point in my career on titles like 2K ESPN Hockey and 2K ESPN College Hoops :)
Baseball Simulator (x.com)
This developer is building a baseball simulator where you can get a sense of what it feels like to have all different types of pitches thrown at you. One of the strengths of Vision Pro is augmenters and simulators that are about real life activities
Thatās it for this week! More Vision Pro Gaming news next week! Game on!
Contact us at [email protected] for anything you may need, or to just to say hi!
If youāre a developer that needs feedback or distribution feel free to contact us and drop us a link or promo code š Promise to try your game and give feedback!
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